Well, this is certainly the longest documentary I've ever watched for the Oscars. I don't know if that's how it aired at Sundance (it has to have played in a theater for at least a week to qualify for a nomination) but on my TV, it was a 5-part miniseries with each segment clocking in at an hour and a half. That's seven and a half hours total, if you're counting. That is a lot of time to spend on O.J. Simpson.I wasn't even mad about it, though, because it really is an excellent documentary. I was never one for the sports and I was in junior high when the trial was going on, so you could say my O.J. experience was fairly limited. I certainly hadn't connected it to the riots that occurred in L.A. over a series of police excesses and abuses of power.
In case you were living under a rock or not born until 1995, let me run down the history of O.J. for you. O.J. Simpson started out as a college football superstar in the 1980s in southern California. He was signed professionally by the Buffalo Bills and had a rough couple of years until their management changed. Then he pretty much single-handedly turned the team around. Having had a taste of obscurity during those dark times, O.J. started courting other career options, cultivating relationships in entertainment and corporate sponsors. He became the face of a national Hertz car rental campaign, and parlayed that into a full-blown career as a spokesman, then an actor, appearing in several movies, including the Naked Gun franchise. Along the way, he divorced his first wife and married Nicole Brown. Some years later, Nicole filed for divorce alleging physical abuse. In 1994, Nicole and a waiter from a nearby restaurant, Ron Goldman, were murdered outside her house. O.J. was arrested after a bizarre low-speed chase and went to trial. He hired the Johnnie Cochran firm to represent him, and they proceeded to wipe the floor with the prosecution, securing an acquittal for their client. The Goldman family retried the case in civil court and got a guilty verdict, which required O.J. to pay $33 million is damages. Which wouldn't have been a problem back in his heyday, but with the turn of public opinion against him, was a little harder to manage. In 2007, O.J. and a bunch of cronies were arrested in Las Vegas after (again) a bizarre robbery/kidnapping involving boxes of sports memorabilia. He was sentenced to 33 years in prison.
Okay, now that we've gotten all the background out of the way, let's talk about the documentary itself. Not only does it have exhaustive interviews with his friends, co-workers, sponsors, and lawyers, it also talks to members of both the Brown and Goldman families. It presents background information about the Rodney King trial, the Watts riots, and several other (we'll politely call them) conflicts between the LAPD and predominantly African-American residents in South Central L.A. It presents a portrait of O.J. as a charming manipulator and opportunist, concerned more with his personal fame than any social issue. Several people remarked that he went out of his way to avoid being considered "black," using his popularity to cultivate relationships with powerful white men for his own personal gain. His divorce from his first wife, a black woman, to marry Nicole Brown, a white one, seemed to cement his place in society in his eyes. During his trial, his $50,000/day legal team turned the case from a mountain of physical and circumstantial evidence into a treatise on race relations, painting O.J. as another black American being unfairly treated and even framed by the predominantly white LAPD. The prosecution did their best, but the trial came down to which side the jury liked better and also the chance to settle some old scores. A couple of jurors admitted that they voted to acquit not based on evidence but as deferred justice for Rodney King.
In hindsight, this is less about O.J. as a black man in a white society as it is a triumph for rich people against the system. Do you think there would have been as much furor over this case if he hadn't been represented by one of the best and most expensive lawyers in the country? Would the verdict have been the same without the expert handling of the jury and manipulation of the witnesses and prosecution by the defense? Do you think the penalty would have been as high in the civil case if it hadn't been held in a predominantly white area? Was his 2008 sentencing a backlash for what white Americans saw as a travesty of justice?
I'm not a sociologist, I'm an English major, so I can't give you statistics or studies done on institutionalized racism, but all you have to do is look at the Freddie Gray or Ferguson, Missouri trials to know that not only is it a thing, it's still happening. This would be the part where I have some sort of epiphany, or hopeful speech prepared as a beacon in the darkness, but I'm not that clever or well-informed, I'm afraid. I don't have any answers or solutions and it would be hopelessly naive at best and arrogant AF at worst of me to suggest that I do, in fact, have any clue what it's like to be black in America.
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