SPRING BREAKERS
Sight & Sound, May 2013
by Simon Reynolds
An American tradition that dates back to shortly
after World War 2, Spring Break today
involves hordes of college students descending on Florida beach towns for
week-long bacchanals of binge drinking and bare flesh. Taking place in the gap between the second
and third terms of the academic year, Spring Break is essentially an amplified
version of what goes on every weekend at frat houses across America, especially
at those “party schools” where higher learning is not necessarily a priority
for the students. The only difference is the duration of the debauch, and the
fact that the revelers wear bikinis and thongs and trunks.
“Break” echoes
the idea of break time in the school day, when the children dash out of the
classroom and play free. Confusingly Americans use the word “school” where the
British refer to university. But that
does effectively capture the way that college, for most American middle class
kids, is merely an extension of high school – marginally more autonomous, but
still a time of grafting for grades and extra credit, all of which are entered
into a ledger whose final tally determines what kind of career you’ll have.
The first scenes in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers had me flashing on Chuck
Berry’s single “School Days”. This 1957 rock’n’roll classic juxtaposes the
dragging time of the classroom with the ecstatic release of the jukebox
joint: “Soon as three o'clock rolls
around/You finally lay your burden down... All day long you been wanting to
dance”. In the lecture hall, a
professor drones earnestly on about Jim Crow laws and the black struggle for
civil rights. Bored and restless, two
female students--Brit and Candy, played by Ashley Benson and Vanessa
Hudgens—amuse themselves by drawing an erection plus the slogan “I Love Penis”
on a sheet of paper and miming fellatio.
The salacious duo and their marginally less wicked
friend Cotty (Rachel Korine) are desperate to escape the college grind and get
away to Spring Break. So is their new
friend Faith (Selena Gomez), a virginal, goody-two-shoes type who’s in a
Christian youth group (“are you jacked up on Jesus?” asks the pastor) but who’s
being seduced off the path of righteousness by the charismatic Candy and
Brit. Only hitch is that, after pooling all
their cash, the four girls discover they don’t have nearly enough to get to
Florida.
Desire confronts a limit. But in the first sign that
Spring Breakers is set to ascend through stages of implausibility into sheer
fantasy, desire wills itself through.
The girls blindly grope their way past the impasse, almost seeming to
stumble on the solution: crime. The script, here and at other critical moments,
has an incantatory quality, phrases repeat and accumulate, like a magic spell. .
Bitching about their plight (“so tired of seeing the same things every
single day....”) the girls seemingly
hypnotize themselves into a volitional
state (“I’m not going to sit in the same classroom.. . we’ve been
stuck here... we’re getting out of here”). Stealing their poor old professor’s
car, Britt and Candy and Cotty rob a fast food diner and its working class
customers. Given their slight physiques
and girlish voices, pulling this stunt off requires whipping themselves into a
thuggish frenzy. “We can do
this... just fucking pretend like it’s a
videogame ... act like you’re in a movie or something.” The girls need to believe their own
make-believe. To make it to Spring Break, they break the law but also break
with Reality.
Because I’ve more in common with the professor than
with these tearaways, watching Spring Breakers I immediately thought of the Situationists:
their slogan “take your desires for reality,”
the pamphlet diatribe On the
Poverty of Student Life, the notion
of “the politics of boredom”. Above all, I thought of that widely daubed
graffiti of Paris 1968: “under the
pavement lies the beach”. “Pavement” (flat
functional surfaces guiding the citizen-consumer to the workplace or to the shops) representing mundanity, business as usual, “the poverty of
everyday life”. “Beach” (a
sandy, sunkissed playpen for kids and adults
temporarily reverting to childhood) representing the utopia of life as permanent vacation. Paradise
regained.
I’m afraid I also thought of Bakhtin: the notion of
the carnival, which has been defined as “an event in which all rules,
inhibitions, restrictions and regulations which determine the course of everyday life are suspended”. A
Medieval ritual in which the world is turned upside down in a potlatch of
pleasure, profanity and insubordination.
As it happens, “carnival” is a word that has new currency in American
pop culture through the massive success of Electric Daisy Carnival, the
brand-leader of the new breed of
festivals for EDM (electronic dance music). These massive weekend-long
dance parties combine the drugginess of Nineties raves with the non-hipster
appeal of Spring Break. But they also weave in aspects of fancy dress and
fantasia derived from Mardi Gras and
Cirque Du Soleil. The clothing worn by
devotees of Electric Daisy Carnival and similar festivals mixes super-sexed-up
(many of the girl-ravers are clad in lingerie, are barely more dressed than the
female cast of Spring Breakers) with kitschy-surreal accoutrements like fairy
wings.
Spring Breakers latches onto the EDM boom with its
soundtrack, partly the work of Skrillex, whose audio-visual spectaculars have
made him king of the new dance festival circuit in America. His tracks deftly
merge dubstep’s blaring bass-blasts with the hands-in-the-air builds and climaxes
of trance. But the overall effect betrays his past in the emo-punk band First
To Last: an electronic, digital-maximalist update of the moshing catharsis
offered by arena rock styles like nu-metal. EDM buzz phrases like “rage hard”
and the popular acronym-slogan YOLO ( “you only live once”) express a spirit of
embattled hedonism and lets-get-wrecked recklessness. My own term for this carpe diem attitude is NOW!-ism.
It has a formal corollary in the music and the videos, which offer a barrage of
sensational effects and non-sequential intensities: pop videos involving costume
changes and location shifts every five seconds, sampled phrases or rapped
lyrics that freeze-frame moments of
triumph, glory, excess, disdain,
euphoria.
Even more than its EDM tie-in, Spring Breakers references the mainstream radio sounds of
dance pop and gangsta rap. There are
several overt nods to Britney Spears, including the deliberate echo of Brit’s
name and a scene where the girls sing Spears’s breakthrough smash “... Baby One
More Time”. The arrival of drug dealer
and aspiring rapper Alien (James Franco) shifts the movie away from EDM’s
artificial elation and pseudo-communality and into hip hop’s fantasy world of
regal splendor and paranoia. Wearing
corn-rows and a grill of gold teeth, Alien takes the girls under his wing. Even
though he never learns about their foray into armed robbery, this
self-described “gangsta with a golden heart” recognizes them instinctively as
“motherfuckin’ soul-mates.”
Some of the key scenes involving Alien appear to
have been made expressly with the intention of being DVD-rewind favorites, to be
endlessly quoted and karaoke-performed by fans, just like the “say goodnight to
the bad guy” and “Say hello to my little friend!” scenes in Scarface. One of these sequences has Alien showing off
to the girls, repeatedly exulting “look
at my shit” as he points to the deluxe bed
(“that not a bed, it’s an art piece”)
and brandishes a bounteous array
of assault weapons.
Even before The
Sopranos, it was a cliché that gangsters like to watch gangster movies and are influenced by them: a feedback Moebius loop
of simulacrum shaping reality shaping simulacrum shaping... And sure enough, Alien points to his
flatscreen TV and says “I got Scarface on repeat!” Close on the heels of this
scene comes another would-be-classic candidate:
Brit and Candy grab some guns and turn the tables on their host. When
they orally “rape” him with the weapons, Alien responds like a true sport and
ardently sucks off the barrels. It’s an
echo of an earlier scene where one girl fills a water pistol with liquor and
ejaculates it into her own mouth.
Franco apparently based his character on a real-life
white rapper called Dangeruss. But why
Franco even needed a template is unclear, given that the white appropriation of
the Staggerlee archetype is one of the longest-running stories in popular
culture, from the Rolling Stones to Eminem.
Staggerlee is at once a historical legend and a recurring social fact:
the fantasy, realised at severe cost both to those who pursue it and to the
community they inhabit, of criminality as a life without limits. The gangster is a sovereign individual in a
world of peons and bureaucrats, someone whose existence is both regal (swathed
in luxury and prestige) and primal (a warrior’s life, shedding blood for
territory, vengeance and honor). Alien
embroils the girls in his struggle with rival gangster Archie, played by cult rapper Gucci Mane. On the surface, the emnity
is explained as a mixture of friendship betrayed and turf war (Alien threatening
Archie’s ability to put food on his family’s table). But at a subliminal level
the dispute is about symbolic capital: Alien’s appropriation of what belongs to the black gangster, his
stylization of rapacity, the lore and lingo he invented.
As Archie, Gucci Mane gets to utter the movie’s most
memorable line, when he praises the giver of a blow job with “you’re playing
Mozart on my dick, baby.” But for a
movie whose function is partly to give an adult edge to the careers of former teen-TV stars like Gomez and Hudgens,
there is a surprising deficit of actual carnality. Mostly what Spring Breakers is about is
sexual display. So there’s lots of bump ‘n’
grind dancing in the semi-nude, guys and girls sniffing coke off the flat
abdomens of girls and guys, and raunchy
talk: “the smell of money” makes a girl
wet, a coquettish and wasted Cotty
taunting a guy that he’ll never get the pussy.
But apart from Archie’s blowjob threesome, there’s just one actual sex
act. (Gomez, notably, has exited the storyline by this point. Clearly she was
only prepared to go so far in an R-Rated direction: she’s not involved in the
robbery, is never shown taking drugs or having sex, and doesn’t even swear
much).
As depicted in Spring Breakers, the participants in
Spring Break act out an idea of unbridled freedom and lascivious irresponsibility
that’s as convention-bound and repetitive as the regular, regulated
everyday life of which it’s a
carnivalesque inversion. Is that the
message of Korine’s movie? It’s hard to say: the director steadfastly refrains
from anything that might resemble judgement. As with his script-writing debut
Kids, you can take Spring Breakers as an indictment of youth today, a comment on how pop culture’s anti-social
fantasies contaminate real life. Or you can enjoy it as a (pretty softcore) wank-fantasy.
There’s a smidgeon of a hint of authorial irony in
the juxtaposition of squalor (a passed out girl in a
vomit-spattered toilet) with voice-overs
from the girls phoning their mothers to reassure them that they’re having a
great time, they’ve met so many wonderful people, “next year I want to come
here with you”. What’s disquieting about
these phone calls, which recur at various points and have that same incantatory
repetitiousness, is that you’re not sure if the girls are simply spinning a
line of bullshit (a thought to give jitters to anyone in the audience who’s
actually a parent). Could it be that they actually believe what they’re saying,
when waxing lyrical about how “it’s like paradise here... so magical... I’m starting to think this is
the most spiritual place I’ve been...
It’s way more than just having a good time”?
One of the voice-over lines crystallises the movie’s
theme: “it’s so nice to get a break from reality”. The point of carnival is that it’s
temporary. Faith wistfully beseechs “if
we could just freeze time, this is the way it’s going be forever, this moment”.
But she acquiesces to the school bell call of reality and like everybody else
heads back to college. The two really bad girls, Brit and Candy, don’t. They stay with Alien, who boasts “I live at
the beach all year around” and whose chanted “Spring Break, forever” is a recurrent
refrain. To actually live full time
without limits is psychosis. By the movie’s
end, the girls finally become videogame characters, indestructible. Toting
AK-47s, clad in pink balaclavas and yellow bikinis, they take down a small army
of seasoned street warriors.
Unlike with the earlier youth-gone-bad moves in
which nonentities take retaliation for the fate of boredom and anonymity that
their environment promises them—Bonnie & Clyde, Badlands, even ludicrous ram-raiding exploitation vehicle
Shopping—there is no comeuppance for these renegades from reality. The movie, which started out gritty and
naturalistic, ends up an oneiric art-movie dilation of the gangsta rap video, a
porno tone poem.
While watching Spring Breakers play out to its
morally unsatisfactory (in)conclusion, I thought finally of Marcuse’s concept
of “repressive desublimation.” Way back in the 1960s, the Frankfurt School associate
grasped that capitalism had an interest in creating wanton consumers, insatiable and impulsive. External constraints on our appetites for sex and destruction still
exist (police, law, social services, etc), but they are contradicted and
undermined by a consumer capitalism that erodes internal restraints like guilt
and inhibition, the ability to defer gratification, even the capacity for
linear thought. Stimulating desire and
narcissism, the economy’s interests collide with those of other political
structures like church, education, and family, all of which aim to channel
energy into long-term projects (“heaven” being the longest-term of them all).
Capitalism, advertising, and their bedfellow, pop culture have harnessed Romanticism not for repressive ends
(unrepression is precisely the modus operandi) but for the dissipation of
energy and the displacement of anger from any kind of political articulation.
When a pop star as bland as Katy Perry can sing, in
her #1 hit “T.G.I.F”, about binge-drinking past oblivion (“it’s a blackout
blur, but I’m pretty sure, it ruled”) and ménage-a-trois romps, it seems pretty
clear that excess is normative and “breaking loose” just another set of chains. Likewise, of Spring Break and Spring
Breakers, I found myself wondering: if this is the beach underneath the
pavement, what if anything lies beyond
the beach? Pop culture in its present
state has exhausted it point: its
incitements to poor impulse control and attention-deficit-disorder no longer threaten anything.
