Spring Breakers (2013)

Talking about my Generation, for better or for worse

Spring Breakers (2013)

The cast of Spring Breakers 

Spring Break has become synonymous in American pop culture, where college “kids” are let lose with no responsibility. Their week is filled with the taste of liquor and each other, a time in which they can escape reality and forget that real life is just around the corner. Harmony Korines “Spring Breakers” wants to escape reality not just temporarily but forever. Nothing about the film seems like it could be real, often simulating an extravagant lifestyle promoted by MTV in the 90’s.

Beginning promptly where most Spring Breaks do, Korine exaggerates a lavish celebration of excess, with men pouring whatever they can find onto whatever t-shirt or naked body they come across. Aptly the film continues by showing two students Candy and Brit (played with reckless relish by Vanessa Hudgen’s and Ashley Benson) in a lecture, bored and insinuating a sex act on a sheet of paper with a penis drawn on it. With its willingness to delve deep into the party, these scenes perfectly introduce us to what Korine has in store, with Cotty (Rachel Korine) and Faith (Selena Gomez) joining in the tale, which eventually leads them to James Franco’s Gangster rapper Alien, and hoping that the party will last “forever”.  Spring Breakers has been described as being about living in the moment, a physical impossibility, but Korine takes every opportunity to make this nightmarish vision of the American Dream seem just that.

At its best, Spring Breakers works when it flows with the rhythm of the music and care-free lifestyle of drugs, sex and booze, with Korine never grounding the film with a “moral point” and single handedly conforming and breaking the ideas of Laura Mulvey: of women being erotic objects for the characters and audience and having secondary, less interesting roles. In one scene, two of the characters take it in turns to humiliate Alien by making him perform an oral sex act on a gun, showing that in Spring Breaker’s it is the women who have control.  In fact, with Korine being able to delve into the exploitative edge of his subjects (including the audience to an extent), along with actively being able to critique them as well, he has created a nightmarish journey into the down fall of the American dream-a theme not uncommon to American cinema- but a vision that is shown to be as romantic as the tales of Jay Gatsby and as hollow as the dreams of Tony Montana, where the characters begin to believe in their own delusional fantasy of Spring Break “being the most spiritual place in the world”

Like any good night, the ending is never as good as the beginning. Scenes seemingly drag on repeat in an attempt to re-create the styling’s of a generic pop video, but little of it grabs your attention longer than a three minute music video. For fans of the director’s earlier work, most notably Gummo (1999) and Trash Humper’s (2009),will see this has disconcertingly conventional. However, with the use of talented cast, including an unexpectedly confident performance from Selena Gomez, and a soundtrack helmed by Skrillex, “Spring Breakers” is Korine’s most fully realized and most satisfying film, actively critiquing the culture which it is also conforming to.