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The People Next Door
by Christine A. Corcos
The people upstairs all practice
ballet./Their living room is a bowling alley./Their bedroom is
full of conducted tours/Their radio is louder than yours./They
celebrate the weekends all the week. When they take a shower,
your ceilings leak/They try to get their parties to mix/By supplying
their guests with Pogo sticks/And when their orgy at last abates/They
go to the bathroom on roller skates/I might love the people upstairs
wondrous/If instead of above us, they just lived under us.
Ogden Nash, I Wouldn't Have Missed It: Selected Poems of Ogden
Nash (1971).
In this age of terrorism and
uncertainty, we surely must rely more than ever on our neighbors,
yet we are more than ever unlikely to know them, or know much
about them. The fear of the stranger is never more potent than
when that stranger is someone in one's own home town, someone
who should share one's values and dreams, on whom one should
be able to rely in times of need and whom one should also expect
to assist when necessary. We expect to know our neighbors if
we live in small towns or intimate communities in large cities,
but we expect not to know them if we live in anonymous high-rises.
Indeed, we so prize our privacy that we resist those who attempt
to make friends. They could be well meaning but nosy, but they
could also be serial killers. People disappear daily, and their
neighbors tell police, "We didn't know much about her. She
kept to herself. One day we just didn't see her anymore."
Kitty Genovese's lonely, terrifying death on a New York street
in 1964, within earshot of neighbors who did nothing, not even
call the police, and dramatized in the 1975 film Death Scream,
symbolized our turn toward willful ignorance. Someone we thought
we knew is taken away in handcuffs, and the obligatory interviews
on the six o'clock news reveal, "He was such a good boy!
Always went to church! Always visited his mother!"
Not surprisingly, Hollywood has explored our strange relationship
with our neighbors in numerous films and television shows, to
the point that certain neighbor personas are now archetypal,
if not clichéd, as are the legal issues that involve neighbors.
The phrase "good fences make good neighbors" has a
great deal of truth, and not just because those fences protect
our children from falling into our neighbors' pools. From the
classic fifties comedy Dennis the Menace to the nineties
hit Family Matters television series highlight the long-suffering
neighbor who must deal with a destructive and nosy child. I
Love Lucy had faithful neighbors who were also close friends,
as did the Jackie Gleason vehicle The Honeymooners. The
popular sitcom Home Improvement features a neighbor with
all the answers. Comedies about neighborhoods are perennially
popular with viewers. They create a friendly, reliable world
that does not necessarily reflect our own, but that we yearn
for, a world that seems secure, and predictable, and to a great
extent desirable.
Series like American Gothic, on the other hand, remind
us that the smallest, friendliest seeming town hides secrets.
Like Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery",
shows like American Gothic give us the permanent creeps:
we suspect that somewhere in this country, there really is a
town where evil has overtaken good. Isn't that what Stephen King
keeps telling us? In particular, the small Southern or mid-Western
town comes in for its share of suspicion. My Cousin Vinny
(1992) derived much of its humor from the juxtaposition of New
York and Southern culture, and New York didn't always win out.
Fred Gwynne's bewilderment at Joe Pesci's pronunciation of "two
youths" is worth the price of the film. And as Judge Haller,
Gwynne teaches Lawyer Gambini (Pesci) some rules about courtroom
decorum he'll never forget. But Southern towns aren't always
so amusing: In the Heat of the Night (1967) is the archetypal
example of the clash between prejudice and honor, a story in
which a local policeman must decide to arrest his neighbor, a
fellow officer, in the interests of justice.
The notion that our neighbors have things to hide is a popular
theme in Hollywood. In Fright Night, a teenager begins
to believe that his new neighbors are vampires and he carries
out numerous investigations (also known as trespasses) in order
to prove himself right. Teenagers with time on their hands, usually
during summer vacation, are notorious for investigating empty
houses and bothering retired people, the local "witch"
and anybody who doesn't fit in. For years, movies had obligatory
scenes in which children bothered the town eccentrics, sometimes
played for laughs as in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), and
sometimes not, as in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).
In some movies, the adults take matters into their own hands
once they take the children seriously as in the Tom Hanks comedy
The 'Burbs, when they begin to suspect that their new
neighbors are up to no good, especially since the former occupants
of the house vanished without a trace, as does one of their present
neighbors. The vigilante justice that is a major part of these
"Neighborhood Watch" investigations indicates that
we have little faith in the ability of the police to investigate
our suspicions, even if we can convince the folks in blue to
take them at face value. We know from countless courtroom dramas
that the police cannot intervene until a crime has been committed,
by which time it is normally too late. Indeed, the theme of many
movies of the week as well as Hollywood blockbusters such as
What Lies Beneath (2000), is precisely that the police
are legally impotent, and that we must protect ourselves, because
the people we expect to protect us (the police, the district
attorneys, and the judges) simply cannot do so. That's what the
NRA keeps telling us, anyway. In the Dan Ackroyd black comedy
Getting Away With Murder (1996), Jack Lambert (Ackroyd)
believes he is living next door to a Nazi war criminal (Jack
Lemmon). Because he cannot convince the authorities that this
is so, he decides to deal with the man himself, a theme that
we see taken seriously in such films as Death and the Maiden
(1994) and The Execution (1985). In Rear Window
(1954), the granddaddy of all nosy neighbor flicks, the immobilized
James Stewart details the cool and beautiful Grace Kelly to do
his leg work (literally) when he suspects his neighbor of a murder.
If only Hitchcock had known how often his theme was to be reused
over the next decades ("But, Mom, I know our new neighbors
are up to something!" "Now, mind your own business,
Timmy, and do your homework." Organ music swelling up in
the background. Ominous sounds of digging. Weird laughter. Small
pets disappearing suddenly in the night.)
Hollywood particularly loves the Nazis Among Us theme, and not
just because it may actually be true. The movies that gave us
Nazis in patrician New England in The Stranger (1946)
also gave us Nazis in Manhattan in Marathon Man (1976),
Music Box (1989), Descending Angel (1990), Death
and the Maiden and The Execution, all war crimes films
made more believable because of the real life trials of John
Demjanjuk, Adolph Eichmann, and Klaus Barbie. Except for Music
Box, all of these films require the intervention of laypersons
to bring the wrongdoer to justice, or to make a decision not
to do so. Although lawyers play parts in some of these films,
most notably Death and the Maiden and The Execution,
in few do they have the heroic role. Indeed, the lawyers in the
latter three films seem to most non-lawyers to act in contravention
of justice, to prevent evildoers from being brought to account,
to protect the evil neighbors, rather than to root them out.
Nazis (and later Communists) are only one of the hidden threats
that may face us in our neighborhoods. The neighbor as serial
killer threat has recently emerged as a favorite, particularly
since FBI profilers have impressed upon us that serial killers
are not easily recognizable loonies. In fact, they are usually
the boy (or girl) next door. Mark Harmon was cast against type
as Ted Bundy in The Deliberate Stranger (1986), perhaps
the U. S.'s most notorious serial killer, but Bundy himself was
a handsome, charming man. Harmon also played a serial killer
in the 1991 remake of the Hitchcock thriller Shadow of a Doubt,
in which he is arguably even more creepy than Joseph Cotton in
the original (1943) version. The very neighborliness of the serial
killer is what allows many of them to blend into the ordinariness
of everyday life, coupled with our increasing unwillingness to
get involved, our genuine lack of knowledge about those around
us, indeed our very uncertainty about what constitutes "normality."
In these days of unusual religious views, differing dress codes,
a reluctance to exchange even the most perfunctory greetings
on the street, is it any wonder that many of us refuse to ask
the most basic questions about our neighbors' daily or nocturnal
habits? Innocent questions might be seen as harassment. Who needs
confrontation? Anyone might have a concealed weapon, and might
be willing to use it. And fear breeds more fear.
Meanwhile, "normal" people go unchallenged, even when
we have some sneaking doubts about whether their behavior is
in fact entirely normal, until one day, we hear that the nice
man next door, the deacon of the church, has been arrested for
possession of child pornography, or the vice president of the
bank has been hauled in for sexual harassment, or the helpful
home economics teacher has been convicted of raping a fourteen
year old boy. These people live in our neighborhood? Yes, and
they've begun to reproduce-cineamatically speaking. After a rash
of serial killer movies-The Killer Next Door (2001); Through
the Eyes of a Killer (1992)(Richard Dean Anderson is a carpenter
who builds himself a secret passageway so he can spy on his client/victim),
we had a rash of female sexual predator conspiracy to murder
movies (Stay the Night (1992); To Die For (1995);
Murder in New Hampshire (1991); Seduced By Madness
(1996)). We've had female serial killer movies (Black Widow
Murders (1993); Wife, Mother, Murderer (1991); Overkill
(1992) and Monster (2003), both about Aileen Wuornos).
With the possible exception of Wuornos, none of the real life
people depicted was necessarily identifiable as dangerous to
the average person. Just your average normal, daily dog walking,
Saturday night beer drinking, Sunday church going, weekly lawn
cutting, annual Girl Scout cookie-buying serial killer.
In some cases, fictional neighborhoods can be confining to the
point that the scriptwriters clearly decide to scrap them for
more liberating venues. Murder She Wrote's Jessica Fletcher
clearly needed to move out of Cabot Cove for the more sophisticated
and grittier locations of New York, Los Angeles and London, not
just because Maine was sleepy. It was also because at the rate
the show was going, it was fairly clear that half of her neighbors
were homicidal lunatics and the other half were their victims.
This is not to say that fictional neighborhoods cannot reflect
truth. Certainly Agatha Christie made a great point of showing
us that her sleuth Miss Jane Marple detected crime using the
small neighborhood of "St. Mary Mead" as a lens through
which to view the larger world. Everyone in her tiny village
had an analog somewhere in the world; it was simply a matter
of finding the similarity.
Of course, Nazis Among Us quickly became (literally) Aliens Among
Us in the 1950s once Kenneth Arnold spotted those flying saucers,
although we were never quite certain whether those aliens were
Communists or extra-terrestrials. While My Favorite Martian,
3d Rock from the Sun, and Alf played the idea of
neighbors next door as real aliens for laughs, some Americans
truly believe that aliens do dwell among us. The movies that
depicted popularity of fifties movies such as I Married a
Monster from Outer Space (1958) and Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (1956) translated fairly easily into I Married
a Monster (1998) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1978) and Body Snatchers (1993), films which represented
Communism for some people and real alien invasion for others.
Indeed, the invasion narrative is now such a part of our culture
that both Hollywood and independent filmmakers now parody it
easily: Evolution (2001), Galaxy Quest (1999),
and the much underrated Top of the Food Chain a/k/a Invasion
(1999). Is it safe to go out at night? Many of us believe the
law no longer protects us adequately. It's better to stay home
with our security systems and our pay-per-view. For myself, after
assessing the risk, I think I'll still go out at night, to plays
and to concerts and to movies, I'll still talk to my neighbors,
even if they think I'm a little bit of a nut. I want to rely
on them, and I want them to rely on me, even if I don't keep
watching the skies.
Posted May 19, 2004
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