Spring Breakers
(2012)
Harmony Korine’s latest has received a fair deal of critical
fanfare. To be honest, it was the sole factor that eventually persuaded me to
give it a look; I’m not an enormous fan of his oeuvre, but fair play to those
who find his work rewarding and challenging. I probably should have trusted my
better instincts, as this deconstruction of a youth culture transfixed and
tranquilised by sex, drugs, and gun culture surprises only with quite how bereft it is of substance.
To be highly cynical for a moment, Korine’s decision to
manufacture this critique through the medium of four actresses (including his
missus, 13 years his junior) clad, at best, in bikinis for the duration seems
like your classic opportunistic method of making an artistic statement. It’s
about something really significant, you know. It just happens that the means of
communicating this message requires prodigious amounts of ripe young flesh to
be bared.
The plot, such as it is, involves four empty-headed college
girls (one of whom, Faith, Selena Gomez, is troubled by an unwholesomely
religious home life) out to have some fun for spring break. Which it seems is
when copious quantities of college kids gather on sun kissed Florida beaches
for all manner of misbehaviour, indulgence and carnality. Three of them (Vanessa
Hudgens’ Candy, Ashley Benson’s Brit and Mrs Rachel Korine’s Cotty,) get
together the necessaries for the jaunt by robbing a local eating establishment,
displaying the vigour of ones brought up on a diet of Tarantino movies. Once they've reached their destination they
have a jolly good time, accompanied by alternately thumping dance anthems (at
their party parlours) and dreamy Cliff Martinez ambience (for post-raving
dalliances). Much of the latter is accompanied by Faith’s slightly touched,
idealised version of their jaunt; in itself this seems an attempt to homage the
folksy charm of Malick’s Badlands.
Then the quartet end up in the slammer, after a particularly hard night on the
disco biscuits (actually, I’m not sure we see them indulging those), and are
bailed out by self-styled white gangsta Alien (James Franco, enjoying himself
immensely; there’s absolutely no way an audience could appreciate the actor’s
performances as much as he himself does).
At which point Korine, after a mind-numbingly dull first
half hour, at least has someone animated to secure our attention. Franco, no
doubt improvising like a maniac, pronounces his peace-loving, gun-toting agenda
with a rhetoric that quickly grows tiresome (there’s only so much of him
exclaiming “Look at my shit” one can
take, however ironically conceived). Of
course he watches Scarface on
repeat. Ever since New Jack City the
film has been a meta-reference of a meta-reference. And a Britney Spears song
is the very definition of “inspiring”.
It’s not really all that clever, y’all. It isn’t long before Faith heads home,
because “I have a really bad feeling
about this”. If only Gomez had such prescience before signing on to
Korine’s mentally challenged minorpiece.
Korine, “cleverly” using genre cliches, ensures that Alien
is engaged in some sort of turf war with a former best pal (Big Arch, Gucci
Mane). Alien’s, and the girls’, American Dream turns nasty, after which Cotty
too heads home. Left with his two best “bitches”
Alien elects to take revenge on Arch, at which point the ruthlessness
proficiency of Candy and Brit, first seen during the robbery, manifests itself.
This is the bit where the characters, unable to define themselves outside the
fictional worlds of the idols they imitate, embrace the life of the movie-movie
third act. Do you see?
The most arresting aspect of Spring Breakers is Benoît Debie’s photography. His work on the
underrated Mel Gibson starrer (not many of those around these days) Get the Gringo was also highly
distinctive. Here he infuses the environment with an eye-popping wash of
primary colours, emphasising the disconnected blanket of unreality that informs
these girls. The visuals deserve unqualified praise, but serve to emphasise
that Korine has no engine beneath the hood. A pointed rebuke of corrupting
influences on the youth of today and their gradual descent into sociopathic
abandon? He’s only revisiting a much-explored topic that each aging generation
fixates on (we can’t understand the new kids on the block, each successive new
generation is worse than the last), whether to venerate (Bonnie and Clyde). If he’d explored this through something a little
less obvious, and a lot more focussed, he might have been on to something. But
fixating on rap culture and gun fetishisation is faintly “Oh, really. Again?” But,
since we know he’s such a profound artist, we can be confident that the
decision to adorn his bikini babes in ski masks and Uzis was a purely ironic
act.
There might be something worthwhile to be said about the
saturation fetishisation of the kick-ass female in contemporary culture, a
consequence of the influences of both Cameron, Whedon and Tarantino on the film
and television landscape. They’ve worked hard to reconfigure baser male traits
and propensities have into a normalised and celebrated depiction of the female.
There’s a perverse message of empowerment whereby it is seen as an advance to
embrace masculine impulses and violent tendencies. It’s a self-congratulatory,
masturbatory act on the part of such stylists; a way to impress the chicks.
Maybe there’s a slight sense that Korine is tilting at such deranged glamorisation,
but not nearly enough to consider it a treatise.
At least Korine’s film is mercifully brief, and yet it still
feels longer than it is due to the slipshod construction. It has the air of
something he formulated on the back of napkin and then laboured (not hard
enough) to make some kind of sense from in the editing suite (there are endless
montages, far beyond the point where it suggest a master plan). None of the
girls make much impression, aside from for obvious reasons (but don’t you see,
that’s the point; oh, how clever you are Harmony!) Franco is Franco; the
campaign for Oscar recognition didn’t take, but I suspect that’s more because
most people are heartily sick of the sight of the ubiquitous cheesemonger (I’m
beginning to suspect there are several James Francos, all engaging in the same wretched
performance art for our unedification). Hats off to the advertising department,
though; they turned this thing into a hit. So Korine’s ruse worked (in his
words, to “do the most radical work, but
put it out in the most commercial way”). He succeeded in “infiltrating the mainstream” (what a
daring darling guerrilla you are, Mr Korine). If only he’d hoodwinked us into
seeing something of any merit.
**