I went into this one wary and came out won over. It’s hallucinatory to the extreme, a popsicle-colored fever dream of nihilism and escape. It is not a critique of the attitudes represented. It is a presentation of said attitudes and you, the audience, are on your own to make up your own mind. My favorite kind of cinema. By the end, you are locked into a bell jar with these characters, yearning for some kind of moral certainty. It doesn’t exist. Judge these people all you want. Fear for their futures. Fear for the future of mankind. I’d say that was appropriate, although it won’t do any good. Spring Breakers isn’t a diagnosis, or an analysis. It does not give you an escape hatch. Wrong is not punished. Innocence is not rewarded. You are on your own out there. These girls have been objectified since the moment they were born, they are growing up in a feverishly sexualized culture, and they see no problem with that. It is their normal. And what goes down here is a logical end to that kind of incessant objectification. But even that is too scold-y and analytical for what the picture presents. That’s all me, putting my own concerns onto it. But that’s how the film works. Because IT doesn’t scold and IT doesn’t analyze, there is a huge space left for me, for us. The film takes place in a lusciously colored world, so beautiful you want to enter into it, hoping that some of those colors rub off. But look out, because that world is brutal and you need to watch your own back. The film isn’t about the acting and the girls are pretty much interchangeable, which, again, seems to be the point. There’s a moment where James Franco, as the white rapper/hustler, looks at two of the girls and says, “I think I’m in love with y’all. You’re my soul mates.” That moment comes pretty far into the picture, and I was already won over, but it was that moment when I fell in love with it for real. The language is repetitive, and it works on you like a brainwashing technique with a lot of repetition, a lot of deadpan rhapsodizing, using the same words over and over. The language is incantatory. We’re inside the dream. There is no waking life. Spring Breakers is not realistic. Judging it as “realism” would be a mistake. I loved it.
