Spring Breakers and the Radical Teenage Girl
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Four Disney starlets stripped down to their skimpy, neon-coloured bikinis partaking in a healthy mix of cocaine-snorting, beer chugging and beach parties while on a holiday in Florida. I’ll admit: the premise of Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers doesn’t make the film sound like it’s going to be particularly radical or subversive. Not unless you’re around the age of 14 and in your Effy from Skins phase, anyway. To be honest, it was with this lens of teenage angst that I first viewed Korine’s film: aged 15, Spring Breakers was just another vision of aspirational debauchery, something I’d try and emulate in the sleepy British town where I lived. But in the ten years since it was released, I’ve revisited Spring Breakers again and again, each time developing what I think the controversial film is really trying to say. Now that I’m 25, I’ve decided it’s this - the teenage girl is a figure with deeply radical potential.
At the time of its release Spring Breakers gathered attention mostly due to the young stars at its centre. In one fell swoop, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson had shed the shiny veneer of their child-star past to reveal a murky vision of teenage femininity that threw the parents of 2013 into a tailspin. Spring Breakers was reduced to being the creation of a crass “provocateur”, a film that “reinforce[d] rape culture” and, in essence, “Disney Channel Girls Gone Wild”. But these kinds of criticisms - ones implicit with the notion that we’re unable to sit with cultural products where teenage girls aren’t innocent little darlings - are completely reductive. In actuality, the teenage girl is so much more. In Spring Breakers, the teenage girl is actually able to circumvent the laws of capitalism and the controversial scenes of bikini-clad Disney stars engaging in sex, drugs and violence are necessary in delivering that radical message.
The teenage girl is both a subject and an object of consumerism, simultaneously exploited by it as well as shaping it. Spring Breakers’ Vanessa Hudgens is a perfect example of this, being wheeled out to sell skincare products in her High School Musical heyday. For Brit, Candy and Cotty - those of the four girls that stay for an extended spring break - the typical rules of consumerism don’t apply. Instead, they create an alternative “sharing” culture where second-hand objects have a more symbolic value.
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The robbery which funds their spring break - something you could call a radical act of sharing in itself - is done in a car they have “borrowed” from a university professor. At the end of the film, Brit and Candy become the new owners of Alien’s shiny white sports car; as they drive off into the sunset, you get the impression that they’re driving away from capitalism too. And though not all of the criminal activity in Spring Breakers can be painted as a renegade act of sharing, even the girls’ more conventional consumerist impulses are subversive.
Their “innocent” consumption of toy water guns as children has evidently turned into using these same guns to hold alcohol. This, in turn, has transformed into using actual guns while on spring break. Computer screens that would usually coerce them into buying makeup, clothes or whatever product they supposedly need are used to watch pixelated videos of amateur street brawls. In other words, for these girls there’s no such thing as innocent consumption.
The cherry on top of all of this subversion is that when the girls aren’t deviously appropriating patterns of teen consumerism, they’re subverting their femininity. They force Alien to give a blowjob to a loaded gun, reversing the power dynamic of a subjugating sexual act. Britney Spears’ Everytime, an anthem of female victimhood, is the soundtrack for the perverse dance routine where they twirl around with huge machine guns. Even their physical appearance, though adhering to values of conventional beauty, reeks of a kind of hedonism that’s at odds with the physical labour needed to uphold being truly feminine. They are slim, booby and “sexy”, but they also let their bodies become sticky with beer and allow their hair to turn sea-swept and greasy.
“Raw emotions must be diluted and made digestible so they can be harmonious with a carefully curated online presence.”
If you buy into the idea that these are liberated teenage girls, their controversial violence is the least interesting thing about Spring Breakers. In fact, it might even be wrong to refer to their criminal acts with this label; for Brit, Candy and Cotty, violence occurs as an extension of play and leisure. They are not motivated by the endeavour to accumulate capital, but because they enjoy it and find it fun. And though this is legally and potentially morally wrong, in a society that tells girls to police their bodies and time in a way that’s inherently unenjoyable, it is incredibly poignant.
I could sing the praises of Spring Breakers endlessly. Unfortunately, though, I don’t think the radical teenage girl that Korine created resonates as much today. If the popularity of the “that girl” aesthetic is anything to go by, the kind of voracious consumerism that Spring Breakers sought to dismantle is very much alive and well. Sure, there are pockets of radical teenage girls elsewhere. There’s their growing appetite for “feminine rage”, a way of referring to a subset of literary and film characters who could (if push comes to shove) be positioned as spiritual successors to Brit, Candy and Cotty.
But the above should come with the disclaimer that these are not movements taking place in real life, between four poster-adorned, pink walls, but on Instagram and TikTok feeds. Femcel culture is, for example, delivered in the form of fancams of Amy in Gone Girl. It’s signified by wearing a tote bag with Lana Del Rey on it. Fans of feminine rage aren’t going to let out a guttural scream themselves: they’re going to post an Instagram of Mia Goth in Pearl doing so.
Most of all, these movements are positioned as somewhat of a pushback, yet what’s so liberating about the proto-feminine rage in Spring Breakers is that it is defined by a comparative meaningless. The “why?” is, as I said, because they enjoy it. Because they wanted to. For contemporary teenagers, this is an impossibility. Raw emotions must be diluted and made digestible so they can be harmonious with a carefully curated online presence. And though Korine’s film is by no means pre-social media, it’s in this sense most that the radical vision set out in Spring Breakers feels like a far-off fantasy.
Words: Amber Rawlings
