Yet if there’s media criticism suggested by the movie, it’s of the most superficial sort: one of the young women, prior to the first robbery, exhorts her friends to go at it as “in a video game” or else as “in a movie.” Alien proves he’s living the dream by proving what the dream is, as he keeps “Scarface”-De Palma’s, with Pacino-playing in a loop in his bedroom. Those they leave behind, those who have no other life to get back to, have a heavier price to pay. Or, at least, they are so for the span of their spring break before heading back to their lives relatively unscathed. 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. 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 very mainspring of the movie is his stereotypical and reductive view of black life as one of drug dealing and gang violence. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.Ībove all, Korine emphasizes the story’s racial aspect with a strange twist of visual invention that occurs at the story’s climax.
Petersburg as the only white kid in his school, and he brings them to a pool hall where almost all the players are black. Second, Alien tells the young women his revealing life story of growing up in St. First, the Tampa Bay spring-break scene is depicted as whiter than a Republican convention. The racial underpinning of the action in “Spring Breakers” is too blatant to ignore. 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. Korine presents the divide in experience essentially in racial terms.
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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. “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. 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.
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