Aggro Dr1ft makes perfect sense

At Metrograph in downtown Manhattan last month, Harmony Korine, clad in a neon ski mask, introduced his new film, Aggro Dr1ft, to a room of about 75% men. The film, which had played the festival circuit during the preceding fall before touring strip clubs and nightclubs was finally settling into something resembling a more normal release, and the promised introduction from Korine that night helped sell the theater out in a matter of minutes. In truth, the director spoke for maybe 45 seconds, and posited that the film might be a religious one—an observation he claimed to have formed on the drive to the theater.

The audience laughed, and they kept laughing throughout Aggro Dr1ft. It’s fair to assume Korine meant to be at least partially funny, given the branding of his recent EDGLRD design collective. Aggro Dr1ft is funny, if more in a strange way than a comic one. The entire film is shot in infrared and features visual effects reminiscent of Snapchat filters, giving it the feel of a video game. Its plot, if it can be said to have one, centers on BO (Jordi Mollà), the “world’s greatest assassin.” We know this is what he is because he says it probably 25 times during the film’s 80-minute runtime. The other characters have similar catchphrases they repeat; the mother of BO’s children says “I’m so warm” while lounging around at home. A character repeats “dance bitches” for a few minutes while some women dance on a boat in bikinis. It’s as if there was a button for each character to say one of a few preloaded phrases.

It’s all weird and funny and maybe a little bit of a troll, but Aggro Dr1ft often registers incredibly, painfully sincerely, reeking of childlike naïveté. BO’s mission is to vanquish a crime lord, a demonic figure with horns, who functions as the film’s final boss. There aren’t really any clear parameters on what this conflict is about, other than that BO needs to win it. The crime lord hardly speaks; his catchphrase is thrusting and grunting. You imagine there is a teenage boy behind the screen, inventing the beats and mashing the keys to create his ideal movie based on illicit sleepover viewings of Scarface, Fortnite matches, and Travis Scott playlists. The characters and conflicts are about as well-defined as a middle schooler’s sense of identity.

Korine has often returned to the site of youth to probe our cultural psyche and, seemingly, to freak the grown-ups out. Aggro Dr1ft is his most recent and most abstract exploration of this, but the fascination has held strong for nearly 30 years. His screenplay for Larry Clark’s 1995 movie Kids ignited his career and courted controversy with its depictions of underage sex and drug use. The film is mostly meandering through a day in the life of teenagers in Manhattan, specifically on boys Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) and Casper (Justin Pierce) who are, frankly, total pieces of shit. Kids is surprisingly open-minded and bracing, at least in the beginning, as it explores burgeoning libidos. But for all the hubbub, Kids ends on a conservative, punishing message, as all three leads end up exposed to HIV. Over its 90 minutes, the characters devolve into sexual violence and, finally, a vaguely moralizing conclusion.

2013’s Spring Breakers, meanwhile, presents initially as Girls Gone Wild before revealing itself as a crime flick. Before three of the four girls rob a chicken restaurant to finance their trip, one instructs the others: “Pretend like you’re in a video game. Act like you’re in a movie.” Later, on vacation, they reenact the scene for the theft’s one absentee, Selena Gomez’s Faith. She is disturbed and, eventually, decides to leave the trip before the rest. By the end, the final two girls remaining have linked up with James Franco’s Alien, and ultimately outlive him during an attack on the hideout of his rival, Gucci Mane’s Archie. They win and drive out of St. Petersburg—maybe back to school, maybe anywhere else—in his Lamborghini.

To me, Spring Breakers is a masterpiece, the preeminent time capsule of pop culture in the last moment before Instagram filters completely overtook reality. But like Korine’s previous work, it was deliberately provocative and controversial, not least for casting Disney darlings Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens as the partying, gun-slinging, bikini-clad criminals. Spring Breakers hit when a bevy of child stars were desperate to shed their squeaky clean images; the most famous, of course, is Miley Cyrus, who took a sharp pivot from Hannah Montana to twerking on Robin Thicke at the 2013 Video Music Awards. Her behavior was in support of her album Bangerz, a trap-influenced pop collection that saw Cyrus collaborating with rappers like Big Sean, French Montana, and Future. Like the girls in Spring Breakers, sexual maturity, experimentation, and libertinism meant aligning with—and arguably exploiting—Black culture.

Bangerz helped bring discussions of cultural appropriation into the forefront, and Cyrus was asked her thoughts on the topic in a Rolling Stone cover story. “I know what I am. But I also know what I like to listen to,” Cyrus said. “Look at any 20-year-old white girl right now—that’s what they’re listening to at the club. It’s 2013. The gays are getting married, we’re all collaborating.”

Cyrus had a point, if a poorly expressed one: At the time, Black culture and hip-hop specifically were reaching then-unheard levels of commercial viability and mainstream visibility. The material was more popular, among white people at least, than it had ever been, but the songs that ended up the most commercially successful were often those performed by white artists: Cyrus, Macklemore, Robin Thicke, Iggy Azalea. The controversy wasn’t truly about white people enjoying the music, but about them profiting from it, often at the exclusion of Black people.

This dynamic is all over Korine’s work; the friction lies in whether he’s merely depicting it, commenting on it, perpetuating it, none or all of the above. That Spring Breakers ends with a sequence where former Disney star Vanessa Hudgens murders Gucci Mane and takes his belongings is hardly a coincidence. In The New Yorker, critic Richard Brody notes that the scene features a “blacklight that turns their bathing suits fluorescent, makes their masks glow blue, and—most remarkably—greatly darkens their skin, in a cinematographic version of blackface.” It’s an uncomfortable image, and one that exists in conversation with that moment, when white teenagers and young adults were playing in a cultural sandbox that didn’t belong to them but were being rewarded for it. Why did Miley Cyrus and, a decade before her, Christina Aguilera dip into these aesthetics in an attempt to show they weren’t little kids anymore, only to forget about them when it stopped being profitable? If Spring Breakers has an answer to this, it’s that it was not only materially beneficial, but shockingly easy.

Aggro Dr1ft gestures to similar questions as Spring Breakers with its infrared coloring; being lit according to surface temperature instead of visible light renders everyone the same skin tone. Its Florida setting and vague criminal plot line also recall the older film, but more online, more anonymous, less real. The ladies of Spring Breakers pretend that they’re in a video game; Aggro Dr1ft simply is a video game. Spring Breakers’ characters take other identities, sometimes by force; Aggro Dr1ft is almost completely devoid of identity. Whoever is playing this game is not trying to usurp Gucci Mane. They just get to play beside Travis Scott, who nominally plays a character named Zion, but is so thinly characterized he just ends up as Travis Scott—himself already a video game character via his collaborations with Fortnite.

But here, there is less payoff. Where Spring Breakers or Kids at least gesture to our own real world, Aggro Dr1ft simply shows the smooth repetition of the digital world—or is it a purgatory? When a video game hits the credits, it can only restart, and you play the game again. Is that what Korine meant by calling it a religious film? At a certain point, you can drive yourself mad trying to assign meaning to anything, especially since the idea of his films having a message makes the director sick.

Aggro Dr1ft’s lack of specificity isn’t a glitch, at least not enough of one to stop the game. At 51, Korine’s age keeps him separated from youth culture, and he no longer commits to going as far as he once did. But Aggro Dr1ft does feel authentic to spending a lot of time in a digital world, moving not as a person but as an avatar. There is less meaning to be found because the world itself is less real than Spring Breakers—that film is already more stylized and caricatured than Kids or Gummo. With Aggro Dr1ft, Korine’s movies and characters have been stripped for parts, and reassembled into their most anonymous form. The kids from Kids are less likely to go see Aggro Dr1ft in the theater than they are to Snapchat from their bedrooms. But if they did go, they’d probably recognize what they saw.