Until now, Aggro Dr1ft was only available to view at rare events inside clown-filled strip clubs across the U.S. is Director Harmony Korine’s newest “film” is now available to purchase on his website edglrd.com. The project reaches beyond the limits of film and acts as a statement of what the future of movies may mean in the age of YouTube and TikTok. There’s no exact story or narrative; rather, it’s a psychedelic audio-visual mirage defined by a stream of glorious and beautiful colors.
Still from Aggro Dr1ft
The film’s story revolves around a mercenary family man played by legendary rapper Travis Scott, but that’s not what defines Aggro Dr1ft. Instead, it’s the constant barrage of immense neon visuals that are unlike anything else, not even imagined in film. It’s something that audiences may love, hate, or even be physically unable to watch. Still, ultimately, it’s something they won’t forget.
Travis Scott in Aggro Dr1ft
At its core, Aggro Dr1ft is a movie about the fear of obsolescence within artists. How can the dated format of movies survive in the age of YouTube and TikTok? Aggro Dr1ft confronts these fears with bright ideals of what the media world could achieve through more experimentation. Creating a medium that interacts directly through sensory straying from the expected traditions of the format.
Still from Aggro Dr1ft
Harmony Korine began his career at 18 when he wrote the script for the dark, polarizing, and controversial 1995 film Kids where an AIDS ridden teenager goes on a sexual journey throughout a desolate New York City. Korine is an artist who writes and directs most of his projects, and at the core of most of his work is a sense of punk, cutting edge, and rebellion from the mainstream world, presenting a usually dark vision of underground madness. His most well-known project is the 2012 film Spring Breakers, which starred Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, who at the time were both primarily known as Disney actors in children’s movies and television. Korine, in 2012, saw the vision of punk through mixing Gucci Mane in his prime with Disney Channel stars in a Florida spring break sleaze fest, and at the time, it was cutting edge for the culture. Korine is constantly feeling the pulse of the culture for ways to push the extremities, whether cultural, visual, or societal, to create new statements on how we can progress or deform.
Many people go to movies to find a story because that’s what movies traditionally have been. The dialogue Aggro Dr1ft I surmounts to “dumb guy poetry,” Travis Scott says generic somewhat meaningless phrases like “Wake up, do it.” It avoids trying to make any point outright. Instead, it just exists to emit a feeling and style that attacks your audio and visual senses directly without remorse. People watch movies as a form of escape. Still, few things like Aggro Dr1ft exist to act as this bright flashing sensory deprivation chamber.
Aggro Dr1ft feels alot like the greatest video game that you’ve never played. This fever dream version of Call of Duty is a project that, like its predecessors in experimental art, is attempting to make a statement about the future of our media and if you want to find a larger message about the world around us you can most definitely find it within the movie. Aggro Dr1ft is like an acid coated rorschach test, you can almost find whatever meaning you want to within it, whether it’s through the colors, the sounds, the feelings, the movements, no matter what it’s undeniably a statement on the current state of what is cutting edge in a world that sometimes feels on the verge of collapsing.
