Give me a Break

Woodrow Wilson once described America as ‘a nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do tomorrow’. A better description of Spring Break you’d be hard-pressed to find, as millions of college students invade the beaches of Florida, California & Cancun in pursuit of happiness, alcohol, sex and just about anything else. As a new film set for British Box offices next week,_ Spring Breakers_, sets out to further mythologise the legend it’s probably time to reflect on the reality.

The film itself, depending on your point of view, is either a modern day great Gatsby-like metaphor for the decay of American Capitalism through an egocentric collision of rampant post-modern greed and youthful excess, or an excuse to look at Selena Gomez’s tits. Spoiler alert- it’s mostly the latter. The main problem with the film, however, is not its ridiculous art-house pretensions, but it’s that it paints a unrecognisable picture of what Spring Break actually looks like.

Firstly, films like _Spring Breakers_ are exactly what the problem with Spring Break is. Every single film, poster or brochure displays the holiday as some kind of secluded pilgrimage for fit blonde girls in bikinis, where they can spray each other with water pistols and tanning oil away from the rigors of everyday life. This has for many years created a catch-22 situation in which thousands of young men, brimming to the eyes with testosterone, descend on the aforementioned Mecca in the hope of crashing the party. This in turn can at times make being female on Spring Break seem something akin to being a dodo in the early 1660’s, though I should point out I lack direct experience as either. The opening credits of Spring Breakers display beautifully organised lines of worldly babes squeezing grey goose vodka into each other’s mouths. If the film had any journalistic integrity whatsoever the next scene would be just be 30 blokes sat in a broken hotel lift for 25 minutes because one of them started the ‘HEY-HEY we want some PUSS-AYYY’ chant and they all got a bit over-excited.

Secondly, many of the locations willing to prostitute themselves for four weeks of such drunken carnage every year are, surprisingly, largely shitholes. We weren’t exactly there for the culture, but a quick visit to Panama City makes Magaluf ’09 seem like a 12 week archaeological excavation of the Bayeux Tapestry. Outside the month of March this city is presumably some kind of Soviet-style soulless post-Armageddon wasteland, filled only by empty holiday tower blocks and deserted fairground rides; sort of like the city they build in inception but with more crazy golf courses.

‘Spring Break forever’ hisses James Franco repeatedly in _Spring Breakers_, attempting to evoke visions of a dreamlike paradise of youthful fantasy. I literally can’t think of anything worse. Not because I didn’t enjoy my 7 days in Panama City, Florida, it was incredible. But the idea of being separated from civilisation, trapped in some kind of Bradley manning-esque indefinite servitude of Southern Comfort, McDonalds and wet-t-shirt competitions is genuinely terrifying. This is about the only thing that the film gauges accurately; the sheer escapism of Spring Break. The entire Eastern Seaboard of the United States could have been pulverised by a North Korea missile attack that week and exactly zero people on Panama City beach would A. Know. B care or C. Know what North Korea was.

The real thing they don’t tell you about Spring Break though is the people. Specifically, that they’re all fucking mental. Where they find these people I have no idea, where they go after even less. On the first day we saw a girl on the floor topless having each nipple licked whilst she shotgunned a bud light and screamed ‘Woooo’ repeatedly like a stripper Owl. She’ll probably just be sat in a lecture next week, wearing glasses, learning about the origins of the French Revolution or something.

Another highlight was the group of ‘dudes’ playing beer pong whilst wearing only tight American flag speedos, equipped with full golden eagle. ‘We’re gonna head somewhere else, far too many N*****s here’ one remarked to us casually. In a belated victory for Racial Equality we later saw him further down the beach grinding on a large African-American girl to the tune of Enrique Iglesias’s ‘Tonight I’m fucking you’. In Dr Kings words ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice’.

At one point a guy ran up to us after hearing our accents, screaming excitedly that he was from Leicestershire and showing us his ‘The Kooks’ t-shirt to prove it. It was all a bit disconcerting and out of place, like seeing Alan Titchmarsh in an episode of Jersey Shore or something. We politely asked him to never return.

Anyway if its writing on t-shirts you want, it’s the Americans you go to, and Spring Break is the absolute epoch of such absurdity. Nothing quite topped the improbably obese man on day 2 we saw sporting the cunningly subtle ‘I came here to drink beer and fuck bitches’ tank top. I’d hazard a guess he’d enjoyed more success with the former than the latter, but you have to give him serious credit for essentially voicing the inner monologue of 98% of the towns current inhabitants.

I write this not to denigrate Spring Break, but to celebrate it. It’s a truly unique, incredible experience that will probably leave you in with more memories in 7 days than you’ll get from the next 7 months. That’s why it does not need the hype and the myth that goes with it. It is not the Garden of Eden, it is not a week long Snoop Dog video and it certainly isn’t what James Franco & _Spring Breakers_ tell you it is either. It’s weird, it’s chaotic, it’s ridiculous and it’s absolutely filthy; that’s why it’s so good. At the end of the final day’s proceedings, I lay hammered and helpless on our hotel balcony at 5AM. Trying to reconcile the damage to my body, self-esteem and tagged Facebook photos, I was reminded of the words of the first black president; ‘If anyone ever doubted that America is a place where all things are possible, tonight is your answer’.