The Bling Ring and the End of the Summer
Hey, New Yorkers. Gossip Girl here. Did you miss me? Well, I sure missed you.
I’ve been doing this new thing where I try to watch one movie I haven’t seen before per week. 50% of the reason is in earnest to try and rekindle my latent dream of being a screenwriter. The other 50% is because my Letterboxd journal since I’ve started it this year looks like a sad, barren wasteland.
This week’s movie, The Bling Ring (2013), has been on my list for quite some time now, and was conveniently bumped up to the top because of my recent re-subscription to HBO Max due to the return of one of my favorite shows, Industry. Along with it came a neatly packaged collection of A24 movies, which I will be sure to make my way through.
Directed by Sofia Coppola and based off the Vanity Fair article, “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” by Nancy Jo Sales, the movie follows the story of “The Bling Ring,” a group of well off, delinquent suburban high schoolers who sneak into Hollywood celebrity homes, stealing clothes, jewelry, and cash, subsequently bragging about their escapades at parties, taking slanted selfies on flips phones and posting them to their FB pages, doing hard drugs, barely escaping being caught, and repeating the vicious cycle until their crimes catch up to them.
Something about the paparazzi culture of the 2000s realized within the context of the early 2010s, which would become the advent of the rapid ascension of “lifestyle” influencers, combined with Coppola’s distinctive aesthetic choices (and even the impetus of the film itself being a “viral” editorial feature) all created the perfect storm to trigger a deep ache inside of me.
Watching the kids in the film, I suddenly wanted to go back to a time in high school, and then college, where my thoughts were consumed of what clothes I was going to wear to school to fit in, learning how to do my hair and makeup through YouTube tutorials, consuming content mindlessly without deeper analysis of the cultural and economic impacts to come of social media’s rise, and glorifying what life would be like as a writer at a swanky magazine. A time where my goals felt achievable, and pre-2016 election, positive social change felt inevitable, as the “girlboss” era deemed it.
Sure, it was a complete fallacy from the start — getting “hotter” by whatever westernized beauty standard I had set my sights on would not cure my deep insecurities and working in media was much to my chagrin, full of the same systemic issues found in every other industry — but at least I knew the rules of the game of life, and thought naively so, that I had the answers.
Despite my origins as a kid raised in part by the internet, these days, I find myself overwhelmed and distrustful at every turn — from TikTok to traditional media — I take in news, coverage, and analysis with one eye open, afraid of rampant bias and a lack of fact checking. More often than not, I’ll quickly scroll past an informative video about current events, soothing myself with pop culture analysis instead, as if watching baby sensory videos. Offline and in person, I feel embarrassed and intimidated to join in on conversations about politics, afraid to say the wrong thing, knowing I haven’t kept up enough to have formed an opinion of my own I feel confident in, despite the gnawing knowledge that the election is inching closer and closer.
In college, I was brazen with my voice. I debated friends on issues in the libraries and dorm halls while we were meant to be studying, sometimes bringing myself to tears in my passion. I knew I might not always have the right answers, but I was learning and growing in real time. How is it, I wonder now, that I feel sick even watching something as routine as the DNC coverage, almost conspiratorial in my lack of hope for the future despite my best efforts?
This summer, towards the end of June, already spurred by the mental weight of not meeting my own goal of nurturing my writing practice and this Substack newsletter, I decided to take an intentional break from writing anything, here or elsewhere. I often find that a forced writing break immediately makes me want to write again for psychological reasons I will never understand.
While I read a lot as intended (what a true joy it is to feel my brain rewired again to crave reading for pleasure), I also watched So. Much. TV. Almost mirroring my anxiety of not being able to keep up with the US election coverage, I desperately tried to keep up with all else that culture could provide. Whether it was sports (the Euro Cup, Copa America, the Olympics) or reality TV (Love Island UK and USA, the DCC Cowboy Cheerleaders reboot), my mind hyper-fixated on being an active participant of some semblance of community and cultural dialogue that was happening live. And yet, I was aware the entire time that I wasn’t enjoying any of it as much as I had years previously.
If you can believe it, my original goal of the summer had been to spend as much time outside and maybe even feel the satisfaction of deepening my natural tan over the course of a few months. What I underestimated was how unpleasant heatwaves in the city are and my intolerance quickly turned into irritability, my attempts at socialization into exhaustion. I fell ill twice and for the first time, have noticed my body actively rejecting any alcohol intake. Let’s just say, I’ve been a very sweaty girl.
And so, even with migraines that developed because of my screen time extending so frequently beyond work hours, I retreated to the cool of my bedroom fan, and tried to recreate the comforting feeling of memories of aimless summer days, falling asleep on the couch with my parents chatting in the background and the sun pushing itself through the blinds, except this time my parents were state lines away, I was trying to sell my couch on FB marketplace, and living alone for the first time.
I read this really interesting piece by
called, The Mainstreaming of Loserdom, about the ethics of bed rotting and the resurgence of party culture because of brat summer. I thought of the kids in The Bling Ring, despite their cries for attention, finding solace in each other and on the dance floor, and somehow walked away from that piece spiraling about my own summer I felt I had “wasted” by staying inside. I then immediately thought of the meme of Jemima Kirke where she says, you might be thinking about yourself too much.
I caught up with some friends over dinner last week, and we spoke about how it’s now been four years since the first summer the COVID-19 pandemic hit the US in full force, and how surreal it was how quickly time had passed. We generally called out how tasteless we thought it was when people wished for another lockdown just so they could have an excuse to “stay inside.” I remember back then wishing so desperately to be outside again, back in New York, having graduated college and had almost one good year in the city gallivanting around before everything shut down, getting a taste of my promising future to come. I also remember thinking I would never take it for granted again, yet here I am. And what a strange feeling that is.
There’s something about summer that always feels transitional and transformational, but in a year where I’ve found it very hard to re-find my footing as an adult, whether it be as a writer, as an active participant of society, or as a friend, it makes sense to me that I’m yearning for something familiar to ground myself in.
I met up with a younger family friend who moved to New Jersey recently, who came in to the city to see one of his musical heroes perform live. As I attended the concert with him and heard about his excitement, fears, and mixed emotions entering his life after graduating college, I felt like I was being sucked back into a time machine, reminded of all the good in the world that still continues to percolate whether I see it or not.
Another summer passes, and the world still turns.