'Tipped over, but still growing': Cruel Optimism and Queer Temporalities in The Florida Project

Abstract

In this article, I sketch some of the ways in which the affective-aesthetic work in The Florida Project (2017), an American postrecessionary film set on the impoverished fringes of Orlando’s Disney World, problematizes our understanding of the current climate of economic precarity. I contend that in registering the specific affective atmospheres of survival, the film stages a childhood dream of adventure and mobility, jarringly at odds with the harsh economic realities lived by its protagonists, thus illustrating what Lauren Berlant terms cruel optimism. Yet, in the process, it generates affective temporalities that offer potential openings within and, notably, beyond the impasse, and which, I argue, are akin to Jack Halberstam’s conceptualization of queer time. Even though at first glance The Florida Project does not focalize on queer subjectivities, it does raise questions about time, (non-)productivity and what counts as a ‘good’, happy or successful life, questions which have always been central to queer theory. By elaborating the conceptual connections between film aesthetics, queer temporalities and Berlant’s critique of cruel optimism, this article suggests new ways of thinking about the cruelty of normative temporality in the capitalist scene, as tracked by the contemporary cinema of precarity.