When Harmony Korine was 19, he wrote the screenplay for Kids, a film later directed by Larry Clarke that explores a New York City overrun and susceptible to unsupervised teenagers and adolescents who fill their days with sex, drugs, and violence. While the film’s depiction of children diving headfirst into self-destruction is often powerful – as is the last line of the film that trumpets an endemic ignorance and obliviousness that is presumably destined to destroy the subsequent generation – it is vey hyperbolic and super cynical, but this is something we should come to expect from a writer only a few years removed from early teendom. A nineteen year-old gaze is often exaggerated and myopic on the negative because it’s the easiest to exploit. This is not to say that Kids doesn’t have its merit at certain moments, particularly those that illustrate the convergence of economic stagnancy with general indifference. But this film was much more powerful twelve years ago – when I was 19.
Korine’s latest film, Spring Breakers, seethes with the similar immaturity of Kids only this time more improbably hyperbolic…and from the mind of a forty-year old man.
One would assume that the craft would age with a maturity, an expansion of themes once found in the younger self’s work, or an extrapolation of the same. Spring Breakers does not. It’s a mere devolution that, similarly, links sex with violence – graphically so when Alien (James Franco) felates a gun barrel.
But the link’s origin is rife with silliness: four college girls desperate to get away from “the same things everyday” and “to see something different” rob a restaurant in order to fund their journey to spring break. Certainly, there is something to explore in the mundaneness of life, the constrictions that we all face, or the feeling of being stuck, but the titular spring break is seen by our feminine antagonists (Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, Selena Gomez) as a utopia. And, I’m not sure that this is or was, culturally, the case. Sure, MTV made a bit of a living by throwing attractive bodies together in Cancun and televised crazy antics, but it’s hard to believe that tequila shots and booty shorts were the apex of existence that is depicted in this film.
What Korine appears to be digging deeper toward is an exploration of subtextual violence. As the girls are preparing to rob the restaurant, twice we hear “Just act like it’s a video game”; the aforementioned fellatio scene is an abject connection between the two; the soundtrack is peppered with the cast singing Britney Spears’ Every Time, and Baby One More Time. The former is hauntingly melodic and sung over a string of violent images; the four girls sing that latter in a parking lot, not necessarily recognizing the ominousness of the lyrics.
And perhaps, to a point, Korine is using Spears as an example of an unexposed dichotomy. The film, while released in 2013, seems set in either the late nineties or the early aughts (which, to a point, would explain, partially, the obsession with Spring Break), and at this time, Spears was still depicted as the virginal singer whose body was untouched, although her visage was plastered on walls, in magazines, on videos, and in the fantasies of young men and women. This was all before the point at which Britney went “crazy,” shaved her head, lashed out at some paparazzi, and become perpetual tabloid fodder. In this sense, the depiction of Spears and the girls’ actions demonstrate a departure between perception and reality.
This I see, and this is I think is a fine topic to explore.
However, the reward that the girls seek (Spring Break) seems so extremely, ignorantly minimal to the actions of robbing a restaurant. These are not inner city, ghetto dwelling, backwoods girls. These are college students who – since they live on a college campus – have probably seen a few out-of-the-ordinary events in their short time. So, the connection between video game violence and actually robbing a restaurant seems farfetched given the criminals we’re presented. In addition, their protestations that they “didn’t do anything wrong” when they’re busted – not for robbery – but for being present in the same room as a wealth of narcotics seems as glaringly ignorant.
Perhaps Korine is also exploring a generational tendency to pass the buck and shirk responsibility, but the actions that he presents far exceeds any logical frame of consequences.
But perhaps the point here is that logic is supposed to take a back seat to making money, “the dream y’all,” the “American Dream,” or so Alien (James Franco) reminds us in yet another strained cliché that riddles this film.
