![]() ![]() Having it both ways is Korine’s specialty, which makes him an ideal millennial auteur-a purveyor of the kind of scare-quoted ambivalence (and intellectual ambiguity) that drives some critics to write raves and others up the wall. If you hump trash hard enough, does that make it art? And can something be art-outsider or otherwise-when it’s in on its own joke? The goal was to make something akin to a cursed VHS you might pick up at a garage sale the characters’ repeated, hysterical cries of “Make it! Don’t fake it!” underlined the not-so-secret question of authenticity. Trash Humpers, from 2009, was Korine’s most kamikaze endeavor, literalizing its title through grainy scenes of wizened vandals (played under heavy makeup by the director and his friends) making love to various discarded inanimate objects. ![]() Both Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy were plunges into surrealistic weirdness, while Korine’s seemingly drugged-up appearances on Late Show With David Letterman were the stuff of early-internet legend. Korine always has walked the fine line between stupid and clever: After breaking through in the mid-’90s with the screenplay for Kids-a voyeuristic, hedonistic glimpse at post-AIDS hookup culture crammed with skeezy details and directed by expert leerer Larry Clark-he dared audiences to see him as a nasty genius. The forbidding space of the lecture hall is also a sign that Korine wants us to put our thinking caps on instead of checking our brains at the proverbial door. If it seems foolish to impute symbolic ambitions to a movie mostly scored by Skrillex, you’re underestimating the headiness of Spring Breakers. The editing, though, suggests something a bit more abstract and poetic: These depraved yet weirdly infantile rituals are projections of the all-American adolescent subconscious, the collective daydream of landlocked girls longing to go wild. The droning, debaucherous verisimilitude of Korine’s beach scenes could be MTV or dirtbag ethnography-or an exercise in satire as tongue-in-cheek as a sunburned tourist going to town on a rapidly melting red-white-and-blue popsicle. It goes without saying that this second group is having less fun. After what feels like an eternity-spring break forever-we switch to shots of students zoning out in a darkened college classroom, eyes drooping in the glow of their laptops. In the first segment, the director flexes his aesthetic muscles with some smoothly hypnotic lateral tracking shots of a barely legal Floridian bacchanal: acres of tanned, toned flesh drenched in sweat and Bacardi. ![]() Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers begins by juxtaposing two very different locations, each a depiction of what might be called the student body. ![]()
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