Thoughts on Twilight

Watching the television movie Twilight was especially interesting after reading Smith’s full collection of monologues. I kept noticing small and large changes made to the interviews, and (of course) the choice of performances. Although the collection is organized by categories like “The Territory” and “War Zone,” I think that the book succeeds in presenting more of a polyphony than a teleology---there are enough distinct voices that the book resists offering a “final” solution to or interpretation of the events. As Smith suggests in the collection’s introduction, “I think there is an expectation that in this diverse city, and in this diverse nation, a unifying voice would bring increased understanding and put us on the road to solutions. This expectation surprises me. There is little in culture or education that encourage the development of a unifying voice. In order to have real unity, all voices would have to first be heard or at least represented” (xxv). In contrast, I felt that the television adaptation presented a more familiar and coherent narrative (perhaps inevitably, if only for the purpose of creating an understandable program): build-up, eruption, repudiation of violence, re-assertion of a faith in eventual social justice. I’m not knocking this narrative---but I do think the collection is more successful in lingering with the “twilight”---“the inclarity, the enigma, the ambivalences” (“Homi Bhabha” 232).

Also of interest to me in the program: the performance of gender, class, and ethnicity, and which of these markers took “precedence” in particular performances. One major strand in the collection that seemed to “drop out” of the film was a gender analysis of the riots (for example, see Cornel West’s remarks on “machismo” in the collection). Something I noticed, though, was that the Asian American voices represented in the television adaptation were all female, and they lacked obvious class markers (unless I missed them?). Their “distinct” racial identities were expressed through their accents and use of language, but their surroundings were spare and their costumes unmarked. This is in contrast to the elaborate scenery and costume that marked the first performer in the adaptation, the wealthy Elaine Young, who dined at the Beverly Hills Hotel during the riots. I was especially struck by this because perhaps the most elaborate description of the interviewee’s surroundings in the collection is Smith’s description of Mrs. Young-Soon Han’s home; Smith records details of Mrs. Young-Soon Han’s “impeccable” living room, filled with furniture, trophies, and civic awards. In the adaptation, these details drop out---the focus is on her voice and her identity as a Korean woman rather than her identity as an upper-middle class (?) woman. Of course, this brings up the issue of whether these monologues are meant to be “representative” of particular groups or “individual” (or both)---an obvious tension in this kind of documentary project. I would be interested in discussing further the intersecting performances of class and ethnicity in the adaptation.