The Florida Project
of happiness and fairytales
Most of us grew up listening to some version of a fairytale. A beautiful princess, a prince charming, a magical world, colour and light. As children, fantasy and magic was real, perceptible, at hand. It was not mere imagination, nor nostalgia or longing. Then, at some unidentifiable point, we grew up to be adults and realised the world was just the opposite. There was no magic, no wonder. We found the world a dry, cruel place. Thus, we invented our own fantasies, escape rooms to vacuum out the cruelty of our lives. We invented Disneyland. A faraway, unreal place with rainbows and sunshine, exhilarating rides, fireworks at night. We couldn’t find happiness or joy in the world so we created it. Except that it became necessary to vacuum real life away to create this simulacrum, this simulation of happiness.
The Florida Project (2017) is a most intimate and sharp commentary on the emptiness of this happiness project. The camera descends in the film to the eyes of a child living on the fringes of Disneyland. She does not take the rides or shake hands with the funny characters. Instead, she clicks bikini selfies with her mother in their motel room, collects tips from paying guests to buy ice-cream for her friends and herself, and runs wildly in the rain. She bullies another girl only to become her best friend. She follows her unemployed, single mother as she tries to pay her weekly rent, blissfully unaware of the limits to which she goes, turning friends into enemies and cheating the whole damn world.
The helicopter keeps coming and going. She looks up at the sky, her eyes squinting, sometimes to wave, sometimes to raise her middle finger at the helicopter, emulating her rebellious mother. The helicopter carries drugged adults—more drugged than her weed-consuming mother—travelling long distances to experience happiness. At one point, one of these fairy tale deprived adults lands up at the motel, mistakenly, throwing themselves into a fit. The child remarks casually, “I always know when adults are going to cry.” Beneath the helicopters and beside the fancy hotels, she inhabits worlds of her own, introduces her friends to unexplored crevices, meticulously bathes her plastic toys, unapologetically begs for money to buy an ice-cream, screams hysterically, and runs, to no end.
We watch. The child does not care for us. The screen, another of our most enchanting drugs, interrupts the sheerness of the child’s joy for us. Her own mother feigns to share her joy, sometimes successfully, but mostly with immense suffering. In the face of the constructed fairy tale, she is humiliated daily, displaced weekly, deprived money and food, denied employment, and to round it all up, served a moral lecture every now and then. She does what she has to in order to keep her child’s real fairy tale alive. The catch, however, is that for the other fairy tale to persist, this one must constantly be attacked.
The other fairy tale survives on a more macabre machinery whose face remains hidden to its drugged visitors. A machinery of real estate agents and the morally righteous state apparatus. Always there, this machinery decides to enter the child’s home. The mother gives in, silently. The child does not. Her world does not understand this other logic of happiness. She is content with celebrating her best friend’s birthday under someone else’s fireworks. So when they come to get her, she runs. She leaves them all behind and runs to tell her friend that she might not see her anymore. She breaks down—the real world is catching up quickly, the fairy tale is over. Her friend takes her hand and tells her it is not. So long as they are alive, so long as they can see through the emptiness of the happiness of adults, their fairy tale is not over, not yet.
