‘Red, White and Wasted’ Is a Horror Movie of Trump Country

To state the obvious, the subculture of mudding enthusiasts isn’t a common haunt for readers of this site, nor writers like myself. To the subjects of Red, White and Wasted, a documentary on a family of mudding enthusiasts and their peers in Florida, their shrinking subculture is the reason for concern: swamplands formerly used for mud trucks and parties are being taken over by concrete and industrialization as big business and liberal values push their way of life towards extinction. What first interested me in Red, White and Wasted was curiosity about its framing. I wanted to know if Confederate flag-waving, southern whites would be sanitized as mere “mudding enthusiasts” fighting for a morally neutralized and misunderstood “way of life,” or if the film would show its subjects in their own words on matters beyond monster trucks and MAGA catchphrases. I was thankful, at first, when I realized it was the latter: that Red, White and Wasted offers an unblinking look at right-wing, Trump-supporting, white supremacists. The short-lived gratitude was chased by horror at every comment, spoken without awareness or irony, as a monument to the hopelessness of our national experiment’s survival.

What goes down at the Mudhole

The documentary is shown through the lens–both metaphorical and literal–of Matthew “Video Pat” Burns and his daughters. Nicknamed “Video Pat” for having always having a camcorder in his hand, he was something of a local celebrity in the outskirts of Orlando f…