10 years of ‘Spring Breakers’: Harmony Korine’s contemporary ‘Kids’
There was a point in time when the cult icon and American filmmaker Harmony Korine stood at the very forefront of underground youth culture, with his voice representing a very specific, almost ethereal, mood among 1990s adolescents. Such bubbled to the surface in his very first screenplay for 1995s Kids, a scruffy independent flick directed by Larry Clark that spoke of an authentic reality for a gang of deeply naive New York teenagers.
Known as one of the most significant subversive pioneers of the independent scene, Korine helped promote grassroots, low-budget filmmaking with the release of his writing debut as well as his directorial debut Gummo in 1997. Presenting an amoral vision of contemporary America, his films spoke to a disgruntled generation who could see themselves reflected in reality, preempting the underground revolution of youth culture that would inspire the subversive rebelliousness of MTV and Jackass.
Fostering a behaviour that encouraged erratic behaviour ‘just because’, the rise of MTV came amid a whirlwind of cultural revolution, where commercial technology was on the rise and the dawn of the Internet was rebuilding an entirely new reality. Indeed, from the release of Korine’s Kids in 1995 and his spiritual successor, Spring Breakers, 17 years later, youth culture has utterly metamorphosed.
Reflecting a vapid reflection of the modern youth, Korine’s Spring Breakers is a dizzying fever dream of blinding neon colours, wagging tongues and EDM that throws audiences headfirst into the baffling hodge-podge of internet culture. In many ways, Korine’s divisive 2012 movie is pure trash, providing a titillating sensory experience in which depravity, nudity, violence and more are celebrated as some sort of contemporary nirvana.
Such a tone is framed in a story that follows four college girls who hold up a restaurant in order to get the funds to go on spring break. For a while, they are able to indulge in the fantasies of the rite of passage before they are arrested and bailed out of jail by a drug and arms dealer named Alien (James Franco).
Casting two major pop-culture names in Disney’s Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, as well as young stars Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine, the film set out to attract an audience with pure spectacle, using salacious marketing techniques to get viewers through the door. Whilst photographing the young stars in scantily clad swimsuits could merely be seen as a corrupt marketing ploy, it also serves to reflect the sheer superficiality of the film itself in which nothing but titillating and debaucherous indulgence matters.
Enticing viewers into the cinema by doubling down on nudity, violence and graphic imagery, it is Korine’s intention to reflect the sensory overload of modern internet culture, with the result being both devoid of surface meaning and rich in contextual aesthetics. In a time when youth culture is defined by the fast pleasures of sensational material, Korine is merely reflecting an interpretation of a new reality.
As he stated about the film back in 2012, “It’s about a new generation this idea…the soul is morphed it’s become something else, it’s a new idea, it’s a new vision. It’s about kids that are raised on video games, raised on YouTube clips and raised television babies”.
Just as Korine had reflected on the life of lost young people in the ‘90s with Kids, Korine once again found himself pinpointing generational change in 2012, skewing, satirising and exploiting modern internet culture. As the name of the film itself suggests, identity is a complex ideal, with the youth of the 2010s defining themselves under categories; ‘emos’, ‘scene kids’, ‘hipster’, ‘spring breakers’ in their own search for personal definition.
