This one is ready to fight for their right to party.Īnd they do fight for it. The girls draw pictures of penises in their notebooks and write “SPRING BREAK!” Other generations fought for things. Korine makes this point early and savagely: two of the girls sit bored in a lecture while the teacher talks about how black soldiers returned home from WWII to fight for their equal rights. They’re empty, hollow people, part of an empty, hollow generation. They’re horrified by their middle class existence, by the routine of their classes, by the mundanity of life.
Crowd-pleasing enough to escape the art theaters, cerebral enough to hook in the film snobs, Spring Breakers straddles the growing intellectual divide in our modern cinema, creating something at once vibrant and smart, a societal critique that allows us to slightly revel in that which it is critiquing.įour school girls - and they are girls, wearing puppy shirts and doing gymnastics in their dorm hallway - want to go on spring break.
It’s not particularly groundbreaking in either category - I’ve seen more esoteric films and I’ve seen more visceral films - but it’s the median it occupies between the two that feels unique. Korine’s movie is one part arthouse, one part exploitation. It’s the key to the film’s bizarre mindset. This phrase, spoken by James Franco’s Alien, repeats in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, but it’s not a wild chant.