Nicolas Winding Refn's "Only God Forgives"

When Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling’s Only God Forgives premiered at Cannes in May, there was a chorus of booing followed by pans. Having seen the film and thinking about what critics and audiences were expecting from it, I can see why. But I also ravenously luxuriated in it, my eyes infatuated with its languid rhythm and saturated images, my ears adoring its ambient textures and stretched silences. Greased with Cliff Martinez’s silky synth score, it’s a film in which one alertly bathes as it massages the senses.  In alignment with its strained Oedipal themes, where a muted son has to sever himself from a crassly verbose mother, the fleshy warm glow is womb-like.

Two years earlier, the pair’s first collaboration Drive won Refn a directing prize at Cannes. Though not a hit, it was well on its way to becoming a cult film. But the less-than-welcoming reception for the follow-up was imminent. Drive has its fair share of intelligent cinephile detractors (Quentin Tarantino said of it, “Nice try”) just as it had disappointed mainstream audience members not expecting the slow-burn urban fairy tale when the trailer (apparently) promised a Fast and Furious-tempered action vehicle. Gosling, meanwhile, has been caught in a handsome stoicism that is increasingly grating: looking at you quietly, talking gently with the ghost of a smile, and then punching people in the teeth (after Drive, think of Gangster Squad, The Place Beyond the Pines).  Only God Forgives feeds into this tiresome Gosling type. His character, Julian, runs a boxing club in Thailand that fronts for a drug business controlled by his family, including older and more assured brother Billy (Tom Burke) and mother Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas). Julian wordlessly stares while his mouth lingers in shadows. Calm, silent, gazing, beautiful, chaste–this is very much like the Driver relocated to Thailand.

Refn’s new film isn’t as accessible as his previous one.  With Drive, audiences could be fascinated and puzzled with the enigmatic Driver, but in ways relate — or at least be comfortable with — the familiar noir types in Hossein Amini’s screenplay like Carey Mulligan’s single mom, Albert Brooks’ delightful and lethal gangster Bernie Rose, Bryan Cranston’s crippled mechanic, Oscar Isaac’s ex-con struggling to go straight, and even Ron Perlman’s despicable and vulgar “Fine Ass Pussymobile” bully.  The beautiful contemporary synth-pop soundtrack plugs into the story’s romanticism as it flirts with an attractive filmic iconography preceding it, of Western heroes like Shane, Kenneth Anger’s leather/cars/pop fetish fest Scorpio Rising, Melville’s Le Samourai, and the glitzy sheen of ’80s B-movies.

All that made Drive a richer experience, as Refn, working on assignment, was like an alien making the familiar L.A. terrain seem startlingly new. It was a fairy tale and super-hero movie, and its off-beat pathological longing left the ultraviolence (which only figures into the picture at about the 45-minute mark) as a problematic afterthought. The Driver’s protective vengeance might have been seen as sleek noir posturing and flexing, but I felt that this character resembled the titular character (Ryan O’Neal) from Walter Hill’s The Driver or one of  Jean-Pierre Melville’s or Michael Mann’s criminal loners (James Caan in Thief, Robert De Niro in Heat) less than Mann’s scoptophiliac killer Francis Dollarhyde from Manhunter. That sense of pathology made the picture feel more fantastic and twisted in its solipsism, in addition to being more tragic.  Gosling’s bouts of rage stemmed more from a frustrated–and even psychopathic–sense of inadequacy and apart-ness than heroism. The “victory” over Bernie and the gangsters at the conclusion felt like a beautiful delusion and fantasy more than cathartic triumph. Or maybe it was both at once, which makes Drive more and more interesting to me, as if I’m losing my mind while watching it.

In Only God Forgives, the sense of the hero’s real-world inadequacy is addressed.  The passively observational and silent Julian is in the shadow of his brother, a man with aggressive eyes with specific demands to satiate his fetishes. Looking through a window into a room of prostitutes (all lounging on a set that feels like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey), Billy says to the manager, with chilling affectless speech, “Are those women? I want to fuck a girl. I want to fuck a 14-year-old girl.”  Violently making his way to another bordello, Billy rapes and murders a teen prostitute who happens to be the pimp’s daughter. The investigating police lieutenant, Chang, known as “the Angel of Death” (Vithaya Pansringarm, who exudes a magnificent presence), allows the father to do whatever he wants to the placid and almost catatonic Billy–before having his own arm sliced off by Lt. Chang as punishment for selling off his daughter. We see the after effects of a terrible bludgeoning, Billy’s cranium opened up and spilling curdled brain matter.

When Julian hesitates to avenge the murder because of the context (“I’m sure he had his reasons,” he says of the pimp father), mother Crystal shames and humiliates him. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” she says when Julian tries to explain things. A real man would have brought her the head of Billy’s murderer on a plate. At a dinner, she points out to Julian’s date Mai (Ratha Phongam), a prostitute who dances at a club Julian frequents, how Julian (whose name is feminine) always envied Billy for, among other things, the elder brother’s superior penis.  After the prostitute’s father has been killed by some of Crystal’s hired thugs, Lt. Chang looks at Julian and judges he had nothing to do with it (“He’s not the one”)–not because of evidence, but because, so it seems, he intuits that Julian doesn’t have it in him to carry out vengeance the way men like Billy and Chang do.

It’s a darker avenue of fantasy where what’s dream and what’s real tumble together with uncertainty. The film’s shady and maze-like interiors reminded me of David Lynch’s Red Room from his Twin Peaks universe, particularly as used during the prequel film Fire Walk With Me and the television finale, where characters are lost between real and unreal, waking and dream, good and evil, White Lodge and Black. Characters speak in riddles, their dialogue recorded backward and played forward. Fire Walk With Me was also booed at Cannes, but it demands viewers adjust to its wavelength.  Alongside its Laura Palmer storyline of incest and murder was the mystery of the Red Room, the other-world where garmonbozia (pain and suffering) is dished out through bargains between supernatural characters.  Lynch’s abstract methods are in sync with what I think Refn is doing with Julian, who is wandering through the landscape of the film as through the quandary of his mind. Only God Forgives has other Lynchian motifs like singers on stages (with karaoke instead of lip-syncing) and a terrifically rich sound design of saturated noise and ocean-deep silences that drown everything, much like what we hear in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and INLAND EMPIRE (or Kubrick’s The Shining). As with Lynch’s universe, I don’t think the bell-ringing of movie references of Refn function as a base so much as another texture, surrounding characters who drift tonally through a labyrinth of artifice and longing.

The picture is problematic because of its sexuality. But I don’t think Refn wants to do anything progressive so much as raw and ecstatic, and that means delving into the insecurities of his male protagonists (or himself as a filmmaker) and projecting them onto everything we see. Like with Drive, Gosling’s strong-silent-type hero is chaste but the ubiquitous sexuality of Only God Forgives‘ lurid clubs and bordellos, in addition to the profane and all-too-direct dialogue of Crystal and Billy (Crystal memorably calls Mai a “cum-dumpster”), makes that chastity all the more alienating for the protagonist.  While watching Mai dance, Julian’s gaze becomes a fantasy where he’s tied to a chair as she masturbates in front of him, her imagined climax coinciding with an image of his dismemberment, as a sword comes from the darkness and down on his outstretched arms. Speech, sex, and violence swirl in a tainted soup for Julian (and Refn), and stuck in the confines of his mind and gaze, he’s unable to do what he sees around him, what others can do so easily.  The cutting in the scene, where her groin shifts to his, and the fantasy doubles for cabaret performance, indicates how locked up Julian is within himself. We watch this world that Julian seemingly is apart from and wonder if he’s somehow the inventor of what we’re seeing.

That’s how Only God Forgives functions in the vein of a violent Asian-influenced revenge fantasy. Whereas Drive gave audiences the satisfaction of its B-movie set-up with the hateful evil-doers foiled and (in the case of that infamous elevator, literally) stamped out, Refn refuses such a release here, as the hero’s victory and transformation is his own immolation. Only God Forgives indulges in the grotesque with its visceral ultraviolence, for example a character’s rib cage bursting through a wound after he’s been sliced open. But the violence is spread out between luxuriously moody sequences of staring and wonder. It’s also off-screen most of the time. Refn often denies us seeing the penetration of bludgeoning, stabbing, and shooting. And as the story addresses Julian’s gendered inadequacies of what being a “real man” is supposed to mean, Refn addresses how we intake violence as viewers. Before a grueling session of violence commences in a crowded club, Lt. Chang says, “Girls, keep your eyes closed. Men, take a good look.” Chang then gets all Duke of Cornwall on a poor chap’s eyeballs before going a little Mr. Blonde on the ears.

Maybe it’s that I’m not a real man, but my eyes were admittedly not open for the whole proceeding. “You can’t see what is good for you,” Chang says as his point goes into the vile jelly of the eyeball. I don’t know if Refn wants us to look at everything (I have the same problem with the elevator boot-stomp in Drive, where I think the audience’s double is the horrified Carey Mulligan; and then there are those intestines from Valhalla Rising), but there definitely is a masculine code in Only God Forgives which causes anxiety for Julian, and then it becomes our anxiety.  I have my problems with Refn’s violence as I do with Tarantino’s gleeful “movie violence” (as opposed to Scorsese’s philosophy of violence, where he wants you to be horrified and look away), but at least it’s not blindly cathartic. It’s more like an endurance test.

Is Only God Forgives punishment? Not to be at all in agreement with its detractors, but it’s a sincere question as to whatever Refn’s motives are. The blonde haired and blue-eyed Hollywood hero isn’t the one doing the tolling out in this picture; it’s this Asian “Angel of Death,” whose katana sword, though pulled from behind his back, supernaturally materializes from nowhere.  Revenge violence is fantasy that locks us in a spellbound gaze much like Julian’s sexual fantasy with Mai, during which eyes  looking directly at us before he’s untied–and dismembered in this separate filmic/fantastical plane.  Chang may be a corrupt police lieutenant, but he’s a warm family man who reads to his daughter at bedtime, and his crafty violence is inflicted on pimps or thugs who’ve conspired against him and fellow officers. Julian and his family are drug dealers and foreign invaders–much like Refn’s film is invading Thailand–a Danish director and American star leading a crew of mostly Thai employees. Crystal refers to the natives as “yellow niggers” and doesn’t have time for their property or perspectives.  The confrontation of familial revenge is the song we’re expecting, but Refn changes the lyrics and point-of-view.

Refn’s pictures of lethal silent observers provoke us to wonder about perspective (people have told me that re-watching Drive while thinking that the Driver is a delusional psychopath changed their opinion of the film); the director could be “having a wank” (a phrase people love to use when describing indulgent filmmakers, I guess) with his web of allusions, his films a kind of midnight-movie karaoke. But the karaoke displayed in Only God Forgives points to a sense of how Refn’s appropriations are reverent, even strangely religious. Instead of good-time off-key humor, the karaoke crowd — mostly of policemen watching Chang at the mic — stares and listens attentively as if during a ritual. The artifice is part of the design. Refn’s film in tone, movement, and design feels very Kubrickian, and with the deep reds against chilly blues I was particularly reminded of Eyes Wide Shut (whose principal lighting cameraman, Larry Smith, is Only God Forgives‘ cinematographer), another film set on the blurry boundaries of dream and waking, artifice and myth, where the primal and haunting sounds of the Somerton orgy are undercut when we see how Nick Nightingale’s organ is hooked up to an amplifier. That film, with its scenario of a man set on revenge fucking with strangers as retaliation against a spouse who’s revealed her fantasies of infidelity, also, like Only God Forgives, denies the protagonist–and audience–the expectant orgasm.

From what I’ve read, the negative reviews about Only God Forgives are neglectful of its title which denotes something religious. Here, Refn continues to think about transformation: we see the metamorphosis with criminal-artist Charlie Bronson (Tom Hardy) in Bronson, the silent one-eyed viking (Madds Mikkelsen) — who gives himself up for sacrifice to American natives (and may be the god Odin)  — in Valhalla Rising, and the quiet Driver who becomes a violent action-hero savior, dying and resurrecting with Drive‘s final moments, the College song reminding us that he’s become a “real human being and a real hero.” With its cavernous hallways and crimson dream-like environs, Only God Forgives is like its own temple or church, the plot secondary to a ritual’s solemn function. Gorgeously rendered, its movements and atmosphere are wholly engrossing. The implication is that Julian, like Bronson, One-Eye, and the Driver–in his failure as a hero–becomes a “god,” if only in his own head, or the hermetical universe of the film.

The boxing club where Julian works is replete with its own gods and icons, the statues and pictures of the fighters from the past. Julian and Billy groom adolescents for the ring, and we could see this as a factory where aggression is manufactured. But the boy led to the ring by Julian–which feels like a sacrificial altar–catches the riotous crowd off-guard when he kneels and prays before his fight. As he does with much of the film’s violence, Refn declines showing us a victorious blow and instead cuts backstage afterward. His emphasis is on the ritualistic element, and the young fighter’s meditative sensibility is linked to his trainer, the watchful Julian, so different from the aggressive automaton Billy.

Chang has a sense of sage conscientiousness distinct from other characters.  He leaves the stations of the cross in his wake, but what of mercy (the “forgiveness” of the title)?  Led to the hideout of a poor man who was hired by Crystal to kill him, he slices open the ratting informant but, presumably, lets the other man live.  This other man tells Chang that he’s ready to face the consequences but pleads “spare my son,” a handicapped child whose eyes stare at us into the camera and refuse to look away from the carnage.  The man accepts responsibility and his concerns are unselfish.

This marvelous and unforgettable sequence, with that child’s inscrutable and unflinching face looking at us/Chang, reminded me again of where I was coming from with this pulp revenge story.  Julian’s family is representative of a privileged class.  Crystal verbally abuses workers at the luxurious hotel in which she stays. Billy takes advantage of poor working girls and their families, so poor they are compelled to sell off their daughters. Chang, our presumed antagonist, is fighting on behalf of the proletariat. He’s God’s messenger bringing justice and retribution, ascending to the 42nd floor to confront the nefarious and terrible Kali-Ma mother Crystal.

Julian is a movie hero who was born into the house of villains, and Only God Forgives rather unsubtly delves into his struggle to return to–or be severed from–the womb. It might sound, in our post-Freudian time of academic flippancy, a little (or a lot) pretentious, but I think Only God Forgives works because it hits some uncomfortable primal cords, in its solipsistic and masculine cell, relating to Refn’s sense of cinema that ring true. Refn himself says, “The idea was to make a movie that takes place in the vagina and I wondered what that would look like. Man’s fear of sexuality is the basis of all horror from the male perspective.”  I think there’s something cheeky about his words, but it’s also sincere.  The draped red confines of the film’s clubs have a corporeal feeling, and Julian’s fascination or desire for sex is not procreative but precocious. His fetish is to see hands, his instruments of violence, in orifices (his first violent assault in a club has him slapping–not punching–two male patrons and dragging one of them through a hallway by the mouth).  In a film that confuses reality for dream, it’s possible that what we hear Crystal say is in his self-loathing and sexually anxious imagination (such as that colorful vaginal euphemism “cum dumpster”). Scott Thomas leaves an incredible impression as Crystal, and seeing how she seems to be existing on an alternate plane of existence from the rest of the film’s characters, the performance is a work of art not out of line with what Julian may have concocted in his imagination–though she governs his movements, even if he knows they’re irrational.

She is the terrible mother who will eventually beg Julian to protect her, who was told by doctors to “terminate” the pregnancy she had with him, and who voices the hidden secret of what he’s done with his bare hands to his father. Having given birth to him she now admits that she’ll never understand him and never will. She’s a woman who might as well be conversing with herself and naming all of the son’s sexual insecurities. Julian really wants to get back inside of her (yeah…he does), as if to do everything over or will himself out of existence.

His confrontation with Chang at the boxing club is an anticlimax of atonement (and one of the reasons audiences who dug Drive and Tarantino’s revenge movies will be disappointed with Refn here). He’s not a worthy adversary for Chang, but his will to receive punishment, as someone who doesn’t feel he deserves to live, is what’s remarkable.  The film’s structure, as sacrament more than plot-driven narrative, is reminiscent of Raging Bull, also about a self-destructive man who takes punches like he doesn’t want to live. Redemption in that film wasn’t verbal or narrative, but came with the audience seeing a man who was the worst kind of sinner. “That’s entertainment!” becomes a kind of Holy Rite.

The instinct in revenge is the same for revenge-movie-going: self-satisfaction.  Refn’s film is a self-flagellating exercise where we’re meant to contemplate otherness, be it races, reasons, or perspectives. The opening credits refuse to translate themselves from Thai to English for us. Words flow like money from Crystal’s mouth and are used to control others, along with aggression. Julian’s most verbal moment is when he walks on the streets with Mai after introducing her to his mother. She says that she doesn’t want to keep the dress he bought her and he wrathfully tells her to take it off immediately. But silence is cinema for Refn, and the ritual of solitary gazing, like Chang and the handicapped child looking at each other, or like Julian looking at another child in the film, whom he has been instructed to kill, shifts perspectives and makes people more receptive–a thought coinciding with the symbolic castration/silencing (the reality of which is uncertain) preceding the picture’s concluding karaoke moment of a spellbound audience listening to the Angel of Death.

"The Lone Ranger": Stupid or Just Pretending to be Stupid?

“I’m trying to figure out if this horse is stupid or just pretending to be stupid,” Tonto (Johnny Depp)–whose name in Spanish means “Stupid”–says while looking deeply into the eyes of the pearly white “spirit horse” supposedly guiding him to revenge and redemption.

The line struck me while watching Gore Verbinski’s $215+ million dud The Lone Ranger, one of the worst-reviewed pictures of 2013 which threatens, with its meager grosses over the holiday weekend, to be exactly the kind of death-blow fiasco threatening the current paradigm of studio moviemaking. The Lone Ranger was, as a concept, intuited by the critics and public as its own kind of dead horse–a popular radio, television, and cartoon icon from simpler times: dads and granddads might find something appealing, but this is the generation of 1980s Hasbro and Mattel toys. This misbegotten project serves little modern function as this particular “Buddy Cop” team, comprising the Lone Ranger and his loyal helper Tonto, belongs to regressive stereotypes of rugged white masculinity with the stoic noble savage at the wayside.  Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, one of the main arbiters of (sometimes admittedly delicious) trash in Hollywood, casting Depp as Tonto — problematic in spite of the actor’s presumed Cherokee heritage — and directed by Verbinski, whose two latest Pirates of the Caribbean collaborations with Depp were superfluous special effects shipwrecks of high-starch blockbusting bloat, there’s every reason to presume this Horse is indeed Stupid. The trailer’s ramped style of CGI, BOM-de-BOM-BOM-BOM music, fast-cutting momentum, and eye-rolling comic asides defines what is soul crushing about the modern day Marvel-dominated franchise laden multiplex of high-octane short-attention-span videogame sensations.  This movie’s existence pissed me off. The Lone Ranger just looks like everything that’s freaking wrong with the modern age. 

But I saw the film. And Jesus. I now have to wonder: Was the horse just pretending to be stupid after all?  Is there a more strangely perverse Hollywood “novelty” film to open on the July 4th weekend, whether in its rather loud subtext of angry politics or even in its offbeat way of revealing itself? The presumption was that The Lone Ranger, like Pirates, was going to kickstart another expensive Bruckheimer/Verbinski/Depp franchise in addition to making Armie Hammer, who plays the straight-laced Ranger, a star. It would fit into that Bigger & Louder is Better paradigm of spare-no-expense studio noise, its drive for profits alongside a carpet-bomb campaign obscuring any sense of social responsibility (Subway unfortunately got stuck with the food tie-in). The Lone Ranger, from beginning to end, feels strangely personal for the filmmakers, anachronistically photographic for an event blockbuster, riddled with detail and allusion, and even, as if in accord with the passing of a race that’s had their land stolen from them, understanding of its own tragic decline, as if it knew it would bomb and then perhaps be reevaluated and championed in the years to come.

Negative reviews and my impulse to “take it easy” led me to not think of taking notes during the screening, and I didn’t write anything in the immediate days following. But, if my memory of details are hazy, I can’t shake The Lone Ranger from my mind. What I saw was a reckless adventure that courts derision, an imperfect, offbeat, and longish Western — and really a true Western more than an amusement park blockbuster — about how the mythologies of America and American entertainment intertwine. As if to acknowledge our summer movie expectations, its first images are of a carnival of amusement park rides, the incomplete constructs of San Francisco in the background of 1933, the year of the Lone Ranger’s radio debut. The camera follows a young boy in love with the spoon-fed legend of the Lone Ranger (he wears the mask, the hat, and has the toy gun) into a waxworks tent exhibit of American history. He peers up at “The Noble Savage,” an old Native American mannequin standing in front of a tent and matted background of Monument Valley.  Then, quite creepily, the “Savage”‘s eyes move and looks squarely at the boy, who responds by instinctively firing his gun.

It’s a weird prologue, for one thing the boy believing his toy gun has any power over a moving specter, and for another how it acknowledges the inadequacy of movie makeup to truly capture a semblance of real life, as Old Man Johnny Depp is locked in the wax of an appropriated image, “Tonto,” a white actor dressed up as a Native American.  This Tonto is an exploited employee, frozen in time in his “uniform” of indigenous clothes before putting on a suit and tie and walking off into the weathered terrain, a somber final image that recalls both Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) John Ford’s The Searchers (to which The Lone Ranger pays much homage) and even the Tramp — emulated by Depp in Benny and Joon – at the conclusion of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.  In all of these cases, modernity has not only rendered these characters extinct, but also the film styles in which they thrived — John Ford seeing classic Hollywood eclipsed by new acting methods and a richer perspective on American history, and Chaplin’s visual ballets of sublime choreography suffocating under the oppressive weight of Sound.

Like the 120-year-old Jack Crabbe (Dustin Hoffman) in Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man, the aged Tonto serves as narrator to the acutely attentive boy, who, much like the most aggravating of smart-asses one would encounter at a Geek convention (such as I did during a few panels this last week), points out continuity errors and how Tonto seems to be getting the story wrong, the first flashback entrance of the Ranger, aka John Reid, being a bank robbery with the Ranger and Tonto as the thieves. Why would a famous lawman, even a renegade one, be a bank-robber? The myths are literalized and linearized by the fans, the meaning of the Mask — which Tonto instructs never to take off — lost as it becomes a costume prop.  Tonto’s musings in the exhibit sometimes interrupt the action of The Lone Ranger saga, his past and present tied up in similar gestures and props indicating that what we’re seeing isn’t necessarily true, though it obviously means something for him. I think a lot of critics and viewers are too flippant with this film, The Lone Ranger. It’s far from cynical, though like some of the Ranger and Tonto’s plans, maybe a little irresponsible.

Law student John Reid is on his way out West to visit his rugged Ranger brother Dan (James Badge Dale). The twist in the relationship is that Dan is married to the woman John’s always loved, Rebecca (Ruth Wilson), a scenario drawn straight from The Searchers.  Dan patiently waits at a railway station for the arrival of the mangle-mouthed outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner, reliably excellent), Verbinski’s attention to detail at this setting evoking the opening to Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.  The Lone Ranger is very much like Leone’s epic of expansion and revenge, with avenging figures from the past materializing like ghosts in the landscape as rail barons (such as one played by Stephen Root here) struggle, through corruption, to align the young fractured nation. But whereas Leone and Henry Fonda’s lethal gunslinger Frank called the shots over the money-men, now the politician, Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson), has maneuvered things so that he can control everything: commerce, law, politics, the military (here represented by Barry Pepper’s Custer-like corruptible cavalry man), and of course what to do with the Comanches, with whom there are treaties.  John, a reader of John Locke’s ideas of establishing a civil government for the people, believes there are rational ways of due process to deal with all conflicts. Dan, who’s mingled with the Comanches (he wears a Comanche necklace), understands things on the frontier are more complicated.

The Ivy League “rational” lawman of ideal abstractions and the hard-edged “real-world” lawman of the frontier recalls The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, where the chief irony was that the violent and renegade actions of the John Wayne character allowed Jimmy Stewart’s political man to establish political order in the West. And as Ford’s film reminded us, legends supersede reality (“Always print the legend”), their duplicities established as necessary evils. The Lone Ranger fools us a few times, for example presenting a Comanche raid that turns out to be Cavendish’s henchmen in disguise, a staged massacre meant to rupture an Indian treaty. Beyond machinations, however, we’re reminded of how nature is “out of balance,” with carnivorous rabbits and horses on rooftops and treetops. Any “established” law and order here is inherently twisted and sick, malignant like the scorpions that are roused from the soil.  Tonto seeks the cannibalistic “Wendigo” spirit, projected onto the butcher Cavendish (who cuts out a character’s heart and, if we see things through a reflective eye correctly, eats it).  But the Wendigo doesn’t belong to metaphysics. The butchery of Cavendish is endorsed by respectable members of society.

Genre films mirror cultural attitudes and problems, be it The Searchers with its will to reflect on itself in 1956, Peckinpah’s nihilistic orgies of violence through the Vietnam years, Penn’s Left-Handed Gun and Little Big Man and The Missouri Breaks, Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, and finally another great misperceived flop, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate.  The Lone Ranger‘s masked man halts trains with the words “Constitution” and “Liberty” emblazoned on them, when the owners of those trains perpetuate corruption and genocide while exploiting and taking advantage of the meek. The hero is a figure well suited for the Anonymous Era of neuromancing activist hackers standing up to the gangsterism of the modern day economic and foreign policies, when Whistle Blowers are criminalized before people think about why the whistle was blown to begin with.

That leaves an unsettling feeling with The Lone Ranger, tying its reflection of our modern world to the one lost by the Native Americans, much more accustomed to the injustices of a monstrously obtuse conqueror than we are. In both scenarios, technology brings the world under a greedy thumb, the Iron Horse of rail in the 19th century and the World Wide Web of the present.

There’s still much that remains troubling about it all, however. I can understand the offense many will take with Depp’s portrayal of Tonto, and how they would brush off his words about how he wants to inspire young men on reservations. But Depp, for whatever reason, was bent on making this film. He’s always had a thing for outsiders, and one might well consider his friendship with Marlon Brando, one of the Hollywood stars most vocal about the depiction of Native Americans in film. We may also remember his role in Jim Jarmusch’s Acid Western Dead Man (1995), a picture incredibly sensitive about Native Americans.  It’s often forgotten that Depp also portrayed a Native American in his little seen directorial debut The Brave (co-starring Brando), about a man who agrees to be tortured and killed for a snuff film production so that his family can have a better life. The story is an unsubtle metaphor for Hollywood’s history with indigenous people, and I wonder if Depp believed Tonto would be a friendlier variation on that same theme, smuggled into the amiable confines of a Walt Disney production. There’s even a moment in The Brave when one of the central character’s threatening “employers” says with menace, “See you in the movies, Tonto.”

The result is something too long, sure, but most Westerns are. The Lone Ranger at times may grapple with the elements that sicken me about movies, but most of its set pieces are terrific meldings of stunts and effects work, with a fine sense of clarity absent from its peers. Its longishness also reminded me of how this film isn’t afraid to breathe and take its time at moments, quieting down and recalibrating momentum.  Hammer, whose career is quite possibly in detrimental turnaround because of this picture, is perfect with his comic timing and clueless demeanor, beginning with a sight-gag involving a child’s doll on a train that, for whatever reason, had me stitches long after it had passed, and concluding with the confusion over his title and catchphrase.  Prescient of its failure as I think it was, I believe The Lone Ranger had no ambitions to be a franchise kick-starter.  Depp and company make the satire and melancholy of genocide and expansion palpable.

Even so, like Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate the fault lies in its carelessness with money. I work to justify The Lone Ranger on its surprisingly rewarding aesthetic and thematic grounds, and am overjoyed by its offbeat “wrongness” within tired summer movie expectations–I think a lot of what I acclaim in the film is what rubs other people the wrong way. As Andrew O’Hehir observes, had this been a less expensive film, and I honestly believe it could have been, it may have been warmly received as an eccentric and subversive summer oddity. But its production and distribution is representative of reckless waste and hubris on the part of, if not its artistic contributors, the clueless studio businessmen making the high stake deals. Unfortunately, the artists will probably be the ones punished.

I’m not saying no executives will be fired. But Disney and other studios will likely be gearing up more $200+ million escapist events, working hard to sand-out the eccentricities that betray the audience’s anticipated back-beat rhythm, rather than a smaller-scale mid-level adventure that doesn’t have to make more than half a billion dollars.  Maybe that’s what the final image of the suited Tonto walking into the unfriendly terrain will denote for us, regarding the movies.  That frontier, with its unmastered edges, is almost extinct.  Even if Tonto and the Ranger succeed in their adventure, the film’s bookends make clear how their legend has also been conquered, squandered, bought and sold, and flattened. Time is a recurring theme in the film, and while the norm is to make it so that a story may continue forever and be a studio’s bi-annual ATM machine, The Lone Ranger wonders about races, ideals, genres, and aesthetic models on the downside of the tyrannical clock.

There are already some viewers who have noted the unique joys of Lone Ranger.  Like Heaven’s Gate and Ishtar, both unfairly condemned because of the money spent on them, there very well may be some kind of cult audience who will come to appreciate what Verbinski and Depp have done, problematic aspects and all.  Yet I’m not so sure if where the movies are headed will be conducive to the library of retrospect that home video and repertory movie house programs have granted.  Serialized television, streaming, and event movie production accentuates the importance of right now over rediscovering yesterday. But I can’t be sure. The fate of a motion picture seems determined hours after its release (if not before: Guillermo del Toro’s gorgeous sci-fi monster vs. robots extravaganza Pacific Rim and the Jeff Bridges vehicle RIPD have already been prophesied to bomb: meaning three consecutive weeks of Hollywood disasters).  Over the weekend I was arguing with someone who (drunkenly and fanatically) stressed the artistic quality of videogames as opposed to what insignificant “film nerds” and “critics who don’t mean shit” (he was referring to both A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis at The New York Times) wrote about and spent time adulating. He stressed that written history didn’t matter, as if it was put together by an Illuminati-like cabal of ignorant elitists. What mattered was how people responded to something upon impact. And I think his side is winning.

Sofia Coppola's Home Invaders: "The Bling Ring"

Alongside the angel-soft nocturnal suburban warmth, dogs barking and cars passing in the sleepy distance as a breeze swims through the leaves, we return to the scene of the crime. A cluster of youths jump a fence and briskly walk up a driveway, a handheld camera following closely. They trace along the luxurious house’s transparent walls and find an unlocked sliding door. “Let’s go shopping,” one of the girls says, and we’re catapulted into a glossy, candy-soaked montage of jewelry, shoes, handbags, clothes, Facebook posts, and red carpet glamor. These images playing off each other coalesce into a single greasy – and expensive – ball of undifferentiated avatars showcasing the mindset of the thieves/shoppers. Transgressing physical boundaries without much conscience, their exploits curled into the same stuff of the icons from whom they steal and simulate, there’s zero notion of a separation from their ocular intake and experience and the outside world. Their sensate is all sensate. But note – as they exit the same residence, the angle is different: a black and white surveillance camera’s perspective over the same fence as they exit.

Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ring"

This opening bookend in Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, based on the real-life exploits of some good-looking and fashionable teens who stole from celebrities, of diagetic and surveillance camera perspectives, tells me what the key flaw is with the group – if not the audience. I don’t want to reduce it all to wide contagion of selfie narcissism in social media, but the hyperreal element of endlessly programmed shared images points to something specific about the film’s setting, when Kardashian Reality Television was hitting its stride and the Yahoo.com “movies” page began to have little to do with the content of motion pictures so much as the controversial biographies about the faces populating them. For these teens, entertainment has less to do with a creative product than the “drama” in the celebrity’s life. Is Rachel Bilson still dating Hayden Christensen? Meanwhile, “Lindsay Lohan” no longer has anything to do with Mean Girls, and has everything to do with a DUI or a court appearance, and Paris Hilton is famous for simply being famous, as if fame was a hotel full of rooms without an origin or architectural purpose, just replications with an indiscernible square root. Angelina Jolie is not admirable for her performances or humanitarian work, but for her hot bod and her husband. Real life drama still plays out as entertainment, the projection transference between viewer and subject accelerating to ground zero imminence in the blur of illusion and reality. Assuming the viewer has a plethora of tools ensuring access – to cars, clothes, clubs, parties – of what use are boundaries? Of what use is fiction and the creative construction of artifice? In The Bling Ring we notice the mother (Leslie Mann) of bling ringers Nicki (Emma Watson) and Emily (Georgia Rock) pushes the New Age religion of The Secret, quite in vogue in 2008 to 2009 which, to simplify, assumes that which you imagine is yours to have and fulfill.

The Bling Ring is thoroughly engrossing, beautiful, and disgusting in all the ways it should be. But much of the recent criticism associated with The Bling Ring, regardless of any actual debits the film may exhibit, cannot resist bringing up its celebrity director of privilege, Coppola, who again is wading with her detached camera-eye in the waters of the well-off and well-dressed – as she did in The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, and Somewhere.Perhaps the catalyst for the criticism has less to do with the fact that these characters are usually so wealthy as they are also bored and listless, granted leisure and gaudiness but roaming around in search of fascination, like vampires looking for blood. It may be the same old story, but just as Coppola (usually) affords a fair share of sympathy to her lost and optically wandering protagonists, she’s also found ways to implicate us, bedazzled viewers logging in and reading TMZ headlines next to world affairs – or probably instead of world affairs.

"Dad?": Coppola's association with the confusion of Art and Life began with her performance in her father's "The Godfather Part III" (1990)

In The Bling Ring‘s speculation of confusing star reality for our reality and theatrical drama for tabloid “drama,” there’s the shadow of Coppola’s biography, just as there was with Marie Antoinette. Like the Austrian princess and free spirit who’s given the heavy responsibility of leaving life as she knew it for the clockwork mechanisms of French royalty, 17-year-old Coppola, a non-actress, had to play Mary Corleone in The Godfather Part III when Winona Ryder dropped out due to exhaustion. And like with the world of The Bling Ring, Mary Corleone’s death with the last word, “Dad?”, was belittled by the culture as having nothing to do with the Corleone tragedy (and I contend that that word, that death, and that which follows is an utterly affecting moment in father Francis Ford’s flawed but compelling drama), and everything to do with the Valley Girl-accented and un-movie star-looking Sofia Coppola. Both Mary Corleone and Sofia Coppola paid for their respective fathers’ sins.

Her experiences as a controversial entertainment news story have made her keenly aware of how people ingest images through the interpretation of pop culture. As a filmmaker, Coppola always points out how there’s something ridiculous about how we look. Her skewering of royal custom in Marie Antoinette, commercial shooting in Lost in Translation, or celebrity interviews in Somewhere has a lot to say about how viewers and the viewers’ midwife, the media, approach art. Her idiosyncratic sensibility has led to some banal and unexamined criticism. Of Marie Antoinette, the long-respected Anthony Lane (The New Yorker) wrote, “There are hilarious attempts at landscape, but the fountains and parterres of Versailles are grabbed by the camera and pasted into the action, as if the whole thing were being shot on a cell phone and sent to friends.” Were we to expect the youthful Coppola to make another stiff costume drama with a stately Rachel Portman score? The truth is we would not be localized in any kind of “actual history” so much as comfortably zoned in what our idea of a 18th century costume drama has been for us throughout the decades.

As the Bling Ring, led by Rebecca (Katie Chang) and comprising Nicki, Sam (Taissa Farmiga), Chloe (Claire Julien), and Marc (Israel Broussard), checks the Internet to see if their celebrity targets are out of town, there’s now a sense that the film is presenting Orlando Bloom and Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan as victims, as meanwhile these teenagers are transgressing boundaries and luxuriating in the world of MTV’s ‘Cribs. They rummage through closets the size of studio apartments and say over and over “Oh my gawwwwwd” and “cuuuuute,” swinging on stripper poles, nabbing rolls of cash and stashed cocaine. They take iPhone pictures of the fun, post their experiences on Facebook, and brag about the exploits at parties. There’s a critical temptation to dismiss the hijinks and dialogue, much of which is taken directly from recorded transcripts, as, if not an endorsement, a passive retelling of events with characters who are terminally undeveloped.

And yes, they are undeveloped. But that’s not a flaw of the film. These are undeveloped people. An audience member at a screening I attended was vocal about how “awful” the film was, being about “awful people who do awful things,” and that’s it. I suppose one could point him in the direction of Goodfellas, to which The Bling Ring alludes with its courtroom finale involving one of the group “ratting” on the others, and just as there isn’t necessarily a clear “judgment” laid on the Bling Ringers, who aren’t so remorseful of their actions, so it is with Goodfellas’ Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), complaining about the “egg noodles and ketchup” in a Witness Protection Program that keeps him anonymous but alive. As underdeveloped people, these characters in The Bling Ring round out their personalities by what they intake through media. In home invasions, they simulate other lives, and whatever they present anywhere is rich artifice, a sexy representation of something disparate from a root meaning or purpose, much like the Buddha decorating the wall of one of their first victims: the Buddha is there because it’s a handsome ornament, not because the inhabitants are Buddhist.

And of course, it doesn’t look like ‘Cribs either, but the cultural signifier of that MTV show is far reaching enough so that when the Bling Ringers go through Paris Hilton’s impossibly garish house, with Hilton aggrandizing herself with self-showing posters and pillows displaying her face (she’s her own Buddha), the association becomes an easy dismissal, so ironic because I think that The Bling Ring is, as Coppola’s least passive film, angrily revealing the ugliness of the‘Cribs universe (or the TMZ universe, the Perez Hilton universe, the tabloid universe, the Huffington Post side-boob universe, etc), in addition to the kind of flashy and pop-culture influenced reviews the film has received. Though I don’t see Coppola as a political filmmaker, she is acutely cognizant of the bubble in which she was born and raised — privileged but, lest we forget, often teetering on the precipice of ruin with her father’s multiple chapters of bankruptcy during her formative years (financial toil extending from Apocalypse Now‘s production in the late ’70s to the great success of Dracula in 1992 and the burgeoning Coppola wine business). I can’t say with certainty if the criticism directed at Coppola is because she’s a woman, but I wonder if Luchino Visconti, a card-carrying communist who had an aristocratic lineage, face similar derision with his post-neorealist films following decadent extravagance like The Leopard, The Damned, Death in Venice, and Ludwig? With her cinematographers Lance Acord, Savides (the ace shooter who died during The Bling Ring‘s production), and now Christopher Blauvelt, Coppola’s body of work displays the wonder of eyes searching beyond a fortunate window. Extravagance and privilege always seem to close individuals off into hermetical bubbles. But Coppola’s heroes can’t help but look out at what’s out there.

Coppola's signature image: Scarlett Johansson window gazing in "Lost in Translation"

Maybe this is what really differentiates The Bling Ring from the rest of her body of work: we see the motif of characters gazing with fascination out of car (or carriage) windows in Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, and Somewhere. It’s a perspective that’s beautiful, sad, and seems so much more consummately aware than other films. But The Bling Ring,with its several car scenes, keeps its youthful subjects unconscious of that outer world – just as they’re unaware of the surveillance cameras that capture their exploits. Fleeing a “shopping spree” at Paris Hilton’s, they gab and rap along with the car’s sound system oblivious to the oncoming traffic. If you think a drunken collision with another car would make them more aware, you’d be wrong.

Kirsten Dunst looking out in "Marie Antoinette"

Of the group, only Marc has a sense of reflection, beginning with a dissatisfied moment in front of a mirror before school, and concluding with Coppola’s signature shot of window gazing, as Marc stares outside a bus window, prison-bound to serve a four-year sentence. A reject because of his appearance – despite having a rich knowledge of fashion – Marc is targeted as prey by the predatory Rebecca. She’s the only person who talks to him, but it’s implied she’s doing so for her own benefit; if he’s not attracted to her, he at least becomes the foundation of her own Hollywood entourage.

Like Henry Hill in Goodfellas, Marc is hooked by the flashy club world and privilege he sees, even if he’s held apart from it by virtue of his self-consciousness (along with how this film’s characterizations of Rebecca and Nicki are more fitting for Daisy Buchanan, it’s an aspect of The Bling Ring that indicates how much better suited for The Great GatsbyCoppola would have been than Baz Luhrmann). The Bling Ring has some immersive dance club moments of electric light-washed ecstasy, the glances between the characters having a flirty and alluring sexual energy, promising satisfaction without wholly giving it. Marc is portrayed as asexual, and again like Henry Hill, his love and adoration isn’t directed to another person but to a way of life (he mentions how he wants his own “lifestyle brand”). The dynamism and charge is a glitzy but rootless energy, a narcotic. In the club, the characters are bathing in the music but also removed from the lyrics, the artist, the meaning, their dialogue stumbling through fuzz they’ve appropriated for dancefloor postures. But at last Marc has found a tribe, even if we observe how there’s not much intimacy through this ring. The group is physically close but psychologically disconnected, concerned how only they look to the others in the group.  The Bling Ring is about a beautiful world with beautiful people, but they’re so contemptuous (a close friend is derided as “grimy”) that what we see becomes repulsive.

*

The Hollywood Coppola visually presents is spectral, often videographed at night. This is Coppola’s first digital film, and the way she sometimes films large houses from a distance as the Bling Ring goes from room to room — moving in ever-so-slowly with Gordon Willis-like patience – can’t help but remind me of the nocturnal urban landscapes in Michael Mann’s Heat and Collateral, two Los Angeles crime stories featuring sociopaths without any respect for the space of other people. In the former film, thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) justifies bank robbery because they’re insured by the federal government, but he just as casually colonizes a young bookseller and artist (Amy Brennenman) under false pretenses, telling her, while in her apartment, “If you want to go, there’s the door.” There’s a similar dynamic to how Rebecca adopts Marc, who is a piece of esteemed and convenient property for her. She almost does the same with Paris Hilton’s dog. “You can’t take the dog,” Marc says. “But he likes me!” she replies. “And we could probably get at least $500 for it!”

"Everything with you is seeing, isn't it?" Serial killer Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan) fixates on images of his victims in Michael Mann's masterful "Manhunter" (1986)

It was when I was thinking how Coppola seemed to be channeling Mann’s oceans of night light, following Rebecca and company in a car after swiftly evading capture, that I heard a familiar piece of music on the soundtrack, the ambient piece “Freeze” by Klaus Schulze, incidentally featured in Mann’s wonderful 1986 serial killer film, Manhunter. Though I’m not certain of an intertextual key for further digging into Coppola’s film, the allusion is very applicable here. Manhunter‘s killer is Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan), a lonely man with a troubled past of abuse whose loud outfits and home decorating suggest overcompensating for a bruised ego’s deficiencies. “Everything with you is seeing isn’t it,” investigator Will Graham (William Petersen) says of Dollarhyde, who indeed works at a photo lab and spends long periods of time fixating on the home movies he develops, featuring families – based on their selective attributes – he will fantasize about, stalk, and slaughter. Muted and insecure with his cleft-lip appearance, Dollarhyde’s need for expression (through “This Big Hush,” recalling one of the songs of the film’s memorable soundtrack) is fulfilled through his bloody rampages. As the home invader of the well-adjusted and happy nuclear families he brutally destroys, he imagines himself as one who is loved, wanted, and desired, placing mirror shards in the eyes of his dead victims.

Dollarhyde’s obsession is a filmmaker’s obsession, and Michael Mann’s borderline vulgar sense of style in Manhunterperfectly suits the subject. Dollarhyde will make the world see him as he wants to be seen, with him finally being accepted into the homes into which he spies. “Do you see?” he repeatedly asks an unfortunate reporter (Stephen Lang) while showing some slides of his victims and obsessions, also demanding the reporter look upon him (“If you don’t open your eyes I’ll staple them to your forehead.”) When Dollarhyde’s fantasy collapses with an FBI and SWAT raid, so does the film. The killer’s panic translates into jump-cuts, alternating film speeds, and unmatched assemblage and continuity. The song in Dollarhyde’s 8-track (Iron Butterfly) becomes the non-diagetic score of the film’s climax, the static of a television in the background visually decorating the environment. There’s no difference between Reality and TV for Dollarhyde. His murders are compulsive rituals, wherein, according to Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox), he’s deluded himself into believing that if he “becomes” a part of one of these families enough times, he too will be accepted, loved, desired, wanted — at home.  Dollarhyde’s delusion is perversely syncretic with The Secret: believe it and you will be it.

"Do you see?" Dollarhyde shows a reporter (Stephen Lang) his world in "Manhunter"

Dollarhyde’s inability to separate his life from the images he fetishizes (no difference between his eye and a camera eye) is congruous to the Bling Ringers, making Coppola’s odd selection of Schulze’s music a perfect intertextual tool, as filmgoers familiar with its usage (it occurs in Manhunter when we first meet the insane Dr. Lecktor) may associate it with psychopathology. Rebecca, her idol Lindsay Lohan on her wall (indeed a far cry from Antoine Doinel’s adoration of Balzac in The 400 Blows), wants to become Lindsay.  When she is finally in Lohan’s house, the application of her idol’s fragrance is a moment of cherished erotic fulfillment. The Bling Ringers aren’t malevolent thieves – like Neil McCauley they rationalize their thievery – but they show off characteristics of inflated self-importance and insanity that curves along a dangerous road. During one home invasion, Taissa Farmiga’s Sam finds a loaded gun and plays around with it, greatly disturbing Marc, who seems like the only person in the room who understands the ramifications of a bullet in open space. She teases him with it by pointing it at him point blank, then backing away and alleging that he’s assaulting her when he tries to stop her. Then she points it at him again.

It’s a terrific moment, brilliantly orchestrated by Coppola and the actors, conveying a thrilling uneasiness unlike anything the filmmaker has ever done. The exchange climaxes later when Sam, gun in hand, crawls into the bed of an anonymous boyfriend. He wakes up, grabs it, and the gun goes off. Instead of panic, it becomes the wordless prelude to sex, and is executed like the kind of fantastical stuff we’d see in a wholly different movie, like an erotic thriller: perhaps the movie playing in Sam’s head. There is no “Sam” (she has been adopted by Nicki’s family and sleeps in Nicki’s bed; she’s a rootless cipher), but she plays an assembly of contrastive roles: gangster, victim, dangerous seductress, and submissive woman. The viewer is like Sam, bringing constructed expectations and tropes of narrative with her. As mentioned above, Coppola confused some viewers with her unexpected approach to the 18th century inMarie Antoinette (and Michael Mann certainly had the same problem when he stepped out of the typical visual paradigm for a 1930s crime film with his stellar digital approach with Public Enemies). Our visual intake through the years have programmed how we relate to life – and to films – in both form and content.

Even though we’re welcome to ridicule the Bling Ringers with all of their delusions of grandeur, I don’t think Coppola’s angle is to suggest either our superiority or certainly the innocence of her victims. Though Paris Hilton cameos in the picture and gave Coppola license to shoot in her house, I think it’s Hilton’s own cooperation with the production that defines the degree of self-obsessed insanity which is The Bling Ring‘s subject. With Hilton’s face on her pillows and framed portraits of herself on the walls (asking “Can You Afford Me?”), along with pornographic pictures of herself laying around, it’s Hilton’s unapologetic sense of self that is more strikingly offensive than anything else. What’s insulting is that Lindsay Lohan (a criminal who is ever so quick to turn in her surveillance tapes) barely serves any time in jail, despite repeat offenses, while Marc is loaded onto a prison truck.

So The Bling Ring is Coppola’s angriest film, and it infuriated me. Whether in fame or anonymity, the sense of entitlement and privilege held by all the characters, whether victim or home invader, is maddening by the bare and unmentioned (and so more powerfully felt) fact that all of this is happening during a terrible recession: the first robberies occurred just after the economic collapse in the fall of 2008. And amidst economic amorality, the viewers, in the Hollywood Hills or in low income housing, capture relief and entertainment by seeking out not admirable qualities in public figures but train wrecks. It’s not surprising that Nicki Moore, giving an interview for Vanity Fair, is using her “learning lesson” as an “old soul” to underlie her pursuit of a Business degree, an area of study that will enable her to “become a leader who will take a stand for people.” Actually, given the context of the times, it’s suggested that should she finish that degree, she may go far. The Humanities have nothing to offer, certainly economically.

In Coppola’s last film, Somewhere, the lethargic movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is something like a vampire (a couple vampire references are littered in the picture), undead and feeding on whatever comes his way at the storied Chateau Marmont, his admittance “I am nothing” much like the tender confession of Count Dracula (Gary Oldman) to his love (Winona Ryder) in the film made by Sofia Coppola’s father. The elder Coppola mentioned how the vampire’s renunciation of God, the “Creation,” was akin to renouncing “the creative spirit,” and to lose that is to become walking dead. For Sofia Coppola, the La Dolce Vita emptiness in the dance between celebrity and viewer, rich and poor (or less rich), the seen and seer, is a kind of rampant home invasion through a televisual prism sapping the creative spirit on both ends. In The Bling Ring, Marc begins his adventure by looking in the mirror and recognizing himself. At the end of his journey he seems to recover the sense of self that was lost. He is looking out through a window, beyond the confines of himself. Creativity is born-again through looking, and not disappearing into the vapidity of rootless representation: the “lifestyle brands” of other people. To dismiss Sofia Coppola’s perceptiveness is folly, when she holds up a reflective glass to us and invites the possibility of nobody being there – and then reminds us to look andsee once more.