Trouble in paradise: The Beach Bum and a history of Florida noir
Ah, Florida, referred to both disparagingly and affectionately as the Australia of the United States. The southernmost state and yet not quite identified with the deep south, a meeting point for Latino influence and a rangy variant of Americana, it’s a strange place that magnetizes strange people. Moondog, the poet/small-time crook/drug aficionado portrayed by Matthew McConaughey in Harmony Korine’s new film The Beach Bum, is one such Floridian.
He’s carved out a comfortable lifestyle for himself in the Keys, the archipelago arcing south-west off the tip of the mainland. His wife’s family fortune enables him to spend his days getting high, partying with his fellow oddballs, screwing around and generally taking it easy. A threesome in the morning, a pool party at night, an infinite supply of potent ganja – a guy could get used to it all. The motivating action of The Beach Bum is Moondog’s struggle to maintain this way of living after his wife’s death, in accordance with the rather unusual dictates of her last will and testament. It is one man’s discursive, blearily epic quest to go nowhere and do nothing.
As Moondog racks up legally punishable offenses over the course of this journey, eventually taking flight from the cops, he edges into the humid and swampy realm of the Florida noir. The farther south one travels, the looser the grip of the authorities, and an off-beat vein of fiction has taken this notion as its guiding principle. Outside the planned communities of bluehaired retirees, beyond the gleaming metropolis of heritage and culture that is Miami, Florida takes on a wild-country feeling not so dissimilar to that of California in the early 20th century. That region had only been recently settled at the time, leaving plenty of room for shady characters to test how much they could get away with in the likes of Chinatown and its filmic ilk. But the state that brought us “Florida Man” could and will never be tamed. In the happy isolation of the Keys, colorful weirdos learn which parts of the law can safely be treated as a formality.
Moondog shares a spiritual kinship with Alien, the cornrowed, gunfellating gangster who stole the show in Korine’s previous feature Spring Breakers. James Franco played him as a through-and-through hedonist who only hustles hard in order to live large. The idyll outlined by Alien and the quartet of vacationing undergrads he takes under his prison-tatted wing also entails beach time, lots of stimulatingcompany, and most importantly, enough booze and drugs to achieve a state of endless inebriation – a high from which nobody can make them come down. While Spring Breakers doesn’t adhere to the tropes of noir as rigorously as some others (though there’s an argument to be made for Alien as an homme fatale), its underlying philosophy of self-determination outside the boundaries of polite society places it in league with the micro-genre. The Sunshine State setting qualifies the film for inclusion, but from there, the overall vibe counts for as much as any story elements.
Other films have stuck closer to the tried-and-true tropes, plugging the recurring noir themes of corruption and deception into a more offbeat milieu. Carl Hiaasen wrote the mystery novel Hoot in this classical mode, albeit while softening the tradition to suit a middle-school-aged readership. Nonetheless, the 2006 film adaptation (featuring a baby-faced Shia LaBeouf!) realized Hiaasen’s eccentric menagerie of characters with an emphasis on their more vivid idiosyncrasies. In investigating a scheme concerning a plot of land home to a notable owl population, a group of plucky kids cross paths with a host of quirky local figures, each with a suitably goofy name. The best among them, clearly, being evil pancake magnate Chuck Muckle.
But the king of the Florida noir is Lawrence Kasdan, whose erotic thriller Body Heat got America sweating in 1981. (That film’s spiritual successor in randiness, the Miami-set Wild Things, followed Kasdan down the palm-treelined garden path to hell.) Everything endemic to this particular strain of cinema, Kasdan foregrounded and then amplified. It is not enough to show some shots of the sizzling Palm Beach sun; the writer-director had to set his film during an unforgiving hot spell mirroring the smoldering passions of the secret lovers at its center. Sketchiness doesn’t get much sketchier than prime-years Mickey Rourke as an explosives expert, a Florida Man if ever there was one. And once again, the ultimate goal remains maxin’ and relaxin’, the culprit plotting murder and deception over a course of years for the privilege of endless days with the sand and surf.
The Keys provided a home to McConaughey earlier this year, as fisherman Baker Dill in the perfectly awful January movie Serenity. The film follows a straightforward noir template (until it really, really doesn’t), but it’s unorthodox from the outset in that we join Baker Dill having already achieved the Floridian nirvana this subgenre consistently chases. He catches some marlins, beds a grateful townswoman when he needs a bit of extra cash and drinks beers at a kitschy bar. The film works in reverse, disrupting leisure with danger instead of seeking the former to escape the latter, but these elements cannot exist without one another. In Florida, there’s always at least a little trouble in paradise.