Amy Woolsey – Bitch Flicks

Let’s Talk About the Children: War and the Loss of Innocence on ‘Game of Thrones’

Children have always figured prominently in ‘Game of Thrones,’ but their presence seems especially meaningful this [fourth] season, as we get a clearer glimpse of the war’s effect on bystanders, people not entrenched in political intrigue and behind-the-scenes strategizing.

This guest post written by Amy Woolsey originally appeared at Wicked Stupid Plotless and appears now as part of our theme week on Game of Thrones. It is on the fourth season of the television series and is cross-posted with permission.

When watching Game of Thrones, HBO’s contentious, wildly popular fantasy series, it’s easy to get caught up in the Big Moments, the ones that light up social media and generate a week’s worth of think pieces: Ned Stark’s beheading; the Battle of Blackwater; the Red Wedding; so many deaths. But the show isn’t all about shock and awe. In fact, some of the best, most memorable moments this [fourth] season have been the quiet ones, often involving nothing more than characters talking. There’s the circuitous beetle-crushing anecdote that Tyrion tells Jaime in “The Mountain and the Viper,” delivered with tortured intensity by Peter Dinklage, just before the climactic, explosive duel scene. Daenerys’s flirtation with Daario in “Mockingbird.” Any scene between Missandei and Grey Worm, whose tender relationship is perhaps the show’s most welcome addition to George R.R. Martin’s novels.

There’s a reason why, even in a season teeming with game-changing, water-cooler-ready incidents, “First of His Name” remains my favorite episode. Although relatively uneventful, it contains a wealth of perfect little moments that might seem inconsequential on the surface, but actually have profound implications for the characters and their world. Take, for instance, the scene where Podrick Payne confesses to Brienne, “I killed a man.” It’s a simple, four-word line, but for a character that had previously functioned as little more than comic relief, it constitutes a miniature, heartbreaking revelation. Pod may be hopelessly earnest and awkward, but he’s far from the naïve simpleton we and Brienne thought he was; despite his lack of formal training and experience, he’s just as capable of taking a person’s life as a knight of the Kingsguard.

At its heart, season four is a narrative of disillusionment, watching as each character is deprived of his or her innocence. In the premiere, Arya Stark, not yet a teenager, sticks her newly reclaimed Needle into Polliver’s throat to avenge her friend, Lommy Greenhands. A contemptuous smirk lingers on her face even as her victim chokes to death on his own blood, yet whatever catharsis this death brings is only temporary. Arya doesn’t hesitate to revel in her victory; instead, she simply wipes her sword clean and continues on her journey with the Hound. In an interview, Maisie Williams says that Arya is “being eaten from the inside out… She’s got a hole in her heart. She fills it with all these eyes that she’s going to shut forever, and she’s just turning black from the inside out.” Ultimately, killing Polliver is not the act of a girl obtaining justice for her fallen friend; it’s the act of a girl who has lost – or is in the process of losing – her soul. A deliberate, cold-blooded murder, devoid of feeling, performed with matter-of-fact calmness. With this, Arya has officially been indoctrinated into the culture of violence that reigns over Westeros.

This season has received criticism in some corners for its abundant, almost gleeful use of graphic violence, especially against women. On one hand, I don’t blame anyone who’d rather not spend his or her nights watching people’s heads being crushed or chopped off, and the violence can be occasionally excessive or poorly executed (I complained about a certain scene with Cersei and Jaime as much as the next person). At the same time, though, a lot of the criticism strikes me as overly simplistic. As George R.R. Martin himself said, Westeros is “no darker nor more depraved than our own world,” and omitting or downplaying the violence would be a betrayal of the series’ intention, which is to present the past in all its true horror, an alternative to the glorified, sanitized version we usually see in fantasy stories. If it’s hard to tolerate at times, that’s because it’s effective. Fictional violence should be hard to tolerate. It’s saying something that even in an era when seemingly half the shows on network TV feature serial killers, the carnage in Game of Thrones is still genuinely shocking and gruesome.

While the show undoubtedly does employ violence as a form of spectacle (is it even possible to avoid that in a visual medium?), I don’t think it has, as Sonia Saraiya puts it, “gotten in the way of Thrones’ fundamental truth… a lens that offers not just brutality, but also the assiduous follow-through of healing, grieving, and surviving.” If anything, this season has been all about the follow-through, the way war can invade even the most remote areas of the world and tear apart not only communities and families but also individuals, forever transforming the lives of those it touches. It’s never explicitly stated, but you can detect evidence of war’s devastation, of people struggling to cope with their scars, in snippets of dialogue like Pod’s and in character arcs like Arya’s – again, the little things. Trauma, the show contends, involves more than mangled bodies and troubled minds; it’s a process of moral erosion, the gradual disintegration of personal values in the face of a brutal, uncaring reality. Violence, like power, corrupts.

“Everywhere in the world, they hurt little girls.” Cersei’s blunt response to Oberyn, who assures her that “we don’t hurt little girls in Dorne,” represents a moment of uncharacteristic sincerity for the Lannister queen as well as an unexpected reminder to the audience that, despite her powerful, confident veneer, she is broken inside. Unbeknownst to her companion, Cersei has been subjected to repeated sexual assault throughout her life, first at the hands of Robert Baratheon, her husband, and then Jaime, her brother and paramour (as much as I wish we could pretend it didn’t, for all intents and purposes, the scene in the Sept happened and can’t be ignored). Perhaps more than anyone else, she understands the key to survival in Westeros, which essentially amounts to a willingness to use and be used by others whenever necessary, to discard your humanity for the sake of self-preservation. As Oberyn discovers too late, this world isn’t exactly kind to those motivated by passion and noble ideals.

Other characters are slowly starting to comprehend this fact. Daenerys began season four as the self-proclaimed Breaker of Chains, a benevolent ruler determined to free the slaves of the cities she defeats. It’s becoming more and more apparent, however, that conquering is not the same as leading, as she resorts to increasingly harsh methods in an effort to maintain power over her subjects; the Daenerys that liberated the Unsullied would be appalled by the Daenerys that ordered the execution of 163 people and called it “justice.” The last time we saw Sansa, she was walking down a staircase in the Vale, dressed in an elegantly low-cut gown and bathed in angelic white light. It’s treated as a triumphant moment, and in some ways, it is: Sansa Stark, the girl who once swooned over fanciful tales of castles and chivalrous princes, all grown up, no longer a timid victim. But then, you remember what brought her here – a barrage of physical, emotional and psychological abuse inflicted by the boy she used to idolize, among others – and the moment becomes as ethereal as the light in the background, the triumph an illusion. She may not be helpless, but she’s still a victim, just another pawn in a system governed by forces beyond her or anyone’s control.

Not coincidentally, the season [four] finale, airing tonight, is titled “The Children.” Children have always figured prominently in Game of Thrones, but their presence seems especially meaningful this season, as we get a clearer glimpse of the war’s effect on bystanders, people not entrenched in political intrigue and behind-the-scenes strategizing. As it turns out, most children in Westeros either wind up dead, like the slaves nailed along the road to Meereen and Elia Martell’s infants, murdered by the Mountain, or turn into killers themselves.

“The Watchers on the Wall” puts a kid right in the middle of the fighting, contrasting the surrounding bloodshed with shots of Olly, a boy whose parents had been slaughtered in a wilding raid, cowering in a corner. For a while, it seems as though Olly is being framed as a symbol of innocence, a saint amongst monsters, but in a twist that diverges from the source material, he shoots and kills Ygritte, partly in an effort to aid Jon and partly as retribution for his father. The death itself isn’t what’s significant so much as Olly’s smile: proud, not a flicker of visible remorse. There’s something chilling about it – the realization that even at such a young age, Olly has already joined and helped perpetuate the cycle of violence and revenge that has endured throughout the history of Westeros, passed from generation to generation.

In truth, there are no children in this world, at least not in our sense of the term. Growing up here means living long enough to become hardened and wear your cynicism like armor. When it comes to the game of thrones, no one is safe or innocent, not even children.

Amy Woolsey is a writer living in northern Virginia. Since graduating from George Mason University, she has interned at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and contributed freelance articles to The Week. In her free time, she consumes, discusses, and generally obsesses over pop culture. You can follow her on Twitter and Tumblr, and she keeps a personal blog that is updated irregularly. She has previously written about The Bling Ring and Phoenix for Bitch Flicks.

Dead Woman Walking: ‘Phoenix’ and the Resurrected Femme Fatale

This is a guest post by Amy Woolsey.

You can scarcely read a review of Phoenix, the latest movie by German director Christian Petzold, without encountering a reference to Vertigo. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 classic, Phoenix deals with trauma, mistaken identity, and male authority. Stylistically, it leans more toward restraint than melodrama, but it still makes use of double imagery and lush colors (red in particular) to create a surreal atmosphere that drifts through each frame like cabaret music onto nighttime streets.

As in Vertigo, red suggests romance – and danger.

Both films also include a woman who comes back from the dead. In Vertigo, Kim Novak’s Madeleine Elster inflames the passion of Jimmy Stewart’s ex-detective Scottie Ferguson, only to apparently commit suicide halfway through the movie by jumping off a bell tower. Later, the grief-stricken Scottie runs into a woman named Judy Barton who reminds him of Madeleine, and he grows obsessed with molding her into his former lover’s likeness. It turns out that the two women are the same person: Judy had been impersonating Madeleine as part of an elaborate murder scheme. In Phoenix, Nina Hoss plays Nelly Lenz, a Holocaust survivor who gets surgery to reconstruct her mutilated face. When she reunites with her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), he doesn’t recognize her, but noticing a resemblance, he convinces her to masquerade as his “dead” wife so they can collect and split her inheritance.

The similarity isn’t a coincidence. Petzold, along with late screenwriter Harun Farocki, deliberately designed Phoenix as “Vertigo in reverse,” as he explained in an interview with The Film Stage:

“We always thought about the male perspective. We always thought about a man who creates a woman, but we never thought about the perspective of a woman… It was Harun that said we had to change the perspective, so we started thinking about what the male subjectivity had done to Kim Novak, and the studio system — to the actor and to the character in Vertigo. Why all these stories are made by men, huh?”

Far from a cheap gimmick, the point-of-view switch in Phoenix sheds new light on Vertigo and film noir, demonstrating how the genre has evolved since its World War II-era heyday.

As a genre, noir is somewhat nebulous. The term did not enter popular usage until the 1970s, applied in retrospect to a set of films from the 1940s and ‘50s with similar aesthetic and thematic qualities. Some critics don’t consider it a genre at all, but rather a cycle or style. Still, there are a number of conventions commonly associated with noir, from dramatic lighting that emphasizes shadows to a gloomy, even nihilistic mood, not to mention archetypes such as the world-weary detective and, most notably, the femme fatale – in the words of Roger Ebert, a woman who’d “just as soon kill you as love you, and vice versa.”

Barbara Stanwyck epitomizes the femme fatale as Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity.

Vertigo was released at the tail end of the classic noir period, but Madeleine Elster still displays the characteristics of a quintessential femme fatale. Slender, white, and platinum-blond, she has a statuesque, if patently artificial beauty, her face blank in a way that conveys mystery rather than vacuity – a discomfiting amalgam of sensuality and reserve. Yet even as she emanates danger, an air of tragedy surrounds her. Madeleine is doomed from the moment she appears onscreen; we’d already heard Gavin, her husband, speculate that she’s being possessed by the ghost of her suicidal great-grandmother, causing her to act “like someone I don’t know.” She may be an agent of death, but she’s also captive of it, perpetually haunted by the specter of her mortality. At one point, she tells Scottie that she feels “as though I’m walking down a long corridor that once was mirrored… and when I come to the end of the corridor, there’s nothing but darkness. And I know when I walk into the darkness that I’ll die.”

The femme fatale, then, embodies noir’s obsession with death – not only its inevitability but also its allure. Unlike the male hero, who strives to defy fate at every turn, the femme fatale is acutely aware of her vulnerability. As scholar Elisabeth Bronfen posits, she “accepts her death as the logical consequence of her insistence on a radical pursuit of personal freedom,” embracing ruin rather than wallowing in denial. It isn’t passivity so much as cynicism; as a woman in a patriarchal society, she’s familiar with the limits of autonomy and has no illusions of grandeur or righteousness. Judy describes her reunion with Scottie as “the moment I dreaded and hoped for,” suggesting she expected and possibly wanted to be found (she did stay in San Francisco and keep several items of clothing she’d worn as Madeleine). She accepts the immorality of her actions and the futility of avoiding retribution.

In theory, Madeleine’s “suicide” should humble Scottie, a reminder of his own vulnerability. But being a noir hero, he shuns enlightenment and clings to the very American, very masculine belief that individuals have absolute mastery over their destinies and the world around them. His efforts to manage Judy stem from not only male hubris, but also an obsessive need to regain a sense of control and repel knowledge of life’s impermanence. Instead of directly confronting his guilt and failure, he deflects blame onto Judy, convinced that by vanquishing her, he can attain redemption and subdue his inner turmoil. While driving back to the bell tower where Madeleine died, Scottie declares, “There is one final thing I have to do and then I’ll be free of the past.” Novak’s dubious expression articulates what her character has no doubt learned: you can’t escape the past.

A more prevalent interpretation of the femme fatale reads her as a male fantasy, a screen onto which spectators can project their erotic desires. Although the narrative often penalizes the hero for succumbing to lust, it implicitly encourages the audience to participate in his temptation, establishing his point-of-view as dominant and rarely developing the woman beyond her surface. As Laura Mulvey’s oft-cited male gaze theory goes, men look, while women are looked at. Is it any wonder that the most memorable image from Vertigo is a shot of Madeleine sitting in front of a painted portrait, her back to the camera? She’s anonymous, part of the surrounding artwork. In this case, the femme fatale doesn’t personify fate but transcends it, her temporary demise and subsequent resurrection reinforcing her abstract nature – her fluid identity, otherworldly glamour, and general elusiveness. She’s not mortal because she’s not real. If that sounds contradictory to the “femme fatale as the essence of mortality” theory, it’s because the femme fatale is a fundamentally contradictory figure: elegant yet violent, volatile yet cunning, egocentric yet self-destructive, catering to female empowerment yet also male pleasure.

Hitchcock frames Madeleine herself as a work of art.

At Vulture, Angelica Jade Bastién lamented that noir has shriveled into an empty shell of its former self, tending to appropriate the genre’s most superficial aspects (the violence, the hardboiled dialogue) while neglecting its underlying meaning (the commentary on power, sexuality, deviance, and the American Dream). As a result, the femme fatale has lost much of her potency. Her influence is visible in the demented predators of psychosexual thrillers like Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct and the ravishing, albeit ultimately harmless sirens of neo-noirs like L.A. Confidential and Drive, but these characters lack their predecessors’ complexity and subversive edge. Along with David Fincher and Gillian Flynn’s twisted romance Gone Girl and Alex Garland’s sleek science-fiction parable Ex Machina, Phoenix takes strides toward salvaging the modern femme fatale, playing with perspective in order to deconstruct gender dynamics and genre tropes.

By situating her at the center of the story, Phoenix grants Nelly an agency Madeleine was denied, turning her into a fully realized individual with her own arc and interior life instead of a mere manifestation of the male hero’s subconscious. Behavior that could come across as illogical and contrived makes sense because Petzold exhibits genuine interest in understanding Nelly and what drives her. Without compromising subtlety, he peels back the layers of his heroine’s enigmatic façade, hinting at her willful nostalgia (she implores the surgeon operating on her face to make her look how she used to) and simultaneous, conflicting urge to find the truth about her husband. Hitchcock, meanwhile, never bothered to devise an explanation for why Madeleine/Judy goes along with Gavin’s plan to murder his wife; she just does what the plot requires of her.

It’s clear right away that Nelly is not a conventional femme fatale. She first appears huddled in the passenger seat of a car, her face covered with bandages and shadows – a stark juxtaposition from Madeleine’s introduction in Vertigo, with Scottie furtively eyeing her emerald-clad figure as Bernard Hermann’s score swells. There’s no attempt to hide Nelly’s fragility; as she wanders through the desolate streets of postwar Berlin, she seems to fade into the background, a ghost haunting ruins. Here, the false death illustrates the effects of trauma, the feeling of having witnessed the end of the world and no longer belonging in the present. Johnny’s manipulation isn’t just inconvenient for Nelly; it’s oppressive, a refusal to acknowledge her personhood. When the bandages come off and she undergoes her transformation, Nelly starts to occupy more of the screen, but that initial sense of alienation and repressed anxiety lingers, etched in Hoss’s searching gaze and tentative walk.

Especially telling is the scene where Nelly enters Johnny’s basement, looking like her old self for the first time. The camera establishes a close-up of her shoes before gliding upward, revealing her body in fragments as she descends the stairs. It’s a familiar technique, used to elicit awe at a female character’s appearance in movies as varied as the Bette Davis romance Now, Voyager and the James Bond-esque spy romp Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. In Phoenix, however, the sequence unfolds with an unease that defuses the sensationalism and, as a result, undercuts its effectiveness as a tool of the male gaze. Gone is the mystique that shrouded the femme fatales of classical noir; we’re too conscious of Nelly’s suffering to romanticize her. That’s not to say she is depicted as weak: even at her most ostensibly docile, when Johnny dictates her appearance and movements, Nelly is in command of the narrative. She obtains power not through violence or seduction but knowledge, her willingness to exploit the discrepancy between her real identity and Johnny’s perception of her.

A silent power struggle

Noir is traditionally regarded as the realm of men, with its unsentimental look at crime and corruption. Yet, at its best, the genre has always been as much a portrait of femininity as of masculinity, showing how women navigate and resist the social, moral, and sexual standards imposed on them. After all, one of the reasons for its enduring popularity is its fascination with outsiders, the people lurking in the margins and dark corners of society. Phoenix succeeds where so many have fallen short because it recognizes the value of women’s experiences, presenting a heroine who exists for her sake, not the hero’s, who is neither vilified nor fetishized. At last, the femme fatale manages to transcend the male imagination and become human – free.

Amy Woolsey is a writer living in northern Virginia. Since graduating from George Mason University in May, she has started interning at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. She spends her free time consuming, discussing, and generally obsessing over pop culture. You can follow her on Twitter and Tumblr, and she keeps a personal blog that is updated irregularly. In addition to freelancing at The Week, she wrote about The Bling Ring for Bitch Flicks’ “Unlikable Women” theme week.

Recommended Reading

The Modern Femme Fatale in Nicolas Wending Refn’s Neo-Noir Drive

No Place for a Woman: The Family in Film Noir

Vertigo by Jim Emerson

Hoss Is Boss: The Enigma of Christian Petzold’s Muse by Scott Tobias

Bad Girls and (Not-So)-Guilty Pleasures in ‘The Bling Ring’

This guest post by Amy Woolsey appears as part of our theme week on Unlikable Women.

“Empty.” “Wispy.” “Disposable.” These are the kinds of adjectives used to describe The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola’s cinematic rendering of the real-life Los Angeles robbery spree perpetrated by a clique of celebrity-obsessed teenagers, when it came out in June 2013. Although a smattering of dissent could be heard from various circles, general consensus seemed to maintain that the film was like its protagonists: pretty to look at, without much to say. A couple critics went so far as to ask why Coppola bothered to make it at all, and many others (including Marcia Herring, whose review was posted on Bitch Flicks) made explicit or oblique references to the director’s famously upper-class background, intimating that it impeded her ability to effectively critique her subjects.

In all fairness, it’s easy to see how people would get this impression. With its glittering veneer, ubiquitous (if unavoidable) product placement, and energetic, dance-ready soundtrack, The Bling Ring practically shrieks “pop confection,” a catchy trifle obsessed with imagery and texture perhaps at the expense of substance. It spends more time reveling in obscenely expensive shoes, purses and jewelry than developing the characters. As anyone who endured the heated Wolf of Wall Street debates that waged throughout the 2013-14 awards season can attest, the line between satirizing something and glorifying it is flimsy at best. Lacking an alternate viewpoint to lend perspective to or openly comment on the characters’ behavior, we’re left on our own to decipher what, if any, meaning can be found beneath the surface gloss.

At the same time, I can’t help but detect a disconcertingly gendered undercurrent in much of the criticism. Especially flagrant are the recurring accusations of nepotism that have been leveled at Coppola, daughter of legendary Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola, since her acting days. There’s nothing wrong with interrogating privilege; seeing as people don’t create art in a vacuum, it’s always important to be cognizant of biases and circumstances that might inform filmmakers’ perspectives. The problem is that the targets of complaints concerning class and pedigree are primarily, if not exclusively, women. As IndieWire’s Sam Adams said, even after helming five films and receiving a Best Director Oscar nomination, a feat achieved by only three other women, Coppola is still treated “like an upstart, a spoiled little girl who owes her career to her father” and cannot possibly have any worthwhile insight to contribute to society. By contrast, Jason Reitman (son of Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman), Tony Gilroy (son of award-winning writer and director Frank D. Gilroy), and Nick Cassavetes (son of independent film pioneer John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowland) apparently didn’t benefit from their family histories at all.

It’s true that, by devoting her career to scrutinizing the lives and angst of those immersed in wealth, from Bill Murray’s jaded actor in Lost in Translation to Kirsten Dunst’s Marie Antoinette, Coppola draws increased attention to her own wealth. Yet instead of undermining her credibility, her insider status should make her uniquely qualified to comment on the culture and lifestyle of the rich and famous. With The Bling Ring, for example, she follows the brash teenage thieves with the curious yet matter-of-fact eye of a documentarian, neither in awe of nor disgusted by them. She takes for granted that these people and their world exists – the afternoons spent lounging on the beach, the evenings drinking in nightclubs and doing drugs at parties, the inattentive or absent parents, the educational methods based on self-help books – and, as a result, so do we. Only once are we explicitly made aware of the distance between our reality and the one inhabited by the characters, the sheer strangeness of the events unfolding onscreen. In the film’s most memorable sequence, we’re treated to a voyeuristic, unbroken wide shot of a glass house while the titular ring scurries inside, plundering it. It’s a tantalizing reminder that we don’t belong here; we can gawk at the red carpet all we want, but the gala itself is off-limits.

Coppola’s refusal to condemn, explain or apologize for her characters makes for a rather opaque experience. To state the obvious, these are not likable individuals. They exhibit no visible remorse for their crimes, seemingly oblivious to the concept of personal boundaries, and think about little besides fashion and D-list celebrities. Even Marc (Israel Broussard), who is new to the group and expresses alarm when Rebecca (Katie Chang) breaks into Paris Hilton’s home for the first time, protests less out of a sense of morality than a fear of being caught. The youths are excruciatingly vacuous and narcissistic, think-piece millennials on Adderall. Why should we care about what they do or what happens to them? How does Coppola want us to see them – as brats, sociopaths, rebels, misguided kids, or what?

Perhaps a better question is, why are we so repulsed by them in the first place? Robbing celebrities is hardly the worst transgression imaginable, and this isn’t the first movie to center on unruly rich people. Take the aforementioned Wolf of Wall Street, which chronicles the criminal activities and general depravity of Wall Street stockbroker Jordan Belfort. Like The Bling Ring, it rests on the assumption that all people are, to some extent, seduced by the allure of wealth (as Marc says, “I think we just wanted to be part of the lifestyle. The lifestyle that everybody kind of wants”) and strives to implicate the audience in the protagonist’s wrongdoing, suggesting that he’s the product of a larger culture that tolerates or outright encourages such behavior. Both films use repetition to make statements about capitalist excess, bombarding viewers with images of decadence and materialism arguably to the point of overkill. If it conveys the same basic message in half the screen-time (and with a far more consistent tone), why didn’t The Bling Ring have close to the same impact as The Wolf of Wall Street? Yes, Martin Scorsese’s darkly comic epic had its share of detractors, but it still got five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, which I’m pretty sure qualifies as success.

Let’s face it: people are much more willing to stomach, examine and identify with men who behave badly than women, particularly when they’re affluent and white. The Bling Ring is a rare film that 1) revolves around women 2) who are not admirable or sympathetic and 3) doesn’t treat their misdeeds as either harmless fun or feminist defiance. No wonder so many critics are at a loss for how to interpret it. ReelView.com’s James Berardinelli sums it up:

Spending time with these loathsome, self-absorbed individuals, none of whom has a single endearing characteristic, is an ordeal.

Fine, if you don’t enjoy something, you don’t enjoy it. But what, exactly, are Jordan Belfort’s endearing characteristics? That he looks like Leonardo DiCaprio? Hollywood loves to churn out male scumbags, from Belfort to Patrick Bateman from American Psycho and Lou Bloom from 2013’s Nightcrawler (whose sleek/sleazy vision of contemporary Los Angeles and satirical takedown of American entitlement echoes that in The Bling Ring). While it’s agreed that these characters aren’t good people, their desires and values are always recognized as legitimate, albeit twisted. Even the most vocal members of the anti-Wolf of Wall Street camp acknowledged that Scorsese was trying to say something about greed and power and deserved to be taken seriously. On the other hand, The Bling Ring is dismissed as glamorous fluff and its heroines as spoiled, delusional air-heads, I suppose because they fixate on clothes instead of cocaine and sex. Women who covet money and things are frivolous, whereas men who covet money and things are ambitious.

Yep, men don’t care about how they look at all. — Yep, men don’t care about how they look *at all*.

The key to The Bling Ring ultimately lies in its music. At first glance, the medley of hip-hop, pop, and electronic tunes that Coppola and composer Brian Reitzell have compiled seems to merely complement the flamboyant visuals and shallow characters. Yet they also point to an acute sense of cynicism. It’s impossible to miss the glaring hypocrisy of Rebecca, Marc, and Chloe rocking out to M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” while aimlessly driving around in a luxury car. They may view themselves as renegades, defying the System by stealing from the uber-rich and giving to themselves, doing whatever they want with zero regard for the consequences, but the fact is that they are the System; they do whatever they want because they can get away with it, and they can get away with it because no one cares. It would be a stretch to say Coppola sympathizes with them (she doesn’t hesitate to poke fun at her characters’ cluelessness, particularly with Emma Watson inhabiting a role that lampoons her real-life persona), but she understands the underlying sadness of their situation. They are, after all, teenagers with nothing and no one to rebel against. They’re not distrustful of authority so much as indifferent to its very existence, so alienated from the rest of the world that they genuinely believe they own it.

Recommended reading: The Narcissistic Postfeminist Millennial Supergirls of ‘The Bling Ring’ and ‘Spring Breakers’ by Judy Berman at Flavorwire; The Bling Ring by Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly; Rob Jobs “Now You See Me” and “The Bling Ring.” by David Denby at The New Yorker

Amy Woolsey is a writer living in northern Virginia. She plans to graduate from George Mason University with an English degree this year and spends most of her free time consuming, discussing and generally obsessing over pop culture. You can follow her on Twitter and Tumblr, and she keeps a personal blog that is updated irregularly. This is her first time contributing to Bitch Flicks.