Korine was famously assailed by success right out of the gate with the release of Kids (1995), which Korine had written at 19, an icky film directed by icky photographer-turned-filmmaker Larry Clark. Kids had the caché of being a Miramax indie-film happening (see Clerks, Swingers, Pulp Fiction, and Boogie Nights) when such things seemed to occur with some regularity before a few candidates (54, Cop Land, Way of the Gun) turfed out with filmgoers while wearing that crown. The unrated Kids (Miramax decided to release it without a rating after the MPAA suggested it be rated NC-17) was awash in buzz and controversy before it was even released for a bevvy of reasons, including its frank depiction of teenage sexuality and drug use, and its weirdo director, which helped it to catch fire and, on a budget of $1.5 million, bring in over $20 million worldwide.
With the autonomy granted him by the success of Kids, Korine, at 23 years old, went on to write and direct the anarchic and beguiling Gummo (1997) and then, adopting the tenets of Lars Von Trier's Dogme 95 movement, he made the impossibly more anarchic and arguably less beguiling Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) before mostly retreating into his burgeoning drug habit. During the next several years, Korine would resurface here and there in the pop culture landscape, but, rather than garnering attention for his art, it would be for his bizarre, drug-addled antics, including when two of his houses mysteriously burned down and when it was rumored that his next film would feature the filmmaker, high on crack, picking fights with and, subsequently, given a pounding by passersby.
In 2007, Korine, newly clean, resurfaced with the enchanting—and surprisingly coherent, given that it details the adventures of a Michael Jackson lookalike who travels to an island inhabited by other lookalikes, among them Abraham Lincoln and the Pope, to build a stage and mount a performance that they hope will draw an audience from "town"—Mr. Lonely. The film was Korine's most linear and cinematic to date, but, despite being by far his best-looking and least modestly budgeted picture (estimated to cost about $8 million), the film failed to make much of a splash financially—grossing less than $500,000 domestically—or otherwise.
Next, in 2009, Korine seemed to be leaning back on his old habit of invoking outrage through the lens of his Dogme '95 sensibility with the release of Trash Humpers. Only thing is, 14 years had passed since the loose collective was formed, making this type of thing seem like yesterday's news. The film managed to anger a few critics and coax the admiration out of a few more, but it didn't make much of a splash in the cultural zeitgeist; it was as if the elite few who saw it shrugged their shoulders and kind of forgot about it come the following morning.
The only agenda I have in outlining the successes and failures (both commercially and in terms of cultural impact) of Korine's films is in trying to gain an understanding of how we're supposed to digest Spring Breakers, because I think it may be (maybe?) instructive. Is it far-fetched to suppose that after his earlier successes and subsequent time served maintaining a serious drug habit that, after what I'm sure was no picnic in getting his life back to a manageable state, the unceremonious reception to Mister Lonely left him feeling crushed? Is it cynical to think that, after Mr. Lonely failed to cause a stir, Korine tried to recreate his early (relative) success with Trash Humpers and, when that failed to cause a stir, with Spring Breakers Korine is blatantly attempting to court the mainstream? It's a fair question, one that I've been searching for an answer to even though I know one most certainly doesn't exist. And even if that were proven the case, Spring Breakers is so out of alignment with the majority of mainstream cinema that it would thus defy its own raison d'être. Maybe in his attempt and failure to sell out, Korine has found a new, extremely personalized and case-specific formula for success: Spring Breakers cost about $5 million to make, grossed over $30 million theatrically worldwide, was granted instant cult-film status upon its arrival, and has affirmed Harmony Korine's viability as a commercial film director while simultaneously reaffirming his viability as a transgressive filmmaker.
But what is Korine's Spring Breakers supposed to be, exactly?
Much has been made of the casting coup of Selena Gomez (as Faith) and Vanessa Hudgens (Candy), both former Disney Channel royalty, as two of the four disaffected college students at the center of the film (the other two are played by Ashley Benson (Brittany) of ABC's Pretty Little Liars and Korine's wife Rachel Korine (Cotty), who also appeared in Trash Humpers). As both Gomez and Hudgens are extremely popular personalities in certain circles, they provide the film with a built-in audience—even a small fraction of their fans provides Korine with a wider audience than he's used to playing to—and are, in turn, afforded the opportunity to star in a bona fide art film, while Korine is afforded the opportunity to exploit and subvert their screen personas and have people call him a genius for doing so (which they have in droves).
Upon being introduced to our heroines, we are immediately inundated with their desperate, breathy proclamations of needing to spend spring break in Fort Lauderdale—the details of which would seem completely absurd if it bore any resemblance to an actual desire that might befall a single human being here on Earth (but most closely resembles the longing of the characters played by Tom Cruise and James Van Der Beek in their desperation to escape the small-mindedness of their dead-end, football-obsessed towns in All the Right Moves (1983) and Varsity Blues (1999), respectively)—that is so all-consuming that three of the four (Gomez's vaguely Christian character Faith isn't asked to participate) turn into instantly hardened thugs and wind up robbing a local restaurant in the service of following their collective dream. Here, Korine stages the heist expertly, shooting from inside the getaway car, with Cotty at the wheel, peering out the car window and into the restaurant windows, tracking Brittany and Candy as they smash and grab their way through the restaurant before making it back to the car and tearing off. It's thrilling, nerve-wracking stuff, as you're really pulling for them to get away without incident despite the callousness of it all. I'm not sure you would put Spring Breakers on a double feature with Dassin's Rififi as one of the two greatest heist films of all time, but, in its real-time brevity, the sequence works perfectly.
Shortly after our heroines' arrival in Fort Lauderdale, they wind up in the clink after a night of debauchery in a drab Florida apartment complex, only to be bailed out by a creep on the order of a Max Cady recast as a weirdo rapper/drug dealer named Alien, played by James Franco clearly channeling weirdo rapper Riff Raff who, at the time of this writing, in a video taken by TMZ has calmly threatened to sue the film's producers for eight to ten million dollars (though, as with all things Riff Raff, it's somewhat unclear if this is a joke). Franco is good, employing a nice blend of outrageousness and subtlety, though there's still something that doesn't quite track 100 percent in his performance, which may be that he's not quite as convincing a Riff Raff as Riff Raff is. The girls then become entrenched in the dangerous turf war between Alien and his mentor and former best friend, Big Arch (played just adequately enough by rapper Gucci Mane to not be distracting). Two of the girls fall off before the bat-shit craziness of it all reaches a fever pitch and the film concludes.
There's a hallucinatory and heady quality to Spring Breakers that, by no accident, recounts the works of Terrence Malick; particularity The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life. But with its Malick-influenced combination of a chopped up, breezy, and loosely connected images defying an identifiable timeline with breathy, introspective voiceovers, instead of ruminating on the psychological heft of war or the ways in which our private, customized lives have greater meaning and are integral to maintaining the construct of the cosmos, Spring Breakers has its characters ruminating similarly on spring break. It's so effective that you might not recognize how funny it is until after the movie's over.
There is also a confrontational and pervasive sexual aggression in the film that's a bit confounding: there are long, slow motion scenes depicting a parade of bouncing tits and asses, sometimes being drenched in liquor and beer poured by buff, creepy young men. It's all beautifully photographed—Korine has said in interviews that he wanted the film in these spots to look like they were lit with Starburst or Skittles—and masterfully scored by Skrillex, whose scoring of these scenes may best be described as sounding like he's pulling an electric ripcord—but it's a tough pill to swallow. (These scenes bring to mind how, in cereal commercials, milk is poured into a bowl of cereal from an above-average height, causing the milk and cereal to splash over the edge of the bowl in an explosion. It's just not how anyone pours cereal into a bowl. At all.) But is it, objectively, a tough pill to swallow?
Of course, what is considered attractive or sexy is subjective. It's a whole lot of frustrating to figure out just how we're supposed to feel when confronted with this particular brand of manufactured sexuality. Is it supposed to be titillating? Depressing? Unnerving? Perhaps Korine is using sexuality here in the same way folks have said Spielberg uses violence in the Normandy Beach scene of Saving Private Ryan to further an anti-violence agenda; but this is further complicated by there not being much beauty to be found in bullets ripping through clothing and flesh and the face-down corpses of soldiers bouncing ever so slightly when the tide rolls in to shore while there's plenty of beauty to be found in the female form. However, there's also a lot of ugliness to be found in degradation. And a lot of sadness to be found in self-degradation. Are we meant to feel challenged by this, or are we simply supposed to get off on it? Are there people watching Spring Breakers, a Harmony Korine film, in this very particular context, who enjoy that particular brand of sexuality?
No one comes off very well, but even as we're taken deeper down Korine's nightmarish rabbit hole, what resonates in Spring Breakers is the wide-eyed wonder, longing, and, ultimately, innocence radiating from the central characters—even as they're engaged in such unsavory activities as armed robbery, alcohol and drug abuse, and divergent and aggressive sexual behavior—that's both supremely enchanting and really, really dumb at the same time. Their pursuit being so infantile and virginal as they navigate the pitfalls through a fever dream of medium-time thuggery and caustic sexuality is something to behold, if you're up for it. Still, I'm honestly not sure who this movie is for—it seems to me that the dudes who watch it for the sex would be put off by or at least bored with the more philosophical passages of the film, while those cuing it up for its art-house pedigree might be put off by, well, possibly the whole fucking thing.
In the aforementioned A/V Club interview, Korine says, "I’m not telling anyone what to think. I’m not trying to even defend it in that way, or say that this is my intent or that’s my intent, or that’s what I’m trying to say. That’s not for me to argue. I’m trying to make something that’s amazing, something that’s beautiful, something that lasts." I don't know that Spring Breakers is beautiful, exactly, but it's something else, and there is a poetry to it and an elegance in its neon-tinged mysticism, even in its crassest and basest moments. I've thought of little else since I watched it, even though I can't tell you for certain if I enjoyed it or not.
