Spring Breakers: Feverish Dreams of Hyperreality

The article attempts to examine Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers and scrutinizes some of the film’s key themes while recognizing it as a precious, multilayered satire of late capitalist society. The film is much more than just a hyper-stylized anthropological journey into the heart of spring break at the beaches of Florida. It is a hypnotic satire of the collective hallucination beating to the rythm of Skrillex, a reflection of the Millennials generation, a beach neon-noir and a reinterpretation of the gangster genre. It is a doomed search for the American dream and a lesson in ruthless competition dictated by the free market. It is an evocation of the class, racial and sex war in contemporary America. It is both a love letter and a condemnation to pop cultural mythology and both an inversion and a homogeneous continuation of Korine’s opus. But above all, Spring Breakers is one of the most consistent film representations of hyperrality and at the same time its constitutive fragment.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!