Le Socialiste
23rd March 2013, 07:24
I hadn't really paid attention to the trailers for this movie until I read these two articles (and others like them). Has anyone seen Spring Breakers? If you have, did you get a similar impression? I'd be interested in what people's thoughts are.
The spring-break setting is only a backdrop for a crime drama of shooting sprees and body counts—yet, in a way, that’s the point. “Spring Breakers” isn’t about spring break but about the reductio ad absurdum of spring break—a sort of week-long murder camp at the end of which, having snuffed out a sufficient number of lives (and if not snuffed out oneself), a student returns to college refreshed, reënergized, and reëducated or, rather (here’s Korine’s satirical point), finally educated in real competition and rendered all the readier for a career in business. Ultimately, the movie is a manual of competitive ruthlessness that offers the repeated banal definition of the drug dealer’s life as “the American dream.” (A definition given by the gangster himself, Alien—his real name, he says, is Al.) The movie suggests that its spring breakers—especially its two most audacious—are getting, guns ablaze, the education of their life, and that college itself is, rather, the permanent vacation where privileged young people stay clear of the raw realities of America.
Korine presents the divide in experience essentially in racial terms. Far from being his version of “The Hunger Games,” in which a young heroine is thrust into a killing system that she hates, the movie is Korine’s version of Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro.” Mailer argued that white “hipsters” seek to put themselves in the psychological and even practical position of American blacks by means of transgressive behavior (including crimes) that force them to confront the daily perils of the sort faced by blacks. The racial underpinning of the action in “Spring Breakers” is too blatant to ignore. First, the Tampa Bay spring-break scene is depicted as whiter than a Republican convention. Second, Alien tells the young women his revealing life story of growing up in St. Petersburg as the only white kid in his school, and he brings them to a pool hall where almost all the players are black. His former best friend and now deadly enemy, another local druglord, Archie (played by the rapper Gucci Mane), is black, as are the members of Archie’s crew.
Above all, Korine emphasizes the story’s racial aspect with a strange twist of visual invention that occurs at the story’s climax. When the two women—wearing bikinis and pink ski masks—arrive, armed and ready, with Alien for their raid on Archie’s compound, they cross a narrow bridge through a field of blacklight that turns their bathing suits fluorescent, makes their masks glow blue, and—most remarkably—greatly darkens their skin, in a cinematographic version of blackface, with light bulbs (or digital effects) taking the place of minstrels’ cork. Because the women are wearing masks, only their torsos and limbs are darkened—and I think that, if they hadn’t been wearing masks and if their faces had been darkened, the effect would have been far more apparent and widely debated. In the event, their masks don’t merely conceal their faces from their enemies or from the law—they hide the most drastic effects of the visual blackening to which Korine submits them. The director’s ultimate spring-break fantasy is a vision of murder camp—and of “black camp”—and he doesn’t make any effort to distinguish the two. The very mainspring of the movie is his stereotypical and reductive view of black life as one of drug dealing and gang violence.
The four young women are closed units whose sole connection to the wider world is in their deceptive phone calls to family members, a sweetened vision of kids socializing in a constructive way that’s as fake as the values of the parents or grandparents who fall for it. The ostensible truth of things—the drive for pleasure, the craving for money, the allure of violence—remains as hidden from relatives and professors as it does from respectable culture at large, whereas the entire throng of revellers—particularly the quartet of young woman and, especially, the two who join Alien in crime—are, for Korine, dans le vrai. Or, at least, they are so for the span of their spring break before heading back to their lives relatively unscathed. Those they leave behind, those who have no other life to get back to, have a heavier price to pay.
More here (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/03/spring-breakers-review.html).
One of the “extreme” aspects of the Spring Breakers world is the racial divide: On one side you have the hard-partying, white college students, and on the other, violent black gangsters—and one white guy, played by James Franco, who adopts the style of a particular section of black culture (including cornrows and a metal grill). While our bikini-clad protagonists—Faith, Cotty, Candy, and Brit—enjoy some drug-induced wildness with their overwhelmingly white peers, their penchant for violence separates them from the others, who just want to have fun. To fund their trip to Florida, Cotty, Candy, and Brit commit armed robbery with water pistols, aping the mannerisms and vernacular seen in films like Menace II Society and Paid in Full.
When they meet James Franco’s wannabe gangsta Alien later on, it appears to be a match made in heaven: They are drawn in by the way he’s “made it” as a white baller, with a lavish lifestyle and access to an ultra-violent world, populated seemingly entirely by black people. Alien and the girls, by virtue of their skin tone, are able to swiftly modulate between white mainstream culture and aspirations of the black gangsta lifestyle. (A giant poster of Lil Wayne hangs in the background of one of their dorm rooms; later they belt out Britney Spears in a parking lot.) Meanwhile, the black characters in Spring Breakers aren’t merely acting out the gangsta life—that’s just the way they are.
So should we understand this aspect of the movie as a “hyper-poetic” version of “the real world”? What, if anything, is Korine trying to say by showing dangerous white girls as anomalies among their peers but natural allies to a black “gangsta” lifestyle?
My sense? Not much. Korine may intend the obviousness of the racial divide to be provocative, but he fails to comment in any interesting way on this so-called “hyper-reality,” instead merely reproducing a racist vision of the world in which black lives matter less than white ones. This is most egregious in the final scene, in which, as Richard Brody points out, Brit and Candy don quasi-blackface thanks to a blacklight. Korine shoots the scene as if it were a video game with zero consequence: As Brit and Candy dodge in slow motion around the compound of Alien’s nemesis Archie (played by rapper Gucci Mane), toting guns to seek revenge for an earlier incident, the black characters fall instantly and with little fanfare. The bikini-wearing duo emerges unscathed.
Yet the moment that inspires this retaliation is presented much more realistically. One night, Archie and a gun-wielding female companion pull up next to Alien and the girls at a stop light. After a brief threatening exchange with Alien, who is uncharacteristically scared—proving he’s still not as “hard” as his black former ally—Archie drives off as the woman shoots at their car and hits Cotty in the arm. If only for a moment, the violence is utterly palpable and unfiltered by fantastical camera tricks. Later we watch Alien remove the bullet from her arm as she cries.
In this way, Spring Breakers is a mirror image of Django Unchained, in which the deaths of white slave holders in the Old South are treated with frivolity, while the deaths of their slaves are brutal and difficult to watch. Of course, the whole point of that movie is that slave owners deserved to die. What is the point of Spring Breakers?
I’m still not sure.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/03/22/spring_breakers_racist_harmony_korine_movie_with_j ames_franco_adds_little.html
The spring-break setting is only a backdrop for a crime drama of shooting sprees and body counts—yet, in a way, that’s the point. “Spring Breakers” isn’t about spring break but about the reductio ad absurdum of spring break—a sort of week-long murder camp at the end of which, having snuffed out a sufficient number of lives (and if not snuffed out oneself), a student returns to college refreshed, reënergized, and reëducated or, rather (here’s Korine’s satirical point), finally educated in real competition and rendered all the readier for a career in business. Ultimately, the movie is a manual of competitive ruthlessness that offers the repeated banal definition of the drug dealer’s life as “the American dream.” (A definition given by the gangster himself, Alien—his real name, he says, is Al.) The movie suggests that its spring breakers—especially its two most audacious—are getting, guns ablaze, the education of their life, and that college itself is, rather, the permanent vacation where privileged young people stay clear of the raw realities of America.
Korine presents the divide in experience essentially in racial terms. Far from being his version of “The Hunger Games,” in which a young heroine is thrust into a killing system that she hates, the movie is Korine’s version of Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro.” Mailer argued that white “hipsters” seek to put themselves in the psychological and even practical position of American blacks by means of transgressive behavior (including crimes) that force them to confront the daily perils of the sort faced by blacks. The racial underpinning of the action in “Spring Breakers” is too blatant to ignore. First, the Tampa Bay spring-break scene is depicted as whiter than a Republican convention. Second, Alien tells the young women his revealing life story of growing up in St. Petersburg as the only white kid in his school, and he brings them to a pool hall where almost all the players are black. His former best friend and now deadly enemy, another local druglord, Archie (played by the rapper Gucci Mane), is black, as are the members of Archie’s crew.
Above all, Korine emphasizes the story’s racial aspect with a strange twist of visual invention that occurs at the story’s climax. When the two women—wearing bikinis and pink ski masks—arrive, armed and ready, with Alien for their raid on Archie’s compound, they cross a narrow bridge through a field of blacklight that turns their bathing suits fluorescent, makes their masks glow blue, and—most remarkably—greatly darkens their skin, in a cinematographic version of blackface, with light bulbs (or digital effects) taking the place of minstrels’ cork. Because the women are wearing masks, only their torsos and limbs are darkened—and I think that, if they hadn’t been wearing masks and if their faces had been darkened, the effect would have been far more apparent and widely debated. In the event, their masks don’t merely conceal their faces from their enemies or from the law—they hide the most drastic effects of the visual blackening to which Korine submits them. The director’s ultimate spring-break fantasy is a vision of murder camp—and of “black camp”—and he doesn’t make any effort to distinguish the two. The very mainspring of the movie is his stereotypical and reductive view of black life as one of drug dealing and gang violence.
The four young women are closed units whose sole connection to the wider world is in their deceptive phone calls to family members, a sweetened vision of kids socializing in a constructive way that’s as fake as the values of the parents or grandparents who fall for it. The ostensible truth of things—the drive for pleasure, the craving for money, the allure of violence—remains as hidden from relatives and professors as it does from respectable culture at large, whereas the entire throng of revellers—particularly the quartet of young woman and, especially, the two who join Alien in crime—are, for Korine, dans le vrai. Or, at least, they are so for the span of their spring break before heading back to their lives relatively unscathed. Those they leave behind, those who have no other life to get back to, have a heavier price to pay.
More here (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/03/spring-breakers-review.html).
One of the “extreme” aspects of the Spring Breakers world is the racial divide: On one side you have the hard-partying, white college students, and on the other, violent black gangsters—and one white guy, played by James Franco, who adopts the style of a particular section of black culture (including cornrows and a metal grill). While our bikini-clad protagonists—Faith, Cotty, Candy, and Brit—enjoy some drug-induced wildness with their overwhelmingly white peers, their penchant for violence separates them from the others, who just want to have fun. To fund their trip to Florida, Cotty, Candy, and Brit commit armed robbery with water pistols, aping the mannerisms and vernacular seen in films like Menace II Society and Paid in Full.
When they meet James Franco’s wannabe gangsta Alien later on, it appears to be a match made in heaven: They are drawn in by the way he’s “made it” as a white baller, with a lavish lifestyle and access to an ultra-violent world, populated seemingly entirely by black people. Alien and the girls, by virtue of their skin tone, are able to swiftly modulate between white mainstream culture and aspirations of the black gangsta lifestyle. (A giant poster of Lil Wayne hangs in the background of one of their dorm rooms; later they belt out Britney Spears in a parking lot.) Meanwhile, the black characters in Spring Breakers aren’t merely acting out the gangsta life—that’s just the way they are.
So should we understand this aspect of the movie as a “hyper-poetic” version of “the real world”? What, if anything, is Korine trying to say by showing dangerous white girls as anomalies among their peers but natural allies to a black “gangsta” lifestyle?
My sense? Not much. Korine may intend the obviousness of the racial divide to be provocative, but he fails to comment in any interesting way on this so-called “hyper-reality,” instead merely reproducing a racist vision of the world in which black lives matter less than white ones. This is most egregious in the final scene, in which, as Richard Brody points out, Brit and Candy don quasi-blackface thanks to a blacklight. Korine shoots the scene as if it were a video game with zero consequence: As Brit and Candy dodge in slow motion around the compound of Alien’s nemesis Archie (played by rapper Gucci Mane), toting guns to seek revenge for an earlier incident, the black characters fall instantly and with little fanfare. The bikini-wearing duo emerges unscathed.
Yet the moment that inspires this retaliation is presented much more realistically. One night, Archie and a gun-wielding female companion pull up next to Alien and the girls at a stop light. After a brief threatening exchange with Alien, who is uncharacteristically scared—proving he’s still not as “hard” as his black former ally—Archie drives off as the woman shoots at their car and hits Cotty in the arm. If only for a moment, the violence is utterly palpable and unfiltered by fantastical camera tricks. Later we watch Alien remove the bullet from her arm as she cries.
In this way, Spring Breakers is a mirror image of Django Unchained, in which the deaths of white slave holders in the Old South are treated with frivolity, while the deaths of their slaves are brutal and difficult to watch. Of course, the whole point of that movie is that slave owners deserved to die. What is the point of Spring Breakers?
I’m still not sure.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/03/22/spring_breakers_racist_harmony_korine_movie_with_j ames_franco_adds_little.html