From a certain angle, Valerie Blankenbyl and her team show in The Bubble an admittedly artificial city, built a few dozen kilometers from Orlando in Florida on land obtained through real-estate predation, populated by over 150,000 retirees who look particularly happy. They probably are, and that's the first thing that strikes you about The Villages: amidst 50 golf courses and 70 swimming pools, evolving in isolation amidst a remarkably homogeneous social fabric, you'd think you were in an aging variant of The Truman Show, where every resident is a 75-year-old Truman Burbank in the making, sincerely happy and living in the best of all possible worlds according to his or her own criteria.
On the other hand, there's a downside to this medal. Without ever questioning the happiness of the people interviewed, and with Blankenbyl's respect always evident, The Bubble presents a particularly creepy, almost science-fiction nightmare, a sort of cross between Black Mirror and The Village of the Damned, which would have produced a region of extreme homogeneity in terms of social characteristics over some 50 square kilometers. It's a land of old Republicans who drive around in golf carts to buy big guns or luxurious jewelry whenever they feel like it, a territory of die-hard Trumpists who bathe in a sonic atmosphere fueled by a Fox News radio cousin broadcasting 24 hours a day in various public squares, while continually seeking to stave off death with scalpels. But then again, the camera never becomes over-significant, never hostile: it all emerges in a diffuse, soothing way, as if on the bangs of a scenario à la Carpenter's Invasion Los Angeles (They Live).
That's the beauty and relevance of a documentary of this kind, capable on the one hand of spontaneously and easily showing the excesses of this frozen, inward-looking world, in which grandparents are happy to be away from their children so they don't have to worry about looking after the grandchildren every four mornings, and, on the other, a nuanced portrayal of the residents outside, who are organizing themselves to try and combat the expansion of the sprawling city, spreading out like the tentacles of an extraterrestrial mass. Blankenbyl reconciles the different points of view with great care, and the people who were willing to testify (against the advice of the management, who urged them not to do so) are treated with the utmost respect, which doesn't prevent a powerfully surreal atmosphere from emerging. The elderly feel protected from the rest of the world, content to see no glimmer of youth to remind them of their condition, delighted to have worked hard enough to afford the luxury of this mega-residence with no cemetery and ambulances entering with the siren off. All it takes to conceal the blight and maintain an illusion. Sinister and fascinating.
