Why 'Spring Breakers' Will Make You Hate Teenagers Today, but Also Understand Them | Movie News | Movies.com
Opening statements from the article before it goes further into the plot of the movie.
"The most important thing to understand about Spring Breakers is that it’s exactly what it is, and it’s also a lot more. Unquestionably, it’s a leering, hedonistic celebration of teenagers objectifying and dehumanizing themselves in the name of adolescent, boundary-testing rebellion. But it’s also, in both form and content, an objective portrait of the way that popular culture has virtually obliterated the possibility for American youth to experience something without a numbing deluge of media references and contexts, and therefore with any impulse at all to take responsibility for themselves, much less acknowledge that there are repercussions at all.
All of which is why Spring Breakers will make you hate teenagers, but understand them as well.
On a purely experiential level, it’s hard to develop much sympathy for the four girls at the center of the film. Although they’re playful and naïve at the beginning of the film, their indifference to the prospect of staging a robbery in order to get the money that they want – not to mention their delusional desperation to “see the world” via a week in, of all places, St. Petersburg, Florida – makes it difficult not to judge them as ignorant, if not just plain stupid. But what’s interesting about writer-director Harmony Korine’s film is that he sort of expertly allows reality to infiltrate their ambitions, becoming an encroaching reminder that there is a world out there where they may eventually have to answer for their behavior."
