Spinning Your Wheels

To be completely honest, when a producer acquaintance of mine, Noah Lang, who I met at the St. Lawrence International Film Festival several years ago, contacted me and was wondering if I would watch a documentary he was producing on ‘mudding’, I was wholly unaware of the term.

Defined in the Urban Dictionary, “To go out in the mud in the back of a truck or jeep or other 4×4 vehicle and spin in the mud until all occupants are covered in mud”, directors Andrei Bowden-Schwartz and Sam B. Jones focus this topic on a family living in Orlando, Florida.

Titled Red, White & Wasted (it recently played at the Tribeca Film Festival), a good friend of mine always says, “film is a microcosm of society”, and perhaps there is no more precise example of that than this. Led by patriarch Matthew “Video Pat” Burns, a divorced man living day by day as a scrapper, his family are self proclaimed rednecks. Residing with daughters Krista and Jessi, they live for mudding. Practically raising his daughters in the swampy forests of Orlando, he had a pretty good thing going in the nineties, famous for being one of the figureheads of this pastime, he was crowned with his moniker from the fact that he filmed these eventful weekends. . . selling them for decent money along the way.

Flash forward to present day and things have changed. The powerhouse that is Disney has continued to grow, woodland that was once plentiful has been cut to further develop the growing city, and the final natural spot for mudding (Swamp Ghost), which was devastated by fire (and some negative stories that have circulated in the press), is now off limits – signs now say ‘no trespassing’, while police constantly patrol the area for lawbreakers.

Echoing the changing landscape of America, this natural, ‘very’ back-roads form of mudding is a dying recreation. In a way, a lamentation on how very quickly things are changing, Video Pat struggles to find his way in life when his very essence is challenged. . . his soul alive when he finds himself mudding – it is his passion, his life force, the tether that unites his family and friends (a community with nowhere to go).

Like so many things, mudding has now become a corporatised, capitalist venture (termed the Redneck Yacht Club). . . no longer about family, friends, nature, and a frivolous good time, you must now venture out of the city to fabricated locations where people (tens of thousands) are more interested in showing off their fancy vehicles and partying like they are at Mardi Gras in New Orleans. . . when Video Pat does make the trek (the first time he has left Orlando in as long as he can remember), he is like a fish out of water, though the general idea of mudding is the same, he is like a senior citizen trying to join a professional sports team – he just does not fit.

Yet, there is also a darkness associated with mudding. Video Pat is more than consumed with his passion – it is more than just a hobby to him. It is insinuated that his videotaping of some of the wilder parties that would crop up late at night may have caused his wife to leave, while the combination of hard worker and obsessive mudder has left his daughters without an involved father – both girls deal with relationship issues (Krista soon finding herself pregnant), and add drug addiction and health problems to Jessi’s list of concerns.

Intriguingly, it is impossible not to mention the fact that we are within a segment of the population that is more conservative (or Republican) leaning. Mudding’s evolution is just one example of how things are changing so very quickly, this portion of the population feeling left behind in our fast moving world – with more rules, regulations, and cost than ever before. Though they are trying to adjust, it just isn’t easy. . . in this twenty-first century, you could view the Burns family as racist (as they are), but even they seem to have attempted to make small strides to change. In this present landscape, they may not be the most sympathetic family, yet there is a poignancy to their disappearing ways, where, at each turn, there is a new barricade to their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

Touching on love and racism, friendship and bigotry, life and addiction, happiness and depression, Red, White & Wasted is a walking dichotomy of a film, reminding us to find a balance in our lives – as Aristotle once said, find the ‘golden mean’ (the middle ground between two excesses). To viewers, the Burns family will likely also be a dichotomy – somehow they elicit sympathy (how can you not be empathetic for people as their way of life disappears?) while also confounding viewers with their uncouth world views.

Compliments to the film making team, for they drop us into this story and then pull us out again (we meet the Burns family and leave them with no finite ending), letting each watcher decipher what they have seen, not skewing their story with a specific bias or lean. Likewise, their visuals depict the allure of the lights of tourist-trap Orlando or the kaleidoscopic world of the Redneck Yacht Club juxtaposed against the poverty and lifestyle of an impoverished white family in a bustling city. It speaks to the complexity of our world and how quickly it is changing. Also worth noting, the Blair Brothers, best known for their scores found in Jeremy Saulnier’s films (think Blue Ruin; Green Room), write a stellar composition for this documentary. Lastly, I want to give kudos to another old acquaintance of mine, Rod Blackhurst (director of Here Alone), who is the executive producer on this project. So, put the pedal to the metal and track down this fascinating new documentary, it is well worth getting a little dirty.