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The Beverly Hills Hotel
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 an anonymous female student at the University of Southern California. They’re in the woman’s sorority house in a room filled with Laura Ashley brand furnishings. The woman talks about feeling “scared to death” when the riots began. She and sorority sisters were worried the protestors would attack sorority row, as they had during the Watts riots. The women packed their bags and sat in the hallway upstairs, listening for intruders.
Smith describes the Laura Ashley brand furnishings that adorn the sorority woman’s room to signify her class status. Though not a luxury designer, the brand mimics Victorian-era designs and suggests an upper-middle class background. Smith’s stage directions suggest to the audience that this account, like Elaine Young’s before it, will relive the riots through the eyes of someone from a privileged background. USC’s campus is located nearer to where much of the riots’ action occurred than Elaine Young’s location in Beverly Hills, so her and her sorority sisters’ fears may be more justified than those of Young and the Hollywood Agent.
Themes
The student describes how her parents were on their way to California to take part in a caravan of old 40s cars, but she told them to turn around, since her father “[would] die” if one of the rioters hit his prized 1941 Cadillac with a bottle. The woman launches into a long monologue about all the different antique cars her father owns: Lincolns, Continentals, Town and Countries. They are his prized possessions.
The woman transitions from talking about how she feared for her life into a tangent about her father’s prized classic cars. Her hyperbolic insistence that her father “[would] die” if one of the rioters damaged the car is yet another example how out of touch the upper classes are with the experiences of LA’s marginalized communities. As people literally die in the riots, all the woman can think about is how her father will figuratively die if a rioter damages his personal property.
Themes
