Broken Girls: Spring Breakers takes some shots at Millennials

Spring Breakers opens with an unfortunately familiar libidinous beach scene.  Late night channel surfing exposes “order now” commercials for DVDs like “Girls Gone Wild.”  Tabloids and celebrity gossip sites plaster unflattering, unwitting, or salacious pictures of the young and famous at their worst.  Music videos often have scores of girls writhing behind the performer.  MTV has aired Spring Break specials for years that glorify the mid-season escape to Florida (or Cancun, or San Diego…).  None of these iterations have contextualized the bawdy beach parties as anything other than fun, whereas Spring Breakers goes out of its way to show them as crass, demeaning, and revolting.  As Skrillex’s club music screeches in the background, middle fingers fly, lewd pantomimes abound, and bare breasts jiggle under a constant stream of beer, all in creepy and uncomfortable slow motion.  The male gaze is heightened to an absurd level, rendering these images gross caricatures.  These are our society’s young people, doing what society tells them is cool and sexy.  It is anything but.

Director Harmony Korine uses Spring Breakers to comment on a generation of unambitious, moderately educated youth, and he has set his sights on ex-Disney stars as his storytelling puppets.  After departing the unsettling beach party, we meet his main characters: Faith (Selena Gomez, former Disney Channel star, occasional movie star and singer, and previous girlfriend of Justin Bieber), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens, former Disney Channel star, occasional movie star and singer, and previous girlfriend of Zac Efron), Brit (Ashley Benson, currently starring in ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars), and Cotty (Rachel Korine, wife of the director).  The four girls have been friends for years and attend a generic, bleak-looking college in an unspecified part of the country.  They are obviously bored out of their minds, but lack the intelligence to pursue a lasting solution to this problem.  The quick fix they hone in on is going on spring break to St. Petersburg, Florida, which they are certain will change their lives and change them as people.  Into what is never specified, and maybe they don’t even care.  They just want something different.

Problems arise when the girls can’t afford the trip.  Instead of accepting their disappointment, they decide to rob a local diner with squirt guns and a mallet using a professor’s car, which they then torch.  Setting the car on fire is the only acknowledgement on their part that they could face consequences for their crime, and they do little else to avoid arrest.  In fact, they are downright giddy at their success, and they celebrate around the flaming vehicle.  They have the money they need for spring break.

Faith, the heavy-handedly named devout Christian of the group, does not approve of her friends’ methods (she was not invited to participate), but decides to move forward with spring break as planned.  They finally get the chance to don the neon bikinis they will wear exclusively for the rest of the film’s runtime.  Upon their arrival in St. Pete’s, the girls appear at a nondescript hotel packed tight with woo-hoo-ing party-goers and proceed to drink, do drugs, run their mouths at strangers, and do whatever pops into their vapid, uncreative minds.  It is here their luck seems to have caught up with them, and all four are arrested for their participation in the raucous bacchanal.

When they tell the judge they have no money to pay the fines levied against them, they are told to “call their parents.”  None do, choosing instead to wait out more of their spring break in a jail cell, mostly naked save for some nylon-spandex blends and a few blankets.  Hark, here comes their knight in shining hubcaps, Alien (James Franco), a rap star by day, criminal lowlife by night.  He takes a creepy liking to the girls and rescues them from their un-fun jail time.  Even though Candy, Cotty, and Brit are all ready to search for a fun time with Alien, Faith’s spidey sense starts tingling. She tearfully tells the girls how much she does not want to be in a re-purposed garage for underground deals and gambling, midday, in a bikini.  Candy, Cotty, and Brit see no harm in it.  After Alien makes a skeezy sexual plea for her to stay, Faith takes off for home.  Without their moral compass around to guide them (who they had pretty much ignored the whole time up until then anyway), the three girls left in St. Pete’s mindlessly and pointlessly follow Alien around and delve into his personal vendettas.

“Think of it like a video game, or a movie” one girl says to the group before robbing the diner.  The girls extend this mentality to the rest of the events in the film, viewing the trouble and danger they find as just another fun piece of the story.  Candy, Cotty, and Brit are blank, empty people with little agency or shred of will to affect what happens to them.  They proceed with the ever escalating set of events simply so they have something to do that day.

They constantly pantomime hypersexuality, extreme masculinity, sexual power plays, passivity, rage, and the occasional Britney Spears song.  Faith does this less so; whereas she is often the most present of the four (she is horrified, albeit briefly, at the consequences of robbing a diner and getting arrested, and she sees Alien for the scummy creep he is), she is also the most naive.  She talks to her friends of buying a house in Florida and living out the rest of their days collectively; they mock her for this when she’s not listening.  We listen to Faith leave a voice message for her grandma about how she’d like to come back to Florida with her someday, while watching college students drink and writhe sexually but uncaringly with each other.  Faith doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

Franco’s Alien is the one thread of humor in a cast of otherwise annoying and false characters.  He authentically believes he is a god among men because of his guns, cash, and stuff (in one of the best scenes in the movie, he jumps on his bed exclaiming exhuberantly at the girls, “Look at my shit!  Look at all my shit!” before listing his “shit,” which includes “shorts in every color” and Calvin Klein cologne).  Although Alien is certainly out of his world with his concept of status, power, and influence, he has more of a grasp on real world consequences than the girls; they see St. Petersburg as a Disneyland of lewd, crude, sensational behavior one can visit and leave, while Alien knows the cost of doing business on the streets.  Franco is consistently at his best when he’s at his weirdest, and he has a new personal best in Alien.

Korine became famous for writing the disturbing movie Kids, which is partially about an HIV-positive teenager determined to have sex with as many virgins as possible. Spring Breakers was never destined to be a mainstream party flick.  While it may not be what many of the stars’ teen fans are expecting, it manages to use some mature and interesting film tools, like flash-forward and repetition, to great effect (Franco’s intonations of “Spring breaaaaaaaak…Spring breaaaaaaaak… Spring break forevaaaaaaa” surface again and again for an eerie reminder of the stupidity of the tradition).  It is clear that Korine has a real contempt for these kinds of girls: in college but not well educated, unmotivated, uncaring, displaying, performing, over-trusting, and in a constant loop of obnoxious behavior.  His satire of how a lack of direction can spiral into crime and amorality is straightforward, but ultimately unhelpful as a form of entertainment.  Instead of showing these young women as the victims of a society that sends these messages, they are portrayed as those who perpetuate this candy-coated grossness.  The characters are all despicable, do nothing valuable or poignant, and are crass for crassness’s sake, so how do we make the kind of social change the director seems to demand when we’re given so little to work with?