Consumerism has long been associated with the American Dream. In this dream of things, the hopeless entanglement of capitalism with what it means to be American is perhaps nowhere clearer. This preoccupation with things is succinctly encapsulated in a scene from Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, where, in his “Look at all My Shit” speech, Alien pontificates on how as a drug dealer, he was able to fulfill his dream by illegally hording cash and acquiring material possessions. During the concurrent montage views of Alien’s pad, it quickly becomes clear that proliferation and multiplicity are key—shorts in every color, Scar Face on repeat, numchucks, multiple bottles of Calvin Klein cologne, bullets, blades—and of course Candy, Cotty and Brittany, who come into Alien’s possession in the second half of the film. As A.O. Scott observed, this scene displays an uncanny similarity to a scene in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, where Gatsby violently throws from his closet balustrade a proliferation of men’s shirts down at Daisy seated on his bed below. What makes these scenes interesting in relation to each other is their shared implication that the pursuit of consumerism and its logic of surplus function as symptoms in the psychoanalytic sense. The very impulsiveness of our consumer habits speak to an anxious inability to identify what it means to dream in America and certainly never outside the logic of capitalism. If we watch carefully, then, and in their shared stylistic excess as well, Spring Breakers and The Great Gatsby betray a powerful if immanent critique of American values simply by reproducing our dreams in all their excessive and schizophrenic preoccupation with things.