Spring Breakers (2013)

directed by Harmony Korine

Meggie Gates

The cover of Future Sex is photographed under red lighting. With a woman holding a vibrator between her legs, sprawled out on a shag rug, it’s the kind of book cover my mom would steal and hide from me when I was younger. The conclusion one she’d yell at me about when I was older, loosely quoting about how monogamy and missionary are bullshit. Emily Witt, the author, discusses the direction sex has taken and will continue to take into the future, which is “What is good or bad about sex is not about sex at all, but rather where the sex would land us in the social order,” turning the scope on self, the page’s bleed reworking what society has packaged for years: “I had disliked my freedom because I didn’t want to see myself landing on the outside of normal.”

Sex has always felt dirty to me. Having sex, in any way, feels naughty and liberating. Everything surrounding the conversation is fun, yet dangerous. The sort of Romeo and Juliet love story where owning five vibrators is wrong but you’d also die for those five vibrators. When I was nineteen, an old boyfriend introduced me to vibrators and Tumblr and it became my entire personality for two years. I’d reblog toys, post semi-nudes, and get compliments from strangers inquiring if they could buy my underwear. Making such a thing into a business seemed taxing and fearful and I was okay on my own. I had two jobs and no energy to set up a P.O. Box so instead, I reconciled by handling other people’s affairs and how they should talk to men if they wanted to get money. “Oh, like a pimp,” my friend once said when I brought this up. I suppose, if you want to look at it that way. Not like I was taking any of the profits. I was just excited to be there.

It was exhilarating to stumble into a world I was locked out of most of my life.

During these Tumblr days, Harmony Korine’s 2013 Spring Breakers was released. It was brought to my attention by said boyfriend, who desperately wanted to see Ashley Benson naked, and left me desperate to be more chaotic than half nudes online. The movie wasn’t necessarily outside of the line of works Korine had already created, but it was decidedly different. It was less unsettling than Gummo, less “elderly” than Trash Humpers, and 100% less depressing than Kids. It was, essentially, Korine’s redefining moment as a filmmaker who came into a lot of money.

He shot it predominantly on 35mm.

A huge draw to Spring Breakers isn’t the plot, but rather the actors and the characters they play. Korine managed to corner a distinct market with his casting choices, namely, horny twenty year olds from the DCOM era. When the movie was released, people carpooled to the one movie theater off campus just to see Selena Gomez (Faith) in an onscreen bikini. I mean, two former Disney stars who rail coke and hang out with a dreaded James Franco (Alien) is a parody within itself, but then throw in Gucci Mane? And Gucci Mane’s essentially just playing Gucci Mane (Archie)? And Gucci Mane gets gunned down by a knock off version of Riff Raff James Franco? And rapper James Franco has a threesome with Disney’s Vanessa Hudgens (Candy) and ABC Family’s Ashley Benson (Brit)?

It’s like eating candy coated in blood.

The bright, oversaturated neon hue is what steals the show. Dripping in greens, yellows, reds, and blues, it’s an essential character. One that screams “I’m an Andy Warhol painting!” As the film progresses, the colors subtly become brighter and stronger, blending and warping with time. Planning their departure to Florida, Candy, Brit, and Cotty (Rachel Korine) dance in the rain and snort cocaine under a red-orange tint. Before the big heist at the end of the movie, Cotty, out of commission, lays on the floor of Alien’s shower under a bright red hue, an exact mirror of the first, and the last, time the girls would commit petty crimes together. Candy and Brit now stand alone in the face of violence, and the neon has never been brighter. The threesome scene, dripping in purples, blue, and pink, precedes the final, technicolor heist. Delivering pleasure before pain. Standing resolute next to Alien, Candy and Brit are shot in a black light, dressed in fluorescent Sharpie-colored swimsuits. On the way to Archie’s, a shifting tide turns abstract to surreal. The colors have become so sugary sweet, so overwhelmingly visual and hard to stomach, it feels like the only way neon can exist gracefully is by trailing the dim glow of death.

While reds attend hypersexualized party scenes and neon blues accompany dingy pools, all mirror Korine’s casting choice to put pop culture stars at the middle of violence. “Pretend like it’s a video game!” Candy yells as her and Brit rob the Chicken Shack. “It’s just like a movie.” The characters these teen stars play are so disillusioned by the MTV generation they grew up with, they don’t think twice about committing crime. Spring Breakers itself almost reads as if it was born from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Not saying Wizards of Waverly Place is going to influence anyone to go on a drug-fueled rampage, or Pretty Little Liars is going to make someone terrorize a town, but what will become of the self-obsessed generations who grew up with these shows? As pressure grows more to experience everything in the hopes of having the best feed, what will people do to win the internet?

I shut down my Tumblr around 2016 after receiving what appeared to be a pseudo-death threat. I had received a coffin in the mail and figured a moderate two month hiatus away from the internet might help me reconsider how much information I put out into the void. No more posting about being horny? I could do that. No more selfies? I could maybe do that. My parents told me to post less, post anonymously, or stop talking to strangers. I told them I’d try. I created a list of pros and cons to figure out how to safely get back online.

The only thing I hate more than men overstepping boundaries online is me, myself, being offline.

I got back into Twitter in fall 2018 and with it, so did my mental energy. I started posting every little detail about my life despite knowing how easily accessible information is these days. I bitch constantly and, one or two times a year, it revolves around some absurdly expensive haircut I got. I consistently forget Chicago blonde ($300) costs compared to Iowa blonde ($120) and walk away with a $260 haircut out of my own stupidity more than I’d like to admit. I complain online about how hot and poor I am after an hour of crying to my mom on how to alleviate stress, and instantly get a DM from a man I don’t know.

“Sorry, my new policy with men is you have to Venmo me to speak to me.”

“How much was the haircut?”

“$252.”

It immediately shows up in my account.

CAM, much like Spring Breakers, leans into the horny mess of being alive. It is a 2018 psychological Netflix thriller filmed in neon, dripping in pink hues that bring vibrancy to the screen. The story, written by former cam girl Isa Mazzei, details a Black Mirror scenario where AI has harvested the information of Alice Ackerman, resulting in a better, sexier cam girl Alice. The first ten minutes establish Alice in her pink, plush workroom. There is a giant screen where she films her webcasts and the room is pink. Did I mention how pink it is? There’s pink curtains, a pink vanity, a pink circle mirror lined with pink bulb lights. Near the bed is a tall, marble statue (surprisingly not pink) of a naked woman with her arms above her head and hands reaching up her torso to touch her breast. As she prances around her neon room, showing clients her cute butt, the scene quickly escalates and ends with her slashing her throat.

All within the first five minutes of the movie.

CAM’s colorful moments are isolated to the workplace. Neon letters signify the type of rooms people can perform together in at a commercial studio three hours from Alice’s hometown, a place she travels to after falling ten spaces from top fifty. Typically positioned against each other, the girls team up under the soft glow of multicolored lights to climb the ranks with joint shows. The upstairs of the space meets everyone’s expectations of what a strip joint might look like. There’s letters blinking on neon bar signs, there’s dingy green light bleeding out the doors of a room where two naked girls perform for clients, and there’s a giant vibrator in the middle of a room draped in Christmas lights, a machine that vibrates so hard, women 100% would lose feeling in their clit. As Alice saddles up her vibrating horse, her vision blurs and the camera focuses on multicolored lights overhead, interjected with shots of Alice under harsh white lights. Technicolor lights lead up the bar stairway and into a room where Alice undergoes the most ‘pleasurable,’ and painful, experience any woman could ever have, teetering between consciousness and, likely, death. The PR stunt causes Alice to land back in the top 50 at the expense of her clit.

Alice loses her profile to an AI bot that looks exactly like her. After numerous attempts to get her account back, tech lets her know there’s nothing they can do. Watching desperately as her clientele pledges allegiance to a fake her, neurosis whittles her down. She sits in front of her computer chewing her fingers before purchasing $1,000 worth of coins to spend on fake Lola. Lola plays along for a bit before shooting herself on camera and Alice screams. In a separate neon pink room in a separate world, Alice has succumbed to her own death. She shakes in fear, unsure what this outburst of violence means for her mortality, before fake Lola wakes up. The only difference in the past two minutes for her is that her stretchy blue and silver leotard leggings combo is now drenched in blood. Not the fake blood that Alice staged within the first few minutes of the film, but real. Blood.

Overcome with watching her suicide on camera, Alice loses her mind. She eventually gets Lola to play a game of “Monkey See, Monkey Do” with her. Both sit in front of their vanities under the red bulbs framing the circular mirror, the room taking on a much darker red than the previous pink. As the two try to beat each other, Alice finally reaches a breaking point and bangs her head into her marble top vanity, showing that fake Lola isn’t real. As blood pools on her keyboard and countertop, it drips onto the floor, soaking in the pink carpet that has decidedly darkened since the beginning. She retrieves her password back from Lola and deletes her old account, starting anew under a blue lit room as Evebot.

The perils and pleasures of the deep web are typically one in the same. I am intrigued by the things I find taboo and can lose hours to chaotic evil, the idea that I am bigger than myself and nothing can ever kill me. I toy constantly with strangers I’ve never met online and never worry about if they can find me or not because, unlike Emily Witt, I want to see myself land on the outside of normal. I fear mixing fiction with reality but I fear, more, a life unlived. More explicitly, a life that’s boring. I want it to feel like a video game because video games are fun and colorful. Sometimes life isn’t that neon.

Meggie Gates is a writer and comedian in Chicago, IL. They’ve had bylines in Bitch Media, the Chicago Reader, Consequence of Sound, and the Outline. They need everyone to know they’re getting really good at chess.