living in a cocoon
by Douglas Messerli
Lacey Schwartz and Mehret Moandefro
(screenplay), Lacey Schwartz (director) Little
White Lie / 2014
The facts, when they become known as her parent’s relationship began to
unravel, are simple, documented by what was right before their very eyes, so
obvious that even when she left the questions regarding Lacey’s identity of her
college application blank, Georgetown University declared her a black student,
and she was immediately welcomed into the Black Student Alliance.
How could anyone in Lacey’s place not feel completely betrayed when the
simple facts are revealed? Her mother, Peggy, began an affair with a black man,
Rodney Parker, the same year she met Lucy’s father, continuing the affair for
several years and remaining close with Rodney and his family throughout her
married life. Despite all the “white lies” (quite obviously, there is far more
here than “one” lie) the rest of the family themselves told Lacey, he mother
secretly knew the truth, but withheld it, quite obviously, for fear of
destroying a marriage which was, in large part, unfulfilling. But even when the
relationship finally fell apart, Lacey’s father finally doing the simple
arithmetic, Peggy never speaks the truth. Was there ever a moment of insight
that her secret might literally explode one day in her beloved daughter’s face?
Lacey Schwartz’s documentation of her own coming to terms with the truth and her search for her own identity are not nearly as interesting as are the silences behind the encounters between daughter, mother, father, and friends. Certainly, both parents’ refusal, even after the truth had become apparent, to directly face their daughter’s questions, prove that these are people who never learned to look within. And when Lacey finally breaks through the sturdy exterior of her mother’s simplistic explanations—that she grew up in an age when things like religion, marriage, and family were simply assigned to you, requiring that you simply accept them—we discover a rather hedonistic younger self, a would-be independent person who, had she continued in that direction, might possibly have broken down some of the barriers to interiority. Yet there is also almost a sense of arrogance in her denials of wrong-doing. Somehow she still remains unable to see the complexity of her self-denials, the horrors behind her cocooned existence.
The wronged father, Robert, in many ways, is even worse. Yes, he has
been lied to, continues to be lied to even as his daughter attempts to frame
her questions. But he is still more interested in his own pain, wallowing in
his own sense of wounded manhood instead of attempting to help his daughter to
explore the many ways in which he may not only have participated in the “white
lie” of their lives, but encouraged it. Attempting to begin a conversation with
him, Lucy queries whether he has noticed that she has identified with being black.
His sharp retort that, of course, he has noticed her interest in black writing,
music, friends, etc.—appears to suggest that exploring one’s identity is simply
a matter of surrounding oneself in the artifacts of what he imagines represent
that racial identity. It appears that he (and admittedly, at moments, even our
narrator) has never imagined that there might be millions of blacks who do not
define themselves by listening to so-called black music, by reading texts
written by black writers, or necessarily surrounding themselves only with their
black peers. We can understand that, in attempting to discover her own
identity, that Lacey may be exploring cultural and social behavior previously
unavailable to her in her white-Jewish upbringing. But her father cannot seem
to even wonder if identity might be something one might want or need to
reimagine.
The “little white lie” that this troubling film refers to is not simply
the fact that the family and friends chose to lie to Lucy and themselves, but
that the entire society in which they were embedded encouraged and allowed that
and other lies—and, even worse, continues to embrace the lie—that being Jewish
and being black (unless one might be of Ethiopian heritage), being biracial, or
being of several racial heritages simultaneously is something best not spoken
of, not even attested to by one’s own vision. The lie arises from ignorance
more than from evil intent. If one seldom encounters anyone out of one’s
cultural milieu, how can one even imagine how other people live? The culture in
which Lacey grew up was not racist because it would not allow Blacks to enter their community, but in the fact that it
might not even recognize a black man or woman among their midst. The community
in which the Schwartz’s lived (ironically, as Lucy points out, the German word
for black), was not just color-blind but unable to visually and mentally make
sense out anything around them, including their own lives.
Late in the movie, Lucy asks her mother a devastatingly important
question, “Might Peggy, had not met Robert and not been encouraged by her
family to marry him, have married Rodney Parker, the black man who was Lacey’s
father?” The mother, apparently, cannot recognize that possibility, suggesting
that her Jewish husband was clever and funny and, besides, he had money. Her
idea of identity, evidentially, has a great deal to do with deep pockets.
The disturbing short film ends, fortunately, with an implicit admission
that identity is never one thing, but is a series of shifting possibilities
that often embrace contradiction and even conflict. Marrying a black man, we
see Lacey dressed in white, celebrating in what clearly is a Jewish wedding,
the families from both sides coming together to openly share an event that,
almost for the first time, isn’t pretending to be something else.
Los Angeles, January 5, 2014
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2014).
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