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Application of the Laws
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 Otis Chandler, a director of the Times Mirror Company and former editor of the Los Angeles Times. Chandler remarks that there are few families that have had the ability to accumulate wealth generationally. The only examples he can think of are the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, and the Mellons of Pittsburgh. Most wealthy families let their wealth slip away as they become addicted to alcohol or other vices.
Chandler’s remarks about wealthy families squandering away their wealth is a cynical response to Bradley’s earlier call for institutions to use their power to elicit change. Though it's unclear if he’s blaming formerly wealthy families for their own misfortune, he nevertheless suggests that there are increasingly few people with the capital to advocate for change.
Themes
Chandler reiterates that he doesn’t want to sound hopeless. However, he maintains that if real change is going to happen, it has to be a long-term commitment: it can’t be a vague promise to implement policy for a couple years and hope society’s deep-seated problems will just go away. Chandler has confidence LA can be a safe city for everyone someday, so long as things don’t return to “business as usual,” and so long as change isn’t confined to lofty speeches.
Chandler distinguishes between the long-term structural overhaul that will need to happen to ease Los Angeles’s racial tensions and repair their corrupt police force, and the lofty speeches that occur in the wake of the riots. These speeches are effectively useless, and Chandler suggests they’re just distractions as the city slowly returns to “business as usual.”
Themes
Chandler cautions that this situation has happened before. After the Watts riots, the city was absorbed in a fervent desire for change and social progress. And yet, in just two years, all that hope and energy was lost. He bemoans the separation between the federal and state governments and the country’s citizens. Chandler pauses before speculating that change will cost a lot of money and necessitate higher taxes. He anticipates the criticism he’ll hear from people who want that money allocated toward AIDs and health care and education, but he insists that rebuilding the city and enacting change is more important. He starts to say that “if our cities deteriorate into jungle land, which they are now…” but he trails off before he can finish his thought.
Again, the play portrays justice as an imperfect, complex issue. With a limited budget, the city must decide which problems are most pressing. Setting aside more money to fund infrastructure projects in minority neighborhoods and create employment opportunities takes away from funds that might otherwise have been allocated to help other people—justice for one group, the play shows, inevitably comes at another group’s expense.
Themes
