Apr 2015 *
This is a review I wrote a while ago, right after I frst saw the film, and never shared anywhere. Upon a rewatch yesterday, I was surprised by how well my initial thoughts held up, so here they are. Beware: It's massively pretentious and contains big spoilers. I'll edit this with piccies when I'm less drunk and tired.
It would be highly appropriate if Harmony Korine, after providing the Kids script that exposed the sordid reality of young Gen-Xers, would 2 decades later put an all-new generation of irresponsible teen miscreants under the cinematic magnifying glass. Indeed, at first glance, Spring Breakers seems essentially an updating of Kids. Whereas Kids was entirely gritty and grungy, a pure product of its time, Spring Breakers is similarly relevant to its here-and-now - gaudy, glossy, glamourous, hyper-stylised. Polar opposite aesthetics reflecting vastly different eras, yet both populated by youth with near-identical concerns. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
But Korine is 10 times the artist that Larry Clark ever was (and I say that as someone who enjoyed all of Clark's films and despised one of Korine's), and this is far from Kids 2.0: The Gen-Z Edition. What begins as a simple social commentary about teen party culture spirals away into violence, nihilism and pure drug-art hallucinatory madness; a demented deathdance through the ashes of the cremated American Dream.
'Kay, let's get the plot out of the way. 4 hot chicks leave their boring lives to party hard at Spring Break. Short on money, they fund their trip by 2 of the girls, Brit and Candy, robbing a restaurant armed with water-pistols. They psyche themselves up for this criminal act with the words, "Just pretend it's a fucking video game. Like you're in a movie." Remember that line, it's the most important of the entire film. They arrive at Spring Break and skimpy bikinis become formal wear. Booze is chugged, drugs are hoovered up willing nostrils, tits are flashed and eyes are opened up fucking wide to a new and exciting world of sleaze and decadence. Hedonism sledgehammers the cerebral cortex like a spiritual epiphany, as it always does to the the young, eager and inexperienced.
The 4 end up in jail and get bailed out by a drug dealer/rapper named Alien. He's a materialist who likes to own nice things and, in his world, a bikini-clad teen hottie is very much a nice thing worth owning. Despite their good fortune, this run-in with the law is enough of a comedown to send one of the girls home. And then there were three... Alien looks to corrupt them, molding them as lackeys to the kingpin image he hopes to project onto his own ego. They all rob a rival drug dealer and retribution sees another teen goddess packing her bags with a bullet-hole in her arm, the lustre of this fantasy life blemished by real blood and pain. And then there were two... Brit and Candy. The two who started this whole adventure with a watergun and a dream.
So far, it's been pretty crazy, but we're still basically in Kids territory, albeit a much more flamboyant version, right? Nope, let's back the fuck up a little and focus on the moment where Korine already cranked the WTF-o-meter up to 11 and flipped our expectations upside down.
Just as Alien boasts of the 2 angels he's created, a sudden inversion of the power dynamic between them occurs and the girls make him their bitch, forcing him to fellate them (yes, really). Up until this point, we'd assumed that these 2 were certainly amoral and selfish, but being led down a dark path by the temptation of hedonism and further corrupted by Alien's gangster lifestyle. There was still potential for salvation. Now the truth is revealed: There was never anything inside them that could be corrupted. Just a mass of thoughtless impulse and a gaping hole where the human conscience should reside. The video game didn't end after they robbed the restaurant, it was only just beginning.
Rather than using Kids as its template, the movie becomes more of a thematic follow-on to Scarface, that cautionary tale/paeon to all-out excess. Alien idolises Tony Montana and is a stand-in for the character here. He displays his guns like trophies and wears bling like medals of honour. Just as in Scarface's day, the American Dream is an illusory rainbow that leads to a pot of shit, but the ethos remains and there's still pride to be gained in the struggle against adversity, clawing one's way out of a world of need into a world of want. For the 2 girls, life provides no adversity to struggle against. There is no rainbow to pursue and never has been.
We currently have the most spoiled and privileged generation of kids in human history. Throughout the ages, parents have always worked hard to provide their children a more fortunate life than their own. We've now reached a point where once unimaginable luxuries are taken for granted. 10 year old's carry around brand new iPhones. The internet is a limitless tool for freedom of information and communication, easily the greatest achievement of the human race, yet for those with no memory of life without it, it can easily just become a means to call some stranger a faggot nigger cunt on XBox Live without any real-world repercussions. Society's laws are driven by need - need for structure, for safety, for order. When a child grows up without needing a damn thing, then the superego never properly develops, leaving the id to reign supreme over the psyche. Once upon a time, this would be limited to the utmost upper echelons of royalty and riches. Nowadays, middle-class privilege is breeding a new class of aristocrat en masse. Millions of little universe-centres who only pull the proverbial silver spoon out of their mouths so they can use the handle to make lines of coke on a teenage whore's cleavage. Baby rockstars always searching for the next hotel window to hurl a TV out of.
Added to that, we now live in a world where the line between reality and fantasy has become increasingly blurred. Whereas once the external world was clear-cut concrete fact and our imagination was pure fantasy, now the situation has been reversed. The "real" world is a constant bombardment of fabrication, lie and biased re-envisioning, such that the only sanctum of truth that remains to us is within our own heads. Advertising constantly assaults us with the mirage of utopian existence. This cream will make your skin clearer. This pill will make your dick bigger. This *insert product* will make your life happier. A never-ending brainwashing barrage of capitalist deception on a daily basis. Meanwhile, the news, that supposed bastion of "truth", is hand-selected and filtered through PR spin; the "facts" sifted through, presented on a need-to-know basis and delivered in a manner that saves you the trouble of deciding how you should feel. Real life, especially tragedy, is mythologised far more than any Greek god ever was.
What does this mean for the millenials? The kids too young to remember 9/11, yet live perpetually underneath the shadows once cast by the fallen towers, as if they were the world's largest gravestones? How does the untamed id process the world's horrors disingenuously delivered instantly at hi-definition 24/7? By retreating to the only place left that's real. By pretending it's all a fucking video game. Like they're in a movie.
The question remains with Spring Breakers though: Is Harmony Korine judging his self-centred sociopathic protagonists? I say a fervent 'Nay!'. Other reviewers have happily and hypocritically labelled this as a scathing indictment of today's irresponsible youth. No surprise there. At the core of the human condition lies pure selfishness. We blame our parents for the imperfect world they left us, then we condemn our own children for conforming to the imperfect world that we create for them. But the world doesn't systematically alter according our wishes or expectations. It simply is.
The human race is pure pageantry and Korine has never been afraid to be a float in this garish parade. He presents our sleazy side, but also happily flashes us his wife's tits to show that he's down here in the quagmire with the rest of us. And yes, we're left with the neon bikinied vision of our unlikely anti-heroines, striding with assuredness away from the bullet-riddled, cornrowed corpse of Alien. The romanticised image of thug life superceded by a new breed of sociopath; one armed with lax conscience, confident strut, immaculately waxed pussy and Daddy's platinum card.
Perhaps you could criticise Spring Breakers for the fact that it lives and breathes entirely in the here-and-now and offers nothing predictive; no inevitable downfall for our dancers after the funereal waltz ends. Time always marches on. The optimism of the '60s gave way to the pessimism of the '70s. The decadence of the '80s begat the simplicity of the '90s. You can only surf atop a wave for so long, before it crashes. The current decade rolls on from the last, reaching tsunami highs. One thing's for sure: When this tidal wave of luxury finally crashes, it's gonna bury those who rode it for so long.
But Korine plays his true hand in the movie's most epochal moment - the Britney Spears karaoke scene, where it moves beyond Kids and Scarface territory. The point where it stops being the millenial edition of The Great Gatsby. Soulless treacle and empty profundity are presented at its most sincere. Superficiality and psychopathy melded to create a thing of pointless beauty. Excess in no way presented as recrimination, but as pure celebration. Welcome to the 21st century. Sentiment is dead emotion outside of its transient worth. Immediacy is all. Fuck context. Fuck consequences. Fuck the future. This is the fucking apocalypse, baby, and it looks goooood. Sprang Break, y'all.
It would be highly appropriate if Harmony Korine, after providing the Kids script that exposed the sordid reality of young Gen-Xers, would 2 decades later put an all-new generation of irresponsible teen miscreants under the cinematic magnifying glass. Indeed, at first glance, Spring Breakers seems essentially an updating of Kids. Whereas Kids was entirely gritty and grungy, a pure product of its time, Spring Breakers is similarly relevant to its here-and-now - gaudy, glossy, glamourous, hyper-stylised. Polar opposite aesthetics reflecting vastly different eras, yet both populated by youth with near-identical concerns. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
But Korine is 10 times the artist that Larry Clark ever was (and I say that as someone who enjoyed all of Clark's films and despised one of Korine's), and this is far from Kids 2.0: The Gen-Z Edition. What begins as a simple social commentary about teen party culture spirals away into violence, nihilism and pure drug-art hallucinatory madness; a demented deathdance through the ashes of the cremated American Dream.
'Kay, let's get the plot out of the way. 4 hot chicks leave their boring lives to party hard at Spring Break. Short on money, they fund their trip by 2 of the girls, Brit and Candy, robbing a restaurant armed with water-pistols. They psyche themselves up for this criminal act with the words, "Just pretend it's a fucking video game. Like you're in a movie." Remember that line, it's the most important of the entire film. They arrive at Spring Break and skimpy bikinis become formal wear. Booze is chugged, drugs are hoovered up willing nostrils, tits are flashed and eyes are opened up fucking wide to a new and exciting world of sleaze and decadence. Hedonism sledgehammers the cerebral cortex like a spiritual epiphany, as it always does to the the young, eager and inexperienced.
The 4 end up in jail and get bailed out by a drug dealer/rapper named Alien. He's a materialist who likes to own nice things and, in his world, a bikini-clad teen hottie is very much a nice thing worth owning. Despite their good fortune, this run-in with the law is enough of a comedown to send one of the girls home. And then there were three... Alien looks to corrupt them, molding them as lackeys to the kingpin image he hopes to project onto his own ego. They all rob a rival drug dealer and retribution sees another teen goddess packing her bags with a bullet-hole in her arm, the lustre of this fantasy life blemished by real blood and pain. And then there were two... Brit and Candy. The two who started this whole adventure with a watergun and a dream.
So far, it's been pretty crazy, but we're still basically in Kids territory, albeit a much more flamboyant version, right? Nope, let's back the fuck up a little and focus on the moment where Korine already cranked the WTF-o-meter up to 11 and flipped our expectations upside down.
Just as Alien boasts of the 2 angels he's created, a sudden inversion of the power dynamic between them occurs and the girls make him their bitch, forcing him to fellate them (yes, really). Up until this point, we'd assumed that these 2 were certainly amoral and selfish, but being led down a dark path by the temptation of hedonism and further corrupted by Alien's gangster lifestyle. There was still potential for salvation. Now the truth is revealed: There was never anything inside them that could be corrupted. Just a mass of thoughtless impulse and a gaping hole where the human conscience should reside. The video game didn't end after they robbed the restaurant, it was only just beginning.
Rather than using Kids as its template, the movie becomes more of a thematic follow-on to Scarface, that cautionary tale/paeon to all-out excess. Alien idolises Tony Montana and is a stand-in for the character here. He displays his guns like trophies and wears bling like medals of honour. Just as in Scarface's day, the American Dream is an illusory rainbow that leads to a pot of shit, but the ethos remains and there's still pride to be gained in the struggle against adversity, clawing one's way out of a world of need into a world of want. For the 2 girls, life provides no adversity to struggle against. There is no rainbow to pursue and never has been.
We currently have the most spoiled and privileged generation of kids in human history. Throughout the ages, parents have always worked hard to provide their children a more fortunate life than their own. We've now reached a point where once unimaginable luxuries are taken for granted. 10 year old's carry around brand new iPhones. The internet is a limitless tool for freedom of information and communication, easily the greatest achievement of the human race, yet for those with no memory of life without it, it can easily just become a means to call some stranger a faggot nigger cunt on XBox Live without any real-world repercussions. Society's laws are driven by need - need for structure, for safety, for order. When a child grows up without needing a damn thing, then the superego never properly develops, leaving the id to reign supreme over the psyche. Once upon a time, this would be limited to the utmost upper echelons of royalty and riches. Nowadays, middle-class privilege is breeding a new class of aristocrat en masse. Millions of little universe-centres who only pull the proverbial silver spoon out of their mouths so they can use the handle to make lines of coke on a teenage whore's cleavage. Baby rockstars always searching for the next hotel window to hurl a TV out of.
Added to that, we now live in a world where the line between reality and fantasy has become increasingly blurred. Whereas once the external world was clear-cut concrete fact and our imagination was pure fantasy, now the situation has been reversed. The "real" world is a constant bombardment of fabrication, lie and biased re-envisioning, such that the only sanctum of truth that remains to us is within our own heads. Advertising constantly assaults us with the mirage of utopian existence. This cream will make your skin clearer. This pill will make your dick bigger. This *insert product* will make your life happier. A never-ending brainwashing barrage of capitalist deception on a daily basis. Meanwhile, the news, that supposed bastion of "truth", is hand-selected and filtered through PR spin; the "facts" sifted through, presented on a need-to-know basis and delivered in a manner that saves you the trouble of deciding how you should feel. Real life, especially tragedy, is mythologised far more than any Greek god ever was.
What does this mean for the millenials? The kids too young to remember 9/11, yet live perpetually underneath the shadows once cast by the fallen towers, as if they were the world's largest gravestones? How does the untamed id process the world's horrors disingenuously delivered instantly at hi-definition 24/7? By retreating to the only place left that's real. By pretending it's all a fucking video game. Like they're in a movie.
The question remains with Spring Breakers though: Is Harmony Korine judging his self-centred sociopathic protagonists? I say a fervent 'Nay!'. Other reviewers have happily and hypocritically labelled this as a scathing indictment of today's irresponsible youth. No surprise there. At the core of the human condition lies pure selfishness. We blame our parents for the imperfect world they left us, then we condemn our own children for conforming to the imperfect world that we create for them. But the world doesn't systematically alter according our wishes or expectations. It simply is.
The human race is pure pageantry and Korine has never been afraid to be a float in this garish parade. He presents our sleazy side, but also happily flashes us his wife's tits to show that he's down here in the quagmire with the rest of us. And yes, we're left with the neon bikinied vision of our unlikely anti-heroines, striding with assuredness away from the bullet-riddled, cornrowed corpse of Alien. The romanticised image of thug life superceded by a new breed of sociopath; one armed with lax conscience, confident strut, immaculately waxed pussy and Daddy's platinum card.
Perhaps you could criticise Spring Breakers for the fact that it lives and breathes entirely in the here-and-now and offers nothing predictive; no inevitable downfall for our dancers after the funereal waltz ends. Time always marches on. The optimism of the '60s gave way to the pessimism of the '70s. The decadence of the '80s begat the simplicity of the '90s. You can only surf atop a wave for so long, before it crashes. The current decade rolls on from the last, reaching tsunami highs. One thing's for sure: When this tidal wave of luxury finally crashes, it's gonna bury those who rode it for so long.
But Korine plays his true hand in the movie's most epochal moment - the Britney Spears karaoke scene, where it moves beyond Kids and Scarface territory. The point where it stops being the millenial edition of The Great Gatsby. Soulless treacle and empty profundity are presented at its most sincere. Superficiality and psychopathy melded to create a thing of pointless beauty. Excess in no way presented as recrimination, but as pure celebration. Welcome to the 21st century. Sentiment is dead emotion outside of its transient worth. Immediacy is all. Fuck context. Fuck consequences. Fuck the future. This is the fucking apocalypse, baby, and it looks goooood. Sprang Break, y'all.
I'm a poor man, so I can't afford to sniff lines of coke off hooker's asses. I've never been to a party, and I'm not a ladies man at all. I don't care about living gangsta, driving fast cars, or fucking. This movie is far from my lifestyle, but god damn it if I find it a blissful experience everytime. Almost like a drug.