When the two women-wearing bikinis and pink ski masks-arrive, armed and ready, with Alien for their raid on Archie’s compound, they cross a narrow bridge through a field of blacklight that turns their bathing suits fluorescent, makes their masks glow blue, and-most remarkably-greatly darkens their skin, in a cinematographic version of blackface, with light bulbs (or digital effects) taking the place of minstrels’ cork. His former best friend and now deadly enemy, another local druglord, Archie (played by the rapper Gucci Mane), is black, as are the members of Archie’s crew.Ībove all, Korine emphasizes the story’s racial aspect with a strange twist of visual invention that occurs at the story’s climax. Petersburg as the only white kid in his school, and he brings them to a pool hall where almost all the players are black. Second, Alien tells the young women his revealing life story of growing up in St. First, the Tampa Bay spring-break scene is depicted as whiter than a Republican convention. The racial underpinning of the action in “Spring Breakers” is too blatant to ignore. Far from being his version of “The Hunger Games,” in which a young heroine is thrust into a killing system that she hates, the movie is Korine’s version of Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro.” Mailer argued that white “hipsters” seek to put themselves in the psychological and even practical position of American blacks by means of transgressive behavior (including crimes) that force them to confront the daily perils of the sort faced by blacks. Korine presents the divide in experience essentially in racial terms.
Ultimately, the movie is a manual of competitive ruthlessness that offers the repeated banal definition of the drug dealer’s life as “the American dream.” (A definition given by the gangster himself, Alien-his real name, he says, is Al.) The movie suggests that its spring breakers-especially its two most audacious-are getting, guns ablaze, the education of their life, and that college itself is, rather, the permanent vacation where privileged young people stay clear of the raw realities of America. “Spring Breakers” isn’t about spring break but about the reductio ad absurdum of spring break-a sort of week-long murder camp at the end of which, having snuffed out a sufficient number of lives (and if not snuffed out oneself), a student returns to college refreshed, reënergized, and reëducated or, rather (here’s Korine’s satirical point), finally educated in real competition and rendered all the readier for a career in business. The spring-break setting is only a backdrop for a crime drama of shooting sprees and body counts-yet, in a way, that’s the point.
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