Rob From The Rich So You Can Be Rich

Loving every word of A.O. Scott’s take on this year’s crop of materialistic films featuring “commodity fetishism:”

Fitzgerald’s Gatsby may be subject to analogous confusion, but Mr. Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” is something else altogether. The movie’s view (literally, its visual presentation) of American materialism is not moralistic, but pornographic. It traffics in the sheer libidinal pleasure of money and what it can buy. So does “Spring Breakers,” though this may be less obvious because of the proximity of its images to pornography of a more familiar kind.

Are Spring Breakers, The Great Gatsby, and the Bling Ring simply hedonistic? Or are they SUBVERSIVE? (“Like Daniel Lugo and his band of thugs, who kidnap a businessman and steal everything he owns, Ms. Coppola’s adolescent burglars are taking physical possession of what they feel already belongs to them.”)

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