With the 2010s' candle burning out, I thought it worth looking back on
my favourite movies of the past ten years. It may have been a relatively
uninspiring decade for mainstream cinema, but even the weakest year had
a few standout releases worth celebrating. This post covers the top placed movie.
#1: SPRING BREAKERS (Dir: Harmony Korine, 2012)
How's this for an opening line: had F. Scott Fitzgerald been alive in 2012, he'd have made Spring Breakers instead of The Great Gatsby. Gatsby is a satire of the flamboyance, narcissism and excess of its time and the hollow fantasy of high society. It has entered into the pantheon of great literary masterpieces as an encapsulation of a distinctly American tragedy.
Ninety years later, Kris Jenner, matriarch of the Kardashian dynasty, holds a Great Gatsby birthday party, an all-night celebration of the flamboyance, costumes and excess depicted in the novel. Welcome to the future. People change, hairstyles change, interest rates fluctuate. Irony remains the universal human constant.
How's this for an opening line: had F. Scott Fitzgerald been alive in 2012, he'd have made Spring Breakers instead of The Great Gatsby. Gatsby is a satire of the flamboyance, narcissism and excess of its time and the hollow fantasy of high society. It has entered into the pantheon of great literary masterpieces as an encapsulation of a distinctly American tragedy.
Ninety years later, Kris Jenner, matriarch of the Kardashian dynasty, holds a Great Gatsby birthday party, an all-night celebration of the flamboyance, costumes and excess depicted in the novel. Welcome to the future. People change, hairstyles change, interest rates fluctuate. Irony remains the universal human constant.
The excess of Gatsby's time is expressed in a very different language today. What was sharp satire then becomes a fashionable birthday party today. After travelling through the rise of the American empire, Bernaysian consumerism, the collapse of social mores, sexual liberation, Reaganism, easy credit, the financial crash, party culture and the commodification of identity, the decadence once limited to high society becomes the story of an entire civilisation lost in itself.
The most notable separation between Gatsby and Spring Breakers - aside from the neon bikinis and Britney - is that Fitzgerald's novel is a cautionary tale warning those seeking fulfilment in the self-destructive culture it depicts. By contrast, Spring Breakers offers no warnings and no moral finger-wagging. Though the movie doesn't condemn, critics were wrong to suggest the movie celebrates spring break culture. It simply invites you in.
Nietzsche's famous quote from Beyond Good & Evil, that those who stare into the abyss find the abyss staring back at them, perfectly expresses (in a very different context) the experience of Spring Breakers. Unlike Gatsby, the movie is not a matter of the intellect, but the senses. Harmony Korine's film is a ninety-minute act of hypnotism, using rhythmic, pulsating repetition of visual and aural cues to pummel the audience's senses out of the restraints of self-consciousness and into the non-stop dopamine freebasing of a world of pure stimulation.
In Fitzgerald's time, excess was how the rich celebrated their power and status. Social classification remains an unavoidable element underlying spring break culture in our time as well, which Korine implicitly filters through the prism of race and the sexes. The difference is that where Gatsby and the Buchanans were very much aware of using their partying to express their social status, spring breakers are not. Theirs is a celebration of nothing but celebration for its own sake.
As Korine's four girls - two of whom are played, brilliantly, by Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, child stars from the Disney ranks - delve deeper into their collective violent ids, the film pushes its audience to increasingly revel in the visceral pleasures of abandoning the rules and morals of the real world. If you'll forgive me one more literary reference, the movie functions in that respect as an inversion of Dante's journey in the Commedia - which incidentally starts right before easter, just in time for spring break - from spiritual homelessness to the divine enrichment of knowledge. Only here, instead of Dante having the poet Virgil for a guide, the four girls have a drug dealer named Alien, played by a never-better James Franco. Go figure, as they say.
What ultimately makes Spring Breakers such an exceptional achievement in filmmaking, and my favourite movie of the decade, is that it evokes none of these themes and allusions on its own. What little passes for plot exists as nothing more than a pocket watch in a hypnotist's act, a tool Korine uses to seduce his audience before reflecting them back on themselves. Whatever it says about the allure of excess, the ease with which even the most high-regarding member of society can be drawn into their most primal state, is said entirely through the viewer's reaction to the film rather than the film itself.
Perhaps that is why many critics and viewers hated it for 'celebrating' nihilism: it showed them that side of themselves, drawing them out of their self-image as people of curated thought and principle and into a core human state, as Nietzsche would have it, beyond good and evil. As someone with an instinctive aversion to alcohol-drenched, sexualised party culture, I was amazed at how easily and thrillingly the film drew me into that world. It made me rethink how I perceive a culture I exist almost entirely separately from, and how I see myself in relation to the side of human nature that culture appeals to. Many of my favourite films this decade have explored human nature by luring you into their worlds. Spring Breakers tops my list by doing so in luring you into yourself.
PREVIOUS ARTICLES
Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Numbers 10 - 8
Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Numbers 5 - 4
Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Number Three
Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Number Two
The most notable separation between Gatsby and Spring Breakers - aside from the neon bikinis and Britney - is that Fitzgerald's novel is a cautionary tale warning those seeking fulfilment in the self-destructive culture it depicts. By contrast, Spring Breakers offers no warnings and no moral finger-wagging. Though the movie doesn't condemn, critics were wrong to suggest the movie celebrates spring break culture. It simply invites you in.
Nietzsche's famous quote from Beyond Good & Evil, that those who stare into the abyss find the abyss staring back at them, perfectly expresses (in a very different context) the experience of Spring Breakers. Unlike Gatsby, the movie is not a matter of the intellect, but the senses. Harmony Korine's film is a ninety-minute act of hypnotism, using rhythmic, pulsating repetition of visual and aural cues to pummel the audience's senses out of the restraints of self-consciousness and into the non-stop dopamine freebasing of a world of pure stimulation.
In Fitzgerald's time, excess was how the rich celebrated their power and status. Social classification remains an unavoidable element underlying spring break culture in our time as well, which Korine implicitly filters through the prism of race and the sexes. The difference is that where Gatsby and the Buchanans were very much aware of using their partying to express their social status, spring breakers are not. Theirs is a celebration of nothing but celebration for its own sake.
As Korine's four girls - two of whom are played, brilliantly, by Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, child stars from the Disney ranks - delve deeper into their collective violent ids, the film pushes its audience to increasingly revel in the visceral pleasures of abandoning the rules and morals of the real world. If you'll forgive me one more literary reference, the movie functions in that respect as an inversion of Dante's journey in the Commedia - which incidentally starts right before easter, just in time for spring break - from spiritual homelessness to the divine enrichment of knowledge. Only here, instead of Dante having the poet Virgil for a guide, the four girls have a drug dealer named Alien, played by a never-better James Franco. Go figure, as they say.
What ultimately makes Spring Breakers such an exceptional achievement in filmmaking, and my favourite movie of the decade, is that it evokes none of these themes and allusions on its own. What little passes for plot exists as nothing more than a pocket watch in a hypnotist's act, a tool Korine uses to seduce his audience before reflecting them back on themselves. Whatever it says about the allure of excess, the ease with which even the most high-regarding member of society can be drawn into their most primal state, is said entirely through the viewer's reaction to the film rather than the film itself.
Perhaps that is why many critics and viewers hated it for 'celebrating' nihilism: it showed them that side of themselves, drawing them out of their self-image as people of curated thought and principle and into a core human state, as Nietzsche would have it, beyond good and evil. As someone with an instinctive aversion to alcohol-drenched, sexualised party culture, I was amazed at how easily and thrillingly the film drew me into that world. It made me rethink how I perceive a culture I exist almost entirely separately from, and how I see myself in relation to the side of human nature that culture appeals to. Many of my favourite films this decade have explored human nature by luring you into their worlds. Spring Breakers tops my list by doing so in luring you into yourself.
PREVIOUS ARTICLES
Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Numbers 10 - 8
Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Numbers 5 - 4
Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Number Three
Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Number Two
