I don’t know when Lakeview Terrace will disappear from movie theatres. It features Samuel L. Jackson brandishing a chainsaw, so my best guess is "soon," which is a shame. A Chicago reviewer called it "one of the toughest racial dramas to come out of Hollywood since the fires died down [after the L.A. riots in ‘92]—much tougher, for instance, than Paul Haggis’s hand-wringing Oscar winner Crash ." While I never saw Crash (saw the Cronenberg one in ‘96—fool me once, etc.), Lakeview Terrace is both good and devoid of hand-wringing so I’m willing to take his word for it. Elsewhere , the same reviewer calls it "a decidedly conservative movie"—a conservative movie about race that considers hand-wringing beneath its attention? Directed by Neil LaBute? And I just came to see a "bad cop" thriller.
The psychological territory out beyond guilt and fatalism looks pretty strange, apparently, although we only ever get a lopsided picture of it: Samuel L. Jackson keeps trying to draw Patrick Wilson into racially symbolic encounters ("You can listen to that noise all you want, but when you wake up in the morning you’ll still be white"), but Wilson is having none of it. Like the good liberal he is, he points out that other white men may have hurt Jackson in the past, and Jackson’s late wife may even have died in the adulterous company of her white boss, but he isn’t any of those people. Well, obviously , Patrick; no one thinks you are, but Samuel L. Jackson has some issues with white men that he needs to work out, and you can help him by letting yourself be cast in that particular role in his little personal play.
We enlist others—strangers—in our own psychological dramas all the time, often for superficial reasons. It’s always touchy figuring out how far to humor someone in this kind of thing, but there’s no reason to abdicate your role in another man’s psychodrama on the grounds that the whole process is illegitimate because "I’m more than [my race, my gender, my class, my accent]." Wilson isn’t the one that Samuel L. Jackson is really mad at, and it’s a little unfair to make him take knocks on that man’s behalf; on the other hand, such good can come of it! For instance, Wilson could have turned Jackson’s personal narrative from a spiraling tragedy into a story of salvation if he’d had the compassion to step up to the plate. Think of it as just one more way to be a good neighbor. (I get that this is a tough thesis to buy, and I understand those who only hear "crazy-crazy-crazy" when they read it, but I’d recommend they watch the film.)
For more on the good that can come of allowing yourself to be drafted as a player in another man’s psychodrama (or, in this case, a nation’s), see Gerald Early in the Chronicle . ("The black narrative of victimization may have outlived its historical need and its psychological urgency, but it may still have a kind of cultural work to do as a tale of redemption and as an example of salvation history.") Plenty of people reject the facile logic behind "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," but those people then need some other recipe for a harmonious (or even post-racial) future. Early and Lakeview Terrace point us towards "redemption narratives," but, if that’s going to work, we’ll need to find the strength and humility to take up our parts in them. Catch Lakeview Terrace while it’s still in theaters. Don’t worry; it still has Samuel L. Jackson wielding a chainsaw, too.
