Marc is the new dude at school, eager to carve out a place for himself and settle in. He’s immediately befriended by the aforementioned Rebecca, a razor-jawed queen bee who divides her time between stealing cocaine out of parked cars, staring at photos of Lindsay Lohan like a rabid hound, and just generally being a sociopathic ice sculpture. Rounding out Marc and Rebecca’s merry band of misfit dicks is Evil Hermione; a blonde girl named Chloe who is the least worst; and a fifth girl who is utterly unmemorable until about an hour in, when suddenly she cracks like a whip and turns Bling Ring into a horror film for ten agonizing minutes. Oh and also sometimes Gavin Rossdale is there, still having that haircut.
One afternoon, Rebecca has an epiphany: When celebrities go out of town, you can go to their houses, poop in their toilets, and take their diamonds. You can find out when celebrities are out of town because there’s an entire industry (called “the internet”) devoted to tracking the precise movements of celebrities at all times, and, apparently, no celebrities ever lock the back door by the pool! Perfect crime! Once the kids start slipping through sliding glass doors and returning to their suburban McMansions with fistfuls of Orlando Bloom’s Rolexes, they cannot stop. Their motivations differ—Evil Hermione wants luxury, Marc wants acceptance, Rebecca wants to get in close and wear celebrity like a skin-suit—but they’re all instantly addicted.
Inside Lohan’s palatial closet, Rebecca stares at herself in the mirror, haughty and entitled and draped in Lohan’s jewelry. Every cell in her body radiates: “I deserve this. This is mine. I matter.” That’s the misconception at the crux of the Bling Ring. You can make yourself famous—the Bling Ring kids are undeniably famous now. But shortcuts aren’t real. Real magic isn’t real. The Secret (around which Evil Hermione’s mom has based and entire home-schooling curriculum) isn’t real. Touching Lindsay Lohan’s stuff doesn’t make you Lindsay Lohan, pantomiming importance doesn’t make you important, and you don’t get to just skip to the end and matter without going through the long, grueling steps that make a person actually matter. Sure, show business traffics in artifice, and smoke and mirrors can make an Audrina Patridge, but the fact is that you can’t steal genuine significance.
In a police interrogation room, Rebecca asks, “Did you speak to any of the victims?” For a split second you anticipate—finally—that you might hear some empathy from this sharp, icy diamond child. And then, of course, it’s, “What did Lindsay say?” About me. What did Lindsay say about me. At the time, in fact, Lindsay was locked up for her own crimes—her own shortcuts, her own entitlement, her own glamorous invincibility. Just another rich kid who feels above the law because she’s not the “kind of person” (i.e. poor/brown) who generally experiences consequences in our country. Sigh. One exhausting thing about The Bling Ring—there’s almost no one to root for.
But exhausting or not, The Bling Ring might be the most perfect encapsulation of baseless entitlement and blind privilege since The Hills. (I genuinely like The Hills, for the record. But it’s more of a thought experiment about polished nothingness than a purposeful piece of art.) And while I certainly don’t think stories about mostly rich, mostly white kids ought to dominate our culture anygoddamnfuckingmore, I do think that indictments of celebrity worship and the aggressive dismantling of privilege have an increasingly important role to play. And Sofia Coppola (herself a richer rich kid than any of the Bling Ringers) can mock the shit out of some privilege.
