Sam (Taissa Farmiga), Mark (Israel Broussard), Nicky (Emma Watson), Rebecca (Katie Chang), Chloe (Claire Julien) of Sofia Coppola’s 2013 film “The Bling Ring” (all “Bling Ring” images via PatheFilms.com)
News broke last month that celebrity Lindsay Lohan would soon be getting her own “docu-series,” aka reality TV show, on OWN, the Oprah Network. Now that she’s out of court-ordered rehab, she’ll sit down with Oprah for an exclusive interview about all things LiLo, airing August 18th; her reality TV show will begin in 2014. Lindsay is the American celebrity “bad girl,” and no matter how many times she fucks up, she always does it well.
M.I.A.’s hit song “Bad Girls” is playing moments before a car crash in Sofia Coppola’s filmThe Bling Ring, in which a gang of nobody teenagers robs the homes of celebrities, including Lohan’s. “Live fast, die young, bad girls do it well” blasts from the radio as they chant along, high on something, until a car slams into them and off to jail they go, DUIs and all. Meanwhile, a couple of Lindsay’s good girl Disney sisters go bad in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, the film released earlier this year about a group of girls so determined to “find themselves” on spring break in Miami, they rob a chicken shack with squirt guns.
In Bling Ring and Spring Breakers the adolescent characters form twinnages and girl gangs, acting as singular beings on a quest to “just be free and have fun,” to quote Selena Gomez’s character from the latter film. But what does it mean when “being free and having fun” means embodying the dangerously bored, brazenly entitled criminality of LiLo? In their quest to find themselves, these teen girls (and one boy) simultaneously accessorize and become accessories to (as well as agents of) crime — they become lethal bling. And in the case of Spring Breakers, they become a force of anarchist negativity that is both intoxicating and disturbing. In this America, the teen dream of finding yourself means losing yourself — and bad girls do it well.
READ THE FULL ESSAY ON HYPERALLERGIC:
https://hyperallergic.com/77034/bad-girl-criminality-and-american-teen-dreams/
