There are few films so of their time as Sofia Coppola’s 2013 satire The Bling Ring. It was the year of the selfie. The year Kanye proposed to Kim. The year Lorde ruptured the charts with a fantasy of rococo wealth and Grey Goose. The Bling Ring not only captured this zeitgeist but also predicted the long-term effects of social media’s Valencia-hued glare on celebrity culture. And how did Coppola do this? She took us back to 2008.
In the era when reality television became king, a group of malcontent teenagers wreaked havoc on the Hollywood Hills, burglarising the McMansions of multiple celebrities. The gang targeted stars who freely advertised their vacant homes when promoting their whereabouts on social media amid the halcyon days of Facebook and Myspace. The teens stole millions of dollars’ worth of goods from the likes of Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom and Paris Hilton; the latter famously kept a key under her doormat.
