The Lessons of “The Perfect Neighbor”

“The Perfect Neighbor” chronicles how Lorincz, in her attempts to turn law enforcement against members of her own community, managed only to unite the two groups in shared disgust. (I haven’t felt such visceral and intensely gendered loathing for a documentary termagant since “Dear Zachary.”) One cop, walking to his car after responding to another of Lorincz’s 911 calls, mutters, “Psycho.” Yet, as marginalized and reviled as Lorincz was, she also presented an extreme manifestation of our national post-COVID psychological profile, one exemplified by the snitches, narcs, and paranoiacs of Nextdoor and neighborhood Facebook forums. These are the weirdos posting Ring-camera footage of the suspicious-looking Cub Scout who had the audacity to ring their doorbell; they’re wondering if their neighbor’s sunflowers are spying on them; they’re thinking they might call the cops on the teen-ager who just used their driveway to turn his car around, because that’s got to count as trespassing. Statistically speaking, a lot of these people have guns.

When children play together, it “requires solving some form of a social problem,” the pediatrics professors Hillary L. Burdette and Robert C. Whitaker once wrote. The kids have to figure out “what to play, who can play, when to start, when to stop, and the rules of engagement.” The teamwork and the give-and-take of play can help “cultivate a range of social and emotional capabilities such as empathy, flexibility, self-awareness, and self-regulation.” These are the essential components, the authors go on, of emotional intelligence. But, for the kids in “The Perfect Neighbor,” the social problem above all others was Susan Lorincz. And, in the panopticon of twenty-first-century America, she is everywhere.

If Lorincz seems distressingly typical, the neighborhood we see in “The Perfect Neighbor” feels increasingly uncommon. Unstructured outdoor play among children has been waning since the early nineteen-eighties, despite mountains of evidence about its benefits for kids’ physical health, executive-function skills, and socialization. The reasons for the downturn are varied and long familiar; they include parents’ statistically unfounded fears of kidnapping, increased social isolation, privatization of public spaces, municipal design that favors cars and speed over walkability and safety, and the rise of organized sports. The sight of unsupervised children playing or walking or riding a bike gradually became conspicuous and, too often, triggered the involvement of police or child-welfare authorities. Nervous parents withdrew their children even further.

Peter Gray, a psychology professor emeritus at Boston College, has drawn a provocative correlation between the decline of unstructured outdoor play—play that is “freely chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its own sake”—and a decline in children’s mental health. Kids who regularly engage in unstructured play, Gray has written, build confidence and a sense of mastery by having to make decisions and navigate conflict among themselves, without the intervention or judgment of grownups. These children are more likely to develop a strong intrinsic locus of control, which leaves them less vulnerable to anxiety and depression later in life. Gray emphasized that true free play is not oriented around extrinsic goals, such as earning a high grade from a teacher or impressing a soccer coach. The kids are the ones deciding what they want, and they feel at least somewhat in charge of whether and how they get it.

A 2021 study found, unsurprisingly, that “higher parental perceptions of neighborhood social cohesion also predicted more time in outdoor play.” This social cohesion is heartbreakingly evident in “The Perfect Neighbor.” The footage illustrates the easy trust and solidarity among the various parents, who appeared to have a tacit agreement that the neighborhood more or less belonged to the kids. They had a freedom to play and explore that many of their peers in wealthier neighborhoods sorely lacked—or, rather, they would have had that freedom, if only Lorincz hadn’t perceived it as a violent siege.

In November, during Lorincz’s sentencing hearing, her sister offered credible testimony that Lorincz was severely abused as a child. Watching her sister speak, I began to wonder if Lorincz was undone not just by racism or mental illness but by a frenzy of envy and dispossession—if what ultimately drove her mad about her community was that it was a community, that her neighbors cared about each other and looked after one another’s kids. At one point in Gandbhir’s documentary, a police officer, in the midst of interviewing some of Lorincz’s young neighbors, pauses to ask a woman which of the assembled kids happens to be hers. None of the children’s parents are actually present at that moment, but the woman responds without hesitating: “They’re all mine.” She’s joking, but she means it. ♦