The Bling Ring at 10
“I just think she wanted to be part of, like, the lifestyle.”
When the titular Bling Ring, a group of teens who get their kicks stealing from the unlocked houses of their favorite celebrities, strut past the camera accompanied by Kanye West’s “Power”, their faces blank and their eyes covered by large sunglasses, we aren’t invited into their pleasure in the same way we are in the similarly joking-but-not-joking musical montages in Marie Antoinette. Sofia Coppola has held her movies at a remove since The Virgin Suicides—the story of suicidal girls as seen from afar, by the boys across the street—but finds finds a new, stranger distance in The Bling Ring. Although the choice to shoot on digital was cinematographer Harris Savides’, she has an innate understanding of the medium: the images have that uniquely affectless sheen, that blank literalism which is only heightened, made emptier still, when loud music is blaring over them.
© 2013 - A24
It’s not so much that the film went above the critics in 2013, as it went beyond them. Most negative reviews read the same as the positive ones, they all recognise the same things. In The Dissolve, Scott Tobias complained that “the audience has little to do but wallow in amorality”, and Alonso Duralde concurred in The Wrap: “[Coppola] neither explains nor excuses nor extols nor excoriates these kids”. He comes desperately close to recognising that “said repetition was meant as a point” before hitting against the walls of his imagination of what a film can and should be. He can only meekly shrug it off as “not working”, without seeming to understand what it was working towards.
To be fair, Coppola was looking at her current moment, or just a few years prior to it, with an unusual clarity of a much greater distance. Few movies have made contemporary fashion look as dated as it would come to fifteen-twenty years later. But more importantly Coppola understands that to tell a story of the internet era you can’t be bound by the twentieth century conventions of great art. An incisive backstory or some great psychological motivation would only obscure the genuine emptiness of this (and our) time. There is a hole at the centre of this true story, and Coppola is brave enough to retain it.
The heists, if you want to call them that, play out without tension because they carry so little weight or meaning to these kids; they treat them just the same as a house party while their parents are away. In a lot of ways they’re just normal teenagers. They have a feeling of immortality—and no consequences—that their death drive constantly pushes up against. When Marc (Israel Broussard) and Chloe (Claire Julien) are speeding down the street singing “live fast, die young” they seem, on some level, to be willing the oncoming car crash.
As Richard Brody said in The New Yorker, “[the teenagers] don’t have a lucidly political bone in their bodies”, and so the best explanation Marc can come up for the motivations of their mysterious ring leader Rebecca (Katie Chang) is that she wanted the lifestyle that “everybody wants”; that she’s no different from anyone else. But when she looks in the mirror of her fashion icon Lindsey Lohan and puts on her perfume, you can see Rebecca willing herself to see anything else looking back at her, you can see the profundity of her emptiness.
© 2013 - A24
There are only a few moments when Coppola gives a glimpse under the layers of irony and unreality, the most pronounced and terrifying is when Sam (Taissa Farmiga) finds a gun at Megan Fox’s house. It becomes quickly obvious that, since she’s willing to aim a possibly loaded gun at her friends just to piss them off, she might shoot them for equally little reason. These kids are less than normal, they are blank. So much so that Coppola blurs the lines between them, as it’s never clear which people and how many of them are in the Bling Ring at any one time; the group seems to be in constant and arbitrary flux. They are clear surfaces off which their culture can perfectly reflect.
In a world, Brody continues, that “detaches effect from cause [...] they depict only the outcomes”. The “beautiful, gorgeous things” that the Ring steals, in this reality, have a magical quality. They can transform you into something else, something greater: a celebrity. Is there really much more to being one than the things you own and the parties you go to? In the reality TV era that the film depicts, and in a certain ways now, perhaps not.
The only character that isn’t portrayed with a sympathetic emptiness is Nicki. Emma Watson’s performance is big and attention-grabbing—her prissy performativity has never been put to better use—and she gets most of the best lines. Though many of them are direct quotes from the original Vanity Fair article written by Nancy Jo Sales, Coppola chose to change the character’s name as she did with all the others, but in those cases it further abstracts and de-personalizes them. Nicki is in some ways meaningfully different from Alexis Neiers, even if they share an egotistical, ditzy demeanor.
Surprisingly, Neiers didn’t parlay her infamy from these robberies into a media career—she was already filming a reality show for E! when she was arrested. She was less an exploiter than she was exploited: in the appalling and often inaccurate true crimes series (the lowest form of art) The Real Bling Ring, Gennifer Gardiner and Amber Mazzola, two of the producers of Neiers’ show Pretty Wild, snicker about how good the arrest was for the show and evasively giggle about recreating that undoubtedly upsetting moment. They did, and still do, care so little about their subject that they don’t bother to even fein empathy.
Nicki is much easier to laugh at and ironically celebrate as she cooly calculates and transparently turns her infamy into fame, if there’s any real distinction to be made between the two. She becomes symbolic of the way things are about to change. The door she opens, to the accessibility of the celebrity lifestyle, stays wide open behind her.
© 2013 - A24
Marc talks about getting eight-hundred friend requests after he got arrested (and accepting every one of them) but those numbers are nothing today. I have more followers than that. Having to accept them is antiquated and only a limitation on the attention you can receive. Twitter and Instagram and TikTok are all public facing, and so they become brands to be managed. Jessica’s wish came true, but the monkey’s paw curls: everyone lives like they’re a celebrity online, but that’s isolated from the material gains, from the beautiful, gorgeous things. To account for that loss, everything else has to be absorbed into your personal brand. We follow Nicki’s lead, where every lesson learned is a way to center yourself and suck more into your orbit. Everyone and everything is just another part of your story.
Esmé Holden is a film essayist from Manchester, UK. You can read more of her writing on substack.