Debbie Ocean has been in prison for five years, eight months, and 12 days. Her brother Danny is dead. Probably. Her slippery ex-boyfriend, the artist Claude Becker – the one whose criminal hijinks sent her here in the first place – has not only escaped police suspicion, but has also become a disgustingly successful society boy. At her parole hearing, Debbie reflects on these men, and disavows herself from the chaotic legacies of their bad decisions. “My brother, may he rest is peace, is a criminal,” she says ruefully of the original protagonist of the Ocean’s series. And so from Danny’s ashes rises Debbie – the parole board is convinced of her regret for her past actions, and she is released. It is only natural, of course, that her first step as a changed woman is to head straight to New York’s finest department store, shoplift an entirely new wardrobe, before stealing a recently-vacated five-star hotel room.
Ocean’s 8 is the latest iteration of Hollywood’s recent all-female adaptations of past classics, following reboots of Ghostbusters and upcoming adaptations of Lord of the Flies and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. The film, directed by Gary Ross and co-written by Ross and newcomer Olivia Milch, gives the tongue-in-cheek spirit of the original Ocean’s series a decidedly feminine – and arguably feminist – sheen. The previous Ocean’s movies featured women as love interests at best and scene decor at worst, but in the latest reboot women are the front-and-centre agents of criminal enterprise; the men in their lives are either dopey and irrelevant or outright villains.
Prison did not, in fact, rehabilitate Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) but rather inflamed her appetite for swindling and revenge. After acquiring a new wardrobe and home base, Debbie makes contact with her original partner-in-crime, the devilishly captivating, pantsuit-loving Lou (Cate Blanchett) who has been busy running an underground alcohol diluting operation. Debbie convinces Lou to help her execute a heist that has been five years, eight months, and 12 days in the making: stealing a $150 million dollar necklace off the neck of superstar Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway) at the prestigious Met Gala in New York. The duo gathers a crime-committing crew, recruiting stoner hacker Nine Ball (Rihanna); light-fingered thief Constance (Awkwafina); the ‘woman on the inside’, Tammy (Sarah Paulson) and disgruntled jeweller Amina (Mindy Kaling). Helena Bonham Carter as Rose Veil, a has-been fashion designer facing major debt, rounds up the group as Daphne Kluger’s would-be stylist.
There is something about the female con artist that captivates the public imagination. A month before the opening of Ocean’s 8, the very same New York cultural milieu portrayed in the film was enchanted by the story of Anna Delvey, a beloved It Girl who masqueraded as a German heiress, befriended New York’s 1% elite, conned her way into staying into five-star hotels, and kick-started her own arts ‘Foundation’, all the while possessing very little actual wealth. In New York Magazine, writer Jessica Pressler detailed Delvey’s crime spree through the city, capturing in particular the unsettling, moral nihilism of ‘High Society’ and its valorisation of empty, affected mystery that allowed Delvey to thrive. “It was unclear where exactly Anna came from… or what the source of her wealth was”, Pressler observes; an acquaintance of Anna told Pressler that Delvey “managed to be in the right places… There are so many trust-fund kids running around. Everyone is your best friend, and you don’t know a thing about anyone.”
In a world where the aspirational elite knows everyone and no one at the same time, where salvation is supposedly found in Saks Fifth Avenue and moral goodness signified by blindingly-white teeth and an immaculate blow dry, the unrepentant female con artist is the hero our society does not need but deserves. She exposes the hollow core of the high life while getting a quick buck from its moral failings; or, as one tweet put it – “Anna Delvey’s story is a fascinating peek into the mountain of bullshit that is New York society”. It’s a contradictory triumph that young women know well. We are often caught in the double-bind of hating the ‘mountain of bullshit’ fed to us from above – the imperative to care about fashion, beauty, and our social standing – while also inevitably finding some sort of salvation in these very worlds: this mass order of Fenty Beauty highlighters, we say to ourselves while furiously online shopping at our desk jobs, will fill my gaping existential void! We love the female swindler as she both exposes our material dreams for what they are – phantasmic, glorious frauds – while also flouting the imperative for women to be understatedly ladylike in these very passions.
Delvey conquered high society through an outward-facing effervescent charm, elevating her It Girl status to such meteoric heights that even Martin Shkreli felt overwhelmed in her presence. Debbie Ocean, on the other hand, opts for a inward hyper-competence. She walks through Bergdorf Goodman with strong self-assurance, claiming perfumes, lipsticks and foundations at an insatiably fast rate. She schemes, steals, and cooly carries through highly-detailed criminal plans five years in the making because, as she says, “It’s what I’m good at”. As we see Debbie and her friends hack their way through the Met Gala with clockwork precision, we see not only expert grifters of material goods, but also grand manipulators of gendered symbolic order. The women of Ocean’s 8 take the imperatives for women to covet fame, jewellery, and beautiful gowns and craft a plan that involves all three. But they switch up the script by using these things as means for greater ends. The single Amita wants to get back at her mother; quiet Nine Ball can finally open up that bar she wanted, and young Constance is pretty sick of performing cheap tricks in New York parks. It’s ultimately, for all of them, a great chance to meet interesting new friends and do fun things – an increasingly rarefied opportunity in today’s atomised and homogenous world.
These subtleties are likely to be lost on male audiences. Explosive as the allegations of Delvey’s criminality were, coverage of her story was mostly limited to traditional women’s and fashion publications. Anna Delvey’s story first broke in The Cut, New York Magazine’s style supplement, before being covered in Refinery29, Women’s Wear Daily, Vogue, Dazed, and Jezebel. This is maybe a little disappointing, but not surprising: it takes an intimate knowledge of the unique hell that is being a young woman under late capitalism to fully appreciate the world-defying cathartic significance of Rich Womanly grifting. So long as our email inboxes continue to be stuffed with fifty different promotional newsletters from COS, Zara and Mango; our commutes peppered with shiny advertisements featuring impossibly beautiful models from Pretty Little Thing (the ideology is right there in the name!), and Instagram models rake in millions from promoting appetite suppressant lollipops, the Anna Delveys and Debbie Oceans of the world will speak to us deeply as our collective Freudian Ids; they are the natural and grotesque evolution of a society that values a woman in proportion to how readily she swipes that cold, hard plastic at the cashier’s desk in her spiritual and moral destiny to be beautiful.
Critical reception to Ocean’s 8 has been mixed, with much chatter converging around the question of whether or not a film, by virtue of being ‘feminist’, warrants automatic praise from women critics. The short and long answer to that question is no. There are many ways to interpret feminism, and not of all them are right. And yet the highly cited (and somewhat misunderstood) warnings from stars Mindy Kaling and Cate Blanchett about how the dominance of middle-class white men in film criticism may in fact skew our cultural tastes – and what is deemed worthy of critical attention – should similarly be heeded. Ocean’s 8 has its faults. Its script is thin and replete with deus ex machinas that are explained away through the detached and uninterested plot devices of ‘special new technology’. It is, as Haley Mlotek pointed out in the Ringer, a bit too deferential towards the fashion elite to have any meaningful critical bite to the world it ostensibly parodies (Delvey, here, did the better job). The entire gender-swapped movie industry, observes Amanda Hess in the New York Times, is a way for women to absolve the bad gender politics of Hollywood’s previous franchises – the masking of ‘feminist content’ becomes a cynical business ploy to resurrect these culturally dated blockbusters from financial and cultural obsolescence, all the while keeping women leads in the shadows of male narratives.
And yet there is a cathartic and sophisticated release in seeing Sandra Bullock and her talented pals navigate the feminised realms of department stores, bubble baths, fancy balls and jewellery stores, readily abandoning all morals to acquire these goods in covetous but calculated lust, and in doing so, exposing them for the empty false idols they are. But, as with the case of Anna Delvey, the moral and political significance of these contradictions will go over men’s heads, prone to interpret such scenes as further evidence of the mystifyingly trivial interests of women. But they should be paying attention. This Freudian, revanchist thirst for excess is bound to eventually bleed outside the bounds of acceptable femininity. And then, what becomes of men?
Rebecca Liu is a freelance writer living in London. She is an editor for Kings Review, and tweets at @becbecliuliu
