I
was looking the other day at some raving comments on Spring Breakers by English
professor and cultural critic Steven Shivaro. He says he found the movie “utterly
ravishing” – “so gorgeous as to negate or suspend the uneasiness” he felt about
some dubious ideological messages embedded in it. Prof. confesses he was “helplessly
& successfully disarmed by Harmony Korine’s relentless audiovisual
seduction: the sunsets, the colors, the slow-motion, the breasts, the throbbing
but sublimated yearning of the electro score, the intellectual montage that
layers Britney over thuggery, and gorgeous beaches over willful stupidity, the
heartfelt spirituality of Selena Gomez’s voiceovers.” He takes in “all this as
an almost didactic demonstration of the way that, in our neoliberal culture,
there is no distinction whatsoever between hedonism and self-help, or between
transgression and hypernormativity.”
How
funny – I had the exactly opposite reaction, as if we saw two different movies.
I found the imagery Korine deploys so repulsive, ludicrously hyperbolic, and
manipulatively stilted that I remained numb to any redeeming ideological
messages he might have wanted to implant. We do seem to inhabit sometimes incommensurate
mental matrices, after all – and this is a divide which probably runs not just
between the “two cultures” (or intelligentsias) once described by C P. Snow;
but within the arts and humanities, too. Come to think of it, some physicists
who have dwelled on the “tao of physics” or pondered the abiding mysteries of
the universe may envy the conceptualizing abstraction of much
modern/postmodernist art and cultural “theorizing”; to say nothing of the nerdy
pursuit of causal explanations and/or neat fixes to political and institutional
hiccups in the “social sciences.”
