From the Archives: My Spring Breakers Analysis from 2012
The website that published it is now defunct, but you gotta read this now that Kim has circled back with a SKIMs campaign inspired by Korine's iconic early aughts imagery.
The website that published it is now defunct, but you gotta read my review of Harmony Korine’s controversial 2012 blockbuster, Spring Breakers, now that Kim has circled back with a SKIMs campaign inspired by Korine's iconic early aughts imagery.
Also, my writing at age 22 was not TOO shabby now that I look at it again. I wrote this long before discovering postmodernism or Baudrillard or any of the material that now guides most of my work. I’m a lil proud of my early inklings of the ideas without context.
Also, much needs to be said about Kim Kardashian in the context of Korine’s lesser known film, Mister Lonely. Will get on that soon.
Spring Breakers, the much-anticipated “neo-teensploitation” film by infamously gritty, formerly underground writer-director Harmony Korine, premiered in March to mixed reviews of its hyperreal (yet surreal) tale of four college girls who will do whatever it takes to achieve their ideal MTV-style spring break. Right off the bat, the movie is founded on gimmick: two of the four leads are teeny-bop Disney stars Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez, acting in their first “edgy” film, a move that New York Magazine wrote off as exploitative. It is exploitative, but there seems to be thoughtful and provocative intent behind the choice: this is an exploitative movie about exploitation. Korine casts incessantly objectified teen icons in roles about an environment – spring break party beaches- that incessantly objectifies young women. This sets the tone of irony and social deconstruction that underlies the film’s neon-bikini chaos. Korine claims that all he wants to do is “overwhelm people’s senses,” but this movie covers a lot of ground.
The story is about four girls so desperate to go on spring break that they put on ski masks and rob a diner. Then they party in an unnamed town in Florida for a few days and get arrested - not for the robbery, but for spring breaking, along with a slew of other kids who have committed standard party fouls. James Franco as Alien, a sleazy local white-rapper, bails the girls out of jail. Absurd adventure ensues as we watch four pop princesses don hot pink ski masks and rob the same spring breakers with whom they had previously been partying, sidekicks to Alien in an escalating drug war with his rival dealer and former best friend, Archie, played by Gucci Mane.
It seems important to first acknowledge the things that most people took away from the film: the fascination of how sexual body parts come into close focus for so long that the sex stops being sexy. How the vibe of partying is rendered so true to life that the entire film starts to seem like one long, discombobulated hangover memory. But this onus to desensitize viewers — and the film’s odd realism — both point to a larger purpose: to deliver a jarring, sweeping, disjointed but vivid layout of America itself.
Spring Breakers is about people ruining each other as they scramble for their American Dream. It's about gender, class, race, and power - so of course it's also about capitalism.
Archie, the more powerful drug dealer, talks about The American Dream while he’s half-asleep and being ridden by a woman. Alien speaks of it too, standing on a bed in his depressingly empty home with machine guns in both hands. The only main characters who don’t use the term are the main girls. What we hear about instead is their “spring break” dream as they busy themselves by sucking on red, white and blue popsicles.
There’s a scene early on when the bad girls reenact their robbery for Faith (Selena Gomez) in the parking lot. They scream, too convincingly, “GET ON YOUR KNEES,” a regurgitation of a message that girls have digested time and again: get on your knees, or else—participate in the "patriotic" ritual of pleasing men and produce the spring break culture that Korine so accurately depicts in the film. The girls even become complicit in the hyper-sexualization of the moment—when they have their pink-haired friend (Rachel Korine) face-first on the pavement, one of murmurs, “You like that?” Not long after, Faith, the good Christian girl of the group, leaves early for home.
Still, it's a more complicated story than simply one of girls being exploited. The point is that the trio has figured out—for better or worse—how to transform the violence that has been done to them as young women in this world into violence that men can understand. When they need money for spring break, as beautiful and shameless girls, they have the option of sexual bartering. But instead they choose a masculinized method of getting money: armed robbery (important to note that in their case they were merely “armed,” robbing the diner with squirt guns). In a brilliantly bizarre scene in Alien’s bedroom, Candy and Brit force him, at gunpoint, to perform fellatio on his own guns—guns which the girls, of all people, finally acknowledge for what they are: metaphorical phalluses, symbolic of male dominance. This is the moment when the tables turn and the menacing older man becomes putty in their hands.
We see no legitimate seduction in this film, unless you count the gun scene. For girls who proclaim to “love penis” and equate sucking dick with feeling free, we never see Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) or Brit (Ashley Benson) having sex until they’ve begun their relationship with Franco. In fact, we see them watching cartoons and going to bed early in their hotel room. It’s easy to call the girls "empowered" because of the comfortable way that they wield the guns they get from men or drive the cars that they steal from men. But the fact remains: They still need to get these items from the men.
During a pre-dinner robbery pep talk, one of the girls says, “You have to act hard. Pretend it’s a videogame.” They find the courage to do all of the boundary-pushing things they’re doing by “acting hard.” They may be highly competent at doling out the violence they’ve learned, but ultimately they're acting. By the end of the movie (spoiler alert!), with the surprise of a last scene, you could call them “strong women” because they are fearless and commit to finishing what they start. This would be a lazy feminist reading of the movie. They are as fallen as everyone else, entangled in a mission that nobody involved really understands.
But they do obliterate the entire underground system that had been exploiting the “harmless” spring breakers. Which brings us to the question of class. They take out the two primary players of the city’s drug business. The drug dealers are maybe the most complex tragedies of the movie. The girls shoot up Archie’s whole operation, with powerful coldness, “as though it were a video game.” The gangster victims, dropping like flies around the pool, don’t seem like people. The camera looms behind the girls, POV-style, like a video game, neon lights lining the entire frame. And then we see the bullet holes in the men’s skulls, as Faith’s voiceover sings the praises of what a transformative vacation it had been (note that the girls didn’t shoot any women).
Spring Break was the livelihood of these men. The girls, despite their entanglement, were tourists. If this is a movie about America, the thesis is that Black people are capitalism’s clearest casualty. This is hinted at in the beginning when Cotty (Rachel Korine) is sitting in her kitchen and watching a YouTube video of a white man and black man pummeling each other in backyard boxing. And don't forget the expressionless face of the Black man in the diner who handed over his wallet when the girls assaulted him with their squirt gun. Or the discussion of the civil rights movement in the first scene, at school, when Candy is not paying attention to the lesson but cracking jokes about giving head.
As for Alien? He is the only person we see in the movie who does not have a community. The girls, irresponsible as they seem, have each other. Archie sits in the middle of a long white couch surrounded by family and friends. Alien is alone, delighted by a chance to save the girls so that they will be indebted to him. But it doesn’t seem as though he desires sexual favors in turn so much as he wants friends who will listen to him, people who will "look at his shit." In a scene when he’s getting to know the girls just after bailing them out, he talked about his love of rapping: “All those people listening to you. It’s humbling.” There’s a childlike sentimentality to his character: He’s unable to let go of his attachment to Archie, who he never stopped referring to as his “best friend,” even when Archie started calling him “the enemy.” Alien is alone.
Initially, of course, we see him as a threat. The moment Franco’s character is introduced, the soundtrack switches from the college kid-people party rap (ASAP Rocky/Skrillex) to Southern rap (Gucci Mane/Wacka Flocka). We see Alien as a liaison into a world that the girls, however “bad,” are not cut out for. It’s true that he originally had intent to exploit them: “and they all make it so easy for me,” he sing-songs at some point early in their friendship.
But this all changes as soon as he falls for them. I think he enjoyed being deep-throated by the guns because his entire life has been a slow suicide. What fascinates me is that every male I’ve spoken to about the film did not gradually come to empathize with Franco’s character —my male friends saw him as a scummy quasi-villain from his introduction up until his final moment. It was the women I spoke to who could identify Alien’s weakness and earnestness, just as the girls in the film did. I don’t know why it is that the feminine eye can locate those loopholes in a game of power, but it feels important. By the end, the girls are a danger to him.
In many ways, the film is a tragedy. Most of those killed were Black, Alien dies alone, and the girls get to drive home in a stolen car, diabolical and dead inside as a means of self-protection in a world constantly telling them to get on their knees. The spring breakers will come in and out of that town each year, willfully ignorant to the violence intrinsic to their pleasure seeking.
It's a movie that invites analysis, but its brilliance is that it somehow remains impartial, presenting to us extreme images and stories without instructing us how to feel. Korine's investment in providing overwhelming sensory stimulation allows the plot to speak for itself, and without even realizing it, we're digesting a story about the fluidity of power, systemic oppression, and the sadness of people - while we believe we're enjoying bikinis, beaches, and pop music.
(Initially published with The Weeklings.)