O.J.: Made in America (2016)

directed by Ezra Edelman

Sophia Stewart

By July 2016, my days living in Los Angeles were numbered, and my impending departure had made me see my hometown with kinder, more curious eyes. In a few weeks I’d be a college freshman in a city 400 miles away. I imagined once I got there that classmates might ask where I was from, and I would say LA, and this answer would make me feel proud, maybe even a little smug. I figured on campus I’d have to act as a sort of ambassador. Consequently, I entered my last summer in LA with newfound allegiance to the city. But I left that summer and that city in a haze of ambivalence, dogged by the knowledge of how little I knew.

*

At the core of every mythology (Greek, Norse, Egyptian) is a cast of characters. Los Angeles, famous for its mythmaking industry, has essential characters too: Joan Didion, the Kardashians, Angelyne. These characters I know well—I’ve read most of Didion’s work, attended high school minutes from the Kardashian mance, and spotted Angelyne in two separate Coffee Bean parking lots. Growing up, I sensed from overheard conversations and sitcom quips that another one of LA’s integral characters was OJ Simpson, an oft-referenced figure who I knew only as a famous person that got away with killing his wife somewhere near UCLA, where my parents both went. That this was the extent of my understanding satisfied me.

I can’t say for sure why at 18 I sat down one night to watch all 467 minutes of Ezra Edelman’s OJ: Made in America. It really wasn’t my kind of movie. It looked on its surface to combine my two least favorite genres of documentary (sports and true crime) and its mere distribution by ESPN (a network I have never in my life watched voluntarily) should have repelled me. Still, the film seemed like enough of a foundational text of LA history to necessitate my viewing. It was, and it did.

Anyone with the misfortune of spending time with me in the months after I first saw Made in America was subjected to variations of the same diatribe. It should be mandatory viewing for every Angeleno—every American! I’d say with thespian fervor. Never before has a single character study so illuminated a shared regional history! The functions of race and class and gender and power and celebrity in this city have never been more apparent to me! I was overzealous, yes, bordering on insufferable, but my conviction was sincere. In hindsight, my public-facing enthusiasm for the film misrepresented my private experience watching it—I spent most of Made in America’s nearly eight hours (and many days after) vacillating between feelings of devastation, frustration, and misanthropy.

Made in America presents the stories of Los Angeles and OJ Simpson as intertwined. Narratively, both hinge on powerful people doing bad things with impunity. Thematically, both are steeped in violence and suffering and injustice. As a documentarian, Edelman is interested in how this violence and suffering and injustice manifest on grand and intimate scales. He shows, for instance, the familiar 1992 footage of South Central LA on fire, but intersperses it with quiet tears rolling down the cheeks of a local pastor as he registers the unjust verdict that precipitated that fire. In depicting agony, Edelman censors nothing and admits everything into evidence. He insists on the fullest picture possible. An image of a lynching in 1930s Indiana, then, becomes just as crucial as photos from the murder scene in Brentwood. All that pain, excavated, magnified, interpreted—it was, for a young white middle-class woman, a shock to the limbic system. It still is.

Since 2016, I’ve made a point to watch Made in America twice a year. Each time I respond differently. My first viewing felt like an awakening. I was riled up, appalled that I’d spent my life looking at the world through such a narrow aperture, thinking I got the gist. After I rewatched it last month, I just felt impossibly sad. Still, I was compelled in my post-OJ stupor, as I typically am, to prosthelytize the film, and implored the new guy I was seeing to watch Made in America. “I’m not from LA,” he said. “I don’t care about OJ like that.” “You don’t understand,” I told him. “It’s not just about OJ.” I listed some of the many things it is about: the dehumanizing nature of celebrity, the spectacle-making of media, the inherent biases of law enforcement, the brutality of policing, the responsibilities of public figures, the complexity of justice in America. “I’ll watch it soon,” he said. Hit with his nebulous, noncommittal “soon,” I knew I’d failed to convey the urgency of my request. He needed to be educated, of course, and stat—but the movie was also a kind of litmus test. Would he see what I saw in Made in America? Would he feel the same sort of gnawing anguish that I did for the story’s many victims? And what would I do if he didn’t?

*

My dad tells it like this. It was a balmy June afternoon, and he was working at a production studio in Burbank. Suddenly his boss summoned the staff’s attention and rallied them into her office. She instructed everyone to gather around her TV. In silence my dad and his coworkers huddled around the little box: on screen was a white SUV hurtling northbound on an empty 405, pursued at a deferential distance by a fleet of police. In what the newscaster called “the suspect vehicle” was former football star and actor OJ Simpson, pressing a gun to his temple. Simpson was wanted for a double-homicide in which one of the victims was his ex-wife. He’d not turned himself in at the agreed-upon hour and was now a fugitive of the law.

Helicopters hovered in the sky, and crowds formed on the freeway overpasses, some spectators chanting words of encouragement, some swinging white t-shirts over their heads. In stunned silence the whole office watched as the car got off at Sunset, and the chase’s backdrop shifted from a spacious seven-lane freeway to the constricted roads of the Westside. Details were scarce but the sheer novelty of the sight was captivating. It was like something out of a movie, my dad says to me, narrating the experience with the kind of clarity I’d expect from a Boomer recalling the JFK assassination. It was, I imagine, the same caliber of national event.

For nearly a full year after the chase, OJ was tried for murder at the Los Angeles County Courthouse and, more importantly, on television. Media coverage was ubiquitous. Smothering. Every American was watching the same thing, but saw something different: social stratification had splintered reality. As for Los Angeles, the secret of our shiny city was laid bare for the whole country—we were a bastion of white supremacy, our past and present blighted by racist violence, racist policing, and racist court rulings. Nothing that happened in the courtroom could be disentangled from LA’s history; the OJ case was tried in the shadow of the Watts Uprising, Operation Hammer, the assault of Rodney King and acquittal of his attackers, the murder of Latasha Harlins and minimal sentencing of her killer, the 16 days of riots that followed. For white Angelenos like my dad, that shadow might have been harder to make out. (Even so, he knew acquittal was imminent once the glove came out.)

All of it—the murder, the trial, the verdict—could have only happened in Los Angeles. The circumstances were too specific, from the celebrity culture that enabled OJ’s misbehavior to the police culture that sowed reasonable doubt in jurors. Through the vessel of the OJ case, some of our most sacredly held institutions (USC football, Hollywood, television) collided with our most sinful ones (the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Superior Court), while the rest of the country, lacking this local context, observed. Yet as quintessentially LA as the story of Made in America is, the movie also makes a strong case that what we might think of as quintessential LA doesn’t really exist.

The area that I grew up calling Los Angeles is a municipal mess, a sprawling jumble of disjointed neighborhoods. At the height of his power, OJ made the city cohere. He created a unifying aspirational narrative in a deeply fissured place—this Black man born into poverty had transcended the city’s socioeconomic partitions to join its highest echelons. But Edelman makes clear that OJ’s acceptance into LA’s upper crust didn’t really reflect any kind of regional racial progress—as an actress friend of the late Nicole Brown Simpson says in Made in America, “Los Angeles is unlike other places; if you're a celebrity, you have no color.” OJ bought in: “I’m not Black,” he’d tell his friends, “I’m OJ!” But to the murder trial jury he was both Black and OJ, and in him they saw a successful Black man persecuted by LA authorities; if history was any indication, he needed saving. His innocence was beyond the point. The trial transcended the crime.

Made in America, like the trial itself, isn’t about whether or not he did it. (He did it.) And as a director, Edelman isn’t interested in making moral judgements. In the final stretch of the film, one juror says that she thinks “90 percent” of the members of the jury voted to acquit OJ because of Rodney King. Like a form of payback, she says. “Do you think that’s right?” the interviewer asks her. She throws up her hands. It was a response to an accumulation of wrongs. It doesn’t matter if it’s right. It’s what happened. Sometimes celebrities become symbols. Sometimes trials become circuses. Sometimes hurt people hurt people. And sometimes those who have been thoroughly fucked by institutions have to find some way to fuck those institutions back. No one knows this better than Marcia Clark, who cuts a painfully competent figure in Made in America. She admits, “It was all so much bigger than we were.” I remember watching her say that, feeling like I was shrinking in my clothes. It’s all so much bigger than I am.

*

Two summers after I first saw Made in America, I interned at a local magazine that had its office on Sunset. My daily commute involved traversing a stretch of the Hollywood Walk of Fame and passing the theater that hosts the Oscars. Late one afternoon I was on my way home, walking my usual path down Sunset, when I stopped suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk, like I’d hit a pane of glass. Parked along the curb beside me was a white Ford Bronco. I’d never seen the car in person before (the model was discontinued in 1996, two years after the chase), nor had I ever seen it depicted outside of that old helicopter footage. I could only imagine it gunning it down the 405, cops in tow—never like this, stationary, just a few feet away. I took a picture.

The OJ case cleaved a lot of lives in two, into before and after. Families were destroyed, friendships ended, careers ruined, reputations soiled. Edelman’s talking heads often start sentences with phrases like “Before the [murder/trial/verdict]” and “After the [murder/trial/verdict].” When I ran into the parked Bronco, I realized I could—and, in fact, often did—divide my life into the years before I watched Made in America and the years after. It sounds dramatic, I know. But there was a time, just a couple years prior, when that Bronco would have meant nothing to me; now, it conjured a 50-year-long story of brutality and impunity, fame and privilege, gore and shock and grief. A whole history of my city. All dispensed in a moment by a car on the side of the road. Eventually I returned to reality and continued my walk down Sunset, past the Oscars theater, and across the Walk of Fame, until I arrived at my car. To get home, I took the 405.

Sophia Stewart is an editor and writer from Los Angeles. She lives in Brooklyn and tweets @smswrites.