31 Movies of May, Day 21: Vernon, Florida

May 21st viewing: Vernon, Florida, chosen by my inner Florida Man

Year of Release: 1981

Directed by: Errol Morris

Written by: N/A

Starring (as themselves in interviews): Albert Bitterling, Roscoe Collins, George Harris, Joe Payne, Howard Pettis, Claude Register, Snake Reynolds, Henry Shipes

Accompanying Beverage of Choice: Son of Juice (IPA, 6.3% ABV), Maplewood Brewery, Chicago, Illinois
(Support Independent Breweries - buy local when getting buzzed during quarantine)

The most striking thing about Vernon, Florida is the dignity that director Errol Morris grants to his subjects. The most thought-provoking thing about the documentary is whether they actually deserve it.

As is befitting of the title, Vernon, Florida is about the eponymous town in Florida’s panhandle, and it doesn’t concern any real story or narrative, but instead just depicts a general sense of local character through interviews with members of the town populace. The citizens of Vernon come across as eccentric but savvy, folksy but lyrical, poor but adept. It’s a very matter-of-fact presentation, with no self-consciousness or defensiveness seen on camera. Morris extends a level of humanity to these people that rural southern individuals generally don’t receive in most media, and it helps create both a sense of place and a sense of community without really showing much, if any, person-to-person interaction.

When I say Morris “extends” this humanity I should also give credit to the people interviewed as well, as they don’t necessarily need a documentarian to demonstrate their worth to the world. They seem perfectly capable of doing so themselves. Of particular note is the turkey hunter who Morris keeps coming back to more than anyone else. The hunter speaks glowingly of the turkey as a species, with his every word depicting the turkey as a worthy adversary, not dissimilarily from how Quint describes the great white shark in Jaws. He has the highest level of respect for the “smart bird,” as he calls it, and when he goes over the turkey feet and beards he has kept as hunting trophies, you can see the intense level of care, planning, and skill that has gone into this passion of his. 

Such talent and dedication can be seen in nearly all of the interviewees. But while there is clear valor in these residents, it always feels like some seediness really should have seeped in at some point, and the film seems to suffer a bit without it. Morris started this project under the much-less dignified title of “Nub City,” originally looking to explore Vernon’s reputation as a town where citizens cut off their own limbs in order to defraud insurance companies into big payouts. None of this actually appears in the finished film, as all of Morris’ subjects refused to discuss such matters, and he ultimately was pushed into altering the topic of the documentary due to threats on his life. It’s not exactly the good-hearted, salt-of-the-earth depiction that was shown to audiences.

There is one moment, however, when a bit of malice does seep through the film’s edges, albeit likely unintentionally. With seven minutes left in the film’s runtime, Morris is interviewing a homegrown wetland naturalist of sorts, and the man speaks about his thoughts at night when he looks up at the stars. The man says he fantasizes about how each star in the sky might be a world for a separate society, and how there could be a star in the sky for everybody - an Irish world, a Russian world, a German world - and, lumped all into one at the end, “a colored world.” 

There’s no emphasis placed on that last descriptor in the film, and I don’t know if Morris really even gave it a second thought. The film came out in 1981, and while I’m fairly sure “colored” was no longer favored nomenclature at that point, I expect it was still used sporadically enough that it might go overlooked, especially when uttered casually by a Southern white man who was born deep in the Jim Crow era. But 40 years later, that comment throws a lot into contrast, notably that all of the people Morris interviews are white, and with Morris off-camera, you don’t actually get much sense of how the town treats those outside of the insular white male figures seen in the film. 

That’s not to say that these people shouldn’t be given any sort of respect as human beings. Even when interviewing history’s greatest monsters, approaching the conversation with respect between two people on equal footing is the responsibility of a documentarian, if only to prevent their own interactions from tainting the material they hope to obtain from the subject. But in leaving out the darker aspects of the community, that original darkness that first drew him to the story, Vernon, Florida feels less like an act of empathy, and more like an act of submission.