I cannot recall the last time a movie of recent vintage has stayed with me, has burrowed its way into my brain, quite like Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers. It is an art film masquerading as an exploitation film, though one could easily make the case for the reverse. The film wallows in Spring Break cliches—drugs, booze, orgiastic intoxication, T&A. But in the process, it unleashes such sublime images and sounds, amounting to what Steven Shaviro describes as a “relentless audiovisual seduction.” Indeed, there are moments in the film that are unlike any I’ve ever before seen. Here are but a few that stick with me:
*Alien (James Franco) enumerating his bedrooms possessions with the refrain, “Look at my fucking shit,” but delivered with such brio that these common words sound as if they’d never been uttered before. It’s like MTV Cribs without the slightest pretense of humility: conspicuous consumption at its most crass. And Franco makes it absolutely alluring. [1]
*A diner robbery rendered in a single take from the passenger seat of the getaway car, which gives us only partial glimpses of the crime, and none of its sounds.
*A series of shots in which what I can only assume to be still photos of the protagonists digitally morph, encapsulating the blurred perceptions of the revelers.
But the ones that most enthrall me come in the latter third of the movie, and they are the ones I want to take up in the remainder of this post. These instances, I believe, are not merely isolated moments of intense affectivity for me, but are rather the culmination of what seems a quite purposeful design, the seeds of which were laid very early on in the film.
Much has been made of Korine’s casting of Disney pop-tarts Ashely Benson, Selena Gomez, and Vanessa Hudgens in such against-type, scandalous roles, but what is most striking to me is how indistinguishable the characters become.
Gomez, as Faith, is of course the obvious exception, her brown locks setting her off from the blonde trio. But this distinctiveness plays itself out in the narrative as well. Faith’s name is underscored several times throughout the film: Alien directly asks her for her name, and he is never seen doing so with the others; the character is introduced in, and thus aligned with, her evangelical Christian church; her friends frequently call her by name, especially when protesting her (relative) modesty and her decision to cut short her trip and return home. And with Faith gone, we are left with three blondes, all who resemble one another enough that, amid the throng, it becomes difficult to distinguish one from the other—at least for me, one who is largely unfamiliar with the stars and their earlier work.
Faith is given a level of specification that the other three women lack, for the film seems to go to great lengths to withhold their names. Faith refers to all three by name, but only when they are not present, thus never linking names and faces. And after four viewings, I note that Cotty (Rachel Korine) is only called by her name after she is shot in the roadside altercation with Archie (Gucci Mane), and she shortly thereafter hops the bus home and vacates the film. And by my count, Brit (Benson) and Candy (Hudgens) are only tied to their names once apiece.
This lack of individuation is made manifest when Cotty, Candy, and Brit forgo their own distinctly colored bikinis for matching swimsuits and pink ski masks in the film’s most stunning sequence, wherein Alien performs Britney Spears’ “Everytime” as the girls twirl and dance with shotguns and assault rifles, all intercut with slow-motion shots of them robbing and terrorizing others at gunpoint. Perched to the side of his piano, the three blondes appear as identical menacing bunnies, with only their two front teeth visible through the small mouth holes of the masks. It feels like something out of Godard.
But it should come as little surprise that these characters are so at home in masks, for there are few moments in which they aren’t performing. Aside from the loquacious Alien, very little dialogue transpires in the film, and what does is either highly elliptical or always already surrounded by quotation marks. That is, after their arrival in Florida, the few exchanges the women share are reenactments or performances: they drunkenly sing and dance Spears’ “Hit Me Baby One More Time” in a convenience store parking lot; Brit, Candy, and Cotty recreate the Chicken Shack robbery for Faith; and these three mime back to Alien everything he says to them (“yeah, we’re bad bitches”). The bullet that enters Cotty’s arm is the event that halts her performance and precipitates her departure from St. Petersburg. Candy and Brit, though, remain entirely opaque, and none of their actions ever reveal or even suggest what they really think about the things they see and the violence they perpetuate. Their interiority is entirely off limits to the viewer.
Anything that might distinguish or differentiate Brit and Candy is further elided in the film’s climactic gun fight at Archie’s compound. Shot under black light, their neon yellow bikinis and pink ski masks glow in the dark, but at the expense of their skin. They become blank, black slates [2], nothing but glowing tits and ass.
This battle—if even we may call it that, for no number of armed men are any match for Candy/Brit, who kill nearly everyone in sight but emerge entirely unscathed—is Spring Breakers‘ at its boldest, most alluring, and most terrifying, shifting us away the trailer’s promised carnality to carnage. It presents us with images of such sublime gorgeousness, such slick, colorful surface, and at the same time that it withholds any key to understanding why or how these young women are capable of such acts. It’s as if Korine is asking us, imploring us, to take a good luck at what hell such surfaces have wrought us. Look at this fuckin’ shit.
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1. My friend and colleague Cameron Kunzelman (of This Cage is Worms), who writes on video games, comic books, and “critical RiFF RaFF studies,” points out to me curious parallels between Franco’s “my shit” monologue and a much earlier YouTube video from white rapper RiFF RaFF. You can find much of Cameron’s commentary on RiFF here. For a story on RiFF RaFF’s lawsuit against the Spring Breakers producers, click here.
2. Richard Brody makes the astute observation that this moment marks the point in which the film’s racial politics become most apparent, as they white girls are made black in their attack on Archie and his all-black crew.