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Human Remains
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 Peter Sellars, a director. Seller describes the conflict of Eugene O’Neill’s tragic play, Long Day’s Journey into Night. In the play, the father figure, James Tyrone, is too cheap to replace his house’s burnt-out lightbulbs, leaving his family to live in darkness. Sellars suggests that this is similar to the state of contemporary America. He returns to the play, describing how Tyrone’s life has been consumed by providing for his family, and influenced by “a culture of success,.” And yet, he refuses to replace the bulbs. In America, Sellars suggests, there is no family, and no house to return to. “We can’t live, / our own house burning,” says Sellars.
Sellars identifies a disconnect between Tyrone’s desire to look successful and the reality of his situation, which involves a suffering family whose lives do not benefit from this outward display of success. Sellars sees the same disconnect in Los Angeles: the city wants to project an image of progress and functionality, while ignoring the systemic problems that perpetuate social ills and racial tension. Sellars’s remark that “we can’t live / [with] our own house burning” suggests that the facade of functionality LA wishes to project is unsustainable if the city refuses to address the problems that plague its most vulnerable communities.
Themes
Sellars continues with the house analogy. Even though the fire might only be burning in the basement, soon it will spread, leaving even the top floor uninhabitable. And shutting the door to one’s own room does little to stop the flames. Sellars closes his statement by remarking that O’Neill “wrote the classic play about / the American dream.”
