Five Spring Breakers Water Cooler Talking Points

After months of international hype, Spring Breakers, the new film from cult director, Harmony Korine, has finally arrived to local cinemas. Despite the neon posters and fun-time marketing imagery, it’s a moody piece that’s already sparked loads of online discussion, from its debaucherous use of clean-cut Disney starlets to James Franco’s seedy turn as a corn-rowed trap-rapper. Below, we discuss a few more of these water cooler talking points in greater depth…

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1. “Wait. What’s a water cooler?”

Hmm, this was unexpected, but a good place to start, I guess. Well, it’s kinda like a bathtub, a big wet thing that you stick your mug under when you’re thirsty. But really, it’s just a symbol, an olden-day thing that people used to stand around while telling boring morning stories to each other. Maybe your water cooler is a cafe queue? Let’s just move on, please.

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2. “What the fuck just happened?”

Assuming that you didn’t just doze off around the 28^th time that James Franco breathily said “Spriiiiiiiing breeeeeeak yaaaaaaaaaall”, this is most likely the main question that’ll be rolling around your head as you exit the cinema. That fun teen romp through a debaucherous spring break holiday that you were eagerly anticipating (something like an R-rated Saved By The Bell: Hawaiian Style) in fact turned out to be an odd mix of eerily violent criminal scenes, colourful found-footage of beer-bongin’ co-eds, hilariously cartoonish James Franco gangsta-posturing, and a general dirty, seedy, creepy undertone that left you feeling like you were stuck in Travis Bickle’s mind and/or in need of a 45-minute shower.

In the past, director Harmony Korine has explicitly outlined his hatred of narrative and plot (“The idea of plot is unattractive, because I never liked people who plotted out their lives,” he said in a recent interview). In the press rounds for Spring Breakers, he’s regularly described the film as a “pop poem”, an impressionistic melange of Skrillex noise blasts, trap-rap drawls, giggly schoolgirl affectations and neon colour schemes, with all these motifs looping around themselves repetitively like the elements of a song. In other words, you’re not supposed to watch this film the way you’d watch, say, Freaky Friday. It’s intended as a sensory experience rather than a story with any affixed meaning or message. Still, when I called out Korine on the surface-level vacuity of the film during a recent interview, he became noticeably annoyed. Obviously, he finds a deeper meaning in recontextualising all these disparate elements; I just walked out feeling like I did that time when I was 15 and my school friends dragged me along to some dingy strip club in a city backstreet and I saw old couples making out to degenerate porn.

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3. “So, is this guy like a pervert or somethin’?

You could definitely argue such a point. Korine’s a guy who’s built a career on provocation, and Spring Breakers offers the most obvious example since his debut writing gig, Kids. The shit-stirring reaches its apex in a simple poolside conversational scene, where Korine unnecessarily pans up-and-down the girls’ bodies, like a perverted bobbing duck dipping its head in-and-out of the water, just to capture a glimpse of their scantily-clad crotches. This isn’t Godard panning over a naked Brigitte Bardot in Contempt (which was a compassionate protest) or even Gallo copping a real-life beej from girlfriend (and Korine’s ex) Chloe Sevigny in The Brown Bunny (which at least had narrative value); it’s just immature provocation.

The most frustrating thing about Korine’s films is that they’re too hard to either love or hate: amongst all this cheap PC-baiting, there’s an empathy that often comes through, too. Even as he’s exploiting these young actresses with unnecessary crotch and boob shots, he finds moments of subtle innocence in friends drinking till sun-up and drunkenly singing along to Britney Spears songs outside some beachside convenience store. A case could even be made for Korine as a ‘great defender of youth’, satirising the media’s hysteria regarding ‘wild kids!’ to ridiculous extremes. Take, for example, the kitten-killing metal kids in Gummo, or the promiscuous AIDS-rapey kids in Kids, and, now, the criminally-impulsive ‘girls gone wild’ in Spring Breakers. It’s all part of the same weird sense of humour that somehow manages to transform the teen-y, MTV-lite, holiday credo — “Spring break foreverrrrr!” — into a sick running gag.

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4. “James Franco is pretty good, huh?”

Yep. Franco gets a lot of shit for lackadaisically phoning in performances (check out the things people said about his ‘Oz’, sheesh), but he’s pretty magnetic as the smarmy grill-flashin’ Alien, a rapper/dealer/potential sexual deviant who becomes a weird spiritual father figure to the vacationing girls after bailing them outta the cop shop. Franco’s cartoonishly menacing performance culminates in the film’s most enjoyable scene, a ranty monologue that could be called a) the ultimate expression of our generation’s materialistic preoccupations, or b) just a straight ape of this wacky Riff Raff home video. However you see it, we’re pretty sure you’ll leave the cinema screaming “look at my sheeeeeyit!” and won’t stop for days. There hasn’t been a monologue this hilariously over-the-top in a movie since Ben Affleck’s Mamet-referencing riff in The Boiler Room, and even that was about boring shit like stockbroking, not Calvin Klein colognes.

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5. “Spring break yaaaaallllllllllll, spring break.” 

Good one. Get ready to hear your office co-workers and drunken friends randomly drop this shit into conversation for weeks. Sigh. So, this seems like a good place to finish up. Anyway, I’m hungry. Pepper steak yaaaaalllllllll. 

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