The 2019 documentary Red, White & Wasted focuses on modern changes to the city of Orlando, Florida using the lens of the grassroots mud-riding scene there. Orlando is well-known to most Americans as the home of Disney World, but for some locals that sprawling entertainment complex has meant an end – or at least a major decline– to the way of life that they value. The narrative in the film centers on a man named Matthew Burns who had been part of the mudding scene there for decades and who had become well-known as the guy who made video recordings of outings (long before everyone had a smart phone). In the film, we follow him as he struggles to make sense of his life, while he is raising two daughters as a self-employed single dad in a world where social norms are changing.

The subculture of mud-riding, with its big trucks and jeeps, has long been associated with people we call rednecks. This mythic moniker was, for a long time, an epithet meant to belittle white people from lower socio-economic groups and to bemoan their rough-edged presence in the wider society. The people we see in this documentary are mostly white, are working or struggling to get by, and declare openly that their affinity for mud-riding is at odds with what city leaders, economic developers, and housing industries want Orlando to be. What I will add to this, which the filmmakers don’t address, is the issue of stakeholders. The people we meet want access to the wild, untended land that is necessary for their pastime, and given their position in society, they have no stake in the developments, and thus no right to access the lands anymore. The men and women who love mud riding aren’t the ones getting wealthy off of the changes. In short, they’re losing what they love and gaining nothing in return. Certainly, their narratives about “progress” differ from the powerful people who are edging them out.

Zooming in to Matthew Burns specifically, we have a man who makes his living on scrap metal, while he raises his two teenage daughters after his wife left him. Burns is a dumpster diver and a racist, but he is also a man who is doing his best to carve out a place in a society that offers him very little. He loves his children, but we also see the difficulties of his way of parenting. Living on the relative edges of society, all of them struggle to have what they need and have a little fun, too.

A secondary focus of the documentary is newer thing called the Redneck Yacht Club. Where Burns’ heyday in the ’80s was a family affair with some good ol’ boys mudding in their everyday trucks, this incarnation of the subculture is extreme. People come with RVs like they would for the in-field of a NASCAR race and parade around in some of the biggest, most jacked-up trucks possible. And once the sun goes down, it is not kid-friendly, with booze and sex on full display. Near the end of the film, we watch Matthew Burns attend one of these events, and he seems lost. No one has ever heard of him, no one knows what he’s talking about, and really, no one seems to care. These folks aren’t here for nostalgia. They’re here to get drunk and laid . . . oh yeah, and to run through the mud a little.

This story is not new: people on the South’s lower income levels being pushed out by people with money. While modern narratives of progress involve new construction and large price tags, the people who once had access to the lands under development get shut out. They neither had nor have any legal rights to it, so they have no recourse. And this isn’t new. Jack Temple Kirby discusses this phenomenon, which goes all the way back to the South’s frontier days,  in The Countercultural South. Matthew Burns and his friends are just a more recent incarnation. What a film like Red, White & Wasted offers us is another opportunity to re-consider our beliefs about how people are treated in this twenty-first century economy where the Sunbelt South’s economic development agenda is now on steroids.