Offscreen: Evading Whiteness in ‘Spring Breakers’
Early in Spring Breakers, the 2012 film by Harmony Korine, a director infamous for unsettling realism, two girls—Candy and Brit—sit in class passing explicit notes about their spring break plans. Their professor lectures on the Civil Rights Movement, a photograph of Emmett Till on the screen, while one girl pretends to perform fellatio on a hand-drawn penis. Till’s presence goes unremarked, the scene cutting away and never returning to his inclusion.
Spring Breakers ultimately centers around four young women, Faith, Cotty, Candy, and Brit, who rob a restaurant at gunpoint in order to pay for their trip to the Florida beaches in St. Petersburg. In the first half, young, mostly white, bodies are constantly in contact: bare, sweating, drinking, smoking, snorting, dancing, and touching. Korine trains the camera to linger on long takes of their bodies, muddying the line between voyeurism and art. Dueling claims of misogyny and feminism coat debates over the film, but few, if any, look closely at the representation of race and racism throughout.
In the shot following the classroom scene, Selena Gomez’s character, Faith, worships with her youth group as her pastor poorly appropriates African American Vernacular English. He compares the felt presence of God to “the swagger” and asks, after reading scripture, “Y’all feel me?” On the beaches of Florida, the women watch a white rapper, Alien, who reaches at a white idea of Blackness, or minstrelsy. Played by James Franco, Alien bails the girls out when they are arrested at a hotel party. His presence immediately makes Faith uncomfortable. Is her distrust because she does not know him, even though she surely did not know every person in the hotel she was just partying in, or because of his proximity, however projected, to Blackness?
Alien brings the girls to a pool hall, where the majority of the people present are Black. The men in the room surround the girls, but in stark contrast to earlier scenes, where mostly white bodies were touching at all times, the Black bodies approach—but never touch—the white bodies. Faith expresses visceral discomfort. She pulls the other girls aside and complains to them through tears about the “unfair” situation: “These people are, like, touching us and talking to us and I don’t know them, and I don’t feel comfortable. I want to go home. This is not what I signed up for.”
We are to read their mere presence, at least to Faith, as somehow violent, apart from the earlier contact between white bodies in various states of consciousness. Now sobered, Faith finds herself feeling victimized, on guard in a crowd of Black men.
When Alien asks why she came down for spring break, Faith replies, “I don’t like where we’re from, so I thought if we came here we could be free, or just have fun.” Embarrassment about her hometown translates to a desire—like Alien—to embody a different life, but in what must be her first encounter with Black bodies, Faith seeks to escape back to the home she fled.
Faith leaves. Like Till, she slips offscreen. If we are not careful, we are apt to forget she was there at all.
The collision between Black and white bodies escalates when Alien angers Gucci Mane’s character, whose associate shoots Cotty, played by Rachel Korine, in the arm, sending her home. Candy and Brit are the only girls who remain, and, seeking justice or just entertainment, they plot revenge with Alien. A description of the end of this film cannot avoid directness: the girls use Alien’s guns to kill every single person, all of whom are Black, at Gucci Mane’s residence.
Stated another way: the white and white-passing girls who ignored their professor’s lesson on Emmett Till leave a pile of Black bodies in the wake of their vacation.
Amidst their massacre, the disembodied voices of Candy and Brit call their mothers to tell them they are going to come home and be good again. Echoing Faith’s earlier call to her mother when she described their “spiritual” spring break experience, Candy says, “We met people who are just like us. People just the same as us.” Of course, she means the other spring breakers, even Alien, but not the other group of people, the ones she kills while her voice recounts her once-in-a-lifetime trip. Mirroring Faith’s spirituality, Candy projects her moral image against her violent act.
In a film that draws the viewer’s attention to white and Black bodies in contrast to one another, the ending finally renders the white bodies explicitly violent. The girls who did not learn about Till—who was killed because of a white woman’s lie—become the killers, their fabrications only voiceovers to their own acts of anti-Black murder.
***
I have always struggled with my feelings about Spring Breakers. In my reading, it is a film about white and white-passing young women who carry out an act of white supremacy—regardless of their motive—before returning to the safety of their suburban lives. The evidence for this reading is clear, but its delivery at the hands of a white filmmaker sits uncomfortably with me, especially given Korine’s own handling of the material. If a white auteur intends to represent whiteness on-screen, with a conclusion that results in anti-Black violence, then they had better carry an ethical responsibility for that representation forward, rather than evading it as someone else’s problem. As it stands, Korine is either unwilling to address, or is otherwise unsure of, whether the film comments on whiteness at all.
Of the film’s creation, Korine revealed part of his intent: “Everything has become so corporatized and boring so real outlaw culture or criminal culture feels like the last vestige of American rebellion. These girls have grown up on WorldStarHipHop and Gucci Mane.” In Korine’s view, the girls’ anti-Black violence is a manifestation of their American rebellion, and is the opposite of boring: it’s entertainment. Further, they learned it, according to Korine, from a Black artist. Where Korine could condemn a culture of white anti-Black violence that teaches the girls to treat their massacre as a pastime, he instead points the finger at hip-hop culture – an irresponsible white lie.
When asked about the film’s undertones of racism, Korine offers: “I don’t know if it’s a racial division, but that is part of that landscape in the film and I’m not going to shy away from it, because it’s politically… or I guess you could say morally abstract. I wanna go there. It’s good to talk about that stuff.” I have searched and searched for evidence that Korine did not shy away from the so-called racial landscape of the film, but to no avail. He prefers that viewers render their own interpretations, but in a nation where too frequently racist terror is enacted only to be doubted (“Was this racially motivated?”), leaving certain violences open to various readings is more than irresponsible: it permits any of us, like Faith, to return home unscathed.
When asked if a viewer walks away with a surface-level appreciation of Spring Breakers, quoting Alien’s minstrel performance with mere admiration or ogling the girls’ bodies, Korine responded, “Yeah, I actually hope that people do. I hope that there’s people who watch the film and only get that. I don’t think there’s only one way to get the film.” When a potential critique of whiteness is subsumed by permission to sit back and soak in the good vibes, one wonders if there is a critique at all.
Where Black filmmakers are consistently expected to speak for the representation of race in their films (see Jordan Peele’s Get Out, or any other for that matter), white filmmakers like Korine are able to treat the inclusion of race as mere landscape. Refusing to explain the film, Korine stated his ultimate goal: “I just want to be great. That’s all. And live beyond all those types of descriptions. I don’t want to be contained in any way.” But Korine is part of an American tradition that always lets white and especially male filmmakers live beyond any description of their embodied experiences. No one is going to contain him by having him answer a question about race in his film. No one will relegate Spring Breakers to a generic Race category on Netflix. At the end of the day, he gets to walk away unburdened by the questions of race, gender, and beyond.
Korine’s comments, and his transcendence of race as a topic worthy of his discussion, make the film an unwitting participant in an American ritual on several levels, wherein whiteness only becomes fully visible when it turns deadly, when cast in sharp contrast to Blackness, only to be avoided again later. Korine lays bare an aspect of white American reality in bleak form, only to slip away from interrogations of it, casting the responsibility back on viewers who might barely notice the presence of race at all. There must be a way to call attention to the violence perpetuated by whiteness without reproducing it. There must be another way to see white bodies, to unravel their myths before their consequences.
***
During their spring break around the start of the pandemic in the U.S., college students flooded beaches along the gulf in Florida and Texas, ignoring new calls for social distancing in order to honor months-long plans to soak in sun, alcohol, and ocean water. Shortly after, at least six of the Florida students and 64 University of Texas students tested positive for the virus. As some of the first known U.S. cases, the “spring breakers” drew criticism from politicians, journalists, and everyone in between for putting people at risk because they believed themselves invincible.
“I just keep hearing how this affects mostly older people,” one college student told reporters. This imagined immunity—from the disease and accountability to others—provided one of the earliest examples of collective irresponsibility amidst the outbreak of the virus.
The spring breakers, of course, are only one beginning to that distinctly American story. “We’re just living for the moment. We’re just gonna do what happens when it happens,” one commented in a video that quickly went viral. One of the more infamous students, who later turned out to be an aspiring rapper like Alien, said to reporters, “At the end of the day, I’m not going to let it stop me from partying.” Like deleted scenes from Spring Breakers, I watched and rewatched these clips, observing their uncanny similarity to Korine’s own characters, except that we would not see the ending so explicitly, the part where the virus spread from one body to another, violence masqueraded as entertainment.
As the virus spread, the real-life spring breakers briefly provided the faces for a faceless disease, people who could be pointed to and blamed as a group, for one viral moment. But the president returned to explicitly racist language, blaming China with widely repeated epithets at his June rally in Tulsa, the official restart of his campaign, which he had originally scheduled for Juneteenth. Hate crimes against Asian and Asian American populations skyrocketed from March 2020 onward.
One year later, a white man traveled to three massage parlors to kill six Asian women and two white customers. He stated that it was not racially motivated, and the claim was repeated by white media outlets as fact. It’s the kind of violence that tells me we cannot afford to employ artistic representations of white supremacy and leave them open to interpretation.
During my own spring break as a teacher, before any shutdowns and a week before college students flooded beaches along the gulf, my spouse and I traveled to Washington, D.C. to visit a friend. Upon arrival, we made our way to the National Mall to visit the Museum of African American History and Culture. Families and school groups populated the museum, none of us knowing that two days later all of the museums would close at the advice of health officials. We milled about and came into contact with others, unaware that this would be one of the last times we would physically brush against another person’s sleeve and not feel that we had erred.
One of the museum’s displays is an anteroom housing Emmett Till’s exhumed casket with a photograph of his brutalized face where his body once lay. This was the only room in the museum that asked guests not to take photographs, to remain silent as we considered one historical instance of an extralegal, anti-Black killing, one of the most known instances before the 21st century. In paying a different kind of attention, without the aid or distortion of phones and conversation, the weight of this room suggested the gravity and deliberation of our reflections. It was an extension of Mamie Till-Mobley’s courage and resolve to show white Americans the violence we were capable of through the display of her son’s body in an open casket.
Simeon Wright, Till’s cousin, was with Till on the day of his kidnapping and subsequent murder at the hands of a white mob. He was later the one who discovered Till’s casket had been exhumed, and he recovered it and worked to place it in the Smithsonian. When asked about what looking at the casket imparted to him, he spoke of Till-Mobley’s love for her son, “interrupted and shattered by racial hatred without a cause.” To continue to look at the casket, as Till-Mobley insisted upon, holds significance for Wright. “It brings back memories that some would like to forget,” he said, “but to forget is to deny life itself.”
Years before the opening of Bryan Stevenson’s Legacy Museum in Alabama, Susan Sontag wrote in her book Regarding the Pain of Others that the U.S. has no museums about American slavery but many Holocaust museums because the latter was not an American crime. A museum of slavery, she writes, “is a memory judged too dangerous to social stability to activate and to create.” While we find it difficult to learn about the Holocaust, we can more easily look at instances of evil that do not readily reflect ourselves back to us, even if we now know how Nazi ideology took inspiration from American slavery. And if ongoing efforts to preserve Confederate statues are any indication, white Americans continue to struggle with, and often against, reflection.
One of the directors of the Museum of African American History and Culture, Lonnie G. Bunch III, recalls asking himself of Till’s casket, “Should we collect that?” In telling the history of Black Americans, Bunch and the museum’s curators struggled with moments in history that were necessary to tell but difficult to spotlight. They did not want the museum to only be about slavery and its legacy. While they knew they could not shy away from this aspect as a part of the history of Black people in America, they also wanted the museum to represent Black culture, including both resistance and joy. Hence, the bottom floor begins with slavery—the genesis of Black history in America—and the top floor represents the achievements and legacy of Black Americans into today.
Surveys leading up to the museum’s opening found that, as journalist Krissah Thompson reports, slavery “ranked as both the top subject that visitors want to know more about—and the one they’re least interested in exploring.” This paradox is difficult to parse: as Bunch says, this is not a museum of slavery but the wide-spanning history and culture of Black Americans, including, but not limited to, that terrible legacy.
On the other hand, white visitors to the museum might want to avoid “exploring” slavery because of what it implies about what we have yet to grapple with 400 years on. In visiting this space, are we here to learn about and celebrate Black history? Or are we to learn about our violent role in that history, to reflect on our responsibilities in the here and now? While a history museum not expressly for or through a white lens in the U.S. fills a major gap, there are still too few museums that trouble that lens. Like Black filmmakers, the Museum of African American History and Culture should not bear the burden of museums everywhere, should not shoulder the entire weight of histories untold.
The museum’s careful consideration to include Till’s casket stands in stark contrast to the brief appearance of Till’s photograph in Spring Breakers while two young women mimic a sex act. Considering that Till was accused of making advances on Carolyn Bryant, Korine’s reversal hardly feels accidental. But in pushing Till to the background, and being unable to bring this theme forward into frank conversations with media outlets, Korine’s perceived boldness as a filmmaker rings hollow, an emptiness at the center of what could have been something more.
It’s not that Korine should not have made Spring Breakers, but that he might have been intentional about its execution. In an essay collected for The Source of Self-Regard, Toni Morrison wrote of the utter lack of museums regarding the memory of slavery in the U.S., arguing that an institutionalized practice of acknowledgment “could suggest the moral clarity among white people when they were at their best, when they risked something, when they didn’t have to risk and could have chosen to be silent; there’s no monument for that either.” Korine undoubtedly made risks in his film, but he seems unwilling to carry them through offscreen. He wrongly assumes that many white Americans are equipped to notice representations of whiteness as such. If the museums that Morrison wrote about existed, I have to wonder if white Americans would visit, and if so, what we would see.
Riding the escalator down in the museum, a group of 20 white teens passed us going the other way, wearing MAGA hats and laughing loudly. We glared at the ascending troupe in disbelief, but they did not seem to notice us. As I walked through the segregated bus, I wondered what the teens had thought as they walked through it. I wondered what exhibits, if any, slowed them down or made them still, reflective, conscious. What was making them laugh on their way up. I wondered if they had stepped into the anteroom holding Till’s casket, and what it had made clear to them. What—if anything—it unsettled for them, before we all returned home, offscreen, while the spring breakers briefly filled our news feeds.
Ben Lewellyn-Taylor is an educator in Dallas, Texas. He writes on religion, music, literature, and film. He is currently earning his MFA in creative nonfiction at Antioch University. Ben’s essays and reviews have appeared in New South Journal, No Contact Mag, Lunch Ticket, New Critique, Variety Pack, The Adroit Journal, HASH Journal, and Bridge Eight Press, among others.