Dear pals,
If you listen to the friends of OJ Simpson for long enough, you get the impression that the football superstar, suspected murderer and convicted armed robber has never told the truth in his life. Oral evidence of this abounds throughout the seven-plus hours that make up Ezra Edelman’s multifaceted portrait of “the Juice”, Made in America, all from the mouths of people who claim to have known Simpson well. From denying wrongdoing and selling his friends out during his school days to openly using “spare” golf balls as a full-grown man, the first 45 years of Simpson’s life seems essentially to have geared up to denying, in a court of law and on internationally-broadcast television—and with all the evidence stacked against him—that he had brutally murdered two people.
Edelman’s 2016 film is, among many other things, about truth itself. Though that sounds painfully trite, the way the theme is approached in this case remains subtle and fascinating. The film—more popularly known for its broadcast format as a five-part “event” miniseries—is Edelman’s third as director and takes on the familiar style of his chosen genre, the sports documentary. New talking head interviews are interspersed with archive footage to construct an accessible picture of the figure under discussion and, in keeping with genre trends of its decade, voiceover narration is eschewed entirely—lending a flavour of horse’s-mouth authenticity. But the way Edelman uses his ever-expanding run time to twist and interrogate his own authority as a journalist makes Made in America a cut above even the very best of his fellow ESPN 30 for 30 series instalments.
Edelman, as we mention in the podcast, reportedly began this project with the same opinion that he—along with much of America’s Black population—had reportedly held in the mid 1990s: that OJ was somehow set up and persecuted for his rarefied status as a powerful and influential Black man. As Edelman proves by the end of his own film, this notion of innocence was almost certainly wishful thinking. So it is that he uses the sometimes brilliant, sometimes troubling, sometimes clearly and deliberately false testimony of his interviewees not only to both justify and interrogate his original position but also to demonstrate that the systematic revision of that position comes with a hefty load of caveats. (That Edelman’s tight central focus on Simpson’s trial as a nexus for America’s problems with race swallows up a significant detail—namely, two people were murdered and this has never officially been solved—is a problem we spend some time working through.) When Made in America points to and deconstructs Simpson’s careful manipulation of his own image, as a strong but friendly and, significantly, “race-less” all-American hero, it pointedly does so at the same time as it ironically appropriates conventions of the hagiographic documentary film—a film like, for instance, Edelman’s own HBO doc Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals (2010).
Sometimes Made in America asks merely for observational study. Indeed, due to sheer run time, we spend more time with various characters than we ever would in a standard single film. Edelman’s camera often lingers on his speakers during pauses and silences, giving the viewer generous time to consider whether they believe this person, whether they trust them and even if and how they would respond were they in the interviewer’s position. This is perhaps at its most potent whenever any of Simpson’s cartoonishly smug, slimy defence team appear on screen; but then, such is the film’s potent and articulate scepticism of institutions, class ideals and even the relationship between itself and its own imagery that, frankly, the bullshit meter already feels off the charts for most every speaker.
But that scepticism is a direct result of the film’s knowing construction, and speaks to a gap between its encouragement of observation and its clear manipulation. An aesthetic question arises whenever we see news footage: that is, shot sequences that have been appropriated, but not originally edited by, Edelman and his team. (Or, indeed, when we note that the funniest part of the film is simply an unaltered sequence from The Naked Gun.) It speaks to how the documentarian has great power over their material but only to a point: much of the archive footage is simply what it is, of course; meanwhile, the film’s original footage is defined by its interviewees, who bring their own agendas and their own canny methods of communicating.
All this to say that for all its expanse and rigour this is still a subjective and quite personal critical study. Edelman’s coup is in using the inherent populism of his chosen form to mount an interrogation of himself and the viewer—of our own shared complicity in the questions raised about race, stardom, class and society. In examining Made in America for its structural lengthiness as much as the trenchant and cogently expressed ideas it contains, one can argue that the “punishment” implicit in asking a viewer to sit with something (and something so relentlessly dark) for this long is in fact linked to the directness with which Edelman editorially assails us, and which is in turn reflected more obviously in the way his voice occasionally steps in to gently interrogate his subjects. (This whole point, of course, is predicated on treating the film as a film rather than a series of episodes.) This is a palpably painful piece of work made all the more so by the fact that its unwieldiness still can’t bridge the morass between creator—who rarely appears to involve himself in the film—and its actual subject, who exists only in the archives and becomes, for all the centrality of his iconic face, a tantalising structuring absence. Made in America, a forensic study of tragedy, builds up only to yet another omission: the recorded words of OJ Simpson himself, entreating us to remember him as the Juice—a memory so tarnished as to be functionally non-existent.
Please note we’re returning to content warnings with this episode—the film, and our discussion, entails: physical and psychological domestic abuse; racist violence and white supremacist institutional behaviours; and graphic images of double murder that Edelman shows on screen.
As ever, thanks for listening—please do share us around if you can, and please rate & review us on Apple Podcasts!
—Calum & Eddie
