breaking free

"Children know normal better than anyone"

Dell Parsons, 15 yr old narrator of Richard Ford' CANADA.


"I'm so tired of seeing the same thing, every single day"

Faith, late teen or ear 20something played by Selena Gomez in Harmony Korine's SPRING BREAKERS







This weekend i finished reading CANADA at about the same time i went out to see the premiere of SPRING BREAKERS.

Both are about protagonists who are trying to escape the prison of the present.

Both the film and book feature a life changing robbery. in the first third of the story.

The unseemly Charley and Arthur are the criminals in Canada that lead Dell into transgression.  He was brought to Canada to escape something else, and here he lives in monotony , though always intrigued by the fantasy of what criminal otherness Charley and Arthur belong to.


SPRING BREAKERS takes more time to illustrate how the dream of this other place leads them gradually to cross over into a moral no mans land.  CANADA, once the protag Dell is in Canada, is about surviving by a dream of moving on, growing older, moving away and moving past something.
the dream sustains both the group of girls and our young guy, though dreams become reality in SPRING BREAKERS.

Both the film and the book  express a young person's attempts at creating and recreating oneself, and playing a role to survive the prison of adolescence.


http://www.youtube.com/user/SpringBreakersMovie1?v=ouVDDB-Oo90

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuY62NVMF3Q