Dead Girls

by Alice Bolin

  This slippage between the real and the fake is disorienting and sad. One can imagine that the family might have found comfort in the show’s alternate reality. Their enthusiastic participation in this heightened, simplified performance of their lives could explain why the most real moments on the show feel the most false. When the police come to the house to arrest Neiers for her involvement in the Bling Ring, Gabby appears at the top of the stairs and yells theatrically, “What is going on?” Her performance is so phony that you could assume the cameras missed the actual moment of the arrest and the show’s producers have reenacted it. But then the police officer at the door says, “Shut off the cameras,” and the picture goes dark. So the scene couldn’t have been staged. Could it?

  The immortal moment in Pretty Wild occurs after Neiers has agreed to be interviewed by Vanity Fair reporter Nancy Jo Sales. Neiers is devastated by “lies” Sales writes about her, including that she wore six-inch Christian Louboutin heels to court, when in fact she was wearing “four-inch little brown Bebe shoes.” Neiers is shown in hysterics, recording voice mail after tearful voice mail for Sales. On the show we see a portion of their interview, and it is so chummy that Sales’s ultimate betrayal does feel a little unseemly. “We are so wholesome and down-to-earth,” Neiers says, lounging with Sales on a bed. When Neiers breaks down, talking about the “very rocky, tough, tough times” in her life, Sales gives her a hug. This is the predicament of the journalist that Janet Malcolm famously talks about in The Journalist and the Murderer. The journalist promises to tell her subject’s story when that is never her intention: Sales is loyal to her own story, not Neiers’s. Sales’s article also mentions Neiers’s use of oxycodone, which is a more logical reason for her meltdown than Sales getting her shoes wrong. This fact is not mentioned on Pretty Wild, which of course is not telling the whole story either.

  Coppola based The Bling Ring on Sales’s article, and its dialogue is often pulled directly from it. The most outrageous borrowed lines in the movie come from the character based on Neiers, played by Emma Watson. “I’m a firm believer in karma,” Watson says fatuously, “and I think this situation was attracted into my life because it was supposed to be a huge learning lesson for me to grow and expand as a spiritual human being.” Watson’s contempt for her own character is obvious. “I want to lead a huge charity organization,” she says with sticky insincerity. “I want to lead a country for all I know.”

  Coppola gave actual words spoken by Neiers to a classy British actress to say in an over-the-top Valley girl accent, so that the fakeness of the delivery heightens the reality and ridiculousness of the lines, making the obvious point of the film even more obvious: these kids are shitheads. But as closely as the film re-created things Neiers really said, Watson’s portrayal of her is different from Neiers’s character on Pretty Wild. On the show, Neiers is babyish, silly, and mannered—she comes downstairs the day after she’s arrested wearing a pair of pink short shorts with pole hottie printed on the butt—but she is not the cold, robotic, empty-headed beauty queen of the movie. She is at times blindly affectionate toward her sisters, at other times hysterical and desperate, understandable when considering the severity of her addiction and the long prison sentence she was facing for her involvement in the robberies.

  Coppola’s film allows the audience to enjoy the audacity with which the Bling Ring fulfilled their fantasy of owning a piece of celebrity, while it comfortably condemns them as stupid, entitled, and amoral. They almost certainly were these things. But Pretty Wild, despite all of its artificiality, sometimes gets closer to the real story by acknowledging a truth The Bling Ring doesn’t deal with: shitheads have feelings, too.

  Throughout Pretty Wild’s nine episodes, Neiers frequently bursts into a litany of her good attributes. “I’m a great person,” she says. “And people who really know me, who did do their research on me, would know the great things I do for the community, for this universe.” “We are successful, independent, strong women,” she and Taylor tell each other on the beach in Cabo. “My main destiny in life is to be a leader,” Neiers tells Sales during their interview, and later, when she is leaving her a voice mail, she says, sobbing, “I opened up to you so the world could potentially know what a great, amazing, strong, talented, healthy girl I am.”

  Coppola has interpreted this habit basically as a kind of PR damage control, Neiers’s clumsy attempt to shape her public image. But Pretty Wild offers another explanation. The beliefs that Neiers was raised with, essentially the self-help spirituality of The Secret and Ernest Holmes’s Religious Science movement, place a huge emphasis on the power of positive thinking. Neiers learned from a young age that she could control her reality with this compulsive affirmation. “If Buddha can sit under a tree for forty days, I can do this,” Neiers says after she is sentenced to six months in jail. “I can do this.”

  Neiers, her sisters, and her mom are a close, indulgent family, saying, “I’m so proud of you” at the smallest signs of progress. Their cheery approach to their problems is ultimately what makes Pretty Wild so sad. Dunn talks about how she hasn’t been able to establish boundaries with her children. She walks in on Taylor in the shower and says, “Nobody has breasts like you do,” then enlists Gabby to help with an impromptu nude photo shoot. At one point, Dunn tearfully apologizes for not being a good role model and not setting rules for the girls. “Yeah, we’ve been crazy and wild,” Neiers says to comfort her. “But we love each other.” This is obviously true, but it couldn’t prevent Neiers from going to jail, and it couldn’t prevent her addiction.

  The proof of Neiers’s sincerity on Pretty Wild is how similar she sounds now, when she is sober, an adult, a wife, and a mother. Her message is still close to the one Watson repeated in The Bling Ring, that her hardships were all for the best. “I believe that in some weird way, this whole thing with the Bling Ring, this whole reality show, is going to give me an opportunity to help people,” she said recently in an interview. It seems like the spiritualism she was raised with has dovetailed with the rhetoric of addiction and recovery. Recovery places an emphasis on honesty, stripping away the layers of deception that build up in an addiction, but this honesty is also a pose, just like the positive thinking of Neiers’s childhood. Like all systems of self-improvement, it’s a way to fake it until you make it.

  Even today, Neiers denies any responsibility for the Bling Ring burglaries. Despite the fact that other members of the group have talked about her participation, and she is shown on a surveillance video leaving Orlando Bloom’s mansion, and items stolen from celebrities were found at her home, she insists that she sat in a parked car outside Bloom’s house, “totally loaded,” while the others committed the burglary, and she “never stepped foot in that house.” “I gladly share my deepest and darkest secrets to the world in the hopes of helping others with my story,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I admit to stealing to support my drug habit?” But as we have seen, there are so many motives, so many complications: Neiers’s reality doesn’t have to be the real story. I suppose the truth exists in some combination of all the ways the Bling Ring has been documented and interpreted, a symphony of stories in which each lets some things go conveniently unsaid. The shows, articles, books, movies, police reports, interviews, and confessions hum it together in the low moments: what really happened and why.

  My Hypochondria

  I caught hypochondria mysteriously at the age of twenty-two, a few months before I learned my father was in congestive heart failure, which was a few months before my mother had surgery to replace a leaking valve in her heart. I see them as conveniently related, my parents’ crises and my long season of terror about cancer, HIV, Lyme, and flesh-eating bacteria, but that cause and effect is faulty—not only did my anxiety start before my parents got sick, it was more likely chemical, the tapered end of a yearlong withdrawal from the antidepressants I’d taken for nine years. I’ve come to think of my hypochondria more as an extreme of self-obsession. Worries for my family’s h
ealth barely entered into it; in fact, my hypochondria helped distract me.

  My hypochondria made me feel special, like I had come to the ultimate insight: that I one day would die. There was no arguing with the logic of my fears, as in all likelihood I would get sick, though there was no telling when. But it was strange how at the same time that I thought I was being realistic and facing my own mortality, I engaged in a new kind of magical thinking. Rather than believe the world was truly indifferent to me, I believed that I had become the target of all of its bad luck. There are exceptions delineated in every WebMD article I’ve read. Infections can be impervious to antibiotics. You could be pregnant even if you’ve gotten your period. Almost anything can be a symptom for Lyme. These exceptions spoke to me and about me in the late-night glow of my laptop screen. Once as I was driving Highway 60 toward Los Angeles, I saw the familiar sign for the carpool lane, hov 2+, and it momentarily transformed itself into a diagnosis: hiv+. Embarrassingly, I took this as an omen. This was truly stupid, confronting the universe’s randomness by doubling down on my belief that I was its protagonist. I compromised by allowing the story to be a tragedy.

  The main character in Agnès Varda’s 1962 New Wave classic Cléo from 5 to 7 seeks bad omens, too. A pop star who is remarkable for her vanity and childishness, Cléo spends the day the film documents in agony, waiting for test results that will tell her whether her stomach illness is something serious. The first scene shows Cléo visiting a psychic for a tarot reading, one that presages evil forces, illness, and even death. “The cards said I was sick,” Cléo sobs to her assistant after the reading. “Is it written on my face?” She meets a young soldier in a park, and he tells her that it’s the first day of summer. “It’s the longest day of the year,” he says. “Today the sun leaves Gemini for Cancer.” “Shut your mouth,” Cléo says. Varda shows hypochondria as a perfect twentieth-century ailment: terror that is in the end just another decadence.

  In my hypochondria, I watched Cléo from 5 to 7 and I saw myself reflected on-screen—or rather, refracted. At one point Cléo watches a silent short featuring French New Wave superstars Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina, Eddie Constantine, and Jean-Claude Brialy. Godard plays a man who watches his lover, Karina, walk down a flight of stairs and trip on a hose. When Godard wears his signature dark glasses, Karina’s situation turns dark—she dies and is taken away by a hearse. When he removes them, the hearse transforms to an ambulance, and she is fine. Cléo from 5 to 7 posits that modern life’s endless, mindless watching directs the self inward, rather than outward. Cléo watches the film like she is looking in a mirror.

  The meta-joke of these New Wave filmmakers in the film within a film adds to Varda’s portrait of the spectacle’s concentric rings of self-absorption—not only is Cléo a document of its main character’s narcissism, but as a movie about a pop singer, it is pop culture regarding itself. Varda shows everything that distracts from the mirror’s feedback loop as an unwelcome intrusion. In one scene, Cléo tries on hats, blissfully taking in her face in many mirrors, thinking, “Everything suits me. Trying things on intoxicates me.” Then the camera moves outside, and the cars and passersby on the street are reflected in the window of the hat shop. Traffic sounds drown out the scene’s romantic music as the real world is superimposed on Cléo’s fantasy world.

  If Cléo from 5 to 7 were purely a critique of capitalistic frivolity—Women trying on hats, disgusting!—I don’t think it would move me. But it’s about narcissism as a confused response to an uncertain world: narcissism as political paralysis. After shopping for hats, Cléo listens with dread to a news dispatch on the radio about the singer Édith Piaf recovering from an operation. But other news items hint at the specter haunting the film, the greatest proof in mid-century France that the world is neither good nor predictable: the Algerian War.

  Cléo from 5 to 7 was released in April 1962, a month after a cease-fire was declared between French troops in Algeria and the National Liberation Front insurgents, and just two months before Algeria was declared independent. The Algerian War exemplified a particular type of modern war: one waged against communist or Muslim insurgencies; one which resists the use of the word war (in Algeria, the term of choice was pacification); one marked by the use of terrorism and torture; one in which victory is impossible, and anyway, beside the point. Anyone alive in the twenty-first century knows that this kind of warfare gnaws at the liberal Western conscience and undermines the security wealthy countries believe they have earned.

  Hypochondria turns out to be the perfect outlet for societal dread. In Susan Sontag’s book-length essays Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, she outlines the ways that mass anxiety has mapped itself onto illness, particularly in modernity. Tuberculosis, which could be transmitted through the air, amplified nineteenth-century fears of pollution and urban filth, just as, post–World War II, metaphors used to explain cancer directly reflected concerns about the age of radiation. As Sontag writes, “Cancer proceeds by a science-fiction scenario: an invasion of ‘alien’ or ‘mutant’ cells.” Similarly, the sources of moral decay metaphorized as the disease—the unwholesome effects of racism or rock and roll as “cancers” on society—were seen as products of mysterious invasions, dangers catalyzing spontaneously in virtuous American institutions.

  AIDS arrived right on time to take advantage of Cold War paranoia about societal infiltration. Sontag quotes from literature on AIDS describing infected cells that “harbor the virus, vulnerable at any time to a final, all-out attack.” This image of AIDS as the enemy within is a metaphor for the kind of war Cléo’s Paris knew, and the contemporary United States does, too: one of ever-looming threat, sleeper cells, terrorists, and guerrillas, where the difference between you and your enemy is ideological and thus invisible. Information distributed about the threat of AIDS also reinforced how people should think about their endless war. Much of social programming is an education in fear, and, as Sontag writes simply, “Illness is such a perfect repository for people’s most general fears about the future.”

  I was a junior in college and a political science major during the thick of the Iraq War, a year and a half after the news of Abu Ghraib broke. That’s when I took a history class about twentieth-century Algeria. We read The Stranger and Henri Alleg’s precise descriptions of France’s campaign of torture there. My reaction to these echoing atrocities was mostly embarrassment. I became fixated on a stupid remark I made in class, so I skipped the rest of the semester. For good measure, I stopped going to all of my other classes, too. I went to the campus every day but spent my time buying expensive foreign fashion magazines at the university bookstore. My backpack was so stuffed with Vogues that there was no room for books. I guess I understood escapism, though I studied hard, dutifully reading each issue from cover to cover. I was through with political science after that, but I didn’t admit it right away. In a literal way, it was too depressing.

  My junior year of college was the worst relapse of my mental illness since the breaking point the summer of my thirteenth birthday when I stopped sleeping and messianically predicted my own death. That was in August 2001, and my crisis would diffuse to a more sustainable depression for the rest of the fall and winter—for me, and it turned out, for the rest of America. Although my visions of airplanes crashing through the windows of my French class didn’t help anything, my anxiety even then defied cause and effect, always early to the party.

  More than once I have been surprised to discover that personal tragedy is tinged with some true and mysterious relief. When my father got sick, he and my entire family were visiting me in Montana to celebrate my master’s graduation. He had been struggling to breathe but called it “allergies.” The morning after the blowout party celebrating my thesis where he and I had matched shots of Jägermeister, my brother’s boyfriend saw him in the hotel parking lot doubled over and wheezing and took him to the emergency room.

  There was so much terror with the heart disease diagnosis and for months after
ward. Doctors told us what he couldn’t do—eat salt, drink alcohol—and at the same time grimly assured us that no matter what, his dangerous irregular heartbeat would return. He had to leave Montana wearing a defibrillator that looked like bombs strapped to his chest. But I also found that my feelings at the time were not at all what I had anticipated. My sadness and fatigue were solid, so different from fear. I slept in the same bed as my mom, in a hotel room in Missoula, and I thought about basically nothing. And once the bad thing was a reality, my brain began, inevitably, to deal. Emergency had nothing in common with anxiety because my fears couldn’t imagine my survival. Not to mention that my father having heart disease—he rode his bike ten miles a day—was not something I had even had the foresight to be afraid of.

  I had these insights about the futility of fear, and still that summer my hypochondria was the worst it has ever been. I was suffused by sexual shame, taking multiple useless pregnancy tests and convincing myself I had genital warts and candida of the throat. I was racked by my phantom problems, indifferent to my parents. When I think of the summer my dad got sick, I barely remember anything about him. Maybe this was grief and brain chemistry, too, but when I consider this reaction, I feel only shame.