THE AMERICAN DREAM Y’ALL.
It’s easy to think of the movie-going experience as passive – you sit down, the lights dim, and for the next hundred minutes or so someone has a direct synaptic connection to you. Whatever happens, you’re the passive receiver, and all you need to do is decide whether you like the content being piped into your brain.
A lot of films operate like this. They have ideologies, firm visual sensibilities, a grand, directorial vision, and all you need to do is sit back and take it. (This, by the way, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.) Spring Breakers doesn’t work like this. It’s the first film I’ve seen where the lights came up and I felt almost euphoric – not from the preceding ninety minutes, but from the collective sigh of relief coming from every other seat.
Spring Breakers forces you to participate in it. Harmony Korine presents you with a canvas so rote that at times you’re amazed that the borderline-pornographic sequences on display are leaving you so cold. There are dozens of tits—bouncing and jiggling and covered in liquor and cocaine—but remarkably little titillation. The cinema I sat in was filled with typically brazen adolescent men, but the overwhelming atmosphere was one of discomfort. There was the feeling that all of this was a little too obvious, so by the books that it leaves space for the rest of your mind to conjure up theories about what’s really going on.
And it’s at this point where people start to hate it.
Drab and lifeless, lacking substance, even rape apologia at its worst – a lot of people have weighed in against this film, and it’s definitely possible to read it that way. The film splashes us with lurid colour, paints caricatures rather than characters, and delights in constant repetition. There are no obvious clues; despite all the neon, none of the signs read Satire This Way. There are genuinely funny moments (pink ski masks, a piano, a gangster rapper crooning Britney Spears songs), but even those moments leave you wondering what the point of it all is.
Films like this excite me, because I’m indecisive, and when I’m asked to reach out and complete the contract between the artist and the viewer, I keep changing my mind. At the moment, I think that Spring Breakers is an excellent piece of satire that depicts youthful nihilism and then takes it to horribly logical extremes; tomorrow, I might shrug it off as a stupid, needlessly exploitative and cynical vision of young people.
I’m British, which I think only adds to the confusion in this case. I actually had cause to visit New College of Florida—the primary campus location at the start of the film—back in 2009 (if you look closely, there’s a scene where their 50th Anniversary banners are flying proudly; one wonders if they regret the accidental promotion now). It’s quiet, bookish – there are only a few hundred students (I attended a university with around 15,000), and not the backdrop I’d expect for the kind of decadence on display in Spring Breakers. I met a few people during my visit, and, while they were all perfectly lovely, none of them really seemed the type to disrobe in a heartbeat, run along the boardwalk, and scream “spring break forever, bitches”.
This isn’t to say that the stereotype doesn’t exist – New College, after all, was just a filming location, and it’s reasonable to assume that a tiny, aggressively rigorous liberal arts college probably isn’t the natural habitat for nihilistic softcore misogyny. But it might be fair to say that, for Spring Breakers to really work and make you question its motives, the culture that it apes needs to be worth this level of scrutiny. Essentially, for Harmony Korine to have a point worth making about decadent twenty-somethings—desperately fornicating in the streets and committing casual acts of violence so they have the funds to keep the party going—those decadent twenty-somethings need to already exist.
From my quaint, suburban, sexually repressed vantage point, I can only wonder if they do. Girls Gone Wild and Jersey Shore might be about real people, but they can hardly be considered documentary filmmaking. I have heard horror stories about Ibiza and Magaluf – arguably Europe’s Daytona Beach – but have never witnessed it myself. There’s the real, oppressive sense that the world of Spring Breakers exists, but I’ve only ever seen it on a screen, or heard about it through an anecdote.
Maybe it should be a point of recognition that Korine came from a similar viewpoint – he never went on spring break, so maybe this is all a fever-dream, a dystopian view of what America’s youth might actually be like. I don’t usually spend my time questioning how “real” films are, but here it feels critical. I’ve never been on some wild, decadent vacation in the sun. I haven’t even been to that many house parties. But I still feel that white rapper-cum-gangsters roam the streets in Florida, and that there really are countless girls and boys writhing around hotels and beach parties for a couple of weeks a year—but without the knowledge that they’re really there, it’s hard to be sure that the whole phenomenon needs dissecting.
With all of that in mind, I keep coming back to James Franco. The female leads, despite career history, actually feel perfectly cast – all teen heartthrobs coming out of their shells, shedding clothes and inhibitions and an entire demographic in one stylish swoop. And casting Gucci Mane as a rival gangster rapper works, notably because he already is one. But Franco feels as alien as his character’s namesake. He does a commendable job, and disappears behind the silver grill of teeth and spaced-out drawl, but in a film that largely feels disturbingly close to something real, Franco treads a fine line between slipping out of view and leaping out of the screen.
That might be it, though. A fine line. Heady, disturbing satire, balanced (however improbably) against absurd comedy, never quite figuring out where it wants to sit. It reaches out and asks you to fill in the blanks, then rearranges the pieces every time you try and make contact. It’s thrilling, and infuriating. A dozen meaningless aphorisms that occasionally flicker with charge, but never long enough to allow you to really figure them out. Spring break forever, bitches.
Christopher Fraser is a science fiction writer living in the north of England. He has a website. He hopes there is more to life than bikinis and big booties.
This is a thing that I wrote.
