Catching Up on 2013: The Bling Ring
Written and directed by Sofia Coppola, The Bling Ring is loosely based on the true story of a group of California teenagers who, in 2008-09, robbed the homes of a number of Hollywood celebrities including Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel Bilson, and others.
Marc is a quiet boy, a new student at a California high school. He makes friends with a girl, Rebecca, and the two of them start committing small crimes, from breaking into parked cars to, eventually, breaking into the house of one of Marc’s out-of-town acquaintances. They realize they can do the same thing to the homes of celebrities by simply using the internet to determine when they’ll be out of town. They and a group of other girls start breaking into the homes of various celebrities and stealing some of their clothes, shoes, jewelry, and more. Eventually the crimes are reported and a media frenzy grows around “The Bling Ring.”
I’ve enjoyed all of Sofia Coppola’s films that I have seen, though there is a coldness I’ve found to most of them, a distance between the audience and the characters/events on-screen. I find that I like her movies intellectually more than I love them. I respect them as the works of a talented filmmaker, more than I feel an emotional attachment to them. I found that to be very much the case with The Bling Ring. I never quite found myself engaged with the characters on screen, though I thought the performances by the actors were all very solid, and I was fascinated by the film’s many potent critiques of today’s media-obsessed culture.
The film is a fascinating commentary on the way our culture is obsessed with celebrity. Marc and Rebecca and their friends want to be like the celebrities they worship, and don’t see anything morally wrong about breaking into their homes and stealing their stuff. These celebrities are in the public eye, therefore they belong, in a way, to these kids. Paris Hilton’s things are already their things. They (the kids) have a perfect right to waltz into these celebrities’ homes and take their things. This is the idea of napster writ large. These things are ours, we don’t have to pay for them. We already own them. More than that, we are ENTITLED to them.
These issues of celebrity and their public/private lives is also all tangled up with these kids’ connection to social media. They follow these celebrities and learn all about them, including tracking their comings and goings, using the internet and social media. Then, after breaking into their homes and stealing their stuff, they post photos of themselves on facebook wearing the stolen items. These kids don’t think twice about that. They’re certainly not thinking about the repercussions, which of course makes them very dumb kids. But more than that, it seems that the act of their wearing these stolen fancy clothes and accessories, and then posting those photos so everyone can SEE them doing so, is the whole point of their actions.
After they get inevitably busted, Marc shows some remorse, but in several powerful scenes at the end of the film we see that the other kids don’t seem to. Nicki (Emma Watson) goes on TV to talk about her experiences being in prison and having a cell next to Lindsay Lohan, and to advertise her new website where people can learn more about her experiences. There are so many levels to this scene. There’s Nicki’s oblivious lack of remorse to her crimes. There’s her conviction that her tangential connection to Lindsay Lohan (she stole and wore some of her stuff, and she was near her, briefly, in prison) makes her an authority on Lindsay and what she was thinking and feeling. There’s the idea that being on TV and having a web-site is the goal — that celebrity isn’t the result of doing something notable, it’s the goal in and of itself. (It never crosses Nicki’s mind that people WOULDN’T be interested in visiting her website and learning all about her and her every thought.) Then there’s the way the media eats all this up and eggs these fame-seekers on. Nicki is ON TV, so she;s become just like the celebrities she idolizes, right? All these different ideas are bouncing around this scene, and throughout the whole movie. I don’t care at all about Nicki as a character (to be honest, I’m not sure if Ms. Coppola wants us to care about these characters), which is what I was talking about before about my never feeling emotionally connected to the film, but boy was I fascinated by all of the questions and ideas raised by the film’s story.
There are few figures presented in the movie who are not deserving of scorn. Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and their ilk are hardly worthy role models for kids. This group of teenagers are hopelessly spoiled, entitled, immoral brats. The few adults we see in the film are just as bad. We spend some time with Laurie (played spectacularly well by Leslie Mann), who is the surrogate mom for several of the girls in the Bling Ring. Laurie sees herself as a wonderful mom and role-model for these kids, giving them the freedom teenagers need and helping them to reach their dreams of Hollywood success. But she is a nightmare figure, the worst kind of inattentive, wrong-thinking, self-deluded parent. Had she actually provided guidance and moral strength to these kids, it’s hard to believe they would have ever been involved in these crimes in the first place.
The Bling Ring, like all of Ms. Coppola’s work, has an intellectual richness that I admire. This film has a lot to say, and I found the story to be an incendiary critique of where American culture is heading. I wish that I had cared more about any of the characters, as that would have given me an emotional investment in the story to go along with my interest in the points the film was making. I commented above that I’m not sure whether or not Ms. Coppola actually wanted us to empathize with any of these kids, and my uncertainty about that makes evaluating the film somewhat challenging. If Ms. Coppola wanted us to care about these kids then in my mind she clearly failed. But perhaps she wanted there to be a distance between the audience and these kids, perhaps her whole intention was to hold up all of these characters for our ridicule and scorn. If that’s the case then she succeeded, though I still wonder whether her critiques on our society and youth culture could have been even more effective had we actually cared about any of these kids.