Fearsome Fun With "Spring Breakers"

I often find myself on the wrong side of the cultural and generational divide, but even when I was in the right age bracket and social environment for the college ritual of spring break, I didn't understand it. Sure, a road trip with friends to the beach had some appeal, but doing so with the express intent to engage in mass boozing and partying and casual sex, the way the photogenic youngsters on MTV did? I didn't understand it. To me, an introverted geek, the mass media version of spring break always looked vaguely sinister and dangerous. You had all these young people trying so desperately to have fun by throwing caution to the wind, participating in a glorified bout of yearly mass hysteria. And everyone involved was quick to excuse any bad behavior by claiming that they were just being young and letting off steam.

Harmony Korine, who admits he never went on a proper spring break either, shares many of my sentiments. In "Spring Breakers," we're introduced to a quartet of college girls, Faith (Selena Gomez), Brit (Ashley Benson), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), and Cotty (Rachel Korine). The latter three are desperate to go to Florida for Spring Break, and Faith, our designated Good Girl, gets swept up in their plans. The film portrays them as sweetly childish and viciously amoral simultaneously. One moment they're the picture of girlish innocence, cavorting about in their pastel-colored bikinis, and the next they're screaming obscenities and brandishing firearms as they rob a diner to add to their spring break fund. When the girls do get to Florida, after various misadventures, they meet a local gangster named Alien (James Franco), who opens further avenues of indulgence and depravity to them.

At first "Spring Breakers" looks like it's going to be a cautionary tale, but it's considerable more interesting than that. The story is rudimentary and only minimally developed. Few attempts are made to give the girls distinct personalities, and Alien is only makes as strong an impression as he does thanks to the excellent work of an unrecognizable James Franco. Rather, the film is an exploration of moods and images and emotions in a very free-form fashion. Much of the narrative is dreamlike, with events shown out of sequence, occasional repeated shots, and unexplained leaps in time. Korine's characters initially do not seem to be real people, but constructs embodying all the different media conceptions of what it is to be young and cool and admirable. His images echo celebrity culture, reality show culture, the rampant sexualization of young women, and the glorification of crime. They get mixed together in bizarre, fascinating combinations, such as a scene of the girls dancing to a Britney Spears song, while masked and armed for an evening of crime.

I've only seen one of Korine's prior films, "Gummo," but it was enough to get across his penchant for the fringe. He takes long, hard, unflinching looks at the deviants and the freaks, not the sanitized Hollywood versions of them, but those who are uncomfortably, almost unfathomably out of step with the norm. However, there are no value judgments made one way or another about his subjects, and Korine uses the same approach with "Spring Breakers." His visions of the partying college students in their spring break revelries border on the nightmarish, but there's no sense of condemnation or moral outrage. Instead, the focus remains on the sheer strangeness of the events, on the impulses of the girls trying to contextualize their shallow fun as something deeper and more meaningful, or Alien's version of the American dream.

Notably, the girls and Alien do turn out to be regular, screwed-up human beings in the end, who we can sympathize with. It's not the characters who are strange and disturbing, but the unseen role models they are emulating and the cultural messages that they feverishly parrot. There are some striking moments when the affected facades of coolness drop for just a moment, and all the fear and the uncertainty become palpable. "Spring Breakers" is very cynical, but only up until a point. We see that there are consequences to pursuing the hedonism of spring break to its logical extreme. Characters make different choices and have arcs - they're small, but they're significant ones. These are anchors to reality that keep the film from feeling too satirical or distant or contrived.

"Spring Breakers" is clearly Korine's commentary on the state of the popular youth culture, from the involvement of the former Disney Channel tween starlets to the Skrillex and Britney Spears-heavy soundtrack, but it's harder to discern what he's trying to say. Perhaps the movie itself is the message, a feature that was marketed to the lowest common denominator in order to entice less discerning youngsters in search of cinematic lewdness into the theaters. Then it held up an art house funhouse mirror up to the audience and invited them to see themselves the way that people like me tend to see them.

I wonder how many appreciated the view.
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