Originally made for public television, 1981's Vernon, Florida was an early taster of Errol Morris: an hour-long survey of the eponymous community - notionally, a small, quiet all-American backwater - which helped pave the way for countless Carl Hiaasen novels and the 'Florida Man' memes that came to circulate in the early 21st century. Characters proliferate, and we sense Morris didn't have to wait long for them to appear: the turkey hunters waiting out their prey, a traffic cop doing likewise with speeding motorists, a latter-day trapper of some kind ("I've been bit by everything there is in this country") who proffers what he swears is a gopher - but is clearly a tortoise - and insists that it's good for the eatin', a godly builder who extols the power of prayer in finding a van at a heavenly price, a veteran garage owner whose conversational opener is "you ever seen a man's brains?". (It could have got weirder and bloodier still: Morris originally came this way, on a ticket paid for by his mentor Werner Herzog, to investigate claims Vernonians were lopping off their own limbs for insurance purposes.) So this, apparently, is how men - and Morris's subjects are almost exclusively men, because who else would disappear so enthusiastically down such vertiginous rabbit holes? - spent their days in an America leaving the tumult of the 1970s behind in order to enter into Reagan's more leisured and leisurely 1980s.
Still, what's noticeable is how determinedly Morris avoids sneering of any kind, possibly because he realises pointing a camera at people for any length of time and fashioning a documentary from the results is itself a perilously niche activity; from the off, this documentarist was sincerely interested in his fellow humanoids, however curious their concerns, and he set about drawing out their stories, methods and peccadillos so as to demonstrate there is no such thing as ordinary or typical American life. What Morris wound up filming here was both proof of existence - several thousand feet of richly textured celluloid that showed such folks were once living here among us, whether for decades or just a fleeting afternoon - and a fine advert for showing up in a place with an open mind and allowing the folks you encounter to start shooting their mouths off. At the back of it all is a tacit understanding that our fellow humans are fascinating and sometimes magic, because they can give you material that even the greatest writer would be hard-pushed to script. This town's unofficial historian even goes so far as to gift Morris a worldview and methodology that would come to sustain the filmmaker over what's so far been a near-fifty year career. Looking out on Vernon's unusually marshy swamps, this unassuming subject is minded to recount a joke he'd once heard about two sailors at sea. Sailor one observes "there's a lot of water out there". Sailor two replies: "Yeah, and that's just the top of it".
Vernon, Florida is currently streaming via NOW.
