Spring Breakers (2013)

Originally published in The Daily Nebraskan, 1/24/2013

Alien has tons of shit.

He’s got nunchuks. He’s got a really nice bed – excuse me – work of art. He’s got shorts in every damn color, Calvin Klein body spray, dark tanning oil, tons of sheeeiiit. And that's just his bedroom.

He has “rooms full of shit.” He believes life is all about big booties and money falling, y’all. He even has followers. He preaches to crowds of them once every year. Alien is even willing to die for what he believes.

“Spring Breakers,” the film in which Alien is a character, is one of the best that came out last year. It’s the latest work from Harmony Korine, whose previous film, “Trash Humpers” was shot on VHS and consisted of little more than him, his wife and his friends humping trash cans, talking to odd locals and breaking stuff.

That film is trash, but it’s beautiful trash (You’d be surprised what you can learn about a society by going through its garbage). It’s about strange, numb people living lives of quiet desperation in the mundane streets of Anywhere, USA.

“Spring Breakers” is like that. It wants us to care about people we don’t feel comfortable around, like the mindless, binge drinking party-girl or the mindless, macho jackass who flaunts his possessions to strangers. Aren’t they human beings, too? The genius of Korine’s work is that he manages to have it both ways: He criticizes and celebrates his subjects at the same time.

The film opens with a semi-music video for Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites.” It’s an exploitative montage of party people gyrating their bodies, flipping off the camera and grabbing their crotches, all in slow motion. “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” is the perfect song to open this movie. It contrasts light electronic hums with brash, loud bass droning, a contrast in tone that parallels Korine’s contrast of intent. These opening shots are repeated ad nauseam throughout the film.

The movie’s sun-bathed spring breakers want nothing more than to get loaded and have a good time; they’re hedonists, and Alien is their prophet. They’re enjoying themselves, and maybe they’re even happy. It’s an empty lifestyle that attracts vice and violence. They’re human beings. They’re shallow. All of these things are true, and the movie wants us to alternately condemn and celebrate the exploits of these characters.

Three of the four girls are basically interchangeable. Faith (Selena Gomez) stands out amongst her friends. She’s the “good” girl. Faith wants an escape as much as her friends. She just has a different kind of escape in mind. Her idea of “the best spring break ever” doesn’t involve getting arrested, bailed out by a fishy-looking thug named Alien (James Franco), then taken to a thuggin’ house party full of gangsta ass, well, thugs. Things get too real for her. Faith decides to drop out of the spring break odyssey, but not before Alien can express his love for her. Think about that – Alien, the prophet of spring break hedonism, conveys his devotion for Faith, the Bible study girl who tells her grandmother, “This is the most spiritual place I’ve ever been.”

The remaining girls become Alien’s disciples of sorts, brandishing assault rifles as they dance to his performance of Britney Spears’s “Everytime.” Alien calls Britney Spears “an angel if there ever was one on this earth.” He truly believes that. The scene itself is tender, but ridiculous. Heartfelt, but satirical.

“Spring Breakers” is surprisingly egalitarian. Alien, going against the grain of hip-hop culture, doesn’t subjugate the girls to the role of “hoes.” He treats them as equals, calling them his soul mates. He even enlists their strength in a series of robberies. It could be that he had an epiphany during the scene where Ashley Benson and Vanessa Hudgens turn the tables on Alien by making him fellate the barrel of a gun as though he were giving the two of them oral sex. This is the point where he declares them his soul mates.

One might pose that the film objectifies women. Or is it the women in the film who are objectifying themselves? What if that is what they want? (Bunuel’s “Belle de Jour,” a 1967 French story of daytime prostitution, comes to mind.) Benson and Hudgens seem perfectly aware of what they’re doing. Their characters are definitely strong enough to carry out their will, even if that will is in service of vice and greed.

As Alien says, “Some kids want to grow up to be president, be a doctor … I just wanna be bad.”
There’s more to this film than meets the eye, but the stuff that does meet our eyes is gorgeous. Korine told cinematographer Benoit Debie to make the film look like “a Skittles commercial on acid.” The score by Cliff Martinez and Skrillex is like a simmering cauldron of bass and electronic pomp. It’s meant to be an intoxicating experience. This is why lines of dialogue and images of writhing beach parties repeat themselves, like in a fever dream.

It’s a vicarious experience. There’s glamour and glory in crime and vice. If there wasn’t, movies like “Goodfellas” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” wouldn’t exist.

Better to work out those fevered dreams of being bad on the screen than on the streets.