Hi everyone, Tim here; you may know me from my film review blog Antagony & Ecstasy, from my dogged commitment to the Film Experience’s own Hit Me with Your Best Shot or you may not have the damnedest idea who I am and don’t care. But I’m going to be with you on Thursdays for at least a little while now, with a weekly column, where we’ll talk about… well, that’s the trick, isn’t it? Movie stuff. Whatever seems to be interesting about the new movies poking their heads around that particular week: something particular about the way a movie was put together, or conceived, or, in this case, sold.
The dirty secret of the film industry is that it exists to be profitable. It actually does good to be reminded of that, because even in the case of the costliest, sprawlingest tentpole movies, we tend to act like that the filmmakers are our buddies, or some such; but it’s true of even the most independent-minded, anti-commercial cinema that it’s actually supposed to make some sort of money. Sad as it is to think, even microbudget indies that cost fractions of pennies by movie budget standards are still wildly expensive by actual human being standards, and if they constantly hemorrhage money, then it would be impossible to keep making them.
All of which is to say: I truly don’t begrudge Annapurna Pictures the right to turn a profit on Spring Breakers, more...
...nor Harmony Korine the right to become a bankable film director, even though I would park myself firmly in the “not a fan” camp regarding this particular picture. What I do begrudge is the way they got there by selling the film as something it isn’t to an audience who would never in a hundred years see the thing it actually is. This thought first occurred to me a few days before the film made its bold jump from 3 to 1104 theaters (a jump of 36,700%), when I happened to be by a television that happened to be playing Entertainment Tonight, and the perky lady anchor breathlessly hyped the naughty, sexy movie starring former Disney stars Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens that they’d be talking about after the break, selling the movie on the basis of its salacious, Lives of the Movie Stars elements to, well, to the sort of people who watch Entertainment Tonight.
This is really quite dazzling. To go from the rabidly anti-populist Trash Humpers to a sexy exploitation picture shilled by the same team eager to bring us scoops about the new season of "Dancing with the Stars" in one step would be a legendary act of selling out, if only that’s what Korine had actually done. In fact, as I expect we all know by now, Spring Breakers is more of an all-out satiric assault on the kind of mentality that drives the entertainment media, in all its obsession with nipple slips and mostly-naked teenybopper icons and a quintessentially middlebrow American prudish fascination with watching sex. The kind of person that would go see the movie because a syndicated TV show suggest that you can see Hudgens being kinky is exactly the person that the film is most eager to condemn.
In short, Spring Breakers is the current reigning champion of the trend of advertising a movie as something completely different, one of the most magical facets of being a regular filmgoer in the 21st Century (and earlier: one of my all-time favorite movie trailers, for the holiday classic Miracle on 34th Street, is functionally an original short film that manages to avoid mentioning that the film in any way involves Christmas). It’s not, maybe, the most epidemic problem facing the world, but it’s desperately annoying, and has always struck me as counterproductive: it seems like it would stand to reason that the best way to get people to pay for your product is to attract the people who’d be most likely to enjoy it. And maybe that’s why we have the other trend in movie advertising, to share every salient plot point that happens prior to the last five minutes. But that’s a different rant.
It seems like it should be obvious box-office suicide; except it’s not. There have been films that have proved this before, but none so spectacularly as Spring Breakers. It might insult its audience to their face, and there might be walk-outs (four of the dozen-odd people in the theater where I saw it when it started were not there when it ended); but it made $4.9 million the weekend of its wide expansion – in three days at the U.S. box office, Spring Breakers made more than eight times the international lifetime grosses of every previous Harmony Korine film combined. It does not matter in the least if the people who got it there knew what they were getting into or not, if they were delighted by the surprise, or felt ill-used and lied to.
That’s what’s so galling: the lack of any kind of respect for the audience. Sure, there are always those suburbanites happy to have the chance to see this kind of stuff, smuggled under the radar (in addition to walk-outs, there was post-film applause in my theater), but that doesn’t change the fact that the audience has been openly lied to. It’s a little crime, as they go, but surely none of us want to end up in a place where it’s a guessing game every time we go to the cinema.