Spring Break Forever…
I watched Spring Breakers in preparation for spring break. Nothing prepared me for the significant life changes it would cause. It has broken me. I was fine until twenty-one minutes and three seconds, and my existence was changed on a molecular level. Alien as portrayed by James Franco in the 2012 film Spring Breakers haunts my nightmares. Alien as portrayed by James Franco in the 2012 film Spring Breakers tortures me every waking moment.
All I can think about is how he looks. Why does he have a gold grill on his teeth? Why does he have the world’s most greasy appropriative dreadlocks? He has a marijuana leaf tattooed on his hand. Even when he wears sunglasses it somehow makes his twisted visage worse. The bedroom walls are plywood with a space-age headboard. There are guns and nunchaku hung on the walls everywhere. The wheel-wells are reflective dollar signs. The vanity plate reads: “BALLR.” It makes no sense. This character makes no sense. Alien as portrayed by James Franco in the 2012 film Spring Breakers, MAKES NO SENSE.
How old is this character supposed to be? Is he young but looks old because he doesn’t take care of himself? Old but look young because his mental development and perception of reality are entirely skewed? Does he exist outside of the modern conception of linear time?
I can only think of Alien as portrayed by James Franco in the 2012 film Spring Breakers when I think about this film. I do not think of Selena Gomez as the girl who goes home first or Rachel Korine as the second girl who goes home. I don’t think about the fact that Gucci Mane is in this movie. I do not think of Vanessa Hudgens who plays the girl played by Vanessa Hudgens, or Ashley Benson who plays the other girl who is not Vanessa Hudgens.
There is a scene in this film where Alien as portrayed by James Franco in the 2012 film Spring Breakers is forced to perform fellatio on a gun because he is being threatened by Vanessa Hudgens and the girl who is not Vanessa Hudgens. Why do I have to see James Franco perform oral sex on a gun barrel? Why is that something in this timeline that exists? Why did I have to see it? Why didn’t I stop the movie right there?
There is a pivotal sequence in which Alien as portrayed by James Franco in the 2012 film Spring Breakers performs a horrible cover of Britney Spear’s “Everytime” to a trio of girls in pink ski masks with assault rifles. This cover is performed on a white piano very close to a pool and near the ocean before becoming a montage of violence and extortion…TO A BRITNEY SONG.
Asmodeus himself possessed James Franco in the filming of this movie. The energy of this rapper named Alien is like the photonegative of the “my main goal is to blow up and pretend I don’t know nobody” guy from Vine. If James Franco himself told me that every time the camera would begin rolling that he lost control of his body by some extraterrestrial-party-parasite that pushed his consciousness into the recesses of his psyche, I would believe him. There is pure evil behind those eyes. His essence oozes into your pores. And into your brain. Alien as portrayed by James Franco in the 2012 film Spring Breakers terrifies me. James Franco has been abducted and replaced by an alien.
His first lines are “Y’all just got transported, I don’t know if you all know that, but we’re in a magic place y’all.” And little did I know he’d do just that. He has elevated me to a different planar dimension. Even as his character dies in the film, the xenomorph inside lives on. This is eldritch horror. The transmissions from space are interfering with my brain waves.
Whenever I close my eyes, I see him. There he is. There he is. There he is. The tinfoil hat doesn’t help at all.
I hear his half-southern drawl whisper… “s p r i n g b r e a k f o r e v e r ” like a demon sent for my soul. I hear “s p r i n g b r e a k” in my ear as uttered by Alien as portrayed by James Franco in the 2012 film Spring Breakers and jolt awake in a cold sweat. The drips in the shower become a dissonant round of “s p r i n g b r e a k.” I can’t focus in class because every thought is interrupted by “s p r i n g b r e a k.” Every word that is said out of earshot is “s p r i n g b r e a k.”
I look up into the sky full of stars and whisper, “s p r i n g b r e a k,” as the elliptical silver spacecraft emblazoned with a dollar sign descends. The muffled sound of Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” blares into the night with LED disco lights. Suddenly I am engulfed in a column of green light. This I leave as my last message to the planet Earth before I go on my final vacation: …………. ……….s p r i n g b r e a k…….……s p r i n g b r e a k….…..s p r i n g b r e a k f o r e v e r 🙂
Connor Stanford is a first-year theatre studies major who spent their spring break in a James-Franco induced haze. You can reach them at [email protected].