Rachel Lee, the alleged mastermind behind the infamous celebrity “—is part of a seemingly growing trend in projects that are meant to be objective, but wind up narratively confusing because of the blurred lines between subject and annalist. We recently saw that on display in Glossy, journalist Marissa Meltzer’s new book about the ascent of the millennial makeup brand Glossier. Most of Glossy is taken up by fawning assessments of Glossier founder Emily Weiss; Meltzer writes of feeling teenager-like insecurity around the polished visionary, and at several junctures, admits to letting Weiss dictate the terms of her inquiries.
The Ringleader strikes a tone similar to another recent Max documentary, Bama Rush, in which an investigation into high-stakes collegiate Greek life becomes an oddly solipsistic portrait of director Rachel Fleit’s struggles with alopecia and low self-esteem. In her film, Fleit turns the camera on herself and opens up about how the young, beautiful sorority girls she’s interviewing make her feel lesser-than, and about how she badly wants to join their ranks.
In all three of these projects, the authorial instinct to report on one’s subjects empathetically ends up overtaking the mission of the projects themselves.
Especially in The Ringleader, Carr produced something more like a feature-length fan-cam than a balanced story. She gives her subject way too much leeway to explain away her chronic thefts as a byproduct of her drug addiction. When Lee blatantly lies to Carr, first saying that she never sold items she stole, before admitting in the same breath that she had, it’s frustratingly brushed over.
“It’s really stressful thinking about the past. It’s quite disturbing, actually,” Lee says at one point in the doc. “I think I, honestly, was a sociopath. I think I honestly didn’t care about anybody or anything.” It’s probably her most sincere moment, and Lee deserves some element of sympathy for her struggles. But The Ringleader ultimately fails to justify itself as an essential or enlightening new piece to the Bling Ring puzzle, which was already the subject of a more comprehensive Netflix documentary last year.
Journalist Nancy Jo Sales, whose seminal 2010 article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins” chronicled the Bling Ring saga in full, told Vanity Fair that she declined to participate in Carr’s documentary because, “I’m not sure what else there was to say.” That about sums it up.
