Generation Me heads to "spring break forever"

Spring Breakers is a singular object lesson on the concept of “more.” More volume. More stimulus. More energy. More, more, more.

I was reminded of Justin Torres' note-perfect first chapter to We the Animals: "We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men."

If you recall, "more" was also the theme of Scarface, Brian de Palma’s influential kingpin story about Tony Montana, who wanted the world and self destructed on the brink. It’s completely appropriate then that a character in Spring Breakers has “Scarface on repeat” in his bedroom. This is Scarface with college girls and it’s relentless.

It stars four bikini-clad princesses of varying degrees of innocence, from the fawn-like Christian girl to the coked-out nihilist. They arrive to Florida’s spring break parties like the Four Horse(wo)men of the Apocalypse; their steeds are candy-colored scooters. Beneath them the ground quakes, but only from the pulsing music that throbs from the DJ booth. If this is the apocalypse, then it is painted in neon and glitter and its soundtrack is dubstep and Britney Spears.

Much has been made about Spring Breakers up to this point. It stars some squeaky-clean child stars who aren’t so squeaky or child-like anymore. They spend much of the movie in tiny bikinis, and much of it doing very bad things with guns, drugs and criminals. Many people had written the film off simply because of its elementary subject matter — teens at spring break. To many, me included, it looked like a stylized version of an MTV reality show. But it is a serious film with some momentous ideas, and it’s written and directed by a very serious director, Harmony Korine (Gummo), who has something to say about Generation Me and their quest for more. His Spring Breakers, a hand grenade tossed from the screen, is an intensely provocative movie that will surely become a cult classic, a label it earns in spades.

Four college girls are out of money and can’t afford the bus tickets to Florida for spring break. So they do something that comes only naturally to them: they rob a fried-chicken joint using sledgehammers and squirt guns. Cash in hand, the girls — Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson) and Cotty (Rachel Korine) — explode onto the spring break scene, which largely involves men pouring alcohol onto topless women in slow motion. The movie frames its subjects lovingly and, yes, a tad gratuitously as shots linger on breasts, groins and mouths. It’s shot through a distorted lens of hyper-stylization with over-saturated colors, bleached horizons, washed-out vistas and a campy VHS quality. The look is intoxicating and hypnotic, a vortex of color that envelopes you in a dizzying flood of quick cuts and slow motion.

The girls are barely individuals; they operate more as a pack than as four single minds. The only standout is Faith, the wholesome all-American girl with the questionable friends. We meet Faith first, framed in a beautiful shot of floor-to-ceiling stained glass. Her preacher is warning her: “The swagger is coming on upon us.” He looks like a TV wrestler with his dyed hair and fake tan. When Faith tells her church friends she’s going to Florida for spring break, they tell her to “pray hardcore.” Another girl adds: “No, pray super hardcore.”

Faith isn’t in on the robbery, but she knows where the money came from and goes to Florida anyway. She’s easily, though not entirely, corruptible. When they get to Florida, the party commences at a full throttle. At one point the girls are chugging from tall bottles of hard liquor and singing Britney Spears songs in a parking lot. (Britney’s music makes another appearance later in a scene so surreal and absurd it could easily be a modern-pop version of a Dalí painting.) The next day the girls are arrested for a variety of misdemeanors and then promptly bailed out by Alien (James Franco), a cornrow-wearing hustler who can spot easy prey when he sees it. Later it is abundantly clear, though, that maybe Alien’s the prey as Brit and Candy, the movie’s alpha predators, lock onto his world and refuse to let go until they get more, more, more.

The movie is expertly paced, beautifully shot and choreographed, and the music, switching from party anthems to a more ambient score, is finely tuned to the pace of the action. I really enjoyed a hallucination sequence that played tricks with the film’s digital noise; what looked like film grain was actually a warping effect that morphed the stars’ faces as if their very DNA seemed to spring to life in new directions. Technically, this is a stellar movie in every way, but Spring Breakers is more than just its technical composition. It is a biting exposé on young people and the way they behave. It’s a devastating portrait, one that teens will misunderstand as the director’s explicit acceptance of the YOLO era. The ones who idolize the lifestyle in Spring Breakers will have, unfortunately, missed the point entirely, like all those rappers who worship Scarface, yet forget that Tony Montana dies a miserable wretch at the end.

Korine is certainly an interesting director for this material. In the past he has gazed oddly and humanely at broken souls, and he does it again here. The way he stages the college kids and their spring break “scene” is humane, but still unflattering. He portrays the girls as ditzy idealists whose pathetic needs are fueled by boredom and booze. They want to escape college in Florida so they can “be who they want to be,” to escape from society’s molds. The girls do escape the trappings of a “normal” lifestyle, but they escape to the same place as thousands of other people exactly like them. I’m reminded of a cartoon strip of three pierced and mohawk’d droogs, visual clones of one another, as they point to a man in a suit and tie yelling the word “Conformist.”

It all feels very selfish. Everything that happens in the film is done for selfish reasons. The girls are there to drink and do drugs, substances that alter their self worth. The boys are there to do the same, and have sex, their own narcissistic super move. The hustlers are there for money and power. Even Alien, who bills himself as the Pied Piper of Spring Break, is only looking out for his bottom line and his own vanity. It’s all a power play for each person’s individual needs. No one does anything for anyone else without some kind of personal payoff. After one of the girls gets shot, Brit and Candy go after the shooter more for selfish reasons than revenge. I think Korine is saying something profound about young people and their attitudes, but I also think he loves these characters, as shallow as they are.

The performances are admirable, though I often could not tell which of the four girls I was looking at. Only Gomez and her innocent features were distinguishable among the four leads. Franco’s bizarre Alien will surely be a fan favorite with his platinum teeth-covered grills, his pompous braggadocio and a scene of sexual submission so uncomfortable that several people in my screening walked out in disgust.

This is a remarkable — at times, offensive, crude and profane — film that says something brave and unflattering about young adults and teens. It’s certainly the wildest thing released this year by a mile. And as depraved as the behavior is, you'll be left pondering — or possibly wanting — more, more, more.