Quote of the day:

If America ever passes out as a great nation, we ought to put on our tombstone: America died from a delusion she had Moral Leadership.
—Will Rogers

I’ve previously written about the unreasonable older woman that used to live next door to us on the hill on West Main Street in Richland. My parents had been warned that she didn’t get along well with children, so they tended to ignore her complaints. As a result we kids got away with harassing her in ways that we really should not have. But it wasn’t just my sister and myself; some other neighborhood kids joined in as well. Eventually, a truce of sorts was called, and things settled down. And finally she moved away.

Of course, those were the 1950s in lily white Richland, Pennsylvania. She and we were all of the same white race. And she never called the police on us. Nor did she own a gun.

Unlike the woman who is the main subject of the documentary The Perfect Neighbor.

The situation is similar except while the unreasonable woman is white, the neighborhood kids are Black, nor do they seem to be intentionally harassing her; they’re just kids being kids. Over the course of a year the woman calls the police department several times to complain about the so-called harassment she’s receiving from not just the children but also from the mother of some of them. And she has a gun. And she lives in Florida, home of the Stand Your Ground law. Eventually she shoots her gun through her closed door at the children’s mother.

The film, which can be found on Netflix, is told completely through police body cam and similar footage, and as others have pointed out, it is put together like a thriller.

The title is ironic, of course. It comes from the woman’s own self-description during one of her calls.

I found the film hard to watch at times, not just because the woman, some reviewers call her a termagant, is a complaining, whining asshole, but also because the film concentrates on her side of the story, often to almost the exclusion of the neighbors’ side. So I watched it in three roughly half hour sessions.

I wish now that I had watched it straight through because the film does build up its momentum, and towards the end we do get to hear at least some of the neighbors’ side of the story.

I’d rather not say any more about it, as there are a few turns in the story that I hadn’t anticipated and because I hope at least some of you will watch it for yourselves. In the end I’m very glad to have seen it.

For a comprehensive review, you can check out The Moya View’s The Perfect Neighbor: A Harrowing Portrait of American Law and Loneliness, which is where I first heard about the documentary.