Race and Insurrection

Chronwatch.com, 11/09/08


Neil LaBute’s latest film, “Lakeview Terrace”, is about an interracial couple moving next door to Abel Turner, a widowed black cop living with his two children. At first, there seems nothing terribly unusual about this. But Abel’s reaction is far more Main Street than Liberal America. He does everything in his means to show his dissatisfaction with this marriage. Even the woman’s father finds it problematic, as shown in his often disdainful treatment of his white son-in-law. Main Street may never accept the mores of politically correct, Liberal America.

Political correctness is certainly not LaBute’s style. But here is the radical thing, “Lakeview Terrace” is the most politically correct of LaBute’s films. It is his version of: all people are equal, and can live together in marriage, friendship or as neighbors without animosity. Which means that those who disagree are racists. And fear of appearing racist finally appears to be the Achilles heel in LaBute’s film career of coldly dismantling all our preconceived political correctness.

No topic so far has been off limits for LaBute. “In the Company of Men”, his brutally honest, and borderline sadistic film, follows two corporate employees who manipulate a deaf young woman into a romantic relationship, only to cruelly laugh her off at the end.

In “Your Friends and Neighbors”, LaBute meticulously dissects the hypocritical, yuppified world of close-to-middle-age couples (surely his prime audience) and their inability to function as mature adults. Even Carey, the most astute of them all and probably the most callous, who sees right through the bullying manipulations of a friend’s girlfriend, and who tries to comfort the separated wife of another (strangely, he is also the one most capable of kindness), is tangled in the same web as his friends.

And this is the secret of LaBute’s films. His characters never seem to escape from their enclosed worlds, even those who are most aware of them. Chad and Howard, the two overgrown frat boys from “In the Company of Men” may have laughed themselves silly at their prank, but they are still stuck in their juvenile world. The friends of “Your Friends and Neighbors” are as dependent on each other as they are on the world they have fabricated for themselves.

Renee Zellweger’s character in “Nurse Betty” develops amnesia where she escapes into the fantasy of soap operas after having witnessed a horribly violent assault on her husband. And like all of LaButes characters, she inhabits this self-created, delusional world which she could walk right out of if only she would wake up (or in the case of Chad and Howard, and all the cast of “Your Friends and Neighbors” – grow up.) Fortunately for Betty, she does “wake up”, although her final vacation leaves us wondering if she’s now ready for another lapse.

We enter the world of a would-be artist graduate student in “The Shape of Things”. She has a young geeky undergrad friend, whom she progressively improves with plastic surgery, diet and exercise. This is actually her only work of art, and it isn’t even something which she did, only something she watched unfold. Her raison d’etre is her “conceptual art”, her addictive world where she can justify all of her heartless mistreatment of her Pygmalion.

LaBute uncompromisingly tackles art, handicaps and yuppiedom, yet race becomes his taboo topic. In “Lakeview Terrace” he tries to show Abel as a principled black man, who is only trying to preserve his race. But then, LaBute’s meter lurches back to it’s politically correct spot, and he carves out a callous and manipulative Abel instead. Except in this case, the average audience finally agrees with his portrayal of such a heinous character. This audience, just like LaBute himself, cannot bear to see the racial equality social experiments of the last four decades go up in flames. Abel has to be wrong. The worse he is portrayed, the better.

The delusional world that LaBute believes Abel is inhabiting, and which prevents him from being an ordinary, compassionate human being, is that Abel adamantly believes that racial mixing is unacceptable. This is what keeps Abel doing one wrong thing (morally and legally) after another. Abel, after all, is a racist.

LaBute nonetheless gives Abel one moment of glory, where his meter swerves one final time to the other (politically incorrect) end, and he shows us the underbelly of his true feelings. As Abel lies dying on the asphalt, LaBute has Abel’s arms extended all the way across, making an illusionary cross holding them apart. Like the famous Goya painting “The Third of May 1808”, where a Spaniard stands with his arms extended wide before the French firing squad, Abel lies heroically prostrate, sanctified if not martyred in a Christ-like pose before his spray of bullets. An innocent man killed for his insurrection.