Temporal Looping and Pleating in Spring Breakers

This article is about the cinematic presentation of time, arguing that contemporary cinema increasingly draws on musical structures to organize images. Drawing on a Deleuzian conception of time in cinema, I propose and develop the idea of a morph-image. In the case of Spring Breakers, this musical structure is that of electronic dance music, that intensifies and amplifies experience through two primary temporal forms: looping and pleating. Time repeats and returns, brushing against itself. In so doing, Spring Breakers’ musical form expresses the tension between a closed or open future, what Nina Power has called the “weaponization of time.”