Escaping Boredom: An Examination of Kierkegaard’s Aesthetes

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Boredom is a circumstance that everyone must face at some point. It is a time when one experiences a close proximity with oneself and doesn’t know what to do with oneself in that situation. It is merely an expression of dissatisfaction. Everyone experiences boredom and it is inevitable, but how does one escape it? Boredom must be escaped by doing or even imagining something that one can derive pleasure from. Søren Kierkegaard, in his book Either/Or experiments with escaping boredom and narrows it down to two different aesthetes, which means finding meaning through pleasure. The first is the Reflective Aesthete which is essentially the possibility of doing something, but not actually doing it. The second is the Immediate Aesthete which is essentially …show more content…

Faith lives in small town where there is not much to ever do. She’s on spring break from her Christian college and she just wants to have some fun and do something different to escape boredom. In other words, Faith needs a change in her life to escape boredom. Kierkegaard writes in Either/Or, “Seeing that boredom is a root of all evil, as enlarged on above, what more natural than to try to overcome it? But here…in trying to avoid it one only works oneself further into it. ‘Change’ is what all who are bored cry out for” (232). The evil that is boredom is basically corrupting Faith’s mind into thinking that she needs a change to derive pleasure from. In the film, while talking to her friends about potentially going to Florida for spring break she says, “I just want to get out of here. There’s more than just spring break. This is our chance to see something different” (Korrine, Spring Breakers). Clearly, Faith just wants to make a change and get out of her town to go do something different, which is a characteristic of Kierkegaard’s Immediate Aesthete. The routine and stability of Faith’s life has bored her out, and she just wants to experience something different. The actuality of her going to Florida later in the film makes this quote directly relatable to the Immediate Aesthete. Once Faith is in Florida, though, she realizes …show more content…

Brit, Candy, and Cotty, mainly Brit and Candy escape boredom through the Reflective Aesthete. Everything is just an act and they’re not fully committed on taking action. Also, they are “bad girls” while Faith is a “good girl” tempted by bad things/people. They will kill people because they just see it as an act, whereas Faith wouldn’t harm a fly. Brit, Candy, and Cotty go through spring break treating it like it’s just an act, and it’ll all be over eventually. Faith wants to live in the moment forever, but obviously can’t. Each girl shows signs of the Reflective aesthete, just in different ways. So, spring break for Faith was just an escape that she wished could last forever up until her arrest, and spring break for the other girls was just an act to gain pleasure from which they weren’t committed too. Korrine characterizes these girls in this contrasting way to essentially show that they are very different people, but they still deal with escaping boredom like everyone else in the world just in unalike ways from each

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