![]() She catalogues their reactions to their diminished employment prospects as apathy and disconnection. The other day The New York Times ran an opinion piece by an academic who has been studying the young working class of Massachusetts. After all, this boredom is not wholly apolitical. But art about boredom, as they do it, is reluctant to keep things interesting, or shake things up with a strong take.Īnd you can have a “take,” here. The gleeful producers of reality shows don’t have this problem. Namely, that they have to depict boredom in an interesting way, which can end up defeating the purpose of showing us the bored at all. Coppola is often subjected to similarly formed praise, usually comparing her to someone like Stanley Kubrick, who was as fond of moral vacuums as she.īut, fundamentally, the problem facing people like Sofia Coppola and Tao Lin is that their interest in the boring presents them with a very difficult task. A New York Observer review recently placed him in “the literary tradition of Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Musil.” The writer also says he’s like Proust. For this, in some circles, Lin is a styled revolutionary. His books are plotted by way of gchats and the sort of distant, halting sexual encounters that seem to plague twentysomethings nowadays. Lin, who has been kicking around the web for some time now, has made his reputation based on his deliberate adoption of mundane prose and subjects. In literary circles, there’s a lot of chatter about a new novel, Taipei, by Tao Lin. They plod along like narcotics, and not the fun ones either.Ĭoppola’s film is not the only recent piece of art to seek to depict this. And it all goes beyond mere bad acting, as you’d see if you watched the shows. It is this same curious and apathetic ethos that informs shows like The Hills or Teen Mom or even Keeping Up with the Kardashians. ![]() Even when the kids speak in clichés-the trailer’s central joke is Emma Watson earnestly saying, “I may want to lead a country someday,” something her alter ego, Alexis Neiers, did actually say-they are, it feels like, trying on another outfit, committed to the theater of meaning rather than the experience of it. The crimes are remarkable not because they are particularly horrible but because they were committed with an extreme indifference. Giving it more reason than that would miss the point, somehow, to me. “Bling” just happened to be the solution they chose instead of the multiplex. What seems more likely to me is that these kids were bored, and this was a way of filling up an empty night. These kids are, at best, a faint reflection of Gordon Gekko. Yet I don’t know that they acted quite out of the investment-banking-inspired plutocratic greed that Sales, and to an extent Coppola, suggest. And they hardly lacked for material necessities to begin with. The Bling Ring stole from the rich and gave to themselves. It’s just as hard to style these young women (and one young man) as Robin Hoods as it is to feel sympathy for their victims. Sales understands this, of course-her book quotes, in quick succession, both Michael Lewis and Glenn Greenwald-so her posturing grates, a bit.Ĭlass is important here, but not in the usual way. “It made me wonder if there was some kind of growing resentment toward the rich (a precursor to Occupy Wall Street sentiment?).” It’s hard not to throw the book down at faux-naïve moments like those, because yes, of course there is. The book is filled with half-musings: “I was surprised, as I started talking to people about this story by how many seemed to find what the Bling Ring did amusing or even kind of marvelous,” Sales writes. But even she is at a loss to venture a strong analysis of the phenomenon. Vanity Fair’s Nancy Jo Sales reported out the story her fascinating book of the same title arrived last month. The trouble with identifying the problem has been a theme of the press on the Bling Ring generally. It’s not so much that one expected a moral treatise from this but that the movie’s refusal to comment on what it’s depicting makes it look asleep at the wheel. For an hour and thirty minutes, we are treated to the story of a group of teenagers from the LA suburbs who decide to rob a bunch of celebrity houses, get to do this quite a lot before they are arrested, and… that’s it. The Bling Ring, which opened wide in the United States over the weekend, is like most of Sofia Coppola’s other films: occasionally beautiful, freighted with never-quite-articulated existential angst and absolutely unsure of what it has to say.
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