"If God is masculine, idols are always feminine," says Baudrillard in Seduction. "To be sure," he goes on, "seduction in the age of the masses is no longer like that of ancient mythology… In these seduction is hot, while that of our modern idols is cold, being at the intersection of two cold mediums, that of the image and that of the masses." (95)
The Bling Ring is an ode to that cold seduction. Set in 2009, it revels in the vulgar excess that defined the times (Yes I'm a shopaholic, I'm a Gucci addict / Can't take my visas from me, gotta support my habit, sings Reema Major on the faultless soundtrack). Paparazzi pictures, red carpet interviews, and gossip columns flash across the screen as we follow a troupe of fame-obsessed teenagers on a spree to burglarize the homes of tabloid stars. As they gain notoriety, surveillance cam footage and news stories emerge alongside the glossy montage. The once voyeurs become the subjects of their own admiration—an infamy that ushers in the new new age of celebrity.
Despite its flashy tabloid exterior, there’s a purity at the heart of Sofia Coppola’s crime thriller. Though she is brutal in her characterization of the bling ring as spoiled kids who grew up in the foothills of fame, she earnestly joins them in their heedless celebration of glamour. Not a cop, but a confidant—allowing me, allowing you too, to be seduced alongside them.
Coppola, known for her refined taste, goes full tack for this feature. Her garish depiction of Hollywood and her fealty to the teenagers' crass desires were poorly received. Some critics (who clearly know nothing about having a good time) characterized the film as amoral, lacking condemnation and—most frustratingly—shallow. The Hollywood Reporter snidely remarked that Coppola "seems far too at home in the world she depicts to offer a rewarding critique of it." But the film is a surveillance of the surface, and I prefer it this way—made by someone who scraped their knees on the same ground.
In the featurette, Making The Bling Ring, production designer Anne Ross shares the foundational image of the film’s visual language: beige Calabasas McMansions, so sunbleached they are almost blank. Baudrillard calls this "light without origin… water without depth… something other than the sun shines on them, a brighter star without an atmosphere" (62). If Baudrillard had gone to the club, maybe he’d know that this is just 3000W strobe.
The glittering abyss of the nightclubs where the ring now bide their time is a mirror of the nowhere beige in which they were raised, making this a story about seeking surreal familiarity rather than escape. Baudrillard describes the trompe l’oeil (or enchanted image) as the "scraps of social life" (60). “They do not describe a familiar reality, as does a still life. They describe a void, an absence, the absence of every representational hierarchy that organizes the elements of a tableau”. It's this very blankness that allows for a pure desire to be the subject of the film; depicting the pursuit of excess, glamour, and fame not as means to an end but fortheir own sake.
In my dreams, Sofia appears as a rapturous Bacchante. She is dancing naked at the center of her lush estate grounds, spectacularly drunk off her namesake rosé, basking in the heavenly white light of a Jenny Holzer-esque LED sign that reads: This is An Artifice and I Live Here. This is not a film about transgression but rather, of habitation. Sofia knows that in Hollywood, everyone is born a star.
The ringleader, Rebbeca Ahn (Katie Chang) studies fashion blogs and gossip mags with a devotional fervour, cataloging all the minor deities and their little totems: Lindsay Lohan in Herve Leger, Paris Hilton and her Louboutins, Rachel Bilson’s collection of Chanel Mademoiselles. "Rebecca's, like, biggest conquest was Lindsay Lohan… she was her ultimate fashion Icon," Marc (Israel Broussard), Rebecca’s gay bestie and accomplice, reminisces once the glitter has settled.
The idea here is so simple, it is almost insulting. Coppola herself summed it up succinctly: it's a movie about "girls trying on other people's stuff to find themselves." But I think it is something more sacred, though not quite holy. Hegel calls fetishism the crudest form of religion. It is “the religion of sensuous desire," a fantasy that deceives the worshiper into believing that the object will bend to comply with his desires, discarded once it is proved impotent. The celebrity homes the kids rob are cathedrals of discarded wealth, piles of excess clutter every corner; so scarcely precious that no one even notices when they go missing. But the bling ring’s wide-eyed gaze re-enchants these objects, restoring their status as visible divinity. What is this, if not idolatry?
As the troupe shrieks and clamours over a 1 of 1 Birkin or laments over Paris’ Louboutins that are too big to wear, what they are enchanted by is a singularity. Nicki (Emma Watson) and Sam (Tessa Farmiga) fight over a yellow rhinestone dress, frustrated and defeated when they find out there is, in fact, a second. It is a totem that has lost its charm.
We live in a disenchanted culture. Despite the resurgence of many of these same styles (notably, Y2K and Indie Sleaze), I find the devotion to excess embodied by The Bling Ring to be absent today. There’s an earnestness to Nicki mixing animal prints (despite Marc’s dissuasion) or Paris’ ridiculous shrine to herself that cannot quite be reconstructed—for emulating the past requires one to examine their desires.
Though Charli XCX’s messy party girl persona attempts to pay homage to the socialites of this era, it is never without a wink or a nudge; only as fatal as a staged car crash can be. On Fridays, I follow suit in this restrained recklessness: smudging my Kohl with a precision brush, upping the exposure on my selfie since the flash on my digital camera is not strong enough, singing along to boisterous club songs with a self-effacing smirk so that they know that I know that it's a joke.
So they don’t make glitter that chunky anymore, and the leopard print that once roared now only whimpers. The searing heat of seduction has gone cold. Can we ever return to an uncomplicated hedonism?
In some ways, the 2010s were the beginning of the end; the rumblings of a reality so thoroughly mediated by culture and media that one's relationship to it becomes reflexive. The Bling Ring knew something no one else did yet: who you are on the inside does not matter. You are nothing more than how you are perceived—though nothing less either. You are the brief burst of heat emitted by the flash, the pulse that is caught and amplified by the microphone. You are a tabloid story in-waiting, a star who must will its own birth. Lindsay got a DUI so I got a DUI too.
There is no arc of justice (whatever that even means anymore) to follow in The Bling Ring, but there is conviction—the kind so potent that it is usually relegated to the realm of dream, fantasy, or devotion. Would it be that ridiculous to say that the first stans were just called saints? In the age of overexposure, where fame has been diffused, that relation is now an archaic one. I have this thing called a Phone and it is a shrine to myself. The singularity of fame has been forever lost; for there is no populist model of glamour, nor any democratic excess. There is no need to raid celebrity closets when they lay it all bare. So we steal from the past, rehashing a time when fame was something tangible, but just a little out of grasp.
"If God is masculine, idols are always feminine," says Baudrillard in Seduction. "To be sure," he goes on, "seduction in the age of the masses is no longer like that of ancient mythology… In these seduction is hot, while that of our modern idols is cold, being at the intersection of two cold mediums, that of the image and that of the masses." (95)
The Bling Ring is an ode to that cold seduction. Set in 2009, it revels in the vulgar excess that defined the times (Yes I'm a shopaholic, I'm a Gucci addict / Can't take my visas from me, gotta support my habit, sings Reema Major on the faultless soundtrack). Paparazzi pictures, red carpet interviews, and gossip columns flash across the screen as we follow a troupe of fame-obsessed teenagers on a spree to burglarize the homes of tabloid stars. As they gain notoriety, surveillance cam footage and news stories emerge alongside the glossy montage. The once voyeurs become the subjects of their own admiration—an infamy that ushers in the new new age of celebrity.
Despite its flashy tabloid exterior, there’s a purity at the heart of Sofia Coppola’s crime thriller. Though she is brutal in her characterization of the bling ring as spoiled kids who grew up in the foothills of fame, she earnestly joins them in their heedless celebration of glamour. Not a cop, but a confidant—allowing me, allowing you too, to be seduced alongside them.
Coppola, known for her refined taste, goes full tack for this feature. Her garish depiction of Hollywood and her fealty to the teenagers' crass desires were poorly received. Some critics (who clearly know nothing about having a good time) characterized the film as amoral, lacking condemnation and—most frustratingly—shallow. The Hollywood Reporter snidely remarked that Coppola "seems far too at home in the world she depicts to offer a rewarding critique of it." But the film is a surveillance of the surface, and I prefer it this way—made by someone who scraped their knees on the same ground.
In the featurette, Making The Bling Ring, production designer Anne Ross shares the foundational image of the film’s visual language: beige Calabasas McMansions, so sunbleached they are almost blank. Baudrillard calls this "light without origin… water without depth… something other than the sun shines on them, a brighter star without an atmosphere" (62). If Baudrillard had gone to the club, maybe he’d know that this is just 3000W strobe.
The glittering abyss of the nightclubs where the ring now bide their time is a mirror of the nowhere beige in which they were raised, making this a story about seeking surreal familiarity rather than escape. Baudrillard describes the trompe l’oeil (or enchanted image) as the "scraps of social life" (60). “They do not describe a familiar reality, as does a still life. They describe a void, an absence, the absence of every representational hierarchy that organizes the elements of a tableau”. It's this very blankness that allows for a pure desire to be the subject of the film; depicting the pursuit of excess, glamour, and fame not as means to an end but fortheir own sake.
In my dreams, Sofia appears as a rapturous Bacchante. She is dancing naked at the center of her lush estate grounds, spectacularly drunk off her namesake rosé, basking in the heavenly white light of a Jenny Holzer-esque LED sign that reads: This is An Artifice and I Live Here. This is not a film about transgression but rather, of habitation. Sofia knows that in Hollywood, everyone is born a star.
The ringleader, Rebbeca Ahn (Katie Chang) studies fashion blogs and gossip mags with a devotional fervour, cataloging all the minor deities and their little totems: Lindsay Lohan in Herve Leger, Paris Hilton and her Louboutins, Rachel Bilson’s collection of Chanel Mademoiselles. "Rebecca's, like, biggest conquest was Lindsay Lohan… she was her ultimate fashion Icon," Marc (Israel Broussard), Rebecca’s gay bestie and accomplice, reminisces once the glitter has settled.
The idea here is so simple, it is almost insulting. Coppola herself summed it up succinctly: it's a movie about "girls trying on other people's stuff to find themselves." But I think it is something more sacred, though not quite holy. Hegel calls fetishism the crudest form of religion. It is “the religion of sensuous desire," a fantasy that deceives the worshiper into believing that the object will bend to comply with his desires, discarded once it is proved impotent. The celebrity homes the kids rob are cathedrals of discarded wealth, piles of excess clutter every corner; so scarcely precious that no one even notices when they go missing. But the bling ring’s wide-eyed gaze re-enchants these objects, restoring their status as visible divinity. What is this, if not idolatry?
As the troupe shrieks and clamours over a 1 of 1 Birkin or laments over Paris’ Louboutins that are too big to wear, what they are enchanted by is a singularity. Nicki (Emma Watson) and Sam (Tessa Farmiga) fight over a yellow rhinestone dress, frustrated and defeated when they find out there is, in fact, a second. It is a totem that has lost its charm.
We live in a disenchanted culture. Despite the resurgence of many of these same styles (notably, Y2K and Indie Sleaze), I find the devotion to excess embodied by The Bling Ring to be absent today. There’s an earnestness to Nicki mixing animal prints (despite Marc’s dissuasion) or Paris’ ridiculous shrine to herself that cannot quite be reconstructed—for emulating the past requires one to examine their desires.
Though Charli XCX’s messy party girl persona attempts to pay homage to the socialites of this era, it is never without a wink or a nudge; only as fatal as a staged car crash can be. On Fridays, I follow suit in this restrained recklessness: smudging my Kohl with a precision brush, upping the exposure on my selfie since the flash on my digital camera is not strong enough, singing along to boisterous club songs with a self-effacing smirk so that they know that I know that it's a joke.
So they don’t make glitter that chunky anymore, and the leopard print that once roared now only whimpers. The searing heat of seduction has gone cold. Can we ever return to an uncomplicated hedonism?
In some ways, the 2010s were the beginning of the end; the rumblings of a reality so thoroughly mediated by culture and media that one's relationship to it becomes reflexive. The Bling Ring knew something no one else did yet: who you are on the inside does not matter. You are nothing more than how you are perceived—though nothing less either. You are the brief burst of heat emitted by the flash, the pulse that is caught and amplified by the microphone. You are a tabloid story in-waiting, a star who must will its own birth. Lindsay got a DUI so I got a DUI too.
There is no arc of justice (whatever that even means anymore) to follow in The Bling Ring, but there is conviction—the kind so potent that it is usually relegated to the realm of dream, fantasy, or devotion. Would it be that ridiculous to say that the first stans were just called saints? In the age of overexposure, where fame has been diffused, that relation is now an archaic one. I have this thing called a Phone and it is a shrine to myself. The singularity of fame has been forever lost; for there is no populist model of glamour, nor any democratic excess. There is no need to raid celebrity closets when they lay it all bare. So we steal from the past, rehashing a time when fame was something tangible, but just a little out of grasp.