How ‘Spring Breakers’ Forecast the Next Decade of American Chaos

Go south, young women. Head to Florida. Maybe try St. Petersburg, a city where students might take a seasonal break from the grind of academia and indulge in some time-honored traditions, like wet bikini dance contests or binge-drinking. Sex and drugs? Motel orgies? Doing bumps on the dance-floor with tongue-wagging bros? That’s called “Tuesday” in Saint Petey’s, yo. Imagine the lawless vibe of international waters, but on dry land. Play your cards right, and you might — as the “good girl” of a quartet of twentysomethings says in a voicemail to her grandmother — “find” yourself and make “friendships that I know will last a lifetime” in this Axe Body Spray paradise. Or, if you’re really lucky, you could meet a dude with cornrows named Alien who’ll help you blast your way to the American Dream™, one AR-15 bullet at a time.

Loitering with intent right at the cultural-timeline intersection between Girls Gone Wild and the Trump administration, Spring Breakers is a movie dedicated to slo-mo twerking both itself and you into a trance. The perfect distillation of writer-director Harmony Korine’s art-trash aesthetic and the cinematic equivalent of a tramp-stamp tattoo of Godard’s face, this story of horny, hype beasts tearing shit up during a week off has aged — or maybe ripened is a better verb — into something like a sunshine state of the nation. Released in the States 10 years ago today, it still feels like a documentary (Korine & Co. filmed much of this during an actual spring break) that slips into fever-dream territory, giving you the woozy feeling of experiencing a drug high and the next-day hangover at the same time. But its portrait of an all-sensationalism-all-the-time mindset as an extension of American life only feels more on-brand today. You can see that same tabloid mojo online, in the news, and for a while, radiating out of the White House. What a difference a decade makes.

That Korine, a filmmaker for whom the term enfant terrible might have been invented, used a teen-movie formula to do this — as well as casting three former kid stars who were in the midst of changing their images — only makes this sleazefest more subversive. Selena Gomez was still known as the squeaky-queen pop singer who’d starred in Wizards of Waverly Place; Vanessa Hudgens was one half of the romantic duo at the center of the High School Musical movies; Ashley Benson had done appearances on Zooey 101 and 7th Heaven, as well as a stint on Days of Our Lives. (The fourth member of the gang, Rachel Korine, was Harmony’s wife and had costarred in his aptly named Trash Humpers, so she was already ready to rock.) Their fanbases tended toward the young and impressionable side, to say the least, and likely weren’t ready to see their idols doing beer bongs, kissing sketches of dicks, and forcing a wanksta to fellate a gun silencer. Gomez, in particular, was vocal about warning her underage fans away from this, and later confessed that the pressure of transitioning from Disney poster girl to an actor who could hold her own in an avant-dirtbag opus like this gave her a meltdown on set. Korine allegedly responded by comforting her before pushing Gomez into a pool.

On paper, you could see why some folks thought this might be little more than cheap jailbait exploitation — come see these former child stars get wet ‘n’ wild. But while Korine certainly knew that Gomez, Hudgens and Benson’s presence would cause a “sense of illicit frisson”conceptual shock,” he was less interested in taking dollars from the dirty-old-men crowd and more interested in creating something experiential, experimental, eye-frying. During a press conference, he said that the movie’s origin story started with this image in his head of young women standing on a beach, wearing bikinis and ski masks. When it came to time to write his self-proclaimed “beach noir,” Korine embedded himself in a motel room in Panama City during an actual spring break in order to soak up the vibe. “It was madness,” he admitted. “Kids just destroying shit, fucking in the hallways, setting golf carts on fire, blasting Taylor Swift 24 hours a day.”

You can see how that first-hand observation of IRL debauchery wormed its way into the film. Kicking off with a montage of actual spring breakers spraying beer and shaking crotches by the sea, Korine’s sunburned thrill ride starts with the dial at 11; the most subtle thing in this Beach Blanket Bacchanalia is the bass drop in Skrillex’s “Scary Monster and Nice Sprites.” (The shots of someone suggestively sucking on a red, white, and blue popsicle runs a close second.) When Benson, Hudgens and Rachel Korine convince Gomez’s super-Christian character to help them rob a chicken shack to get enough cash to fund their vacation, you get a taste of the criminality to come. But the first half of Spring Breakers is just a stream-of-consciousness tour of one of the most oddly accepted American rites of passage. You can tell that some of these scenes involved little more than inserting these actors into real spring break maelstroms and making sure they didn’t get mauled. A sequence in a crowded motel room that involved co-eds making out with each other and regional sensations the ATL Twins snorting lines off someone’s mons pubis is so authentic that you worry you’ll catch chlamydia just watching it.

Then right around the halfway point, an alien lands. Or rather, Alien lands. This is James Franco’s caricature of the ultimate Southern gangsta, a creature that’s all cornrows, cocked guns, and cultural appropriation. His Alien was part and parcel of the would-be Renaissance man’s performance-art era, when he appeared in prestige dramas and pot comedies and TV soap operas, juggling meta-celeb appearances with academic stints, poetry writing, and indie-directing jobs. It’s also his single greatest performance, for as much as that statement means in 2023. (See again: what a difference a decade makes.) This gold-grill–wearing guardian angel proves to be too much for Gomez’s character, who hightails it back home after Alien bails them out of jail. But the other three stay, at which point we get the now-classic “Look at my shit!” monologue. Machine guns, nunchucks, stacks of Franklins, a statue of a black panther, endless rows of sneakers and baseball caps, gold bullets — he’s the materialistic Id of the U.S. of A. Even his Great Gatsby shout-out about having “shorts in every color” slaps.

At this point, you either buy what Korine is selling — what The Village Voice dubbed “Gidget Goes to Hell” — or like Gomez, you get on the bus. You’d miss the pièce de résistance, a rendition of Britney Spears’ “Everytime” that makes good on the filmmaker’s original vision of young women in bikinis and ski masks. (Franco said that Korine had pitched him before he’d even written the script with the description of a film somewhere between “a Britney Spears video and a Gaspar Noe film,” and the way Noe’s on-loan cinematographer Benoît Debie shoots this croon-along during the Magic Hour 100-percent makes good on that promise.) You know it won’t end well for these three Bonnies and their Hawaiian-shirted Clyde, especially when Gucci Mane shows up as a rival St. Pete kingpin. And when the inevitable, purposefully cut-rate Scarface climax does happen, it feels like mission accomplished. What’s more American than going out in a hail of bullets, gold or otherwise?

It’s also a narrative concession that fits in well with Korine’s surreal notion of blending genre-movie thrills with ideas borrowed from the trap and electronic music he’d been listening to, turning repetition and a druggy sense of dissociation into a “pop poem.” The look of the whole movie, which he wanted to resemble something “that was lit by Skittles,” also hits a crescendo in this Vice City-run-amok set piece.

But even before that, you can feel how Spring Breakers has turned its bad-trip peaking into something else besides kids shaking their ass on a beach. Critic J. Hoberman coined the phrase “vulgar modernism” to describe the work of Jerry Lewis; here, Korine took that notion one step further and poured Bacardi 151 on it, before lighting the whole thing on fire. Back then, it felt like a nihilistic but exhilarating goof from the guy who wrote Kids and gave us the old, weird Americana of Gummo — a filmmaker reporting on the culture of his “Redneck Riviera” home base. Now the whole shebang feels like a preview of something that would take over almost every aspect of our country. It’s only a few steps from this annual gathering’s anything-goes shamelessness to political crudeness, reality-TV politics, and American carnage. Everything is now over-the-top, heated to a crisp, turned up to the max. It went from the beaches to the Beltway and beyond. The bus home is no longer an option. Spring break 4-eva.

From Rolling Stone US.