Spring Break Forever
The crowd outside was sticky and loud in the specific way that only happens when teenagers have been standing in the cold for four hours waiting for someone famous to emerge from a car. Potsdamer Platz in February, hundreds of people screaming at the Berlin premiere of Spring Breakers.
Somehow I’d gotten hold of one of those pink VIP wristbands that theoretically would have gotten me close enough to conduct a very intimate interview with Selena Gomez. Instead I fumbled the whole thing, ended up in the photographers’ pen with everyone else who couldn’t work the system, and spent the next two hours watching a red carpet parade of European D-listers shuffle in front of a logo wall.
This is actually fine. The photographers are always the best people to talk to at these things. Everyone else is either screaming declarations of love or getting roped in by some TV host who wants someone to sing a Britney Spears song into his microphone. The stars themselves are wrapped in a perimeter of people whose entire job is to physically relocate you if you get too close.
The advance guest list had been passed around beforehand, promising nothing good. Reality show contestants, soap opera actors, models from the kind of program where public humiliation is the format. Some names had no description at all—the people making the list had no idea who they were either. Maybe porn. Then the parade began: the woman with the spectacular chest, the guy with the naked girls on his shirt, a few people nobody could place, and then the pitch of the crowd shifted entirely as Selena appeared and the whole square became one long scream.
What they were actually there to promote is Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, which Korine has managed to sell as a serious film largely on the basis that he once wrote the screenplay for Kids. That’s not nothing—Larry Clark’s film is genuinely devastating, one of the better documents of what a generation can do to itself. Spring Breakers is approximately as far from that territory as your face is from Selena’s. The transformation of these sweet Disney girls into trigger-happy gangsters happens so fast and with so little weight that James Franco, doing everything he can as the unhinged Alien, can’t pull the film back from the nothing it’s headed toward.
Selena gets written out at the halfway mark, which the film frames as a character choice and which I choose to read as an act of mercy. Up to that point, the Wizards of Waverly Place fans in the audience had already been in visible distress about the frequency with which words like "fuck," "cunt," and "slut" were appearing in dialogue involving their girl.
What the film has instead of story or character is images—genuinely good ones. Korine shoots it like a music video with ambitions: sun-soaked flesh and neon and slow motion, tits and sunrises cut together over looping dialogue, as if he needs to explain ten times what just happened because he knows you were too busy hiding your hard-on the first nine. The Girls Gone Wild energy is deliberate. Vanessa Hudgens in a bikini, pissing in the street in slow motion. Skrillex’s Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites played as a brooding orchestral arrangement while brain matter drifts through a swimming pool—which is, I think, the exact moment I lost the thread entirely.
I’m going to buy a very large HD television specifically for this film and watch it on loop with the sound off. Spring break forever.