Abstract
The films The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola, 2013), Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2012), and Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011), were all dismissed for their depthlessness. This article argues that we need to explore the depths and variety of their engagement with surface in order to fully appreciate what these films are trying to say. The article proposes that these films in fact employ three different “strategies” of surface engagement, in and through their aesthetics; The Bling Ring relies on a sense of “skimming”, Spring Breakers engages ideas of “drifting”, while Drive promotes a sense of “gliding” or “coasting”. Analysis of these strategies of surface aesthetics reveals that the films make dialectic categories of depth and surface, sign and meaning, form and content, indistinguishable, and it is precisely in doing so that they offer complex critique on the crimes they display, and the state of our current hyper-mediated and networked world. These films are not only about the stories they tell but about how the very function that the films themselves perform is intricately intertwined with those stories. This makes the films self-reflexive and postmodern, but it also shows that surface itself, in the cinema, cannot and should not be dismissed as a monolithic, indeterminate nothing. The article argues that we must analyse and engage the depths of surface if we want to understand meaning in cinema today.
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