Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers considered by curator Tom McCormack

Like his adoptive patron Werner Herzog, Harmony Korine is concerned with how people behave when culture recedes. But where Herzog is obsessed by characters who test themselves and summon their strength to fight the wilderness and its elements, Korine is drawn to people who have simply been left behind. His heroes and heroines have been remaindered, along with a few other traces of Americana. Gummo takes place in a town devastated by a tornado. The isolationist commune of Mister Lonely is filled with celebrity impersonators of bygone Hollywood stars. Trash Humpers is what it sounds like. Always, everyone has abandoned you; your world is just the stuff they didn’t want.

Spring Breakers begins with four college students—Faith, Brit, Candy, and Cotty—stranded on campus after the wealthier students have gone off to party. The four girls do headstands in the hallway; count their money (not enough to get away); and mimic acts of fellatio with fake guns and other stand-in penises. Eventually, Brit, Candy, and Cotty decide to rob a fast-food restaurant. Faith abstains.

The style of Spring Breakers is dissociative. Speech and image drift away from each other and back again; voice-over narration floats over elliptical montage sequences. The scene of the robbery is shown twice; the first time the view is from outside the restaurant, as the getaway car circles the joint and pop music blares on the radio. The violence of the scene is apprehended by the audience at a remove, as it is by Faith, who’s uncomfortable hearing about the robbery, but game to use the money to go to Florida and party.

After the girls go broke and get arrested, they’re bailed out and taken up by Alien, a full-time hustler and part-time rapper played with expert camp histrionics by James Franco. “I’m not from this planet, y’all,” insists Alien as he beckons the girls into his car.

Faith doesn’t recognize Alien’s criminal underworld as continuous with the fun times the four girls set out to have in Florida. By this point in the movie, we’ve already witnessed Faith’s trepidation at first hearing of the initial robbery. And she’s already displayed a more intense discomfort when hearing of the crime a second time: In the middle of drinking and singing Britney Spears in a convenience store parking lot, Brit, Candy, and Cotty launch with giddy abandon into a more detailed version of how they robbed the fast-food joint. This time we hear the noises and threats and see the fear on the victims’ faces. Faith is shocked—she hadn’t spent much time imagining what got them to Florida.

After being taken aside and given a bizarre, sexually charged lecture by Alien, Faith finally decides to catch a bus home and return to the boredom of college life.

In Book 9 of The Odyssey, Odysseus tells of sneaking into a Cyclops’s home to find “a dragging rack that sagged with cheeses, pens crowded with lambs and kids.” The race of Cyclopses “neither plow nor sow by hand,” though “wild wheat and barley grows untended, and wine-grapes, in clusters, ripen in heaven’s rain.” At one point, Odysseus says, the Cyclops “clutched at my companions and caught two in his hands like squirming puppies to beat their brains out, spattering the floor.” Mythical lands lush with greenery and flush with mead are often held together by psychotic violence. Those who live there are alien creatures capable of withstanding the combination.

Franco’s Alien lives in a mansion, and while there are no “pens crowded with lambs and kids,” there are many other silly luxuries, like “Scarface on repeat, y’all” and “dark tannin’ oils.” Mostly though, his home is filled with guns and piles of money.

Alien seems startled when Brit and Candy grab one of his AKs and force him to perform oral sex on it, promising, all the while, to kill him. The scene—the most unforgettable in the film—goes on for a long time, with Alien increasingly convinced of his own impending death and, simultaneously, seeming to enjoy more and more the violent simulated fellatio. When Brit and Candy remove the gun from his mouth, and it becomes clear they’re not going to kill him, Alien exclaims, “I knew y’all were my soul mates!” We, the audience, may have misrecognized these characters, but Alien did not: they’re Cyclopses, too! It’s more obvious when they have their ski-masks on.

In Spring Breakers, Korine’s concerned with re-associating our world and reasserting an ancient connection mostly lost on contemporary US culture. The American Pastoral is not at odds with the crazy violence of America. It’s merely its most natural setting. In our myopic pop culture, which keeps our world neatly compartmentalized, Korine forces us to reckon with the true price of Paradise and the true nature of Ecstasy. And if we don’t like it, we’d do best to take the early bus back home.

Tom McCormack is a writer and curator living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Moving Image Source, Rhizome, and the Brooklyn Rail.

Wesley Morris, boston globe film critic: “they hate people who have opinions that run contrary to their fanaticism”

A film review by Wesley Morris can take a number of different angles: a star’s power over the production, the quality and chemistry of the performances, a film’s place in a genre or the arc of a career. He writes in lively, smart prose sprinkled with memorable turns of phrase. Of Michael Moore’s abilities as a director, he wrote that he “can turn a kernel of truth into a bucket of popcorn.” About The Help: “On one hand, it’s juicy, heartwarming, well-meant entertainment. On the other hand, it’s an owner’s manual.”

Wesley Morris recently (this past January) moved to Grantland, where he works today. He began his career in the late 1990s writing for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Examiner, then moved to the Boston Globe. From his offices there, late last year, the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for criticism discussed bringing notebooks into the theater, Hollywood’s relationship to homosexuality, and doing the right thing. - Naoki O’Bryan

THE BELIEVER: When writing a review, do you feel obligated to come down to a yes or no decision?

WESLEY MORRIS: No, no. I would hope that by the time you are done reading what I’ve written you can determine whether or not it’s an experience you would like to have, if you haven’t already had it. If I like a movie, I’m definitely advocating for it, but it’s not “you should see this” or “you shouldn’t see this.” I try to take a longer view about what the movie is doing and where it fits in the context of other things, in the way that certain good literary criticism tries to do the same thing. I’m slightly limited by the fact that I write for a daily newspaper and that I have to apply that idea to five separate movies in the space of anywhere from five hundred to a thousand words each, as opposed to taking one film and dealing with that for about two or three thousand words. But hopefully the effect is the same. Hopefully I can give you a sense of whether or not I had a good time, and whether it worked or why it doesn’t work.

BLVR: How much, if at all, do you take a filmmaker’s intent into account when writing about a movie?

WM: It’s important to keep that in mind, but I don’t think it’s the guiding principal for me in terms of what I think the movie is doing. Anything produced and then exhibited for public view is open to interpretation. A movie is just like a work of art or a book or a piece of music. The intent of its maker is one thing, but its interpretation by an audience is something else. I don’t stop at what the filmmaker wanted to do.

BLVR: As a critic, it’s your job not to love a movie just for its director, but a lot of fanboys do exactly that. Do you ever clash with them?

WM: No. You can’t really reach those people. The movies have entered this new, strange, partisan situation. There’s nothing inherently a critic can do to enlighten these partisan moviegoers. They’re as fanatically devoted to movie franchises as certain sports people are to their teams. I don’t write for those people because they read reviews to have what they believe verified, and they hate people who have opinions that run contrary to their fanaticism. Without even having seen a movie they will attack a critic for not liking it.

BLVR: Do you go to regular theaters, critics-only screenings, or both?

WM: Both. I love to go to the movies with people, but a lot of the time it’s me in a room with a bunch of other movie critics, which is fine. I don’t need the audience, but sometimes it’s nice to have a gauge—not so I know how I feel, but so I get what is or isn’t working for moviegoers.

BLVR: You’ve written about bringing in a notebook.  Woody Allen once said he “disagrees completely” with critics who bring notebooks into the theater because it keeps you from fully absorbing the movie.

WM: It’s easy for Woody Allen to say that because he’s not a critic. It’s not essential to have a notebook—and a lot of the times I don’t even use what I write down—but at this point I would be more distracted not to have a notebook than to have it. Once in a while I’ll look down and for the two seconds my eyes are away from the screen I’ll miss something and I’m annoyed with myself. It doesn’t happen that often, but it has happened. Still, I’d rather have the notebook than not have it.

BLVR: What do you appreciate when you look at a film review as prose?

WM: Anything that makes me think and entertains me a bit. I just have to be able to follow and enjoy the writer’s voice and the writer’s point of view. Liking what the person has to say is not really important to me.

BLVR: Are there any critics or writers whom you’d cite as an influence?

WM: I like Nora Ephron. She wasn’t a critic in the strictest sense of the word, but she did a lot of social criticism. She was so funny and so in the right place at the right time when she was writing for Esquire and New York magazine in the seventies. She has a really strong voice, she had really strong opinions, and she managed to incorporate her own sense of herself into things that she wrote without hijacking the subject with narcissism.

BLVR: What comprises a work of bad criticism?

WM:  There’s a kind of jargon that some critics have—they get it from reading Variety or the Hollywood Reporter, so they write in what some people call “Varietese.” They’re concerned with what the box office is gonna be like, with Oscar prospects. Those are side concerns.

BLVR: Looking back on your earlier work, is there anything you wish you hadn’t done?

WM: No. [laughs] Well, I had a correction once where I said that Michelangelo Antonioni was dead when he wasn’t actually dead—he was just barely alive but he was not actually dead, so I regret that. I’m a better writer than I was then, I’m probably a better thinker. But my taste hasn’t changed too much. I’m probably more honest about the things I don’t like that I should like—should, whatever that means. I don’t have to like every movie that Abbas Kiarostami makes just because he’s Abbas Kiarostami, but that took a bit of time for me to understand.

BLVR: Can you take me back to the first film review you ever wrote?

WM: It was probably something when I was in the eighth grade about a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie called April Morning. It was the one movie we got to watch in school all year, and I talked how mediocre the movie was, and how because it was our only movie, it was such a shitty movie for them to pick. I didn’t synopsize the plot, I wrote about how awful a time I had watching it. That was the first piece of criticism I was consciously aware of writing. The teacher pulled me aside after class and said, “This is really good, you should think about continuing to do this.” And he continued to encourage me. So I did it for the school paper and that was the beginning. 

BLVR: After Brokeback Mountain was passed over for Best Picture in 2006, you wrote that while Hollywood preaches tolerance of homosexuals, it doesn’t provide “an actual homosexual to tolerate.” Have the movies’ portrayal of homosexuality improved at all over the past several years?

WM: Not really. TV does it better. I just don’t know what the movies are doing. They just don’t care, and if nobody is pushing them or holding their feet to the fire, they have no incentive to do anything. The tragedy of Brokeback Mountain is that it just kind of took that off the table for studios. They don’t feel like they have to do it, so now every time they make a movie that stars two actors playing gay guys, their gayness is the attraction as opposed to the story.

Brokeback Mountain is a sad love story about two people who can’t be together, and the reason that they can’t be together is because being gay is a stigmatized thing. It would be interesting to have the same movie in which the two guys weren’t in the closet and there was no shame about them being gay and they couldn’t be together for other reasons. I still feel like we’re a long way from that happening.

BLVR: What would it take to make that happen?

WM: For the studio to just be like, “I don’t care, yeah, they’re gay.” What you get is this in-between thing, what they call Bromance, two guys just kind of spending all this time together, but then they put in a woman just so you know they’re not gay. Pretty much everything else points to the two guys being in love and loving each other, but there’s Anna Kendrick or some woman whose only purpose is to not let your mind go there and stay there for too long: “They are straight, don’t worry, don’t be freaked out.”

BLVR: Do you see social change influencing movies, however slowly, or change coming the other way around?

WM: Ultimately the social change has to come from the people who make the movies, so the people who make the movies have to look at the landscape and say to themselves, “Well, you know, these things are changing, and I’m okay with their having changed, and I think it’s okay to start reflecting those changes through the movies we make.” I don’t see a lot of studio executives caring at all about what the culture is telling us. They think they make the culture. They’re not out taking the temperature of things and using the results of whatever sort of cultural surveying they’re doing to make movies. They’re interested in doing things that people are already comfortable with, and taking those properties and filling them.

Also, it would be nice to see them try to take more risks and think beyond Will Smith and Denzel Washington. There are lots of other non-black, non-white people you could put in movies to try to make them a star, but nobody seems to be doing that either.

BLVR: You’ve often criticized movies based on their portrayals of race, for example, you’ve written that Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is sappy and righteous and all about Spencer Tracy’s speech at the end. But you’ve mentioned that you really love Do the Right Thing. What makes that film so great?

WM: It’s honest. It’s the best American movie made on the subject of race. It looks at it from a number of different angles. The problem with a lot of movies when it comes to race is that they want to be moral, and they want to make the audience feel good about something that a lot of people don’t feel good about. The great thing about that movie is that it isn’t interested in being moral. It’s interested in what this collection of people in that particular neighborhood felt, with each side having their own frustrations with another group.

BLVR: Why do you think Spike Lee put those two quotes—one by Martin Luther King Junior and the other by Malcolm X—at the end of the film?

WM: To point out that there’s two ways to do it. The so-called Malcolm X way, which is violent reaction to oppression and racism. And there’s the passive, so-called Martin Luther King kind of response, which is change through resistance and peaceful disobedience and protest. In some ways people give Spike Lee a hard time for what they see as a short-sighted or reductive interpretation of both men, but I think it’s really good shorthand for the two options that the movie gives you, that really aren’t two options. It’s not a binary situation at all, it’s actually much more complicated than that. Both of those reactions are understandable and maybe even viable. It might even be better with a bit of both used at the same time.

BLVR: Do you feel any responsibility to be a black voice in a predominantly white profession?

WM: Sure! I don’t go out of my way to do it, but it’s a natural outgrowth of my being black. I do feel a responsibility to address things that are problematic, but again, I don’t have to go out of my way to do that. I have a pretty good sense of when to express misgivings. And white critics are just as capable of pointing those things out and noticing them as people of color. All critics have the responsibility to tease out the social ideas and social problems in a movie. I don’t feel an obligation to do that because I’m black. I feel like I do it because I’m a human, and I’m a human who is aware of the history of humanity and the ways in which the movies touch on those things.

Straight white males: that’s the predominant moviegoing category, and the persistence of that is a dismaying maintenance of the status quo. It’s legitimate to point out the ways in which the movies and popular culture in general are failing to recognize how different the world looks now than it looked even ten years ago, or even how different the United States looks than it looked ten years ago.

I’m uniquely positioned to deal with some of those things, but I don’t think that people who don’t deal with those things are at fault. Everybody brings their thing to their criticism. I bring this wealth of opinions and feeling and knowledge about race and gender and sexuality. I feel like I have it, I may as well express it, and if it’s applicable to what I’m writing about and I’m not forcing it, I should try to use it, because it’s interesting. It speaks to more than some people.

photo credit: Matthew J. Lee, The Boston Globe/AP

Gun Guys

Dan Baum is the author of Gun Guys which documents how he – a Jewish liberal Democrat – strapped on a Colt Detective Special .38 revolver, left his comfortable home and family in Boulder, Colorado, and undertook a walkabout to meet his fellow gun lovers. His goal: to confront his inner conflict over his love of guns. The book is a thoughtfully composed and revealing look at the reality of gun culture America, and an intimate look at the men – from Jewish submachine gun collector to Hollywood armorer to hog hunter – who love their firearms. We recently sat down at Random House’s offices in Manhattan to talk about the issues raised by this, his fourth book. – Diane Mehta

THE BELIEVER: You say that carrying a firearm gives you a sense of guardianship and moral superiority. Why?

DAN BAUM: You have the secret. You’re wearing this gun and you’re hyper aware of the gun, of how dangerous it is, and you’ve got your head on a swivel all the time because it keeps you in this “condition yellow” I talk about in the book. You walk along the street among the unarmed and you feel like their protector. Because if an Adam Lanza were to show up, you’d be the guy.

BLVR: How does that feel?

DB: It takes you pretty quickly to devaluing the role of government. For a leftie, that’s kind of uncomfortable. We believe in nice, big, vigorous government that’s going to take care of us and protect us—then you realize no, if something were to happen, the police wouldn’t be there. That’s one of the reasons why I wrote the book. To figure out: Why is a fondness for guns the same chromosome as conservative politics?

BLVR: You took some gunfight training. Did it dislodge your belief that you’d be quick enough to handle a real emergency?

DB: When I heard about the Aurora movie-theatre shooting, my first thought was I wish I had been there with my gun. The New York Times editorial page sneered at the idea that an armed citizen would have been any good there—they said thank God there wasn’t an armed citizen; then there would have been two people shooting in the theater. Gun guys would say, “Yeah, you want two people shooting in the theater. What’s worse than one guy with a gun bent on mass murder?”

BLVR: In Gun Guys, you talk about “offensive vigilance.” Is it good for tens of thousands of people to feel amped up? What are the consequences for our collective mental state?

DB: I kind of wish we were all more vigilant without wearing guns. When I see people walking along the street with headphones in and staring at their phones, I think not only is that person in danger, but they’re really kind of useless. I don’t think it’s antithetical to leftist politics or liberal politics or a fondness for the collective to wish that we were all not necessarily armed to kill, but more tuned in to what’s going on around us.

BLVR: Do gun guys think liberals are all a bunch of wusses?

DB: The conservatives say we’re a bunch of oversocialized, overmanaged “sheeple,” and while I’m no less a Democrat than when I started all this, I kind of get it. The idea that things would have come out worse had someone else in Sandy Hook had a gun—to me it seems delusional. People should be allowed to carry guns but the training should be way better. I think it’s a big fucking deal to carry a gun.

BLVR: Do gun owners have some sort of collective hope to seek out drama in a country that is continually never at war at home?

DB: There’s a great book called A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit. It talks about what really happens in disasters. People come together in really beautiful ways and the violence all comes from the authorities—I certainly saw that during Katrina. But Solnit says that people always remember disasters as the best time of their life because it is a relief from what Solnit calls the slow-burning perpetual disaster that is everyday life. Life really kinda sucks for a lot of people. So for the gun guys –and even I felt some of this—there’s a desire for life to bust out into the dramatic so I can see what I’m made of.

BLVR: That sounds like it’s verging on paranoid.

DB: I don’t know how paranoid you need to be to say shit happens. People who looked like us, wearing Benetton and Gap clothing, were lined up in front of pits and shot, just for being who they were, in Bosnia. They didn’t have guns to defend themselves.

DM: You say gun guys feel insulted and need respect. But have they earned it?

DB: The bulk of the gun guy demographic is middle-aged white men who didn’t finish college. That’s a population that has been particularly screwed in the last thirty years. Those guys haven’t had a wage increase since 1978. So they’re pissed. But it’s forbidden speech in the U.S. to discuss your plight in terms of class because then you’re just making excuses for your sorry ass. The only people giving them an analysis is the NRA, who comes along and whispers in their ears, “You’re pissed because the liberals are trying to take away your guns.”

BLVR: So they hate Democrats?

DB: I’d meet guys who would be natural Democrats: a parks and rec worker in Wisconsin, plumbers, electricians, and truck drivers. And while the Democratic party goes on and on that they’re all about the working man, these guys won’t listen to the Democrats about anything—about immigration, climate change, women’s rights, gay rights, anything—because of the hostility Democrats have towards guns.

BLVR: Do you think we’re safer with or without guns?

DB: I personally don’t believe that banning assault rifles or adjusting how many rounds are going to be in a magazine is going to yield any improvement in public safety. Besides, until Sandy Hook, we had a shot of taking over the House in 2014. That’s now over. So you feel really good about yourself, Andrew Rosenthal, editorial director of the New York Times, really self-righteous that we support banning these evil rifles? We’re going to have John Boehner now for two more years. Is it worth it? I think it’s not.

BLVR: You come across a lot of Jewish gun owners in the book.

DB: The book’s full of Jews! Isn’t that amazing, I kept coming up with Jews!

BLVR: You paint some loving portraits of a submachine gun competitive shooter, a pig hunter, and Robert, a Jewish gun collector…

DB: I’m getting such hate mail. People really don’t want to show these guys any respect.

BLVR: The hate mail is from the left?

DB: It’s from both sides. The left says these people are accessories to murder. After Sandy Hook and Aurora and every one of these shootings, pundits say the problem is that we have this terrible gun culture. But the law-abiding gun guys say, “Who me? I’m gun culture? Adam Lanza killed those children.” You can imagine how offensive it is to them. It’s like gay people being told they’re to blame for AIDS. What? We’re the victims! Guilt by association is a really toxic thing.

BLVR: Let’s talk about New York City’s gun laws.

DB: New York City has had tough gun laws since the 19^th century. It’s the only place that had tough gun laws. So there’s just a different culture here when it comes to guns.

BLVR: The NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly recently said that he supports the assault rifle ban, but it’s handguns that account for most of the murders in New York and in the country. Would the gun show loophole and background checks he mentions help the situation?

DB: Police chiefs are political appointees, they work for mayors, so they will always be anti-gun. But go talk to rank-and-file police officers. I can’t think of a single uniformed police officer of sheriff’s deputy I’ve ever asked about the assault rifle ban and concealed carry laws who did not answer with a totally pro-gun position: “The more citizens carrying guns, the better, because I want good guys carrying guns because I can’t always be there.”

BLVR: What enrages us most is the fact that kids pick up guns at gun shows—

DB: They don’t get them at gun shows, they get them from their parents. If gun guys would lock up their fucking guns, most of what we’re talking about would not happen. We wouldn’t be having this debate about assault rifle bans. We wouldn’t be screaming at each other. The gun guys themselves have to do this and they won’t, and the NRA won’t lead on it. That’s why I hate the NRA. They’re bad for gun guys, bad for us all.

BLVR: Do armed citizens really provide a bulwark against tyranny?

DB: I’ve lived in a bunch of countries where the only people with guns are the army and police, and I don’t like it. I’m old enough to remember when liberals were really suspicious of the military and the police and of excessive police power, so I’m puzzled by liberals’ desire to live in country where the only people with guns are the military and police. Something doesn’t fit.

BLVR: You had a really intimate conversation with Sean Thornton of the NRA about how carrying a gun makes you think about death.

DB: It’s part of what gun guys are proud of: “I’ll think about it,” they say. “I’ll sit here in this restaurant with my gun—never with my back to the door—and imagine something terrible will happen. I’m letting my mind go where you will not let your mind go.” You might think it’s fucked up, macabre, testosterone-poisoned death obsession, but they’re proud of it.

BLVR: It’s a huge personal responsibility to think about death, which is fucking scary.

DB: I think we gun guys get a little contact high from the grim reaper in a way that free climbers and sky divers do. There’s just something about it that’s kind of cool. I take my gun out and put it on. By the end of today, by the time I come home tonight and take this gun off, I might kill somebody with this thing. This bullet, this first bullet in the magazine, might go tearing through somebody. It’s heavy. That’s why I stopped carrying a gun. It was more than I could take.

Photo: Wall Street Journal