The Lessons of “The Perfect Neighbor”

“The Perfect Neighbor” chronicles however Lorincz, successful her attempts to crook instrumentality enforcement against members of her ain community, managed lone to unite the 2 groups successful shared disgust. (I haven’t felt specified visceral and intensely gendered loathing for a documentary termagant since “Dear Zachary.”) One cop, walking to his car aft responding to different of Lorincz’s 911 calls, mutters, “Psycho.” Yet, arsenic marginalized and reviled arsenic Lorincz was, she besides presented an utmost manifestation of our nationalist post-COVID intelligence profile, 1 exemplified by the snitches, narcs, and paranoiacs of Nextdoor and vicinity Facebook forums. These are the weirdos posting Ring-camera footage of the suspicious-looking Cub Scout who had the audacity to ringing their doorbell; they’re wondering if their neighbor’s sunflowers are spying connected them; they’re reasoning they mightiness telephone the cops connected the teen-ager who conscionable utilized their driveway to crook his car around, due to the fact that that’s got to number arsenic trespassing. Statistically speaking, a batch of these radical person guns.

When children play together, it “requires solving immoderate signifier of a societal problem,” the pediatrics professors Hillary L. Burdette and Robert C. Whitaker erstwhile wrote. The kids person to fig retired “what to play, who tin play, erstwhile to start, erstwhile to stop, and the rules of engagement.” The teamwork and the give-and-take of play tin assistance “cultivate a scope of societal and affectional capabilities specified arsenic empathy, flexibility, self-awareness, and self-regulation.” These are the indispensable components, the authors spell on, of affectional intelligence. But, for the kids successful “The Perfect Neighbor,” the societal occupation supra each others was Susan Lorincz. And, successful the panopticon of twenty-first-century America, she is everywhere.

If Lorincz seems distressingly typical, the vicinity we spot successful “The Perfect Neighbor” feels progressively uncommon. Unstructured outdoor play among children has been waning since the aboriginal nineteen-eighties, contempt mountains of grounds astir its benefits for kids’ carnal health, executive-function skills, and socialization. The reasons for the downturn are varied and agelong familiar; they see parents’ statistically unfounded fears of kidnapping, accrued societal isolation, privatization of nationalist spaces, municipal plan that favors cars and velocity implicit walkability and safety, and the emergence of organized sports. The show of unsupervised children playing oregon walking oregon riding a motorcycle gradually became conspicuous and, excessively often, triggered the engagement of constabulary oregon child-welfare authorities. Nervous parents withdrew their children adjacent further.

Peter Gray, a science prof emeritus astatine Boston College, has drawn a provocative correlation betwixt the diminution of unstructured outdoor play—play that is “freely chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its ain sake”—and a diminution successful children’s intelligence health. Kids who regularly prosecute successful unstructured play, Gray has written, physique assurance and a consciousness of mastery by having to marque decisions and navigate struggle among themselves, without the involution oregon judgement of grownups. These children are much apt to make a beardown intrinsic locus of control, which leaves them little susceptible to anxiousness and slump aboriginal successful life. Gray emphasized that existent escaped play is not oriented astir extrinsic goals, specified arsenic earning a precocious people from a teacher oregon impressing a shot coach. The kids are the ones deciding what they want, and they consciousness astatine slightest somewhat successful complaint of whether and however they get it.

A 2021 survey found, unsurprisingly, that “higher parental perceptions of vicinity societal cohesion besides predicted much clip successful outdoor play.” This societal cohesion is heartbreakingly evident successful “The Perfect Neighbor.” The footage illustrates the casual spot and solidarity among the assorted parents, who appeared to person a tacit statement that the vicinity much oregon little belonged to the kids. They had a state to play and research that galore of their peers successful wealthier neighborhoods sorely lacked—or, rather, they would person had that freedom, if lone Lorincz hadn’t perceived it arsenic a convulsive siege.

In November, during Lorincz’s sentencing hearing, her sister offered credible grounds that Lorincz was severely abused arsenic a child. Watching her sister speak, I began to wonderment if Lorincz was undone not conscionable by racism oregon intelligence unwellness but by a frenzy of envy and dispossession—if what yet drove her huffy astir her assemblage was that it was a community, that her neighbors cared astir each different and looked aft 1 another’s kids. At 1 constituent successful Gandbhir’s documentary, a constabulary officer, successful the midst of interviewing immoderate of Lorincz’s young neighbors, pauses to inquire a pistillate which of the assembled kids happens to beryllium hers. None of the children’s parents are really contiguous astatine that moment, but the pistillate responds without hesitating: “They’re each mine.” She’s joking, but she means it. ♦