Spring Breakers (2012)

I watched Spring Breakers at the local movie theater - and so did a large group of teenagers who seemed rather perplexed by Harmony Korinne's nightmarish exploration of youth culture. Having only seen Gummo - a strangely beautiful, but also depressive - film about young people in a small town, I didn't quite know what to expect. Spring Breakers starts off as a surreal rock video. Kids dancing, an abrasive tune by Skrillex, the camera spins around - the whole thing evokes instant nausea. A gang of teenagers look forward to spring break. They want to go to the place where all kids their age spend a week of partying. They can't afford it, but that's not an absolute limitation - they rob a bank and go on holiday, where one is to party and 'have a good time', whatever that means in this world which is portrayed as a sort of hedonistic hell, where everyone is trying to experience everything. Some of the girls have second thoughts, and go home. Sunny Florida delivers. The party never dies out. The girls end up at a party raided by the police, get arrested and are bailed out by a local wannabe-thug. In one of the film's characteristically weird scenes, the girls line up at a piano on the beach, where they belt out a Britney Spears tune. Gummo was a lo-fi, eccentric little movie. Spring Breakers seems to aim at the Mainstream, creating the kind of images that actually look like the thing derided in the movie: commercials, music videos, glossy sunsets - everything that is creepy and pervy about commercial culture and desires (some of the actors are brought from the Disney teen-star factory...). The camera ogles, but the result is not, I think, supposed to look alluring - it's just sad and alienated. - Yet, the problem with the movie is it's stance, that its entire idea seems flawed. What can Korinne, given the main ideas of the movie, confront us with other than faux-beauty and a world so warped in its desire for - well its not clear what it desires - that it is hard to even react to it. Is Spring Breakers just an exploitation movie with social critique as its excuse?