Choose Your Dream: The Bling Ring's (2013) Wasteland of Teenage Idolatry

The Bling Ring (Sophia Coppola, 2013)
It is such an unusual and shocking thing: bored teenagers of privilege sneaking into the homes of particular celebrities and stealing their clothes.  If it seems foolish and vapid and narcissistic, it is.  But such is the culture of celebrity idolatry America has manufactured, and such is the hope of wildest dream fulfillment bestowed upon it's children by well-meaning but misguided parents.  Sophia Coppola sees all of it.  And instead of building a tired, pointed and moralistic tirade against it, she has crafted a brilliant observational satire that exposes the complex sociological consequences that enable not only the existence of something like TMZ, but the ubiquity of it's tabloid interests.  She also finds a more frightening cause lurking below the surface.
Coppola begins her film with teenagers.  One might call Rebecca and Mark troubled teens because they are at an alternative school and have a sordid expulsion history, but Coppola will not allow us to co-opt their clichéd histories as the explanation for their crimes.  Rebecca finds it fun to rob; Mark goes along for the ride.  We will soon meet sociological opposites, Nicki, Sam and Chloe, a group of home-schooled teens adopted by Laurie, an active mom who wants to instill in her girls a sense of social positivism and be-the-change activism.  "What qualities do you guys admire about Angelina Jolie?" she asks, trying to engage them in finding a positive role model.  "Her husband," they say.  "Anything else?"  "Her hot bod," they tell her.  This is not just about the shallowness of American teenagers; this is about the ineffectual parents who have done nothing but offer them shallowness as a way of life.  As if charity should need a celebrity endorsement.

Laurie (Leslie Mann) wants to excite her girls in humanistic endeavors by giving them a positive celebrity role model, such as Angelina Jolie, who has fame, fortune, fashion and a number of charities.  Her efforts reveal the misguided intention to have her words be relevant by trumpeting selflessness while using a symbol of the polar opposite to prove its validity.  

Visually mirroring the homemade "Choose Your Dream" poster, Rebecca chooses a dream that self-reflexively admires the gaudy vanity throw pillows of Paris Hilton while coveting her clothing.

Laurie doesn't realize her efforts fall on deaf ears.  Her girls are not the rowdy classroom of apathetic or hostile inner city youth immortalized in bad films like Dangerous Minds that just need a role model; these girls are handed role models at every turn and internalize it just as superficially as it is offered to them.  They don't respect authority because their authorities have proven uninteresting.  Laurie means well, she doesn't seem disingenuous, but her approach to her girls embraces an internal materialism, accumulating good karma the way Paris Hilton accumulates shoes.  Why should they care about charity when that is something rich people do?

One of Coppola's strengths is that she is able to reconcile the erratic and undisciplined decisions of her teenage subjects without treating them as unknowing idiots or malicious, manipulative schemers.  But she also doesn't treat them purely as examples of sociological nature/nurture theories: they have agency and freely choose to rob the homes of celebrities, but they also do not understand what they are doing or even what they really want.  

One of the major criticisms lobbed against The Bling Ring by critics is that Coppola fails to create complex characters.  To me, this is one of Coppola's most brilliant observations.  Teenagers are complex.  No one denies that and I doubt Coppola would.  These teenagers are complex.  But the expression of that complexity is not found in reflexive conversation or in traditional character arcs.  The complexity is hidden, obscured by insecurity, uncertainty, vanity and emotional ignorance.  The lack of visible complexity is not about showing the vapidity of the American teenager that embraces the vapidity of American pop culture (ala Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers), it is an honest way of humanizing these characters by recognizing that they don't completely understand what they do or why, they just do it because they want to.  Or perhaps, more frighteningly, they do it because they need to.

The desire to be seen and known runs deep through The Bling Ring.  It is not enough to go into Paris Hilton's house and steal her shoes.  It must be trumpeted.  It must be added to the resume of social achievements.  A brush with fame.  It must be photographed and shared and liked on facebook.  The desire to be the dream becomes the undoing of the group as increased security and media make their task more difficult.  Others want in.  The stakes increase.  The landscape changes.  

The irony of robbing from a celebrity convicted of shoplifting is not lost on Coppola, though it is not trumpeted.  It adds to the atmosphere of the lingering notions of entitlement, boredom and teenage erraticism.  

What are we left with in the end?  Lives ruined by the desire to get something for nothing?  Not exactly.  We get magazine interviews.  Cameras.  Reality TV.  Justice is thwarted by celebrity fascination.  Infamy is just fame without talent or money.  What exactly were they thinking?  The adults all want to know what's going on.  They want an explanation.  They want to understand.  Nicki is able to step in most easily, enabled by her mother to tell the adults what they want to hear about the future of their children and how her biggest crime was being a teenager.  "It all comes back to bad choices, who you have as your friends."  

Peer pressure.  Culture.  It's not their fault.  They were young and stupid.  Nicki paid for her crime in prison and even shared a cell with Lindsay Lohan.  But she hasn't gotten to share her side of the story, though she teases it constantly.  That's just good broadcasting.  Don't tell everything in one segment that can be expanded to three.

Underneath the surface is an unwillingness by the cultural taste-makers to pass judgment on the teenagers.  They broke the law, they say.  It's wrong, sure.  But really, Paris Hilton can afford more clothes.  She shouldn't leave her key under her mat to begin with.  But how will anyone learn if constantly enabled?  A thousand social answers would never solve that one basic truth: they robbed because they wanted to.

The brilliance of the end is how easily Nicki is able to use a disassociated sound-bite philosophy of vague spiritualism and nondescript "I'm just blessed" optimism to justify herself in a way any celebrity screw-up would.  "I'm a firm believer in karma and I think the situation was attracted into my life as a huge learning lesson for me to grow and expand as a spiritual human being," she tells a slew of reporters before going into court.  "I want to lead a huge charity organization.  I want to lead a country one day, for all I know."  Spiritual acknowledgment -> (false) humility -> doing good in the future.  We have seen this a thousand times.  

We will see it again.

"Anyway, you can follow everything about me and my journey at NickiMooreForever.com."