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Don’t Shoot
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Police Brutality, Corruption, and Systemic Racism
Healing, Progress, and Collective Consciousness
Justice, Perspective, and Ambiguity
Individuals vs. Institutions
Action vs. Symbolic Gesture
Summary
Analysis
Smith interviews Joe Viola, a television writer. Viola recounts where he was when the riots first began. He had just mailed his daughter’s registration forms to Berkeley and was standing at a street corner when the first cars arrived. A kid holding a gun pointed a weapon in Viola’s direction and said, “You’re dead, motherfucker,” or something to that effect. These events happened “Right here, right on the corner!” Viola specifies to Smith. Viola was too terrified to move. He heard screams, though he couldn’t see what was happening.
Witnessing a car drive by with a gun-wielding kid hanging out the window isn’t an image that tracks in Viola’s privileged life. That he sees this terrifying image immediately after completing the normal task of dropping off outgoing mail emphasizes how significantly the riots disrupted and injected unrest into the otherwise content lives of LA’s privileged classes. Suddenly, gang violence that had been restricted to faraway neighborhoods has encroached on Viola’s world. Viola’s incredulity that such violence could spread to his world comes through in his exclamation that all the events of his story occurred “right here, right on the corner!”
Themes
A week later, Viola read a newspaper article that clarified some of the details he couldn’t discern about the terrifying scene in the moment. Two cars filled with teenage girls pulling up to a curb outside the Jewish Federation. The girls emerged carrying a two-by-four and used it to hit a man in the head. The man fell to the ground, and people pleaded with the girls to stop. When a bystander tried to help the beaten man, a kid in one of the cars yelled, “shoot ‘em,” prompting another kid to shoot the girl in the leg. Viola remembers that one of the cars pulled up to him afterward, prompting him to run back to his house, lock the doors, and protect his wife and kids.
Viola’s energetic retelling of the presumed gang violence he witnessed in his neighborhood that day emphasizes the surreal aspect of the experience. He seems as though he can’t quite believe what he saw, which is why he relies on details gleaned from the newspaper article that was released afterward to supplement his retelling of the story.
Themes
