The first scene of The Bling Ring is a perfect encapsulation of the film’s greatness. It opens with the clique silently breaking and entering into a celestial Hollywood Hills mansion, and at the second they start burglarizing the glitzy wares Sleigh Bells’ “Crown on the Ground” starts playing. At first you can’t tell if the bombastic, penetrating beat is in fact an alarm system going off, but after the first few seconds pass and you’ve realized it’s a song it reads like the very mechanism that’s supposed to punish their act by reporting them to authorities has joined the heist by heralding them with fanfare. It’s a film that provides a voyeuristic view into the unique trials and tribulations of coming of age in a fame-adjacent, celebrity-obsessed culture just as its protagonists are voyeurs in their idols’ homes.
The Bling Ring is one of my all time favorite movies, one I gladly watch again and again even if it’s just to put in the background for the intoxicating ambiance because I know the plot by heart. It has everything; high stakes of both fiscal and social nature and a standout soundtrack that basically gives you a contact high to match. Every element from the soundtrack to the cinematography is dripping in the alluringly artificial lustre of luxury, showcasing the petri dish of euphorically excessive consumerism that these teens inhabit. It becomes clear that the potency and pervasiveness of their environment would have made this situation inevitable if it hadn’t ended up being that group of high schoolers at those exact houses on those dates.
The glib teenagers of the Bling Ring were effectively the folk heroes of the aughts, appropriating the glitzy trappings of celebrity with wanton abandon to make their ascent in a socioeconomic stratosphere built on image. With the advent of the Internet it felt like anyone could be a celebrity, and the members of the Bling Ring were prepared to capitalize on that by leveraging their idol’s possessions as authentic costumes to approximate themselves as having reached the height of glamour.
Class critique is strongly alluded to in the narrative of The Bling Ring, even though the teenagers were born into far more affluence than most of the world. In fact, a burgeoning young adulthood lived in the periphery of celebrity could ostensibly have exacerbated the teens’ voracity for upward mobility; being close enough to touch their idols means being within tantalizing reach of achieving demigod status in their glossy microcosm built of the dogma of image and wealth. The American capitalist scammer mentality of taking what you believe to be yours through whatever means necessary reverberates throughout the entire film, displaying that the teens are perhaps unwitting byproducts of the mutations that the nascent Internet had on both the folk tale of the American scam and America’s particularly ruthless strain of capitalism. At one point in their Vanity Fair interviews after they’ve been caught (and ironically garnered celebrity in the process), Marc (played by Israel Broussard) sums it up succinctly: “America’s always had a sick fascination with a Bonnie and Clyde kind of thing.”
Above all, the film documents a pilgrimage by young disciples towards the glimmering mirage of their imagined materialist mecca. Armed with the values they’ve absorbed from coming of age in a theocracy of wealth and fame, they are writing their own prophecy by forcibly claiming the material goods that they have been taught directly and indirectly determine the substance of their personhood. Fundamentally, they are running full tilt towards somewhere that has been sold to them their entire lives but does not exist; the mythology that if one ascends to the highest echelon of wealth and fame, they will reach an oasis in which it is impossible for them to feel worthless.
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