Harmony Korine was just 19 when he penned the screenplay for Larry Clark's Kids, a brutally honest look at the New York youth culture, clearly inspired by his experiences, and a few years later, he followed up with his directorial debut Gummo, firmly establishing himself as a provocative filmmaker unafraid to ruffle a feather or two.
Inspired by the bleak cinematic worlds of social realists like Alan Clarke, Korine continued to make films that prioritised the strange and disenfranchised, taking a decisively raw and often uncomfortable approach, where his films sometimes meander, allowing vignettes of weird people doing weird things to unfold.
It would be wrong to say that the worlds that he captures are the kinds you'd want to experience for yourself, but there's a strange appeal to them in all of their horridness, and yet it's hard to pinpoint exactly what makes his earlier films so captivating. Perhaps it's the way he romanticises, or rather, finds the slightest speck of beauty in the grotesque and the mundane, with Gummo showing us a poverty-stricken town with a cast of inhabitants ranging from tragic to utterly horrifying, but Korine has a way of making everyone seem larger than life. Most of these people would undoubtedly be labelled freaks, but here, they find a space to make their own.
Yet, in 2012, he made his first of several films set in Florida, Spring Breakers, and it seems like he has found the state to be a muse of some kind, as it's a place he calls home and finds fascinating, although he's not quite sure why, telling Film Comment, "I don't know, it's strange, I can't really put my finger on it. I lived here for a couple of years. I've really been infatuated with the kind of strangeness, the beauty, the palm trees, the sky, the...vibrations of South Florida, Miami, Key West."
This mixture of strangeness and beauty is exactly how you could describe Korine's films. With Spring Breakers, he honed in on the excess associated with party-going college students in Florida, capturing the guns, drugs, sex, and skin that define an American spring break taken to its utmost extreme. The film photographs these sun-soaked locations with unlikely poetry, lingering on the jiggle of a bikini-clad bum or a naked breast and capturing a man wielding a gun or shotgunning a beer as though we're dealing with imagery a lot more profound.
Taken in by the haziness of a drug-fuelled vacation, there's a hallucinatory vividness that feels exhausting to watch: how many more neon bikinis or party montages can we feast our eyes upon? Korine perfectly achieves what he sets out to with Spring Breakers, though, with James Franco's pimp-like dealer and rapper Alien highlighting the inherent strangeness of those characters the filmmaker associates with Florida; he's a 'Florida man', alright.
We usually connect the epitome of the 'American Dream' with Hollywood or Times Square in New York, but in Korine's world, it's Florida that represents this with its simultaneous grit and crime paired with its idyllic spread of palm trees and bright blue water. "I love the whole state. I love the way it looks," he told Interview, "It's like the city of the future that's built into the ocean".
Since Spring Breakers, Korine has returned to Florida for The Beach Bum, a stoner comedy featuring Matthew McConaughey as Moondog, with the Keys playing a vital role in the film, essentially becoming a character in and of itself. Then came his experimental infrared movie Aggro Dr1ft starring Travis Scott and the equally as experimental and bizarre Baby Invasion, both of which utilise Florida as a backdrop.
It seems like he is set on using Florida as a location for the time being, even if his recent cinematic experiments have been increasingly nonsensical and odd. I mean, using AI for Baby Invasion is undeniably disappointing, and his finest Florida work will always be Spring Breakers, a misunderstood meditation on the 'American Dream' soaked in neons and smoke, the crack of gunfire echoing behind the electronic blast of Skrillex.
