It’s been 9 years since we first experienced the
controversial phenomenon that was Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers - and almost a decade since it
first premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in 2012. This was a time where clean
hipsterdom and the trash aesthetics of the earlier 2000s were beginning to converge. It was
a pre-Me Too time of tentative sexual revolution, where the slut walk, “choice” feminism”
and the tailspinning Disney girl were dominating the zeitgesit (see: Miley’s VMA
pole performance). A time where cultural aesthetics were pioneered by waifish
Tumblr it-girls like Alexa Chung, Atlanta de Cadenet, and Cara Delevigne, and
co-opted by dirtbags like Terry Richardson, Robin Thicke, and American Apparel’s Dov Charney.
It was the moment where precociousness and raunch made bedfellows, and indie sleaze was born.
“Indie sleaze” really is the best way to describe it. It perfectly encapsulates this transitional
time by embodying that fragile balance between women’s renewed “sexual agency” and the sinister
undercurrent of exploitation that followed it. Spring Breakers came out when I was 16, and I
remember this time well. It was an era where I was discovering my own sexual agency as
mainstream feminism began a new cycle. But this newfound freedom had a darker edge.
And like Candy, Faith, Brit, and Cotty, my friends and I were blissfully ignorant
of it. Blissfully free from the idea that there could be men waiting in the shadows,
hoping to exploit our desire for that freedom. Really and truly, if there was ever a
film to define such an ambiguous era, it’s Spring Breakers. With its shocking
casting and provocative marketing campaigns, Spring Breakers took the world by storm. The
film is directed by notorious indie filmmaker and artist Harmony Korine, who had become known
at this point for his almost-performance-art style antics on late night talk shows, and for writing
and directing some of the most controversial films of the past 2 decades. I mean, the man made
a film called “Trash Humpers”. But to this day, he wields a great deal of respect in
the industry, and that respect wasn’t gained from pure shock value. His films,
bizarre as they are, unflinchingly strip the artifice of American life and lay bare the
ugliness beneath. He’s a master of discomfort. You’d be hard pressed to find a person who
has a middling opinion of Korine and his work - either you love it or you hate it.
And Spring Breakers would be no different. Our attentions perked in 2012 when press photos
were released of female stars, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, and Ashley Benson, fresh out of
their Disney and young adult eras and scantily clad in neon bikinis with looks of defiance on
their faces. Whether it was out of curiosity, shock, or titillation - the imagery was
powerful enough to get people out to see the film in droves. Yet what we saw in theatres
was completely different from the fast-paced, sexy crime drama that was promised by the
press photos and trailer. What we got instead, in typical Korine fashion, was a slow grinding,
plotless, arthouse film - filled with long montages, repetitive chants, and really strange
improv. Seldom has such a mainstream film been so divisive. So frustrating. And yet so
enduring. To this very day, people try to emulate the aesthetics of Spring Breakers, yet
few can say they actually enjoy watching it. A decade out from the film and I think we can look
at it with clear eyes. Is Spring Breakers a movie that’s definitely bad or good? It’s definitely
cool and provocative in an aesthetic way. Maybe sometimes aesthetics are the most important
thing in film - I mean, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message”. But
does Korine’s use of the Indie Sleaze aesthetic make his film subversive, or was he just inducting
another work of “hipster sexism” into the 2010s canon? Hindsight is 2020, so maybe after all this
time has passed we’ll finally get our answers! Spring Breakers, like Korine’s other films, is
really weird. Filmed by k who had recently come off working with Korine’s European twin, Gaspar
Noe on Enter the Void, Spring Breakers has a distinctly impressionistic vibe to it. The film
begins with four good friends, Brit, Candy, Cotty, and Faith, trying to figure out how they can get
money to travel to Florida for spring break. While Faith is more moralistic than her friends, Brit,
Candy, and Cotty have no qualms about obtaining the cash through whatever means necessary. So,
wearing ski masks, they rob a nearby restaurant with water guns and burn the getaway car. All four
girls travel to Florida together and go buck wild until they’re arrested for using narcotics at a
party and are later bailed out by a local rapper called Alien. This is when things take a turn.
Faith, who expresses discomfort with Alien’s friends and lifestyle, goes back home - leaving
Brit, Candy, and Cotty alone without a moral voice to ground them. On top of being a mediocre
rapper, Alien is also a relatively successful drug dealer who's been hustling on the turf of his
old friend Big Arch. Big Arch thinks Alien has been overstepping his reach, and threatens him and
the girls in a driveby shooting where Cotty gets injured and has to go home. Now it’s just Alien,
Brit, and Candy left. The girls enter an intimate relationship with Alien and vow to help him get
revenge on Big Arch. They boat to his house, where Alien is, like, immediately gunned down and
killed - and the girls proceed to kill everyone on the premises. The last shot shows the girls,
wearing pink balaclavas and tiger swimsuits kissing Alien’s dead body before running off into
the night. And then Ellie Goulding’s Lights plays. From start to end the production
process was anything but ordinary. Korine says he started the film off with a
vision of girls in bikinis and ski masks, wielding guns on the beach - and built from
there. He also went to an actual spring break location to write his script, which
proved to be a bit of an impractical choice. The editing process was also far from regular.
Korine has said that this process emulated the loop-based and repetitive tracks of electronic
and dub-step music in an effort to “obliterate the sense of time and go with something that was more
like a feeling." It’s one of those instances where a director builds his themes into the medium of
the film itself rather than into plot or dialogue. While the film is hard to pin down, there are
some clear messages you can extract from it - the dominant one being a corruption of the American
Dream. Korine wanted to centre his film during Spring Break - a yearly event where young college
students trek en masse to Daytona, Panama City, or Fort Lauderdale to drink, do drugs, and
debase themselves away from the watchful eyes of their parents or RAs. This setting
is a perfect allegory for American culture. As Korine puts it, “even the phrase
'Spring Break' and what it represents, what it can be, the idea of a destruction of
innocence and disappearing into the night." Coming out of the era of Girls Gone Wild and MTV’s
Spring Break, these beautiful getaways in Florida became a hub for debauchery. Where young people
would pilgrimage for fast pleasures, fleeting attempts at fame, and a chance at pretending to
be anyone else. Kids head to Florida to glutton themselves with alcohol and scream freedom -
and isn’t that what the American Dream is really about? It’s not the white picket fence and big
house we fantasize about. It’s commodified sex, crime you can get away with, and extreme, flashy
wealth. Rapid escalation and temporary relief. The real American Dream is a debauched
fantasy, an artifice of freedom. And that’s what Korine, through his seemingly
superficial, plotless, and meaningless film, is trying to sell us. Phillipa Snow describes
this paradox best, “Spring Breakers’ satire and critique is grounded in the obverse: lacquering
his abnegation of a failing dream with gorgeous, covetable dumbness, Korine helps ensure his movie…
floats like a bimbo, and stings like a bee.’” But Korine has never been a filmmaker who’s
interested in morals. Spring Breakers places no value judgment on the American Dream, spring
break, or the people who attend it. Rather, he simply tips over the surface of
the dream and shows us its underbelly. So why am I attributing indie sleaze to this
film? Well, if we’re to compare the press photos to popular photography of the time, you can see
some pretty obvious similarities. Overexposed flash and white backdrops. Very youthful
looking girls. Bright colors, Semi-nudity. And when we look at the film, we see a reliance
on party visuals quite reminiscent of Project X, another movie that came out in 2012. Slow
motion shots of body parts, drinking, and grime. But indie sleaze is more than just clothing
and photography. It’s a bit of a philosophy. Indie Sleaze is a marriage of clean and
trashy - a celebration of the gross, grimy, and tacky. But most of all, it’s a
celebration of not giving a fuck. I spoke to my friend Carrera,
who works as a trend forecaster, to get her perspective on indie sleaze and what
it’s all about. This is how she defined it: “Indie sleaze is an aesthetic trend that finds
nostalgia in the early 2010s era — a time characterized by naughty polaroid pictures,
ironic hipsterdom, mustache finger tattoos, American Apparel shiny leggings,
and candid club photography.” “The early 2010s was a time that
praised youthful transgressions. With the rise of sites like myspace
and Tumblr, many would share highly stylized images of sexually playful
partiers having candid moments of explicit joy. Images of women (often white) with
smudged eyeliner, barefoot with a PBR in hand became a kind of idealized anti-glamour
that came to define a generation of cool.” Essentially, the indie sleaze aesthetic is
all about exuding an aura of carefree-ness. In an article for Harper’s Bazaar, about
the recent resurgence of indie sleaze, Mark Hunter, photographer and runner
of the popular 2000s blog Cobrasnake, says: “It was an organic, free-spirited time
of not caring, which I think people crave. When you look at my photos, people look like they’re
having the best time of their life. They’re not focused on the phone in their hand or posing
for the camera. They’re living, basically.” The article also quotes current blogger,
Mandy Lee, who says indie sleaze was all about “authentic genuine fun and freedom”. Now
the concept of freedom is something that Spring Breakers tackles head on - and it complicates that
concept even further with its casting choices. The aura of Britney Spears is invoked
many times throughout Spring Breakers. If it’s the girls singing “Hit Me Baby One
More Time” outside a convenience store, or a slow motion scene of Alien
playing “Every Time” at a grand white piano - it’s clear that Korine’s
use of her music is pretty deliberate. Britney, a former Disney star-turned-sexed up pop
idol, and later paparazzi bait, is the emblem of exploited girlhood. So it’s overwhelmingly obvious
to anyone who knows this that when Korine decided to cast Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, who
were made in Spears’ image, he was making a point. There’s a very meta element at play here.
The girls in the film are impressionable, but ruthlessly ambitious. Their fast corruption
within the film is paralleled by the corruption of the Disney actresses’ images within its marketing.
Remember, the film came out around the exact time that Miley Cyrus was releasing her Bangerz album
and being photographed by Terry Richardson. This was potentially the climax of the public’s
fascination with the corruption of good girl idols. Shortly before the film was released,
Gomez issued a statement on her Facebook: “Note: this movie is not for my littles.” Korine
was keenly aware of the public’s sometimes genuine and sometimes perverse excitement at this
“transitional” time in the Disney girl career. Gomez, Hudgens, as well as Benson and Korine’s
wife Rachel who stars as Cotty, all maintain that this was a deliberate choice on their parts.
Gomez especially frequently cites that this film was a departure from her usual because she was
doing it for her. Hudgens often cites the amount of “freedom” she was afforded on set. Now there
is a frequent debate in the “transition era” of Disney girls like Gomez and Brtiney Spears,
and now even Olivia Rodrigo, about whether the “change” is coming from them or a PR team of men?
Korine seems to be commenting on this implicitly through this very meta casting. Yet it's hard
to paint any of this as necessarily altruistic. I’m not 100% that he did this to gift Gomez
or Hudgens the freedom they never had. Korine seems to have taken great pleasure in exploiting
their already hyper-commodified images. He says: “There's obviously something very exciting about
working with these girls who are, in some ways, in real life, representative of that culture and
that pop mythology; and also people who the public can identify as personalities that are complete
contrasts to what they're portraying in the film. I love that that part is a conceptual
shock on top of the actual film." Much like the kids on real spring break,
and like their characters in the film, this was an opportunity for the Disney girls
to pretend to be someone else for a change. Knowing he wanted to mimic the actual debauchery
of spring break, Korine hired thousands of extras to go crazy on and off camera. He threw the
girls into this environment with intentionally minimal security, and encouraged them to party
alongside everyone else Benson. While this all made for very believable filmmaking and probably
a really fun filming experience, it appears that Korine himself may have been deriving a similar
pleasure from the corruption of these girls as male audiences would and did. As I said at the
start of this video - this was a transitional time in the realm of sexual poltiics - where feminism
had not yet emerged as mainstream, and women’s renewed sexual liberation was underscored by a
current of men waiting to take advantage of it. Now I’m in no way at all comparing Korine to
sleazebags like Terry Richardson and Dov Charney, who knowingly took advantage of the women whose
images they captured. It’s obvious that Korine fostered a healthy relationship with his cast
members and ensured that their experience was a fun and consensual one. Not a single one of them
has anything bad to say about him, and ultimately I don’t think his film is morally wrong in anyway.
But I do think placing the iconography of these actresses within the indie sleaze aesthetic
does speak to the double entendre of early 2010s culture. The lead girls in the film appear to be
in control of their sexuality at all times - but there are always men like Alien waiting in
the sidelines to use that to their advantage. And with the meta casting, the question
extends to real life: were the actresses in control of their sexed up images, or were
they exploited? Snow attempts an answer: “...“it’s possible for women in a movie to be neither disempowered or
empowered by its narrative, and for a gaze directed at nude and near-nude
girl bodies to feel neither male nor female, but apparently agnostic, so that four babes (two
of whom are former Disney starlets) look and act less like Lolita stereotypes than like four
adult-adolescent Mobius strips in booty shorts.” I’ve said this in reference to the films of
Paul Verhoeven and I think it applies here: Spring Breakers is so gratuitous and over the top,
that it’s hard to read the film as anything even remotely sexy. What makes filmmakers like Korine
so smart is that they use genre to invoke double meanings within their works. Spring Breakers
lures people in with its salacious marketing, but those who really love weird arthouse
films, or love what Harmony Korine’s all about, are able to derive an underlying meaning
from the genre of the film itself. For me, watching this film 10 years later was a
big breakthrough. With all its superficiality, melodrama, satire, and gratuity - I finally
figured out how to pin down Spring Breakers. It’s an exploitation film. The entire concept of indie sleaze
is exploitative. The trash, raunch, and provocativeness embedded within it make
for a great new update to the exploitation genre for the 2010s. And I’m gonna dane to argue
here that Korine’s use of it makes Spring Breakers the last great exploitation film of our time. What is an exploitation film you ask? Exploitation films are not so much a genre as they
are a mode of production. These are films which rely on the social taboos of the time they’re made
as an easy way to entice viewers. As human beings, we’re naturally curious and inclined towards
morbidity, sexuality, and gratuity - things that will easily seduce us into buying tickets. These
films throw budget and quality to the wind as an expedient way to tap into the basest of human
desires. While these films are often looked down upon for their association with “low culture” -
they can often be quite radical and subversive. Revealing elements of the culture that mainstream
media is less likely or able to comment on. There’s something really subversive about
being bad. Cultural historian Jeffrey Sconce investigates this theory in his essay, “Trashing’
the academy: taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style”, where he defines
films that exist on the fringes of the industry as “paracinema”. He says, “the explicit
manifesto of paracinematic culture is to valorize all forms of cinematic ‘trash’, whether
such films have been either explicitly rejected or simply ignored by legitimate film culture”.
In Sconce’s mind, paracinema has created a cult of moviegoers who share a very developed and
distinct taste for the “temple of schlock”. Springbreakers, because it operates in
superficiality alone, is a decidedly exploitative film. The marketing campaign uses icons of purity
and sleazy aesthetics to shock and entice viewers. The film itself contains a ton of graphic ,
bombastic music, violence, and a very noted, I think intentional, appropriation of black
culture, to keep you watching - however confused you may be. And most importantly of
all, it’s a sensory film. The exploitation is baked into the very way the film is made. Sconce
describes the style of paracinema as a sort of “aesthetic aberrance”. He says that a focus on
style and aesthetics is crucial to paracinema: By concentrating on a film’s formal
bizarreness and stylish eccentricity, the paracinematic audience, much like the
viewer attuned to the innovations of Godard… foregrounds structures of cinematic discourse
and artifice so that the material identity of the film ceases to be a structure made
invisible in service of the diegesis but becomes instead the primary focus
of textual attention. It is in this respect that the paracinematic aesthetic is
closely linked to the concept of ‘excess’. In other words, a lot of the time with
paracinema, which includes exploitation films, the structure and style of the film
is the most important aspect of it. What was Korine trying to say with this sensory
style of filmmaking? He kind of says it here. All the way back in 2013, Korine saw
a shift in the way youth culture has increasingly prioritized experience
and sensation above all else. We can no longer sit still - but rather chase
quick rushes of dopamine wherever we can. If it’s in 6 second Vines and now Tiktoks, or
in the sensational violence of video games, or in party drugs - we’re chasing momentary ecstasy,
and companies are quick to deliver it to us in every facet of life imaginable. As Amanda Nix
astutely points out in her defense of the film: We are able to laugh at ridiculously over-the-top
characters and alarming scenes like that because they seem so far removed from reality.
The only way this movie works is that the very premise is that it’s supposed to feel like a fever
dream. If it were shot in a lucid realistic way, the amusing elements go away and we’re
just stuck with really frightening imagery. So the message comes through form. I’m watching
a movie about girls chasing experience - who approach life with a zero sum mentality
and refuse to see the consequences of their actions - or rather do not receive consequences
because they’re pretty and white. And here I am, chasing experience by going out to watch this
film. Am I watching Spring Breakers for the plot, or am I chasing the rush of dopamine it gives me?
The answer is pretty obvious. Lovers of paracinema - of the bad and the tasteless, may be able
to see this double meaning of Spring Breakers. And it’s the people who appreciate it for what
it is, pure trash, who will love it forever. 2013 was a confused time in history. A time that
stood on the precipice of major cultural upheaval. When the frontiers of social technology were
still open, and we lived in relative ignorance of what was to come. But it was also the
beginning of unprecedented progressive change, when a new consciousness was starting
to form. After tip toeing on the edge, we finally went over. We fell into a pit of
darkness and opened our eyes to Trump and the Me Too era. Surfaces stopped being so glossy and
we started to see things as they were. Terry and Dov were sexual predators. Gavin McGinnis was
a proud boy. Mark Hunter was dating a minor. Our celebrity idols were partying a little too
hard. And the ignorance could no longer persist. While it’s cool that the aesthetics of
my youth are coming back in fashion, I think it’s important we don’t
glamorize this era too heavily. Coming out of such a dark period, right
out of a worldwide pandemic, I think people want to shut themselves off and relive the
carefree glory days. Like Carerra told me: “Indie Sleaze resurfaces in a post-covid moment
where there is an interest in transgression and playful rule-breaking. After an extended
period of pandemic-era civil obedience, many are looking to make mistakes and let loose.” But this “no-fucks-given”
attitude comes with consequences. I don’t know if a film as amoral as Spring
Breakers could be made today. I mean, compare it to aesthetically similar films that came after it,
like Assassination Nation or Zola, both of which were driven by story, politics and morals first.
Spring Breakers on the other hand gives us all spectacle with no heart. It’s a perfect emblem of
the fast-paced ambiguity of the indie sleaze era, a time when digital media was accelerating access
to all kinds of imagery and lifestyles, with no context or meaning. The years that followed
indie sleaze exposed these romanticized images of debauchery and sexual freedom as participating
in a darker realm of exploitation and abuse. Looking at it from the future, Spring
Breakers embodies the confusion of 2013. It’s by no means an easy movie, or a pleasant
one - but if you turn your brain off and just go along for the ride, it’s a lot of fun. It
wears its superficiality proudly, and delivers on those fast pleasures it knows we want so
badly. It wears indie sleaze in a new medium, and encompasses all of the duality wrapped up
in it. Indie sleaze looks fun and carefree, but has darkness lurking beneath. Indie
sleaze pushes us to chase false freedom, and just like in the film, “freedom”
in our society comes at a cost.
