Every couple of years the film community gets a picture that is critically divisive to the point of riots; a picture that compels nearly anyone with a pen and a Film 101 course to their name to provide personal input (“Zero Dark Thirty”, “Amour” and “The Tree of Life” are a few from recent memory).
Such films ascribe to the moniker of “art-cinema”, but are generally well-known enough to gain considerable viewership and invite debate as to the value of their worth as popular entertainment (God forbid something of that sort should carry something resembling a moral agenda).
Regardless of whether we consider such works “good” movies, their value lies in their ability to spark intellectual debates, which allow critics to constantly reassess the (gasp!) purpose of cinema and popular entertainment (the worth of criticism itself frequently crops up in this conversation).
In the past month, this critical swell has been caused by no one other than l’enfant-terrible Harmony Korine, with his latest picture “Spring Breakers.” The film, Korine’s fifth feature as a director, is a hypnotic account of four girls’ journey to the sunny shores of Florida to engage in the beer-soaked, MTV-fetishized revelry we know as Spring Break.
The bikini-clad quartet is composed of Disney Channel icons Vannessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez, soap-opera actress Ashley Benson, and Korine’s wife, Rachel. Halfway through the film, we encounter Alien, played by James Franco (decked out in cornrows and grills, with guns and drugs in tow).
Since I first viewed the trailer—which I immediately showed to anyone around me so that they could see how ridiculous Franco appeared—my interpretation of the film has focused on its self-conscious exploration of the use of star personas (a hypothesis only supported by my theatrical viewing).
Korine’s use of the pop-culture princesses allows this film to reflexively consider popularity and social-pressure in several ways. These good girls gone bad allow us to consider how America expects young women to be behave (throughout the film, guardians call their daughters and attempt—through copious lies—to assuage the fears that these precious girls might be engaging in any illicit affairs).
If American viewers (likely college-aged males) go to “Spring Breakers” solely in the hopes of seeing a few pop stars in a threesome, they’ll be pleased; but if they neglected to consider whether or not these stars serve as stand-ins for ideal American girls, maybe they’ve missed something.
If the film is Korine’s examination of the fantasy of teen excess that he seemed to have missed out on—as he has frequently affirmed in interviews—it is all the more interesting that his image of girls longing for such a vacation are America’s image of dream girls. These are the kinds of people that the average American teen wants to look like if they are to join in on the festivities, Korine suggests.
In this vein, Franco represents the antithesis of male fantasy projection; he is precisely the opposite of what an American male might aspire to be. Franco, the successful (and rather well-educated) movie star, portrays one of the most off-putting and lowly social archetypes. And yet, this drug-dealing thief possesses an essential component of the American dream; he retains his affluence. He is our culture’s nightmare of success (Franco gone wrong!)
The way many have interpreted this use of celebrity is that it amounts to a marketing technique or a deflection (a Trojan Horse if you will) to sneak in radical, challenging perspectives on sexism and racism in the youth culture of America.
While that sounds like an interesting movie, such a subversive culture lesson hardly seems like the film Harmony Korine made. How radical can this flick be: it’s still playing at Cooks Corner people! If Korine’s irony attempts to critique and question the events on display, he can’t help but trying to make these parties look as cool as possible, ultimately preventing space for distrust and intellectualization to take place (the seeds of healthy critical debate).
That being said, obviously (and luckily) this film is anything but a standard, run-of-the-mill Hollywood teen dream. The film eschews narrative restrictions from its outset: the lurid, Skrillex accompanied beach part montage (naturally—pardon the pun—there are Natty Ices and breasts aplenty).
Throughout most of its second half, Korine dips even deeper into the realm of dreamscape—assisted by the brilliance of cinematographer Benoît Debie, who has established (in his past few films) one of the most fluid and unrestricted camera styles in modern cinema. The surreal nature of this film is explicitly supported by a repeated shot sequence on a bus, where the two girls that leave early lie down, only to follow even more wild and lawless events perhaps being imagined by the runaways in their slumber on the bus. With shades of “Inception,” we dive deeper and deeper into the twisted myth of teen culture gone amok.
Korine also provides one of the most strangely pleasing sequences of the year in a magnificent montage of debauchery and burglary set to a laughably innocent Britney Spears track. Did this sequence say anything about American culture? Not in my mind, but boy was it fun to go along for the ride.