Don’t Be Scared of Shit: Spring Breakers is as Real as Real Gets
Caution: NSFW images and James Franco ahead
We all have friends who profess to know what’s best for us. They encourage us to try new things, and sometimes they try to steer us away from things they perceive as obvious mistakes. “No, don’t,” our well-meaning friends warn us when we mention we might like to see a notoriously polarizing movie, “it’ll never be anything but a waste of time.” But as we all know, curiosity coupled with a siren song typically rock-paper-scissors these friends and our own self-preservation instincts to death. We have to see for ourselves what’s going on in those dreadful hinterlands to which we are told to never go, stick our hands on the cookie-baited bear trap.
Now then: Harmony Korine. If you’re shuddering at the mention of the name, you’re the person I want to talk to. If you don’t recognize it, stick around. Korine, who began his filmmaking career at age 19 as the writer of 1995’s Kids, is considered by many one of the household names in the shit-caked order of “enfant terrible” bottom-feeding provocateurs. His latest, 2012’s Spring Breakers, is a film that many have likened to the crass nonsense of Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, but as anyone at all familiar with Korine’s work knows, love or absolutely hate it, the situation is far more complicated, and I’ll go ahead and put it on record that I think Spring Breakers is among the most visually poetic films of the past ten years and is much closer on the film-language spectrum to Terrence Malick or Jean-Luc Godard, especially in terms of its big, themey complexities.
It is my feeling, as I suspect is dangerously common with things that I am slow to understand, that Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is what we call in the industry “an important film.” I say this as a recent graduate writing program dropout who was so repulsed by my department’s heralding Dave Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as some kind of structural paragon of literary fiction that I conned my reticent friends into screening Spring Breakers on the occasion of the final spring break in my life’s formal education. In so doing, the initial reaction to what ensued was unanimously sour as a four-person “protagonist” made up of Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgeons), Brit, (Ashley Benson), and Cotty (Rachel Korine, wife of Harmony) sticks up a chicken restaurant to fund their spring break in Florida.
All throughout the first act, our small audience seemed taken aback by what amounts to visual profanity — a style of cinematic nastiness that’s not quite pornographic but not at all unlikely to be described as such by any teenager who came to Spring Breakers to glut an unrequited need for Blue Crush 3.
That’s when it started to click for me — as soon as I realized who would go to see a movie called Spring Breakers, I said something out loud that appeared to suck a little bit of Korine’s poison out of the room’s wound. The thing that I think I said was a little bit like this, and afterward we all seemed to loosen up: “This film… is as if an orangutan showed up on a Hollywood lot wearing a suit jacket, proclaiming that he’s going to update Natural Born Killers for the Instagram era, and this orangutan… he’s wearing a name tag that reads: Marvin Scorsess.”
More than that, on rewatching it, I think it’s probably one of the best films I’ve lately seen. It’s essentially an overheated Flannery O’Connor-ish potboiler that distorts time from the film’s meager 90 minutes into something courting the infinite that things like Moby-Dick tease with a little finger — and is similarly deathly serious and ferociously comedic. It’s disgusting, it’s loathsome, it’s loud, it’s exploitative, it’s seemingly not intended for human consumption and every single element of it works excruciatingly well.
Spring Breakers is a masterwork in juxtapositions to such a degree that at first the editing seems to express nothing that could have possibly originated from human psychology. We zip back and forth through time as debaucherous parties are intercut with the girls lazing in a hallway, plotting their initial heist while passing mouthfuls of pot smoke between them, corrupting one another in secret bedclothed communion. Over and over again, lines are repeated: “Pretend it’s a video game,” Brit advises her accomplices, “like you’re in a fucking movie. Don’t be scared of shit.”
This dreamy repetitiousness guides us to understand this is not a conventional film by virtually any standard — we’re looking at characters who represent a tableau of moral concepts and values puppetted through an insular, nihilistic music video or looping animated gif of beachside twerking. If you were to watch it with no sound, it likely wouldn’t make a bit of sense. Under the burning neon and surging dubsteb, the film generates a compact, hallucinogenic, and sinister ambiance that resembles your more frightening memory-fragments from large house parties in which moving from room to room, or here, from shot to shot, feels disquietingly close to breaching a series of realities slightly different than each that came before.
This, I think, is the source of most of the discomfort that arises in the majority of Korine’s audience. This isn’t what anybody going to a movie called Spring Breakers signed on for. And as such, the girls are promptly arrested at a party and bailed out by Alien (James Franco), a rapper posing as hardcore gangster, and the well becomes all the more polluted as another means of downward mobility beckons to the girls. It’s at this point in the film, conspicuously surrounded by the first black people on-screen in numbers larger than one-at-a-time, Selena Gomez’ Faith becomes visually and verbally shaken. “This isn’t what this is all about,” she confides to her friends in a broom closet. “We need to go home.” As the first washout, she boards a bus and the audience is exposed to the first subdued color effects in the film — as she whisks herself back to Kentucky, she is seen no more in the luscious unreality they’ve dreamed into existence and is little better than dead to the film’s distorted continuum.
These scenes mimic that predictable audience reaction to the language Korine selected for his film— when is enough enough? When does it become a matter of hampering accessibility to your own movie? In all likelihood, Korine may not be actively trying to turn people away, but part of what makes the film so compelling is that it refuses to compromise with its perceived audience. In fact, all the fevered montages of overflowing beer bongs and flapping, alcohol-soaked breasts are usually accompanied by an array of brusque middle-fingers pointed directly at the camera. I can’t for the life of me figure out how so many viewers aren’t able to get the picture.
Part of Korine’s mystique is his ability, like David Lynch before him, to shape scenes into tonal chimeras that do not in any way represent what we recognize as 1:1 depictions of our empirical reality translated to screen. Instead, certain moments desynchronize in small crucial ways to alert our rational, sense-seeking brains that we’re standing at the edge of water deeper than the illusion telegraphed into our vision-centers, creating an experience that resonates with truly awesome emotional power. This is the way that script doctors and BrainPickings.org keep shouting about how fiction is the only way to arrive at real truth — Korine is showing us an abstract actuality rather than the real thing, showing us how he thinks of things rather than sees them. In Spring Breakers, guns fire out of sync with the tumbling bodies they supposedly shot and dialogue appears improvised but oddly stilted, and if that’s not your thing, that’s cool — go ahead and bail on it. See you back home after the rest of us are ready to get back on the bus.
“Look at my sheeyit,” Alien flaunts from atop his bed, flanked by countless weapons hung on the walls above the seashell-shaped headboard, “This is the fuckin’ American dream. This is my fuckin’ dream, y’all! All this sheeyit! Look at my sheeyit! I got… I got shorts! Every fuckin’ color. I got designer T-shirts! I got gold bullets. Motherfuckin’ vampires. I got Scarface. On repeat. Scarface on repeat. Constant, y’all!” As a blatant send-up of the Gatsbyian “so many beautiful shirts” scene, this segment is absolutely hilarious, but as the last two girls fawn over his collection, they pick up a pair of silenced pistols and the tone swings straight into pulverizing anxiety as they point the barrels at his face and tell Alien to open his mouth. Maybe they’re just fucking with him they say, but they could shoot him dead right there, nobody would know, and all that sheeyit would be theirs.
In response, Alien begins enthusiastically licking both gun barrels, fellating them as we wonder if he’s about to orgiastically expunge the distinction between gun and penis, gunfire and orgasm, and be shot through the head as part of these girls’ fabulous vacation. The tension is diffused as the girls are obviously titillated, and as Alien tells them that they have just proved themselves his “motherfuckin’ soulmates,” we’re wondering if these soulmates of his had any idea of whether they were actually playing around or if they were going to slaughter him. Their reptile impulses are extremely difficult to understand, but Alien seems to have matched them tit for tat. It’s true love between the three. True enough to be, at least.
Korine has managed, with a visually arresting, technically fabulist piece of comedy-crime-horror, to capture and bottle a vision not from the American Dream, but from the American Hallucination. The film resembles Taxi Driver in that it can be read as a morally bankrupt worldview summoning twisted self-empowerment into the sunlit lands of the supposedly-innocent like some demon out of the brooding recesses of desire. Look at all you desire, says Spring Breakers. Looks an awful lot like Faust, does it not? it adds. But again like Taxi Driver, and unlike Faust, Spring Breakers chooses the harder way to wrap up the apocalypse it awakens: an egalitarian politic for a story’s resolution is roundly ignored — the girls’ comeuppance for their misdeeds truly never comes, as there is no devil with whom to deal out of desperation. Sometimes, it’s just pure psychopathy, an out-and-out will to destroy oneself that perpetuates the world’s sicknesses, the dream of living out a power fantasy for a brief period of time where anything at all becomes intrinsically possible, all soon to be spirited away once the final pseudo-heroic deed is done. In the end, it is Brit and Candy who drive Alien deeper into dream than he ever knew to go. For him, it was all an act, an empowering alter ego. No longer.
This mechanism of blurring violent performance with inebriated play and the imaginary with the happening-now constitutes the film’s primary effect. The last two remaining girls prove themselves far more twisted and dangerous than their saccharine white gangster hostage — they survive to the end to commandeer the dead rival gangsters’ supercar and drive it (ostensibly) back home to return to school and their former lives, per their promises to their mothers over the phone just before the final firefight. It is a romance film whose primary ingredient is psychosexual terror — a film that is both pointed critique of shameless superficiality and a gross indulgence in the same.
In the DVD making-of extras, Selena Gomez, with just a twinkle of regret in the corners of her eyes, describes the intense stress she experienced shooting this film as members of her very young, Disney-oriented fans kept visiting the set to see her, and she alleges that she felt a deep responsibility to protect them from the images and material continually employed in the daily shooting schedule. Similarly, Rachel Korine cites an impulse to protect Gomez from the “buff meatheads” thrashing all around them in the extreme party scenes, claiming you can see her swatting away their hands in multiple shots. Ashley Benson relates a moment on-set when she interrogated the extras about their infectious comfort and confidence while topless and flailing around on-camera, to which they replied, “It’s so much fun! We get to be in a movie!” Vanessa Hudgeons, swerving eerily close to her character, relishes that she got to show her young fans what a “real girl” looks and acts like.
There come times in which an artist must be welcomed to detect and react to political situations or ecologies that compel him to make art from cat shit fished out of public sandboxes or regurgitated nail clippings and clothespins, and especially, I’ll argue, if those political situations aren’t immediately palpable to the rest of us. In a 1997 interview, Korine says, when asked if he thinks he’s a self-indulgent filmmaker, “How can an artist be expected not to be self-indulgent? That’s the whole thing that’s wrong with filmmaking today. Ninety nine percent of the films you see do not qualify as works of art. To me, art is one man’s voice, one idea, one point-of-view, coming from one person. Self-indulgent to me means it’s one man’s obsession. That’s what great artists bring to the table.”
To my eye, creation in all forms of commercial art functions the way Korine describes. Consumers use money to adjudicate what is “good art” and what is “bad art.” We need more voices in large cinema releases. We need more styles ushered into literary canon. We need more antitheses to the modern Disney model, which has in recent years been to scrub as much subtext as mathematically possible from its recent Star Wars remake or any of its comfortably bankable Marvel properties. The reigning sentiment in these features seems to be that everything is fine, apart from the few ne’er-do-wells who are holding us back, and that we’ll get by as long as we subscribe to the status quo. Spring Breakers gives us a glimpse into the other side, where nothing is certain and everything is scary, and it absolutely strikes me as a badly-needed vacation. We balk at the unfamiliar, as is well our right. We invent words like “melodrama” to help describe our inherent distrust of authors. Films like Spring Breakers come along to assure us that distrust is deeply mutual.
It can be read as a film for the amoral as much a film for those who feel creatively threatened by external forces, by audiences or thesis committees, and so it might have been the absolute best thing I could have seen in my final days of my MFA program, where Aliens of all stripes are kept strictly off-world and literary fiction is marshaled by arbitrary laws ceaselessly trickling through the Euclidean arcades of English literature.
It’s all you can do to book a trip into the unknown, just to see it for yourself. Just do your best to bring something back for the skittish rest of us when you do.
