On The Florida Project (dir. Sean Baker, 2017)
The thing you have to understand about The Florida Project — before you can understand anything else about it, before the sad-children-in-the-shadow-of-Disney reading can even begin to do the work people want it to do — is that the land the Magic Castle Motel sits on was specifically the land Walt Disney didn't buy in 1964, and the reason for both halves of that sentence is the same reason, which is that Walt Disney was engaged in what may be the single greatest private real estate acquisition in American history and he was doing it using shell companies.
The story is that in 1964 Disney sent a handful of lawyers and bag-men to Central Florida with instructions to buy up as much contiguous land as they could, quietly, through a rotating cast of fake corporations with on-the-nose names — M.T. Lott Real Estate Investments, Ayefour Corporation, Bay Lake Properties, Reedy Creek Ranch Lands — and with strict orders that the name Disney not appear on any document, any check, any filing, anything, because if the sellers figured out who the buyer was the price per acre would go up by an order of magnitude that afternoon. And it worked. Walt picked up roughly 27,000 acres of swamp, pine scrub, and exhausted citrus land straddling the Orange–Osceola county line at something like two hundred dollars an acre, which even in 1964 dollars was cheaper than the dirt had any business being, and when the story finally broke in late 1965 and the Orlando Sentinel figured out who had been buying the entire lower-middle part of the state, the remaining parcels around the edges of what Disney had already assembled shot up to nowhere in the space of about a week.
And everything around Disney — the entire US-192 motel strip the Magic Castle sits on, the entire tourist corridor from Kissimmee west to the park gates, every single purple and cyan and flamingo-pink mid-century-moderne motor court whose sun-faded carcass Sean Baker used as a location — is sitting on land that was somebody's late-arriving, post-reveal, high-priced consolation prize. You couldn't get a piece of what Walt got. You got a piece of what Walt left behind, and you paid more for it, and you had to build something that would extract value from the proximity to the park without being inside the park, because inside the park was off the table.
This, institutionally, is called "agglomeration without spillover." Normally when you build a major regional attraction you get a ring of tax base around it — restaurants, hotels, retail, services — and that ring shares in the value the attraction creates by capturing a fraction of the visitor spending, and the local counties tax the ring, and the ring supports public services that support the attraction, and everybody's incentives are at least nominally aligned. Disney did something specific to avoid this. The Reedy Creek Improvement District, chartered by the Florida legislature in 1967, was a quasi-governmental entity carved out of the Orange and Osceola county maps that functioned as Disney's own private municipality, with its own building codes, its own fire department, its own utility authority, its own bonding power, and effectively its own police. The district's board was controlled by Disney landowners. The district's revenue went to Disney infrastructure. The district's tax base did not contribute to Osceola or Orange County services in any meaningful sense.
Which means the ring around Disney — the Kissimmee motels, the US-192 t-shirt shops, the souvenir warehouses, the low-wage service infrastructure — got all of the externalities and none of the tax revenue. The kids on US-192 go to Osceola County public schools. The Osceola County public schools are funded by Osceola County property taxes. The single largest property owner in Osceola County pays its property taxes to itself, through Reedy Creek, to build its own roads and maintain its own fire hydrants. This is not a secret and it is not contested, it is the explicit legal structure the state of Florida agreed to in 1967 because Walt had made it clear that without this structure there would be no park, and the state of Florida in 1967 was desperate enough for the tax base to make a deal that would, seventy years later, produce the specific conditions inside of which Moonee's mother would be trying to make her weekly rent.
Now, the motels themselves. US-192 was not originally built as emergency housing for the precariously-employed working poor of the Greater Orlando service economy, it was built as mid-market tourist infrastructure for the 1970s and 1980s middle-class American family driving down from Cleveland in a station wagon to take the kids to the Magic Kingdom, and the motels were built to that price point and that aesthetic. The purple paint, the neon signs, the "Futureland" and "Arabian Nights"-type theming — that was meant to catch the eye of a family doing sixty miles an hour on a four-lane trying to decide where to stop for the night, back when the only on-property Disney hotels were the Contemporary and the Polynesian and everything else was off-site.
Then the 1990s and 2000s happened. Disney kept building on its own land — the Caribbean Beach, the Port Orleans resorts, the All-Star Value Resorts, the sprawl of Disney-operated hotels in the thousands of rooms — and the off-property motels on US-192 got undercut. The All-Star Music Resort is a Disney-branded budget property inside the bubble, on Disney transit, with Magic Bands and park integration, for not that much more than a room at the Magic Castle, and once Disney built it the calculus for a visiting middle-class family changed permanently. You could stay in the bubble. You no longer had to drive in every morning past the Walgreens and the Winn-Dixie and the souvenir warehouse with the giant orange on the roof. The 1980s motel's entire business model was "we are what you can afford and we are close to the park," and that business model died the moment Disney figured out it could be what you can afford.
So you had a whole inventory of purple tourist motels on a four-lane highway with collapsing room rates and declining maintenance budgets, and you had — in Central Florida, in the 2000s, accelerating dramatically after 2008 — a population of service workers and evicted families and people whose credit would no longer pass a normal apartment application, and the match between those two things was the invention of the extended-stay weekly-rate motel as de facto low-income housing in Florida. Which works for a very specific reason that the movie never explains and assumes you understand, which is that in Florida if you rent by the week and stay fewer than twenty-eight consecutive days you are legally a hotel guest and not a tenant, which means the motel can evict you at any time for any reason or no reason without going through the eviction courts, and you in turn don't need to pass a credit check or produce references or put down first-last-and-security to move in, you just need this week's cash.
This is the apparatus Halley is navigating. Every Friday she has to put together roughly two hundred fifty dollars in cash, and if she can't, Bobby can put her out on the sidewalk with her daughter and her belongings by Saturday afternoon without filing a single piece of paper. This is also why Bobby moves families between rooms every month or so, which the movie shows and doesn't explain — it's to reset the twenty-eight-day clock, so nobody can claim tenant status, so the legal machinery stays on Bobby's side, so the motel can keep functioning as what it is rather than becoming what it would be if the state of Florida required it to function as actual residential housing, which it cannot financially support and is not structurally equipped for and its insurance doesn't cover.
Bobby. Willem Dafoe as Bobby is the most important structural figure in the movie and people keep misreading him because the Oscar clip was the scene with the pedophile and everyone got fixated on Bobby-as-protector, which is fine, he is a protector, but what Bobby actually is is the middle layer of an institutional pattern that has no good name. He's not a landlord — landlords in the Florida statutes have specific duties and rights and Bobby doesn't have most of them. He's not a social worker — social workers are trained, licensed, and supervised, and Bobby is not. He's not a cop. He's not a therapist. He's the guy with the keys and the walkie-talkie who is, in practice, the last institutional backstop between the families at the Magic Castle and the actual street, and he's a private employee of a private motel operator whose business model is marginal and whose tolerance for his interventions is finite.
Bobby is doing social work without the training, the funding, the authority, or the backup, and the reason he is doing social work at all is because the state of Florida has, for forty years, been making a specific set of choices about where the tax base from Central Florida tourism flows, and a specific set of choices about the rental regulatory environment, and a specific set of choices about the Medicaid expansion and the TANF regime and the housing voucher program, and the downstream effect of those choices is that when a family like Halley's runs out of legitimate options the last option is a motel manager on US-192 who has to decide every week whether the kid on his property is in enough danger that he needs to involve the state, knowing that if he involves the state the kid gets taken.
(This is the choice he makes at the end of the film, and it is not a dramatic choice, it is a bureaucratic choice, and the movie is careful to let it be bureaucratic.)
What Baker is doing, across his filmography — and I'll be brief about this because I've been on about it elsewhere — is documenting a very specific American economic layer that doesn't have a good name in public discourse but is in fact the entire substrate of several American industries, which is the service-and-adjacency labor pool around the big private entertainment and tourism sectors, and the informal housing and care arrangements that pool generates because the official labor market doesn't pay enough to support regular housing and the official housing market doesn't have enough inventory to house the people who work in it. The Florida Project is the cleanest statement of the thesis because the metaphor is built into the geography. You literally cannot film it without filming it — the motel is a mile from the park.
Which brings me to the temporal rhyme, because this pattern is not new and it is not unique to Disney. Resort economies do this. The Catskills did it, the Jersey shore did it, Atlantic City did it in its second act — the periphery labor pool that services the glamour core cannot afford to live in the glamour core, so it lives adjacent in a shadow inventory of housing stock whose entire economy is structured by the glamour core's wage ceiling and land prices. Mining towns did it harder, because at least mining towns had the decency to be explicit — the company built the housing, the company owned the housing, the company took rent out of your paycheck, and you lived in a company town. The late-twentieth-century resort pattern is a company town without the company taking responsibility. The labor pool is there, the substandard housing is there, the shadow economy is there, but ownership is distributed across a hundred small operators and the actual beneficiary is a mile away behind a moat and a monorail, and when you ask the beneficiary what they're doing about it the beneficiary says "we're not in that business." Which is technically correct. They are in the business of hiring the labor that lives in that housing at a wage that makes that housing the only option, and they are structured as a special legal district that does not contribute to the public services that housing relies on, but they are not, in a literal sense, operating the motel.
The Hollywood studios did a cleaner version of this in the twenties and thirties, which is maybe the most useful parallel because it happened on similar geography — the San Fernando Valley's development as a bedroom community for studio crews and extras was explicitly subsidized by the studios in some cases, and the specific wage ceilings of non-contract crew labor produced a specific housing type (the single-story stucco bungalow with the detached garage) that is still visible from the air when you fly over Van Nuys. The difference is that by the fifties and sixties Los Angeles at least had the public infrastructure — transit, schools, annexation of incorporated areas — to absorb the periphery population into something resembling a functioning metropolis. Central Florida never did that. Central Florida grew up after the mid-century, in the Sun Belt expansion period, under a set of state-level political and tax regimes that were specifically hostile to the kind of metropolitan integration that Los Angeles got. Orange County and Osceola County did not build the transit, did not build the schools, did not build the public housing, did not build the medical infrastructure, that would have been required to support the service population Disney's presence was creating. Instead they collected what property taxes they could from the non-Reedy-Creek parcels and hoped.
This is how you end up with Moonee. Not through the malice of any particular actor and not through the failure of any particular program, but through the compounding effect of a set of institutional choices made at the state level between 1965 and about 2005 that each, individually, looked reasonable to the people making them and that collectively added up to an environment in which a bright, funny, healthy seven-year-old child lives in a purple motel a mile from the happiest place on earth and her mother turns tricks in the bathroom while the child watches YouTube in the parking lot. The movie is not making an argument about the moral failure of anybody in the frame. It is showing you the set of conditions, patiently, at length, at kid-height, and it is trusting you to work out that the conditions are the argument.
The title is doing some work, too, obviously. "The Florida Project" was Walt's internal code name for what became Walt Disney World, during the acquisition phase — the blueprints and the planning documents all say "Florida Project" because anything that said "Disney" would have tipped the price. The movie's title reclaims the phrase and points it somewhere else. This IS the Florida project. The kids are the project. The motel is the project. The service labor force living on US-192 in tourist-bait mid-century motor courts that the company town couldn't be bothered to build because it got a better deal by not building them — that is what Walt's Florida project actually produced.
And the ending, which people have been arguing about since 2017. Moonee gets found by child services, who are about to take her. Jancey — her one real friend, the neighbor kid — grabs her hand and runs, and the movie follows them, and the camera suddenly switches from 35mm to iPhone and the two of them are sprinting through the gates of the Magic Kingdom down Main Street toward the castle in the lowest-resolution consumer-grade footage imaginable, a formal rupture so violent that it reads almost like an error in the print, and that is where the movie ends. The reading I find most persuasive is not the "is it real or is it a dream" reading, because the formal rupture forecloses that question — the film has already told you by changing cameras that this is not of a piece with what you have been watching. The question is not whether it happened. The question is what the iPhone means. And what I think it means is: this is the only format in which Disney is accessible to these kids, the unlicensed illegal guerrilla stolen shot from the fan's pocket, the footage that didn't require a permit because no permit would ever have been issued, the dream in the resolution that the dreamer can afford. Baker couldn't get shooting permits inside the park, so he shot it guerrilla on a phone, and the guerrilla iPhone becomes the thing itself — the last shot of the movie is exactly as much Disney as the characters will ever have.
Which is a formal argument, and it's sitting inside a geographic argument, and the geographic argument is sitting inside an institutional argument about a fifty-year-old real estate shell-company play and the tax district that got chartered to protect it, and all of that is sitting inside two children running, which is what the movie wants you to see first and last. Same as it ever was, basically, just with better signage.
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