Researching for the film enthusiasm class I’ll be leading through OLLI (via Ringling School of Art) in January entitled Flamboyant Florida Films, I decided to choose a couple of docs. An older one a work colleague suggested is Vernon, Florida from director Errol Morris. Well, have I learned something new!
First, Morris is an Academy Award Winner for best doc back in 2004 called The Fog of War (holy rabbit hole, I’ll be watching that next).
Vernon, Florida was made during his career nascence, which had quite a wobbly start, partly due to the controversial nature of the original idea (Vernon was known as ‘Nub City” after the high number of people who had lost limbs in accidents) and his firings of several cinematographers. In fact after his first two films, of which Vernon was one (the other “Gates of Heaven” was lauded by Roger Ebert), he decided to become a private detective in his hometown of Long Island.
Morris uses a free flow UN-narrated interview process allowing his subjects to talk at length. In Vernon, Florida these include:
a cantankerous Chicagoan who bought a house for $2200 and paid it off in short order
a turkey hunting zealot
a Floridian pet wrangler
a religious church builder
a phlegmatic police officer
an Arizona couple whose interview contains overlapping talk
I look forward to a community conversation on this documentary because I wonder if the film holds up as time capsule or if it’s simply too cringey. All but the police officer and the religious man have either a barbaric streak or possess eccentricity bordering on mental illness. Sure the barbarians are ‘road smart’, a new term I just came up with, meaning a backwoods survival intelligence, but at the same time, I don’t think I’d want them as neighbors. The more innocuous people as aforementioned appear naive or dimwitted.
This is a moral dilemma: is Morris shining a light on humans who most would pass of as ‘hicks’? Or is he mocking and taking advantage of their innocence?
Finally, it’d be interesting to see if Vernon has even changed much as the 2000 Census claims that the panhandle town has remained relatively small at approximately 750 people.
