When discussing the sociopolitical problems of the United States, health care and housing are the primary issues in American society. The elevated prices of houses are due to the real estate industry, which raises the costs of residences to gain higher profit margins, benefiting from a basic human necessity: a roof over one’s head. Consequently, it has a parallel market for those who cannot afford mortgages. They are the flophouses, hotel rooms rented at a lower price for those who do not earn enough to finance a home. In Monica Strømdahl’s Flophouse America, she follows a twelve-year-old boy named Mikal, born and raised in one of these flophouse hotels. Hence, we observe his daily life, growing up in a rotten place, where he watches his addicted dad being drunk day after day, and his negligent mother.
In this sense, the film is a sad witness to the tragic reality of American society. There is a fascinating subtext to the documentary if you have a context for the post-2008 housing crisis. Back then, the lack of rigid income proof to receive funding from a banking institution created a bubble in the early 2000s, leading to a global economic crisis by the end of the decade. Surely, when the private market crashed, the federal administration rescued the banking system through a whole line of credit to prevent it from a more profound financial destabilization. Yet taxpayer money does not benefit the payer as much as corporations, particularly in the current context of a pro-oligarchy government such as this one. Hence, there is an entire parallel market to fulfill, where the companies and the government fail to cover the public necessity. In the documentary’s context, the accommodation crisis led to a proliferation of flophouses, people living in their cars, and recreational vehicles (RVs), spreading a 21st-century style of nomadic life in the context of late-stage capitalism.
Monica Strømdahl studies the miseries of American citizens through the eyes of an adolescent. Throughout Mikal’s wanderings through the condensed hallways of the hotel building, we observe the tragedy of addiction and how it affects subsequent generations. He is the child of vice, a man who gets openly wasted in front of his son, while his wife attempts to help him, talking to him, when he is not conscious. It is a lamentable documentation, the out-of-body experience from drinking, extracting the little humanity left from the individual’s body. In a sense, the flophouses resemble the American cheap hotels and motels in the 1970s, throughout the establishment of a new culture, where the depressed individuals would experiment with new drugs, such as cocaine, LSD, and heroin, to ease the difficulties of a new order. Flash forward to the 2010s, and it is not that different. In this sense, the child grows in a problematic environment, attempting to occupy his time with chores from the flophouse’s administration, such as handling keys, opening doors, and gathering loose objects. However, it is a part-time occupation to a full-time suffering, the constant pain of watching a parent subject themselves to self-destruction, weighing themselves with a vice, attempting to wipe out the world’s pains.
Furthermore, Strømdahl opts for a cinema verité style, using the bleakness of the flophouse’s aesthetic to convey the lifeless lifestyle of its inhabitants. Yet, in a small hotel room, a child is raised. Despite its energy and desire for life, it lacks the conditions necessary to raise Mikal. Consequently, there is a specific perspective on growing up in a confined space, and on occupying himself with the routines of others, who are not that different from his parents. If so, Flophouse America is a portrait of a particular aspect of the American economy, an unfortunate element of the highly capitalistic philosophy of the American/British liberalism, which is the basis of the economic policies of those governments. Hence, Mikal is an example of the failure of a system that thinks about profit first and consequently, for the individuals. He is the direct result of the century-long liberal policies, which granted wealth to a few and misery to most.
Ultimately, Flophouse America is a cinema verité approach to American misery. Monica Strømdahl observes the growth of a child who has few perspectives on his life, particularly because of his family’s problem, his father’s addiction to alcohol. It is a miserable portrait of a potential child lost in the disgrace of the American complicated economics and policies, which stems from centuries of an economic philosophy.
Flophouse America will be available to stream on January 30, 2026. It recently played at the DOC NYC Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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