How OJ Simpson Became A Celebrity Again

OJ Simpson was always a murderer to me, and I think it’s a safe guess to say that most people under 25 hold him in the same regard. The slayings, the Bronco chase, the trial and all the accompanying pageantry have up until now only existed as myth, legends told with constrained can-you-believe-this whispers. OJ was never anything except “that guy who got away with murder,” which makes the various reexaminations of his story in 2016 so fascinating.

While there’s no shortage of material to take in about OJ Simpson, and in particular his trial, two works released this year have come forward as especially authoritative and modern. FX’s The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story and ESPN’s 30 for 30 iteration OJ: Made in America are from some angles antithetical to one another, but from other angles perfect complements. Watching both series with little-to-zero knowledge of who OJ was in the 1990s, and the impressions of who he is in the 2010s, is not only impactful and insightful, but it’s also exceptionally relevant.

It might seem odd to those old enough to remember, but one of the more evident and surface-level points of education provided by both series is just what a huge freaking celebrity OJ was. In 2016, there is zero sense of what a pervasive, important and popular figure he was during and after his football career. The temptation is to draw a modern parallel—imagine if Kevin Hart was put on trial, in the face of confusing and compelling evidence, for killing his family—but nothing quite feels apt. (This is a ridiculous proposal, but maybe Obama works best for the [insert replacement celebrity here] exercise—just because the surreal, preposterous, spit-out-your-coffee feeling actually means we’re coming close to some idea of what people felt in 1994 about OJ murdering Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.)

OJ’s celebrity is analyzed in both American Crime Story and Made in America, though the lens for each is obviously different. American Crime Story is hardly about OJ at all, but the chaos and fanfare with which it presents the proceedings of the trial is so effective that the only possible impression is that, holy smokes, this guy was a huge effing deal. Meanwhile, Made in America goes to such great lengths to emphasize the phenomenal nature of OJ’s fame—it spends two of its seven-and-a-half hours on Simpson’s pre-trial reputation—that as someone who has never seen the man in anything except courtroom smarts and prison garb, each flashy Hertz-ad grin and sideline wave is almost unbelievable. OJ Simpson was not a celebrity in the way that Kim Kardashian is a celebrity—polarizing, persistent, aggravating—he was closer to someone like Tina Fey or Will Smith—universally recognized and beloved.

Watching it back, the OJ Simpson trial (and ‘trial’ here is describing not only the courtroom proceedings, but the related crimes and coverage and fallout) is deeply impressive, and when you see the major highlights appear in both shows, the effect is astonishing. If the American Crime Story series is your first look at the OJ trial, there are several moments so evocative and cinematic that the instinct is to accept them as dramatizations. We all know that OJ tried the gloves on, but did he really do so with all that pomp and showmanship? Did Johnnie Cochran really stare down Chris Darden and give him that wrenching, ruthless “N*****, please”? Did one juror, after the verdict, really look at OJ and give a black-power salute before he left the courtroom? It all seems a bit too made-for-TV, but after seeing Made for America (and reading Jeffrey Toobin’s excellent Run of His Life, which is the basis for the American Crime Story series), your jaw drops in all the same places, because they all happened exactly as they were portrayed in the dramatized account. Cuba Gooding Jr.’s glove scene in The People v. OJ Simpson is almost frame-by-frame the same as the real effing OJ Simpson’s attempt to try on the gloves in the real effing courtroom. It feels surreal. The one-liners are the same. The fronting and the self-aggrandizing and the egotism and the fireworks is all the same. You don’t want to believe what you’re watching, but you have no choice but to believe it.

And that’s the final, most significant takeaway from learning about OJ Simpson in 2016: The sheer reality of the story is uncomfortable for how unavoidable it is. Made in America especially contextualizes the trial in a way that shoves its undercurrents toward the shore. It’s easy to sit on your couch in 2016 and watch all of this and think about how unfair it was that justice was never served for Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. It’s easy to be angry at the jurors—they had a choice to make and clear evidence in front of them and they chose to act in opposition to that evidence. That’s not excusable; that’s outrageous. It’s easy to think that. But the triumph of ESPN’s documentary is that it simultaneously acknowledges the injustice of the verdict but also gives you the information to understand why that verdict was issued.

If you were black in America in 1994, and you had gone through your life watching people cross the street to avoid passing you, or being pulled over and excessively questioned by police, or hearing your neighbors whisper (or shout) their choice racial epithets in your direction, maybe you felt like you didn’t have a choice when it came to delivering a verdict on OJ Simpson. Maybe you felt like it was the best opportunity you would ever have to express your pain, your fear, and your frustration with the American criminal justice system and, to hell with it, American racial politics at-large. Made in America doesn’t pose this question to pardon the verdict—in fact, both programs are rather transparent in saying that letting OJ go was nothing short of infuriating tragedy—but it does pose this question in the interest of fairness. The OJ Simpson trial did not exist in a vacuum, and it wouldn’t be right to present it that way. As a fresh viewer, it makes you angry. How could we let this happen? As a fresh viewer, it disturbs you. How can this still be happening?

Reexamining the OJ story thus finds its greatest purpose. Watching The People v. OJ Simpson and OJ: Made in America doesn’t feel like a look back at a pair of period pieces. It feels modern and current. We still let celebrities enrapture our thoughts and compel our viewpoints and direct our trends. We still let our racial stereotypes and our racist traditions affect the way we judge things as fair, unfair, right, or wrong. We still live in a country that is split along boundaries of class and race and identity. We still thrust things forward as symbols or representations of greater ideas they have no legitimacy or claim to represent. We project narratives and we rush to give our take and we make things about us. It’s not a hopeful thing. It’s a cynical thing. But that was the OJ Simpson story in microcosm: It was hopeless and cynical. For as impossible and unbelievable as the whole thing is, its transcendence and transience as a cultural moment was guaranteed.

This shouldn’t have happened, and when you see it all for the first time your shock and awe is only surpassed by your discomfort and disappointment. The dual representation of the history, as given to us by American Crime Story and Made in America, couldn’t be more appropriate. The OJ Simpson trial is stranger-than-fiction, but it’s documentary. It’s sensational reality, but it’s horror.