By There’s a moment in Harmony Korine’s AGGRO DR1FT when a character, upon being shot, looks damn near into the camera and declares with all the droll energy of a particularly unamused DMV employee: “You got me.”
It was, perhaps, the most intelligible line of dialogue at the film’s premiere/rager/hypebeast drop, which took Korine’s aesthetic manifesto as far away from the context of its initial fall festival run as possible and into the bass-boosted liminality of LA strip club Crazy Girls on an early February weeknight. Not that, of course, anyone in their right mind would come to AGGRO DR1FT for its dialogue. (There’s an argument to be made that no one truly in their right mind would engage with the film at all, I suppose. And yet!)
For a film of this profile—controversial as they are, Korine and, especially, Travis Scott possess considerable cultural capital—the lack of traditional decorum is staggering. Rather than the relative poise of mainstay screens, Crazy Girls provided folded chairs approximating rows, pre- and post-film DJ sets (the latter from Korine himself) adorned with topless pole dancers, and a seemingly endless stream of Cîroc. The film itself played on no less than five screens, some of them offering a complete view of the frame while others inexplicably offered a cropped version of events, each of them appearing on the precipice of total burnout from Korine’s blissfully indulgent infrared saturation. An imposing wall of drones (courtesy of AraabMuzik), bass, and ostensible dialogue served to complete the experience of utter overstimulation, rendering the room effectively an extension of the film’s dissociative Floridian vision.
This is, truthfully, the only appropriate context I can envision for AGGRO DR1FT.
I’ve written about Korine before; the eternal provocateur embodies a singular and distinctly American hedonism rarely confronted elsewhere with such directness. His brand of sleaze borders on malaise, as listless as it is ferocious. With AGGRO DR1FT and his screening strategy for it, Korine has firmly canonized himself as the patron saint for this sort of sauced-out white boy that has emerged as a cultural mainstay over the last few decades.
Such a crowd is a bizarre one to court—it’s a group that feels both perfectly at home aesthetically and hopefully out of place socially with the atmosphere of a Hollywood strip joint. It’s tough to imagine most of the night’s attendees going out to Crazy Girls of their own volition, let alone in such flocks as did for Korine. Their discomfort, plentiful as it was in all its gangly awkward stationary glory, was only outdone by that of the dancers, faced with an open bar and a room filled to capacity with boys more eager to ogle Conner O’Malley than anyone on a pole.
If the crowd was a bit less socially inept than I’d feared, it was only because I’ve been to the New Beverly too many times: nothing can scathe me. Amidst an overbearingly curated atmosphere of debauchery and litness, everyone largely kept to themselves, contributing little to the sensory atmosphere. It’s a group of people more devoted than anything to the party as anthropology, too bogged down in self-awareness and track IDs to fully achieve what I imagine is Korine’s vision. At risk of being overly dismissive—and having nothing in the way of proof—I’m confident there was a nonzero amount of attendees seeing boobs for the first time in the flesh. A gay man myself who can queen out with the best of them (and little to offer in a strip club past admiration of the “werk” variety), I felt somehow like one of the most at-home members of the crowd.
Viewing the event externally, there’s perhaps some bleakness about the whole affair, but I’ll be the first to admit in the moment I myself was too lit to notice or care. I’d say the same might have been true of others in the crowd, but the unnerving ease with which I was able to reach the open(!) bar throughout the night belies the undeniable tenuousness hanging over it all.
That tenuousness stopped with Korine himself who, for what it’s worth, actually seems to be the rare exception who can truly get down with the best of them and not just observe from the sidelines. (I’d be remiss not to mention his real-life politics here, though I’m not really sure what to make of Jared Kushner being his Torah study buddy other than it adding another wrinkle to Korine’s self-concept.) Such a disconnect between aesthetic and reality, uncomfortable as it may be, is perhaps the operative conceit of AGGRO DR1FT, which Korine has deemed on record something other than a traditional movie.
Photographer: Armando Maese
The film is more akin to a video game than anything in the cinematic canon, effectively a feature-length GTA cutscene in a K-hole. It’s all there just as you’d expect: the violence is exaggerated, the movements oddly smooth, the asses gargantuan, only Korine has stripped us of all our agency and the satisfaction that comes with it. Rather than see ourselves in Jordi Mollà’s BO, in his infinite vagueness and intangible cool, Korine renders the audience fully inert, denying the opportunity to engage with AGGRO DR1FT’s world as anything more than a bystander.
And it’s then when the deepest stupidity of the whole affair becomes wholly, horrifyingly unavoidable. Korine’s ethos in the film—as well as his whole EDGLRD shtick in general—is unabashed in its vapidity. The morals are played fast and loose but never sensationalized. There’s an underlying dread throughout the film’s proceedings, as if to wonder is this all there is? His provocation is shamelessly empty, beating you to the punch of calling it dumb and mocking you for even caring.
When the film’s credits rolled (after an 80-minute runtime that felt at once fleeting and eternal), event staff swarmed to pack up chairs and any trace of the event, strippers unceremoniously returned to their poles, and everyone else did lines in the bathroom, Korine’s nihilistic nightmare suddenly nothing more than a shared, ephemeral fever dream.
As Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me” opened Korine’s DJ set, one last jab from cinema’s preeminent troll, all that remained was a strip club full of white boys.
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