Do You Want to Be Famous? The Bling Ring and our obsession with our own legend

Written by Georgia Balmer

Graphics by Amya Bhalla

Do you want to be famous? Deep down, if you are truly honest with yourself, the answer is probably yes. You may not dream of international stardom, but we all foster a desire to be recognized in our own lives, to have people want to listen to our stories, to laugh at the right moments, and to truly care about our passions. We all, on a small or large scale, just want to be “famous.” To be seen. Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring may appear on its surface as a flashy brash portrayal of fame-hungry teens, but when we are honest about our own pursuit of “fame” it becomes a brilliant portrayal of our own insecurities and aspirations. 

It seems a wildly improbable story. A group of LA teens who decide to rob the houses of their favorite tabloid stars and get away with it for far too long. If it were not a true story you would probably tap out. Yet, it is true. Coppola based the film on a 2010 Vanity Fair article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” which detailed the very real crime spree of a group of teenagers in 2008. Their victim list reads like a People’s who’s who, from Paris Hilton to Orlando Bloom and Miranda Kerr to Rachel Bilson. They reportedly stole an estimated $3 million in petty cash, designer clothes and personal items— including private photos of Paris Hilton. All by googling addresses and watching for event and appearance announcements to ensure their victims were out. Apparently, LA never got the memo on home security. 

Coppola’s ability to perfectly present the group’s descent from party animals to criminals is entrancing and not at all surprising, her father is Francis Ford Coppola after all. At its core, this is a film about crime, but that is easy to forget. The characters’ attitude to underage drinking, school night clubbing and wielding a stolen gun is all apathetic, each escalation is just another part of chasing the same thrill. Emma Watson’s character, Nicki Moore, shows the same excitement for dancing in a nightclub as she does twirling on Paris Hilton’s stripper pole in her home’s own club room. There is little distinction between their partying and their crime, Coppola’s use of phone cameras, surveillance tape and webcam recordings adding to the hyper-real feel of the film. This is a party gone seriously wrong, and it is seriously fun to watch. 

Mainly, because we have little empathy for these characters. It is enjoyable because we are told to not like them. Presented as fickle, self-centered ‘bad girls’ who represent the most dangerous elements of our fame-obsessed society, we have no pity for them when the consequences come. They flit across our screen, their dialogue painfully contrived, their effort to fit in and say the right thing showing how ‘uncool’ they really are. Yet, they become the ‘it’ things as the film progresses. By stealing from their own tabloid heroes, they morph into the mythology of fame they have created for themselves. When we meet Marc, played by Israel Broussard, he is the awkward bullied new boy at school who we watch ‘steal’ himself popularity and his own legend. They become heroes in the eyes of their peers and each other. In a world where Facebook is in its infancy the idea was novel, in our insta-world of 2021, it is a legend we no longer need to steal. All we need to do is post. 

Coppola was critiqued by critics for a shallow portrayal of a serious crime, and I would agree. The film is shallow, but so is fame. Every time we post on social media, we chose how to present ourselves, we chose to add to a mythology of our own lives even if we don’t aspire to A-list fame. The film shows the impact of fame on the famous, but more importantly on the watchers, admirers, and followers. The Bling Ring made the already infamous real-life teens immortal in cinematic form, literally making the watchers famous.

Yet, these were, and are, real people. Coppola presents reality as a film, reflecting the warped portrayal that reality tabloid culture presents back to us. We consume the lives of real people as if they are characters in a film, social media warping this thin line to a perpetually dangerous point. We have little empathy for these characters and can critique them with no consequence, yet there are consequences in the real world. Every time we ‘like’ a tabloid’s post on Instagram, gossip to our friends about the Kimye divorce or wonder if a celebrity has put on weight, we perpetuate the toxic tabloid culture. We feed the market that allows TMZ, People and Instagram gossip pages to survive. We treat celebrities as if they are characters, and with social media allowing the ‘girl next door’ to go viral, the consequences of our critique are increasingly damning. 

The Bling Ring is a scorned lover’s goodbye letter to fame. Whilst glamorous, the film does not celebrate the shallow fame-hungry characters. It simply presents them all as lost in their pursuit of fame. These are ordinary people pursuing a non-ordinary ideal. We may not all want to be famous, but we all want to be extraordinary in at least one person’s eyes. In a world where we can all have our own stage, 100 followers or 1 million followers, The Bling Ring shows us the insecurity that feeds our own ‘fame’ and the danger of pursuing our own mythologized legend. It is brilliantly shallow and all the more genius for it. I will ask again, do you want to be famous?