MovieChat Forums > Spring Breakers (2013) Discussion > Reframing gangsta misogyny

Reframing gangsta misogyny

posted 9 years ago by LeCadavreExquis
6 replies | jump to latest

Repost, bitchez!

In the beginning of the film there's a scene in a lecture hall which - besides being aesthetically pleasing, all those kids gently lit by their notebook screens, like a counterweight to the neon saturated fever dream that will follow - serves a thematic purpose: the class is on the African Americans's equal rights movement, and it's the narrative of emancipatory movements that Korine subverts in Spring Breakers.

The film boasts four leading female characters; two of them are shown to be drawn to violence and they go from mimicking guns with their hands and filling up squirt guns with booze - consider the significance of firing those phallic instruments into your own mouth - to robbing a diner, also with a play gun, but with very real results. Ultimately it enables the girls to go to Miami - which, not by coincidence, is Tony Montana's stomping ground in Scarface.

So let’s analyse this some more. There's a party scene in the beginning of the film, that shows one of the lead females playing craps and taking the money. Playing craps is a trope in roughly 90's hip hop culture - more on that later - and a typically masculine pass time. The robbery too sees - although we initially don't get to see more than the occasional glance through the window - the females adopting a souped up masculine, criminal machismo. We see them acting out an a-moral fantasy of masculinity, all the while physically stressing their femininity.

Fast forward to Miami. We're introduced to Alien, a white rapper/criminal - another trope in 90's hip hop culture: the 'gangsta' rapper, the hustler, the pimp - sporting corn rows and a grill, who was raised in a black neighborhood and who's turned the cartoonish gangsta tales Dr Dre raps about into a lifestyle. 'look at all my s_hit,' is Alien's materialistic mantra, 's_hit' signifying his dope, guns and money - and apparently his, continuously played Scarface (!) dvd. He’s basically a white caricature of an of itself caricatural branch of hip hop culture.

And what does Alien do: he buys the women. Then there’s a key scene. When Alien’s about to subject the ladies, who are at this point essentially his slaves, to his male dominance, the roles are reversed and the girls ‘pimp’ the pimp, penetrating him with his own (!) guns – no need for an extensive knowledge of Freudian symbolism to interpret this . The male character is subjugated via phallic penetration – btw sexuality and violence/guns are linked from the beginning not only visually, but also acoustically, i.e. the recurring sound of a single gunshot - and the typical ‘gangsta’ scenario of hyper-masculinity, of male superiority, is inverted, turned inside out, in other words: the gender roles are reversed.

What, I think, Korine is doing here, is dismantling the misogynistic mythology that dominated a significant part of 90’s hip hop culture, and assembling it again in the context of female emancipation. In other words: the narrative that was used to objectify and subjugate women, is now used by women to quite the opposite end.

It’s no big surprise then, that the film that’s so overly present in rap music, is quoted in the surrealistic ending of the film; Scarface’s ending is basically turned on its head. I don’t think this scene, in which the females are shown to definitively put an end to the perverted amoral dream of male dominance, literally gunning it down, should be interpreted metaphorically per se, but there’s surely something to be said for not reading it exclusively literally. The ending symbolically completes this tale of emancipation: the two female leads penetrate the bastion of male superiority and tear it down by using the exact same myths, symbols, or weapons that were used to establish it in the first place.

Richar Brody, in The New Yorker, offers a to a degree similar analysis in this article: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/03/spring-breakers-r eview.html. He centers on a broader ethnic perspective, where I think a more specific cultural focus is in place, and although there are some sharp observations - especially of the aesthetic effect of the lighting in the end scene - Brody mostly disregards the role gender plays. Still, a good read.

Ghosts and lovers, they will haunt you for a while

[–] ClockworkPomegranate 9 years ago

Intetesting analysis but have American females in real life subverted gangsta rap machismo (or any other kind of machismo) and symbolically ass raped its male practitioners with a firearm?

If the answer is yes...this essentially means that women accept male machismo as a desirable trait they want to emulate and it still leaves stereotypical male behaviors and status signifiers as the golden standard at the top of the status hierarchy. If this is the case and women strive to mimic male aggression that basically says that women want to be female versions of men.

There are so many problems and inconsistencies with this. One that immediately springs to mind is that females are physically weaker than males and when no weapons are conveniently at hand males will almost aways have the upper hand in a physical confrontation.

And isn't feminism supposed to raise the status of traditionally female behaviors and personality traits? Women accepting male standards as desirable and good while downplaying or shunning femininity looks an awful lot like men have "won" the gender war and males and females who express "too many" traditionally feminine behaviors are still discriminated against.

This seems totally backasswards to me.

what does that say about feminism?

[–] LeCadavreExquis 9 years ago

this essentially means that women accept male machismo as a desirable trait they want to emulate and it still leaves stereotypical male behaviors and status signifiers as the golden standard at the top of the status hierarchy. If this is the case and women strive to mimic male aggression that basically says that women want to be female versions of men.
[...]
And isn't feminism supposed to raise the status of traditionally female behaviors and personality traits? Women accepting male standards as desirable and good while downplaying or shunning femininity looks an awful lot like men have "won" the gender war and males and females who express "too many" traditionally feminine behaviors are still discriminated against.

You're right about this; I shouldn't have used the word 'feminism'. This reimagination of femininity within a violent phallocentric value system isn't what feminism is about and although I haven't seen the film yet, it's basically the same criticism Anita Sarkeesian has of Mad Max' supposed feminist sensibilities (read her tweets about this here: https://storify.com/wire2k/anita-sarkeesian-on-mad-max-fury-road).

Ghosts and lovers, they will haunt you for a while

[–] ClockworkPomegranate 9 years ago

I haven't actually watched the film yet...am about to start and will post my take on your premise here after I've watched and absorbed it.

[–] emmaemmaem 9 years ago

I really enjoyed your post and you have given me some more food for thought about this film. Thanks.

[–] LeCadavreExquis 9 years ago

Ah, thanks; glad you liked it. And as an apropos to nothing: your username repeats my daughter's name.

Ghosts and lovers, they will haunt you for a while

[–] djcres-1 9 years ago

It's an interesting interpretation which I agree may have been a key theme through the movie. If this truly was the intention, it failed terribly for one reason: the women of note are afluent, spoiled, white, and without much evidence of struggles that weren't self inflicted or desired. This is all contrary to the essence of gangster rap, which finds its roots in the struggle of impoverished mistreated African Americans. The music is incredibly masculine and clearly misogynistic but given the obvious class issues stated above, the target of that misogyny is largely those within the same class and NOT the women in this movie.

If anything my point is emphasized in the clear distinction made between the gorgeous perfect bodied white women raiding the mansion, and the overweight not particularly attractive, non white women archie is sleeping with. This supposed role reversal would've suited those women better in its point than the women we ended up with.

I do want to emphasize that the movie MAY have been playing with the above theme (poorly) but it is equally as or more likely that it was getting at something else entirely. Similar to his other works, this film seems to comment on the moral lacking of the current youth culture. One big factor explored is the influence of music on these vapid, wealthy, hedonistic, white children. Music being the underlying rhythm to their perceived never ending party.

In particular, gangster rap became entwined in white suburban culture seen as a symble of teenage rebellion. This movie was likely attempting to show the blurred lines created between the hip hop lifestyle these people aspire to live and the reality of a true class system which sees them on top. The movie remarkably fails here was well, as it struggles to decide between condemning and celebrating these kids.

An argument can be made that neither condemning nor celebrating is necessary to make a point, which is true, but unfortunately the movie doesn't do neither, it does both. That's why at the end of the day it's really just a confused mess.