It still stuns me that Spring Breakers was given a wide theatrical release. To me, this is a hair’s breadth away from being a full-on avant-garde piece, and while I found the film’s sweaty, disorientating, disturbingly excessive style exhilarating, unleashing the film on general audiences almost seems cruel.
No matter what, Spring Breakers is easily one of the best and smartest films of 2013, a movie that picks apart the myth of young adult individuality by showing how the things young people turn towards in search of making sense of the world – drinking, drugs, reckless sex, and even violence – are intensely subsuming and dehumanizing, with James Franco’s Alien, one of the year’s very best character evocations, standing in as the disturbing end result of it all.
At least, that’s one interpretation – Spring Breakers is as heavy and complex and intellectually rich as anything released this year, and when I got home from seeing it back in March, I typed 9 solid pages of notes, theories, and observations on the computer. I have tried several times to organize that all into a publishable essay, but the film keeps eluding me. Spring Breakers is an experience, one so perfectly and hauntingly realized that trying to capture what it has to say in writing is akin to bottling smoke.
Spring Breakers is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray.
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