Spring Breakers: A Symptomatic Interpretation

The film Spring Breakers, directed by Harmony Korine, focuses on four young girls who seek an escape from their mundane lives as college students and decide to go to Florida for spring break. The girls are so desperate and deprived that they are driven to the extremes. This film serves a social commentary on the modern culture of today’s youths. The film takes on the perspectives of the protagonists, through it’s use of gloomy, cool colors in depictions of college life, and prison. However, the scenes showing the beaches and the parties are all in an overly exaggerated neon color scheme. The subtle use of cinematography techniques helps to convey the depravity of modern day youths. Interestingly, the scenes filled with drunk college students presented in trashy party montages are combined with Faith’s voice overs describing meaningful epiphany’s from the trip. This seems to
The book defines ideology as a “systematic set of beliefs that is not necessarily conscious.” Ideology plays a big role in political discourse which is perhaps why the book brings up Marxist theory (described as political and economic discourse that looks at history and society in terms of unequal class structure) and relates it to film. Ideological critique is something that involves “symptomatic reading” which relies on a “subtle and sometimes wishful approach” to analyzing and interpreting film. The book also talks about poststructuralism which, rather than structuralism, stresses the open-mindedness of stories and explores subjectivity with film structures. Poststructuralism analysis also includes many distinct areas of thought from psychoanalytic to postcolonial to feminist. Spring Breakers could be analyzed on many different ideological and poststructuralism critiques specifically surrounding the philosophy of youth in the modern