Film Carew: Spring Breakers

If Spring Break is a rite-of-passage for every American college kid, then the Sell-Out Commercial Movie is a rite-of-passage for every young American auteur. Most leap at the cash sooner rather than later; and, even if they do hold out for a while - like, say, David Gordon Green, who made three auteurist pictures in the South before heading West for those glittering dollars (and a risible career since) - they eventually cross over to the dark side and never come back. Harmony Korine has held out longer than most, and held out hard. His oeuvre stands as one of the most defiant, debased, repellent, and confronting in the history of cinema; a run of prurient provocations that play as profane performance-art, and work by their own obnoxious logic.

Gummo is a transcendent piece of delirious grotesquerie, all bacon duct-taped on walls and spaghetti slurped outta shit-brown bath-water; Julien Donkey-Boy is the most cinematically-beautiful Dogme movie ever made (which is maybe faint praise, or maybe triumphant praise; even I'm not sure); Mister Lonely's mocking celebrity-delusions don't disguise the fact it's a sweet valentine to Korine's hero, Werner Herzog; and Trash Humpers (whose poster infamously featured a masked man sitting on the toilet) is a masterclass in trolling, a fuzzed-out fuckaround shot on decomposing VHS that creates a climate of utter annoyance, blares it out at fever-pitch, and dares you to question your own revulsion. Throughout, off-screen, as pseudo-celebrity in his own right, Korine has played the bumbling clown, the cracked-out prince of Indiedom out to stick his fingers in various pies and light-sockets: his 1999 SSAB Songs CD, made with the future members of Gang Gang Dance, hit fried-freak-folk and concrète collage in a fashion comparable to - and perhaps influential on - early Animal Collective; his book, Crack-Up At The Race Riots, splattered a gonzo collage of droll poetry, celebrity mockery, and fitful genius filled with worship for David Berman; his run of Letterman appearances were gleeful pieces of comic precision cloaked in the played-up persona of a guy who'd just been freebasing backstage (which he may've actually been, when not rifling through Meryl Streep's purse).

One of these young ladies is actually a good Christian...

Spring Breakers, Korine's fifth film, is his crossover moment. It's a success in a manner that Hollywood suits recognise: it made more box-office cash in its first week than the rest of Korine's entire filmography has in total. It's his most colourful, coherent, commercially-accessible work, filled with plentiful concessions to a wider-audience - mostly in regards to editing, but definitely in terms of narrative - that Korine has never dabbled in before (unless you want to count the script for Kids he wrote in three weeks as a teenager, which he probably wishes you wouldn't). Yet, all this is comparatively speaking, seen in relation to Korine's cracked, crooked, cockheaded, crackheaded career. Within the sausage-factory of the American movie industry - wherein Korine is now, somehow, playing - Spring Breakers feels like an act of cinematic terrorism, going off like a stick of dynamite, sending all the pig guts and offal and blood and sawdust spraying against the factory walls, whooping with delight as it does. Compared to something as casually-misogynist but culturally-unthreatening as the witless, joyless, gay-panic, boys-gone-wild college-com 21 & Over, Korine's movie-for-the-masses is operating in an entirely different realm; a piece of pestering, provocative, porny cinema that carries a sense of artistic daring, ideological danger, and outright hostility unheard of in Hollywood's culture of market-researched committee-thinking.

As its title attests, Spring Breakers throws itself headlong into the bacchanalian orgy of Florida-in-March. Korine isn't out to glorify or demonise the revellers; even if, dragged out to slow-motion crawl and blasted with Skrillex, he's happy to making mocking sport of them; the filmmaker, as a child of the '90s, someone for whom irony is second-nature. Korine shoots them with a meta-21st-century style that functions as one long montage; a cacophonous mash-up of Girls Gone Wild, gonzo porn, The Real Cancun, R&B video-clips, MTV Cribs, and Scarface that doesn't so much gawp at its endless reams of lithe bodies, more hatchets them up into one long glassy-eyed fever-sequence, a pointillist mosaic in constant motion, flickering with vacant digital detachment. Whilst it has the most identifiable narrative of any Korine movie - a bunch of college kids from nowheresville, Tennessee bus it down to St. Petersburg, end up falling in with James Franco's hustler/rapper/gangsta/wigga, and cross various lines of legality - the film does anything but play as a straight story. Instead, its flurries of collage are filled with foreshadow, repetition, reiteration; circling around the same moments from different positions, flashing forward and back, in a fluid, almost-liquefied style that is as restless as teenagers, as ephemeral as youth, as fleeting as a mid-semester holiday, as tangible as the tide pulling out to sea. Underneath this swimming, slippery cinematic daydream are structural anchors; the basic narrative that makes this film, freeform as it is, a recognisable commercial entity. Yet, even this structure is irregular.

Selena ain't no Disney film star anymore...

The film begins by introducing us to its girls-gone-wild: four friends desperate to get outta town; tired of staring at the same gas-station, the same people, the same shit. Selena Gomez arises, from amidst a pack of lookalike bottle-blondes (whose ranks include fellow former-childstars Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson, plus Korine's real-life wife, Rachel), as the audience's character of identification; a good Christian girl who goes along on the trip, but not along with everything; who indulges in the rampant vice whilst never committing to it; who views Franco's grill'd clown with a sceptical frown. She is, in short, the moral compass. Yet, after the first act, she leaves on a bus, never to be seen again, and the shift is symbolic: morality has been sent home, now immorality reigns. This is, structurally speaking, incredibly rare; and you wonder if it's the most oblique imaginable reference to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho: Gomez, like Janet Leigh, an ethically-conflicted woman descending into purgatory, desperate to undo the damage and condone for her sins; before the film abruptly dispatches this would-be main character, then gets into bed with the psychotic of the piece. Which makes Franco, roughly, Anthony Perkins by way of RiFF-RaFF; a boy's best friend no longer his mother, but his firearms.

Once the film becomes Francofied, it starts to turn a little more Korine-like; with the endless repetition of dialogue - “it feels like a dream”; “look at my shiiiit”; and, of course, his deathly growl of “spring breaaaaak”, which turns the partier's holler into a zombified moan - less like attempts at catchphrases, more like the shit-stirring, audience-baiting, nonsense-rhyme shrieks of those Trash Humpers (“Shake it! Bake it! Don't fake it!”). In his mock-gangsta drawl (“why you actin' 'spicious?”), Franco whispers sweet, silly nothings in the audience's ear, voice afloat on the washes of montage; Korine spinning seemingly every line over and over. Most filmmakers repeat things to make them meaningful, he does it to make them meaningless; each catchphrase having the hollow hot air of a hip-hop boast, escalating exclamations ringing routinely empty.

“Why you actin' 'spicious?”

With everything floating in these many-layered montages - photographs, voices, chronology - nothing ever takes place in a narrative 'present', ever exists in a cinematic 'reality', or has any gravity at all. It's not merely that Spring Breakers has no weight, but that it is weightless; drifting above the regular cinematic mores of morals, crisis, conflict, resolution. People do things that other dramas build around - break the law, get arrested, shoot guns, drive fast, take a bullet, indulge in vice, seduce, fuck, run, sing songs - but here it all feels detached, empty, barely-there. For some, this may be the result of Korine applying his dreamer's aesthetic to something resembling genre trash. Or, perhaps, of him being out of his depth: crime and gangstas seeming unreal, here, because they're so far from his reality. Yet, Korine's auteur status - which he hasn't yet turned in at the door— asserts that he's someone who understands making art with a central thesis, and the faint echoes of the incomparable Trash Humpers dare to suggest a companion piece.

Trash Humpers was Korine's VHS movie: evoking 'found-footage' horror; '70s performance-art; '80s home-movies; CCTV footage; the grim pallor of snuff films; the wobbling degradation of a nth generation dub. It had the dark, dank, dirty aura of the curtained-off backroom at a video-store, the covert feeling of bootlegs swapped by record collectors, perverts, and purveyors of occultism long before video went digital, let alone online. Spring Breakers is, despite being shot on 35mm, his digital riposte: playing with surreal palette of digital colour-correction and the high-gloss sheen of televisual entertainments; but, beyond that, the digital era's spiritual qualities. Never alighting for a single moment, the movie moves like someone flipping through the endless channels, scrolling and clicking online, skimming across the surface of everything, bored by the whole experience. It's been criticised as essential 'porn' by so many, in reaction to all that endless flesh, to its constant throb of desire. But there's nothing in here even resembling a traditional sex-scene, let alone actual fucking; instead, Korine captures the tenor of pornographied culture, of the generation who've grown up watching pixels bump-and-grind since pre-adolescence. Here, endless flesh isn't titillating, but banal; the rap-video pantomimes of copulation prosaic; the complete lack of inhibition mundane. In one scene, Gucci Mane sits in a bubbly jacuzzi, watching two buxom women in a shower make out for him, the look on his face one of sleepy disinterest. Spring Breakers never hits a climax, dramatically, like some sad masturbator in front of their screen, watching endless carnal acts with dead eyes, searching for something to arouse their seen-it-all-before, unexcited, overtaxed libido.

Time to cover up girls!

The film's characters may be barely-there - never fleshed-out, figuratively, as much as they literally have their flesh out - but they all share something in common: a lust for more that remains eternally unsatisfied, ill-gotten gains never enough. Franco intones, several times over, that his life of hustle has him living the “American dream,” yet the dream only leaves him yearning for more, a rapacious consumer chasing the dangled carrot of luxury, unable to buy the happiness that, since birth, advertising has promised him as being purchasable. In this way, the film becomes a portrait of greater American culture: Spring Break the Roman orgy of an empire in decline, the American dream turned capitalist nightmare; the Rise of the Idiots meets the Decline of Western Civilisation. Like a Gregg Araki movie, it gives us a parade of witless teenaged nihilists whose self-destruction has an apocalyptic, end-days desperation. But, here, they're less raging against the dying of the light, more going through the motions; all this marrow-sucking just a perfunctory living out of clichés As Seen On TV.  “Just pretend it's a video game, like you're in a fucking movie,” Benson exhorts her homies, and this is just that: a portrait of the Twitter generation, living life as an ongoing performance, a game of pretend, acting out what they've seen on their screens, what they've been sold as big dreams. Spring Breakers has no gravity, no reality, because this is life through the digital prism: what happens when people stop being polite, and start getting unreal.