[With one
son in college and another about to be, Spring Break is a lot more than just a
concept or a professional reality for this AmericanStudier. So this week I’ll
AmericanStudy a handful of cinematic portrayals of Spring Break, leading up to some
weekend reflections on being a college Dad!]
On the
fine, fraught line between challenging and exploiting the objectification of
female celebrities.
First
things first: despite their very similar titles, Spring
Breakers (2012) is a much more complex, ambitious, and thoughtful film
than yesterday’s subject, Spring Break
(1983). Yes, indie filmmaker
Harmony Korine, who wrote and directed the film, has said in
interviews that he wanted to make it in part to make up for his own missed
Spring Break experiences (he was apparently too busy skateboarding to venture
to sunnier climes), so Spring Breakers
could be said to reflect the same hedonistic goals as the earlier film. But as
has been evident since the controversial and groundbreaking film Kids (1995), his first writing credit, Korine is
ultimately more interested in deconstructing than in celebrating such youthful
desires and pursuits, and Spring Breakers,
an unremittingly bleak and violent film which he’s referred
to as a “beach noir,” is no exception.
None of
that is what led the media coverage of Spring
Breakers, however. The consistent focus was the fact that two of its four
female leads were Selena
Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, known at the time as squeaky-clean teen
icons (Gomez mostly from a pop music career that had begun on Barney & Friends and Hudgens mostly from the High
School Musical films) who in the film give far grittier and more
sexualized performances than they ever had before. That was also relatively
true for a third lead, Ashley Benson, although her role on the TV show Pretty Little Liars had been
a bit darker than Gomez’s and Hudgens’ prior work; the fourth lead, Rachel Korine, is
Harmony Korine’s wife and so had been part of his films for some time already. Between
spending a good bit of the film in bikinis, taking part in numerous scenes
featuring sexual
situations and drug use, and eventually killing quite a few characters in a violent climax, these
previously and famously Disney-fied actresses thoroughly challenge that image,
a reversal that understandably drew a great deal of attention.
While I’m
sure Harmony Korine would say that he cast these actresses due to their talents
(and their performances are excellent across the board, to be clear), it seems
clear to me that he also did so (at least in part) because he knew the
controversy over their image revisions would draw more attention and coverage
to the film. Which is fine up to a point; but since those revisions again
require the actresses to do things like wear skimpy outfits for nearly all of
the film, it does feel possible to argue that Korine is both exploiting their
celebrity and objectifying them in the process. In her review of
the film for The Guardian, critic Heather Long advanced that analysis,
arguing that it “reinforces rape culture” and “turns young women into sex
objects.” But Rolling Stone’s Josh
Eells argued the opposite position, claiming that the film features “a
kind of girl-power camaraderie that could almost be called feminist,” part
of Korine’s career-long goal of doing “the most radical work, but putting it
out in the most commercial way to infiltrate the mainstream.” A complex duality
which, to be honest, is really at the heart of the whole concept of Spring
Break in the 21st century.
Next
Spring Break film tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other Spring Break films or texts you’d share?
