Aggro Dr1ft는 완벽하게 이해됩니다

지난달 맨해튼 시내 메트로그래프에서 네온 스키 마스크를 쓴 하모니 코린(Harmony Korine)은 약 75%의 남성이 있는 방에서 그의 새 영화 Aggro Dr1ft를 소개했습니다. 지난 가을 스트립 클럽과 나이트클럽을 순회하기 전 페스티벌 순회 상영을 했던 영화는 마침내 좀 더 정상적인 개봉작에 가까운 영화로 자리 잡았고, 그날 밤 코린의 약속된 소개로 극장은 몇 분 만에 매진되는 데 도움이 되었습니다. 실제로 감독은 약 45초 동안 이야기를 나누며 이 영화가 종교적인 것일 수도 있다고 가정했습니다. 그는 극장으로 가는 길에 이러한 관찰을 했다고 주장했습니다.

청중들은 웃었고, Aggro Dr1ft 내내 계속 웃었습니다 . 최근 EDGLRD 디자인 집단의 브랜딩을 고려하면 Korine이 적어도 부분적으로 웃기려고 의도했다고 가정하는 것이 타당합니다. Aggro Dr1ft는 코믹한 것보다 더 이상한 방식으로 재미있습니다. 영화 전체가 적외선으로 촬영되었으며 스냅챗 필터를 연상시키는 시각 효과가 적용되어 비디오 게임의 느낌을 줍니다. 줄거리는 '세계 최고의 암살자' BO(조르디 몰라)를 중심으로 전개된다. 그가 이 말을 80분짜리 영화 동안 25번이나 했기 때문에 우리는 그가 이런 사람이라는 것을 압니다. 다른 캐릭터들도 비슷한 캐치프레이즈를 반복합니다. BO 아이들의 엄마는 집에서 빈둥거리며 “너무 따뜻해요”라고 말한다. 일부 여성이 비키니를 입고 보트에서 춤을 추는 동안 캐릭터는 몇 분 동안 "춤추는 암캐들"을 반복합니다. 마치 각 캐릭터마다 미리 로드된 몇 가지 문구 중 하나를 말할 수 있는 버튼이 있는 것과 같습니다.

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 의 특이성 부족은 결함이 아니며 적어도 게임을 멈출 만큼 충분하지 않습니다. 51세인 Korine은 나이로 인해 청소년 문화에서 멀어지고 더 이상 예전처럼 멀리 나아갈 생각이 없습니다. 그러나 Aggro Dr1ft는 사람이 아닌 아바타로 움직이면서 디지털 세계에서 많은 시간을 보내는 것에 진정성을 느낍니다. 세상 자체가 Spring Breakers 보다 덜 현실적이기 때문에 발견할 의미가 적습니다 . 그 영화는 이미 Kids 나 Gummo 보다 더 양식화되고 희화화되어 있습니다 . Aggro Dr1ft를 사용하면 Korine의 영화와 캐릭터의 일부가 제거되고 가장 익명의 형태로 재조립됩니다. Kids 의 아이들은 침실에서 Snapchat을 보는 것보다 극장에서 Aggro Dr1ft를 보러 갈 가능성이 적습니다 . 하지만 만약 그들이 간다면 아마도 그들이 본 것을 인식할 것입니다.