Spring Breakers

I began the evening by watching the speech to the United Nations by Malala Yousafzai, the schoolgirl who was shot in the head by the Taliban because of her fearless advocacy for education and equality. I was eating a dinner of soy burgers and homemade french fries. It had been a relaxing Saturday. I had gotten out on the road by 6:30 AM for my run around Lake Union. The morning was sunny but mild. Upon returning home, I spent the rest of the day reading and taking care of a few chores.

Looking at the video of Malala Yousafzai's UN address from Friday I started balling like a baby. Why? Her clarity and courage are overwhelming. We're so used to the prevarication of politicians that I was blown away. Malala Yousafzai's message, the one that almost got her killed? Education, equality, tolerance, peace -- a perfect statement of humanism, and the exact opposite of Great Power statecraft which relies on misinformation in service of a global capitalist order based on class division, domination and war.

Which is an appropriate transition to my viewing selection following Malala Yousafzai's speech, Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers (2012). In this film young women flee from their university education to the Florida coast in order to engage in the American ritual of the spring break bacchanal. This is a film devoted to booties and titties and Western culture's fascination with thug life. The female student protagonists are gangsta prodigies who end up forming a bond with a low-level dope dealer/rapper/stick-up man played with depth and nuance by James Franco.

The whole picture is an obscene hallucination, which is Korine's specialty; but this is not to say that it is without merit. It is actually, in its own way, an understated and quiet movie; it reminds me, because of it's editing technique, of Steven Soderbergh's The Limey (1999).

Korine is making an important point about base materialism. Our liberal democratic consumer capitalist culture creates its own destabilizing Taliban ("students"), acolytes of excess who dream of "an ax blow to the ape anus."