Korine is known to pepper his films with non-actors, a presence that destabilizes the studied affect of the professionally trained. Shot on location in St. Petersburg, Florida, Spring Breakers features hundreds of actual party-goers as background players, a casting decision that lends the film the candid air of documentary. Other non-actor cameos include the ATL Twins, a pair of party-hopping gold-toothed wanksters rumoured to share their lovers, and Gucci Mane, a rapper with so few fucks to give that he had an ice cream cone tattooed across his cheek. Throwing a string of Mardi Gras beads across the boundary between fact and fiction, Spring Breakers captures the real-life personalities and subcultures that inspired its creation and tosses them together with fantasy.
Emerging from this beer-soaked backdrop are the film’s main characters, a collection of archetypes sketched so lightly that their performance hinges less on the exploration of individual interiority and more on the embodiment of a particular vibe, as per Korine’s vision. Vanessa Hudgens of High School Musical and Ashley Benson of Pretty Little Liars subvert their squeaky clean personas to play a pair of devilish undergrads both menacing and ridiculous. Forming a trio with Rachel Korine, the director’s spouse and muse, the girls cackle, rip bongs, make out topless, and twirl AK-47s like ribboned batons.
"...the girls cackle, rip bongs, make out topless, and twirl AK-47s like ribboned batons."
Alien, the cornrowed dealer who takes a special interest in our heroines, is played by James Franco, the multi-hyphenate director-actor-writer known to slide into the DMs of teenage girls. Over the course of his career, Franco has appeared on screen as an adventure hero, a Marvel villain, a romantic lead, a handful of historical figures, and several winkingly satirical versions of himself, all of which are united by the smug self-awareness of an actor unable to drop his ego and disappear into a role. I find this approach both captivating and nauseating, and Spring Breakers is no exception: Alien is creepy and pathetic but nevertheless compelling, a big man when his finger’s on the trigger but a small man when he’s under the gun. Besides a few aesthetic differences—the hairdo, the Southern accent, the neck tattoo—he’s exactly who I imagine Franco to be.
Last but not least, Selena Gomez appears as Faith, the closest thing to a protagonist Spring Breakers has to offer. Gomez’s wholesome public image, informed by her status as a Disney Channel star and perhaps more closely scrutinized than those of Benson or Hudgens, began to wane in the early 2010s during her widely publicized relationship with Justin Bieber, the fairweather boyfriend for whom she removed the purity ring she’d worn since age 13. In a similar gesture to the ring’s removal, Gomez’s appearance in Spring Breakers represents her attempt to reshape a juvenile, morally rigid brand into something more adult. Faith, as pure and God-fearing as the name suggests, is the only brunette in a crowd of peroxide blonde and Manic Panic pink. Initially seduced by spring break’s promise, she quickly becomes terrified of the Floridian underground she’s unwittingly joined, eventually collapsing into hysterics and catching an early bus home. It’s an exaggerated version of a story familiar to anyone who’s ever wanted desperately to rebel and then had a bad trip, an arc Gomez plays with enough conviction to make me believe it.
Every generation has its own version of hedonism, and Spring Breakers expresses the millennial kind, an ethos defined by a series of acronyms: EDM, MDMA, YOLO. I was 19 when Spring Breakers premiered, 20 by the time of its theatrical release. My friends and I were obsessed with it, the way Korine held a funhouse mirror to the angst that underpinned our recklessness. We were a generation pressured to get degrees, only to be told that no jobs would be available for us once we got them; we were called lazy, coddled, and shameless, the inheritors of insurmountable debt and a dying planet. What could we do but party hard until the end? In what is perhaps the movie’s most well-known sequence, Hudgens, Benson and Korine don black sweatpants and pink balaclavas to dance with machine guns around an outdoor pool, their ecstatic prancing soundtracked by Britney Spears’ “Everytime”. Pathos builds through the ironic layering of images—Britney’s mournful voice overtop the women’s bright smiles, the sun behind them beginning to set, big guns swinging by their sides like cherished teddies. I wasn’t sure how Spring Breakers would age, now that the Mayans had been proven wrong and my Friday nights no longer revolved around binge drinking, but revisiting this sequence a decade later, under circumstances no more hopeful than they were 10 years ago, the vibes remain as relevant as ever.
Korine is known to pepper his films with non-actors, a presence that destabilizes the studied affect of the professionally trained. Shot on location in St. Petersburg, Florida, Spring Breakers features hundreds of actual party-goers as background players, a casting decision that lends the film the candid air of documentary. Other non-actor cameos include the ATL Twins, a pair of party-hopping gold-toothed wanksters rumoured to share their lovers, and Gucci Mane, a rapper with so few fucks to give that he had an ice cream cone tattooed across his cheek. Throwing a string of Mardi Gras beads across the boundary between fact and fiction, Spring Breakers captures the real-life personalities and subcultures that inspired its creation and tosses them together with fantasy.
Emerging from this beer-soaked backdrop are the film’s main characters, a collection of archetypes sketched so lightly that their performance hinges less on the exploration of individual interiority and more on the embodiment of a particular vibe, as per Korine’s vision. Vanessa Hudgens of High School Musical and Ashley Benson of Pretty Little Liars subvert their squeaky clean personas to play a pair of devilish undergrads both menacing and ridiculous. Forming a trio with Rachel Korine, the director’s spouse and muse, the girls cackle, rip bongs, make out topless, and twirl AK-47s like ribboned batons.
"...the girls cackle, rip bongs, make out topless, and twirl AK-47s like ribboned batons."
Alien, the cornrowed dealer who takes a special interest in our heroines, is played by James Franco, the multi-hyphenate director-actor-writer known to slide into the DMs of teenage girls. Over the course of his career, Franco has appeared on screen as an adventure hero, a Marvel villain, a romantic lead, a handful of historical figures, and several winkingly satirical versions of himself, all of which are united by the smug self-awareness of an actor unable to drop his ego and disappear into a role. I find this approach both captivating and nauseating, and Spring Breakers is no exception: Alien is creepy and pathetic but nevertheless compelling, a big man when his finger’s on the trigger but a small man when he’s under the gun. Besides a few aesthetic differences—the hairdo, the Southern accent, the neck tattoo—he’s exactly who I imagine Franco to be.
Last but not least, Selena Gomez appears as Faith, the closest thing to a protagonist Spring Breakers has to offer. Gomez’s wholesome public image, informed by her status as a Disney Channel star and perhaps more closely scrutinized than those of Benson or Hudgens, began to wane in the early 2010s during her widely publicized relationship with Justin Bieber, the fairweather boyfriend for whom she removed the purity ring she’d worn since age 13. In a similar gesture to the ring’s removal, Gomez’s appearance in Spring Breakers represents her attempt to reshape a juvenile, morally rigid brand into something more adult. Faith, as pure and God-fearing as the name suggests, is the only brunette in a crowd of peroxide blonde and Manic Panic pink. Initially seduced by spring break’s promise, she quickly becomes terrified of the Floridian underground she’s unwittingly joined, eventually collapsing into hysterics and catching an early bus home. It’s an exaggerated version of a story familiar to anyone who’s ever wanted desperately to rebel and then had a bad trip, an arc Gomez plays with enough conviction to make me believe it.
Every generation has its own version of hedonism, and Spring Breakers expresses the millennial kind, an ethos defined by a series of acronyms: EDM, MDMA, YOLO. I was 19 when Spring Breakers premiered, 20 by the time of its theatrical release. My friends and I were obsessed with it, the way Korine held a funhouse mirror to the angst that underpinned our recklessness. We were a generation pressured to get degrees, only to be told that no jobs would be available for us once we got them; we were called lazy, coddled, and shameless, the inheritors of insurmountable debt and a dying planet. What could we do but party hard until the end? In what is perhaps the movie’s most well-known sequence, Hudgens, Benson and Korine don black sweatpants and pink balaclavas to dance with machine guns around an outdoor pool, their ecstatic prancing soundtracked by Britney Spears’ “Everytime”. Pathos builds through the ironic layering of images—Britney’s mournful voice overtop the women’s bright smiles, the sun behind them beginning to set, big guns swinging by their sides like cherished teddies. I wasn’t sure how Spring Breakers would age, now that the Mayans had been proven wrong and my Friday nights no longer revolved around binge drinking, but revisiting this sequence a decade later, under circumstances no more hopeful than they were 10 years ago, the vibes remain as relevant as ever.