(You never looked so cute killing people)
Ae Padilla
If I had known exactly what Spring Breakers was would I have watched it sooner?
In the five years since the instant “cult” classic debuted I developed a fuzzy idea of what this film was despite one single trailer view. In my head it was a combination of Gigli, Showgirls, and Crossroads – lacking of any substance apart from the questionable acting talents of its four leads – who started their career on the Disney Channel because they were approachable cute kids and stuck around because they became hot adults. Would there be talent in the film to some small degree? Probably. But actual movie time merit? Probably not.
Now that I’ve finally seen it I contemplate my present day film-watching self. I like to believe my taste has been furthered along by the countless film analysis lectures I’ve sat through and mindful separation of Garden State as a “great film,” but in reality with the wave of my un-ironic YouTube watching it has probably gotten worse.
Right off the bat the first thing about Spring Breakers is that it feels dated. I picture myself watching it “back then” with a different set of eyes. It’s simple, but too much time has passed. Now before the opening credits end I want to yell to the young faced Selena Gomez: Do not go back to Justin! I want to tell James Franco not to be an inappropriate sleaze. I want to warn the pink-haired girl she will not be famous.
But alas without my tidbits heard, a story starts.
The film opens with a gratuitous amount of exposed breasts and women being sprayed with copious amounts of beer (implied by the way the cans are held to be ejaculation from men’s penises). In this one shot I know everything that this will end up being. Trashy, over the top, unbelievable. Because I’ve participated in spring break Florida style and even I, as a woman, haven’t see that many nonchalant tits in my life.
The feel, mood, whatever experience you want to call it only gets better when we meet the girls (women?) we will spend an hour and thirty eight minutes with which surprisingly ends up feeling both simultaneously like microwave minutes and not enough time in the same watch.
There is a faith based girl named Faith (Gomez) who smokes like she’s the protagonist of a DARE skit. There’s a promiscuous girl named Cotty (who you instantly know is promiscuous because of her pink tresses) (Korine), a stereotypical “bad” girl named Britt played by Pretty Little Liars Ashley Benson and Vanessa Hudgens, “Candy” who spends so much of the film covered by her dyed blond hair that virtually anyone could play her.
When I introduce the girls like this, I know the writers, producers, director knew what they were doing down to the cast’s names. It’s the way the cinematographers and visual art directors knew and perfected their own job, the people who who succeeded in capturing a world not too dissimilar to Avatar – a florescent dream which will never match up to real life but that you somehow end up feeling strangely attached to long after you turn off your television.
Everything is an exaggeration. Everything is a fist full of colors. Which of course is the point.
The parody, representation, the feigned ideals of what Millennials (and most people want) all before Millennial hating was a thing. A type of non-consequential Wonderland.
I’ll be honest. As I said before I had no idea what Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers was about before my watch. Not only did I manage to forgo any accidental five minute viewing my extent of the movie’s plot was: four college students rob a store to afford the week-long American quintessential spring break trip.
It’s easy to see how I thought the villains could have been the quartet. And yet in the illuminated sparkly world the girls reside in it just as easily could have been the characters we would meet along the way who pushed them to partake in acts against their will. Or even the people in their lives who raised and influenced them to turn to such extreme measures. The “others” who brought them up to be, whether they intended to or not, extreme caricatures of humans.
But in the context of this film these people did not exist. At least not as one physical being. And honestly it’s kind of hard to feel bad for anyone, no matter how much they are adorned with neon, when they continuously complain about a lack of funds for recreational activities as they snort coke off each other’s stomach.
Ugh. Writing it is as bad as watching it.
These are barely legal women who waste their education and livers to a point where I (someone who wasted away their own education and liver) wants to smack the “just trying to find myself” Ashley Benson in the mouth.
Britt is nothing more than a rich spoiled girl who finds herself as hit-man #1 in a series of assaults. Prior to her metamorphosis she represents everything a privileged student has and will be: she hates her town (by extension her life) and a week of partying with no consequences is just what she needs so that she can inevitably regain focus and become the lawyer or accountant she’s actually destined to become.
When I view the protagonist from this lens is the whole movie perhaps just a direct attack on the notion of spring break as an escape from escape? A commentary on how ridiculous the “holiday” is? An exploration on the overlooked acts of college students who will one day be the members of society we look up to?
It’s a theme, sure. But it’s not a theme as blatantly embedded and displayed as violence. And in this film violence is everywhere.
Because the brutality of this whimsical progressing road trip flick to the shifting ruthless juxtaposition that encapsulates a classic like Goodfellas is unmistakably important. Equally so is the fact that the perpetrators of this gritty violence are three Barbies and their Hispanic friend who is so white they probably forget that she’s not white.
I was shocked (why was I even surprised at this point by anything the script threw my way?) at not only the ease of escalating violence by the trio but by the reactions of the women to their own violence.
If Britt was a real person she would probably be diagnosed as a sociopath but in this world, at least until she burglarizes a restaurant, she’s simply a brat who gets off on the idea of scaring innocent people. A barking dog with no bite. Right up until she turns a corner.
I can’t be the only one who wanted Faith to say something like “that’s shitty to do to people” when she found out the extent of how much the girls/criminals disregarded people’s feelings while committing an atrocious felony. Perhaps I was so angry at this lack of conversation because I myself wanted to see if given the time to really think about it…they did regret what they did.
Almost at the edge of asking, Faith ultimately succumbs to her pathetic as she is brave character. She says nothing and in an instant we are left with no repercussions for that act but all the money they acquired and the potential activities they can partake in with their winnings. “Rich people” pastimes. Partying, shopping, buying expensive alcohol, buying expensive scooters blowing so much bank I am almost…jealous.
Like when I see the money that all too many celebrities and “personalities” have for the price of being fake, I begin despite their lack of authenticity, to feel a rapid reliability to the dream the girls have. As they acquire more monetary value they hurt and humiliate more too (ultimately to sickening levels). But they have it all. Everything you would be hard pressed to find a Millennial or Gen Z not want. A pot of gold without the search for the rainbow.
The importance of that envy I have and venture to say most people would is that the viewer [me] still feels it even if they are sufficiently aware of how the girls aquired the money.
As a culture we will glamorize violence (even if we exclude ourselves from accountability in relation to the violence) if, and only if, it provides financial results and unmistakable swag. We will most especially applaud that violence if it is at the hands of white busty blonds.
I don’t know if that’s giving too much credit to a film that wants to make us believe a judge would allow college students to get arraigned in skimpy bikinis.
But Spring Breakers is smart.
I’m willing to let itself believe it even knows how white it is although I’m skeptical if it knows (again people love white violence – think Breaking Bad) exactly how cringy the full development of violence and subsequent execution on the few people of color in this film is.
It’s one inquiry in a a list of endless inquires.
See I have questions about his movie, boy do I have them. Most that will never be answered and most that shouldn’t be.
Like how many fucking days have gone by in this break? Why is Alien’s house so ugly that with a hundred dollar Target gift card I could remodel it? (I think I know the actual answer to this but I still need to ask it anyway.) And why the fuck are these girls always naked with each other? Granted my group of close female friends tops off out about five people and we all don’t spend every waking minute together but I’m pretty sure that our fictitious spring break would not suddenly awaken a deep need to lick each other’s navels.
Still one of the main questions I come back to, mostly because its lined with fury, is why the fuck do the white girls get to kill black men (who historically as a race gets so commonly trashed on for their perceived violence in a community)? I mean I know I’m not supposed to be rooting for them to flawlessly carry out their plan but I’m definitely not supposed to be rooting for drug dealer Big Arch, although by drug dealer laws (I’ve just made up) he did lay down claim to his neighborhood first.
Throughout the climax of ricocheted bullets why am I supposed to accept that Alien is due his avenge from a duo of women who, while gaining their agency through plucking a fake cock simulated as a gun into his mouth, get to drive that actual gun into a dangerous black man all the while hopefully sparing the, again, NAMELESS black women (the audience is not supposed to care about) before jetting off to be Bonnie and Clyde.
Is race in relation to the stories we can tell about people the deep meaning that Harmony Korine so desperately wanted from us? Is it that like with romanticized felons Bonnie and Clyde we too can only be told a story about delinquents if it is told this way? A sad, pretty, harmless way that wants you to forget about the fact that firearms blow off your head the same way even if they are used by sexy women?
Who knows? I’ve already established Spring Breakers has a lot of question with not too many answers. But there is value in the discussion of glorification – most of all escapism – the ability for some people to lose themselves in their new lives while still maintaining hold of their old one.
It is the truest fact that a subset of humans get the privilege to return to their lives after making mistakes without the hindrance of being completely defined by them.
It’s SO MUCH but the whole story is also taking place in the paradise setting of “too much.” It’s capable of being a million different things at once. It’s dumb and ingenious, deep and ditsy.
It’s sexist while shining a light on sexism, particularly in the multi-layered sequence where misogynistic rapper Alien gets on his knees and sucks his own gun (presented as a cock) from the girls hands. In a story that Alien has hijacked (IE the main plot was what will the girls continue doing during their vacation?) Britt and Candy manage to take their story and agency back (if only for a moment.) The two dominate the satirical Riff Raff. They “make him more of a man” by forcing him to show gratitude in a stereotypical demeaning way that women often partake in in songs, porn, even the beginning of Spring Breakers itself.
In that tense moment moment where Alien is controlled (literally choking on his own firearm), Alien is “put in his place”, Alien is set free from the conditions he puts on himself, the idea of achieving success he is not quite sure of. The idea of being a man he thinks is equated with media manhood. Money, girls, and guns. Fucking females and not being fucked by them.
If the whole scene didn’t make to so uncomfortable I would have applauded.
I know there is more to say about the film. But a borderline thesis on Spring Breakers feels useless. I’m sure any insightful think-pieces are keeping company with the likes of London Olympics articles and “what Facebook going publicly actually means for you.”
Basically, it’s been too fucking long since it came out. And this angsty teen drama isn’t Citizen Kane.
Although I will definitively say if I ever watch this film again ill absolutely discover more problematic themes but with it more beautiful visuals and nuggets of cultural criticism. I don’t do drugs but goddamn I wish I had for this gem. Of course if I do see it again I’ll probably ready myself with a pack of Q-tips to stick into my ear every time Alien’s continuous “Springggg break” pours out of his grilled mouth and every time I am subjected to the never ending “scardey pants” (that I as a twenty-six year old adult should even write this means kudos to you Benson for saying it non-stop.)
I also still have Franco’s acting to dive deeper into and the internal question to answer of whether or not Alien is the saddest character of all, searching for meaning like all of us but succumbing to the superficial human he is. Losing himself in that “too much.”
Living his (spray painted gold) “American dream,” which this film highlights lies not in comfort as it has until recently but in excess.
We’re the girls, Alien, the “regular” partying college students, even the customers at the diner searching for the American dream? As I have frequently said, is the updated American dream (what Korine believes it to be): your Benz parked in your compound separated by your iron gates — no white picket fence in sight?
And finally I could not finish this piece without discussing and taking a deeper look into Britney Spears who presents a sort of glue and finality by being vocally wedged into one of the most iconic scenes of this film I don’t even have to describe because you know it.
Coincidentally my favorite song by Spears is “Every time.” One because its beautiful and two because I like any song I can cry to.
But if I knew nothing about the plot of this movie then how could I know about the joy and terror of having my pop princess’ melody as the background to a serendipitous mirage of madness?
My life now will always be pre and post the mystical number. The Palms hotel will be replaced with a representation of life that is so stupid, smart, an almost parody of itself you have to stare at in its entirety before you realize that the girls with the pink masks and matching one pieces are a beautiful vice. A Britney themselves who at the time of this films release was dealing with an unhealthy mental state (remember the shaving head incident?) we all unashamedly made fun of her for.
But she came back. After the film. Ironically with a show in Las Vegas. Popularity better than before.
No matter the calls to their mothers I’m not sure I could say the same redemption would happen for Britt, Candy, and Cotty. I don’t know where their comeback story lies.
Then again maybe these characters exist in a vacuum of a luminous drop. To think about them in the real world, the one they can escape from but we never fully can is a disservice to them and a crushing reality check for us. They are pop stars on a stage. Out of grasp. People we watch high. Beyond rules. And us.
Spring Break Forever.
aepadillablog 