There are few films so of their time as Sofia Coppola’s 2013 satire The Bling Ring. It was the year of the selfie. The year Kanye proposed to Kim. The year Lorde ruptured the charts with a fantasy of rococo wealth and Grey Goose. The Bling Ring not only captured this zeitgeist but also predicted the long-term effects of social media’s Valencia-hued glare on celebrity culture. And how did Coppola do this? She took us back to 2008.
In the era when reality television became king, a group of malcontent teenagers wreaked havoc on the Hollywood Hills, burglarising the McMansions of multiple celebrities. The gang targeted stars who freely advertised their vacant homes when promoting their whereabouts on social media amid the halcyon days of Facebook and Myspace. The teens stole millions of dollars’ worth of goods from the likes of Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom and Paris Hilton; the latter famously kept a key under her doormat.
The saga – and the subsequent arrest of the teenagers – became the subject of an infamous Vanity Fair feature by Nancy Jo Sales, which Coppola adapted into a meditation on the (literal) trials and tribulations of super rich kids. Known for her fascination with the interior lives of young women and the exteriority of excess, Coppola finds perfect subjects in the members of The Bling Ring. The teenagers are surrounded by images of themselves – in mirrors, cameras, the reflection of a stolen pair of sunglasses – and yet no one appears as a fully formed being, merely a mannequin for a Hervé Léger bandage dress. Blinded by the seductive light of a paparazzi flash, Coppola invites us to survey the teens as they scramble in the darkness for a stolen bag and a sense of belonging. They start off stealing street style inspo; they end up stealing handfuls of jewellery.
Despite her signature eye for beauty, The Bling Ring is perhaps Coppola’s ugliest film. Beneath the digital jag and fluorescent beams of club neon, Coppola narrows her focus on to the ecosystem in which the ring were born and bred – immensely privileged, but still on the fringes of ‘true’ celebrity.
Other film-makers may have painted a tale of trifling villainy; Coppola, meanwhile, extends empathy toward her adolescent characters – merely a product, she suggests, of the rabid capitalism of the time. It’s no coincidence the robberies coincided with the global financial crisis. If the big banks could get bailed out, then why couldn’t a teen get away with stealing a millionaire’s Rolex? You don’t have to be starving to want to eat the rich.
A decade after its release, the film remains resonant for its thesis that contemporary selfhood is inseparable from canny branding. The two collide in Emma Watson’s era-defining performance as the clique’s most memeable member: Nicki Moore, whose Adderall-laced line readings and Juicy Couture tracksuits land with the subtlety of a Jägerbomb. There is nothing remotely natural or even believable about Watson’s performance – one could argue her work here is Brechtian. “[Nicki is] superficial, materialistic, vain, amoral,” Watson said in a 2013 interview “I really hated her.”
The Bling Ring, suitably, closes on Watson’s vacant stare, promoting a website where she will tell her “side of the story”. When stealing fails, we can always turn to that most lucrative of products: ourselves.
The Bling Ring is available to rent on iTunes and Amazon in Australia and the UK, and is streaming on Max in the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
