Convincing new reviews of Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers” and Jane Campion’s and Garth Davis’s “Top of the Lake” make edifying reading.
Heather Long, who attacked “Spring Breakers” in The Guardian last Thursday, and Michael Sicinski, who expresses disappointment with “Top of the Lake” in the current online edition of Cinema Scope, contextualize these radically different works in the light (or should I say miasma?) of the Steubenville rape case.
“’Spring Breakers’ isn’t just a terrible movie,” Long writes, “it’s 90 minutes of reinforcement of the party girl image, the kind of bad girl who’s ‘just asking for it’. The kind of girl whom some in the media and in court tried to portray the Ohio rape victim as – pointing out she was allegedly drunk and living it the night two football players took advantage of her.” (The case is hideously close to that of the alleged sexual assault of an intoxicated British teenager by four young British soccer players, who, jurors were told, wanted to have “a permanent record of their conquest.” They are facing a retrial on April 22.)
Before analyzing “Top of the Lake,” Sicinski notes his horror that the Steubenville atrocity engendered a kind of rape version of a snuff movie. “Can a group of young white men truly be so completely at home in their own sense of entitlement that they not only see an unconscious underage girl as their plaything, but whip out a cellphone camera and perform their own prosecuting evidence as if they were doing comedy improv?," he writes.
He goes on to say that “from its very opening episode, ‘Top of the Lake’… presents an isolated New Zealand backwater that, purely in terms of textual construction and tone, seems almost like an allegory for a war between the sexes, if not one woman’s paranoid projection of all-enveloping male control. The community of a Laketop is a universe in which men do as they please, the police look the other way (when they are not openly complicit)… and women understand that they must either make nice or suffer untold misery and humiliation.”
In such films as “The Piano,” “The Portrait of a Lady,” and the hugely underrated “In the Cut,” Campion has powerfully depicted the dehumanizing effects of misogyny on both women and men. Sicinski admires the “tonally awkward and inconsistent” early episodes of “Top of the Lake” for their rendering of the Laketop community as “so openly hateful to the female sex [that they] reflected a fundamental crisis of our times.”
He regrets, however, how Campion sacrifices her feminist worldview – “male dominance as a toxic force, strangling the world like kudzu in a garden” – to “off-the-rails plot twists, character contrivance, and convenient episode-seven mopping up.” The series “contents itself with fashionable cynicism, and that’s not enough,” he ends. “There’s way too much on the line.”
Despite these criticisms, “Top of the Lake”’s presentation of a microcosm of patriarchal cruelty makes it imperative viewing in the era of the Steubenville case, the appalling details of which indicate the sinister influence of the drive to mediate digitally sexual abuse and disseminate the images. That one cellphone image described in the phone text transcripts from Steubenville is suggestive of the much-discussed “semen” shot in a recent episode of Lena Dunham’s “Girls” should set alarm bells ringing.
While I still contend that there’s an element of moral condemnation in Korine’s depiction of spring-break debauchery (particularly in terms of its degradation of women), any notion that it’s a righteous screed is qualified by its celebratory exploitativeness. The prankster in Korine might be horrified at the notion that the film “tells” as much as it “shows.” (Larry Clark’s “Kids,” which Korine wrote, similarly had its cake and ate it, too.) Any suggestion that the young heroines of “Spring Breakers” empower themselves is absurd.
It’s hard to disagree with Heather Long when she disparages the scene in “Spring Breakers” in which one of the girls “is drinking even more than the guys and making sexual poses as the young men encircle her and urge her to ‘take it like a stripper,’” and another in which “young men lick drugs off a topless woman…. She’s just a sexualized serving platter.”
“We’re left with a homage to the worst of spring break,” Long concludes. “It’s a film that tells young women that ‘the time of their life’ is getting drunk and exposing themselves to guys. And we wonder why we have problems with rape culture.”
There’s little doubt that the four heroines are in danger of being raped or pimped out by James Franco’s Alien, and thus it's revealing that Korine removes the innocent Faith (Selena Gomez) and the sexually provocative Cottie (Rachel Korine) from harm’s away before the other two become killers. You sense he is being protective of the erstwhile Disney child star and his wife, as if enough is enough.
The key problem with the movie, though, is that its satire doesn’t bite hard enough to indicate to future spring breakers that re-creating Caligula’s Rome on Florida’s beaches and in its bars and hotel rooms is not in their best interests.