Previous
It’s Awful Hard to Break Away
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 Dean Gilmour, Lieutenant and Coroner for Los Angeles County. Gilmore is a friendly man who speaks slowly. He talks about working with an attorney to have a young woman declared dead. The girl and her boyfriend were looting a New Guys appliance store in South-Central that caught fire during the riots. The boyfriend is thought to be the only person to escape the flames, though squads searched the building multiple times and couldn’t find any human remains.
Gilmour’s monologue focuses on an aspect of the riots Smith has yet to cover in depth: the nearly 60 casualties. After Parker described the riots as cathartic, the play now shows the casualties that his monologue ignored. These deaths suggest that the justice Parker felt is not as simple as he portrayed it. Rather, his catharsis comes with a hefty price: inflicting harm upon someone else.
Themes
Gilmour ruminates about how the missing people’s families—and humanity more broadly—need closure and ceremony to move on after a death. He describes the almost 60 fatalities that occurred during the riots, but he suggests that it’s difficult to say which of these deaths were caused by the riots themselves. Furthermore, shouldn’t officials consider whether gang shootings that occurred during the riots should count as riot-related? After all, there are gang shootings every day.
Gilmour’s ruminations about the need for closure following a loss suggests that in many ways, people are much the same: they all crave more or less the same thing when a loved one dies. This is something, he suggests, that transcends race and class differences. Then, he also implies that those who died as a direct result of the riots are somehow considered more tragic than the deaths that occur every day—suggesting that many people are numb to the regular violence.
Themes
Gilmour rambles on about which deaths are and are not attributed to the riots. He talks more about human remains, describing in detail how they decay over time, naturally or with the help of animal scavengers. Gilmour shuffles through his papers to try to find a press release and recalls his personal experiences with death: his child was stillborn, his brother was murdered, his sister was killed by a drunk driver. He explains how his own grief allows him to empathize with victims’ families. Finally, Gilmour locates the press release. He reads the details aloud: 41 gunshot wounds, 26 Black fatalities, 18 Hispanic, 10 Caucasian, two Asian. Mostly male, mostly the victims of gunshot wounds. Four deaths involved the LAPD. Gilmour closes his monologue by remarking, “Let’s pray for peace, hunh?”
Gilmour’s tangent about death and decay, combined with his summary of riot casualties broken down demographically, have the effect of dehumanizing victims. Death becomes less of a personal concern than a scientific process, and the lives lost become statistics instead of people. His remark, “Let’s pray for peace, hunh?” also suggest an air of resignation. He seems to imply that the riots and casualties will soon fade from public consciousness, but people will continue to die violent, senseless deaths if nothing changes.
Themes
