they don't care about anything

My media consumption in the past couple days is all about sociopaths & self obsessed people. I watched The Bling Ring this morning, which I felt was a surprisingly understated film given the subject matter and Sofia Coppola at the helm. Emma Watson is fantastic. I read Nancy Jo Sales' book about the case over the summer and found it pretty fascinating that what appears to be a gaggle of incompetent teenagers managed to pull off something like this string of robberies. Sofia Coppola makes beautiful movies that always surprise me somehow.

I also read Alisa Nutting's novel Tampa after waiting for months for a library copy. Originally there was just one and the wait list didn't shift for ages. (I have a theory the first person who got it refused to return it either for wank material or some sense of moral outrage.) Some of the reviews made the obvious but fundamentally flawed comparison to Nabokov's Lolita. For one, the writing is nowhere comparable. It's like the genderswapped Lifetime movie version of the original. I think the sheer pornographic detail makes people very uncomfortable, and the idea that the narcissistic pedophile is a woman instead of a man. But it is pretty fascinating, in that creepy unsettling way to look into the heart of madness. Perhaps people are uncomfortable as well that there's no redemption arc, no saving grace. She's just simply a monster we can't explain away with a history of abuse or penitent convert to the light. It was interesting.