Mikael D.Brkicand Mathew Sova with

Alex Gartenfeld T H E B L I N G R I N G

Bruce Hainley KASP R PA S A K S A I B O T Egija Inzule Hannes Loichinger Reality as Moralism by Alex Gartenfeld

hat was it like when the Bling Ring went Wclubbing in Hollywood together? 18-year- old Alexis Neiers says she’s ‘known’ for hanging out with Emile Hirsch and Leon- ardo DiCaprio. Does she have a thing for jowly men? Did they picture Leonar- do DiCaprio while having sex with him?

She wouldn’t be tall enough to accom- pany them into the club but maybe, on a lonely night, she could go home with one of them. Maybe with this kind of connec- tion and numerous visits, she had a hook- up for bottle service. Did this make her feel fully realized as a woman, as an as- piring actress? Maybe, on occasion, the Ring members ran into a celebrity whose closet they’d ransacked, and maybe they commented on his or her clothes. May- be Sofia Coppola could include a scene like that in the movie — it would make for riveting dramatic irony. The kids would stand around drinking un- til 5 a.m., texting, glaring at other people coming into the bar. The maintenance was constant. They’d chatter with other regu- lars. The first few times they came to the club, they had to wait a while to get in, and one of the girls hoisted her bag a little further forward on her shoulder.

Sometimes, a#er they had pawned a few things, they would treat themselves to a room at the Chateau Marmont. Only Ra- chel Lee, the ring’s leader, got to put on a sleep mask and stay there over night since she was the one who found their victim. Her guests and cohorts would go out of their way to make a little extra noise, so the front desk would have to call up and tell them there had been complaints. The wannabes at reception are so desperate. The chateau is attractively run-down (it al- ways was, but especially a#er the Balasz revamp), and it can be linked to the way that all kinds of ‘benign ruins’ are reacti- vated and haunted by people who want to be seen in public without going into public. For some, this run-down aesthetic reifies the global imperative to renew and ‘make work’. For others, it proves vintage rules; the lived-in look means reinvent yourself, but there will always be a record of your old self online. Stephen Dorff is staying down the hall, just like in the mov- ie — ‘He’s even staying in room 69.’ ‘He looks old, but his body looks so good.’

He did stay there during the filming of Somewhere, in the name of vérité. Coppola said of the hotel, ‘It shows you’re successful, but your friends can visit and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/8176308/LA-confidential-Sofia-Coppola-interview.html it’s not too fancy — so you’re still down- to-earth, too. It’s not super luxury at all.’2 That is to say that you’ve been entirely alienated from your friends, transformed yourself into the bourgeoisie. And you will only host people in your imperma- nent domain — your citadel, clutching your phones. ‘But it’s nice. I like to stay there,’ she continued. Somewhere is everywhere, the epicenter, Tron, a cold hard drive en- cased in a vacuum with Coppola next- door, listening through the plaster walls. own boutique lifestyle, and the way she so heavily produces her films, it’s the director wants you to ask: What is it like to become The kids in the Ring were so inept at selling Coppola herself. Even if Coppola spent the things they pilfered that their loot was more time in LA (and less time in Paris), never commodity. The police chalked their and even as a bona-fide ‘style icon’ who love of stolen celebrity clothing up to the definitely gets ‘free clothes,’ she might be eroticism of becoming someone else, liken- ‘too old’ for these kids. Her quirky beauty! ing the experience. Like Avatar, Hannibal Not blond enough. Lector, or the guy who wears a merman costume in a wading pool in his backyard. But what about the abjection? ‘Remember Seth Price, on Richard Phillips. that most of your body lies on the inside.’3 http://www.art-agenda.com/shows/richard-phillips-%E2%80%9Claw-sex-christian-society%E2%80%9D/ From the way she signifies issues from her Coppola performs the role of the artist on the outside (living in Paris) and inside, complicit, yet committed to a critical style of immersive field research. She’s the doc- tor in the jungle. As she moralized in Some- where, we have to give up the lifestyle in order to reach transcendence — i.e. no- where. Like Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, where a similar moralism is dumped unwanted into our open arms, there is no real interest in subjects’ relationship to work, or what it means for the experience and understanding of the body. The result is a bourgeois affirmation that our identity is derived from the formulation of career, while displacing ideas of work that are both more fluid and concrete. It’s also a short ride from disembodied self-destructive libertine Lux in 1999’s The labor: we have to fly out into the desert Virgin Suicides. (take mescal) and start over. Liberation is just a helicopter ride to the desert, where Boredom is style, we realized again, an you will find a lot more than two prostitutes epiphany Coppola reached a#er her brief working a pole in sync: a daughter! Life marriage to Spike Jonze. It was then that is so surprising sometimes. More substan- she wrote and directed the 2003 film Lost tial acting roles that manifest newfound in Translation, her most interesting role to self-reflexivity about the ‘real life’ lessons date because it was (more or less) an ex- one has learned. plicit self-portrait, so the brutality towards its subject matter was spread out. Once The director’s special move is to intro- she stops fiddling with her camera on the duce the close parallels between the life bed in her panties, she’s as guilty as her performed in public and the one lived on- glad-handing, photographer husband. screen. This tension usually involves an in- Marie Antoinette, 2010, was nicely infu- tense malaise that awaits an existentialist riating because it located the historic root spark. Kirsten Dunst’s laconic, depressive at which politics became pure image, and demeanor, for instance, manifests as the reduced that moment to style. If Coppola’s forthcoming The Bling Ring doesn’t get the story right, the lesson will be that when kids do not have appropri- ately famous parents — if their bourgeois moral specters of capital, whereas she and isn’t haute enough — then their aspirations her ilk have reached a perfect, sentient state are intrinsically evil. Coppola lives in Par- in which their consumption is sublimated is, so she takes interviews at the Café de behind tinted windows. The most haunting Flore. Her publicist doesn’t need to set it image in the story is the way the robbers up; the owners (who knew the surrealists) would walk backwards through the yards know her father. Coppola’s less genera- in order to avoid revealing their faces to tionally established subjects are the im- the security cameras. One would think that a walled property would have a camera on the periphery, too, but no matter: they became zombies, sure, but also, awkward sensualists, violating with their hands. The second most powerful symbol in the story: the unlocked door. Walk in and take what you like. Hansel and Gretel as legit- imators of private property. Just clipping the fence with garden shears and walking into any property you can. In LA, it evokes the labor and movement of migrant work- ers. The Bling Ring as propaganda against illegal immigrants.

But if the movie hints at the fact that we all want to be stolen from, then there is hope. That we let our whereabouts be known so that people will take our things, so that we never recover them, so that they become entirely replaceable with insurance; that they may be re-animated in tribute to us. The trailer and promotional material does not look promising. For one, the film doesn’t follow the Ring’s ‘master mind’, Lee. In- stead, it follows Alexis Neiers, who was supposed to be on a reality show promot- ing her partying in LA, but is now featured in a reality show about her legal troubles. (It’s unclear to me whether this aired.) The choice of subject could be because the http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/03/billionaire-girls-201003 script follows from Nancy Jo Sales’ arti- cle about the troupe in Vanity Fair.4 Sales seems to have entered the story through Neiers because she writes about people for whom self-promotion comes to approx- imate an art form, and because Lee, who had yet to be convicted but also probably wanted to project a mysterious façade, did not respond to interview requests. (She was later sentenced to four years in prison.) Or the story was recast because Lee is Asian, which makes it difficult to cast a movie star like Emma Watson in the lead, unless she were to play the role in yellow-face…

The Asian actress gets bottom billing on the IMDB page.

The trailer shows the exploits and inevita- ble bust of the characters, but the image we’re supposed to remember is that of Watson grinding on a friend and licking her lips with her tongue. Watson ‘hates’ her character because Neiers is obsessed with fame,5and MTV is giving the actress an award for being a ‘trailblazer’ (be- cause this movie follows up her role as someone who stands up in an SUV in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, based on a book of the same name, published by MTV.) Watson sheds her girl-next-door im- age, thus multiplying the audience’s sex- http://metro.co.uk/2013/04/02/emma-watson-bling-ring-character-is-superficial-materialistic-vain-and-amoral-3579724/ ual imagination. The Bling Ring role, she said in an interview, forced her to ‘learn to step into others’ shoes.’ Not literally. In another situation, this cliché might to al- lude to inter-class contact, but what Wat- son means is empathizing with an affluent white woman who admires celebrities like herself. The trailer is cut like a music video mon- tage, which Coppola has done before and which no longer suggests youth cul- ture. Then there appears to be a compel- ling scene of youth walking (as in Mean Girls or Kill Bill: Volume One). Such ar- chetypal clips suggest that each one of us has a strong personality, but as a group, we are capable of creating an interesting composite image.

Do the Bling Ring kids like Sleigh Bells? The trailer should have been scored by Skrillex. Harmony Korine’s wife should have been in it. The media has called Nick Prugo the rat, seeing in-person celebrities they could think because he turned coat on the others and about while they were doing it. Rachel was had apologize on ABC News wearing his best beard, and he needs her if he’s go- ugly, not-stolen clothing. ‘He confessed ing to continue skulking around the men’s to crimes we didn’t even know he commit- room at places like Wonderland. ted,’ said the cops.6‘Why would a dude be knocking off chick’s houses?’7Indeed. Sales. He identifies a one-of-a-kind Alex Perry dress at Miranda Kerr’s house. And while Vanity Fair focuses — cruelly, I suppose — on how pretty Neiers is in ‘real life,’ we never get an appraisal of Lee’s looks. (Clichés of http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/nick-prugo-accused-bling-ring-member-speaks-celebrity/story?id=9732025&page=2 pulp cinema: On top of being an ‘overly adaptive conversion to Western-style cap- italism,’ Lee is ‘the scheming lesbian.’)

Nick has a long nose and close-togeth- er eyes; his body seems pasty and pli- able, like he’d just slip into other people’s clothes. He has an appealingly unspecial look. Neiers was his ticket to Hirsch and DiCaprio, or more likely the other nor- mal-looking guys trying to get fucked a#er Kaspar and Inzule’s assignment to write Coppola — the interaction with the writer about The Bling Ring before it comes out as a class expression that manifests a hier- presumes an ambivalent relationship be- archy of remunerated service. In her inter- tween artist and ‘inspiration’ that parallels views, she’s so mysteriously wordless, so the viciousness Coppola directs toward unwilling to divulge meaning: she’s more her subjects. In Somewhere, Dorff plays expressive than we could possibly know himself, a B actor looking for someone or understand.8 to need him. Like a life coach, Coppola is there to tell him about himself.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/8176308/LA-confidential-Sofia-Coppola-interview.html A#er five years of working as an editor at Interview among other projects, Inzule wrote to me that my ‘light’ style would befit this project, a comment suggesting that in due time, my contribution would be coopt- ed and brutalized as well. Or that a com- mission to write on Kaspar’s ostensibly top- ical ‘subject’ would stand in some kind of tension with the elusive abstraction of his photographs across the spread. Perhaps inappropriately assuming that the logic of the assignment radiates from Kaspar, this mode would seem to come straight from Kaspar not only appropriates The Bling Ring’s theme and title (following Coppo- la’s impulse to cannibalize), but also the medium format frame Vanity Fair used to photograph Neiers. She’s shot from be- low while sitting in the front seat of a car, sipping a Frappuccino—caffeinating, reju- venating, re-starting. The artist’s images, by contrast, are stuttering, non-composed, discursive. With their non-composition and focus on the means of production, the pictures evoke John Miller’s ongoing ‘Middle of the Day’ whereby the artist photographs day laborers (or whoever else is unfortunate enough to be on the street) during their lunch break between 12 and 2 p.m. Here, he interprets artistic distance from his subject as an amateur photographer, or more likely a paparazzo. He may or may not be a squatter at his own location, the house Schindler built for John J. Buck,, but perched on the stoop, he might have to escape at a moment’s notice. What’s pictured is the artist’s trappings — the support for the images; his bling and his absolution. Kaspar’s images prominently feature a tripod and a light, but also the noticeably redundant economy of mate- rials — a newspaper and an iPad, a cup and mug of coffee — that raise awareness of the artist’s staging of the scene. Buck designed interiors for women’s cloth- ing stores, making this something of a shell for the engine that creates desire. In Kaspar’s last shot, we see that the house opens right onto the street, begging for at- tention. The artist dares not enter, rejecting the spectacle of celebrity how-the-other- half-lives while learning the real lesson of the Bling Ring — the eery condescension of slipping into another’s place.