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"We've been waiting for Miami spring break for a while. We're just out here having a good time. Whatever happens, happens.”

While this quote could have come straight from the script of Spring Breakers- and indeed summarises the general plot- it originates with Brady Sluder, the real-life Miami spring breaker who went viral in March 2020 after announcing that Covid would not keep him from partying. In Korine’s film, as in real life, the Florida dreamland offers a place of hedonistic escapism, which, left unchecked, overruns the comfort and safety of the normal and familiar.

Upon its release in 2012, the Dionysian ritual of Spring Breakers seemed reassuringly mundane in its vulgar attempts to shock and titillate. The poster featured a gaggle of open-mouthed 20-somethings spilling out of neon bikinis, including former tween idols Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, who had spent the previous decade capering innocently around Waverly Place or East High School while their primogenitor, Britney Spears, shaved her head and clubbed a paparazzo’s car with a golf umbrella.

Eight years ago, pre-covid, the superficial taboo transgressing of Spring Breakers soothingly reiterated the circle of life, with a wry, self-referential awareness of its own exploitative nature, providing an indulgent portrait and morality play about the lifestyle and the vices that it simultaneously enshrined and accused.

These days, the morality play aspect of the film, and its air of antique ritual, have assumed a significance that Korine hardly could have anticipated. A world of sweaty, lissom bodies grinding indiscriminately against each other on jam-packed beaches is a distant memory; Spring Breakers has taken on the tone of a memorial to a lost way of life, a bygone time, corroded by the insidious mixture of selfishness and hedonism that now breeds Covid-like in the Florida swamplands.

A sense of timelessness pervades the story; Korine initially planned a ‘sensory film’ that sprang from feeling rather than plot. “I can’t stand plots,” he reflected, “because I don’t feel like life has a beginning, middle, or end, and it upsets me when things are tied up so perfectly”. Thence: a loosely ordered exploration of what might happen when the American college kid spring break turns sour. As Aldous Huxley put it, “carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and oratory - all serve as “‘Doors in the Wall’”. Spring Break is this modern bacchanalia, a period of partying and release to keep reality ordered for the rest of the year: in the words of Selena Gomez’s character Faith, “a break from reality, just for a little while”. Korine threw his heroines into the fluorescent, carnivalesque realm between reality and fantasy and left them squirming nearly-nude beneath the camera’s gaze for the 90 minutes, sobbing and pouting, undone and reconstituted by the fantasy which they sought to create. The film invokes a universal space once inhabited by Miley, Britney, Madonna, and every other girl making a hedonistic transition from innocence to adulthood.

Spraang breaaaak. Spraang breaaak. Spraaang breaaak forever.

James Franco as Alien, the cornrowed, gun-toting rapper draws a bevy of co-eds into the Spring Break underworld, intoning his mantra-slash-command throughout the film, in closeups or disembodied voiceovers. In his charge, the co-eds become suspended in a purgatory and trapped in unrestrained, orgiastic escapism- wild music and dance, sex and drugs- intended to strengthen normal life rather than replace it.

Somehow, viewed in 2020, for all its clunky dialogue, and luxuriating over the bared flesh of its barely post-adolescent stars, Spring Breakers succeeds more now than ever in capturing the transitory hubris of youth, beauty and power- not only of the young women in the camera’s eye, but of Western culture, with the failure to grasp its own fragility and fantasised images of strength and invincibility.

Áine Kennedy is a London-based writer and manager of the ScriptUp blog.