“Scarface on repeat!”
That’s just one of the requirements for the American dream as rattled off by Alien (James Franco) at the exact midpoint of Harmony Korine’s cult-masterpiece Spring Breakers, which turns 10 this week. Other necessities to dream in American: shorts in every color and nunchucks. But it’s Alien’s obsession with Brian De Palma’s lurid 1983 study in sticky coke-fueled excess starring a brown-faced Al Pacino that perhaps gestures the loudest toward Korine’s true aims.
A small-time gangster with loftier goals on his St. Pete perch, Alien is the absurdist apotheosis of the “Florida Man,” that methy affliction that befalls so many in our southernmost state. (See also every single character in the series Claws, a show that could only exist in this movie’s wake.) Like Pacino’s Tony Montana, who also couldn’t stop getting high on his own supply, Alien will go down in a blaze of golden bullets, all while waving around his “little friend.” But Alien’s big moment plays more like a punchline than it does opera. And under Korine’s eye, this country’s foulest fetishes become a blackest-hearted satire of neon buffoonery, all done up in Girls Gone Wild drag. Or as Tony Montana put it succinctly: Capitalism is getting fucked.
Credit: Michael Muller / Muse Prods / Kobal / Shutterstock
Alien is not the main character in Spring Breakers, although it’s hard not to walk away from the movie without him Sharpied across your brain, given the amorphous interchangeability of its actual leads. A quartet of college girls named Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), Cotty (Rachel Korine), and Faith (Selena Gomez), they’re prone to drawing giant dicks on their notepads as their professor drones on about “African-American experiences in the postwar U.S.,” but not too much in the way of individual personality. Faith is the religious one, and that’s about as far as we make it. Name deep.
Operating as a sort of 16-limbed single organism, our foursome rolls into town like a hedonist blob of sun-dappled flesh and string bikinis, swallowing up everything in their path. Nothing from pills to jockstraps is safe! This means they fit right into the boob-flashing bacchanalia that we Americans like to call spring break, and which Korine paints as The Purge but for sex and drugs. Assembled as a haze of slo-mo sleaze, this is the MTV dream that every person of my generation and younger has been sold since birth. Drink and smoke yourself 10 steps past oblivion. Puke it up; do it some more. Bill it all as a good time and head home, back to daily life, saved by the bell.
Of course, all of that good-time machinery has to have its carny operators backstage, greasing the wheels, keeping that eternal bender bending. Enter Alien, smelling blood in the water when our foursome finds themselves busted (in those aforementioned bikinis, natch) for partying a smidge too hearty. Alien, perched in the courtroom like a blinged-out vulture in Versace Jeans Couture, pays their bail and wraps his Freddy-Krueger-long arms around their bare shoulders, inviting them to see the behind-the-scenes of the funhouse. What fluorescent magic lies behind the curtain? Why just sip its pleasures when you can drink straight from the tap? Spring break forever, bitches!
Credit: Muse Prods / Kobal / Shutterstock
Fancying himself a siren of sin, a Pied Piper of poppers, Alien aims to lure these lusty dames straight into his spaceship. (Which is just coincidentally what he happens to call his bedroom.) Little does he know that he’s beamed up an illness a la the Martians in The War of the Worlds, those poor little green suckers who found themselves done in by the common cold. Korine’s “Beach Noir” (as he’s coined it) positions our heroines as the hetero white rot in the gut of a sick Americana. Any flickers of conscience are buried beneath an unquenchable hunger for immediate sensation. “Just pretend it’s a video game or a movie” is their mantra, whether it’s piles of cocaine or faceless nobodies they’re blowing away.
Our girl gang might not be among the most privileged of the college crew who storm Florida every March annually. They have to violently rob a chicken restaurant to go on their vacation, after all, and that’s well before Alien’s influence. But like Alien and Tony Montana before him, it’s their straining for that white privilege, for the real American dream of doing whatever the hell you want to do sans consequence, that’s the fix they’re truly deeply and most madly hooked on. As they croon inane Britney Spears lyrics at a poolside white piano, their day-glow ski-masks awash in a perfect Kool-Aid colored sunset, life really is a game, a movie, and a music video all wrapped in one. And that’s the most American dream of them all.
How to watch: Spring Breakers is available for rent or purchase on Prime Video.
