If Harmony Korine Remade Spring Breakers...

By coincidence this past week in the same movie theater, on the same screen, I saw the new Harmony Korine movie, shot by Benoît Debie a few days after I saw Climax (2018, Gaspar Noé), which is also shot by Debie. Getting to see the latest new film by Korine or Noé is always a treat because Debie shoots in a saturated palette with an assortment of candy-colored gels that I can only compare to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last couple films shot by Xaver Schwarzenberger: Lola (1981) and Querelle (1982).

Cult figure Harmony Korine has a natural flair for gaining attention, is never short on jokes, and has great taste in movies. His screenplays for Kids (1995, Larry Clark) and Ken Park (2002, Clark) are an auspicious pair; his masterpiece is Gummo (1997, Korine);  and the rest of his filmography is uneven, but worthwhile for his fans, or maybe what I mean to say is that while I’m not sure I’m exactly excited about his other films, I’m still drawn to them.

Spring Breakers (2012, Korine) was a huge hit and Korine’s only movie that is accessible to mainstream audiences, but it’s not really a Harmony Korine movie. The Beach Bum (2019, Korine) is his penance for Spring Breakers in that it exhibits his personal aesthetic while confirming poetry is more important than box office.

For example, why does Spring Breakers have all the morality? The worst is Selena Gomez’ character—even she knows she doesn’t belong in the movie and takes a bus home at the start of the second act. And why does Spring Breakers have a conventional story arc? The Beach Bum proudly and successfully makes a statement of being a movie truly representative of Korine’s anarchist vision as a filmmaker. And if you understand this, you understood Trash Humpers (2009, Korine). There’s a reason MOONDOG (Matthew McConaughey) cavorts with a bunch of lowlife degenerate whino junkies; not only is it to visually represent the antitheses of the perfect bodied Disney star twentysomethings in bikinis from Spring Breakers, but when amid the mayhem of destroying Moondog’s mansion for kicks a middle-aged man in an adult diaper swings from a gold chandelier, it is here the ethos of Trash Humpers returns.

But The Beach Bum shows Korine at the height of his powers by also deceiving the audience with the initial appearance of a conventional narrative only to eventually subvert any expectations of such a possibility. There is a turn the plot takes where I was reminded of the disgust I felt watching Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot (2018, Gus Van Sant) and realized it was a commercial for AA, but luckily it was a psychout. My final concession is that if Gummo and Trash Humpers are anarchist cinema, The Beach Bum is an arthouse comedy built around an anarchist protagonist. And the film also uses poetry to establish the voice of the Harmony Korine who made Gummo and wrote A Crackup at the Race Riots—both as a narrative poem and with Moondog’s verse. It’s been a while since American independent cinema has worked this well.

If Terry Richardson Remade Badlands...

Harmony Korine creates high concept product for the international arthouse circuit. Spring Breakers (2013, Harmony Korine) is atypical for him because it is unlike the intimate cockroach surviving devastating disaster of nature structure he commanded in Gummo (1997, Korine), or the narratives where he transports us to tag along with obscure communes, Mister Lonely (2007, Korine) and Trash Humpers (2009, Korine); because, in his newest film he ventures for the first time away from his commitment to realism.

Gummo is presented almost as a documentary. Trash Humpers is presented as a home movie. And, while portioning out his aesthetic with equal measures of both, Korine goes all out in favor of a superbly realized stream of images--mostly shot with a shutter over-cranked to the point of tableau--and sounds, to arrive at what I am unfortunately struggling to decide describing as either like a music video, a commercial, or post-Eisensteinian montage. But undoubtedly, Spring Breakers is presented as a dream fantasy.

Music videos and commercials rely on image and sound because they're so short. They also typically feature many cuts. But, whereas they can project a wide array of disparate and unrelated shots, Spring Breakers feels more like a theme; or, like a book of photography.

Spring Breakers is A-list teensploitation. We get no plot or character. The girls are one dimensional: they like partying (sex, drugs, and violence) in bikinis and believe spring break is about finding themselves. The only plot turns are who gets robbed and who leaves spring break. Maybe I'd expected more. But, this is acceptable for the teensploitation genre. The goal of teensploitation is to get teens to spend money on a movie that promises sex and other R rated antics. So, why I would still commend the plot structure of Spring Breakers is because it places the reality of the dangerous crimes being perpetrated in the background, and basically eschews any moral consequences in favor of following each girl's pursuit of their ideal endless spring break.

And the girls' continuous grounding in reckless high-stakes adventure is what sets the movie apart. No one ever interrupts their roadtrip; well, at least no moral laws do. The obsession with the fleeting spring break is all that matters. While the girls travel to Florida, spring break ends. However, they stay and refuse to quit living the spring break lifestyle. And inexplicably, so does the film. The film places all the vice and danger so close you can touch it, and says if you want it, you can have it all and for life.

The setting is magnificently realized. Korine's primary ingredients are several party scenes full of girls in bikinis and topless (Is this a record for number of nipples?), girls making out with girls, girls in ski masks, pistols, machine guns, blunts, lines of cocaine, hard liquor by the liter, beer bongs of the syphon variety, beer bongs of the trumpet variety, and cool cars. And the bulk of the film is precisely about shuffling out these images. The aesthetic is fetishistic taboo. Again, like Gummo, Korine delights in beautifully photographing filthy squalor.

One shot that occurs shortly after the midpoint, that nears sublime, is an image of a girl in a bikini on the beach holding up a beer bong with its trumpet end blown out by the overhead sun behind it--it looks truly sacred.

Every aspect of the film has been punched by a rainbow. Even the dreary lecture halls are no match for the dayglo candy colored beams emanating from the girls' laptop screens; the Christian church of course, happens to be one with colorful stained glass vignettes of the gospels.

James Franco as Alien is over the top, but doesn't turn the film into camp. He's hilarious, but subordinate to the dangerous warpath of the girls.

The centerpiece of the film is a climactic, character-defining sequence set to the extant, prominently mixed "Everytime," by Britney Spears, from her 2003 album, In the Zone. And here's where I'll end it: I didn't think the use of the song was ironic; I bought into it; I bought into the whole plastic shallow sexy sentimental invigorating sweep of Britney, spring break, uninhibited youth and the whole enchilada. For real. Sometime last year I heard about this and decided it was the biggest thing I would look forward to in 2013--and it is every bit what I'd hoped for and more. This proves Harmony Korine is never ironic or condescending about his characters. When he decides he's found an interesting story, he comes up with art.

--Dregs