On The Bling Ring

Just two posts ago the idea of celebrity was examined in This is the End with some incorporation of Richard Dyer’s star theory. With The Bling Ring, Sophia Coppola explores what Dyer could not, for it focuses on an obsession with celebrity that is a construct of the last fifteen years: a fascination with celebrity that transcends traditional forms of entertainment.

In The Bling Ring, celebrities are not famous because of what they bring to film or even because of their intertextual representations; they are commodities, lifestyles to be bought into that the celebrities themselves are, at times, as guilty of perpetuating as are those that obsess over them (especially the reality TV stars that feature).

Coppola’s film is incredibly precise in how it portrays what is a growing trend (problem) in society and traces the issue back to gossip magazines, reality TV and the start of our celebrity obsessed culture. This is a very contemporary representation of youth (a youth full of blind confidence and maturity) and it may not translate to an audience even one generation older than the film’s protagonists. In addition, the narrative becomes repetitive and this is not Coppola’s best film. But it may however be her most pertinent for it addresses an issue accurately that we are in the middle of rather than relying on hindsight.