I Think You Should Always Try To Understand
Storytellers have a responsibility to their subjects.
One of my favorite films is the documentary O.J.: Made in America, about the life and trial of O.J. Simpson and the broader socio-political context that all but ensured his acquittal for murdering his estranged wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. It is an important film both for the things it has to say and, critically, the way that it says those things, which is what I want to focus on here.
The film is a wonderful feat not only of research and interviewing but also of editing and direction, all in service of a uniquely American story that is inherently rife with drama and tragedy but which is deceptively easy to tell poorly, as evidenced by the many other slapdash, fly-by-night crime series-style documentaries on the subject which never really seem to get to the heart of the matter. Made In America’s director, Ezra Edelman, deserves all the praise that he got for showing clearly that organized injustice, in this case the longstanding and insufferable oppression of black people in Los Angeles and across the country, must inevitably breed miscarriages of justice elsewhere. I have written about that dynamic before in regards to the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, but that is not my subject here today. Rather, there are two smaller moments in Made in America, moments of characterization of Edelman’s interview subjects, that are representative of Edelman’s profound sensitivity and graciousness towards his subjects, real human beings with real lives who found themselves caught up in Simpson’s story, that I think are supremely important for all storytellers and all story-listeners to take note of. These two moments help us to better understand and empathize with the inner lives of two people, mere supporting characters in the story, who we may otherwise fundamentally disagree with and even abhor. As we find ourselves today in an age of rampant misunderstanding, impatience, and intolerance, these moments of intentional and gracious storytelling are all the more important to highlight.
Before I go on, I should say that I will be discussing two moments in the film which could be considered soft spoilers. This may sound odd to say about a documentary about an incredibly famous case of double homicide, but it is the way in which Edelman executes these moments, less the actual information that they deal with, that makes them resonate. These moments intend to hit you emotionally, and they come towards the tail end of the story after the highest stakes have been established. Reading my analysis won’t necessarily tarnish the first viewing experience of them (I have watched the film at least seven times over the years and these moments have yet to lose their poignancy), but they absolutely are impactful revelations in the film. Regardless, I highly recommend watching the film, before or after reading this.
To start with the first, let’s set up the thorny issue of LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman, pictured above. For those who don’t know, Fuhrman’s testimony was essential to the prosecution’s case against O.J. Simpson. Fuhrman was the one who discovered at Simpson’s residence the famous bloody glove that didn’t fit, and he had been called out to Simpson’s home in Brentwood at least once before to settle one of the many domestic disturbance calls that Nicole Simpson had made against her husband. Fuhrman could testify on Simpson’s history of violent abuse of Nicole as well as the literal trail of blood leading from Nicole’s house to O.J.’s house. Simpson’s defense team, knowing that they couldn’t argue that the blood didn’t exist, decided to call into question the entire investigation by the LAPD, arguing that O.J. Simpson had been framed by a racist institution hell-bent on making an example out of a rich celebrity black man that had the audacity to marry a pretty blonde white girl and enter into the halls of white respectability. Perhaps needless to say, many people in Los Angeles in the mid-90s were more than ready to accept such a narrative. It is clear to me that O.J. Simpson was destined to get away with his brutal 1994 murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman the moment that LAPD cops laid their nightsticks upon Rodney King that horrible night in 1991.
To fold Fuhrman into this racial narrative was relatively simple for the defense team. After all, we’re talking about the LAPD. The Los Angeles Police Department is one of the most organized and effective terrorist organizations the U.S. has ever incubated, and I’m not just talking about the bad old days of mid to late 20th century Los Angeles, when Fuhrman was on the force from 1975-95. The abuse is ongoing. “There are at least 24 gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department,” writes Cerise Castle in her recent multipart investigation on LAPD gangs for KnockLA. “Deputy gangs have killed at least 40 people, all of whom were men of color. … Litigation related to these cases has cost the County just over $100 million over the past 30 years.”
Going back to the years before the Simpson trial, the list of LAPD abuses is long and unaccountable. With District Attorney Gil Garcetti’s decision to try O.J. Simpson in downtown L.A., a decidedly poorer and darker district compared to Brentwood where the murders took place, the majority black jury members had no shortage of instances of police brutality they could mentally draw from to color their view of Detective Fuhrman and the case against Simpson. Rodney King was the most recent high-profile example, which Fuhrman tells Edelman in the documentary could have been dealt with differently: “This is what happens when you take away a tool that would have ended this in ten seconds: chokehold.” The L.A. chief of police at the time of King’s beating, Daryl Gates, commented in 1982 about the many fatalities of black men who suffered police chokeholds before its use was banned, saying that in “some blacks when (the chokehold) is applied the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do on normal people.” This institutional division of humanity was summed up nicely by Richard Pryor when he talked about police chokeholds in his 1979 standup routine: “Police got a chokehold they use out here though, man. They choke niggas to death.”
Before Rodney King there was Eula Love, killed at her home in front of her children by the LAPD over an unpaid utility bill. There was 39th and Dalton, ransacked and destroyed with its residents brutalized by the cops. Before this was the assassination of the intrepid Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar in 1970. The LAPD, after having surveilled Salazar because of his critical writings against the department in the LA Times, ultimately murdered him with a tear gas canister through the brain at point blank range, immortalized in Hunter S. Thompson’s brilliant article, “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan”. Salazar was working on a book about LAPD brutality at the time of his death, for which he had cultivated sources that revealed to him how wide and deep the LAPD was willing to go in its systematized surveillance and brutalization against left-wing activists. “Salazar’s friends at the Times and [radio station] KMEX were well aware that he had been threatened by the LAPD and was undoubtedly under surveillance, perhaps by multiple agencies,” writes Mike Davis and Jon Weiner in their history Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties. The LAPD murdered two other people in addition to Salazar that day during their police-induced riot against marchers in the Chicano community. No cop, including Thomas Wilson, the one who fired the fatal tear gas canister, “ever suffered so much as a departmental reprimand, much less criminal charges for what they did that day.”
Before this was the 1965 Watts Uprising, where the LAPD and the National Guard roamed the streets to beat bystanders and unload volleys of bullets and shotgun shells into the homes of black residents. One apartment building was shot up by the rampaging “Nazi-like occupation” as Watts resident Nelson Perry described it, with over 200 bullets fired into the building and the residents dragged out onto the street and beaten. Elsewhere in Watts, a father named Aubrey Griffith was murdered on his front porch in front of his wife and children by 15 cops firing eleven shotgun blasts into him. A young adolescent child was beaten on the street by police in front of his mother. One Watts resident, trying to stop the beating, later said that “Two cops jumped on my back. Others struck the boy with their clubs. They beat that little kid’s face to a bloody pulp. His mother and some others took him away. That’s when I thought, white people are animals.” Shortly before the Watts explosion, contributing to the community’s anger, was the rape of 22-year old Beverly Tate by LAPD officer W.D. McCloud. McCloud was fired but he and his fellow officer who oversaw the rape did not face criminal prosecution. After agreeing to testify about the sexual assault to a grand jury, Tate, a mother of two children and also four and a half months pregnant at the time, died of “unknown causes” on September 30th, three months after the rape.
These and many other such cases held firm in the minds of the jury at Simpson’s trial. And Mark Fuhrman did himself no favors here. At trial, the defense team laid the groundwork by getting Fuhrman to testify that he had not used offensive racial slurs against blacks, at least within ten years before the trial. The defense, led on this front by legendary defender F. Lee Bailey, knew that Fuhrman was lying. “We heard from a guy that Fuhrman wanted a job in South Africa,” Bailey says in the documentary. “He wanted to be on a force ‘where you could shoot niggers and not get accused of anything.’”
The defense then showed that Fuhrman had lied on the stand by revealing to the jury taped interviews between Fuhrman and a Hollywood screenwriter doing background research for a film script where Fuhrman openly used racial slurs and luridly described acts of police brutality. “Anything out of a nigger’s mouth for the first five or six sentences is a fucking lie,” Fuhrman says on the tapes. “That’s just right out. There’s got to be a reason why he’s going to tell you the truth.” The screenwriter, trying to wrap her head around the legalities of what Fuhrman was telling her asks him about probable cause for stopping people on the street. “You don’t need probable cause. You’re god.” And that is indeed how the LAPD operated.
“I have 66 allegations of brutality, torture, all kinds of stuff,” Fuhrman brags with a swaggering confessionalism. “We basically tortured them. Broke numerous bones in each one of them. Their faces were just mush. … We could’ve murdered people and got away with it.”
“It’s not that you want to murder people…” the screenwriter sheepishly offers.
“Sure we do,” Fuhrman retorts. “We’d love to.”
Fuhrman would go on to say that he was embellishing for effect, putting on a bit of a show for the screenwriter, offering the general mindset of the police and less what he actually felt or thought. “Some of the characters in that screenplay are wrapped around people that I knew in LAPD and other departments,” Fuhrman says in the documentary. “And then there’s a little exaggeration in it.” Regardless of Fuhrman’s intentions for the interviews he gave to the screenwriter, the tapes permanently damaged the jury’s view of Fuhrman’s testimony. “Yeah it was pretty bad,” Fuhrman tells Edelman. “And there’s nothing that you can take back. There’s not like a ‘oh, gee gosh, I’m sorry.’” In one exchange, Fuhrman tries to rehabilitate his image. “You’re saying what’s on those tapes is not reflective of your attitudes or experiences?” Edelman asks him. “I don’t know how you feel or see me,” Fuhrman says, “but I can tell you this, you would be shocked if you saw me in the field. I was so fair, beyond — beyond — all scope of what you had to be. Fighting? I didn’t use tazers. I didn’t use sticks. When I fought a suspect I fought straight up. I was fair on the street. There was a time that I was…..pretty violent. But….., that was long before I was on the police department.”
Edelman has the unusual distinction of being born from a black Baptist mother and a white Jewish father, both of whom were involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. As such, Edelman perhaps has all the reason in the world to hold nothing but disdain for Fuhrman, and therefore utilize Fuhrman’s interview only insofar as it propels the narrower story of the trial and gives context to the state of rampant racist policing in Los Angeles. But Edelman does something much more extraordinary than this, something he didn’t need to do at all, and which speaks to what I believe is one of his overarching intentions in telling this story. As Mark Fuhrman the character is about to exit the stage, pleading the 5th on the witness stand after he’d already been boxed into perjuring himself by the defense team, for which he was convicted of a felony and punished with three years probation (and as such is barred from serving on any police force in California), the real Fuhrman of 20 years later, gray and contemplative, offers this to Edelman: “For you it’s a documentary, for me it’s the end of my life…..Now I’m gonna tell you a story.” And here Edelman hard cuts to a picture of a young, good-looking Mark Fuhrman posing with some of the pilots in the Blue Angels, zooming in slowly on his face. “In…..1989,” Fuhrman says, “I was married. I had a house. Had a daughter who was born in ‘91,” and here we cut back to a closeup of Fuhrman in the present, “son that was born in ‘93. Had this group of friends — unbelievable friends. Every one of them was different than me though. They all came from intact families. Fathers. Houses they still go back to, rooms that they still had. But they welcomed me into this group. I thought I had it made. I — finally — was really happy for the first time in my life….then I answered a phone.”
We hear audio from the next clip begin to play of the chief of police at the time of the Simpson trial, a black man named Willie Williams, disowning Fuhrman over the tapes, but Edelman holds on Fuhrman’s expression after telling his story, allowing it some room to breathe.
This is all very striking to me. At some point in the interviewing and editing process, Edelman decided not to leave Fuhrman’s personal story on the cutting room floor, and not only keep it in the film but also lean into it. Edelman had to ask for a photograph from Fuhrman from the time that he was describing. He showcased it. He emphasizes Fuhrman’s fall by directly transitioning to Fuhrman’s boss publicly disavowing him. Whatever personal feeling Edelman has about Fuhrman and whatever feelings or memories he knew the audience would have about him, Edelman chose to be gracious towards Fuhrman’s story of his rough upbringing, a brief shining flash of happiness, of family, of community, and the eventual dissolution of all good things he thought he could hold on to. This is the naked pathos of a cop with, let’s say, racist tendencies, who devoted a large share of his life to a wildly violent and oppressive institution, and yet, for me, it works. I feel the pathos too. I feel sorry for Fuhrman. And I wish different for him.
This is what I mean when I say that storytellers have a responsibility to their subjects. Whether we are dealing in fiction or nonfiction, protagonists or antagonists, we have a responsibility to portray people fairly, holistically, judiciously, and with empathy. We should showcase people, no matter how abhorrent and hateful, in their best light. As a lighting designer for theatre, I mean this both literally and figuratively. When we can see people as they really are, clear and legible in all their faults and virtues from no matter where we sit, then we can understand them and know them better, we can love them or hate them, embrace them or shun them, on solid ground, all under a revealing light which may be called truth. This is a mark of a good storyteller. If this was the only such instance of characterization by Edelman, you could say that it is a mere point of interest, a nice little detail, and not much more. But Edelman offers another one of his interviewees a similar treatment.
Jump to the jury’s verdict, reached after only three and a half hours of “deliberation.” Everyone involved with the Simpson trial expected the jury to be out for some considerable time. “There is a rough rule of thumb for jury deliberations,” Jeffrey Toobin, who covered the trial, says in the film, “one day of deliberation for every week of trial.” With a trial that lasted 226 days, or about 38 weeks, everyone thought they could settle in for a while. The suddenness of the jury’s decision shocked everyone on both the prosecution and defense teams. Simpson’s lead lawyer Johnnie Cochran had to be telephoned back down to L.A. from his vacation up in Napa. The District Attorney at the time, Gil Garcetti, says in the film he was offended by the jury’s swiftness. “They did not deliberate.”
“We had to go home,” one of the jurors named Carrie Bess says in the film while throwing up her hands. The jury had been sequestered since the beginning of the trial, meaning for 10 months the jury could not talk to friends or family, they couldn’t watch T.V. or read the newspaper, they couldn’t talk to each other about the case, and they had to live in a hotel room and adhere to a strict curfew, their movements and behavior monitored by the court. The jurors as such were themselves imprisoned, like O.J. Simpson was, except he had visitation rights. Edelman was able to get two of the jury members to talk to him for the film, both black women, which is what the jury was mostly composed of. Bess, now 73-years old at the time of the documentary, makes a stunning confession to Edelman:
“Do you think that there were members of the jury that voted to acquit O.J. because of Rodney King?”
“Yes.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“How many of you think felt that way?
“Oh, probably 90 percent of us.”
“90 percent. Did you feel that way?”
“Yes.”
“That was payback?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You think that’s right?”
She again throws up her hands and shrugs.
“Do you regret it?”
”Somewhat. But deep in my heart, I done what I felt was right at that time. Back then we took care of our own. Now? ‘You’re on your own, Joe.’”
For some people this exchange may have them screaming at their television sets. And it’s not the only time Bess casually says something objectionable. Earlier in the trial when the prosecution was laying out all the evidence of Simpson beating Nicole for years, often to the point of her fearing for her life, it became clear to the prosecution that most of the jury was either indifferent to the abuse or failed to see how it was relevant. In the film, Bess explains her feelings on Simpson’s violence against Nicole: “Let me tell you, I lose respect for any woman that take uh ass whoopin’ when she don’t have to. Don’t stay in the water if it’s over your head. You’ll drown.”
Contrast Bess’ callousness with Yolanda Crawford, 25-years old at the time of the trial. Crawford has consistently maintained that the jury’s verdict was not about payback, but rather a reasoned response to what was presented at trial, regardless of what actually happened the night of the murders. She says that people blamed the jury for the prosecution’s mistakes, which indeed were many, and that “if they had come correct, they would have won.” But there is still the issue of the lack of jury deliberation. Edelman presses Crawford on this:
“267 days — that’s how long the trial lasted.”
“Mhm,” Crawford responds knowingly, looking down.
“1,105 pieces of evidence.”
“Mhm,” Crawford says again as someone who has heard this line of questioning for twenty years at this point.
“45,000 pages of trial transcript from 133 witnesses. How the hell did you deliberate for three and a half hours?”
“How many days was it again?”
“267 days.”
“266 nights.”
Crawford says this, and then looks up directly into Edelman’s eyes.
Hard cut to an empty, sterile hotel room.
“266 nights I went back to that room — alone.
Wasn’t able to talk to other jurors.
Wasn’t able to talk to family.
Nobody but me, and my thoughts.
I waited ‘til the end to come up with a decision. But each night that I went home after listening to testimony, I stored that.
By the end of that trial, I knew where I was. And it was clear.”
I don’t know why, but every time I hear Crawford say “266 nights” that first time, I start to cry. It’s just…devastating. I still don’t agree with her. I think she was wrong no matter how she chooses to rationalize it. But, that response. The force of it. The weight of it. The authority. 266 nights. I can’t argue against that, nobody can. Nobody can take those nights away from her, and nobody can give them back to her either. She was alone. For 10 months. And she thought. And again, similar to Fuhrman’s story, Edelman makes the remarkable decision to illustrate Crawford’s powerful rejoinder with B-roll footage of an empty hotel room, carrying Crawford’s experience beyond words and into feeling. That jury paid a high price for their verdict. They have heard the vicious invectives levied against them for decades now, and Crawford, with quiet dignity, shuts them all up. And Edelman chooses to cast her in that light of truth.
“My white neighbors, people I’d grown up with all my life, a person I talked to every single day, just stopped speaking to me because of this trial,” Crawford says. And this is one of the central themes that Edelman explores with great sympathy in the film —the ways in which many people involved with this case, not just the families of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, had their lives permanently upended. Fuhrman intimates that he lost his marriage, his house, his job, and his circle of friends — the friends that had lifted him up and saved him. Crawford lost relationships in her life too. Other jurors suffered death threats. So did the prosecution team. When asked after the verdict what the toll had been on those who tried the case, District Attorney Garcetti said, “I haven't been able to weigh it entirely, but the toll is immense.” Garcetti, referring to Chris Darden, the prosecutor who made the ridiculous decision to have Simpson try on the killer’s glove in court and who was visibly devastated after the verdict, tells Edelman, “My guess is that if Chris were given the opportunity again to say yes or no on this case, he wouldn't have taken it. He's paid one huge price.”
The directorial decisions that Edelman made for O.J.: Made in America make that price feel real and true. The good storyteller leads with empathy for their characters, all of them, not at the expense of responsibility, but in service of the truth. This can be a very hard line to walk. Jonathan Rosen writes in his book The Best Minds: “Identification, I was beginning to learn, like empathy, can displace understanding and obligation as well as encourage it.” Reading that bit of clarifying nuance struck me very hard. I often identify with the grievances of those who are seriously wronged, regardless of whatever heinous acts they may carry out in response. I choose to understand them. But to understand is not to condone, and perhaps too much identification with and empathy for someone can cloud rational judgment. It can lead you down the ultimately dehumanizing path of romanticization, of caring for someone only insofar as you idealize them, only insofar as you can comprehend them. By going too far in the direction of empathy, we may deny that person the necessary criticism and love that saves us from the worst of ourselves, the kind of criticism and love that flows from deepest respect. “And now they want from me sympathy and understanding,” James Baldwin said about racist white folks and the systems of supremacy they installed and benefited from. “I understand it all too well. And I have all the sympathy in the world for that spiritual disaster. But I have no pity.”
Though there are pitfalls such as these, we must always try to understand first. It is always necessary, though perhaps not sufficient. I argue this all the time in regards to politics and similar exigent problems. If we fail or choose not to understand each other, then evil awaits. Edelman chose to understand. He chose to give. He chose the gracious light of truth. Because of this, O.J.: Made in America is one of the best films ever made.