Podcast Summary: "The Perfect Neighbor Is an American Nightmare"

Cannonball with Wesley Morris
Host: Wesley Morris
Guest: Parul Sagal (NYT Critic)
Date: November 20, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode delves into the Netflix documentary "The Perfect Neighbor," which explores the 2023 shooting of Ajika Owens, a young Black mother, by her white neighbor, Susan Lawrence, in Florida. Through intricate analysis and deeply personal reactions, host Wesley Morris and critic Parul Sagal unpack the film’s ethical dilemmas, its use of police body cam footage, portrayals of race, trauma, and community, and how documentary form shapes our understanding of real-life tragedy.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Initial Reactions & Reluctance to Watch

• Reluctance Based on Knowing the Story:
  • Morris admits he hesitated to watch the documentary, knowing it would require witnessing the death of a real person.
  • Sagal echoes the reluctance, saying, "I watched it with tremendous reluctance...I still am not sleeping well. Like, I’m still very, very jittery." [03:51]
• Draw for Filmmakers:
  • Sagal was compelled by fellow documentary filmmakers’ insistence that "there are questions in this film that you're going to want to engage with."

2. Neighborhood Dynamics & Systemic Issues

• Chronic Tensions:
  • The documentary’s primary footage comes from police body cams covering repeated calls from Susan Lawrence regarding neighborhood kids playing outside.
  • Morris, referencing body cam footage: "Susan is calling to say all sorts of things about the kids on her property. The kids are loud. The kids are getting on her nerves." [06:28]
• Perceptions of Authority:
  • Police repeatedly advise children and parents to avoid antagonizing Susan, implicitly making the children responsible for managing her discomfort.
  • Sagal: "The kids are responsible. The kids are like, don’t aggravate the kids…when the police come and speak to the neighbors and specifically to the children…every single cop slips into this reverie: 'I remember when I was a kid.'" [09:07]
• Asymmetry of Danger:
  • Sagal notes, "The potential—it’s so different for Susan…for Susan, despite however unhinged she’s behaving, she’s essentially benign and treated that way." [14:43]
  • Even after displays of threatening or reckless behavior (brandishing a gun, ramming a gate), police approach Susan as fundamentally non-threatening.

3. The Power of Perspective: Who Are We Identifying With?

• The documentary’s body cam angle roots viewers in the experience and point-of-view of police officers.
• Sagal observes, "We are the camera around their necks, Right? We identify with them." [12:47]
• This forced identification incurs ethical ambiguity: "Whose fear am I identifying with in that moment?" [13:08]

4. Susan Lawrence’s Performed Victimhood

• Susan is adept at using her perceived vulnerability—her race, gender, and trauma—to draw police attention and sympathy.
• Sagal: "There’s a sense of her own inflated sense of her own weakness, her own vulnerability, her own fear, her own victimhood...And that, to me, I think…shows us very, very clearly these acts that people create and trot out in front of institutions…" [19:29]
• Morris: "This is a white woman who understands the power of her whiteness. And the kids also understand the power of her whiteness because she is called the Karen." [17:33]

5. Ethical Dilemmas in Documentary Filmmaking

• Exposing Trauma:
  • The film includes the deeply personal moment of Ajika Owens’s children being told of their mother’s death.
  • Sagal struggled ethically: "I don’t know if I am entitled to see. Do I deserve to see this?...Ajika’s mother was very intent on keeping all of this in the movie...She’s invoked the lineage...the mother of Emmett Till." [24:37–25:20]
• Motivations & Memorialization:
  • The documentary is partially advocated as a memorial and a public reckoning, per Ajika’s mother Pamela Diaz, invoking civil rights traditions.

6. Filmmakers’ Intentions vs. Audience Experience

• Sagal distinguishes between two films: the one the filmmakers think they made (an indictment of systemic failure, a memorial for victims) and the one viewers experience (a potentially more ambiguous narrative, with humanized police and little depth for any character).
• Sagal: "The film that these filmmakers have given us is a bit more wayward than they would like...the kids are a group, Susan is the villain, but we know so little about any of them." [20:19, 40:08]
• The use of police footage, meant as critique, may inadvertently reinforce authority or desensitize to suffering through the "watchability" of body cam storytelling.

7. Documentary Form and New Ethical Frontiers

• The Double-Edged Sword of Found Footage:
  • The hosts discuss the transformative use of public records and body cams for artistic ends—highlighting both the objectivity, the loss of personal narrative, and the fine line between advocacy and voyeurism.
  • Morris: "The system is the filmmaker here, right? The system is at least the camera operator..." [37:49]
• Limits of Empathy and Identification:
  • Sagal observes how police body cam footage shapes identification, sometimes inverting the subversive intent by mainly humanizing authorities.
• Archival Material and Subversiveness:
  • Sagal: "What’s actually subversive is not that they’re reclaiming and retaking this footage and putting it to other ends, it’s that it’s humanizing the police." [34:30]

8. Ambiguity, Absence, and What the Film Omits

• Character Depth:
  • The film provides little about Ajika Owens or Susan Lawrence’s backgrounds. Sagal supplements the discussion with research about Susan’s traumatic upbringing.
  • Sagal: "It's not only that it doesn't ask questions of Susan, but we don't really see Ajika. We don’t really see the children really, as specific children." [40:04]
• Unexplored Motivations:
  • The lack of interiority in everyone but Susan leaves the documentary emotionally and ethically fraught. Susan’s trauma is addressed more, which, as Sagal notes, brings in the notion of "the entitlement of her background, the entitlement of the trauma she's endured." [43:01]
• Form as Denial:
  • The filmmakers use the form as plausible deniability, avoiding deeper personal probing under the guise of found footage.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the film’s moral shock:
  "I watched most of it from in between my fingers." — Parul Sagal [00:34]
  "I’m still not sleeping well. Like, I’m still very, very jittery." — Parul Sagal [03:51]

• On body cam vantage:
  "We are the camera around their necks, Right? We identify with them." — Parul Sagal [12:47]

• On victimhood:
  "There’s a sense of her own inflated sense of her own weakness...her own victimhood." — Parul Sagal [19:29]
  "This is a white woman who understands the power of her whiteness." — Wesley Morris [17:33]

• On ethical discomfort:
  "I struggled with the notion of how I would feel as a child having that moment captured in that way and then put on the world’s biggest streaming platform." — Parul Sagal [24:37]

• On documentary objectivity:
  "What was beautiful about documentary is that...it was always nudging me, the ones that I love, into a place of...deeply conditional partial revelations, partial truths, you know, interpretation." — Parul Sagal [37:20]

• On the role of the system as filmmaker:
  "The system is the filmmaker here, right? The system is at least the camera operator." — Wesley Morris [37:49]

Important Timestamps

• [03:51] Sagal describes her somatic, emotional reaction to viewing the film
• [06:28] Depiction of repeated police calls and community dynamic exposition
• [09:07] Police counseling neighborhood children and shifting responsibility
• [14:43] Analysis of how Susan is treated as benign by law enforcement
• [17:33] Notion of Susan as "the Karen" and her manipulation of racial power dynamics
• [24:37] Discussion around the ethics of showing children's trauma
• [29:07] The police interrogations of Susan Lawrence
• [32:13] The "watchability" of the documentary, and how it is shaped by movie conventions
• [34:30] How the film's use of footage paradoxically humanizes the police
• [40:04] Sagal points out the lack of deeper character exploration
• [43:01] Entitlement of trauma, weaponizing personal history

Conclusion: The Film’s Enduring Questions

• The episode ends with both critics acknowledging the depth and complexity of "The Perfect Neighbor," and how it raises more questions than it answers—about community, race, documentary ethics, and the effects of capturing real trauma on camera.
• Sagal captures the heart of the ethical dilemma:
  "The lines between art and advocacy, I think, are just very, very useful to see." [43:38]
• Morris concludes:
  "I do feel like this movie is very, very complicated and very deep and raises a lot of questions. And I think that...I’m grateful for those questions." [44:11]

For listeners, this episode is an intricate exploration of how we witness, process, and make sense of tragedy, and the films that try to capture it.