Spring Breakers – Bitch Flicks

Violent Women: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our Violent Women Theme Week here.

The Violent Vagina: The Real Horror Behind the Teeth by Belle Artiquez

It’s a conundrum, one that Dawn faces head (or vagina) on. She is forced to confront these opposing views, and her body reacts the only way it knows how, it bites the penis of society, it castrates the men that want to turn her into something she doesn’t want to be: a sexual young woman.

Salt: A Refreshing Genderless Lens by Cameron Airen

Violent films with a female at their center tend to be viewed differently than violent films with a male lead. When a woman is in this role, it’s controversial. When a man is in the same type of role, it’s a part of who he is as a human being. We’ve become numb to the violence that men engage in onscreen. As a result, we don’t criticize it like we do when a woman is engaging in it.

Shieldmaidens: The Power and Pleasure of Women’s Violence on Vikings by Lisa Bolekaja

In Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies, Neal King and Martha McCaughey assert that “cultural standards still equate womanhood with kindness and nonviolence, manhood with strength and aggression.” Under the Victorian cult of true womanhood, womanly virtue was supposed to encompass piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Thank goodness writer/producer Michael Hirst ignored those virtues by creating two dynamic women warriors with his historical drama Vikings.

Emotional Violence, Kink, and The Duke of Burgundy by Rushaa Louise Hamid

In much of feminist literature from the past, kink is seen an act driven by patriarchy, with submissive women reproducing their oppressions in the bedroom and capitulating to gendered norms of women as silent and subservient. Even nowadays as the tide gradually changes, there is still a large amount of ire reserved for those who practice BDSM.

Violence and Morality in The 100 by Esther Nassaris

This act of mercy killing is the first of many moments when Clarke is forced to be violent for the good of others. It not only prompts an important change within herself – she loses her idealistic ways – but it prompts a change in the group dynamics. After this moment, Clarke begins to pull away from the co-leadership she and Bellamy had operated in and moves toward becoming the sole leader of the delinquents.

The Rising “Tough” Women in AMC’s The Walking Dead Season Five by Brooke Bennett

This season seems to present a large change in representational issues by including complex characters of color that we actually know something about and care for, presenting the couple of Aaron and Eric from the Alexandria community and self-pronounced lesbian Tara, and doing away with the innate equation of vagina equals do the laundry while the men go kill all the zombies.

Nine Pretty Great Lesbian Vampire Movies by Sara Century

Almost unfailingly exploitative in its portrayal of queer women, this specific sub-genre of film stands alone in a few ways, not the least of which being that the vampires, while murderous and ultimately doomed, are powerful, lonely women, often living their lives outside of society’s rules.

The Real Mother Russia: Modernising Murder and Betrayal in The Americans by Dan Jordan

The ideological battle between the FBI and KGB is thus a gendered one, as the national characters of Uncle Sam and Mother Russia are pitted against each other on a more even world stage.

Monster: A Telling of the Real Life Consequences for Violent Women by Danika Kimball

Throughout her life, Wuornos experienced horrific instances of gendered abuse, which eventually lead to a violent outlash at her unfair circumstances. Monster vividly documents the life of a woman whose experiences under a dominant patriarchal culture racked with abuse, poverty, and desperation led to a life of crime, imprisonment, and eventually death.

Stoker–Family Secrets, Frozen Bodies, and Female Orgasms by Julie Mills

Her uncle’s imposing presence has awakened in her at the same time a lust for bloodshed and an intense sexual desire, and she promptly begins to experiment and seek out means with which to satisfy both.

Sons of Anarchy: Female Violence, Feminist Care by Leigh Kolb

At the end of season 6, Gemma violently clashes the spheres of power. She’s in the kitchen. She’s using an iron, and a carving fork. Using tools of the feminine sphere, she brutally murders Tara, because she fears that Tara is about to take control and dismantle the club—the life, the style of mothering and living—that she brought home with her so many years ago.

What’s in a Name: Anxiety About Violent Women in Monster, Teeth, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Colleen Clemens

The first college course I ever developed focuses on women and violence. Stemming from my interest in women who enact violence on and off the page, I wanted to ask students to think about our perceptions of women as “naturally” peaceful.

Hard Candy: The Razor Blade Hidden in an Apple-Cheeked Confection by Emma Kat Richardson

Hogtying and drugging Jeff is only the tip of Hayley’s sadistic iceberg: over the course of the next several hours, she subjects him to a series of tortures more at home in Guantanamo Bay than a sleepy suburban neighborhood, including spraying his screaming mouth with chemicals, temporarily suffocating him with cellophane, and attacking him with a taser in the shower.

High Tension: Rethinking Female Sexuality and Subjectivity Through Violence by Laura Minor

Rather than pander to the male gaze, Aja decides to reject these scopophilic pleasures in favour of championing female subjectivity, but he also chooses to reject heteronormativity by having the lesbian desires of Marie drive the plot of the film. Interestingly, it is these desires and subjective experiences that both initiate the use of violence and intensify the representation of violence throughout.

“It is not fitting for her to be so manly and terrifying”: Catharsis and Female Chaos in Pasolini’s Medea by Brigit McCone

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film Medea was created in the aftermath of Italian fascism, another masculine cult of personal self-sacrifice in the interests of the state. Utilizing the operatic charisma of the legendary Maria Callas in a non-singing role, he harnesses the pitiless woman as an agent of chaos, rebelling against the dictates of the masculine state that urges her husband to discard her, in favor of a politically advantageous match.

Domestic Terrorism: Feminized Violence in Misery by Tessa Racked

Annie is a human being, dangerous not because of an evil supernatural force, but rather a severe and untreated mental illness. Although Annie is not given an official diagnosis in the film or the novel, an interview with a forensic psychologist on the special edition DVD characterizes her as displaying symptoms of several different conditions, including borderline personality disorder (BPD).

Girlhood: Observed But Not Seen by Ren Jender

Girlhood starts on a peak note: a slow-motion scene of what looks like Black men playing American tackle football on a field at night, wearing helmets, shoulder pads and mouth guards, so we don’t realize–until we notice the players’ breasts under their uniforms–that they are all girls.

Patty Jenkins’ Monster: Shouldering the Double Burden of Masculinity and Femininity by Katherine Parker-Hay

In this narrative we see masculinity float free from any ties to the male body, femininity float free from any easy connection to frailness – we see them meet in the one body of this working class woman to excruciating effect.

Feminist Fangs: The Activist Symbolism of Violent Vampire Women by Melissa-Kelly Franklin

The acts of violence by the female protagonists are terrifying, swift, and socially subversive. They target misogynistic representatives of the patriarchal society that oppresses and silences women, taking them out one by one.

Slashing Gender Assumptions: The Female Killer, Unmasked by Kate Blair

To a certain extent, the reveal of woman as killer in both films comes across as a “gotcha” moment. After an hour or so of being scared out of your wits, it’s both surprising and puzzling to see a woman emerge as the killer. In the real world, most documented violent crimes are committed by men, but in a film, where anything can happen, there’s no reason to make this assumption.

“Did I Step on Your Moment?” The Seductive and Psychological Violence of Female Superheroes by Mary Iannone

This style of fighting codes our female superheroes as half menacing and half attractive – we are meant to be afraid of them, but also enticed by them. Their violence is inextricably linked to their sexuality.

Nobody Puts Susan Cooper in the Basement: Melissa McCarthy and Skillful, Competent Violence in Film by Laura Power

As McCarthy tousles with her own nemesis in the kitchen fight, Feig uses slow motion to let us savor the violence and bird’s eye shots to let us see the controlled swings of Cooper’s arms and legs as she fights. The violence is not slapstick. The violence is not played for laughs. The violence is just flat-out cinematically terrific.

“She Called Them Anti-Seed”: How the Women of Mad Max: Fury Road Divorce Violence from Strength by Cate Young

In Mad Max: Fury Road the “strong female characters” are notable specifically for their aversion to violence. The film portrays its women as emotionally strong people who engage in violence only in self-defense, and only against the system that oppresses them.

Sugar, Spice, and Things Not Nice: Violent Girlhood in Violet & Daisy by Caroline Madden

The character of Daisy personifies the film’s juxtaposition of violence and girlhood. Daisy loves cute animals and doesn’t understand Violet’s dirty jokes. The twist is even that she has not really killed anyone, thus remaining innocent of all crimes. The opening scene displays the most daring oppositional iconography — the young girls dress as nuns, the ultimate image of pure goodness, while having a shoot ‘em up with a gang.

Children: The Great Qualifier of Female Violence by Katherine Fusciardi

True, the rape revenge trope has been put at bay, but there is still a gender issue behind the remaining motivation. It focuses around the assumption of maternity being the all-encompassing passion. Until female characters can be violent for reasons that have nothing to do with their womanhood, there still isn’t complete equality in media.

How Spring Breakers Ungenders the Erotic and Transformative Power of Violence by Emma Houxbois

Mad Max: Fury Road: Violence Helps Our Heroines Have a Lovely Day by Sophie Hall

Furiosa, stabbed and wounded yet still persistent, takes down the main villain Immortan Joe. “Remember me?” Furiosa growls just before ripping his breathing apparatus–and half of his face–clean off. That quip may seem like your average cool one-liner, but for me it is so much more than that. It’s Furiosa, our female protagonist, who takes out the bad guy. Not Max. Not Nux, or any other male character. Her.

Puberty and the Creation of a Monster: Ginger Snaps by Kelly Piercy

Ginger, despite morphing into a werewolf, becomes our protagonist killer in a very human way, and the complexity of her journey is a cinematic rarity. A large part of its appeal is the addictive excitement-and-relief cocktail that comes with seeing your experiences reflected on screen–to see menstruation from a menstruating perspective. Who wouldn’t see want to see the violence of their PMS daydreams being played out?

When Violence Is Excusable: Regina Mills and the Twisted Morality of Once Upon a Time by Emma Thomas

In the past, Regina’s path to control is lined with dark magic. Dark magic is fueled by her anger, and the two intersect endlessly until it is hard to tell whether Regina is controlling the anger, or the anger is controlling her. What is definitive is that the more her power grows the more violent she becomes. With the only person who offered her a loving future dead, there is no one to rein her in.

Timorous Killers: The Breach of Shyness in Polanski’s Repulsion by Johanna Mackin

The eye we see in the film’s opening credits belongs to Carol and encapsulates her relationship to the internal and external worlds. To outside observers, Carol’s large, doe-like eyes are a signifier of her feminine allure, but, as is made palpable to the viewer, they also house her intense fear and constitute a deceptive barrier against the malignant traumas that disturb her internal world.

Death of the (Male) Author: Feminist Violence in Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar by Sarah Smyth

How significant it is, then, that Ramsay changes the ending from the novel where Morvern discovers she’s pregnant to instead give her a narrative of hopeful escape and adventure. Through the economic, cultural and narrative capitals gained from the violence enacted on the male author both inside and outside of the text, the female protagonist is offered a radical feminist alternative. Rather than by trapped by her class position, socio-economic position, job possibilities or pregnancy, Morvern is, instead, offered freedom, autonomy, and authority.

TV and Classic Literature: Is The 100 like Lord of the Flies? by Rowan Ellis

On the contrary, Octavia moves away from the explicit sexuality of her role in the pilot, and although her initial training is linked to Lincoln, she gravitates toward a warrior’s life to gain the respect of Indra. Although some critics have seen this as a drastic change in her characterisation, looking back at her first scene in the pilot, where she is held back by Bellamy while trying to attack the others for repeating rumours about her, it feels more like a development.

The Killer in/and the Girl: Alexandre Aja’s High Tension by Rebecca Willoughby

In High Tension, we have le tueur—the Killer—in place of the Monster, who in Shelley’s novel can be read as Victor Frankenstein’s doppelganger, that most famous of psychological devices used to illustrate the violence with which the repressed returns, doing all of the things the typical, well-socialized individual could never dream of doing. But where Victor utilizes the Monster to reject society’s expectations of him (including a traditional, heterosexual union with his adopted sister, Elizabeth), High Tension’s Marie creates le tueur because her desires do not fit within the normative world of the film.

From Ginger Snaps to Jennifer’s Body: The Contamination of Violent Women by Julia Patt

Thematically, Jennifer’s Body mirrors Ginger Snaps in many respects: the disruption of suburban or small town life, the intersection between female sexuality and violence, the close relationship between two teen girls at the films’ centers, and—perhaps most strikingly—the contagious nature of violence in women.

How ‘Spring Breakers’ Ungenders the Erotic and Transformative Power of Violence

This guest post by Emma Houxbois appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Ever since his screenwriting debut at age 19, penning the controversial script for director Larry Clark’s Kids, Harmony Korine has been best remembered in the public consciousness for navigating the razor’s edge between gritty realism and outright exploitation, with critics sharply divided on either side. In order for Clark to put himself in a position to meet the teenage Korine and solicit what would become the script for Kids, he taught himself how to skateboard at age 50 and hung around Washington Park Square as a means of earning the respect of his would be collaborators and in doing so, emerge with a film that captured the fidelity of their perspective rather than his alien construction of it.

Clark’s methodology of getting close to his subject, shooting using the techniques and visual language of documentary filmmaking, and relying on mostly untrained actors made an impression on Korine that has lasted, in one form or another, across his career to the present. When Korine began filming Spring Breakers in 2012, approaching the age of 40, his engagement with the youth culture he sought to evoke in the film had shifted almost completely into a position where he was stepping into the shoes that Clark wore when they collaborated on Kids.

The semiotics and technology of camera work had evolved remarkably in the 20 years since Kids was filmed, to the point where shooting handheld no longer immediately communicated that the film was either a documentary or aping one the way that Kids or his own follow-up Gummo had been received. Instead, it had evolved into a low cost alternative that fueled the explosive rise of independent filmmakers as diverse as Steven Soderbergh and Robert Rodriguez and stayed on as a stylistic flourish as many of those directors and DPs earned their way into studio budgets. The final nail in the coffin of handheld photography being immediately associated with documentary filmmaking or low budget productions was perhaps Steven Spielberg’s extensive use of it in the Omaha Beach invasion sequence in Saving Private Ryan.

Thus Korine was forced to rely on other means to convey the sense of spontaneity and unvarnished realism that defined his entry into filmmaking. This necessary shift came in the form of moving to a surrealistic approach that saw him hire famous well-known actors and rely on them to improvise and mingle with the same kind of untrained participants that he and Clark had both relied on in the past.

When the news emerged that Korine had cast former child stars Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, and Ashley Benson alongside his wife Rachel and James Franco through paparazzi photos of the young women handcuffed and leaning against police cars dressed in neon bikinis and sneakers, the immediate assumption was that Korine was mounting a kind of personal bacchanalia that would prey on the impressionable young actresses and exploit them for his own sexual appetites, a line of criticism similar to that which marred Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny and severely compromised the reception of Abdellatiff Kechiche’s work on Blue is the Warmest Color.

The film itself opens very conscious of these expectations and addresses them in the most confrontational way possible. It begins with Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites,” the dubstep anthem that bore the brunt of intergenerational musical warfare that painted it as being the clear sign that contemporary youth culture had no sense of taste or appreciation for art. The song is set and to a clearly constructed montage of the seeming worst excesses of Spring Break: young women dancing provocatively in bikinis, stripping, and simulating all kinds of sex acts for the lurid enjoyment of their male peers and the camera that frequently slid into slow motion to capture every jiggle and bounce, zooming in leeringly as they sucked on popsicles or laid back with their mouths open for the boys to pour beer and energy drinks held over their crotches into their mouths. The loudest, ugliest, most lurid speculation about Korine’s motives and the popular construction of Spring Break as a playground for the worst excesses of young male sexuality exploded across the screen.

It cuts abruptly to the norm of its protagonists’ lives, a generic and sedated tableau of aimless midwest life that pans through passively watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic while taking bong hits to Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson’s Brit and Candy bored in class among a sea of laptops flickering from one PowerPoint slide to the next in their professor’s lecture. Instead of laying the intended facts bare as he did in prior efforts, Korine takes on the role of trickster in Spring Breakers, first by baiting his critics by presenting the most lascivious and staged panorama of youthful excess imaginable, then by immediately following it by burying the true central thesis of the film in the droning voice of the professor:

The professor is speaking about what he refers to as the first and second reconstructions of the South, which he tells the class establishes a continuum, that the men of the South went to war, an experience which radicalized them upon their return home to revitalize their communities and effectively value their own lives and social cohesion more than in the antebellum and interwar years.

“When you go overseas to fight Hitler,” he tells the class as Brit and Candy doodle notes fantasizing about their upcoming Spring Break including miming oral sex on a cartoon penis, “you get shot at, you see your friends killed. You’re going to come home a different person. You’re going to come back a radicalized individual. You’re going to risk life and limb.” He further advances the theory that the Double V campaign, victory at home and abroad, meant to the generation who went to war that they were to defeat not only Hitler’s fascism and racism in Europe, but that they were to return and dismantle Jim Crow as well.

While the full text of the lecture isn’t available, this is likely speaking specifically about the Black soldiers who fought in those wars and not the generation as a whole, which again, has further connotations later in the film. The hard truth of it is that such a thesis completely ignores that these kinds of trauma frequently, and especially in current times, result in PTSD symptoms that would severely compromise or outright rob someone suffering from it from any desire for that kind of action, but the film is more concerned about society’s formal and informal liminal spaces and how they operate to encourage conforming rather than creating sustained radicalization that subverts norms.

This sequence then transitions into a middle-aged youth pastor who sloppily tries to construct his evangelical message with teen slang while wearing a tight Affliction style t-shirt emblazoned with Christian iconography and a crucifix tattoo down the length of his neck. His inauthenticity, the blatantness of the artifice he puts up in order to channel youthful energy and momentum toward his own end is a winking parody of Korine and Clark before him.

The girls, driven by desperation to escape their mundane lives to take part in Spring Break, scheme a robbery of the local chicken shack to raise the necessary funds to get there. To psyche themselves up for the crime, they exhort each other to pretend it’s a video game, to detach themselves and dehumanize their victims in a hurried pep talk to the same end as the grueling boot camp scenes sequences in Full Metal Jacket. However, instead of finding themselves repulsed or detached by their actions, they revel in the thrill, getting their first taste of a dark urge they chase through the film like an addiction.

Throughout this time, it becomes apparent that Korine’s camera has abandoned any sense of being an objective or passive viewpoint and instead takes on the same kind of probing, predatory nature it took on during the opening montage. As the girls engage in innocent play both at home and in their first forays into St. Petersburg, the camera constantly attempts to expose and eroticize their bodies but finds itself stymied by a change in pose or subtle movement juxtaposed against the tinny, childlike score. There’s a lurking menace, a predatory masculinity that haunts them through the lens and seems to foreshadow an undoing for them at the hands of the ravenous boys who await them in Florida. It’s all in service to the idea of building up the expectation of a didactic narrative that punishes women who transgress in the way of classic fairytales and Edward Gorey.

This construction reaches its zenith as Alien enters the film for the first time, arriving just as the girls find themselves out of money and stuck in county jail for being caught with cocaine. His initial appearance is full of leering and looming menace, with closeup shots of his grill lampshading the teeth of a fairytale wolf ready to devour the helpless girl as an agent of cosmic retribution. He interrogates them about their experience so far, probing it for fuel for his own fantasies, again hewing close to the initial framing that Spring Break is fundamentally a place where women exist for the pleasure of men, but as Alien reveals himself and his personal identity, he begins to emerge as a contemporary Jay Gatsby.

Like the F. Scott Fitzgerald character, Alien embodies a teenage boy’s conception of being rich and successful, but it’s informed by a culture that encouraged and abetted misappropriation of Blackness as the center of that construction who conceals his clear artifice by embedding himself in the legitimate Black community the way that James Franco, the trained actor playing Alien is shot in and among untrained actors from the local Black community. The Gatsby parallel reaches its apotheosis as he lists all of his proudest possessions, pointing to all the different colors of Calvin Klein briefs he owns in a nearly identical shot to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby throwing a stack of different colored silk shirts to Carey Mulligan’s Daisy in Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby released the same year.

As Selena Gomez’s Faith breaks down and Alien hauls her off for a private chat, the construction of their experience as the radicalizing construction of warfare emerges in her dialogue as she says “This is isn’t what I signed up for,” mimicking common war movie vernacular as the expected breaking point where Alien erupts into violence draws nearer, intercut with a flash forward to Alien reaching up a bloody hand to grasp a gun. The tension dissipates as Faith returns home safely, however.

Without her it seems as if Alien has built a fantasy of his own with Brit, Candy, and Rachel Korine’s Cottie making up his own personal harem. He invites them into his fantasy, transferring his vicarious experience of Blackness by taking them to a strip club run by Alien’s former mentor, played by Gucci Mane, which instigates the biggest clash of authenticity and artifice in the film as trained actor James Franco playing the role of Alien putting up a false performance of Blackness comes into conflict with Gucci Mane, untrained actor and real life murderer (acquitted for self defense). It’s the first major crack in the character’s facade and the assumption that he represents a reckoning for the girls.

That reckoning seems to occur as Alien begins playing dangerously with guns in front of Brit and Candy in bed, but when the turn happens, it’s Brit and Candy who frighten Alien by picking up a pair of loaded pistols equipped with silencers and force him down on his knees in an eroticized reenactment of their robbery of the chicken shack. As the oral sex imagery in the film’s opening montage is reversed and takes on a dangerous shift from popsicles and streams of beer to a loaded weapon, it’s Alien and his performance of masculinity that is called into account as Brit and Candy experience the erotic thrill for themselves. Instead of resisting, Alien embraces the shift in power by aggressively sucking on the silencer, embracing his new role as the subject to their object.

What emerges from this sequence is the realization that there was never going to be a didactic element to this film, that it was presented as a ruse to facilitate the idea of Brit and Candy reveling in the erotic thrill of violence and domination that is usually reserved for men. Alien isn’t their reckoning, he’s theirs to exploit for their own gratification as they use him to recapture the thrill of the chicken shack robbery by committing a string of violent robberies wearing pink ski masks emblazoned with unicorns to thoroughly code their violence and the erotic thrill they derive from it as being inherently girlish rather than simply a pantomime of masculine violence.

The reckoning, when it does occur, is in the form of Archie, who again imposes the harsh light of authenticity on their delicate artifice by having them sprayed with gunfire, resulting in a bullet would for Cottie, which again, recalls the professor’s commentary that being shot at and witnessing a friend being shot is an inherently radicalizing experience. Cottie then retreats, leaving Brit and Candy thus transformed. As Cottie explains her rationale for leaving, that everyone is returning to their normal lives -intercut with shots of the montage of the normative Spring Break- it serves as a reminder that the socially acceptable and encouraged version of that liminal space is constructed with the purpose of letting participants break social norms around sex and drinking with the understanding that they will re-adopt those norms when it ends. Brit and Candy, by remaining, have crossed fully over from a legitimized liminal space into a simulation of warfare as they have sex with Alien one last time before they launch an attack on Archie.

In the final moments before they attack, Brit and Candy leave messages for their mothers, telling them that they’ve been changed by Spring Break, that it’s refocused their priorities in life, that they want to return to their lives, that they’re going to apply themselves to school and appreciate their mothers more when they return, completing their transformation along the lines of their professor’s lecture.

When the attack finally occurs, it’s Alien who dies in the opening hail of gunfire, giving way to voiceovers of their full voicemail memories to their mothers as they shoot their way through Archie’s compound with his people placed around the sprawling yard like enemies in a video game, killing everyone they encounter until they reach Archie himself and shoot him in his bathtub.

The film ends with the camera rotating over Alien’s dead body as they return, bending down to kiss him while the frame continues to pivot until it is completely upside down and they run away into the distance, visually completing the inversion.

What Spring Breakers ultimately accomplishes, despite never fully exploring the fraught and exploitative relationship Brit and Candy have with Blackness, is to produce a narrative where women discover and pursue an erotic thrill discovered in violence without being killed or consumed by madness and guilt the way most every other violent female protagonist in film is.

Thelma and Louise take their lives, understanding that they cannot be allowed to remain in the world after having tasted the thrill of their transgression. Beatrix Kiddo, the protagonist of the Kill Bill films must curl up on the floor and atone for the enjoyment she got from her revenge by sobbing while her daughter sits outside blithely watching television. The examples are endless. What Spring Breakers postulates, in its own dark way, is that the experience of surviving non-sexualized violent trauma and being transformed by it in a meaningful and potentially positive way is not a gendered experience, nor is the seductive allure of dominance and violence as a means of asserting it.

“Pleading for the Female Gaze Through its Absence in Blue is the Warmest Color”

“Conspicuous Consumption and The Great Gatsby: Missing the Point in Style”

Emma Houxbois is a fiercely queer trans woman whose natural habitat is the Pacific Northwest. She is currently the Comics Editor for The Rainbow Hub and co-host of Fantheon, a weekly comics podcast.

Girl Gangs Are Mean: Teenage Girl Gang Movies Through the Years

While most teen movies revolve around coming-of-age stories, gang movies reveal the extreme side to adolescence—the misfit, criminal, and violent side. Gang movies are rather simple, either focusing on episodes of gang debauchery, or revolving around rivalry and jealousy. Usually the viewpoint is that of the ring leader, or the “new girl,” who is initiated into the gang but is still an outsider. Yet, among the plethora of girl gang movies, every decade has produced stories involving specific issues and specific types of teenage girls.

This guest post by Emanuela Betti appears as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.

One of Roger Corman’s first films, Swamp Women, was a 1955 crime story revolving around a gang of female convicts. There has hardly ever been a lack of female gangs in films — in particular, teenage girl gang movies became increasingly popular starting in the 50s, which led to numerous movies on the subject that span different generations. If there is a genre in which teenage girls have never been lacking representation, it’s gang movies.

Yet, that representation has varied and changed throughout the decades, ranging from high school delinquents to outlaw bikers. While most teen movies revolve around coming-of-age stories, gang movies reveal the extreme side to adolescence — the misfit, criminal, and violent side. Gang movies are rather simple, either focusing on episodes of gang debauchery, or revolving around rivalry and jealousy. Usually the viewpoint is that of the ring leader, or the “new girl,” who is initiated into the gang but is still an outsider. Yet, among the plethora of girl gang movies, every decade has produced stories involving specific issues and specific types of teenage girls.

The 50s and the Rebellious Years

An abundance of films and B-movies related to gangs and juvenile delinquency was released in the 1950s. The films produced at that time reveal a growing anxiety about teen rebellion. While Reefer Madness was a propaganda film about the dangers of marijuana, movies such as The Violent Years and Girl Gang were propaganda films about the threat and danger of rebellious teenage girls, and the dramatic consequences of being part of a female posse. The girls were portrayed as violent criminals, on par with their male counterparts — driven by teen angst and restlessness. Gang movies in the ‘50s were heavily moralistic: films such as The Violent Years and High School Hellcats blamed juvenile delinquency on parental neglect and dysfunctional families, while teenage gang members usually suffered a tragic fate. The Violent Years (written by Ed Wood) was particularly exaggerated in its tragic ending: Paula, leader of the gang, becomes pregnant, is jailed for murder, and finally dies in childbirth — yet, still has the insolence to look at the screen and ask, “So what?”

The 60s and Biker Gangs

Girl gang movies of the ‘50s were particularly judgmental, until the 1960s rolled in with the biker film craze. Three all-female motorcycle gang movies were released in the same year: The Mini-Skirt Mob, She-Devils on Wheels, and The Hellcats in 1968. Compared to ‘50s gang movies, female biker movies of the ‘60s indulged in the gang fantasy rather than pressing moral lessons on the viewer. There are no schools or parents in biker movies—the gang is the family. The girls in biker gangs are a tight-knit posse, led by an Alpha female who bosses and uses men to her liking; the idea of assertive and domineering girls has carried on from the ‘50s, but without judgment. Despite the popularity of the biker genre, the depiction of adolescence in biker films was essentially unrealistic, and indulged in a fantasy rather than a truthful portrayal of teenage girls.

70s and Switchblades

In the 1970s, gangs ditched their motorcycles and stocked up on switchblade knives, moving back into an urban setting instead of the open road. Probably one of the most iconic gang movies, Switchblade Sisters, is about the Dagger Debs, an all-female city gang led by Lace. The story revolves around the arrival of new girl Maggie, who joins the Dagger Debs and slowly begins to take over leadership. For a gang movie, Switchblade Sisters has a complex storyline, filled with power struggles between characters — Lace becomes increasingly jealous of Maggie, Patch is a sly manipulator, and Maggie goes from a quiet girl to a cold-hearted leader. Although the world of Switchblade Sisters is also unrealistic, the political turmoil of the ‘60s and ‘70s is strongly evident in the darker tone of the story and the characters’ actions. At one point, we are introduced to a Black Panther-inspired gang, which we also see in another popular gang movie, The Warriors.

Although The Warriors focuses mainly on male gangs, there is one female gang in the movie known as the Lizzies. They are also armed with switchblades and knives, and they lure gang members by seducing them. Again, female gang members retain the exaggerated image of the Alpha female that they have been given since the ‘50s.

Teenage Royalty

From the 1980s on, “gangs” become high school “cliques” led by the popular girls. We first see high school girl cliques in the Pink Ladies from Grease, which was a throwback to ‘50s teen gang movies. In 1988, Heathers presents us with yet another elite girl clique (the Heathers) who are the most popular and envied girls in school. Although Heathers is a humorous take on teen movies, Veronica (Winona Ryder) is the closest depiction to an “actual” teenage girl since the biker and switchblade girls: she vents her hate for the Heathers on her diary, and has a teen romance with the typical bad boy. Jawbreaker and Mean Girls are both told through the point of view of the new girl. They begins as a socially awkward outsiders but slowly (like Maggie from Switchblade Sisters) take over the spotlight of the original queen bee.

While previous gang movies were driven by gang rivalry and dominance for territory, the modern high school girl gangs are at war for social status. Teen angst is present, but rather than expressing it through vandalism and crime, it’s expressed through different means — they ditch the switchblades, and their weapons are gossip, manipulation, and backstabbing.

Notorious Teens

After a long period of “teenage royalty” girl gangs, in the 2010s, two movies tackled girl gangs in a different light: Spring Breakers and The Bling Ring. The stories still revolve around beautiful and privileged girls, but instead of fighting for high school popularity, they gravitate toward a criminal lifestyle. The girls in Spring Breakers commit armed robbery, while the members of the Bling Ring steal expensive goods from celebrities’ homes. Modern girl gang movies are not indulgent fantasies or exaggerated portrayals of high school life — the new girl gangs embody a sentiment among many teenage girls: the desire for material things, and most of all, notoriety. The girls in Spring Breakers feel entitled to wealth, while The Bling Ring girls follow their desperate obsession for celebrity status.

Emanuela Betti is a part-time writer, occasional astrologer, neurotic pessimist by day and ball-breaking feminist by night. She miraculously graduated with a BA in English and Creative Writing, and writes about music and movies on her blog.

Travel Films Week: ‘Spring Breakers’ Forever

This is a guest review by Marcia Herring.

Movie poster for Spring Breakers

In a lifetime, how many chances are we granted to truly reinvent ourselves? Growing up, I would often daydream about taking a trip: leaving my conservative duds, Midwestern accent, and semi-closeted life behind me. I would wake up and magically be able to fill the shoes of an exaggerated version of myself. I could experience life on the other side without the backlash of disapproving parents, poisonous social norms, and my own fear of change.

Many viewers may not consider the 2013 film Spring Breakers a discussion of how a little change of location can open the doors wide for reinvention — after all it is easy to get distracted by the bright lights and dubstep of Harmony Korine’s portrait of excess and meaninglessness. The plot of Spring Breakers centers around four girls; daydreaming their way through a semester at college in their Kentucky hometown, they become driven by the idea that they might escape and finally have some fun — or discover themselves, depending on which girl you asked.

Being typical college students, Faith, Candy, Brit and Cotty are broke. How, then, will they get away from the copy-of-a-copy existence they lead? The idea comes — a strange bubble of a thing — to rob a convenience store. It goes down without Faith’s knowledge; she is busy singing half-hearted worship songs at a Christian campus group, and would never approve anyway. Cotty plays getaway driver while Candy and Brit don ski masks and water guns and terrorize their way into enough money to get all four girls to Florida.

Once there, the freedom proves heady. The girls overindulge in drugs, late-night scooter rides, flirtations, and alcohol. St. Petersburg is already full to the brim of people just like them — here for the week and ready to party, their “real” selves be damned.

Of course, the hedonistic bliss cannot last long. After all, spring break isn’t forever. Spring Break is not some magical concept that, although it certainly feels like it, exists separate from the rest of the world. The girls get caught. They spend the night in jail, miserable and worried. A judge passes their (relatively tame) sentence, and the girls are rescued from having to call their parents by local “businessman” named Alien (James Franco, in the role he must have been born to play). Conversation with Alien quickly reveals that he is far from the lifeless folk the girls are used to encountering. Alien has his hands in the drug trade of St. Pete, engages in petty crime for entertainment, and even has a rival (Gucci Mane). Alien’s dream is the American Dream, the dream of more, better stuff … and he wants to share that dream with the girls.

Alien (James Franco) and his girls (l to r: Rachel Korine, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, and Vanessa Hudgens)

The film, which stars Selena Gomez (Wizards of Waverly Place) as Faith, a sheltered good girl gone bad, Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical) as Candy, Ashley Benson (Pretty Little Liars) as Brit, and Rachel Korine (known mostly as director Korine’s much-younger wife) as Cotty, would be easy to read as exploitative. After all, three of the four female stars are known for their roles in relatively-wholesome entertainment. Both Hudgens and Gomez have been a major part of the Disney generation of girls (including Miley Cyrus). Upon reaching late adolescence and the chance to become “real” stars, they have taken career moves that bared skin. They’ve also been subjected to sexual scandals. Is this casting intentional? I don’t doubt it! Does it play into our culture’s obsession with the graduation of young girls into women by subjugating them to a particular brand of role? Yes — in a way.

Caveat: I am certainly not an advocate for the nudity = mature film career movement; I wanted to touch on a few of the ways Spring Breakers might, depending on how you view the thing, do this a little better than most. For one, none of the “Disney girls” is ever shown nude. The sex scene that focuses on Brit and Candy is much less explicit than the earlier scene where the camera is on Alien. The only top-billed nudity comes from Korine, who is quite a bit older than the other girls — and as director Korine’s wife, I’m sure she had a voice in how to appear in the film. Rachel Korine also spoke to Vice Magazine about being a mentor to the other girls. Many party scenes featured a large number of extras, and Gomez had some hesitance about being in such a mob. Korine physically protected Gomez, and announced that any inappropriate behavior toward Selena would not go unpunished. End caveat!

I don’t think that Spring Breakers, despite its perpetually-bikini-clad bodies, is an addition to the list of ways these young female bodies have been exploited. Instead, Spring Breakers turns that sexualizing gaze back onto the audience members who may have been enticed to see the film based on the promise of nubile bodies. The opening scene — a montage of spring breakers partying hard set to dubstep — is full of drunk white kids, many of the girls flashing their breasts in true Girls Gone Wild fashion. On a small scale, this may have been titillating, but Korine returns to the theme of careless youth partying with a regularity and focus that not only de-sensitizes the flash of nudity, but eventually makes us grimace. This is a generation partaking in activities they’ll regret because they are bored and aimless. The nudity and partying have no meaning, no purpose, because life for these co-eds has no meaning, no purpose. Korine notes that the film “is more music-based than cinema-based. Music now is mostly loop and sample-based … ” — not even the music of this generation is original. We rely on copies of copies for entertainment. Nothing is real. And when nothing is real, nothing matters.

Here lies the generational gap when it comes to perception of the film. I went to see Spring Breakers on opening night with my little sister, who happens to be the age of the protagonists. Because she grew up with me for a sister, someone who is constantly looking at media as a reflection of society, my sister could appreciate the self-examination of her generation — after all, a few years ago she was just as lost and aimless as many in the film. A quick look at twitter reviews, however, suggest that many other teens — who were lured in with the promise of a party flick — left the theater frustrated and angry. They keep doing the same things, saying the same lines, these viewers critique, unable or unwilling to look at their own lives, their own twitter accounts and see that cyclical action and speech is indicative of an entire movement of youth. (Oddly enough, if viewers were familiar with Harmony Korine’s previous work, they would be surprised by the strength of the narrative plot in Spring Breakers!)

That narrative plot is purposefully left open to interpretation. Korine himself has said that just about any interpretation of the film is a valid one. I’ve written previously about the economic implications of the world Korine shows us, but Spring Breakers is also rich with discussion of the female body (as evidenced above!), sexuality, and female power.

The key for my enjoyment and promotion of this film is that, unlike many other woman-centric narratives, the women make choices and are not unduly punished for them. [The rest of this review contains specific spoilers for the film. Read with caution.] Faith chooses, despite her (ahem) faith, to explore herself with drugs and sexual behavior. She “finds herself” but when threatened with real life consequences, she chooses to return to Kentucky. The other characters are sad to see her go, but never shame her for making this decision. Cotty parties hard, strips down, and flirts with sexual situations. She is not raped — the fact that I was expecting her to be raped really says something about our culture and media depictions of our culture — and when she is shot during a street showdown, it is a wake-up call. Cotty’s wound is directly related to hanging out with a known criminal, not her sexual choices. Again, when she returns home, she is not shamed.

Brit (Ashley Benson) and Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) dress the part

Brit and Candy are in the film for the longest time, so it makes sense that their story has the most to say about women. Early in the film, they are shown using drugs and not caring about school. They flirt with each other but don’t appear to have a romantic history. Spring break is, for them, not an escape from reality, but a new reality in which they can truly come to life. Something awakens in them when Brit and Candy rob the convenience store — something tied in this narrative with sexuality, violence, and self-awareness. Different readings of the film can boil this awakening down to any one of these aspects, but again, the key for me is that Brit and Candy are not punished for their choices. At first, they seem to need Alien’s presence and permission to embark on these new levels of claiming power through violence and sexual attraction, but as the film unwinds, Brit and Candy leave Alien behind.

Alien’s own weirdness — he feels, and sometimes acts, like an alien in his own surroundings — lay the groundwork for Brit and Candy to feel safe enough to explore what they want. And what do they want? They want weapons, and the skills to use them well. They want sex, with each other, with someone who loves them. They want to have agency in relationships. They want to flip traditional gender roles around, listening while Alien gets sentimental about Britney Spears, holding the gun Alien simulates fellatio on, committing violent acts without motive or feeling. They want freedom — to display their bodies how they want, to claim power and use it in all aspects of life, to live the life they choose and not one that has been prescribed for them by a culture obsessed with non-reality. True, the extreme new lives of Brit and Candy are also laced with non-reality, but how much of that is because our culture refuses to let this sort of narrative be real? None of these things is granted to women in media, or, for the most part, in life.

Spring Breakers brings something new to the discussion of women in film. Young female characters with agency populate this critique of youth culture, and young female characters with agency walk away from the narrative unscathed. For some, spring break may be a break from reality. I, for one, hope it is the new normal.

Marcia Herring is a writer from Missouri. She is still working on her graduate degree, has a day job in retail, and writes freelance for the Lesbrary. She spends most of her free time watching television and movies. She wrote an analysis of Degrassi, Teens and Rape Apologism, contributed a review of X-Men First Class, V/H/S, and reviewed Atonement, Imagine Me & You and The Yellow Wallpaper for Bitch Flicks.

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