Spring Breakers
I ended up in the photographer pit at the Berlin premiere instead of wherever we were supposed to be. The passes didn’t work out, the crowd was insane, and honestly it was better this way. Photographers are the only people at these things you can actually talk to. Everyone else is either screaming or getting paid to stand somewhere specific.
Harmony Korine made Spring Breakers. He wrote Kids, so there’s a pedigree to consider. But this isn’t Kids. It’s Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, two other girls, and James Franco doing… well, it doesn’t matter. The plot is window dressing. Gomez and friends rob a diner, go to spring break, Franco plays a cartoonish gangster who enables them. Selena Gomez disappears halfway through the film because apparently her Disney handlers were freaking out about the swearing and nudity. The whole thing is so thin it’s almost not there.
What’s there instead is visuals. Endless visuals. Red sunsets, pools, beaches, bodies. Korine films everything like he’s obsessed, because he is obsessed. And the dialogue repeats itself—spring break, spring break, spring break—like an incantation. The transformation from high school girls to criminals happens so flatly you barely notice it. The film doesn’t pretend to care about narrative. It’s just scaffolding for images.
And the images work. That’s the weird part. I sit there knowing it’s empty, feeling it’s empty, but Korine has arranged everything so carefully that the emptiness becomes seductive. It pulls me in. A film with nothing to say, saying nothing, but with such style and confidence that I keep watching anyway. Each shot is framed like it matters even though nothing about the story matters. The visuals are enough.
I’d buy a massive TV just to watch this on mute. When the Skrillex dropped over a violent scene, I realized where I’d landed with this film—somewhere between knowing it’s hollow and being completely into it. That’s the whole thing. There’s no depth to excavate, no message to decode. Just the look of things, the feel of it, the sheer confidence in being completely without substance. And somehow that’s the only argument it needs.