Why the Hell Are We Still Talking About the Bling Ring?

By Alison Lanier | Film | October 12, 2023 |

By Alison Lanier | Film | October 12, 2023 |

Erin Lee Carr makes a lot of true crime documentaries, but—in my opinion—she doesn’t make bad or pointless true crime. She’s been a freelance director for HBO for almost exactly a decade. Her stories tend to be careful and generally pretty fresh, and the crimes themselves don’t tend to be simple. I’m thinking about movies like Thought Crime (2015), her first feature with HBO, or Mommy Dead and Dearest (2017), or At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal (2019).

Which is why The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring, out this month from Max, feels so out of left field. And, well. Bad. And unnecessary.

Her newest feature for HBO focuses on Rachel Lee, the supposed mastermind behind the infamous teenaged burglary crew nicknamed “The Bling Ring.” This bunch of LA highschoolers, who burglarized celebrity homes in the mid-2000s, were made additionally famous by Sophia Coppola’s feature The Bling Ring, which filmed in town literally while the cases were being prosecuted (which leads to a whole other set of issues). As much as I think The Bling Ring is a good movie (fight me), it gives a whole new level of momentum to this story in which the perpetrators thrive off notoriety and public attention.

Carr apparently spent a full year trying to get Lee to sit down in front of a camera, the director told Variety. Lee apparently wanted the production to be a podcast, keep her face off screen. But Carr doesn’t make podcasts; she makes movies.

Lee, the one hitherto reticent member of the gang, speaks for the first time about her role in the burglaries and the narrative around them. We’re walked through her rebellious teen years and how her web of fragile friendships led her down the slippery slope of escalating thefts. Not for profit—for thrill. For proximity to celebrity. For fun. Whatever. I’m on the side of Deputy District Attorney Sarika Kim, who understandably scoffs at Lee’s story of a “broken family” (Lee’s words), social pressure, and keeping her friend group together contributing her criminal behavior: Kim says, “Lots of kids grow up with more difficult circumstances than they did. I grew up with more difficult circumstances than they did. And to say, ‘Well, she came from divorced parents.’ Whatever. No.”

This isn’t a really complex crime. It’s also been reported and re-reported and documentaried ad nauseum. This is what I have to call beating a thoroughly dead horse. And despite having a new perspective on the story via Lee, The Ringleader only really manages to give a platform to yet another Bling Ring member swearing they’ve reformed, that it really wasn’t their fault, that they were the victim of other people’s malicious influence and bad-mouthing. Et cetera, et cetera.

Carr says she aims for a “what the fuck” factor in the stories she tells. As in, you tell someone “Oh, so this happened” at a cocktail party, and the immediate response is, “Wait, what the fuck?” The Bling Ring story has that factor, but it’s worn thin with endless retelling. This isn’t an urgent, important, or new story. It just feels like another chance for a more-of-the-same rehashing of what we’ve already been told over and over again: these crimes happened in an environment of fame-hungry youth, where reality TV and social media stirred up a new avenue of being famous just for being famous. And the continuing coverage is running on the same fuel now as it did then.

The Ringleader is entertaining background noise, now streaming on Max. But it’s by far the weakest project Carr’s come out with in her time with HBO.