“Forensic Theatricality and its Discontents”
Patrick Brian Smith (University of Salford)
Two of the enduring legacies of the video of Rodney King’s assault by four police officers were its forensic unmaking in the courtroom and subsequent media virality. George Holliday’s Sony Video8 recording was dissected by defense attorneys into literal fractions of motion. Rewinding, freeze framing, and repeatedly slowing down the video, the defense repeatedly asked the involved officers “was he complying here with your order to stay down? Was he complying here?” Of course, we know the result of these manipulative forms of reassembly—three of the officers were acquitted, whilst the jury failed to reach a verdict on one charge for the fourth.
The trial was widely televised, with the local station KTTV providing gavel-to-gavel coverage. The combination of the trial’s widely televised circulation and the centrality of the powerful visual evidence made this one of the first courtroom true-crime events to enter the public consciousness as a media phenomenon. These forms of legal dissection and circulation—both within the courtroom itself and its wider dissemination across the media—starkly showcased a failed legal system built on centuries of racialized injustice. Within hours of the verdict, the 1992 Los Angeles riots started.
I start with the Rodney King trial and its various forms of media recomposition and dissemination as an example of what Laliv Melamed has recently called the “theatre of forensics,” where media tools of analytical dissection and circulation “become means of legal and moral omission…serving the obstruction of evidence, the denial of harm and the circumvention of the material structures of violence and intent.” In the King trial, both the video’s courtroom dissection and its subsequent media dissemination became the primary sites for such a theatrical display of the forensic to take place, with the hyperbolic editing and analysis of the video warping the jury’s perceptions, leading to the acquittals and the subsequent backlash from the public at large.
Geeta Gandbhir’s 2025 documentary The Perfect Neighbor can, I think, be read as a deliberate subversion of the forensic theatricality that came to dominate the King trial. The film focuses on the murder of 35-year-old Ajike A.J. Shantrell Owens by her neighbor, 58-year-old Susan Louise Lorincz in Ocala, Florida on June 2, 2023. The film is composed primarily from police body-cam footage documenting Lorincz’s increasing racial harassment of her neighbors, primarily due to local children playing on an open patch of land adjacent to her house, absorbed in their own games and relationships and with no intent to provoke or harass. It includes footage from multiple law-enforcement encounters involving Lorincz, spanning calls she made in 2022 and 2023; her in-person complaints at the Sheriff’s Office in May 2023; the 911 calls—including her own—following the shooting of Owens; and her subsequent questioning by Sheriff’s detectives.
This footage is largely unedited, and periods of seeming banality are retained—officers standing idle, conversations looping, and time palpably passing. Where the King video was fragmented and dissected—transformed into a spectacle of legal deception—the body-cam footage in Gandbhir’s film is allowed to persist in close to real time. This form of durational excess produces a slow burn. Lorincz’s violence and racism do not emerge as acute aberrations to be forensically explained away. Instead, they are re-anchored in the longue durée of systemic and structural racism, institutional complicity, and legal failure that have been the bedrock of sociopolitical and economic life in the United States for centuries.
Another of the documentary’s most striking subversions of the typical mainstream true crime format is that the trial of Lorincz isn’t a central component of the film’s climax. Instead, it is concertinaed into the credit sequence, where a quick four-minute edit presents us with some key moments: the swearing in of the jury; Lorincz entering the courtroom for the first time; testimony from children on the street; testimony from the police officers who had variously responded to Lorincz’s calls; playback of Lorincz’s calls; and testimony from forensic investigators.
Directly following the credit sequence, we are presented with footage from a community memorial for Owens. Focusing on such a crucial instance of communal healing and repair prior to offering the audience any closure on the legal outcome of the case is a powerful move from Gandbhir. Relegating the retributive emotional relief of the trial to the credit sequence subverts not only the typical true crime format (where the trial often forms a crucial part of the third act), it also resists what Brett Story has termed a broader “carceral common sense.” Story argues that popular media’s conflation of retributive affect with justice produces a craving for swift carceral resolutions, further entrenching carceral imaginaries as somehow constructive and conducive to a collective good. In this formulation, catharsis leaves systemic violence intact, operating as a soothing substitute that channels genuine demands for redress into punitive logics. Gandbhir’s film resists such logics through its focus on the instances of community healing and reparation after Owen’s death, rather than any extended documentation of the legal outcome of the trial.
The true power of The Perfect Neighbor lies, I think, in this refusal to perform for the law. Ultimately, the film’s ending “fracture[s] legal sensemaking’s illusory coherence and unity… [and these] fractures open escape routes to alternative forms of redress.” This quotation comes from the introduction to the latest issue of the documentary journal World Records titled “Just Evidence,” which I co-edited with Sasha Crawford-Holland and LaCharles Ward. There, we argue that forms of juridical sensemaking are, of course, never neutral. They always function through the application of established legal frameworks that effectively predetermine outcomes. By contrast, the contributions to the special issue foreground evidentiary practices that refuse to treat justice as a settled conclusion, instead holding it open as a problem to be continually interrogated. What counts as justice, and who has the authority to define it? As we suggest, the phrase “just evidence” itself has a dual valence. It both “expresses a faith in evidence—a belief that truth is on the side of justice,” but is also “underscores evidence’s perpetual ambiguity and inadequacy.” Ultimately, “absent enforcement mechanisms, institutional power, or political momentum, what we are left with is precisely that: just evidence.” It is arguable that The Perfect Neighbor poses similar provocations; the film does not merely critique the failures of forensic and legal cultures and practices, it also quietly withdraws from their stage of theatrics altogether.
“Embody-cam Evidence”
Kelly Gates (UC San Diego)
In June 2023, Ajike Owens, a Black woman, was shot and killed by her white neighbor, Susan Lorincz, in front of Lorincz’s home in Florida. Lorincz had zero tolerance for the Owens children and other neighborhood kids who played football and ran around in an open grassy area next to her home, repeatedly calling the police to complain. The tensions escalated to a confrontation in which Lorincz shot Owens through her locked front door. She then claimed legal protection under Florida’s stand-your-ground law.
Geeta Gandbhir’s Oscar-nominated documentary, The Perfect Neighbor, inserts viewers into the spaces and times in which this tragedy unfolded. To do this, the film makes heavy use of police body-cam video recorded over a two-year period. Gandbhir did not plan to make a film about this incident from body-cam video. She initially began watching the footage, obtained through a FOIA request, to help the Owens family’s legal team. Gandbhir’s sister-in-law was a close friend of Ajike Owens, as the director explains in an interview, and she initially thought she would produce “a film that followed the [Owens] family for a year and their attempts to get justice and impact change.” But as she spent time watching the extensive collection of body-cam footage, she “realized that this was the film.”
The unorthodox use of this type of source material is part of the film’s conceit: the appropriation of police-produced media to offer a more extended account, from a more intimate and emotional perspective. Body-cam video is a relatively new media form, accumulating en masse in archives that are mostly used by the police themselves. Such video is now regularly used as evidence in police investigations, at times making it into the courtroom. Fragments appear in news stories and in true-crime reality television. But the way Gandbhir assembles the footage diverges from these legalistic, journalistic, and infotainment uses, conveying the devastating impact of Owens’ violent death on her family and community.
This paradoxical use of police video invites an analysis of the form that this documentary takes, in addition to an engagement with the social, moral, and legal questions that it raises. What can and must be said about the combination of source material and the way it’s assembled to tell this story? How does this film’s unique form of mediation intermingle with the varied experiences that viewers bring to it? How does its seemingly first-hand, embodied perspective penetrate and grab ahold of our perception, memory, and imagination?
The first and most obvious point is that the body-cam video gives viewers a mobile perspective, the cameras moving around spaces along with the embodied movements of the officers. Historically, the only way to provide close-up perspectives of police activity, as it unfolded, was through staged reenactments, which can be controversial as documentary material. Body-cam videos give us first-hand views of the actual event, their awkward angles and excessive motion mirroring the gritty realist style of cinéma vérité. They have a distinctive look that makes them recognizable as police video, including their low-quality, subjective perspective, and time-date stamp and corporate logo (the latter blurred out in Gandbhir’s film, which appears as a form of redaction). Especially important are body-cameras’ audio recording capabilities, since it is often the recorded words and other sounds that provide the most meaningful information. Yet, as isolated recordings, body-cam videos provide only partial information and therefore make limited sense. A great deal of media production work is necessary to contextualize them and elicit their meaning, juxtaposing segments with other recordings, testimony, and material evidence.
Notably, much of the emotional intimacy and impact of the film comes from Gandbhir’s use of recorded interviews with people affected by the tragedy, including family members, friends, and neighbors. Most of these people are not visible when we hear them speaking, nor are they identified by name. Their disembodied voices are juxtaposed with carefully selected images from the neighborhood, which makes them sound more like a constellation of oral histories than conventional documentary interviews.
The person who gets the most speaking time in the film is Susan Lorincz, and everything she says can and will be used against her. The longest single take is not body-cam footage but an interrogation room video in which detectives question Lorincz (for the second time). This long take lasts twenty minutes, beginning with the detectives bringing her in and ending after she’s led out in handcuffs. The POV of the camera hovers over her as she refuses to be led away to jail, eventually acquiescing. Afterwards, the camera continues to record as one of the detectives returns and retrieves a notepad on which Lorincz has written a letter to the Owens children. The detectives urged her to write it, probably to gather more evidence for her prosecution. The detective reads her letter aloud, ensuring that its contents are recorded aurally. His performance seems perfectly staged for the camera; even the way the frame cuts him off at an awkward angle gives the shot the formal effect of a surveillance camera perspective.
While professional camera work is minimized in this film, the skillful and extensive editing work is what makes The Perfect Neighbor a formally unique and powerful film. In one segment, officers are accompanying Lorincz to her home after the shooting. As a neighbor across the street yells angrily at Lorincz, we are privy to two of the officers having a private exchange. We see one of the officers approach the other and ask if her camera is on. He’s speaking to her but appears to be speaking to us. As she responds to him, we see him reach up to his own camera and press the button to activate it. As his finger touches the button, the film cuts to his camera’s perspective as it switches on, bringing the other officer into view.
On first viewing, I found this sequence disorienting. It felt like a fourth wall-breaking moment, though of course there is no wall created in the first place. The use of multiple body-cam perspectives to represent this exchange both illuminates and confuses our sense of the event. It calls attention to the embodied process of production, thereby disrupting the viewer’s more detached third-person point of view. This reflexive moment is by extension a reminder that all the footage that Gandbhir assembled has been carefully selected and edited to focus our perception on significant and dramatic moments, increasing the intensity of the story. The deftness with which the segments were chosen and edited together—and the dedication to the story that this laborious process demanded—is what makes this film an achievement in the documentary form.
DOCALOGUE 