I’ve always been able to tell if someone is on my level by the way they react to the words “spring break”. Should the phrase spark a visceral need to call out “spraaang breaaak, spraaang breaaak” in an approximation of a blazed-out Floridian drawl, there’s a good chance their brain chemistry was altered at an impressionable age by Harmony Korine’s day-glo holiday nightmare, Spring Breakers. Truly, if you’ve ever listened to Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” on repeat, or convinced yourself you could rock a pink balaclava with a unicorn on it, you may be entitled to financial compensation from A24. But 10 years since Harmony turned squeaky-clean Disney stars Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens into gun-toting baddies, the sun still shines bright on his hellish vision of St. Petersburg, Florida – a Hieronymus Bosch painting by way of Malibu Barbie – which is likely down to the movie’s heavy emphasis on visuality.
As someone who grew up and attended university in the UK (and was 20 when Spring Breakers came out) the concept of spring break was mythical to me — something I largely understood through teen movies and episodes of The Simpsons. I knew about the Girls Gone Wild franchise, which was founded in 1997 and consisted of filming young women at spring break events, under the influence of alcohol and drugs and usually topless. The footage would then be cut together and available for mail order. The exploitative nature of this pop culture relic is present in Spring Breakers, which opens with a slow-mo montage of beach revellers drinking and partying, before then incorporating genuine footage from Girls Gone Wild.
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By including these clips, Harmony took the ethically questionable franchise to a stage which it was never intended for: the Venice Film Festival. Arthouse audiences became voyeurs to these vintage hedonistic images that demonstrate a ‘work hard, play hard’ mentality passed down from graduating class to graduating class. Loud music, bright bikinis, flirting, and alcohol in any shape or form are presented as an American rite of passage — one that Harmony, by his own admission, missed out on. But the blurred lines between reality and fantasy don’t stop with the Girls Gone Wild videos.
Sprawled across the tiles of a grimey communal bathroom, best friends Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson) and Cotty (Rachel Korine) commiserate regarding their shared boredom and frustration, having failed to secure the funds for their Floridian dream. “This is more than just spring break,” Faith laments. “This is our chance to see something different.” Although little information is given about the girls’ backstories beyond Faith being a devout churchgoer and loving granddaughter, it’s implied they are attending college in their hometown.
Candy, Brit and Cotty devise a solution for their problem: they steal a professor’s car, rob the local Chicken Shack using water pistols and hammers, and then set the vehicle on fire (all whilst high on cocaine). “Pretend like it’s a video game,” Candy tells Brit and Cotty. “Just, act like you’re in a movie or something.” So that’s what the girls do. When they later relay how it went down to Faith, she’s disturbed by the violence, but keeps the story to herself.
Following the robbery they make it to St. Petersburg, trading their backpacks and hoodies for weed leaf bikini tops and personalised booty shorts, while embracing the non-stop-party atmosphere over which the gold-toothed rapper Alien (James Franco) presides. They do act like they’re in a movie, creating whole new personas, making new friends, and scooting around the town on mopeds. “This place is special. I’m starting to think this is the most spiritual place I’ve ever been,” archetypal good girl Faith tells her grandmother over the phone, and it’s easy to understand why. For Faith, their trip is a bonding experience with her best friends where the relentless pursuit of pleasure is the only goal. When she earnestly laments to Candy and Brit she wishes they could all move to Florida and live there together, they’re amused by her naivety, but who hasn’t been on a holiday they wish they never had to come home from?
Following a chance encounter with Alien after they’re arrested at a party, the girls fall deeper down the rabbit hole, introduced to automatic weapons and cocaine distribution. The American dream turns into a nightmare, and Faith, disturbed by how easily seduced her friends are by this more extreme vision of excess, decides to wake up. It’s a microcosm for the ‘typical’ college experience: party, learn something new, realise this strange period of your life can’t last forever, and enter the adult world, where spring breaks become just another monotonous week at the office. But Harmony (who in films like Gummo and Trash Humpers has always been fascinated by the communities people find for themselves even in the depths of depravity) doesn’t assign any moral value to the events of the film.
“I wanted to make a film that was more like a feeling, more this idea of these pockets in America and what happens when you get a little lost,” Harmony told SBS in 2013. High-contrast visuals, a soundtrack ripped straight from the Billboard Top 40 of the day, plus Cliff Martinez and Skrillex’s enduring score (“Scary Monsters on Strings” is still an all-timer) recreates the sensory overload that comes with being in a new city, and the push-pull between embracing your surroundings and wanting to retreat to the familiar. In some ways Harmony also set the scene for the rise of TikTok that followed in the ensuing years. Imagery and sound are often combined collage-style, a precursor somewhat to the age fan-cams and aesthetic edits.
Since the film’s release, these visuals have become mainstays on Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest — the girls standing in front of the burning car, James Franco screaming “Look at my shit!” and Selena Gomez’s tear-stained face gazing out from a bus window remain in heavy rotation — and there’s something deeply appropriate about them becoming decontextualised in this manner. After all, Harmony himself said in the aforementioned SBS interview that he was creating a movie “that was more sensory”, and previously expressed a desire to make an alternative cut of the film using leftover footage (that is yet to surface). Social media has only become more obsessed with curation in the decade since Spring Breakers; seeing stills tagged as #aesthetic or #inspo suggests that not only did the film accurately capture the mid-00s style, but Harmony’s ‘no plot just vibes’ mentality paid off.
The image of Candy, Brit and Cotty in their matching fluorescent pink ski masks, tiger swimsuits and sweatpants with “DTF” emblazoned on the ass, clutching assault rifles while a piano version of Britney Spears’ “Everytime” plays is perhaps the film’s ultimate achievement, as sex, violence, and the loss of innocence combine in one visually arresting moment. Britney’s own history as a Disney star adds a layer of poignancy considering Harmony cast Selena and Vanessa, two stars freshly free of their manufactured kid-friendly images crafted under the House of Mouse. But the overlay of Britney’s most soulful and emotive ballad over slow-motion footage of the group committing various armed robberies calls back to Candy’s insistence they “act like you’re in a movie” — or at the very least, a music video, where three minutes stretches out to a lifetime and the goal isn’t to depict life as it is, but as it could be.
In Spring Breakers, Harmony wasn’t aiming for accuracy in terms of the story he wanted to tell. The costumes, music, found footage and small character details (such as the girls watching My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic) create a sort of baseline visual truth, but his smart editing, sparse script and subversive casting are what truly imbue the film with its enduring charm. None of the plot feels particularly plausible, but it does reach an emotional honesty about peer pressure and conformity in female friendships, as well as the youthful desire to experience the world as hard and as fast as possible. The curation of our own memories as we relay them to family and friends, and in turn the curation of the self based on who we’re around or who we’re projecting that image toward, are themes that stem from the film with a hazy, almost ethereal grace. Like working your way through a house party hangover, or adapting to real life after the holiday of a lifetime, Spring Breakers lingers in the brain. A neon nightmare that endures, asking if we can tell when the party’s over, and who we’re going to be on the car ride home.