by Lorrie Moore
Though Edelman’s film is not about Nicole Brown, she is seen as the great beauty everyone upon meeting her instantly declared her to be. We see her lovely in her wedding dress, basking in the sun with her young child, playing basketball by the pool with her husband’s friends, who adored her. We see her sexy modeling shots. In fact, beauty is very much a theme in this narrative: both Simpson and Brown were so good-looking that no actors could convincingly play them (in the docudrama The People v. O.J., Cuba Gooding is miscast as O.J., and Brown is given no written part at all; she is seen only once as a blurry, blond corpse foregrounded at her own funeral). In a film industry full of beautiful people, the casting problem is usually the opposite—the actors are too attractive for the people they are playing. A documentary, using actual footage of all involved, does not have this problem. In Edelman’s case he can also use, and does, home movies and photographs of both victims, so that an honoring trace of their presence persists. But he does not linger there; his story is not about them.
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If a hero embodies the unspoken virtues and vitality of a society, the tragic hero, beneath an admirable veneer, flecked with the marks of youthful struggle overcome, also embodies a society’s secret illnesses. Simpson suffered from many things having to do with American success and celebrity and rags-to-riches financial swings, including disconnect from the black community. He also suffered from rickets as a child and severe arthritis as an adult; his beauty when young fed into both insecurity about its loss and sexual entitlement, which fueled jealousy, rage, and narcissism. More contemporary pathological categories might include borderline personality disorder, mental compartmentalization, and concussive head trauma (CTE) from playing football, but speculative medicalizing diminishes the story’s power.
Edelman’s documentary would like implicitly to link Simpson’s troubles to the culture of sports, though it also compares him unfavorably to Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Jim Brown, other athletes who were aligned with the civil rights movement and were “race men,” which Simpson never was nor aspired to be. He was an ambitious party boy from a party school—USC in 1967 was pretty much beyond the reach of the black community—and after his subsequent professional running back days were over, Simpson was both driven and anxious about money. As his movie career went through its vagaries, he strove to be a successful businessman. He served on corporate boards and did endorsements for rental cars and honey-baked hams, though what he really wanted, a little unrealistically, was to be head of a movie studio. According to the documentary, he was supporting his in-laws.
For many years he was wealthy, famous, and handsome in a land—Los Angeles—that prized such things even more than elsewhere. He loved Hollywood and felt, foolishly—perhaps like Michael Jackson, whom Johnny Cochran also once represented—that he had transcended race. He seemed to feel that lavish materialism would express his accomplishment, that it would signify his success as a black man, that it would speak for itself. He was counterrevolutionary.
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The documentary handles the trial itself in efficient ways. Interviews with the present-day Mark Fuhrman and the now almost unrecognizable Marcia Clark are perhaps the most interesting, although throughout managing defense attorney Carl Douglas has some of the most memorable remarks. Of Robert Shapiro, he says, “He was not known as a trial dog with two g’s.” Of Cochran: “Johnny was always that stalwart defender of justice fighting against the Bastille.” Of the strong and unusual diversity of the jury: “O.J. turned and said, ‘Guys, if this jury convicts me, maybe I did do it.’ ” The verdict was not inexplicable, as much as it might have seemed so to white people watching the trial from their living rooms. The prosecutors, according to Marcia Clark, felt they had lost the case by the time Fuhrman invoked the Fifth. Though Clark closed her case by emphasizing the domestic abuse, hoping to appeal to the women jurors, domestic abuse was not the crime with which Simpson was being charged.
Edelman shows Clark cursing out paparazzi in front of her home when she is called back into the courthouse for the verdict; it’s clear she knows she has lost. As for the vulnerable and complex Christopher Darden, who initiated O.J.’s trying on of the glove (which prompted Cochran’s triumphant rhyme, “If it does not fit, you must acquit”), he refused to be included in the film, a loss for Edelman, who also did not have Cochran or Robert Kardashian, both now deceased, nor Judge Lance Ito, who despite inviting Larry King into his chambers has since rebuffed all publicity. This past spring, however, a somewhat charming and middle-aged Chris Darden did go on The View and on the Today show (where, among other things, he defended his decision to have Simpson try on the glove and did not deny having been romantically involved with Marcia Clark during the case).
Edelman negotiates the legal turns of the trial (most involving blood evidence and its contamination) without getting too bogged down with courtroom psychodrama and the media frenzy that attached to all the participants. The falling-out of Shapiro and Cochran at the end is little more than too many bigwigs at the table but provides an interesting coda. Cochran’s “playing the race card” included “playing the Nazi card,” and he was not above invoking Hitler when speaking of Fuhrman’s racist views. It is an example of “Godwin’s Law” or “Reductio ad Hitlerum” and was an unnecessary move on Cochran’s part—the first person to say “Nazi” loses the argument, my own students like to say—but Cochran did not lose, and Shapiro’s peeling away and grandstanding after the verdict, holding solo press conferences in which he criticized Cochran and Bailey, were merely self-serving.
But O.J.: Made in America continues well past the trial. It follows Simpson as he tries to salvage his life despite having become a social pariah in Brentwood. It shows him before he finally leaves for Florida to protect his assets, after losing the civil suit brought by the Goldmans and Browns. Simpson is shown making faked footage—reluctantly packing up, pulling out of the driveway, telling the cameraman to go, waving him away—in order to sell these films to tabloids. The civil suit had assessed the damages at $33 million and he had no other way to make money.
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The years in Florida are squalid and surreal. Celia Farber, an Esquire journalist who interviewed Simpson at the time, said she began to feel “sorry for him…I kept feeling he was a victim.” The level and scope of negative feeling toward him, his banishment from practically everything, she felt had a component of racism in it. But knocked off all his pedestals, instead of doing good works, Simpson escaped into strip clubs and unsavory parties. Although the black church reached out to help him, and he had read the Bible and the Koran in jail, he did not get religion. He took up golfing with a new social set much lower down the ladder than those he had golfed with in Brentwood.
The documentary takes us through the final extraordinary sentencing of Simpson in 2010 for an absurdly small crime—a chapter the public may not have paid much attention to. Because Simpson had lost all his corporate contracts, he was making money through the signing of memorabilia. (This is how he paid his lawyers during the trial as well: signing footballs and T-shirts in jail.) In the strange mishandling of his personal property after the civil case against him, much personal memorabilia, such as his Heisman Trophy, never intended for sale, went missing. To retrieve some of these possessions, Simpson hatched a plan with some dicey new Florida pals. It was less like a crime and more like a caper out of a movie. They would find the shady memorabilia salesman in a Las Vegas hotel room and confront him.
Because two of his friends were carrying guns, it was called “armed robbery.” Because Simpson said upon entering that nobody was to leave the room, it was called “attempted kidnapping.” When Simpson pleads with the court that he didn’t know he was committing a crime, one is inclined to believe him. But the Nevada judge, clearly not liking the outcome of Simpson’s previous criminal trial, and making a kind of end
run around the double-jeopardy clause in the Constitution, sentenced Simpson to over thirty-three years (with parole after seven). The number was thought to mirror the $33 million awarded in the civil suit, and the day of the sentencing was the anniversary of the murder charge acquittal. Ron Goldman’s father, Fred, was in the Las Vegas courtroom doggedly looking for justice and solace. Fred Goldman’s long, bitter vigil and enthusiasm for the Nevada court’s over-the-top conviction could not possibly assuage his sorrow. One cannot judge such grief. Though one can compare it, if one dares, to the extravagantly and unsettlingly ready public forgiveness of Dylann Roof by the families of the victims of the Charleston AME church shooting in 2015. Amazing grace indeed, as Barack Obama noted.
Edelman’s documentary shows O.J. now in prison looking gray and overweight while trying to put the best spin on things—his coaching of the prison teams, for instance. When the murder trial is brought up by the parole reviewers, Simpson looks crestfallen. He wants to be rehabilitated in the public mind, and the question serves as a reminder that this will never happen. How did this life go so awry? The documentary veers simultaneously toward and away from the question, probably since at the heart of most individual madness there is a kind of mystery, although the sociological threads—sports, race, criminal justice, domestic violence, celebrity, sex, hedonism—are all named and explored. The film is excellent at putting what it can in its cultural context.
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What the film does especially eye-openingly is look at the much-maligned jury and interview two rather sympathetic members. (Further deliberation—something that was expected—might have left the public with a hung jury, a mistrial at best.) Even if there hadn’t been perjury, mishandled evidence, and general and specific reasonable doubt, if one is a juror and perceives there is a kind of war that involves race, one may feel oneself drafted as a soldier and choose sides. War—which includes battle cries, uniforms, songs, artillery, recruits, and often dishonest, obscuring vocabulary (engagement!)—is the fog itself.
The documentary suggests that the jurors felt themselves invited into it, called upon to take care of one of their own, and by the end were battle-weary but not AWOL. In a place where deference to police had been built into the legal system, aggravating racial tensions for decades, this jury would fight back. Did the prison system need one more black man? Did it require this particular black man? The crucial police detective on the crime scene had pleaded the Fifth multiple times to questions regarding evidence tampering; the prosecution’s case had a large wobble in it; how was a conviction possible?
The jurors, for the most part black women from downtown L.A., clearly felt closer to Rodney King than to the white model who had married an admired sports hero. Redemption for one of their own sweetened the technical correctness of the verdict. Nonetheless, with unveiled scorn, coprosecutor Bill Hodgman looks into Edelman’s camera and shockingly calls the jury “unfit,” “a bad lot,” a product of “reverse social Darwinism.”
How curious but inevitable that our artists and comedians are more fearless in their opinions (than, say, our politicians) when it comes to the matter of black lives mattering; in speaking of police culture, after this summer’s tragic Dallas shooting of three cops, Bill Maher has said, “You cannot shoot unarmed people continually without someone shooting back.” When two weeks later a black therapist was shot as he lay with his hands raised in a Florida street next to an autistic patient, the still-living therapist asked the cop why he had shot him, and the cop replied, “I don’t know.”
Because he could. Because deep down he believed he was worth more than the black man in the street. Because our country being awash in guns more than any other country in the world (Yemen is second) makes many policemen trigger-happy. Because frightened cops make for frightened citizens. Because it feels like a war. “People keep saying, ‘We need to have a conversation about race,’ ” Toni Morrison told The Telegraph. “This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back.”
On the subject of O.J., Chris Rock is even edgier. His routine on this topic mentions the $25,000-a-month alimony Simpson was paying his estranged wife when he “hadn’t made a touchdown in twenty years.” Violence during divorce is statistically notorious; almost everyone going through a family breakup is for a time half-crazy, and sometimes it shows up on the legal dockets, as Rock himself comprehends. Ron Goldman was Nicole’s boyfriend, Rock shouts, and was known to drive around L.A. in the Ferrari that O.J. had bought for her. “I don’t even own a Ferrari. But if I saw someone driving my Pinto, that shit would blow up like The Godfather.” Rock pauses with his comic’s wicked grin. “I’m not saying he should have killed her, but I understand.” Prideful rage, as Rock insists, is the story.
But the story’s outcome rests on a civil right of innocence until guilt is “proven” in a trial by jury. And with Cochran leading the way, the jurors surely had the same fact pressing on them as they came to their conclusions and did their work: the stressful, repeated grinding down of the black man in America—his rights, his image, his identity, his safety, his employment, his finances, his health, his sanity, his dignity, his liberty, his spirit. When we look around at our country and its institutions—as Edelman’s documentary asks us to—we can see so much that is sacrificially tainted with this particular human casualty.
As a result, in the operatic Simpson tragedy (which includes loving “not wisely” but also not too well) we can see a hinge to another love story: that of O.J. and his Angeleno jurors—people identified by number rather than name and whose subsequent condemnation and ostracization mirrored his own. Race trumped gender and class. As Edelman tells it, Simpson’s story is intricately entwined with the jury’s, like the rose and briar vines sprung from doomed lovers in old ballads. The agonist-antagonist-protagonist was saved by a Greek chorus of his peers. Saved somewhat. Saved sort of. Saved slightly.
(2016)
Thoughts on Hillary Clinton, December 2016
In 2007 and 2008 I wrote a couple of pieces on Hillary Clinton (which I have not included here). The first one began: “When most of us first saw Hillary Clinton it was on 60 Minutes right after the 1992 Super Bowl and she was seated by her man saying she was not one of those women who would stand by him.” The second piece divided her 2008 supporters into four camps: (1) the no-illusions camp (“You shouldn’t vote with too much hope in your heart”); (2) the camp of wounded projection, which includes a lot of women who sacrificed for their husbands, too; (3) the “we need a woman for president in my lifetime” camp—no matter who she is; (4) conflicted macho men seeking redemption.
The pieces, which now seem a little OBE, were very much of their time and steeped in the details of the 2008 Democratic primary, during which I was canvassing (in Wisconsin and Indiana) for Barack Obama, who seemed a much more significant and useful figure—historically, sociologically, and temperamentally. Because of her marital leg up (no mischievous innuendo there—don’t search!), I didn’t find Clinton a deeply feminist choice. I didn’t see her as representing any systemic change. I did think, on the other hand, that she was smart and quick and had more “charisma” (why this word?) than the press gave her credit for—both she and Obama could get wonky and dull on the trail when tired; nothing wrong with that—she had a big laugh and real warmth and sometimes the heat of a beautiful villainess, like the aging queen in Snow White, everyone’s favorite character in the Disney film. She was a centrist and a hawk and sometimes dodgy; she publicly recounted dodging fictional sniper fire in a Ronald Reagan–style mind-movie set in the former Yugoslavia. She also had a hand in one of the biggest foreign policy catastrophes of our time. This, despite the fearsome Clinton Machine, doomed her in a campaign against a younger, less established online community organizer of oddly named peace-loving dwarves (our young people).
When she ran inevitably again in 2016, this time as the Democrati
c nominee, I at long last voted for a Clinton. Had to for the Supreme Court. She was strong on Roe v. Wade. She seemed strong on tightening gun laws. She was adamant about Citizens United. These things, for a change, did not seem to have a waffle in them. (One had to put aside Iraq, NAFTA, the demise of HillaryCare, the crime bill, the welfare bill, Waco, Texas, the Goldman Sachs speeches, and other dubious maneuvers with which Clinton and/or her husband were associated; one had to hope for the best.) Environmental concern was clearly not a priority of anyone’s, and this seemed mind-boggling. (Clinton was going after Donald Trump’s voters when wooing Jill Stein’s would have won her some states.) We seemed to have two frackers as our major party candidates. Still I assumed—based on very little, apparently—a landslide for her.
But then I noticed that she was not stumping much with Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin. There seemed to be no Clinton headquarters in Wisconsin that had an actual phone number. The mayor of Madison subsequently complained in The New York Times that he did not ever get a call from Hillary. In the summertime, elsewhere, she made mention of putting Bill in charge of the economy. Why? (Bill did not even know to stay off the attorney general’s portion of the tarmac and as a result gave us James Comey and his variously damaging email announcements.) Hillary confidently and happily said she might reserve for herself the task of picking out the new White House china. Not only was she getting ahead of herself, she was talking about dishes, not Beijing. She pivoted overconfidently toward suburban female Republicans, alienating the young. She seemed to have trouble getting traction anywhere outside the party base. When she should have been campaigning for midwesterners, at a fund-raiser she suggested a lot of them were a basket of deplorables. Why, why, why? I returned to my wish that the Clintons had gotten out of the way and let someone such as Elizabeth Warren run, with Warren’s truth-to-power stance and attachment to the working class. That so many people voted for a septuagenarian socialist proved there was hunger for an alternative. (Bernie Sanders had won the Wisconsin primary, which should have concerned the Clinton campaign but apparently didn’t.) In a state full of government workers who use email, her personal server issue was paid attention to. And in a state that is not shy about third parties, third-party candidates could determine outcomes. And did.
