Occasionally a work of art is made (in the postmodern or post-postmodern period usually a film) which captures the contemporary structure of feeling so thoroughly as to lay bare the present and proximate past to a sense of its own particularity. For a certain structure of feeling that has been building since the turn of the century, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers does exactly this.
I watched this film recently with some friends in Melbourne; the response was mixed but everyone agreed that it was an exceptionally interesting work. (My friend Gene, who hosted the screening, has published some thoughts on his own blog.) Some of us had been prompted to watch it after reading Ann Powers’s response to Robin Thicke’s hit of the (northern) summer “Blurred Lines.” Powers positions Spring Breakers within a mode characteristic of recent film clips by female pop stars such as Rihanna, Kesha and Miley Cyrus, in which knowing self-objectification in the style of the selfie has become common. This is the structure of feeling that I am referring to; it can be summarised under the name of the selfie.
The selfie is not reducible to narcissism, even though it is classically so (the vanity of the photographer identifying himself as his own subject, the self-obsession of the Facebook tagger identifying herself in the picture she tags). Firstly, the selfie requires the accessible technology of smart phones and social media. This is the framework of perception in which selfie subjectivity arises, a perception in which the flattened simulacral image, quickly and easily edited or reshot, is the knowing mode of self-presentation of an autonomously sexualised subject. Its apprehension of its world is neither cynical nor naïve, and its reproduction of it is neither naughty nor nice (blurred lines). Authenticity is performative (the object of play) as much as any other existential category. Secondly, the ideological framework of the selfie is that of post-GFC neoliberalism. The total loss of faith in governments which persist ruthlessly to privilege the operations of global finance above the wellbeing of citizens without any attempt at disguise, the evaporation of any sense of security with regard to an individual’s future prospects as a participatory member of society, and the preservation – in spite of this – of access to incredibly diverse and seemingly (but, as we know, not actually) inexhaustible commodity markets – these are the material conditions of selfie subjectivity.
Spring Breakers presents the first feature-length selfie. Four teenage girls travel to Florida for spring break after robbing a diner and there become involved with a gangster – as gangsters. It is not a film about four girls who go on spring break; it is the totally fucked-up film that four spring breakers would make about their experience of spring break if this were their experience (which, it turns out, it was). Their reflection on the experience is the image of the experience that they give the world (“spring break forever”). Experience is the ultimate commodity, but it only counts if you can capture it on your smart phone and share it with your two thousand Facebook friends. “Pretend you’re in a video game; pretend you’re in a movie,” says one character to another – as though it were possible for them to experience the events in any other way! – as though they weren’t already pretending they were in a movie!
Spring Breakers has a surprising amount in common with another recent American film about subject positions/relations within particular moments of capitalism. Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby is surprisingly enjoyable, certainly his best film in many years (though still pretty horrible). Gatsby and Spring Breakers fit into a long line of American films of which Citizen Kane is probably the greatest example, films that represent the tyranny of things over life in American realisations of the capitalist dream. The two films have a number of formal and narrative parallels: for example, they both feature prominent voiceover narration, they both begin with decadent revelry that quickly becomes abject and they both end with the shooting of a significant character. The parallel that struck me the most relates to one of the most remarkable scenes in Spring Breakers: taking place in Alien’s bedroom, the gangster is showing the girls all his expensive possessions, the insignia of his success in a society in which organised crime seems to be the only way out of poverty. “Look at my shit,” he repeats as he presents them with his weapons, clothes, tanning oil, and sprays himself with two different Calvin Klein colognes. The display prompts an unnervingly sexualised response from the girls. Are we to believe that their response is genuine? Is genuineness even an appropriate category in the assessment of this film?
This scene is paralleled remarkably closely in Gatsby when Gatsby throws his hundreds of shirts on Daisy as she stands on his bed. She begins to cry and explains herself by saying that she has never seen such beautiful shirts. The narrator (whose intrusion is heavy handed throughout this film) would have us believe that her response is dishonest, that she is really crying because she loves Gatsby but cannot be with him. But this implicit explanation is itself dishonest (or at best partial) because it fails to explain the significance of the shirts. And the shirts are significant: Daisy cries because she has never seen such beautiful shirts. This is a text in which genuineness plays a significant role (even if ironically); by contrast, Spring Breakers could not care less about the category (which does not mean that it might not important in a more detailed analysis). Nevertheless, both of these responses (and not despite but because of their ambiguity) are correct responses to the experience of the abundant reified reality of the capitalist dream. No measured response could be trusted. In one, the girls’ affirmation of all Alien’s shit is sexual (the selfie is always sexual); in the other, Daisy’s affirmation of Gatsby’s shirts is pathetic.
The shirts and the shit are both then the symbols of monetary success under the prevailing economic conditions. Both Gatsby and Alien obtain their wealth by trading in contraband (liquor and drugs respectively), the easiest way to wealth for those shut out of state-sanctioned markets because of their class. But they also reveal a lot about their own historical moments. Gatsby’s shirts are the flamboyant excess of an aestheticised boom capitalism. While it may be harder for us to see this today, Gatsby’s wealth (like Luhrmann’s film) is grotesque; in its anxiety to obtain the capital of high culture, it distorts that culture’s products into monsters (so much American architecture of the 1920s reveals this all too obviously). Alien’s shit is by contrast the debased sexualised “products” (in the marketer’s sense) circulating within a neoliberalised society in which the only subject position imaginable is that of the credit-card carrying narcissist. Gatsby’s shirts are the aestheticisation of wealth, Alien’s shit its sexualisation.
The conflation of the sexualised individual with his or her property (including the body and its apparel) is the experience which the selfie aims to capture and share. The caption of the selfie is: I know you know I know you want it. But within its structure, the only possible response is to click “like” and think about your next selfie. It will always see itself as the image of its own amazing experiences with the world of things, as, like the voiceovers that recur throughout Spring Breakers, “Something so amazing … magical! Something, so beautiful.”
Melbourne, Auckland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia; August 2013
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