That’s the description Village Voice writer Scott Foundas gave to Spring Breakers, and it encapsulated perhaps what I enjoyed most about the movie. A lot is made out of TV shows and some movies that have come out recently that play with the whole notion of what is real versus what only exists in the mind of the character on the screen. Louie explores this a lot. A second season episode of Girls sparked some debate over whether Hannah’s fling with an older man actually happened or not. There’s a couple of scenes in The Master where it seems like things are happening merely in the mind of the Joaquin Phoenix character but it’s hard to know for sure.
This not knowing is kind of exciting. It’s not just the intrigue that comes from not wanting to know one way or the other, because that can be a thrilling part of watching movies that confuse reality with fantasy. But it’s also in the details that make it hard to determine what’s real or what’s not—the nature of the worlds we’re dealing in that make this distinction virtually impossible to discern. That’s the kind of ambiguity that TV often gets praised for but for some reason movies tend to be more coldly received when they try things this bold. But it’s also the type of ambiguities we face in life all the time, when something can seem like two antithetical things at once, and can be thought of as both or neither just as easily. Sorry, but I dig that sort of thing being depicted in stuff I watch.
Continue reading on the next page…
