How Florida became the backdrop for great independent filmmaking

Florida is among the most peculiar of the continental United States. Hawaii and Alaska may have a leg up in being separated from the rest of the country by miles and miles of ocean or miles and miles of Canada, but among states that are actually connected to other states, there may be no greater odd duck. It's kind of the south, but it's kind of cosmopolitan. It's got swampland and it's got coastal beauty. It has a huge demographic diversity, from rednecks to senior citizens to African-Americans to displaced Cubans. It plays a pivotal role in every presidential election. It attracts such weirdness and such oddity that a Los Angeles morning radio show I used to listen to had a game called "Germany or Florida?", where some outlandish little news item was proffered and you had to guess which of those locations spawned it.

Perhaps all of this has helped make it the go-to destination for independent filmmakers trying to explore serious issues of culture, identity and the American dream, all with the option of palm trees in the background.

The title of this post suggests I'm going to explain how that happened. In fact, I can't do that, though it's possible if I went on the internet and pulled some threads, I might find out. It might be nothing more profound than that Florida offers good tax breaks for films that want to shoot there. Really, I just liked how that title sounded.

The latest example, the movie that gave the idea the critical mass in my head necessary to write this post, is Trey Edward Shults' Waves, a film whose late release date caused it to get kind of lost in the shuffle at the end of 2019. In fact, it hasn't yet debuted here in Australia, an eventuality that will arrive late next week. That release date may have been delayed by coronavirus but it may not have. Sometimes, late-year American releases don't come out in Australia until the following summer -- which is winter here, of course.

I myself saw it as a 99 cent rental on my American version of iTunes. That's also not the first time that has happened, that a U.S. film has reached that point where it's no longer a new video release, so can appear at a discount price for one week, but it still hasn't made its debut everywhere in the world.

One thing setting a film in Florida does is it allows for the collision of dissimilar types, who might not otherwise inhabit the same space. My first example, from back in 2013, does that very well. That's Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, in which we get the science experiment of what happens when you combine college girls on spring break with drug dealers. Only in Florida, right? In that film -- which you know I think is brilliant, as I ranked it my second favorite of the last decade -- it allows for the college girls to find the drug dealers in themselves, and the drug dealer to find his inner college girl. That's all perfectly encapsulated in a single scene, where James Franco's Alien sits at an outdoor piano and delicately plinks out the notes for the Britney Spears ballad "Everytime," while the college girls in question dance around him wearing pink balaclavas and brandishing machine guns. Only in Florida, right?

The next film, chronologically, deals with a different sort of collision of things that seem diametrically opposed to one another, though they shouldn't. That's Barry Jenkins' Moonlight in 2016, which made my top ten of the year. Here you have the story of Chiron, who has a drug addicted mother and whose best male role model is himself a drug dealer. The twist is, of course, that Chiron is gay, a sexual preference that has a shameful history of acceptance in society in general, and in the African-American community in particular. There's something particularly Floridian about this coming of age story, as Chiron's formative sexual experience takes place on a beach by the titular moonlight. The image of Chiron being dipped in the waves by Juan, that drug dealer with a heart of gold, suggests a kind of baptism into a life of acceptance -- and also, indirectly, a life of crime.

The very next year, Sean Baker came back with The Florida Project, which, like Moonlight, also yielded a best supporting actor nomination, though Willem Dafoe did not win the statue that Mahershala Ali did. Like Moonlight, it also finished in my top ten for the year. The clash of apparent opposites here is between extreme poverty and Disney World. Baker stages the lives of children and their absent parents in a long-term motel that's adjacent to Disney World -- several miles adjacent, but close enough that the reflected glory still rests upon it, and the motels are given the types of names that might ensnare less discerning tourists. That the kids should be free to walk around in abandoned homes, and even set them ablaze, gives an indication of the duty to them that has been forfeited, and the chaos that exists just beneath what in many respects is a pretty surface. That chaos encapsulates Florida in general.

And finally we come to 2019 with Waves, which didn't yield any nominations of any kind, nor get the attention it deserved. Because I had no way to see it in time for my own best of 2019 list, it couldn't make the top ten, but I can pretty much assure you it would have made the top five if I had. Here is our first mismatch between the race of the filmmaker (white) and the race of his characters (black, with a few exceptions). Even six months later that disjuncture might already now seem problematic, but not the way Shults handles it, which is fair and credible and never assumes to know more than it does. The apparent contradiction in this story is that it revolves around an affluent black family -- and that, unfortunately, itself is a sad contradiction in what we expect from our depictions of African-Americans at the movies. Even though the members of this family have worked hard to rise above the limitations society tries to place on them, tragedy still reaches them, blurring the accomplishments of a successful businessman and his overachieving wrestler son. As much as the movie is not "about" race, racial issues bleed around the edges, and again, Florida is both the backdrop for this tarnished American dream, and in some ways, its cause. (The image above even recalls the Moonlight baptism scene.)

Four movies in six years does not a trend make, you might say. It could just be a coincidence that four superlative movies set in Florida, with similarly gorgeous looks, made by similarly visionary directors, happened to come out loosely within the space of a decade. The fact that it's closer to half a decade certainly strengthens the case, but it's still possible it's a coincidence.

However, it could also be true that there is something about the American soul that we need to wrestle with right now -- no pun intended -- that achieves its most profound dramatization in that oddest duck of states.

I'll put it this way: If in 2021 I see another Florida-set film advertised that reminds me of Spring Breakers, Moonlight, The Florida Project or Waves, I will be the first damn person in line.