My wife and I saw The Bling Ring in a double feature with Dirty Wars. It was a shocking experience, the two films defining absolute extremes of the current American experience, in almost every conceivable way. Actually, I highly recommend you try this double feature for yourselves, with Dirty Wars going first. It’s a horrifying juxtaposition of concepts, guaranteed to get you thinking.

The Bling Ring is based on a true story of money-and-fashion-obsessed LA teenagers who went around robbing the homes of major Hollywood film stars, models, and socialites. Sofia Coppola is great at creating memorable atmospheres; in The Bling Ring, it’s one of vacuous teenage materialistic narcissism, in the suburbs bordering the Hollywood hills. She blends in large and unflattering doses of “The Secret,” making The Bling Ring this year’s second major film based on real events to link positive thinking and “law of attraction” empowerment with major criminal acts. I think we should all be very grateful to her for this service to society.

At the same time, Coppola’s approach sacrifices a certain connection to reality that might have proved useful in the movie. The robberies (according to the Vanity Fair article) were much more frantic and surgical than depicted in the film. They were cramming shit into suit cases as fast as they could, running to their car with them to unload, then running back to cram in another load, and repeating. In contrast, the movie portrays these teens like whacked-out serial killers, drunk on the illusion of their own power. They wander around the houses slowly and causally, taking an item here, and item there, acting almost indifferent, like they are passing judgement on all they survey. In this way they come across as exceptionally sociopathic, where in reality they were probably only run-of-the-mill sociopathic.

A similar distortion is applied to the way they targeted these houses. In the movie, they pick a house almost as a bored afterthought, and just kind of wander in the same night, almost like they think they’re Gods. The article, however, makes it sound like they cased these houses a little more carefully – studying maps to see where to leave the car and how to get near the house with minimal exposure, and doing drive-by casing of the houses before storming them.

It also was not simply a case of bored little rich white girls, living in a protected bubble. One was an illegal Mexican immigrant. Lee and Prugo got started with traditional small-time theft, and if they did not live minutes from star’s houses it’s reasonable to assume it would have stayed that way. The Alexis Neiers character (Emma Watson) was much more human than depicted in the film – she was kicked out of her house for smoking OxyContin, and was a major drug addict during the whole period. What is the value of erasing the humanity of these teens? Does it help us understand their behavior to depict them as narcissistic robots? Is their behavior even important to understand?

The Bling Ring is fun and all that, but I’m not sure it amounts to a whole lot. You know something’s gone terribly wrong when the film’s main achievement is that has created a new group of exquisitely dressed and accoutred young starlets who would be the natural targets of the next group of fashion stalker criminals – couldn’t they have all worn jeans to the Cannes Film Festival, just to give us all a break from this shit?