The Bling Ring

The Bling Ring
Nancy Jo Sales

One’s first thought is that nobody could be so stupid. Not because of the gang’s crimes — which, after all, they managed to pull off without ever being caught — but for the way they talk about themselves. Whatever they were taught in school, if they even went to school, the Bling Ring have to be seen as pure products of reality television and social media.

Then one begins to wonder. This is Hollywood (or close enough) after all. Many of their parents worked in the industry. Could it be that they were just playing at being stupid? Could Paris Hilton be as stupid in real life as the version of herself she plays on TV? And how hard would it be for the role to take over, especially if you imagined your life not as a movie (Neal Gabler had already alerted us to this a decade earlier) but as a reality TV performance? After all, the same transference also happened in the case of the adults, police and lawyers. And while we’re wondering about things,  why don’t the stars lock their doors? It seems there was a lot of stupid to go around.

Nancy Jo Sales seeks to understand. She keeps asking why. The monster of fame? Narcissism? One feels nervous at how much has changed just since 2013. Reviewing some of the research into narcissism presented in The Narcissism Epidemic, Sales expresses concern at how “many of the leading representatives of our dominant culture may have seriously dysfunctional personalities.” Only three years later one of them would be president of the United States.

Obviously celebrity played a big part in the moral calculations made by the gang, but maybe not in the usual way. Of course the only reason anyone cared about these crimes, the reason they were in the news and the reason there was a book and then a couple of movies about them, was because of whose houses were being broken into. But then that was a reason not to care as well. Fame was all that mattered, and in the end it didn’t matter much (even the sentences handed down were derisory). This is the unbearable lightness of being, American style. It’s a true crime story where nothing is real.