OBSESSED (#7): The Bling Ring, Andre 3000 and the evolution of fame
This newsletter was written in 2007.
Hello, my beautiful OBSESSED babies. I am writing this while couchbound with the most horrendous cramps of my life … all thanks to my new ADD medication! How the hell did this drug get approved with, uh, horrendous period cramps as a side effect? That’d be like a team of cis women approving an ADD medication with side effects including leaky ball syndrome and penis shrinkage.
But we persist. Speaking of persisting in the face of pure devastation: I’ll be taking off the next two weeks from OBSESSED — but don’t cry! Mother will be back soon. Next week is Thanksgiving, and we’ll be hosting my family the following week. And, truthfully? I’d like a small break! So, I’ll be taking one (1) small break. I look forward to speaking with you again the week of December 4.
Until then, stay gorgeous, my queens and kings.
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LISTEN TO THIS: Andre 3000’s new ambient flute album. This is not a drill! The dude’s back, he’s transcendent, and he’s chasing his joy wherever it may lead him (in this case, toward a giant pile of flutes).
READ THIS: “After Barbie, Greta Gerwig Has No Plans to Rest,” a profile on the director by Sloane Crosley for Vanity Fair. Come for the “Barbie” insights, stay for the recollection of the time her child shat in the radiator.
I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT: The Bling Ring, 10 years later.
No Thoughts, Just Vibes
In a sundrenched, palatial Calfornian kitchen, Leslie Mann smiles serenely, standing hand in hand with her two bleary-eyed daughters. It’s morning, and it’s time for affirmations. Mann takes a deep breath. Emma Watson rolls her eyes. “My chief aim in life is to be the best person that I can be for the greater good of the planet and everyone who walks on it,” Mann declares proudly, having just summoned her hungover daughters moments earlier by shouting, “Girls! Time for your Adderall!”
This is pretty early on in “The Bling Ring”: Sophia Coppola’s 2013 film about a gang of wealthy, fame-obsessed Calabasas teens who used social media to track celebrities’ whereabouts so they can rob their homes. When “The Bling Ring” first came out, reviews were mixed. The general consensus was: this is stylish as hell, but lacks depth. It doesn’t offer much insight into the teens’ inner world. We see their dead-eyed fawning over Balmain and Telfar in the mansions they plundered, their dead-eyed gyrations in nightclubs … and not much else.
This is precisely what makes “The Bling Ring” a cozy, perfectly shallow rewatch 10 years after its release.
Why? For lots of reasons. Maybe it’s because we’re living through so many preventable consequences from the actions of greedy, shortsighted billionaires and psychopaths: climate change, AI, housing crises, the creation of Jack Harlow LLC. Maybe it’s because, in some ways, it’s never been easier to see people sacrificing massive chunks of their lives generating endless streams of content, all in the naked hope of being even a little bit famous. Or perhaps it’s the ways the rich and famous seems so utterly aloof and detached from our increasingly terrifying realities, whether it’s Kim Kardashian telling women to “get your fucking ass up and work” or Jared Leto meditating through the first 12 days of COVID.
All these things make “The Bling Ring” an especially prescient rewatch, too. It’s not hard to watch a bunch of rich people who think they're indestructible absolutely nosedive into getting their asses handed to them. (To be clear: I’m generally pro-thief, but anti-entitlement. There is a difference!)
“The Bling Ring” is also a warm, sugary bubble bath of early aughts pop culture: RAZR phones, Audrina Patridge, low-rise jeans (which, when worn by Emma Watson’s Nikki, reveal a hilarious string of teeny tiny stars tattooed above her crotch). It’d be less escapist if our demon teens wore giant Balenciaga shirts, huffed Elfbars and were glued to their iPhones.
But when these teens take flash photos with their chunky digital cameras, it takes you back to a bygone planet. One where insufferable rich teenagers are just the fun kind of insufferable, not the distressing kind of insufferable, because their cool buzzcuts and stick-and-pokes belie their weirdly libertarian views on vaccines.
“The Bling Ring” takes place in 2008, when reality TV was just starting to rewrite centuries-old rules about fame. Before reality TV, you typically had to be some sort of public figure — an athlete, entertainer, artist, businessperson, politician — to become famous. Then, in 2006, “The Real Housewives of Orange County” premiered on Bravo, and “The Hills” premiered on MTV. In 2007, “Keeping Up With The Kardashians” premiered on E!. Suddenly, some of America’s biggest pop culture figures seemed … kind of normal? They weren’t movie stars or rock stars. They sat around their kitchen islands, bickering with one another over takeout salads and doing absolutely nothing. They made fame seem accessible, and people got ravenous for it.
Now? I don’t know. I worry this serves major Boomer luddite energy, but it feels like TikTok is heralding another transformation of fame, no? Just like there weren’t famous reality TV stars in the early 2000s, there haven’t always been schoolteachers* best known for crushing the toosie slide (I have no idea what I’m talking about). Once again, fame has never seemed so accessible. And it feels like more people than ever are chasing it.
The real-life events depicted in “The Bling Ring” easily could’ve lent themselves to some cutting, incisive satire, like “Veep” or “In The Loop” — honestly, the shit I nerd out over — with joke-dense dialogue and storylines that must be diligently paid attention to, lest you miss a ton of poetic payoffs in the third act. Instead, “The Bling Ring” foregoes that in favor of slick one-liners and glossy sequences of rich teens being rich. That leaves lots of missed satirical opportunities on the table. But for a smooth-brained rewatch, that’s all you need. Give me 60 seconds of smirking brats sauntering down Rodeo Drive with Kanye West’s “Power” throbbing in the background. I’ll save the thinking for another day.
*the most deserving people of fame and riches
toosie slide toosie slide too-sie SLIDE