But several things really disturbed me about Spring Breakers, the first starting very early on in the picture, and others taking a little longer to show themselves. The girls are Candy (Hudgens), Cotty (Rachel Korine) and Brit (Ashley Benson), who are trouble-seeking party girls and for some reason hang out with church-going resident-downer Faith (Gomez). They decide to bugger off for spring break, as sexy American teens with inexplicably infinite cash sources tend to do. But these girls are broke, so plot to rob a diner, do it, and run off to the beach for a fortnight of fun. The kind of fun they end up having, whether it is really fun or not, and what kind of fun the audience are supposed to be having are all up for question. In particular our part as the audience.
Only a few minutes into the movie, all four girls are fooling around in a darkened corridor, only wearing their underwear. They do handstands against the walls, and eventually fall about on the floor, wiggling their asses in the air as the camera grooms them like an overly-forceful cat lady. I felt uncomfortably voyeuristic watching this, not even voyeuristic, more predatory. Because never in a thousand years would a stranger pass by, happen to peek into the window of this corridor, and have a scene like this playing out by coincidence. The girls aren't doing all this gyrating for their own amusement -- they're doing it for the audience, and it's contrived as hell. The weirdest thing is, as a female of about the same age as the actresses and the girls they are portraying, I still felt wrong watching them. There was just something so obviously wrong with the scene. And from there, it continued down the route of 'Male Fantasy'.Spring break is fun, and they drink, and snort coke off of other girls' boobs, and get off with slobs. Brit finds herself in a really gross situation, in which she is high as hell, in a bathroom full of guys, sluggishly ripping her bra off and teasing that "you'll never get this pussy." Then the action cuts back to what the other girls are doing. I rather feel that it's because if it'd hung around any longer, it may have subjected us to a gang rape scene. It was upsetting to watch a girl degrade herself in such a dangerous way, especially knowing that this sort of behaviour is really quite commonplace among my generation. I get that this is an adult film, with an 18 certificate, and that there are many movies I have praised that have contained similar incidents, but it's just not what I was up for. It felt cheap and fantasised.
Just when I was starting to wonder how teens managed to rip buildings apart, cause more mayhem than Martin and Charlie Sheen at a father-son picnic, and ingest a steady current of substances without attracting outside attention, the girls are arrested, and stand in a courtroom in their bikinis (honestly, I don't think any of them wear anything more than that at any point). There, they are eyed-up and eventually bailed out by the slimiest geezer I've come across in film since the Duke in Moulin Rouge. In place of a nasally sneer from behind a perfectly waxed moustache, we have cornrows and gang tattoos on a white guy played by James Franco. This dude has named himself Alien, as a result of a lifetime of egotistical self-philosophy that Kanye West holds the record for.The girls go back to his skeevy place and repay him for his kind bailing. And yep, it is exactly as creepy as it sounds. Only Faith has a problem with weirdo crackheads drooling over her shoulder and groping her. The other girls, in a completely whacked state of mind, it would seem, totally get off on the underground superstar lifestyle that Alien leads, which involves being constantly surrounded by pale, skinheaded gangsters, swaggering around with guns wearing only underwear (which naturally works for the girls) and having sex. Faith is the first of the girls to realise that something seriously dreadful is going to come of this situation, and hops on the next bus home, never to be heard of again. Weird.
The rest of the movie documents the remaining girls' moral and personal deterioration as Bikini Bitches of a questionably-successful white gangster. Lots more sex, drugs and abuse. They get dragged into a violent rivalry with another, far less white, gangster. It is an unsettling, dark underworld story, with not a speck of the comparative joy that the earlier days of their trip involved. Franco, punctuating his frequent stoner collaborations with Seth Rogen, reminds us of his often dormant ability, creating a sinister facade that deemed him unrecognisable to me for several minutes. His cited inspiration from rapper Riff Raff helped him to become a silly wannabe hardman who never matured past the age of sixteen, but whose subsequent years have instilled in him a dark idiocy, and a masked neediness.The entirety of Spring Breakers plays out in an almost pornographic way; not in the sense that anything explicitly and unsimulatedly sexual is shown, but in the sense that its whole being is played strictly to a male fantasy. Young, slim girls in bikinis, complete exhibitionists, who are putting on a constant stripper act for their unacknowledged audience. It plays out with intention to titillate -- the main factor that can see art house movies such as 9 Songs and Antichrist separated from mainstream pornography. Not only does it titillate the audience with gratuitous young flesh, it also teases its less mature viewers with the idea of the lifestyles of drug-ring prostitutes being the dream life. Eighteen year olds are still perfectly corruptible with stupid ideas, and so I really would question what creator Harmony Korine (surprisingly, not a female) meant by this movie. It doesn't really present any good ideas, but doesn't present itself as a cautionary tale either. The girls who do decide to get out are completely forgotten once they're gone. Faith, and later Cotty, are never seen again, and this seems indicative of the entire attitude of the film. In this sort of crazy lifestyle, not a thing matters.
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