Loose Canon II: Spring Breakers and white trash chic

A love letter to vulgarity and precarity

Welcome to the second installation of LOOSE CANON. Everyone’s aware of specific canonical traditions within cinema – of the road movie, of the mafia film, of the historical murder-mystery, and so on. These films have rules and signifiers which, over time, we’ve all learned to read and interpret. But what about all the subgenres that don’t have names yet? Loose Canon will look at film through the warped lens of genres you never knew existed, and try to categorize the undefinable. It’s a place for the abstruse and the byzantine. Hopefully, it will make you think about old movies in a new way. If we’re all lucky, it might even make sense.

You can read the first installation here. This week: white trash chic.

The girls, both dirty blondes, are giggling on a pile of money on the bed. On every wall of the bungalow are mounted knives and guns: Heckler & Koch pistols, Armalites with mid-range scopes, an old sniper poking out of a cracked window. A dozen packed bricks of heroin sit on the floor of the bedroom.

Alien is grinning through silver grilles. “Some kids...” he muses, “some little kids, they wanna grow up to be president. Some kids wanna grow up and be doctor, y’know? I just wanted to be bad. They kicked me outta school. I thought that was great! Sheeit, I don’t have to go to yo school, that was the best thing in the world! Some people? They wanna do the right thing? I like doing the wrong thing! Everyone’s always tellin’ me, “Yo, you gotta change...” I’m about stacking change ya’ll! Stacking change! That’s it. Money! I’m about making money.

“This a dream ya’ll. This the American dream.”

I love the film Spring Breakers, because it’s so fucking stupid. It’s the perfect example of a trend in cinema that I’ve come to think of as “white trash chic”.

White trash chic is a close relative of the slacker movie, but it’s a bit different. Our main characters aren’t opting out of society for pseudo-political and philosophical reasons; they operate within worlds that polite society can’t see. Slacker movies often have lead characters who are smart, but have chosen not to embrace the opportunities society has given them.¹ In white trash chic, the leads are still mostly smart, but they’ve never had those opportunities.

The white trash chic film is usually set in the American South, Florida or Appalachia, in the recent past or the present day. Our characters will live on a bayou, in a duplex or bungalow, in a motel, or possibly just on someone else’s sofa. There will be a load of white characters, obviously, though by no means exclusively – you might have a Magical Negro grandmother, say, who dispenses wisdom to the white main character.

And, to state the obvious, the film has to at least partially glamourise and aestheticise being “white trash”. Films which fit the bill include Zola, Good Time, The Beach Bum, I, Tonya, Red Rocket and the ur-text of the canon, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers. Last year’s Love Lies Bleeding probably fits, too – it has a sort of Arizona/New Mexico late-80s trash chic. To be very clear: “white trash” as a phrase is being reclaimed, here. The characters might be shown as regressive, but they are also gleefully independent and unapologetically crass. They’re often of freckly Scots-Irish descent. They smoke like chimneys and have a touch of the Guy Fieri. Here, the depiction of the (usually rural) American poor is triumphant; philosophically, white trash chic should be the opposite of Deliverance, its characters a world away from the racist antagonistic Southerners in Mississippi Burning or Easy Rider.

The Beach Bum. How I feel when I see another Substack essay about the “vibe shift”