The generation of young people currently coming of age is the most frustrating and terrifying there’s ever been when it comes to lack of self-discipline and an inability to prioritize the things that are worthwhile over fleeting matters of pleasure-seeking. Or maybe they’re not. Maybe young people are just as confused and destructive as they’ve always been, and every new generation of old fogies thinks that what they’re seeing is worse than what everyone who came before them had to deal with. These are the sort of questions you’ll find yourself mulling over after coming out of Harmony Korine’s (Gummo, Trash Humpers) latest experiment in testing our cinematic endurance by presenting us with the worst in humanity and forcing us to stare directly in its eye, Spring Breakers.
Spring Breakers is unique in that it’s a challenging-to-watch film that belongs in urban art houses, but because of the teen idols (Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, and Ashley Benson, joined by Korine’s wife Rachel) who he has cast as his leads, Korine has brought it to the suburban multiplexes, where it’s bound to corrupt just as many young minds as it turns off. The story follows four young girls who attend a boring university in a boring town as they attempt to get away from their daily drudgery and go on spring break. They believe that their lives are ugly, soulless, and full of repetition, and that the answer to all of their problems lies in that faraway paradise of meth labs, 2 for $10 tourist t-shirts, and white people with corn rows—Florida. In Florida, anything is possible. Along with the infinite eventually comes trouble though, and once the girls find themselves incarcerated for their careless behavior, salvation comes calling in the form of an aspiring rapper and drug dealer named Alien (James Franco) who has a pocket full of bail money. The girls were looking to cut loose, they even robbed a restaurant to fund their vacation, but now that they find themselves wrapped up in the life of a guy like Alien, are they really prepared to go down the rabbit hole of sleaze that he’s beckoning them toward? Is the goal of staying on spring break forever one that will lead to their freedom and salvation, or is it a Godless pursuit that will lead them to ruin?
The first thing that those considering to watch Spring Breakers need to know is that it’s not nearly as exciting a story as my plot synopsis or the film’s advertising makes it sound. As a matter of fact, not much of a story gets told here at all. Korine is eschewing traditional, linear storytelling to such a degree that the majority of his film is composed of dreamy montage sequences, where the same images and dialogue get repeated to the point where they lose all meaning. The narrative gets stuck, stutters, occasionally gives you a glimpse of something that hasn’t happened yet, and then loops back on itself, to the point where many will question their sanity while watching. Eventually a story gets told, but it happens so slowly, so gradually, that you barely perceive its momentum. New information gets hidden in the glut of things that are being repeated, and eventually it gets repeated so many times itself that you forget it was ever new. When all is said and done, a story that could have been told in the 22 minutes of a sitcom episode gets stretched out to an hour and a half, and some people are going to find that infuriating.
But for those that don’t demand a typical experience from their trips to the movie theater, Spring Breakers has quite a bit to offer. Its filmmaking is so much more polished than anything we’ve seen from Korine before. Many will likely opine that this film is a clear case of him using stunt casting in an attempt at selling a product to the mainstream audiences who have eluded him to this point, but that’s not what’s going on here at all. This movie is far too expressionist to appeal to casual filmgoers. Instead, Korine seems to be making a play at capturing the art film audience, who have generally found his previous work to be too unpolished and confrontational to fully embrace. Of all the criticisms one can hurl at Spring Breakers, being unpolished isn’t one of them. It’s a gleaming gem of design, photography, music, and editing all coming together to create a unique and memorable cinematic experience. It’s a music video (featuring evocative tunes by Drive vet Cliff Martinez and Dubstep icon Skrillex) stretched out to feature length, and it can be hypnotic to sit back and soak up.
The crafting doesn’t just exist to be pretty to look at either. When you start to pick it apart, it becomes the gateway through which you can explore the film’s thematics as well. In addition to the dreamlike, dayglow scenes where the girls are seduced by violence and power, Korine also periodically inserts footage of college kids partying on the beach—the sort of footage that you would expect to get from a movie about spring break. There are closeups of asses and tits jiggling, beer being guzzled, and white person dance moves being danced, all set to the obnoxious and booming sort of party music that Skrillex is best known for, and every time it shows up it’s completely jarring. The effect is that the scenes of violence and danger become comforting and alluring, wrapping the audience in a warm blanket of dazzling sights and pretty sounds, and the party scenes that should be beckoning the audience toward escapism become painful and jarring, making them question why they wanted to watch a movie about spring break in the first place.
Korine sometimes overlays the party scenes with monologuing from Gomez about what a transcendent, pure, and freeing experience being on spring break is as well, and the juxtaposition between her high-minded, pretentious words and the trashy visuals of young people exposing themselves for the base pleasures of strangers and drinking until they become unconscious works to highlight how empty the party culture we’ve made the social norm for people in their early 20s is. The blank stares and follow-the-leader antics typical of the kids in the party footage reveal a group of young people who aren’t fully engaged in or actually experiencing anything. They’ve tranquilized themselves into numbness and they’re parroting scripts that were written long before they came of college age. You get the sense that these kids are empty vessels looking to fill themselves with any bit of escapism they can find, and that the only difference between the escapism of serial substance abuse and the escapism of engaging in violent street crime becomes how alluringly we present one over the other, and how much we’ve decided to condemn one and glorify the other. With just the flip of a switch we could turn our young people from the charming drunkards we view them as into agents of murder.
And therein lies the universality of this story that comes as something of an unexpected surprise. One would expect Spring Breakers to be a condemnation of our currently overstimulated culture, a culture where the ubiquity of glowing screens has increasingly had the effect of making it more difficult for those engaged in it to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, but it also has some insight into how escapism and disassociation has been a problem that has threatened to destroy man for far longer than since the invention of smart phones. Cinema has been exploring the way pop culture glorifies violence and what the effects of us becoming obsessed with this pop culture are since Godard made Breathless, but the problem goes back even further than the invention of a globally shared cultural vocabulary. The lengths man goes to in order to deny the mundanity of his existence and to attempt to take on the immortal qualities of something larger than himself are endless. In a culture where reality television and rap videos dominate the airwaves, we get a generation of young people striving to be drunken, vapid fame whores, but in a culture where a manipulative figure like Adolph Hitler is the one who is dominating the airwaves, suddenly we can get an entire culture that becomes implicated in genocide—and the difference between the two realities are razor thin.
Spring Breakers, then, becomes a wakeup call to any young people willing to listen. One of the strange quirks of today’s youth culture is that even children of privilege have been inundated with a desire to appear “hard” or “legit,” yet this desire still gets paired with an unwillingness to experience any of the hardships or struggle that would legitimately make someone this way, so the results are things like the “white chicks and gang signs” Internet meme. Spring Breakers shows us what it would look like if children of privilege were suddenly granted their wish of being tough and intimidating, and the results look completely ridiculous. If a 19-year-old suburban kid with a cocked hat and sagging pants can watch the overblown antics that a ridiculously dressed James Franco and an army of Disney actresses involve themselves in here and not see his own clownishness reflected back at him, then he has no self-awareness at all. And, seeing as his protagonists are just as fooled by their own narcissistic bullshit after everything they experience in Spring Breakers as they were at the beginning of his film, Korine appears to be condemning his viewers as being exactly that lacking in self-awareness. It would appear that we’re a people who are doomed to be doomed.
Given the headiness of the material and the quality of Korine’s crafting, Spring Breakers is the type of film that’s going to require a higher quality of acting than we would usually expect from veterans of Disney programming, so how did the girls do? That’s actually a complicated question, because while they all prove more than capable of pulling off what is asked of them, they’re also not playing the typical sort of characters we’re used to evaluating. The characters in this film are less distinct individuals, and more a unit. They blend together into a many armed, many legged collective of conformity, to the point where they’re often pushed as close together in the frame as possible, engaged in a complicated orgy of embraces. Due to Korine’s montage presentation, the words they speak even start to lay on top of each other, creating a squirming, indistinguishable mass of group think. Because of this, they’re essentially playing the same character, and it becomes difficult to judge each individual actress’ performance.
Gomez does stand out a bit though, because one of the main conflicts of the film comes when her character can’t quite shake her independent thought and starts to view the group’s experiences in the context of reality, which threatens the totality of their descent into escapism. This conflict provides her with a bit of acting to do, and she proves to be more than capable—through body language as well as through more explicit emoting—of conveying that she’s not completely on board with everything that’s going on around her. Another of the big questions regarding the acting has to be whether Rachel Korine was cast alongside these more famous actresses due to nepotism or if she’s actually able to hold up her end of the film, and fortunately she doesn’t look out of place at all. As a matter of fact, there are scenes where you have to squint to tell the difference between her, Benson, and Hudgens.
You can’t really address the acting in this film without talking about James Franco. Franco is playing a big, showy character who’s clearly designed to grab your attention and get you talking. While the marketing mostly focused on the young girls in their swimsuits, Spring Breakers is actually Alien’s film, and if you didn’t believe Franco in the role, then the whole ship would have been sunk. In my recent review of Oz the Great and Powerful I made the assertion that Franco was an actor who either disappeared completely into his roles if he was interested in the material, or who came off as a disengaged, line-reading robot if he was not. Fortunately, his work as Alien sees him at the peak of engagement. Far from being an actor disinterestedly plowing through his lines, you get the sense that most of what he does here wasn’t all that tightly scripted at all. It feels more like Korine just pushed Franco to immerse himself in the character and then allowed him to go off on in-the-moment, stream-of-conscious tangents, and the results are a character who isn’t likely to be forgotten any time soon. Alien looks like a parody, a caricature, a joke from a comedy sketch, but due to his conviction, Franco makes us believe in him. He’s like Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow if all of the charm and fun were sucked out of him and replaced with insecurities and danger, and he’s so fascinating to watch that you’re likely going to grow tired of hearing entranced fans quote him sooner rather than later. Austin Powers and Borat, meet Alien, he’s one of you now.
Spring Breakers isn’t a perfect movie and it’s not an easy movie to watch. Due to Korine’s offbeat storytelling techniques it can be intermittently boring or frustrating. The repetition grates at first and urges you to rebel. At times you want to grab the movie by its metaphorical neck and force it to move its narrative forward at a faster clip. But a funny thing happens after you settle in. Suddenly you find yourself falling into the rhythm and accepting the film for what it is. And after you leave the theater, you find your mind lingering back on moments that felt boring at first, but that are now sense memories you want to relive again as soon as possible. It’s clear that Spring Breakers is the sort of movie that’s going to work better on a second watch. More than that though, after all of the cries of “worst movie ever” coming from young people who mistakenly went into it looking for easy escapism die down, it could very possibly become the sort of cult art that manages to stick around and become a part of our cinematic lexicon.
