Gotham Diary:
Bling Bang
27 June 2013

It was time to get out of the house for a bit, so I went to see an early-afternoon showing of The Bling Ring. It’s a powerful and unsettling movie, nothing like the whimsical trifle that I was expecting. On the page — not in Vanity Fair; I didn’t read Nancy Jo Sales’s piece, but somewhere more recent, written about the movie — the thieves and their parents sounded laughably fatuous, but onscreen they’re much darker than that. They’re zombies. They look like human beings but have lost all moral grounding; they’re exactly what conservative social critics have been dreading since the French Revolution. But conservatives have only themselves to thank, pushing free markets as they do into every sphere. Coppola’s clutch of young wannabes live in a world sandblasted by mere celebrity.

The story of the bling ring is compelling because it poses an uncertainty: when kids who don’t really need anything help themselves to bits and pieces of the monstrously swollen wardrobes and accumulations accessories of people who are rich and famous for being rich and famous, just how bad is it? We allow teenagers a latitude in minor crime — think of vandalsim — that we don’t tolerate in adults. It’s always obvious that the girls and boys in The Bling Ring have greatly exceeded that latitude, but they have done so in a way that obscures the limits.  Their victims practically invite them into their homes: doors never need to be forced, nor houses broken into. (Negligence seems to have taken the place of smog.)  And only once is theft followed by thief-like behavior (Marc, the semi-closeted gay boy who, unlike his accomplices, seems to be in possession of good sense, sells some stolen watches to a nightclub owner/fence). The thoughtlessness with which the girls use Facebook to post pictures of themselves wearing their loot approaches genuine innocence. Surely these pranksters don’t belong in prison? (The fact that some of them do go to prison merely continues the senselessness of American life.) And while the kleptomania here on display is unusual, the dangerous joyriding is not — not nearly unusual enough.

Sophia Coppola is an impressionist filmmaker rather than a plotter. She creates very powerful moods and lets their pressure power the drama. In The Bling Ring, there is never any doubt that the crime spree will be stopped, but, when it is, Coppola intensifies the catastrophe by inflicting swarms of briskly determined police officers on hitherto unsuspecting parents, creating a mood so violently different that the change in atmosphere has the impact of a surprising plot twist. The horror of having one’s home searched is nightmarish rather than inevitable; given the carefree boisterousness of the teenagers’ escapades, the arrival of the law is much more harrowing than we might have expected. (I’m not quite sure how Coppola pulls this off, but the visitations are more humbling than any I’ve seen in the movies; there’s something very real about them, as if the LAPD itself had been called in to stage them.)

Leslie Mann, who plays the airhead mother of one of the girls, injects a note of real comedy into the movie: every time she opens her mouth, the movie becomes a satire. But her daughter, played by the amazing Emma Watson, is one of the most vicious human beings to have squirmed onscreen, and her best friend, with whom she has shared a bed for years — played by Talissa Farmiga — seems wholly unmoored and possibly sociopathic. Coppola is right to direct our sympathies to Marc, who has clearly allowed himself to be swept up his friends’ wrongdoing because they accept him as himself. Israel Broussard plays Marc as closeted gay man, not as a caricatured pansy; stretched out reading in bed, wearing jeans, T shirt, and pink stilettos, Marc looks incongruous but not implausible. And touching, somehow, rather than funny. His dress-ups are as earnest as anything men do.

The adult males in the film — those who don’t work for the LAPD, anyway — don’t seem to be gifted with alert concern for their children, but I wish that Coppola had shown a bit more of them, because the slightness of their parts exposes the film to exploitation by patriarchs, as Exhibit A for the argument that strong fathers would have precluded its escapades. Such tiresomeness ought not to be facilitated.

***

As I went down to collect the mail, the elevator stopped at the seventh floor, one of the other floors that Kathleen and I have lived on in this building. As I almost always do, I idly noted the fact before the doors opened. When they did, I saw an unfamiliar burly man in black, and the edge of a gurney. My curiosity on autopilot, I leaned forward to see who might be stretched out on it, but that was not possible, because the bag was zipped from one end to the other. Nor were there any tubes or bottles dangling from above. There was no above. There was just the body bag on the gurney. Everything black, except for the attendants’ FDNY badges.

The attendants, seeing that there were two passengers on the elevator, decided to wait for the next one. When I was coming back upstairs, they appeared in the elevator that had just come down to the lobby. The gurney was tilted at an angle, the better to accommodate the attendants and, possibly, a passenger. You don’t tilt gurneys that are carrying living people — as if I needed further proof of someone’s death.

The surprising thing is that I don’t recollect ever seeing such a departure before, despite the size of the place and the ubiquity of the elderly. I’ve seen a few very sick people who, as they were carried out, certainly appeared to be at death’s door, but they hadn’t passed through it yet. Perhaps the zipped-up body bag is new. Perhaps the Fire Department used to conduct these procedures at quiet hours. Was the body not being conveyed to an undertaker? Questions, questions! Not to mention the identity of the late tenant — I wouldn’t mention that even if I knew.