Today’s Tragedies are Broken Fairytales
Though the term itself sometimes feels entrenched in the classical realm of theater dramas and fairytales, the popularity of tragedies persists even today. There’s a certain magnetism to them. After all, characters who share our follies are much more commonplace than those sharing our triumphs. However, that’s not to say that tragedy hasn’t evolved with the times.
Today’s tragedians have outgrown the need for a fatal flaw. Modern tragedy comes in many forms and offers far more nuance than the biblical sins of pride, greed, envy or lust. Harmony Korine’s drama Spring Breakers and the documentary Hot Girls Wanted provide a fascinating double feature when looking at the current status of the genre.
Equal parts coming-of-age narrative and nihilistic fairytale, Spring Breakers’ four college students (Ashley Benson, Vanessa Hudgens, Rachel Korine and Selena Gomez) depart the relative safety of their hometown for the never-ending-party of St Petersburg, Florida. They arrive at Spring Break wanting only to have a good time, only to fall in with a hip-hop artist and career criminal named Alien (James Franco). It’s a very divisive film with some critics panning it as exploitative and misogynistic while others praised the film’s direction and cinematography.
The girls in the film see spring break as an almost-mythical destination and their desire to make the trip one of self-empowerment quickly escalates into an almost-primal need to party forever — a need that Alien not only enables but also shares himself. In a traditional coming-of-age narrative, all the girls would eventually learn their lesson and return home but in the world of Spring Breakers this isn’t the case — and the film’s subversion of this is tied together with its use of fairytale tropes.
From the wolfish and predatory smile of Alien to the rhythmic thresholds that the girls cross throughout the film, allusions to classic fairytales are rife in Korine’s film. When things start to become uncomfortable, Faith returns home. When things become violent, Cotty does the same. However, Brit and Candy become so immersed and invested in the fantasy of “Spring Break Forever” that there is no way out for them. They make it through the film’s final shootout unharmed physically but symbolically they’ve well and truly passed the point of no return.
Either they can’t see how far their adventure in Florida has taken them, or they just don’t care. Though Spring Breakers is a film where the sexuality, violence and drug-habits of its characters is on full display, these things are never regarded as a transgression or sin. It’s merely a hapless side-effect to their obsession with living out their never-ending fantasy. In addition, the film also plays with the ambiguity of whether or not the personas the girls manifest at spring break were within them all along or something their contact with Alien creates. Did they lose touch with reality as a result of spring break or were these tendencies something they awakened within them before they ever set foot in Florida?
There’s a nuance and ambiguity here that’s absent from a lot of classical tragedy. It’s never so simple as a single fatal flaw unraveling someone’s life. Spring Breakers is a harrowing but stylish tragedy that challenges the audience to think about how terrifying the freedom of adulthood can be. It ask if a world without limits is really all that desirable whilst also acknowledging the powerful allure of such a thing.
The conclusions drawn by Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus in their documentary Hot Girls Wanted are a little less ambiguous but in many ways just as tragic. The documentary follows a group of young women involved with the world of online pornography who all pass through a Miami sharehouse owned and operated by their agent. Though the conventions of a documentary are more stable than the tropes subverted in Spring Breakers, still undercurrent is the tragedy running through the piece. However, it’s not so much about as shaming the girls for exploiting their sexuality so much as it is about grappling with precisely why and how the realities of today’s professional pornography gets under their skin.
Like Spring Breakers, Some of the girls end up leaving this heightened world behind while others choose to stay. There’s an interesting comparison to be made here between Tressa and Faith, with them both diving into a world of debauchery and eventually returning home. Hot Girls Wanted plays with the idea that too much freedom can be unhealthy and it’s not so much the sexual dimension to the girl’s work that is the problem but the attitudes and habits it invites into their lives.
There are frequent references to Twitter that help anchor Hot Girls Wanted in the present in the same way that the thumping dubstep of Spring Breakers does. Like Korine’s film, the women in the documentary assert their own agency and pride in their work — the story they convey is one practically defined by its moments of discomfort and doubt. If Spring Breakers is about the perils of liberty and the right to make the wrong choices, Hot Girls Wanted is about watching those ideas play out within the lives of real people.
Tragedies come in many forms but if these two films are any indication, the genre is in great shape in 2016. They’ve abandoned the poetic, embracing realism instead. Spring Breakers and Hot Girls Wanted resonate not because we see how fragile the lives and morality of these characters are but because we get a glimpse of how blind we are to our own propensity for tragedy — and that’s what scares us.
For all we know, we’re dancing on the precipice of our own destruction. What could be more terrifying than that?
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