Fights in the Sixties: Series “Lady in the Lake”: Escape from the suburbs

Maddie Schwartz is tired of being a good housewife. We are in Baltimore in the 1960s. The woman in her late thirties, played by Natalie Portman, can no longer stand her husband’s aggressive and sniveling manner, and repressed conflicts from the past are bothering her. After a heated argument, she leaves her husband and teenage son and moves from the lower-middle-class suburb of Pikesville to a black part of downtown Baltimore. To earn money, she starts researching for a newspaper. She finally wants to realize her childhood dream: write articles and become a journalist.

The Apple TV+ series “Lady in the Lake”, the adaptation of the novel of the same name by Laura Lippman (2019), takes place in 1966, when black and white communities were strictly separated from each other due to racist legislation. In the state of Maryland, where Baltimore is located, sexual relationships and marriages between black and white people were forbidden by law at the time. That only changed in 1967 with a groundbreaking Supreme Court ruling, which also plays a role in “Lady in the Lake.” The Jewish Maddie and the black police officer Ferdie Platt (Y’lan Noel) also feel this segregation when they get involved in a relationship.

When Maddie, who has fled her bourgeois corset and the suburbs, finally goes bankrupt and wants to sell her car in order to at least be able to pay the rent, that’s not possible because she would need her husband’s signature. With a lot of ambition, she pushes through her new job at the daily newspaper “Baltimore Star” and researches two murder cases in which a Jewish girl and a black woman were murdered. Both bodies were found in a lake. While the child’s sexual murder makes headlines, no one is interested in the death of the black bartender Cleo Sherwood (Moses Ingram). Do the two murder cases possibly even have something to do with each other?

The social spheres of black and white are radically separated, only Maddie tries to undermine this order, not least because of her ambitions as a journalist. Soon she finds herself in the middle of a complex affair involving an illegal lottery, the attempted murder of a black politician and a widespread web of corruption. This all happened in the politically heated atmosphere shortly before the outbreak of various uprisings in the black neighborhoods of major US cities, while in Baltimore the Ku Klux Klan and neo-fascists attacked a neighborhood inhabited by black people.

“Lady in the Lake” tells of racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, misogyny and shows, on the one hand, how much American society in the 1960s was shaped by these segregation mechanisms and, on the other hand, how these authoritarian rules are slowly being questioned and eroding . The American-Israeli director Alma Har’el, who also wrote the screenplay for “Lady in the Lake” and whose award-winning debut film “Honey Boy” (2019) tells a biography of the actor Shia LaBeouf, has so far primarily made music videos. You notice this in the series, which also takes place a lot in a music club that is mainly attended by African Americans.

The 60s are not discussed here from the perspective of social and political struggles, but they are also subculturally and aesthetically interesting, stylish and urban, with lots of soul and jazz music. The atmospherically densely staged narrative repeatedly jumps through time, skillfully interweaving different narrative levels and thus expanding the back stories of the various characters, including some surreal and nightmare-like elements. All of this remains extremely exciting until the end and has an amazingly reconciliatory ending.

On Apple TV+