In 1786, an  English philosopher named Jeremy Bentham wrote a series of letters to his father, which he later revised and collected in a book titled Panopticon; Or, the Inspection House: Containing the Idea of a New Principle of Construction Applicable to Any Sort of Establishment, in Which Persons of Any Description Are to be Kept Under Inspection; and in Particular to Penitentiary-Houses, Prisons, Work-Houses, Poor-Houses, Lazarettos, Manufactories, Hospitals, Mad-Houses, and Schools: With a Plan of Management Adapted to the Principle: In a Series of Letters, Written in the Year 1787, from Crecheff in White Russia, to a Friend in England.

(It was the 18th century.  Long titles were trendy.)

His primary subject matter was an architectural plan for a prison that would allow a single guard to watch a large number of inmates simultaneously.  From this basic principle, he extrapolated a number of theories about the act of surveillance and how it would impact people subjected to it.  Specifically, he anticipated dramatic and beneficial changes to their behavior, stimulated by both the external act of being watched and their own internal reactions to being watched.  

In 2007 and again in 2009, Britney Spears became the Guinness Book of World Records’ Most Searched Person; between 2005 and 2008, her name was Yahoo’s most popular search term and she later became the most-searched person of the decade.  Since the age of seventeen, she has lived in a world of surveillance beyond Bentham’s most semicolon-interrupted dreams. It has not worked out quite the way either she or he had planned.

In 2013, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers hit theaters, revealing itself to be less the adolescent sex comedy promised by the trailers and more a neon spotlight on a certain less-celebrated segment of American society, dissected ruthlessly via contrasting depictions of sexuality, race, and class.  It is also a love letter of sorts to Britney, drawing many of its aesthetic elements straight from her videos and personal life, and prominently featuring two of her biggest hits.  More than anything else, though, Spring Breakers is a meta-meditation on young women’s understanding of themselves as constantly under scrutiny, always being consumable erotic objects for viewers of all kinds, and how they deal with that reality and occasionally succeed in subverting it.  

Come on, y’all.  Why you acting ‘spicious?  I promise that it’ll make sense by the end.

Like most people who majored in a field not immediately applicable to employment upon graduation, I mostly know about Bentham and the Panopticon because Michel Foucault expanded on Bentham’s theories in his seminal poststructuralist analysis Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, aka the book most likely to attract a certain sort of skeevy dude in coffee shops when you’re just trying to finish your Literary Theory 101 reading.  I hadn’t ever read Foucault’s source material prior to seeing Spring Breakers, as I’d read some of Bentham’s other philosophical writing and found it to suffer from many of the worse excesses of eighteenth-century British writing.  At the time, I was reading Samuel Richardson’s novels and could not handle any more eighteenth-century excess, so I skipped Panopticon. This was a big mistake on my part.  It turns out that, like James Franco, Bentham gets a whole lot better when he’s enthusiastic about something.  And sweet sugar sand beaches, was he enthusiastic about his inspection-house plan: 

Morals reformed - health preserved - industry invigorated - instruction diffused - public burthens lightened - Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock - the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws are not cut, but untied - all by a simple idea in Architecture!

(“Preface”)

And how was all this to be accomplished?

The building is circular.  The apartments of the prisoners occupy the circumference… These cells are divided from one another, and the prisoners by that means secluded from all communication with each other, by partitions in the form of radii issuing from the circumference towards the centre, and extending as many feet as shall be thought necessary to form the largest dimension of the cell.  The apartment of the inspector occupies the centre; you may call it if you please the inspector’s lodge… Each cell has in the outward circumference, a window, large enough, not only to light the cell, but, through the cell, to afford light enough to the correspondent part of the lodge.  The inner circumference of the cell is formed by an iron grating, so light as not to screen any part of the cell from the inspector’s view. 

(“Letter II: Plan for a Penitentiary Inspection-House”)

But how exactly is that going to make people reform their morals?

It is obvious that, in all these instances, the more constantly the persons to be inspected are under the eyes of the persons who should inspect them, the more perfectly will the purpose X of the establishment have been attained. Ideal perfection, if that were the object, would require that each person should actually be in that predicament, during every instant of time. This being impossible, the next thing to be wished for is, that, at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so.

(“Letter I: Idea of the Inspection Principle”)

Short version: if you think you’re being observed, you’ll change your behavior accordingly.  In the modern world, this is the same principle behind fake security cameras, news reports of NSA metadata gathering installations in Utah, and “speed limit enforced by aircraft” signs.  Or as Foucault explains rather more elegantly,

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power… in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.  To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so.  In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable.

(Discipline and Punish, “Panopticism”)

Unfortunately for Bentham, only a very few architects have built anything based on his design in the past 227 years, and it has been particularly unsuccessful for prison construction.  The Panopticon operates far better as a metaphor for understanding how power functions and how people subjected to it behave, often in ways that don’t seem to be in their best interests.  It’s gotten both more literal and applicable as surveillance technology has evolved beyond iron gratings and protracted partitions.  

As Foucault explains, this sort of power structure does not require physical buildings.  At its most basic, it can operate with nothing more than two groups of people: one which believes it has the right to observe the other, so long as the other accepts that it has no choice but to be observed.  It exists in many forms in our society, but one of the most pervasive is the assumption that women are always on display for men’s benefit.  It permeates the fashion and makeup industries.  It’s the main reason why the porn industry exists.  It presents itself in a maddening array of double standards for men’s and women’s appearance in public, the workplace, and in art.  It is the basis for a huge amount of critical theory.  It can’t be pinned on either men or women, as both are complicit in promulgating it.  You do not need to be a learned 18th-century philosopher to understand that this assumption is part of the belief that women exist for men’s benefit, period, but it apparently helps:  

Addison, the grave and moral Addison, in his Spectator or his Tatler, I forget which, suggests a contrivance for trying virginity by means of lions. You may there find many curious disquisitions concerning the measures and degrees of that species of purity; all which you will be better pleased to have from that grave author than from me. But, without plunging into any such discussions, the highest degree possible, whatsoever that may be, is no more than anybody might make sure of, only by transferring damsels at as early an age as may be thought sufficient, into a strict inspection-school. Addison’s scheme was not only a penal but a bloody one: and what havoc it might have made in the population of the country, I tremble but to think of. Give thanks, then, to Diana and the eleven thousand virgins, and to whatever powers preside over virginity in either calendar, for so happy a discovery as this of your friend’s. There you saw blood and uncertainty: here you see certainty without blood. What advantage might be made by setting up a boarding-school for young ladies upon this plan, and with what eagerness gentlemen who are curious in such matters would crowd to such a school to choose themselves wives, is too obvious to insist on.* 

 (“Letter XXI: Schools”, emphasis mine)

What I find most fascinating about this section is how much it reveals about Bentham’s real plan**.  Gone is any notion of reformation or benefit for the inmates, or instilling any form of self-correction in those damsels.  What would they be correcting, after all?  Instead, the Panopticon would provide a guarantee for “gentlemen,” not only of some abstract notion of purity but the more tangible sense of absolute control over their prospective wives from a young age.

In other words: boy, don’t try to front.  I know just what you are.  Also, schoolgirl fetishes apparently go back a ways.

Like all of Britney’s music videos, “… Baby One More Time” features lots and lots of shots of her staring and singing directly to the camera.  This is not even remotely unusual for the genre; it’s been a standard since before Britney was born.  Early examples were clearly an attempt to replicate a concert experience in video form.  In short order, video directors went for a slightly more abstract choice: performers were singing directly to you, an audience member of one.  Often, they wouldn’t even pretend to be singing as part of a musical performance; instead, they were lip-synching while acting out the lyrical content, participating in increasingly elaborate dance routines, or just walking around city streets.  The net result was both a greater sense of connection with the singers and a lessened awareness that they were in fact singers.  (Occasionally, this effect culminated in the realization that some of them weren’t really singers at all.)

We accept this trope in videos unquestioningly, but if it happens in film, it freaks us out.  It’s destabilizing; fourth-wall breaking, and it reminds us that we’re watching a movie.  In a video, however, it’s titillating or even reassuring.  In Britney’s case, it’s probably the single thing she does best.  Her form of self-regulation is to be perpetually and enthusiastically available to whoever is watching.  It is Bentham’s inspection-school taken to its most logical conclusion: a young woman exists solely for your visual consumption; she was born to make you happy.    

image

you

image

yes you

image

you forever and always

image

you above all others

image

extra-especially you.

However, when Britney stares into the camera, she promises something more than the passive femininity Bentham takes for granted.  It’s compliance with being observed, but it’s also the vague sense that there’s something illicit in looking.  This is exactly the porn that a nation descended from Puritans needs.  It is also why so many of those browser searches for her name had the word “naked” appended to them.  

When Korine mentioned that his intent with Spring Breakers was to make a film that felt “like a Britney Spears video by way of Gaspar Noé,” I wondered if this trope would make an appearance, given how the trailer seemed to be riffing off of the sense of naughtiness combined with control that it conveys (especially through the use of the singalong to “…Baby One More Time”).  It doesn’t, probably because people’s heads exploded enough as it was, and it isn’t exactly the most subtle approach to the subject matter.  Instead, Korine is asking rather elliptically:  what happens when the objects of surveillance begin to understand the power structures in which they’re participants?  What happens when they try to assert control over what other people see?

* Just to up the squick factor, keep in mind that this quote is from a letter that Bentham wrote to his father.

** It also casts a whole new light on all the reviewers who expressed an interest in locking up their daughters after watching Spring Breakers.

When I wrote the script, I started thinking about girls in bikinis with guns, wearing ski masks.
Harmony Korine

(Source: interviewmagazine.com)

While Spring Breakers’ ski masks seem to be an homage to Pussy Riot’s balaclavas, Korine has discounted any connection beyond an “awesome coincidence.” (Another awesome probably-coincidence: Britney wears a ski mask for about two seconds in her...

While Spring Breakers’ ski masks seem to be an homage to Pussy Riot’s balaclavas, Korine has discounted any connection beyond an “awesome coincidence.” (Another awesome probably-coincidence: Britney wears a ski mask for about two seconds in her “Criminal” video.) That said, they still operate on several different narrative levels.  Initially, they’re the barely-plausible excuse for the Chicken Shack robbers to get away with their boob-enhancing spring break funds; later, a new set of cutesy pastel masks serve to both anonymize the three remaining girls to new victims and blur their identities for the audience.  The first is an ancient visual cliché for criminal behavior, but the second echoes the decision to color Hudgens’ brunette hair the same shade as Benson’s: the actresses already look alike, and with the masks on, it’s nearly impossible to tell them apart.  (More on this in a bit.)

By the end of the movie, the masks seem to confer some kind of protection from bullets.  Nobody wearing a mask gets shot, even when multiple gangsters are firing dozens of rounds at them.  However, one of those gangsters had no difficulty shooting Cotty in the arm earlier, and another takes out Alien immediately upon arrival at Casa del Archie.  Crucially, neither Cotty nor Alien were wearing masks, unlike Candy and Brit.  This connection between preventing onlookers from seeing one’s face and staying alive, and even triumphing over those onlookers (who were leering at the Breakers earlier in the film) has some interesting implications beyond simply providing the film’s most memorable image.

In a film featuring countless anonymous boobs and butts, it’s the masked faces that remain most memorable.  They provide a weird visceral shock–the audience’s initial reaction to them both times I saw the movie in a theater was a collective nervous giggle–which is not so surprising, given our assumptions about who’s allowed to look at young women.  A mask flips the dynamic of Bentham’s grating around: I can see you, but you can’t see my face even as you're looking at me.  Moreover, I am depersonalized because I’ve taken active steps to ensure that you don’t know who I am, not because you’ve made me an object.  Ironically, when paired with a bikini, a mask destabilizes sexual objectification with the realization that there is a face and therefore a person under the mask that you don’t get to see.   

This analysis might sound as though the solution to sexism is for women to cover themselves up, but Spring Breakers is not saying that women should be anonymous objects of desire or hidden from view.  To the contrary, it’s largely about seeing and being seen, both within the space of the film and also the more meta-sense of the actresses’ careers and the marketing.  Specifically, it’s about awareness and control over what other people see, given the inevitability that they will be looking.  (In particular, the section with the bikini-clad Breakers riding scooters is as close as I’ve ever seen to a female flâneur scene in a film.)  That control in the form of the masks gives them what they want: the funds to go on spring break, an opportunity to bond with each other and Alien, and the Jadean invincibility necessary to get revenge for a friend and lover alike.

But before I get too enthusiastic about all of this, it’s worth remembering that all this boundary-smashing and subjective image-controlling is going on in a movie.  Generally speaking, actresses (and actors) don’t have much say in what they wear, how they look, the lines they speak, or any other aspect of their performances, and young starlets are among the least likely to have any control in this regard.  For instance, Vanessa Hudgens has admitted that she was massively uncomfortable filming the pool scene, which is an indicator of both her acting abilities and lack of agency.  Likewise, keep in mind that Spring Breakers is still very much a male fantasy.  A complicated and intelligent male fantasy, yes, but still springing from the mind of a guy who thought of girls wearing bikinis at the same time that he imagined them wearing masks.  

Furthermore, the very nature of the relationship between a film and its audience is panopticonic:

The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.

(Discipline and Punish, “Panopticism”)

In other words, I can sit in a dark room and look up at images of Hudgens on a screen; simultaneously, she does not know that I exist.  However, she is aware that potentially millions of people who she doesn’t know will see her, over and over again.  She signed up for this, as did her costars, and it may well have been part of the appeal.  But lately, the bargain between actors and their audiences has been flipping that dyad around, as the unseen masses spend ever more time staring intently at the few in the center and taking it for granted that we can peer into every aspect of their lives. 

There’s only two types of people in the world:
The ones that entertain and the ones that observe.
Britney Spears, “Circus”

The problem with ascribing any sort of deeper meaning to Britney’s various songs about living life in the public eye is the same as attempting to ascribe any authorial intent to her discography, as she didn’t write most of it.  (This does excuse her from any responsibility for demonstrative pronoun errors in her lyrics, though.) It is not entirely inaccurate to say that she didn’t create much of any of her art, as her voice is frequently autotuned, and she is notorious for lip-synching in concerts.  Many people seem to think of her as merely an avatar for a kind of plastic sexuality, and they are both confused and annoyed when forced to realize that there is a real person inhabiting it.  Her annus horribilus of 2007 brought this disconnect to the forefront, and while her production team has done their best to exploit it to her benefit, there’s still a queasy undertone to hearing her sing supposedly deeply self-aware and autobiographical songs like “Piece of Me” while realizing that she had no part in creating them.

But Britney did write one of her big hits, and it’s the one featured in its entirety in Spring Breakers: “Everytime”.  Moreover, it is unquestionably autobiographical, written in the aftermath of Britney’s infamous breakup with Justin Timberlake and his “Cry Me a River” video.  Even if it’s a carefully stage-managed attempt to leverage celebrity gossip into chart placement, it’s still notable for being one of the small pieces of Britney’s life that she voluntarily shared with her audience on her own terms.  While the lyrics reveal some interesting visual imagery and Mulveyian perspective-shifting, a close reading is probably overreaching, as Korine tends to go for a more elliptical approach.  (That, and Britney needed a co-author to write verses like “I may have made it rain/Please forgive me/My weakness caused you pain/And this song is my sorry.”)

The video is one of Britney’s few that is narrative-based as opposed to taking place in a fantasy dance space.  Furthermore, Britney actually had a hand in creating it, though it didn’t achieve quite the maudlin depths that she was aiming for.  (It was originally going to involve Britney’s character committing suicide, but the public outcry–ironically–convinced her label to go for reincarnation instead.)  It also portrays her fans, the paparazzi, and her romantic partner as acting in a similarly aggressive and abusive fashion.  It isn’t her first video about the complications of fame–that would be the profoundly-eerie-in-retrospect “Lucky”–but it’s the first to present being hounded by fans and paparazzi as a uniformly horrific experience.  In fact, if the lyrics are taken literally in the context of the video, it’s less a song about begging forgiveness from a former love, as her boyfriend (hi, Stephen Dorff!) is right there, shoving her and throwing things at her, and more about the symbiotic relationship between a celebrity and her fans.  Mostly, though, it’s about being constantly scrutinized and what happens when scrutiny is abruptly replaced by privacy. Spoiler: Britney dies.  Bentham and Foucault would no doubt be delighted. Double spoiler: it was all a dream.

While the song makes for a hilariously jarring background soundtrack to the Candy/Cotty/Brit/Alien rampage–entirely in keeping with the rest of the movie’s contrast between pretty girly stuff and grimy violence–it also carries with it a whole carousel worth of baggage about the perils of fame for young women and meta-attempts to control one’s image.  It is indeed sweet, but I’m not sure how inspiring it really is.  

It is also possible that Korine chose “Everytime” fully aware of its history, video, and reception, and did so intending to mock both Britney and the characters proclaiming her to be one of the great artists of our age.  Spring Breakers definitely portrays class in an uneasy way, as its plebian protagonists resemble neither the saccharine-celebration stereotypes of country songs or the more clear-eyed depictions found in Daniel Woodrell or Dorothy Allison’s novels. As with Kids, much of Korine’s take on lower-class America (especially the more melanin-deprived portion of it) seems to be a ruthlessly parodic skewering of what Woodrell calls “proletariat prone to criminal activity." 

None of the four female protagonists are particularly sympathetic, and they evince a lack of empathy for anyone other than themselves that borders on the psychotic.  (Candy and Brit may actually be female antiheroes, those rarest of lady characters.)  Their actions have no defense, and they never feel any remorse for anything other than getting caught.  Even Faith’s lack of participation in the Chicken Shack robbery is outweighed by her enthusiastic use of the ill-gotten gains.  Her reaction to the scary black guys at the pool hall may be as close as the movie gets to providing a thoughtful commentary on race.  The majority of these actions are played for laughs, and the audience is clearly not intended to laugh with the characters, but at them–especially Alien.  Naivete, stupidity, tackiness, and viciousness are their primary character traits, tempered only slightly by the women’s fondness for each other, and possibly for Alien.  

Yet there is one regard in which Korine does not judge them at all, and that’s sex–which complicates the assumption that he’s simply presenting them as objects of derision.  None of the women in the movie ever have any negative consequences for their sexual behavior—not even sloshed Cotty taunting the frat boys with “you’re never going to get this pussy!”—and none of them judge each other.  Given how intensely our society conflates trashiness and sexuality for women, this is a startling change from the way the movie otherwise portrays these characters.

For an example of just how nasty that conflation can get, see all of America’s class anxieties centered around Britney.  Rolling Stone once memorably described her as "an inbred swamp thing,” which is the sort of sentiment that inspires one to look up the secret family recipe for fried squirrel.  Likewise, I cannot count how many times I’ve read the adjective “trashy” in conjunction with her name, and for a large chunk of middle-class white America, she represents their worst fears for their daughters: totally lying about that whole virginity thing, overtly sexual, married young, divorced young, still dependent on her parents, mental health issues compounded by major substance abuse problems, and a complete unwillingness to abandon her lower-class roots.  She may be one of the wealthiest women in the entertainment industry, but she has not bought a penny’s worth of refinement, and worst of all, she publicly revels in putting her image up on blocks.    

But “What if someone sees you like that?  What will they think?!” holds no threat for a person who is always on display and who everyone is constantly watching.  This is the real problem with Bentham and Foucault’s theories: if the person under surveillance stops caring about being watched, she has no need to regulate her behavior.  Not coincidentally, that’s the real sin of trashiness in American culture: that one does not care enough to better oneself with the opportunities available.  

And therein lie the most glorious ironies of Spring Breakers, which are that it provides a “REAL-DEAL ART FILM” opportunity for Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Selena Gomez to launch into sophisticated adult careers by playing decidedly non-self-regulating savages, to leverage the contrast between their Disney images and their sleazy characters to remind us that–oh yeah–they are actresses, and to ultimately show how very much they care about being smarter and safer than their predecessors.  

One of the fun parts of living in a society structured largely for straight white dudes is that men get to define acceptable female sexuality by law, custom, and culture. This takes several forms, including the assumption that any same-sex activity between women ought to be purely for male benefit. One of the even more fun parts of this belief is the simultaneous devaluing of expressions of female desire—because it can’t possibly be anything other than fake, as why else would you be smooching on another woman if not to attract a man?—and also reasserting female sexuality as purely performative for male benefit. In other words, even something as profoundly personal as sexual orientation and desire ends up subject to the observer. Welcome to the Panopticon; you may now make out for shots.

Surprisingly, Spring Breakers does not operate by these well-understood guidelines. First, the relationships between Faith and the other three are qualitatively friendly rather than homoerotic (even with all the hand holding, hugging, snuggling, and sitting on each other’s laps) which is a difficult thing to get right either on film or as a closeted teenager*. Later on, when Alien asks the girls if they ever get up to any Sapphic hijinks, Brit’s reaction isn’t the giggly confirmation that would go along with free Cuervo but instead a Maleficentian smirk of disdain.  Notably, she isn’t denying anything (especially those shotgun cigarillo kisses with Cotty that we saw earlier), but it clearly isn’t any of this cornrowed freak’s business.  Likewise, Brit wants penis, but she doesn’t ever mention any interest in the dude(s) to whom it might be attached, any more than the audience is meant to be interested in the character motivations of all the boobs and butts on display during the title credits.  This is neither the strict binary orientation nor the romantic expressions that usually pass for acceptable lady erotic behavior in film.

Nor does the pool scene adhere to the usual porn conventions** for threesomes, either.  Alien is neither an observer standing in for the audience nor an active director telling Brit and Candy what to do.  The shifting back and forth from underwater to above makes it difficult to tell whose what is where.  When the actual penetration seems to be taking place, Alien isn’t between the two women, and they’re having a better time than he is.  The general effect is happy, giggly, and unexpectedly sweet.   

For an example of the more typical cultural depiction of F/F/M interactions, look no further than Archie’s sex scene slightly later in the film with two women who individually and jointly got it goin’ like a turbo ‘Vette.  Not only does he tell both of them what to do while they’re in the shower, but they’re also both looking back to him for direction.  The sex is for his benefit, not theirs, and it’s clearly also for ours–unless there’s some plausible reason for one of the women to be slithering across Archie’s knees while he’s having sex with the other, if not to frame her splendid butt.

The racial issues on display there are vast and beyond the scope of this essay, but I will say this: it sure would have been nice if either character had been named or either actress had been credited.  (That’s not even getting into Korine’s Sarah Baartman-esque comments in a recent interview.)   I understand that the movie operates largely on contrast, but I’m not sure that showing us Gucci Mane directing his own private shower porn is the way to emphasize just how different the relationship between Candy, Brit, and Alien really is.

And it is different from all the rest.  After Faith fled back to her grandma and Cotty decided that the gangster lifestyle was perhaps overrated, I figured I knew exactly where the movie was going.  I settled back with my Junior Mints secure in the knowledge that Brit and Candy would promptly start fighting over Alien’s affections, because that’s how cinematic love triangles inevitably pan out.  Why I thought a Harmony Korine movie would be either that predictable or fall along clearly defined gender lines, I dunno, but the Junior Mints box might have been a more reliable critical source at that point.  

For one, it’s not a love triangle.  Love doesn’t have much to do with it, and it doesn’t seem to be a form represented by Euclidean geometry.  I can’t quite count the number of sides, because Brit and Candy almost seem to be blending together over the course of the movie.  They’re identified as a unit from the beginning: “Especially Brit and Candy… They’re evil.”  The actresses look alike, as the makeup department colored Vanessa Hudgens’ hair the same shade of blonde-with-dark-roots as Ashley Benson’s (and Britney’s), and as mentioned before, once they pull on the masks, they’re almost impossible to tell apart***.  More than that, though, Candy speaks for Brit in telling Alien “We love you too,“ after he has professed his love for "y'all.”  They’re plural, but only just barely.

Despite some critics’ accusations, this blurring isn’t an inability on Korine’s part to write distinct female characters, as Cotty and Faith are plenty easy to distinguish between.  Rather, it represents a certain sort of charmingly naïve polyamorous fantasy in which nobody ever gets into arguments over which movie to watch tonight or which frat party to stick up, and everyone is always in a state of unity and pastel bliss.  

It might also be as close as anyone has gotten to presenting a bisexual gaze on film.   That, however, may depend on the audience.

* The word that kept popping up in my head during those early scenes was “LYLAS,” an acronym for “Love Ya Like a Sis,” as documented on approximately 35% of the pages of my junior high school yearbook and endless band camp letters, and the adolescent girl version of “no homo.“

** Insofar as there are any; there are of course any number of combinations and permutations and conflagrations available in porn, but certain of these show up frequently.  

*** Protip: Vanessa Hudgens has a navel piercing.  You’re welcome.

Most discussions of the Panopticon tend to focus on the observed, not the observers.  This is by design, as both Foucault and Bentham pointed out; the whole point is that the system exists to correct the behavior of people under surveillance, and it functions best if they don’t know if they’re being observed, much less by whom.  That said, observers are part of the dyad too, and it’s worth considering their part in the whole shebang.

As per Bentham and Foucault, the whole point of observers in the Panopticon is that they’re anonymous.  They may not even be watching at any given time.  What they see is less important than the fact that they watch.  Movies operate on precisely the opposite principle: filmmakers carefully and deliberately choose everything visible, and frequently intend it for a specific audience.  The people watching are everything; without them, there would be no reason for a movie to exist.  This is not just a basic principle of entertainment.  Entire schools of theory hinge on the concept of audience identification, especially characters, and extra-especially male characters who view female characters in turn.  

Music videos–especially Britney’s–collapse traditional cinematic barriers between performer and audience, and they do a number on this dynamic as well.  As I noted earlier, all of her videos feature her looking directly at the camera, dancing and vamping and slithering around for you, but very few of them include the sorts of male characters generally considered necessary to create visual pleasure in narrative cinema.  Those that do–“Everytime,” “Toxic,” “Womanizer”–tend to be either jerks or hapless dorks.  The one recent exception is “Criminal,” which is complicated further by the fact that the eponymous male character is played by Jason Trawick, Britney’s then-fiance.  It is presumably fairly difficult to identify with the guy who was actually boinking Britney, if you want to and can’t.  There also isn’t much point in identifying with the guy known entirely as Britney’s man if you’re a woman who wants to be Britney.  

Spring Breakers proves even more destructive to the traditional film theory of the male gaze.  If it were a typical movie operating under this theory, audience members male and female alike would identify with Alien and feast their eyes upon the nubile flesh of the passive Breakers, who would be objects to be looked at and nothing more.  There are several problems with this notion, all of them immediately apparent even to a Junior Mints box.  We first see Alien performing on a stage for an audience that includes the Breakers.  The angle of the camera and the cuts back and forth from the audience to the stage set us up to identify with the Breakers, not him.  In addition, he’s played by James Franco, Oscar nominee and host, arguably the most famous person in this movie (at least, to the people who didn’t need to sneak into the theater).  Second, even without the camerawork, it’s a little difficult to identify with Alien; as he himself notes, he’s from another planet.  

Things shift back to a more familiar dynamic in the courtroom scene, as we can see Alien in the back of the room (though unseen by the Breakers) and the camera then shifts back and forth from his point of view to the front of the courtroom so that we can see him watching.  Tragically for the purposes of this essay, he does not see them in their actual cell, but immediately after springing them, the movie repeats the pattern of us watching him watching them.  He seems to be in control of things–“I saw y'all in there; though you could use a little bailing out”–and for a while, we worry about the Breakers.  

But then things get weird again, as it becomes obvious that Alien isn’t interested in telling either Brit or Candy what to do:

Quite the opposite, in fact.  

And at this point, if we’re still clinging to the assumption that the audience is supposed to identify with Alien, where does that put us?  That’s right: with two silencers halfway down our throats.  We do see one final shot from his point of view as Candy and Brit lean down to kiss him goodbye on the pier, but 1) he’s dead, and 2) the women loom over him in a way that almost never appears in film.  Actresses usually don’t appear above a field of view; it’s even more destabilizing than staring directly into the camera.  But that is of course the point, because Alien is most definitely not in control, and neither are we.  (We may not like it as much as he does, but mileage may vary.)

This shifting back and forth from the male gaze to a particular kind of female gaze is similar to the difficulty in identifying a protagonist for the movie.  For the first half, Faith seems to be the main character, but she’s oddly passive.  She doesn’t even react to other characters’ actions, but only descriptions of their actions (which we see and she doesn’t).  When she abruptly leaves both St. Petersburg and the movie, she’s replaced not by any one other character, but by the triad of Alien, Candy, and Brit.  They’re quite a lot more active, but neither sympathetic nor identifiable.  We don’t feel any great sorrow when Alien dies, and not even the most rabid girl-power feminist will cheer on Candy and Brit as they go on their rampage.  

This detachment is pretty clearly Korine’s satirical commentary on the characters, but it also has the interesting side effect of preventing automatic audience identification along or across gender lines–even during erotic scenes.  It might be an example of a bisexual gaze in film, albeit a screwed-up one that’s more about objectification through switching traditional gender roles and another example of blurring in the film.  That isn’t to say that such a gaze precludes identification, but it won’t fall into neatly defined active male/passive female parameters.  Are we little bitches, and if so, what does that mean?

That queasy uncertainty between straight-up satire and backhanded respect permeates the entire movie, and not just for people who spent their spring breaks reading foofy French poststructuralist theory. For a love letter to Britney, Spring Breakers...

That queasy uncertainty between straight-up satire and backhanded respect permeates the entire movie, and not just for people who spent their spring breaks reading foofy French poststructuralist theory.  For a love letter to Britney, Spring Breakers often seems more like a Crap Email From A Dude in its mocking of her art, aesthetic, and place in American society.  Its main characters are not always protagonists; they are certainly not heroes, and they may be too vapid to be proper antiheroes.  It operates by opposition even as it blurs between gender, characters, and perspective.  It is crude, nasty, and one of the most finely-grained depictions of female sexuality on film that I’ve ever seen.  It is the Britney video that she could never make because we would never forgive her for it, mostly for what it says about us rather than her.  
Ultimately, Spring Breakers is not the immoral movie promised by its trailer.  Instead, it is an amoral movie, which is a rather more dangerous thing.  It does not prescribe or proscribe, even as it taunts and mocks.  It sticks its Popsicle-stained tongue out at us even as it rewards us for watching.  Perhaps the inspector’s lodge is not such a powerful place to be, after all.    

image