This article is the final assignment of Mr. Yang Peng in the 2021 spring semester on the history of architectural development in the twentieth century. The request is to analyze the buildings that play a decisive role in a certain movie.
The blue sky, the light purple motel, the orange-red sunset, the gorgeous fireworks blooming in the black wilderness of Florida, and the rainbow that unexpectedly appeared during the shooting process, everything looked so heartwarming. But beneath this bright color is a desperate poverty trap. That's the story Florida Paradise tells us. Film director Sean Baker, as always, focuses on the bottom of society, follows the perspective of a little girl Moonee, and narrates the warm and suffocating life in a motel.
As the temporary residence of American road life, the motel is naturally an excellent symbol of American automobile culture and liberal spirit. It can be free, like the carnival-like free exile in Kerouac's "On the Road"; it can be sweet, like the boxer's family time in Quentin's "Pulp Fiction"; it can be dangerous, like the The bathroom killing in Chikirk's Psycho. In this film, the motel constitutes a clever irony of its own cultural commitments. Take this motel called Magic Castle, located next to Disneyland in Orlando, as an example, and we can see how such an economical, mass-living space buried the mother and daughter Halley and Moonee, creating an American eternal life. The Poverty Trap and the Lies of the Free Highway Culture.
composition of the building
Just like its name, Magic Castle looks quite Disney-like at first glance. The purple color is like a fairy tale dream. The exterior wall of the traffic core is decorated with bricks and snow elements, which is a deliberate imitation of a fairy tale town. Is it fantasy or reality? Is this cartoon-like architectural appearance a mandatory requirement of the scenic spot for unified vision, or is it a true portrayal of community culture? This question haunts us from beginning to end. Across the street is a high-end resort hotel. But that world seemed so far away, except for the constant noise of private helicopters in the background, the two buildings next to each other had nothing to do with each other. The buildings that belong to this side of the road are nothing more than cheap restaurants, Wal-Mart and surrounding stores that are also decorated with absurdity.
Like every motel on the screen, entering the hotel interior, we can see the parking space clings to the open corridor, making it only one step to get off and enter. In the center of the outdoor space enclosed by the L-shaped building is a swimming pool, where a woman often sunbathes naked. Pedestrian stairs and elevator shafts on the corners are the only longitudinal traffic, connecting the three floors with long and narrow corridors. Corridors make up the public space here, where almost all residents can see and hear each other. To the outside are rooms, each with a similar layout.
The guest room only retains the most core functions. The entrance is followed by the bedroom, the dressing table and the bathroom. The TV is located on the wall opposite the bed and becomes the visual focal point of the room. The tension between the single function and the needs of the long-term occupants makes the life of the mother and daughter Halley and Moonee appear flat and deformed in such a place.
Narrative of Architecture
1 Fast food style personal space
As Le Corbusier said, every kind of building can correspondingly shape the spiritual outlook of its occupants. In the film, although the story does not take place in a motel, we can still dig out the character's logic from this fast-food living feature.
Start by focusing on the interior of the room. In this small room, the sleeping space becomes the absolute main body, and the living and social spaces are compressed into and around the bed. The dressing table protrudes from the bedroom wall, and all functional areas of the guest room, except the bathroom, are separated from each other by no more than two meters. Visually, the walls are painted with simple and rough white paint, which cancels the sense of space division, and the daily closed curtains make the indoor natural lighting almost zero. Such an environment is bound to constitute a monotonous and flat life. In the film, we can easily notice a similar squeeze between the characters: the daughter Moonee is too precocious, the mother Halley is too naive, and the vertical parent-child relationship itself seems to be out of tune with this living environment. Mother and daughter watch the same show, scold the same f word, and share all behaviors and expressions. When this squeeze of living space is developed to the extreme by the plot, that is, when Halley decides to become a prostitute because he has no money, the only way she can protect Moonee is to close the bathroom door and tell her not to come in. The seemingly efficient and economical fast-food residence perfectly exemplifies the Foucault-style discipline. This magical castle serves the efficient operation of capitalism competently, but it tears apart every person who wants to live a full life in it. an individual and a family.
Looking out from the inside of the guest room, on a physical level, the room is connected to the outside world through doors and windows. There is no window on the bathroom side of the guest room, so there is only a small window facing the corridor and crowded with the door in the whole room. This window supports the tension of many internal and external exchanges in the film: at the beginning of the whole film, Moonee knocks on the door in response, and turns into the house through the window. The viewer is also aware of the awkward position of the window facing the corridor—open to reveal privacy, and closed to prevent those who forcibly enter. In order to preserve the poor private space, the window in the film is always closed, and the few "uses" are that Halley observes the people who come to "trouble her" from outside the door through the cracks in the curtains. The functionally fragile spatial fluidity is an excellent metaphor for the claustrophobic, dark and insecure psychological space of the occupants, as well as the social reality of being powerless against foreign aggression.
At the level of substantive communication, it can be considered that TV and iPad are the "furniture" that realizes the circulation of internal and external space. The TV is placed in the middle of the guest bedroom wall, occupying the visual and lifestyle focal point of the room. From adult talk shows to cartoons, Moonee and Halley's perception of the world is shaped by TV culture. Their comical and brutal behavior seems to be out of line with the beautiful social landscape, but it is the ultimate imitation of the TV culture industry. And the iPad is one of the few mediums that allows Moonee and her friends to play "harmless". Cyberspace replaces real space, but cyberspace is also an information cocoon room after another, shaping the residents into different and monotonous atoms.
2 Disjointed Community Experiences
Open corridors, public laundry rooms, smoking afternoons in twos and threes. This motel seems to have a harmonious community? But everyone can intuitively feel that such a "slum landscape" hides unhappiness and despair. In this film, we can cut through a comical plot and glimpse the class division and cultural fantasy displayed by the motel.
"There are no children here." "No, the children are there."
A middle-aged woman named Gloria insists on sunbathing naked by the pool, and Bobby, the caretaker, always forbids her from doing so, because it's not good for them to be seen by children (and children are always happy to peek). Here we can ask two questions: Why is there a swimming pool here? And why does Gloria want to sunbathe nude?
Knowing the history of the motel, the American motel started out as a form of inn that offered cheap lodging for road travelers. With more and more recognition, motels began to broaden their customer base and improve their positioning. Advanced additional facilities such as swimming pools and gyms have also begun to appear. From the location of the hotel in the film (next to Disney), to the unified decoration style with Disney, to the "luxury" swimming pool, the original positioning of this hotel must not be low. Ironically, the long-term residents here are the poorest. Behind these two conflicting facts, it is not difficult to see the bankruptcy of a utopia in urban planning. As Halley told community workers, that "garden" doesn't hire people like her. After all, Disney's radiation effect can only increase the happiness of the vested interests and provide a dazzling landscape. In such a landscape, class contradictions have not been resolved, but have been ignored. The poor can only survive in this bright and beautiful area. gap.
And on top of that, it's even more ironic to live in such an environment and insist on sunbathing naked by an already deserted swimming pool, which is ridiculous and pathetic. It is not sunlight that nourishes Gloria's skin, but another kind of dream of life, a symbol of petty bourgeoisie life. It can be clearly seen that the people who live in Magic Castle have never been at ease here, but yearn every moment for the drunken fans on the other side of the road, breathing the symbols and desires of consumerism. The power of this "spectacle of positivity" is everywhere, flowing from Disney, from TV, and, sadly, from inside hotels. The courtyard enclosed by the L-shaped building is the best metaphor for the Bentham Panopticon. From ignorant children to bankrupt adults, everyone in the corridor is looking at the center of the courtyard - the swimming pool, and those who come by chance of wealthy travelers. This kind of gaze is bidirectional. It is people's viewing of the consumerist landscape, and it is also the landscape's monitoring and illumination of people. All here are under the curse of "another life", they are free to exile themselves yet enslaved by society. They still live in fairy tales made up of things that society once promised, but they can't understand the reality in front of them. Is there a community culture here? It seems to be possible to say no, everyone has long been turned against by the other side of the street, they say one kind of dirty language, they smoke one kind of cigarette, and they eat one kind of pizza, but they remain hostile and unfamiliar.
Architecture, Culture and Society
In this film, unlike the usual romantic road spectacles, the motel is presented as a desperate poverty trap. Compared with motels in films such as Pulp Fiction and Psycho, although the structure and function are almost the same, they exude a completely different cultural atmosphere, subtly reflecting the differences in the expression of the same thing in different narrative systems. .
The Magic Castle in "Florida Paradise" is a true portrayal of America's cheap motels that once disappeared into the romantic narratives of road literature. Analyzing the role of architecture in the film, we do not intend to embrace environmental determinism or use architecture to explain people's spiritual outlook, but to see the shared social reality behind architecture and people. From the perspective of Marx, this truth is that capitalism strengthens itself through all production activities in society, and then executes the abnormalization of marginalized groups. The motel has no original evil in this story. As a symbol of America's highly developed liberal economy, its architectural form simply conveys the eternal pursuit of social "orthodox" culture and productivity. In such an environment, those who go against the logic of capitalism become anti-ethical, and those who are poor become insane. The motel dwellers are both the result of, and marked by, the system of social production.
At the end of the film, Moonee is about to be sent to an adoptive family. She escaped from the containment of the adoption staff, and held her friend's hand for the last time and ran into the crowd of Disneyland, as if she was about to enter that fairy tale world. . And we know very well that this is impossible.
View more about The Florida Project reviews
