In class, Mr. Mitchell brought the Wonder Bread truck beating to the forefront by mentioning that the event actually happened in real life and someone alive during the riots should remember it. However, it might be difficult for some to recognize it because of the way Beatty changes things. Beatty completely fictionalizes the event by making Scoby and Gunnar the perpetrators. He turns this entire scene into a sort of joke as Gunnar and Scoby don't use actual weapons (like rocks) but instead use "doughy satchels of bread" that Scoby finds in the truck. In the book, we get the sense that Scoby and Gunnar aren't really serious about attacking the driver. Scoby is "chewing on a cupcake" while he holds the bread. Beatty describes the aftermath of the beating by saying it "snowed breadcrumbs" which makes it seem more like a foodfight than an actual attack. In real life however, this event was much more serious. The man who was attacked was a truck driver named Reginald Denny who was pulled from his truck at the intersection of Florence and Normandie and beaten heavily. There were four rioters who were involved in the beating and they came to be known as the LA-4. This attack was captured on video by a news helicopter and was on television so the entire country could see it. In the book, the beating isn't particularly graphic or bloody but the images broadcasted live were.
I'm glad that Mr. Mitchell brought this up in class because I was unaware that Beattey was playing this scene off of something that actually happened.
It would certainly alter our general picture of Nick and Gunnar to picture them involved in a beating as brutal as the attack on Reginald Denny, and Beatty lightens the scene significantly by making it a beating via "pillows" of white bread. It becomes more like the kind of metaphorical performance art we see throughout the novel. But there is some real violence in this section of the narrative, and significantly, Gunnar is the victim--his father (in his LAPD gear) beats Gunnar unconscious, and he's in a coma of sorts for days, in a brutal replaying of the Rodney King beating. This act of violence ("You're not a Kaufman!") seems to solidify Gunnar's self-identification as unapologetically black, his heart as "black-owned," and his father as an example of Kaufmanism he wants to distance himself from entirely. Ironically, it also leads to him being sent to the "elite public high school," where he's supposed to be "cured" of some of this newfound blackness. (It doesn't work, of course.)
ReplyDeleteWhy do you think Beatty chose to do that with the Wonder Bread guy? The first thing I thought of was the whole gangster stereotype that he twists throughout the novel. We see Gunnar, Scoby, and Psycho Loco who are gang members but we don't really think of them as that.
ReplyDeleteI agree. Gunnar has a lot of anger after the verdict comes out. He isn't an angry person in the rest of the novel and definitely not a stereotypical gang member. For this reason, through the Wonder Bread scene, I think Beatty try's to show Gunnar's hopelessness without making him seem like a brutal attacker by adding the fact that he used bread to beat the victim.
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