To be “era-defining,” does a film need to be pleasurable to watch? That depends, I suppose, on the era it is hoping to define. In 2012, the American auteur-cum-provocateur Harmony Korine—then approximately thirty-nine years old—released a film about four nubile, snotty, frightening teen girls in very small bikinis terrorising the citizens of St. Petersberg, Florida, and that film, with its sickeningly bright aesthetic and its curiously prescient lampooning of white empowerment feminism, instantly cemented itself as one of the key texts of the ‘10s. It was also, in my personal opinion, a for-real cinematic masterpiece. Some of its brilliance sprang from its distinctive style, which seemed at once of-the-moment and fated to be instantly dated, as if Korine had stuck a pin into the day-glo fabric of the times: the Skrillex soundtrack; the ex-Disney cast; the ski-masks in sickly, Barbie pink; the ironic, pre-Free-Britney use of Everytime by Britney Spears; James Franco, for God’s sake. There was also more nuance than one might at first expect in its treatment of race, and especially in its depiction of appropriation as a form of violent cultural tourism—it showed pretty, well-off white babes weaponizing the presumed innocence of their own demographic for the sake of making cash and grabbing power, and, in doing so, seemed to pre-empt the quintessentially 2010s figure of the hypercapitalist girlboss. 

Perhaps above all else, however, the singularity of its vision seemed to me to depend on the biography and age of its director, who so evidently viewed the girl-subjects of his film with a mixture of envy and terror, fascination and confusion. In the ‘90s, you could scarcely find an artist who was more cutting-edge than Korine, a precocious talent who had written the screenplay for Larry Clark’s Kids while he was still in his teens, and then swiftly made himself notorious by releasing his spooky, grimy, ‘white-trash’ fantasia Gummo in 1997 at the age of twenty-four. By 2012, things had changed, and although he had made several more deeply idiosyncratic, intermittently great films, nothing Korine had produced since had helped to shape the zeitgeist quite like Gummo had. One imagines that he must have felt, as many people do in their late thirties and their forties, that he did not quite belong to the youthful future, but that he was not quite ready to be totally consigned to the past. 

Since it was impossible for him to turn back time and revert into being a Bambi-eyed wunderkind again, he did the next logical thing, and made a movie about teens—teens who embodied everything that adults feared about them, i.e. teens who were cocky, sexually precocious, sometimes totally intoxicated, and obsessed with money, guns, and videogames. The middle-class son of a PBS documentarian, Korine could not genuinely identify with the so-called “trailer trash” protagonists of Gummo, and this difference in experience is the reason his detractors often see that film as voyeuristic, tasteless, or exploitative. Being juvenile and cool and high, on the other hand, was a lifestyle he knew intimately—one, in fact, that he had not long left behind. Documenting wild youth culture at a slight remove, he was still close enough to the material that his depiction felt uncanny, borderline-surreal. Spring Breakers seemed to take place on a grimy-glamorous, quintessentially American beach of the mind, embodying what Somerset Maugham once called “a sunny place for shady people.” (Maugham was referencing the French Riviera, admittedly—but if the flip-flop fits.) 

“Pretend it’s a video game,” one of Korine’s breakers purrs to another, just before they rob a chicken shop for cash in their bikinis. Obviously, first-person video games are often characterized by their lurid visual flair, and by their containment of a certain amount of wanton cruelty. Above all else, they are fakery incarnate—heightened role-playing exercises that allow the player to take part in a stylized pantomime of violence. Last year, Korine released his first feature film of the 2020s, Aggro Dr1ft, which he describes as belonging to a new genre that he has invented called “gamecore,” i.e. movies which replicate “the feeling of being inside of a game,” and which blur “the line between reality and unreality.” Aggro Dr1ft feels unreal not merely in the sense that it is a work of fiction, but in the sense that it does not strictly resemble a real film. It takes some of the hallmarks of Spring Breakers (guns, palm trees, Floridian mansions, violent crime) and then flattens them by rendering them in mock-infrared photography—hot pink; blood red; piss yellow; bile green; a chilly, oceanic blue—so that characters and settings become almost indistinguishable from each other, and depth and dimension cease to matter, just as they cease to matter in a dream. The plot, insomuch as the movie has one, follows “the world’s greatest assassin,” Bo, on what he insists will be his final job. He offers guidance to a protegee, played by the rapper Travis Scott. The two men talk about the Bible and      Julius Caesar; Bo’s wife, an unnamed woman with a notably bodacious body, twerks for him and whispers sweetly about love; a demon, huge and winged and sometimes speaking like an echo of Bo’s voice, appears, glowing like fire over the beach. “The old world is no more,” Bo murmurs. “There are no more kings. Who cares? Nobody cares.” As portrayed by the Spanish actor Jordi Mollà, the assassin is both middle-aged and borderline-anesthetised, with a five-o-clock shadow that feels less like a rakish fashion statement, and more like the actual dishevelment of someone who is deeply depressed.

“Pretend it’s a video game” has come to mean something different here, and the shift is existential: meaninglessness is no longer an excuse for bad behavior, but a threat.

“There is magic in this brutality,” Bo says to himself several times, sounding increasingly zombified and uncertain. “I am mesmerized.” I was, I admit, not exactly mesmerized by Aggro Dr1ft. Is there magic in its infrared brutality? For a few moments, yes, before its pleasurable effects wear off and are replaced by a suffocating numbness. The feeling it induces is of being at once conscious and unconscious, as if the body is asleep, but the mind is awake and is desperate to escape. Visually, its closeness to the style of a classic console shoot-em-up a la GTA leaves the viewer with the sense that they are helplessly—perhaps even tediously—watching someone else play a game. Thematically, it is less a movie about action and violence than one about bored, exhausted hyper-competence: an ennui-stricken workplace drama where the “work” in question is serial, paid-for murder, and the drama is largely non-existent. Where Spring Breakers’ repetitious screenplay suggested the casting of a spell, here the dialogue’s circularity is merely draining. Much like its ageing antihero, the film itself seems weary, and I have to assume that its lack of momentum is deliberate. Throughout, minor characters behave like video game NPCs, caught in behavioral and vocal loops, apparently impervious to the rest of the action, as if Korine is drawing a parallel between their helpless, ouroborotic cycles of movement, and Bo’s dreary life as an assassin. “Pretend it’s a video game” has come to mean something different here, and the shift is existential: meaninglessness is no longer an excuse for bad behavior, but a threat.

Back in March 2019, Korine did in fact release another film to bookend the 2010s, The Beach Bum, and in retrospect it bridges a thematic gap between Breakers and Dr1ft. It is another film about a middle-aged figure who excels at his job but does not particularly enjoy it, and as its title suggests, it is another beach-set movie, every bit as enamoured of the Floridian sunset as its teen-centric predecessor. The Beach Bum did not have much to say about the end of the decade for the culture as a whole, but its construction did suggest the hand of an artist who was thinking more and more about the consequences of not growing up. (The catalyst that sets its shaggy narrative in motion, for example, is the death of the protagonist’s wife in a drunk-driving accident.) There is a great deal of fun and hedonism in the film, but it also has a wistful, mournful quality, and although it lacks the violence of Spring Breakers, it does imply that there is a certain violence implicit in a person’s decision to live only for themselves. The Beach Bum, a reviewer at the Canadian outlet NOW Toronto pointed out astutely at the time of its release, “is pure nihilism masquerading as a comedy.” Now, in Aggro Dr1ft, comedy has been nixed entirely in favour of an even purer brand of nihilism—uncut and lethal. “Man, all I know is wake up, do it, fall asleep, do it, wake up, do it,” Travis Scott’s character, Zion, tells Bo and although the “it” here is presumably killing, it is easy to identify with this kind of terrible boredom, since most of us have our own “it” to do every day in exchange for the money necessary to survive. 

In August 2023, Korine told the GQ journalist Zach Baron that he had “lost interest in normal films.” Aggro Dr1ft’s vision also depends on the biography and age of its director, it would seem, and the most pertinent fact of his biography at present is his complete disinterest in being a director at all. “The weapon is the extension of the assassin’s soul,” Bo says. “I love the magical weapon. It weeps for me if I am unhappy. It understands me. It wants me to achieve perfection.” Sub “assassin” for “director,” then imagine that the “magical weapon” in question is a camera, and the film’s thesis shifts even more sharply into focus. Bo might insist, over and over, that he is the “world’s greatest assassin,” but the pleasure that he once presumably took from being proficient at his job has since curdled. Korine, not being Lars von Trier, would not be likely to self-identify as “the world’s greatest” director. It would be foolish to deny, however, that he is a significant figure in contemporary American film; a new release from Harmony Korine is, if not necessarily as big a story as it was in the mid-to-late 90s or the 00s, still a notable event. Korine, as a result, seems at times to feel shackled to his own lofty artistic status: as a filmmaker of note, as a cool provocateur, as a quondam definer of the times. 

He also seems, more than he ever has, like a middle-aged dad—not a bad identity to have, by any means, but one that is at odds with his former reputation. “I have won the game,” Bo mutters, near the end of the film. “I’m getting old now. I have slayed enough of these demons. My bones creak. My work is done. It’s done.” Increasingly, Korine talks in interviews about traditional film being “dead,” and several critics have suggested that the credit “by Harmony Korine” at the end of Aggro Dr1ft—notable for the absence of “written” or “directed”—might suggest the involvement of AI in its creation. In interviews, the director has been extolling the virtues of AI and of ultra-short films, TikTok-style, for the past couple of years, and this insistence on embracing what most people in the arts consider to be the destruction of art proper is, of course, perverse enough to be in line with his past provocations. It also permits him, crucially, to theoretically distance himself from his work, separating him from the “magical weapon” of his camera, and I wonder whether this isn’t the actual appeal. His going all-in on AI and founding a company called EDGELRD is embarrassing, yes, but since when have we ever taken the things Harmony Korine says in interviews, or the things he does that are shocking or tasteless, entirely seriously? 

“You know what I liked the most about being rich?” one character says to another in The Beach Bum. “You can just be horrible to people and they just have to take it.” So too with being critically feted: it is up to you what you present to your audience, and if you have earned yourself a reputation in the industry as somebody to watch, they will at least sit through it and attempt to figure out what you are saying. What Aggro Dr1ft is saying is, I would argue, that Harmony Korine is sick of making movies; or at least it feels like the work of a man who is sick of making movies, whether he intends it to or not. It is not technically a retirement announcement—Korine screened a new film, Baby Invasion, at the Venice Film Festival last year, and by all accounts it was even more exhausting and even more like a recording of a video game than Aggro Dr1ft—but it resembles one in tone, and it does seem to suggest a degree of creative disengagement. I wanted to say here with confidence that as a work of art, it is not rich enough to define the 2020s in the way that Spring Breakersseemed to capture, with such neon specificity, the 2010s. Then again, might Aggro Dr1ft’s flat, cool air of alienation from the human side of filmmaking, with its AI-inflected style and its robotic characters, not be said to be reflective of the worst possible outcome of our artistic present? If you want a vision of the future, Korine seems to say, imagine a tired and disillusioned man trapped in a repetitious video game rendering of hell, forever and ever. To be “era-defining,” does a film need to be pleasurable to watch? That depends, I suppose, on the era it is hoping to define.