Spring Breakers

The controversy of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) was not so much caused by its erotic inclination — to which many of Western art, possibly even religious, had been ardent — but in the ugly and primal style the whores had been represented. It is possible that the painting was an pugnacious reaction to a more mild painting (Le bonhuer de vivre, 1906) by Henri Matisse, with whom Picasso had been a great rival. It portrays five courtesans in a brothel in Barcelona. Before there was racism, european art simply eroticized Africa, where Picasso had acquired tribal masks by which he was evidently influenced. The outrage, then, it seems, was less of a feminist confrontation than an Anglo-Saxon European one; simply, we had been unconsciously allured into bed with ebony creatures from a foreign land. As we excitedly await Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, which suggests to be Girls Gone Wild meets crime movie meets every Hip-Hop video ever made, we are teased with promotional images and film stills. And it would take Selena Gomez — our lady of $4 million net worth; 15,217,125 twitter followers (as of 3/10/13, 13:01 GMT); within whom Justin Bieber first became a man — to promptly strike a pose that came before her, Madonna, and Marilyn Monroe. An animal, when threatened, will bring their hands to their face; to retract them beyond is to exert trust, the ultimate form of control. To disarm the gaze of its power. Good girl.

Four demographically benign girls rob a gas station to pay for Spring break, get arrested, then bailed out by someone with a university degree — with culturally dissonant cornrows and a temporary grill — who leads them into a dark underworld of out-of-focus bathroom “selfies,” residual lube and glitter. This, per the trailer and some mild research, would be my synopsis. Harmony Korine does what the best film makers do: he places the camera before himself, a rogue yet detached spy that captures the irrational, and often ugly, world around it. Unlike with David Lynch or the Coen Brothers, the viewer cannot simply reduce the difficult aspects in the film to surrealism. The conceit is oddly humble. The verity of the lens i.e. detachment of the director makes the encounter problematic, as we are complicit in every action therein. The completely insane Trash Humpers (2009) feels more believable, thus frightening, than most of the didactic documentaries of today.

The weariness of inserting “Post-” in front of anything lies not its presumption, but in the implicit lineage to which such a chronologically laden prefix is tied. Assistant professors and people aligned by lateral dinner tables with opulent bohemian-ish centerpieces (usually pomegranates and dried twigs), have offered to their students and/or guests an idea of a Post-post-modernism, or meta-modernism, or various combinations of “post,” “meta,” or “alt,” the latter abbreviation for “alternative” seduced by the mainstream through its very opposition to it. It’s hard to tell what is kitschy and what is komplicit these days. The viewer’s responsibly is absolved in irony. When I watch Spring Breakers (oh, I will), it will not be to review it, for I’m doing so now. It will be to masochistically dive into the jeweled cavern of James Franco’s mouth. To smell coconut suntan lotion and fishy muffs hopefully through the fourth wall. Girls in bikinis, hipsters in theaters, an unpopped kernel in my belly button. The only Post- here may be a Postpartum depression for girls who are still babies. Criticism died years ago.

An ever more chill Matisse, as either a fist or nod to Picasso, paints The Dance (1909), stripping the incestuous narrative in painting of its sexuality. As Europe broke into WWI, he escaped further into the rainbows of his paintings. Culture may not be defined by its social transcription, but rather, by the aversion to it. The naked women are seen through childish eyes, drawn with childish hands, made all the more formidable by their disparity to the world. Bed-ridden, Henri draws a woman’s face on his wall with a pencil tied to a long stick — eyes closed, as if unable to look at him, or vice versa. In his final years, he cut senile shapes out of paper and made disfigured figures. Thank you, modernism. Before we shed too many tears for the man though, he did have sex with all of his models, whose youth grew in direct disproportion to his age. “In love, the one who runs away is the winner,” Matisse says, which is both profound and very sad. One worries about Franco, and how elaborate his method acting was, what he did-or-didn’t do with these nubile actresses. To honor a man with his art is asking to be disappointed by his actions. It’s impossible to fetishize mimesis because you just open your eyes. When I see others fuck, I wanna fuck. We’ll let Descartes handle that one.