Structuring Absences Revealed

At nearly eight hours long, Ezra Edelman's O. J.: Made in America exhaustively reads O. J. Simpson as a star text, a construct, a commodity, and an ideology produced by American sports and media institutions. Balancing the documentary's textual analysis with an examination of the temporal (1960s–present), geographical, (Southern California), and national (American culture) contexts that bind Simpson's biography and fame to the broader body politic, Made in America provides a "thick description," or cultural context, to Simpson's life, behavior, and actions on and off the gridiron.

Edelman's attention to the satellite issues that orbit Simpson enriches the documentary's political and social significance. Made in America shows us how Simpson's iconicity in sports as a Black athlete—despite his famous claim, "I'm not Black; I'm O. J."—and infamy after his acquittal in the "trial of the century" function as litmus tests for racial progress and division in America. A lightning rod for criticism, Simpson is the fulcrum by which the documentary pivots around a discussion of race in sports, Los Angeles's impoverished and wealthy communities, and white America's fascination, fetishization, and fear of Black masculinity. As sports historian Amy Bass explains, "[T]he Black athlete is a malleable and complex site, a place to look for discussions of race and nation in the most popular forums and to discover what kind of consequences go with the meanings uncovered."¹ The documentary deftly engages in a composite and layered discussion of blackness and American-ness through an amalgam of interviews, found footage, and research, leaving the viewer to grapple with not only the meanings of Simpson's desire to be more than Black in a society that marginalizes Black people but also the "racial scripts"—attitudes, practices, policies, and laws—that connect and circumscribe marginalized peoples and racialized groups across space and time.

In doing so, Edelman provocatively reveals the structuring absences that bear on and shape our popular, cultural, and political understanding of Simpson's person and persona. "A structuring absence," media scholar Richard Dyer explains, "refers to an issue, or even a set of facts or an argument, that a text cannot ignore, but which it deliberately skirts round or otherwise avoids, thus creating the biggest 'holes' in the text, fatally, revealingly misshaping the organic whole assembled with such craft."² The documentary painstakingly fills many gaps in the story of Simpson's rise and fall. It confronts, head on, the social and cultural forces that "made" Simpson into a star athlete, media sensation, and racial spectacle. By framing a familiar figure in different milieus, Edelman reframes how we have come to situate Simpson's magnetism and later repudiation in our collective imaginary. The documentary weaves together a tale of Simpson's personal and professional fame and disgrace into a larger tapestry about systemic racism, the perils of fame, the paradoxes of Black celebrity, America's toxic sports and media culture, and the often-silent epidemic of domestic violence.

By making present the structuring absences related to Simpson's cultural impact, Edelman attaches the obscured but resonant histories, peoples, and issues associated with the disgraced figure. For example, we now recognize that when we discuss Simpson's 1995 acquittal and its effect on race relations in American society at the time, we are also talking about the longer, deeper, and more entrenched history of injustice that structures the LAPD's relationship to the Black community. When we see images and hear accounts of the LA Riots of 1994, we must acknowledge the ways in which the issues affecting Black people have not changed since the Watts Rebellion in 1965. When we do not mention Simpson's athletic accomplishments in the present day, we continue to be uncritical of the sporting institutions like the University of Southern California that profited off his sporting talent. When we consider how Simpson did not want to be judged by his race, we must also bear in mind, as Harry Edwards states in the film, that "what enabled O. J. to be O. J. and not be Black was...