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The Bling Ring
Jan. 20th, 2020 02:53 pmI discovered last night that The Bling Ring is now streaming on Netflix in the US, so of course I had to watch it, which means that now I've seen all of Sofia Coppola's film!
The movie grew from an article in Vanity Fair, "The Suspects Wore Louboutins," about a series of robberies on celebrities' houses in the Hollywood Hills, which were carried out by a bunch of local teenagers who seem to have been driven as much by their fascination with celebrity culture as by the monetary value of the objects they stole.
This article also spawned a book (the book and the movie seemed to have evolved concurrently, rather than one developing from the other), which I read a few years ago. I'm pretty sure I wrote a review, but I can't find it; however, I remember that I found it very frustrating that the author seemed to have such a shallow, surface-level view of the criminals. It was like she had blown her article up into a book without finding enough information to justify it.
In a way Coppola's The Bling Ring has the same problem, but she turns that shallowness into an asset: that very shallowness is key to the crimes. A bunch of celebrity-obsessed teenagers realized that celebrities often left their houses full of amazing designer clothes unlocked and unguarded, and broke in so they could steal a bunch of stuff but also just to bask in that celebrity lifestyle that they loved to watch and read about. The only thing approaching a deeper motive was the desire to look cool: the ringleaders wanted to impress their friends, so they invited more people into the robberies. And nobody involved had any real understanding of the possible consequences.
It occurs to me that one of the hallmarks of Coppola's work is this grasp of the pettiness of human motivations - the fact that sometimes the motives underlying bad actions are things that seem flimsy and insufficient to an outsider. You try to grasp what's driving her characters, but even when you think you've got it there's a sense of incredulity: surely there must be more to it than that?
Coppola's other hallmark (as I've now seen her entire filmography, it's clearly time for me to generalize wildly) is an interest in stuff, in the physical objects of our lives. I've seen this described as an interest in excess or luxury, and that's definitely a recurring theme (generally paired with a sense of hollowness: in Coppola's work, wealth and luxury enable people to escape from developing an inner self).
But even in The Virgin Suicides, which doesn't take place in any particular luxury, you see the overriding interest in the objects the Lisbon girls surround themselves with, the clothes they wear, Cecilia's diary as a beautiful object, almost a holy book, an illuminated manuscript that the boys study closely in hopes of coming to understand the secrets of girls. The moment that comes closest to explaining the titular suicides is the scene where Lux's mother forces Lux to burn her own records: in destroying her things, she's destroying herself.
The movie grew from an article in Vanity Fair, "The Suspects Wore Louboutins," about a series of robberies on celebrities' houses in the Hollywood Hills, which were carried out by a bunch of local teenagers who seem to have been driven as much by their fascination with celebrity culture as by the monetary value of the objects they stole.
This article also spawned a book (the book and the movie seemed to have evolved concurrently, rather than one developing from the other), which I read a few years ago. I'm pretty sure I wrote a review, but I can't find it; however, I remember that I found it very frustrating that the author seemed to have such a shallow, surface-level view of the criminals. It was like she had blown her article up into a book without finding enough information to justify it.
In a way Coppola's The Bling Ring has the same problem, but she turns that shallowness into an asset: that very shallowness is key to the crimes. A bunch of celebrity-obsessed teenagers realized that celebrities often left their houses full of amazing designer clothes unlocked and unguarded, and broke in so they could steal a bunch of stuff but also just to bask in that celebrity lifestyle that they loved to watch and read about. The only thing approaching a deeper motive was the desire to look cool: the ringleaders wanted to impress their friends, so they invited more people into the robberies. And nobody involved had any real understanding of the possible consequences.
It occurs to me that one of the hallmarks of Coppola's work is this grasp of the pettiness of human motivations - the fact that sometimes the motives underlying bad actions are things that seem flimsy and insufficient to an outsider. You try to grasp what's driving her characters, but even when you think you've got it there's a sense of incredulity: surely there must be more to it than that?
Coppola's other hallmark (as I've now seen her entire filmography, it's clearly time for me to generalize wildly) is an interest in stuff, in the physical objects of our lives. I've seen this described as an interest in excess or luxury, and that's definitely a recurring theme (generally paired with a sense of hollowness: in Coppola's work, wealth and luxury enable people to escape from developing an inner self).
But even in The Virgin Suicides, which doesn't take place in any particular luxury, you see the overriding interest in the objects the Lisbon girls surround themselves with, the clothes they wear, Cecilia's diary as a beautiful object, almost a holy book, an illuminated manuscript that the boys study closely in hopes of coming to understand the secrets of girls. The moment that comes closest to explaining the titular suicides is the scene where Lux's mother forces Lux to burn her own records: in destroying her things, she's destroying herself.
