Courtesy of Netflix
Few collection have made Hollywood and its fame-hungry residents look extra pitiful, shameful, and altogether gross as The Actual Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist, a three-part Netflix affair (Sept. 21) about the group of L.A. teenagers who dedicated a string of robberies—together with, famously, on the houses of celebrities equivalent to Paris Hilton, Audrina Patridge, Rachel Bilson, Orlando Bloom, and Lindsay Lohan—within the mid-to-late 2000s. Pushed by interviews with two of the gang’s chief members, director Miles Blayden-Ryall’s docuseries is a narrative about how a nascent reality-centric popular culture and the rise of social media helped create a group of entitled attention-craving youngsters who believed that the world was theirs for the taking, and that scandal was a surefire technique to stardom. Which it was, in a sure sense—a notion underscored by the truth that they’re now headliners of their very own Netflix challenge.
The non-fiction model of the story that Sofia Coppola dramatized with 2013’s The Bling Ring, The Actual Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist is led by Nick Prugo, who as a high-schooler started robbing luxurious autos in and round Los Angeles along with his good friend Rachel Lee. By this level, Nick had already had a handful of TV jobs, however as he tells it, what he most appreciated in regards to the trade was much less the craft of appearing than the accoutrements that had been its rewards. His illicit pastime with Rachel was thus intensely satisfying, permitting him to trend himself as a wealthy, trendy individual of curiosity. On condition that this was the dawning period of Hilton, Kim Kardashian, The Osbournes and TMZ-enabled insta-celebrity predicated not on expertise however, fairly, on glamour, wealth, outrageousness, and notoriety, Nick was satisfied that he was as lower out for fame as anybody else.
Having been allowed digital entrée into the houses and lives of those Twenty first-century tastemakers (by way of Cribs and Perez Hilton’s tabloid website), Nick felt that he had each proper to actually break into their abodes—one thing he quickly started doing with Rachel. On the similar time, he befriended Alexis Neiers (now Alexis Haines), who alongside together with her sister Gabrielle and greatest good friend/adopted sibling Tess had been groomed for reality-TV fame by their mom Andrea, who outs herself in The Actual Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist as a showbiz momager from Hell. A former pin-up who admits to smoking weed together with her daughters (to be able to courtroom their acceptance) and promotes her The Secret-inspired ethos that targets are manifested by means of optimistic thought—a sentiment she indoctrinated her youngsters with by way of every day mantras about thriving within the leisure enterprise—Andrea comes throughout like a cheery lunatic who bred Alexis to prize movie star above all else. It was a shallow technique that labored, netting the clan an E! present about their lives (Fairly Wild) produced by Amber Mazzola and Gennifer Gardiner.
Whereas she was making an attempt to launch her small-screen profession, Alexis was additionally reaping the fruits of Nick and Rachel’s unlawful labor, and he or she ultimately agreed to hitch them (and confederate Diana Tamayo) once they burglarized Bloom’s house of $550,000 in valuables. The Actual Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist options contradictory and laughably self-serving variations of that occasion from Nick and Alexis, but the reality isn’t arduous to determine. Each of those youngsters, together with their cohorts, had been hard-partying, drug-abusing wild kids who so longed to be like their Us Weekly idols that they'd no qualms about sneaking into their mansions, taking and carrying their stuff, and embracing the infamy that adopted—to the purpose that Alexis’ personal prosecution turned not solely a storyline for Fairly Wild’s first and solely season, however the precise narrative hook that Mazzola and Gardiner had coveted as a means of justifying the whole enterprise.
The Actual Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist is a textbook instance of the snake consuming its personal tail, with younger women and men doing no matter it takes to comprehend their paparazzi desires, after which changing into well-known for these very actions. Nick is open and forthright about his ambitions and the low vanity that begat them, whereas Alexis is way extra defensive about her conduct and the motivations behind it. In each circumstances, nevertheless, it’s clear that a lifetime spent in a Hollywood bubble cultivated in them an instinctive craving for the highlight in addition to its attendant designer footwear, purses, and jewellery. In brief, they arrive throughout as vacuous, materialistic and amoral, prepared to bask in any and all habits which may additional their goals, and Nick’s candidness and Alexis’ caginess play as two sides of the identical coin: persevering with calculated efforts to manicure their public picture for private acquire.
Later revelations that Alexis’ protection legal professional Jeffrey Rubenstein allegedly participated in disingenuous scripted scenes of Fairly Wild, that LAPD detective Brett Goodkin consulted on Coppola’s The Bling Ring, and that Nick selected a lawyer primarily based on his seems to be and his threads fairly than on his credentials (oops!) solely amplify The Actual Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist’s portrait of Angelenos as absurdly obsessive about fame. Whereas this isn’t a shock, it’s nonetheless italicized by Blayden-Ryall’s docuseries, which is itself torn between censure and celebration of its topics, depicting them as covetous crooks and but concurrently gussying up their story with the form of glitzy, look-at-me aptitude (showy dramatic recreations, razzle-dazzle results, fourth wall-breaking narration from Nick) that’s exactly what they craved within the first place. It’s a have-it-both-ways method that’s easier than messy, though it does enable Nick to figuratively grasp himself with each gleeful admission in regards to the remorseless pleasure he felt throughout his breaking-and-entering jaunts.
The vacancy of this showbiz world and the folks it produces was blatantly evident throughout the heyday of Lohan, Hilton and their nightclub-frequenting ilk, and The Actual Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist revisits it with dutiful accuracy if a scarcity of perception. Likewise, know-how’s position in fostering this contemporary movie star tradition, in addition to in facilitating Nick and firm’s crimes, proves one other unilluminating side of this saga, whose final conclusion appears to be that the Bling Ring’s spree was a byproduct of a specific second in time that, depressingly, doesn’t actually appear to have handed us by simply but.