May 3, 2019: Rodney King in Context: The People vs. O.J. Simpson

[On April 29^th, 1992, civil unrest erupted in Los Angeles after the four officers who had beaten Rodney King on video were acquitted on all charges. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy King himself and other contexts for and representations of the LA riots, leading up to a special weekend post on the narrative of “race riots” itself.]

On the problems and possibilities of shoehorning historical footage into historical fictions.

Probably the most surprising thing for this AmericanStudier about the TV series The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story (2016) was that the show’s heart and soul was David Schwimmer’s multi-layered and moving performance as Robert Kardashian. But a close second was the way that the show’s creators chose to open the first episode: with news footage from the Rodney King beating, trial, and riots. Of course this was another famous and divisive trial (and especially verdict) from the same city, just two years before the Nicole Brown Simpson/Ron Goldman murders and three years before the O.J. trial and verdict. And of course both historical events featured the Los Angeles police department in prominent and controversial (to put in mildly) ways. But at the same time, for a TV show focused so fully on offering fictional interpretations of a very particular set of historical figures and events, in a very specific time frame (from the first discovery of Simpson and Goldman’s bodies through to the immediate aftermath of the O.J. verdict), opening with distinct events from 2-3 years prior was far from an obvious or inevitable choice, and one that demands our attention and analyses.

In at least some important ways, I would say that that choice reflects problems with historical fiction as a genre. I’ve written elsewhere in this space about director Oliver Stone’s controversial and somewhat underhanded choice to intersperse actual historical footage of and around the JFK assassination into his conspiracy theory-promoting historical fiction film JFK (1991), without in any way clarifying which footage is which. People separates its initial historical footage from the remainder of its fictional storytelling more clearly and fully, so I’m not suggesting that it blurs the lines between these media anywhere near as overtly as did Stone’s film. But nonetheless, opening a show based so closely on real figures with media footage from 1991 and 1992 does indeed intertwine more than just these two disparate historical moments and events; it seems to position its subsequent fictional representations as similarly authentic. Of course historical fiction is always subject to these kinds of questions, and the best historical fiction overtly forces us to think about the various ways in which “history” and “fiction” are not nearly as distinct as we like to believe. But to me there’s still something a bit sketchy about using 1991-2 footage to open a 2016 fictional show about 1994-5 events.

Yet I do understand the reasons why the creators opened with this footage, and indeed would argue that whatever its limitations, doing so does offer an interesting lens on both the King and O.J. histories. The show’s overt focus is of course on O.J., and one of its central through-lines, one closely linked to both Courtney B. Vance’s Johnnie Cochran and Sterling K. Brown’s Christopher Darden (among other characters, but most especially those two), is an argument that issues of race, racial profiling, and police prejudice and brutality were among the most paramount in the developing narratives and debates around the O.J. trial. But at the same time, the show also focuses at length on themes of celebrity, of the idea of a televised trial and all of its effects, on how these late 20^th century media stories could impact issues of race and justice among many others. And it’s worth considering whether and how those kinds of celebrity and media threads were likewise part of the Rodney King histories—of course King was not a celebrity like O.J. at the start of his unfolding public story, but to some degree he became one as the events unfolded; and in any case those events themselves were undoubtedly televised and covered in distinctly late 20^th century ways. One more complex layer to the King story, and one that this fictional TV drama helps us consider.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

May 2, 2019: Rodney King in Context: Anna Deavere Smith’s Dramas

[On April 29^th, 1992, civil unrest erupted in Los Angeles after the four officers who had beaten Rodney King on video were acquitted on all charges. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy King himself and other contexts for and representations of the LA riots, leading up to a special weekend post on the narrative of “race riots” itself.]

On two one-woman shows that are just as evocative on the page as on the stage.

In this era of tablets and smartphones (which Word doesn’t identify as a spelling error, just to drive the point home), there’s no reason we have to limit our experience of literary works to written texts. You can watch a YouTube video clip just as easily from just about anywhere, and when it comes to theatrical performances, there’s a lot to be said for doing so, for getting at least a sense of their performative (that one Word underlines, but I’m going to keep it) qualities. So I’d be remiss if I didn’t first link to this opening part of Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror (1991) and this trailer for an adaptation of her Twilight: Los Angeles (1992).

As the first clip’s introduction notes, Smith works in a very unique and compelling way: interviewing hundreds of people in response to a particular historical event (New York’s Crown Heights riot for Fires, the 1992 LA riots for Twilight), and then turning their words and voices into a crowd-sourced document that she performs herself in their various characters (although the above-linked Twilight adaptation uses multiple actors instead). Smith is as talented a performer as she is a writer, and so again there’s much to be said for watching and hearing her take on these voices and stories, as you can do (if you have an hour and some good wifi) with all four parts of the above-linked version of Fires.

But if you’re attempting to engage these literary works without internet access or a high-tech 21^st century device? Well, I was introduced to Smith through the published, textual version of Twilight, and I can say with certainty that she makes these voices and characters and communities come to life just as powerfully in that form. Indeed, there’s something to be said for the opportunity to hear them all in our own head, with no performance choices filtering them, distinguishing them from one another, perhaps rendering one or another sympathetic or annoying to our ears. Their subjects are the height of divisive and violent controversies, moments that pitted Americans against Americans in the worst ways—but the texts offer us the chance to hear all sides, and, as Walt put it, “filter them from your self.” Pretty good way to spend some quality reading time if you ask me.

Last King context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

May 1, 2019: Rodney King in Context: Korean American Businesses

[On April 29^th, 1992, civil unrest erupted in Los Angeles after the four officers who had beaten Rodney King on video were acquitted on all charges. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy King himself and other contexts for and representations of the LA riots, leading up to a special weekend post on the narrative of “race riots” itself.]

On an ethnic and communal space that became complicatedly part of the King riots.

At the 2018 New England American Studies Association conference at UMass Lowell, one of the best papers I heard was on the subject of 1980s Korean grocery stores as a potent American Studies myth and symbol. Babson College Professor Paul Schmitz balanced specific details from the histories and stories of that cultural and communal space with broader analyses of the narratives and images associated with it, convincingly arguing that both the Korean grocers and their families and external media and social forces worked to shape this space and role into a complex but inspiring symbol of community, success, and the American Dream. There are many layers to those histories and realities, those images and their meanings, those different sides to this American space; but one particularly complex side is that for various social and economic reasons these Korean grocery stores are often located in (or at least in close proximity to) neighborhoods that feature sizeable African American, Latino, or other minority communities.

As that hyperlinked New York Times article from 1990 illustrates, those geographic details had become a significant story (not only in cities like New York and Los Angeles, but nationally) in the years immediately preceding the Rodney King verdict and riots, and would become a focal point of the riots themselves. As this 25^th anniversary CNN story notes, roughly half of the $1 billion in property damage inflicted in the course of the riots was sustained by Korean businesses, as the riots spilled over from predominantly African American neighborhoods into the adjacent area known as Koreatown. Images of Korean business owners and their friends and families patrolling the neighborhood’s streets and rooftops with weapons became fraught and frightening symbols of the riots and the war-like conditions they produced throughout much of Central LA. As the CNN story reflects, these horrors affected the LA (and national) Korean American community in multiple tragic ways: not only creating deep and enduring divisions with the city’s African American community; but also, thanks to the near-complete lack of law enforcement response to the unfolding horrors, leading Korean Americans to a recognition of their status as second-class citizens in the eyes of the city’s power structures.

Those shifts in perspective and community have continued to unfold in the quarter-century since the riots, and likely will remain complex and evolving in the years to come. But what does better remembering these histories contribute to our perspective on the riots themselves? For one thing, they remind us that the fault lines in American history and community are never as simple as the white supremacist/Americans of color divisions I highlighted through yesterday’s LAPD histories and controversies; while it would be delightful if all Americans of color (or of course all Americans period) consistently operated in solidarity, life is never that one-sided or straightforward. And for another thing, they remind us of one of the most frustrating limits of exclusionary or white supremacist visions of American identity: that those visions not only exclude so many different foundational and longstanding communities, but make it impossible to do justice to the complex histories and stories of all those communities, individually and in relationship to one another. Which is to say, even when American history is at its darkest (and things got very dark during the King riots), it still and crucially reflects the truly inclusive and diverse community that has always defined us.

Next King context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?