The Bling Ring is a Series of Concentric Circles

The London Review of Books takes on the matryoshka doll of fame-hacking that created first the teen celebrity-burglary ring, then the E! reality TV show about the teens, then the Vanity Fair reporter who had to appear on the reality show in order to get access to the celebrity burglar teens, then the Bling Ring book, and now the movie:

The world-within-worlds aspect, the cannibalistic mechanism in all this that allows every fiction and every truth to be consumed by some other fiction and some other truth, leads us to the release this month of Sofia Coppola’s movie The Bling Ring. Closely attending students will note that Coppola, like Paris Hilton, grew up in the rich world of celebrity that she now takes off with moral gusto. Coppola is also a former fashion worker who has made ads for Christian Dior and has modelled for Marc Jacobs. The scenes in The Bling Ring that were to do with the robbing of Hilton’s house were shot in … wait for it … Paris Hilton’s house. The investigating officer in the case, Brett Goodkin, not only served as a consultant on the film but appears in it as well. He has now been reprimanded by the LAPD for accepting more than $12,000 from the film company while still running the investigation that set out to determine the truth of the real-life events.

Andrew O’Hagan’s piece is smart on the particular, deliberate vapidity of aspiring towards celebrity that is based only on itself:

Perhaps it’s a new kind of narcissism, where you only get to feel fully realised, successful and self-loving when you look at your reflection in the pool and see your idol.

If you’d like a quick refresher on your Bling Ring-era idols, let me point you to this Vulture slideshow, which will make you confront with slight dizziness the way five years makes every difference and also no difference at all.