“I wanna rob,” deadpans a chain-smoking post-Hogwarts Emma Watson in the infectious trailer for “The Bling Ring,” Sofia Coppola’s new movie based on the real-life exploits of a gang of sticky-fingered Valley girls who burgled $3 million in designer clothing and jewelry from the Hollywood mansions of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom, and other mid-aughts tabloid silage. A cabal of teenagers indulge in underage partying and grand larceny to the score of Azealia Banks’s badass anthem “212.” With their insatiable hunger for luxury branding (Chanel, Gucci, Marc Jacobs, Dolce & Gabbana, Burberry, and Yves Saint Laurent among them), the Bling Ring girls referred to their stealing binges as “going shopping.” Kleptomania is consumerism’s double.
Commodity fetishism — the quasi-spiritual, phantasmagorical love of stuff, made possible by capitalism, is a major trope in this year’s movies. The New York Times film critic A.O. Scott noted as much in his recent essay comparing “The Bling Ring,” Baz Lurhmann’s overstuffed Gatsby adaptation, and the hedonistic nirvana of Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers."
In Spring Breakers’s standout scene, the vainglorious street thug Alien, played by a gold-toothed James Franco, revels in the sublime excess of all his stuff: “I got shorts! Every fuckin' color… This is the fuckin' American dream.” In an eerily parallel scene in “The Great Gatsby,” the sight of Gatsby’s wardrobe is to Daisy Buchanan an almost transcendental experience. "It makes me sad,” Daisy exclaims. “I’ve never seen such beautiful shirts before.” Gatsby is a Jazz-Age Alien, a gangster in a penguin suit, and those mind-bogglingly gorgeous Brooks Brothers shirts were bought and paid for through unsavory means. Consumerism and criminality are one.
Gatsby’s “view of American materialism is not moralistic, but pornographic,” says Scott. "[It] traffics in the sheer libidinal pleasure of money and what it can buy.” The same could be said of “Spring Breakers” and “The Bling Ring,” which exacerbate the American dream of upward mobility and self-betterment to the dissipated heights of lifestyle pornography.
Neither a celebration nor a critique of consumerism, these movies approximate what cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek calls over-identification: the strategy of pushing an ideology to its limit in order to unravel it from within. “To be really subversive," says Žižek, "is not to develop critical potentials, or ironic distance, but precisely to take the system more seriously than it takes itself seriously." Instead of harping on the evils of mammon, these three flicks literalize desire. They give the people what they want to the point of obscenity. “This is how we live: greedily, enviously, superficially, in a state of endless, self-justifying desire,” Scott concludes. “This is the pursuit of happiness, mirrored in the pleasure these movies provide.”
At a historical moment where social class and economic redistribution have entered the public consciousness (vis-à-vis both the lefty populist rhetoric of Occupy and Mitt Romney’s "47%" blunder), these movies cast the tenants of “good filmmaking” (sympathetic characters, compelling human drama, a coherent moral program) aside like last season’s Prada, articulating a worldview defined by stockpiling fancy things. They might be criticized as decadent and superficial, but isn’t that the point? They’re materialistic, but also materialist: intentionally or not, they expose the unquenchable, desiring logic of capitalism.