With scantily clad (and often topless) college girls, endless amounts of booze/drugs, and the sunny Florida beaches, Spring Breakers was advertised as fitting smugly into the male pornographic fantasy. Korine lures us in with images of sex, violence, and money, then immediately pulls the floor out from underneath our feet, sending us on a downward spiral into a feverish madness which leaves us in utter shock and disgust. This is the magic of Spring Breakers.
The opening scene sets the tone for the entire film. There's a party on the beach, awesome. Everyone's drunk and having a great time, fantastic. Or so one would think. This short 2-minute intro contains all the elements society has prodded us to pursue: wealth, attractiveness, sexual virility; but the images presented fill us with disgust and invite us only to laugh awkwardly as a random set of breasts shake in our faces and women get drenched in alcohol. It is utterly shocking and incomprehensible in our current state of mind. Korine systematically brings us into his world.
The themes become more apparent when we're introduced to the main characters of the film: Candy, Cotti, Brit, and Faith. These hyper-sexualized college girls have no interest in education, but care only for partying, sex, and men. Countless minutes of the screen-time are used to watch the girls caress and kiss eachother while they're more-or-less completely exposed; a concept which on paper would seem arousing, but gives its viewers an uneasy feeling that something is just wrong. This feeling continues as we watch the girls rob a restaurant and laugh as they count the money on a bathroom floor only wearing bras and panties. The casting of former Disney starlets serves to build on the sense of absolute moral perversion.
The film continues on with the girls arriving in Florida, participating in debaucherous acts, and the getting bailed out of jail when they are arrested in the act of said debauchery. Throughout, the girls wear nothing more than neon bikinis and repress fear by "just pretending it's a videogame". Korine invites us to question frequent alternative realities and the unlimited transcendental quality of forgetting ourselves in the moment. Not to mention the entire film is edited with constant flashbacks, overly repeated dialogue, and the the constant mantra, "Spring break forever, Bitches." By the time the credits arrive, the words of these characters have faded into banality and emphasis the insanity of their overly sexed and overly violent debauchery. It's unsettling how characters fade in and out of the film without much significance or meaning to their existence at all.
Hedonism brought them to the beach and it's hedonism which keeps them there with the appearance of Alien. He offers them all the cars, drugs, and money they could ever want, but at the cost of being in the spring break mindset forever. Perhaps Alien is the full realization of a spring break which lasts longer than just a week. He's embroiled in a constant, violent struggle for money by any means necessary; suggesting that the spring break lifestyle is a brief reprieve, but is ultimately unsustainable. As girls disappear from the narrative one-by-one, the relationship between Alien and his new found "loves" thickens in a haze of Brittney Spears, guns, and My Little Pony hoods. Korine suspends all sense of reality by taking the initially alluring aspects of spring break to an extreme. He turns nihilistic, fun-loving females into gunslinging sex mongers. The transition is so subtle that we're not sure if Alien inspired the behavior or if it existed inside the girls the entire time. Moral depravity abounds, but in the most gruesome and disturbing ways possible.
I feel like an entire tome could be written about this film without reaching any precise conclusion. There's an air of mystery, emphasized by repeated dialogue and flashbacks, which makes time and space difficult to comprehend and leaves the entire film shrouded in moral and political ambiguity. By focusing on the ritualized spring break, Korine criticizes our shallow and over-sexed society, while taking us for a ride through the insanity of a full-blown hallucination. Confusion and irrationality are praised. Korine could be making any number of arguments about youth culture, hedonism, and morality in the 21st century, but I dare not to begin naming them for fear the list would never end.
While this film is definitely pornography, it's anything but a fantasy. It's deep, disturbing, socially-significant, and, ultimately, artistic. We leave the theaters sickened with ourselves, our alcohol-drenched rights of passage, and the exploited human body in a way that only Korine could instill in us.
