When I was at University, my friends who studied film urged me to read an essay by a cultural theorist named Manny Farber. The essay is called ‘White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art’. Farber describes grand, purposely important dramas as White Elephants and strange little genre movies as Termites. He argues that the White Elephants suffer from inertia and listlessness, that attempts to create great art result in overripe, padded, uninspiring work. Farber instead champions Termite Art, which has no delusions of grandeur and burrows its way into depths inaccessible to the elephants. This would mean that a gigantic Oscar-winner like Oppenheimer is less artistically valuable than a Paul Schrader character study like The Card Counter. I’m not sure about this. Great movies can be full of ambition or they can be offbeat genre experiments. White Elephants and Termites are both perfectly capable of greatness, they can coexist.
However, if there’s a clear value in Farber’s essay, it’s that it provides a solid rationale for championing lurid trash.
The exploitation movie is a proud and noble art, a termite art. Such movies tackle topical issues with an irreverent glee, challenging censors with liberal amounts of sexuality, violence and other taboo behaviour. They don’t try to offer sermons on morality or the state of the world, they exist to thrill, to display novelties and appeal to new audiences. Think Pink Flamingos, Freaks, Coffy and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. These are uncompromising, radical films that have all earned a place in cinematic history. Though not aiming for critical respect and serious academic discussion, each (eventually) received exactly that. Spring Breakers deserves to be considered alongside them. Though a Termite, not an Elephant, it captures its age better than any other movie of the time.
Harmony Korine’s film follows four American college students: Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Faith (Selena Gomez), Brit (Ashley Benson) and Cotty (Rachel Korine). Faith is a quiet, cautious Christian who enjoys partying, but in moderation. She draws strict lines and doesn’t cross them. The other girls have no limits: they will do absolutely anything to keep the party going. Before the movie hits the twenty minute mark, the crew have robbed a fast food joint (armed with water pistols) to raise money for a spring break trip to the party town of St Petersburg, Florida. The girls party and rhapsodise about discovering themselves among the hedonism of the thronging beach crowds, but it isn’t long before a grill-wearing, drug dealing gangster rapper named Alien (James Franco) has caught up with them.
Korine is obsessed with the anarchy and recklessness of youth culture. He began his career with the films Kids and Gummo, stories of wayward, drug-addled youths who either contract HIV or live in abject poverty. Spring Breakers takes the edgy spirit of these stories and ditches the grimness. It’s a violent movie with threat and danger, but it’s always a hell of a lot of fun. There’s a constant sense of forward movement, with an energetic editing style propelling the narrative onwards and intimate handheld photography keeping us close to the emotion. Korine provides an upbeat contemporary soundtrack, scoring scenes of hedonistic writhing and revelling to Skrillex and The Black Keys. This is a party movie, a loving/scathing tribute to an irresponsible culture that has thoroughly seduced its director.
Cinematographer Benoît Debie, a regular collaborator of French provocateur Gaspar Noé, bathes the film in glowing neon light. Party scenes and dorm-room bong sessions are lit in lurid reds, pinks, yellows and purples. Every indoor scene has a lava lamp aesthetic and every outdoor scene is packed with burning blue skies, dramatic sunsets, raining dollar bills and reflective surfaces. This is the perfect approach. As a study of all-American dumb debauchery, bikinis, backwards caps and giant sunglasses, Spring Breakers has to look flamboyant and it has to echo the visual style that its characters would embrace. In the film’s most spectacular sequence, a slow-motion montage of brutal robberies is scored to the tender strains of the Britney Spears ballad Everywhere. The girls are living one big drug-fuelled music video fantasy, so Korine and Debie shoot it like one.
Despite its extravagant neon style, Spring Breakers is oddly reminiscent of the works of ethereal arthouse maestro Terrence Malick. Like The Tree of Life or The Thin Red Line, it has whispered voiceovers, a fractured time-skipping editing style and dreamy, awe-inspiring photography. Malick finds his movies in the edit, shooting hours and hours of footage before shuffling it around and cutting it down into a majestic collage. Spring Breakers feels like it was put through the same process. Korine alternates between immersing us in the sweat and beer of the Spring Break party scene and hovering above it all with a wry detachment. Cliff Martinez’s ambient electronic score certainly has an icy coolness to it, putting the audience at a distance from the girls’ impulsive behaviour. The movie effectively balances tacit disapproval for the amorality of the college party scene with giddy, voyeuristic fascination for its excesses.
Spring Breakers isn’t quite a satire, and it isn’t mindless schlock. The no-consequences, frat bro attitude of real-life spring breakers would be easy to condemn, but Korine chooses not to. He playfully ribs the tastelessness and vapidity of the partygoers, but never sticks the knife in. Instead of moralising, Korine celebrates the exuberance of the spring break festivities with an outrageous, exaggerated pulp crime movie. His heroines are beautiful criminals, bikini-clad burglars with a joint in one hand and an uzi in the other. They aren’t chastised or punished, they’re just worshipped. Franco’s character is laugh-out-loud hilarious: a southern-accented gangster man-child who refers to his bed as a spaceship and plays Britney Spears ballads on a piano. They conspire and collide in a dark, psychedelic neon rainbow world of big guns and hard drugs. All of these characters are over the top caricatures, but they aren’t reduced to simpering punchlines.
The girls aren’t cruel or stupid, they look out for each other and demonstrate themselves to be surprisingly capable. Gomez’s Faith is given the most detailed character. She balances her adventurous, risk-taking nature with firm moral commitments. Interestingly, this doesn’t cause too much tension. When Faith wants to leave Florida, she’s supported by her friends. Hudgens is absolutely incredible as Candy, the most diabolical and insatiable of the group. She understands the tone perfectly and matches her performance to it, biting her lip as she toys with Franco’s dreadlocks. The film inevitably drew accusations of sexism, as almost all exploitation films do, but the principal cast are far too strong to be dismissed as eye candy. They aren’t mere objects of Korine’s male gaze, they’re icons of cool brought to life through note-perfect performances.
Spring Breakers is a spectacular collage of the early 2010s pop-cultural vortex. It’s a stylish, knowing homage to the Instagram age, a supremely entertaining film that empathises with its characters and parties alongside them. I was thirteen in 2012, but this is how I remember it. The Skrillex never stopped playing and the world seemed to be filtered through YouTube. Korine gets all of the details right. The girls watch My Little Pony in their downtime and dubstep scores every party scene. This was 2012. To return to Farber’s article, Spring Breakers is a classic Termite movie. It’s seedy, silly exploitation, but it captures the cultural moment of the pre-Trump 2010s better than any other movie. Watch a Demi Lovato music video, seek out an old Vine or play some GTA V. Spring Breakers absorbed everything that existed around it and continues to embody it all. I don’t think any Elephant could do any better.
Nerd note: Cliff Martinez also wrote the score for the Soderbergh/Clooney Solaris