As if the transition from adolescence to adulthood weren’t hard enough, fame further complicates coming of age. One is reminded of a young Drew Barrymore, coming out of rehab for the first time at age 13 and the countless stories that didn’t end with her happy present. But there’s nothing quite as cool as youthful nihilism, especially when wielded by young women. Live fast, die young: Bad girls do it well.
Ten years ago, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers and Sophia Coppola’s The Bling Ring represented the grown-up debuts of beloved childhood Hollywood princesses, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson in one, and Emma Watson in the other. The two films are also similar for their adult themes and media commentary. Against this backdrop of conflicting contexts, Korine calls his cast “gangster mystics.” No one would say that a refusal to grow up is endearing, but resistance is fertile.
The similarities between these two movies remind me of when in 2007 the Coen Brothers and Paul Thomas Anderson both did adaptations of stories set in West Texas, as both camps tend to write their own scripts. No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood are companion pieces in the same way that Spring Breakers and The Bling Ring are, but here the young ladies are the ones with the guns.
These two movies seem to prefigure the ten years of turmoil since their release. Rolling Stone’s David Fear points out that in the decade since, Spring Breakers has ripened more than it has aged. He writes, “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.” Korine says, “I wanted to make a film that feels like there’s no air in the room. I never wanted the audience to be comfortable or complacent.” If nothing else, he succeeded in that, especially during the movie’s inciting incident.
Spring Breakers’ heist scene might be the best few minutes of cinema of the 21st century so far. Brit (Ashley Benson) and Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) rob the Chicken Shack restaurant with a hammer and a squirt gun while Cotty (Rachel Korine) circles the building in the getaway car with the camera (and us) riding shotgun. Our limited vantage point gives the scene an added tension because though we are at a distance, it feels far from safe. Much like the security camera footage of Columbine and Chronicle, and the camera-as-character of Chronicle and Cloverfield, we receive limited visual information while experiencing total exposure. The girls’ mantra: “Just pretend it’s a fucking video game. Act like you’re in a movie or something.”
Alien (James Franco) arrives as the girls’ douche ex machina, an entity somewhere between True Romance’s Drexl Spivey (1993), Kevin Federline, and Riff Raff, the latter of whom supposedly sued over the similarities. He bails them out of jail after a party gone astray and takes them home to his arsenal. What could possibly go wrong?
Selena Gomez does the least behaving badly, but her role as Faith is still a long way from Alex Russo or Beezus. As she tells her grandmother over the phone,
I think we found ourselves here. We finally got to see some other parts of the world. We saw some beautiful things here. Things we’ll never forget. We got to let loose. God, I can’t believe how many new friends we made. Friends from all over the place. I mean everyone was so sweet here. So warm and friendly. I know we made friends that will last us a lifetime. We met people who are just like us. People the same as us. Everyone was just trying to find themselves. It was way more than just having a good time. We see things different now. More colors, more love, more understanding… I know we have to go back to school, but we’ll always remember this trip. Something so amazing, magical. Something so beautiful. Feels as if the world is perfect. Like it’s never gonna end.
Spring break is heavy, y’all. As Korine himself explains,“I grew up in Nashville, but I was a skater, so I was skateboarding during spring break. Everyone I knew would go to Daytona Beach and the Redneck Riviera and just fuck and get drunk — you know, as a rite of passage. I never went. I guess this is my way of going.” Ultimately the movie illustrates Douglas Adams’ dictum that the problem with a party that never ends is that ideas that only seem good at parties continue to seem like good ideas. “It was about this dance of surfaces,” Korine says. “The meaning is the residue that drips down below the surface.”
Speaking of bad ideas and surfaces, Sophia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, which is based on a real group of fame-obsessed teenagers, is a mad mix of both. Not since Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen (2003; which features Spring Breakers’ Hudgens) has a group of teens been so overtaken by expensive clothes, handbags, and bad behavior. This crew of underage criminals used internet maps and celebrity news to find out where their targets lived and when they would be out of town. They subsequently stole $3 million worth of stuff from the empty homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox, Orlando Bloom, and Audrina Patridge. Once caught, The Ring seem more concerned with what their famous victims think than with the charges brought against them. “That part of our culture used to be small — that pop, ‘guilty pleasure’ side of things,” Coppola says, “Now it just won’t stop growing.” It’s an attitude that has only grown further and faster in the era of Instagram and TikTok.
It would be remiss of me not to note that two of my favorite composers, Cliff Martinez and Brian Reitzell, respectively, put the music together for these movies. The mood of Spring Breakers is mostly set by Martinez in collaboration with Skrillex. “I love them both,” Korine says, “and wanted to take a certain element of what each does best and have them merge. I wanted the music to have a physical presence.” Atlanta rappers Gucci Mane, who’s also in the movie, Nicki Minaj, and Waka Focka Flame also add texture to the sound. “The movie was always meant to work like a violent, beautiful pop ballad,” Korine adds, “something very polished that disappears into the night.” Seemingly just the right mix of music always accompanies Sophia Coppola’s films, and The Bling Ring features a blend of hip-hop, Krautrock, and electronic pop that reads more eclectic than it actually sounds: Sleigh Bells, Oneohtrix Point Never, CAN, 2 Chainz, M.I.A., Azealia Banks, Klaus Schulze (R.I.P.), Frank Ocean, and others. Discounting the importance of music in creating the pressure that permeates these films would be an oversight.
One more film celebrating a ten year anniversary that deserves mention here is Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto. It’s intimately connected to the other two movies: It’s based on James Franco’s short story collection of the same name, and it was adapted and directed by Sophia Coppola’s niece. Palo Alto beautifully captures the gauzy grey areas when the boundaries between adolescents and adults blur beyond recognition. More so even than Spring Breakers, it foreshadows Franco’s embodying the worst parts of his characters off-screen in the years since.
The AV Club’s Hattie Lindert notes, “Spring break, by nature, is fleeting—but […] the cultural appetite for brazenly vibes-first content against a high-stakes backdrop of violence, sex, and ecstasy, endures.” Life is what you can get away with, and though these films are cautionary tales of an extreme nature, they prove that caution isn’t cool. Youth might be wasted on the young, but our heroes don’t concern themselves with consequences. There’s a decade of evidence piled up right behind us.
Happy Spring!
Thank you for reading,
-royc.
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