I would like to continue our class discussion on Wednesday by talking about the themes of sight and seeing that permeate the book version of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Anna Deveare Smith’s text points to the ways in which the L.A. riots were shaped by visual media: videotapes of the beatings of Rodney King and Reginald Denny, as well as the shooting of Latasha Harlins, circulated widely and shaped public opinion in immediate and affective ways. Homi Bhabha, in “Twilight #1,” implicitly comments on how the media shaped the ways that the riots were seen. He will go on to suggest that we must interrogate how we receive information visually, as well as how we interpret what we are given to see. He notes that “The inclarity,/the enigma,/the ambivalences,/in what happened in the L.A./uprisings/are precisely what we want to get hold of./It’s exactly the moment/when the L.A. uprisings could be something/else/than it was/seen to be,/or maybe something/other than it was seen to be” (Smith 232). Bhabha’s emphasis on sight as a hermeneutic tool suggests that the media representation of the riots actually produces the events in L.A. as a text, a sight of interpretation and self-reflection.
Bhabha continues by taking up the metaphor of twilight that structures Smith’s project. To look at the events as “something other than it was seen to be” requires that we defy the authority of visual, mediated representation in order to search out the ambivalences: “I think when we look at it in twilight/we learn…that the hard outlines of what we see in/daylight/that make it easy for us to order/daylight/disappear./So we begin to see its boundaries in a much more faded/way./That fuzziness of twilight/allows us to see the intersections/of the event with a number of other things that daylight/obscures for/us” (Smith 232-3). For Bhabha, twilight does not obscure, but actually facilitates, sight. Twilight allows us to disidentify with misleading media representations so that we can begin to view the assault on Reginald Denny or looting not as the actions of “thugs,” as one reporter described them, but as events in a much longer history of racial and socio-economic inequality. Echoing Bhabha’s theme of misleading representation, Paula Weinstein explains in “A Jungian Collective Unconscious,” “It was,/I think, a media fest/of making white people/scared of the African-American community” (211). Reverend Tom Choi reiterates this statement when he expresses his surprise at the amicable conversation he has with “these people that quote unquote/were supposed to be hostile on TV” (203). Greater clarity of vision, Bhabha implies, allows us to be more critical of the “daylight” that is constructed for us by the media. If in daylight we “somehow think/the event and its clarity/as it is presented to us,/and we have to just react to it” (233), then Bhabha is calling for a more engaged audience that does not merely absorb what is being presented, but interrogates its truth value and that considers the ways in “we are producing the event” (232), via our interpretations, our fears and biases.
The theme of passive spectatorship, and of the riot as spectacle, runs throughout the book version of Twilight and provides an effective counterpoint to the notion of the engaged, questioning viewer that Bhabha posits. Josie Morales in “Indelible Substance” discusses her discomfort in watching the Rodney King beating in person. She remembers telling her husband “‘We have to stay here/and watch/because this is wrong’” (Smith 67). Morales foregrounds the importance of watching an injustice unfold, but implicitly suggests her inability to do anything except watch because of the “oppressive atmosphere” of police brutality (66). Her words spark questions about the ethics of the spectator, yet the actors involved in the spectacle necessarily complicate those ethics. If Morales were viewing a mugging unfold, for example, we would question her morality if we learned that she merely watched and did not call the police. However, in a situation in which the police are the violent perpetrators, any action by the spectator to aid the victim, the seen subject, becomes problematic. Reporter Judith Tur discusses the act of watching without intervening as cowardly in “War Zone.” Talking to Smith about John and Marika Tur videotaping the assault on Reginald Denny from their helicopter, she explains that “Now these women here—/you’ll see them later—/are taking pictures of this./This is sick./So this is the video I’m gonna be…/that I’m gonna give you for the show” (94-5). Later, she points out to Smith “another animal/videotaping this guy” (96). The irony of Tur’s statements are undeniable: her status as a reporter gives her the authority to represent violence, but it is unclear if she would ever intervene in the events she were reporting. In other words, she questions the ethics of documenting violence without acknowledging her own complicity in turning that violence into spectacle rather than intervening to stop it. I am again reminded of Bhabha’s statement that we, as spectators, are only comfortable viewing events in a metaphorical daylight that does not challenge us to interrogate the ways in which we “are projecting onto the event itself” (233). Tur projects onto the people recording Denny’s assault her own disheartening revelation that “this is not my United States anymore” (96), but she cannot consider her complicity in the construction of spectacle.
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