Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure 9781785339660

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SOFIA COPPOLA

SOFIA COPPOLA THE POLITICS OF VISUAL PLEASURE Anna Backman Rogers

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2019 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2019 Anna Backman Rogers

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Backman Rogers, Anna, author. Title: Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure / by Anna Backman Rogers. Description: New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018046678 (print) | LCCN 2018047710 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785339660 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785339653 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781785339752 (pbk.: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Coppola, Sofia, 1971—Criticism and interpretation. | Women motion picture producers and directors—United States. | Feminism and motion pictures. Classification: LCC PN1998.3.C672 (ebook) | LCC PN1998.3.C672 R64 2019 (print) | DDC 791.4302/33092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046678

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-965-3 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-975-2 paperback ISBN 978-1-78533-966-0 ebook

For Olivia, who knows that ‘there is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in’. Kintsukuroi: to repair with gold.

For Laura Mulvey with respect, profound gratitude and friendship. And to the blind peer reviewer of my original book proposal on Sofia Coppola, who responded that she is too frivolous and lightweight to have a whole monograph dedicated to her work: happy reading, pal.

Contents

List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction The Surface of the Image is Political

1

Part I. Imaging Absence as Abjection and Imaging the Female Gothic as Rage Chapter 1 The Virgin Suicides (1999)

25

Chapter 2 The Beguiled (2017)

45

Part II. Empty Subjectivities and Masculinity as Void Chapter 3 Lost in Translation (2003)

69

Chapter 4 Somewhere (2010)

90

Part III. The Female Body as Patriarchal Currency and the Commodification of Female Identity Chapter 5 Marie Antoinette (2006)

115

Chapter 6 The Bling Ring (2013)

139

Conclusion  On Beguilement

160

References

165

Index

173

Illustrations

Figure 1.1. Cecilia as Ophelia

32

Figure 1.2. Lux Lisbon as dream girl

43

Figure 2.1. The female gaze

55

Figure 2.2. William Henry Machen’s Christ in The Tomb

62

Figure 3.1. Alone in Tokyo

74

Figure 4.1. Dead time

109

Figure 5.1. Marie gives herself to France

120

Figure 5.2. The Dauphine of France

122

Figure 6.1. Ironic product placement

142

Acknowledgements

Thank you. . . To everyone at Berghahn Books for giving me the opportunity to write on my favourite director; I am indebted especially to Chris Chappell for his patience, fortitude and encouragement, and to Soyolmaa Lkhagvadorj for keeping me on track and on time in the final stages of getting this manuscript into print. To my wonderful colleagues at Gothenburg University – in particular Boel Ulfsdotter and Mats Björkin for their steadfast faith in my ability to pull off this project (which has seemingly been without end) and for their tolerance of my endless rambling about writing this book over multiple delicious dinners. And to Adam Chapman for just being brilliant and my continual exception to the rule – I love you. To Annie van den Oever and Miklos Kiss for believing in me and my writing to an absurd extent. To Anna Misiak, Felicity Gee, Emma Wilson, Matilda Mroz, Saige Walton, Laura McMahon, Martine Beugnet, Ashley Smith, Rebecca Harrison, Jenny Chamarette, Tijana Mamula, Davina Quinlivan, Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Michelle Devereaux, Aparna Sharma, Amy McCauley, Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, Lucy Bolton, Catherine Wheatley, Jean Duffy, Hannah McGill, Hope Dickson Leach, Maja Borg, Leshu Torchin, Laura Mulvey, Valeria Villegas Lindvall, Kata Szita, Olga Nikolaeva, Sian Beavers and, last but certainly never least, So Mayer for their wisdom and community: all of you pull me through. To Rosie Stockbridge and Alice Whittle for supporting me unconditionally through thirty-two years and counting of unofficial triplethood. To Anne and Tim Pater – my unofficial parents. And to Beanie, Dais, Weebs, Tomby and the husbands Ed and James (of course). If family is who we choose, I chose well. To Olivia and Duncan Harris-Schelts for possessing brains the size of Texas, for being my best old beans and for reading everything I write. To Helene Frössling Mattson; Faten Adam; Cecile Hascoët; Jane Kershaw; Rose Malone Illingworth; Victoria, Katherine, Fari, Nicholas, Judy, Tom and

X . ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Heather Rogers; the Isdahl, Gragnon and Long families for unconditional support and love. To Olivia Gragnon for designing the most beautiful book cover. And finally, but most importantly, to ‘my people’: Dad (my captain), Mum (wherever you are out there in the universe, I know you see me), Olivia and Mia. My love for you exceeds the limitations of language. Thank you for bringing so much joy and laughter into my life: ‘all the good in me is because of you’.

Introduction The Surface of the Image is Political

Despite the successes of feminist film theory, we still do not have a model for imagining the radical potential of the image. This is where the pretty offers a profound reordering of aesthetics and politics: if the image has been consistently denigrated as feminine and perverse, then prettiness deconstructs this rhetoric and opens up the productive potential of the aesthetic as feminist form. Rosalind Galt (2011: 36)

The discursive strategy that aims at repossessing the feminine through strategic repetitions engenders difference. For if there is no symmetry between the sexes, it follows that the feminine as experienced and expressed by women is as yet unrepresented, having been colonized by the male imaginary. Women must therefore speak the feminine, they must think it, write it, and represent it in their own terms. Rosi Braidotti (in Burke 1994: 122)

To perform the terms of the production of woman as text, as image, is to resist identification with that image. Teresa de Lauretis (1984: 36)

2 . SOFIA COPPOLA

Author’s Note I want to preface what follows with a brief admission: I became a film scholar because of Sofia Coppola’s films. Watching The Virgin Suicides (1999), aged seventeen, alone in a small cinema in London was a paradigm-shifting moment for me; it has taken me most of my adult life to comprehend the profound impact that this film has had on me (its affects and effect) and the ways in which it initiated a shift in my own personal course in life. This is, primarily, a work of scholarship, but it is also one written out of passion, anger and the limitations of personal experience. As Tania Modleski (1991: 45) puts it in reference to any scholar’s claim to think herself outside of the limitations of subjectivity formed in ideology: ‘Today, we are in danger of forgetting the crucial fact that like the rest of the world even the cultural analyst may sometimes be a “cultural dupe” – which is, after all, only an ugly way of saying that we exist inside ideology, that we are all victims, down to the very depths of our psyches, or political and cultural domination (even though we are never only victims).’ Thus, all failures and faults of this text as follows are borne out of love and the limitations of my place as a feminist film scholar (a cultural dupe) in this world – and these are failings for which I alone take full responsibility.

Coppola beyond Celebrity and Postfeminism Sofia Coppola possesses a highly sophisticated and intricate knowledge of how images come to work on us; that is, she understands precisely how to construct an image – what to add in and what to remove – in order to achieve specific moods, tones and cinematic affects. She knows that similar kinds of images can have vastly different effects on the viewer depending on their context: an image redolent with nostalgia and melancholy may contain or presage harm or threat in The Virgin Suicides (1999), and yet when transcribed to the setting of couture (Marc Jacobs’ ‘Daisy’ campaign), it will signal bucolic and halcyon youthfulness devoid of any sinister atmosphere. This monograph is an extended study of Coppola’s outstanding ability to think through and in images. In what follows, from a resolutely feminist perspective, I will explore the mood, texture, tone and multifaceted meaning of Coppola’s aesthetic. In short, I will take my cue from Coppola herself and take images and the affect and effect of images seriously by reading surface in order to reach depth. It is my belief that this is the essential work that Coppola’s

INTRODUCTION . 3

oeuvre asks of us as viewers: if we cannot engage with the surface of the image as a provocation, we miss its signification entirely. Surface, then, is deeply meaningful in Coppola’s diegetic worlds. Yet the surface of the image is continually denigrated as mere frippery – an insubstantial substitute for hard, scientifically rigorous, implicitly masculine knowledge (often associated with language rather than the image, or diegesis rather than mimesis). The image – especially the decorative image – is viewed all too often as seductive, beguiling, deceptive and false. In her groundbreaking study of the ‘pretty’ image, Rosalind Galt writes that ‘even in the context of a positive evaluation of content, pretty images lead inevitably to the spectre of empty spectacle’ (Galt 2011: 12). Film studies in particular has devoted a suspiciously copious amount of time to defaming decorative images and, moreover, associating this kind of image with femininity and femaleness; in other words, it is a discipline (alongside film criticism) that has worked assiduously to insist that there is nothing of import to consider once the curtain (surface and spectacle) is drawn back. As such, there is, I suggest, an alarmingly misogynist agenda at play here. My contention is echoed in Galt’s suggestion that: ‘The rhetoric of cinema has consistently denigrated surface decoration, finding the attractive skin of the screen to be false, shallow, feminine, or apolitical’ (Galt 2011: 2). Moreover, Galt notes that: ‘Many critics hear in the term (pretty) a silent “merely” in which the merely pretty is understood as a pleasing surface for an unsophisticated audience, lacking in depth, seriousness, or complexity of meaning’ (2011: 6). Alongside Galt, I insist that the image itself as spectacle contains manifold signification and that this is what must be borne in mind when we are asked to attend to images such as those produced by Coppola. It is no coincidence, to my mind, that Coppola’s latest film, The Beguiled (2017), overturns the clichéd priapic narrative of its original (The Beguiled, Don Siegel, 1971) by relating events from a female perspective through the trope of visual beguilement. Coppola has, after all, always displayed an acute understanding of how to use a phallic economy of images and words against itself. Feminist politics is, for her, a question posed through production design. Therefore, it is telling, but sadly not surprising, that this lazy proclivity of critics and scholars alike to associate the surface of the image with superficiality and redundancy has extended into the popular and cultural reception of Coppola’s films. Consider, for instance, the critical taxonomy and dismissive descriptors used on a regular basis to delineate Coppola’s aesthetic appeal: ‘tedious vacu-

4 . SOFIA COPPOLA

ity’ and ‘uncritically rendered’;1 ‘a day-dreamy and gorgeous-looking soufflé’;2 ‘this is like a manicurist claiming to capture the inner experience of your pinkie’;3 ‘it’s only for girls and gays’;4 ‘one of the daftest things I have seen for a long time’;5 ‘no weight, depth or particular story’;6 ‘shallow’, ‘superficial’, ‘psychologically diffuse’, ‘vague’, ‘vacuous’, ‘no depth’ and ‘blank’.7 Readers may be curious to note that it is male critics who nearly always perpetuate the infuriatingly gendered tone prevalent in this cultural discourse that has irrevocably shaped the reception of Coppola’s films. The misogynist implication that is embarrassingly evident here is that Coppola’s ‘pretty’ and decorative mise-en-scène is taken to signify nothing beyond its pleasing surface; indeed, her oeuvre is frequently likened to cinematic pastry, a delightful cream puff, full of delicious air but lacking in meaty (and masculine) substance (a metaphor critics employed with alarming alacrity with regard to Marie Antoinette (2006)). This monograph is a concerted attempt to attend to the form of Coppola’s films within both a feminist and modernist philosophical framework (high theory, if you will); I admit that my approach probably renders the tone and content of this study somewhat old-fashioned, especially given the fact that the majority of studies of Coppola’s films tend to centre on or situate her work within both a postfeminist and postmodern context (much of which is referenced in the body of this study). However, I contend that Coppola is responding to situations of postmodernism and postfeminism not from within, but from without, and I must concede further that I loathe the notion of postfeminism as both principle and lifestyle choice. In her recent study of Coppola, Fiona Handyside (2017) also suggests that Coppola’s work bifurcates due to the tensions inherent in the material she explores perennially, writing that: Coppola’s work straddles two differing, indeed possibly conflicting, definitions of postfeminism. On the one hand, her films participate in postfeminist cultural norms (interested in femininity, questions of female agency and power, and showcasing friendships, girliness, fashionable clothes and beautiful homes). On the other hand, they also draw on a significant feminist critical inheritance, showing her films as literally postfeminist (as in being able to learn from these interventions of feminist filmmakers from the 1970s, rather than disavowing them), and thus display a particular interest in questions of form that tend to be unusual in most female focused films. (Handyside 2017: 13)

INTRODUCTION . 5

Handyside draws out the finer points of what she views as Coppola’s ‘quintessentially postfeminist aesthetic’ (2017: 5) by situating her work within the context of girlhood, adolescence and the rarefied settings of sparkle and light. As I do, she also intimates at the darker undertones of Coppola’s representation of female adolescence as a period of time in which one’s ability to flourish can not only be stifled but also brutalized by the sudden realization of what it means to become a woman within a patriarchal society – the often catastrophic results of which result in insidious forms of internalized, self-inflicted violence. However, this study, as my work on Coppola preceding this has demonstrated (see Backman Rogers 2012, 2015), will argue adamantly that Coppola’s critique is situated almost entirely on the side of an outspoken and at times radical form of feminism. It is in attending to the form of her films with assiduous care and attention to detail that this becomes apparent. It is for this reason that this study, as we shall see, employs a panoply of now well-known feminist texts on the image in order to render Coppola’s feminist agenda clear. As such, this study exists in respectful dialogue with that of Handyside from opposite ends of a feminist spectrum with a great deal of common ground and agreement. As a study of form, this book does not engage with Coppola as a personality or figure of celebrity. To come to the point, I am not exploring here the notion, after Timothy Corrigan (1991), that in the contemporary moment, the cinematic auteur functions as a brand. I do not dispute that this is correct, but in the case of Coppola I believe that this, to my mind, somewhat prurient fascination, ripe with double standards, with Coppola’s private life and background has occluded careful and respectful assessment of her work.8 After all, the fact that David Lynch and Terrence Malick (two American independent directors whose supposed brilliance is rarely questioned) have both made advertisements for highend perfumes and yet that this has not become a central point of analysis for both their oeuvres is rather interesting; in contrast, critics appear to have read Coppola’s work myopically through the lens of her own family history, her investment in the fashion industry and her admitted white, female privilege to the extent that every film she produces is assumed to be a hermetic iteration of her own life.9 Once again, then, we face that old adage that a woman is too bound up in her own experience and her own thoughts (in fact, far too narcissistic) to make work about anything other than her own life; in many ways, we have not moved on critically from that moment in which Freud instructed women to leave

6 . SOFIA COPPOLA

his audience since they themselves are the problem. It should be clear, then, that I find this approach (which is in fact bloviating nonsense dressed up as analysis) to be not only tedious and churlish, but also cerebrally indolent and sexist. I am surprised critics and scholars alike continue to get away with this kind of writing. I am not wilfully misconstruing Corrigan’s thesis here; the fact is that Coppola has, in fact, all too readily been turned into a brand that resonates far beyond the boundaries of her films (unlike the majority of her male counterparts or contemporaries, such as Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach). Indeed, scholars have devoted a lot of attention to the fact of her celebrity (see Diamond 2011; Lewis 2011), to the extent that Coppola’s personal choices (as a facet of postfeminist discourse), especially in relation to commodity fetishism, have become inextricably bound up with the ‘appeal’ of her films and the manner in which they are read.10 In other words, it would seem that Coppola as a brand has become increasingly difficult to extricate from any consideration of the formal properties of her work. This is troubling; a case in point would be the way in which the aesthetic appeal of, for instance, The Virgin Suicides has been extrapolated and reified in order to appeal to a youthful demographic. This process of commodification actually belies the devastating core of the film that tells us that leading one’s life within precisely such a hermetic environment as the one Coppola’s brand is used to create is claustrophobic, corrupting and potentially irretrievably damaging. In short, reading Coppola’s films through the Coppola brand distorts their meaning entirely. Moreover, I do not expect Coppola as a person to be consistent with her filmmaking; that women making work that pertains to feminist concerns are held to increasingly impossible standards by the media (namely that they should be able to speak on behalf of all women everywhere all of the time) is, I insist, a form of patriarchal sabotage. I will allow Sofia Coppola her contradictions – the Coppola I write of here is therefore possibly closer to Seymour Chatman’s conception of the ‘ideal author’ (just as I might assume that anyone reading these words is my ‘ideal reader’) or Michel Foucault’s notion of the ‘author function’. The concern of this study, then, is not Sofia Coppola herself, but her work. Sofia Coppola as she exists within these pages will be characterized, taking my cue from Corrin Columpar (in Levitin, Plessis and Raoul 2003), as a feminist auteure.11

INTRODUCTION . 7

Coppola as Feminist Auteure Thus far, I have defined the remit of this book by stating what it is not. My aim is not to demur with existing scholarship on Coppola – I do believe we are all contributing to a useful conversation on female authorship after all – but to situate my ongoing scholarship on Coppola (2007, 2012a, 2012b, 2015) from an alternative perspective than postfeminism, adolescence, fashion and celebrity. I will examine Coppola as a creator, par excellence, of mood (Sinnerbrink 2013) and beguilement through images that reveal, upon close reading, radical critiques of the gilded worlds in which her films are set. As such, Coppola’s powers of beguilement draw us with ease into worlds of psychic fracture, loneliness and abjection. This is the essence of Coppola’s power as a filmmaker: her images appear as pleasurable, but denote something we can only grasp by looking askew or awry – her images are troubling and vexing. Coppola understands that, as Tania Modleski puts it: ‘Ideology is as effective as it is because it bestows pleasure on its subjects rather than simply conveying messages, and so it cannot be combated only at the level of meaning’ (1991: 57). Coppola’s feminist form of politics is precisely ‘bestowed’ via visual pleasure and this is the central assumption of this study. Hers is not a counter-cinema that takes its cue from Teresa de Lauretis’ (1984, 1987) call for the de-aestheticization of images of the female body. As we shall see, Coppola understands that visual appeal can be used subversively as a form of Irigarayan masquerade; that is, Coppola’s strategy is to reveal the process by which an image comes to be meaningful culturally (how images function as clichés that, in turn, inform our understanding of relations of power). Coppola also knows that an image always comes into being for someone and that in the case of representation of the female body, the male gaze is nearly always present as a structuring device. By extension, Coppola understands how the very mechanics of cinema, as an apparatus, function as a technology of gender (de Lauretis 1987). Coppola’s highly specific form of feminist counter-cinema aims to dismantle or decentre the inveterate patriarchal project of classical cinema from within – she uses its imagery and its language against itself. And so, in order to extract meaning from Coppola’s films, we must take their pleasurable properties seriously. In reading Coppola, it is not a matter of listening intently to what is said – after all, very little is articulated – but in remaining alert to the multiform, highly complex nature of her production design and what this connotes philosophically. Coppola, after all,

8 . SOFIA COPPOLA

is known for using images and sounds as the point of inception for her work and rarely starts with dialogue (in fact, the most significant words in her films are, infamously, muffled and inaudible – fans will know to which scene I am referring). She is primarily a director who thinks in images. She is intensely cinematic in this respect. This study enacts a similar process by thinking through Coppola’s images,12 which is to say that the philosophical framework employed here, which I will go on to discuss in the latter portion of this chapter, is suggested or made sense of by way of the image. Coppola’s work has, I would suggest alongside Sharon Lin Tay (2009), far more in common with European waves of filmmaking and 1970s American independent film than it does with the postfeminist and ironic styles of the contemporary ‘brat pack’ (exemplified by Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach and Todd Solondz), which Claire Perkins (2012), taking her cue from Jeffrey Sconce, has elaborated on as ‘smart cinema’. Coppola’s ‘blank’ style, I counter, should not be read in an ironic mode because its existential import is soundly based in critique. The playful and quirky (see MacDowell 2010) tone of hipster irony is not something, I would suggest, that Coppola brooks in her deeply serious and engaged work. In this sense, Coppola recuperates the tropes of what Robert Kolker (2000, originally published 1980) has delineated as a ‘cinema of loneliness’ from within a feminist framework by situating her own work in response on the side of critique. As Kolker remarks of 1970s American ‘indie’ filmmaking (especially in reference to Francis Coppola, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese), this canon of film rarely challenges: ‘the ideology many of them [these films] find abhorrent . . . [they] perpetuate the passivity and aloneness that have become their central image . . . their films speak to continual impotence in the world, an inability to change and to create change’ (2000: 10). Somewhere, by way of example, is a film that clearly evinces a nostalgia for American indie filmmaking of the 1970s and 1980s (Coppola uses the camera lenses deployed in Rumble Fish (1983) to create a specific grainy, washedout aesthetic), but responds to that patriarchal and hermetically sealed historical moment in filmmaking from a feminist perspective. Indeed, the film sets out to critique the romantic notion of masculinity in crisis that the 1970s cinema of paranoia reified through the characters of Harry Moseby, Harry Caul, Johnny Boy and Travis Bickle. Coppola’s work engages radically with American indie’s cinematic inheritance by reconfiguring it as a critique of apathy and impotence. In a similar manner, we can read her engagement with feminist politics as an attempt to subvert and undermine the priapic nature of the cinematic inheritance upon

INTRODUCTION . 9

which she draws. After all, this is the woman who asks what a Clint Eastwood/Don Siegel film from the 1970s might look like from an admittedly white and privileged female point of view (a controversy on which I will elaborate in the first chapter of this study). It will be clear to readers by now that I will be referring to Coppola as the central agent and creative force behind her body of work. This is not to detract from the artistic team that has worked so consistently and assiduously on her films throughout her career to date (cinematographers Ed Lachmann, Lance Accord and the brilliant, late Harris Savides, editor Sarah Flack, production designer Anne Ross, bands AIR and Phoenix, producer Fred Roos, and actresses Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning), but rather to stress that Coppola is the agential or centrifugal force that determines the aesthetic for which these films are renowned; that is, Coppola knows precisely who can help her evoke these particular shades, tones and moods. Moreover, she is known for her discerning taste and quiet determination to achieve the meticulous cinematic effects she desires (she famously refused to make Lost in Translation with anyone else but Bill Murray, despite the fact that the actor had neither signed a contract nor turned up on set in Japan by the first day of the film’s notoriously tight shooting schedule). Here again, I must confess to adopting a somewhat old-fashioned attitude to the notion of authorship. Poststructuralist auteur theory that emerged in the wake of scholarship by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault who announced the ‘death of the author’ and proposed the ‘author function’ instead, sets forth that the author is but an organizing principle within a text’s internal structure. From a feminist perspective, this is, at best, purely common sense (we cannot claim to know the complexity and contradictions of somebody intimately through their work); that is, the work possesses its own logic, which is in turn interpreted by a viewer or reader with her own unconscious bias and experience. Indeed, the contradictions of the text, the moment at which it begins to unravel itself (as Jacques Derrida might have it) signal the impossibility if not the outright falsity of positing a consistent, abiding and wholly self-aware subject as its origin. However, just as the auteur theory in its original manifestation was a highly patriarchal theory that was all too heavily indebted to the Romantic notion of the lone male artist as genius, the work of the poststructuralists who influenced this deconstructive reiteration of the theory (broadly speaking Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze) were entirely blind to the realities and intersections of gender, class, race and their conterminous conferral of privilege or disenfranchisement. At the risk of sounding paranoid in tone,

10 . SOFIA COPPOLA

it seems significant that the moment in which women started to make gains not only within society politically and economically but also culturally also happens to be the moment in which a theoretical course is set that is wholly inimical to any ability to lay claim to a name. To name is, after all, to harness a form of power. For feminist scholars, one cannot remain indifferent to the matter of who is speaking; as Kaja Silverman, who has resolutely rejected the notion of the author as a transcendent source of meaning in her work, argues: ‘it is clearly not the same thing for a woman to speak with a female voice as it is for a man to do so, and vice versa’ (Silverman 2003: 70). To divest a woman of her agency, to disregard her stance as the teller of her own tale is to deprive her of her own voice and her own authority and expertise.13 It is a vehemently sexist manoeuvre that serves to blind us to the manifold ways in which female subjectivity is inscribed within a text – and one of the central facets of this inscription is the author as speaker (or one of many speakers) of a film. Again, as Silverman so persuasively argues, ‘the crucial project with respect to the female voice is to find a place from which it can speak and be heard, not to strip it of discursive rights’ (1988: 189). I concur that we cannot, and must not, pronounce as obsolete and defunct a form of agency (female, feminine, feminist, femme) that is still yet to be realized fully. It is for this reason that I will, as a political strategy, centre the figure of the female and feminist auteure (Columpar 2003) in what follows. Tania Modelski, taking her cue from Nancy K. Miller, has remarked that it is Foucault’s ‘sovereign indifference to the matter of who’s speaking, and not the concept of authorship itself, that is the mask behind which phallocentrism hides its fictions’ (Modleski 1991: 33). The matter of who is enunciating the text, then, is a feminist issue. To lay claim to one’s agency as a practitioner is a feminist act. This is not a trivial issue for, once more, as Miller reminds us, the matter of the signature for women ‘by virtue of its power in the world of circulation – is not immaterial. Only those who have it can play with not having it’ (quoted in Modleski 1991: 33). It is especially crucial that women are able to author texts in terms of both form and narrative within a cultural arena such as film. Hollywood is an industry that almost singlehandedly powers the norms and ideals that shape our notions of what constitutes a successful and therefore nebulously ‘good’ life and, by extension, who is represented. At worst, it is a minacious form of ideology that enacts and perpetuates forms of systemic violence that function through hierarchy, separation, elevation and degradation. Hollywood is notoriously racist, sexist and ageist as an industry, and it is responsible (as the factory of dreams)

INTRODUCTION . 11

for the creation of a cultural subconscious on a global scale. Indeed, it is hard labour to work against the grain of Hollywood. In terms of its treatment of the female body, Modleski has written of ‘the monstrous hypocrisy of a system which could so exploit a woman’s body while infantalizing, idealizing, and sentimentalizing women with its belief in female fragility and spirituality’ (1991: 21). Feminist agency as authorship within the film industry works to deconstruct, decentre and disperse these dubious cinematic pleasures by offering alternative strategies of seeing and desiring. Feminist authorship can employ a number of incisive rhetorical strategies such as the subversive use of genre, the centring of the female gaze, female desire and the female voice, a holistic approach to representing the female body and the foregrounding of the cerebral female protagonist; it also readily appropriates sardonic and scathing humour in order to undermine Hollywood’s pompous determination to take itself so seriously. Within this context, Coppola is a curious case in point since, from the perspective of many scholars and critics, she is frequently cast in the role of Hollywood royalty (indeed, as a rarefied, privileged princess) – a compliant cog in the wheel of the tumescent Hollywood system that swallows up whole most attempts to function independently of its own bloated organism. However, as I will go on to argue, Coppola is highly proficient in undermining the rhetorical strategies of Hollywood precisely because it is a language that she knows how to speak fluently, even if this is not adopted with ease. If, as Audre Lorde famously reminded us (within the intersectional context of race, gender and sexuality, which is admittedly not the world of Coppola), it is impossible to dismantle hegemonic cultural capital by using the patriarchal tools that built such a behemoth, Coppola’s strategy is to undermine the foundations of that structure by recuperating its central assumptions and tenets through a gendered form of politics – a process that casts much of received male rhetoric within an absurd light.14 In other words, she feminizes the master’s tools in order to reveal the weak and provisional foundations upon which his house is built. I would argue, by augmentation, that her relationship to the fashion and beauty industries functions in a correlative manner: Coppola understands intimately how images of femininity and ‘femaleness’ are constructed and used on women and young girls culturally, rhetorically and ideologically. Hers are the tools of the feminist auteure in that she seeks to interrogate those norms and not reify them: in this context, her fascination with whiteness in particular is crucial, for Coppola’s representation of whiteness is, in fact, one that hinges on impossibility and mortality.

12 . SOFIA COPPOLA

Addressing the Viewer as Female It is my belief throughout this study that Coppola not only functions as a feminist auteure within her own texts (the agential force and voice of the films), but that she also addresses the film viewer as female. A great deal of critical attention has been paid to the representation of the female figure or how ‘femaleness’ is constructed onscreen. Less, however, has been said about the female spectator. Indeed, Jackie Stacey’s study of stardom (1994) remains somewhat unique in its emphasis on the female spectator. Since Laura Mulvey (2001) argued in her celebrated polemic on visual pleasure that the female viewer is caught in a double bind and forced into a relationship of subjugation with – or is in fact made complicit in – the production of her own likeness as spectacle, feminist film theory has worked hard to grapple with the intricate complexities of the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class both on and off the screen. To point out the deep imbrication of representation and embodied, phenomenological experience may seem somewhat redundant or evident, yet Hollywood, as the dominant mode of narrative filmmaking, continues to eschew dense description of female perspectives in favour of glossy commodification. Despite voluminous (and mostly, in my view, ill-conceived) criticism of Mulvey’s stance (to which she in turn has responded), it would seem that Hollywood in particular still regards the task of representing the reality of the female body and lived female experience (in all of its complexities and varied intersections) as a dull, lacklustre or even otiose and abject matter. In 1984, de Lauretis opined that ‘the position of woman in language and in cinema is one of non-coherence; she finds herself only in a void of meaning, the empty space between the signs – the place of women spectators in the cinema between the look of the camera and the image on the screen, a place not represented, not symbolized, and thus pre-empted to subject (or self)-representation’ (1984: 8). Writing this book, some thirty-four years after de Lauretis first surmised that women in their multiplicity and difference are nowhere to be found onscreen (which has a lasting and profound impact on how female subjectivities are formed), I would argue that we find ourselves in much the same position on a quotidian basis. There have been outstanding analyses made of late on the considerable progress that women’s cinema is making (I recommend especially Sophie Mayer’s wonderful Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (2015)) and I am loath to suggest that female filmmakers and women working in visual culture at large have had a negligible impact; such a suggestion would be in flagrant

INTRODUCTION . 13

contradiction to the mere existence of this study after all (although, notably, it is dedicated to a privileged white woman). However, the egregious barriers that women face working in creative industries are well documented and we are far from reaching a state of equilibrium and parity. In terms of the representation of women on screen, Laura Mulvey (with whom I coedited Feminisms: Diversity, Multiplicity and Difference in Film Cultures (2015)) and I have argued that we are facing new frontiers of misogyny that subject the female body to an extensive process of dematerialization that seems to sanction the exaction of wanton violence on our onscreen likeness. That Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman (2017), which tightly bound and likened the female body to a war machine, could cause such a furore that grown female journalists admitted in print to crying in the aisles of the cinema due to the simple fact of viewing an athletic female body enact the asinine procedural movements normally reserved for the male action hero frankly speaks volumes. That the Hollywood image is so deeply bound up with fantasy – indeed, is a creation of fantasy – is precisely what makes it powerfully seductive; this in turn affects the production of subjectivity by redirecting and repurposing desire (that Hollywood’s history is intimately related to the birth of the production line of capitalism – in particular the Fordist model – should not be forgotten). In other words, Hollywood drives us towards the unattainable: it generates a form of madness. As de Lauretis puts it: ‘In this manner cinema powerfully participates in the production of forms of subjectivity that are individually shaped yet unequivocally social’ (1984: 8). This is dangerous territory if this highly particular image is not decentred and deconstructed because it becomes the benchmark, the standard by which we judge and measure our own worth simply because of its saturation, which all too often is taken for granted as a given. And as we are well aware, the continuity editing system (which David Bordwell argues has ‘intensified’ (2002) in its very form rather than lost cultural ground) ensures that narration as an ideological effect functions optimally. That is, we perform feminist labour when we demand that viewers read against the grain of the image. De Lauretis, taking her cue I suspect from Mulvey, has argued that this has a detrimental, if not nefarious, impact on the female spectator in particular (her form/likeness already being subjected to ever-more preposterous levels of specularity); she writes that ‘if female spectators find themselves placed in virtually the same position . . . as they are in classical cinema, it is because the inscription of sexual difference in the image(s) is not questioned but taken for granted . . . narrativity is what over-

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determines identification, the spectator’s relations to the film, and therefore the very reading of the images’ (1984: 9). Despite this statement being issued from what would now be considered the annals of feminist theory, we only need to consider the harmful postfeminist confluence of supposed ‘feminist choice’ and the horrifically rigorous standards of the burgeoning beauty industry – an industry that has brought Botox, fillers and all manner of ghastly cosmetic procedures to the high street in the name of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-investment’ (as Jessa Crispin (2017) recently stated, it is not ‘self-care’ if you are paying someone to paint your nails or wash your hair) – to re-establish its contemporary relevance; this is fundamentally a relationship of commerce that is regulated and facilitated through images. Hollywood, as it were, has facilitated a new form of aesthetic labour that is entirely founded on and bound up with fantasy (a fantasy with which women are encouraged to collude). As reality recedes, we are expected to subscribe increasingly tightly to our own virtual, airbrushed image (a dilemma to which Coppola has devoted an entire film: The Bling Ring). To intercede in this is to deconstruct, which is precisely a feminist manoeuvre. Above all, a feminist film must address the spectator as female (as opposed to portraying the female body or character as strong or weak, which is far too simplistic a response) and reveal to her the ‘terms of production of woman as text, as image’ (de Lauretis 1984: 36). This intricate process of unpicking how a specific image of woman has come to take hold culturally and ideologically enables, in short, a form of resistance: a refusal to identify with such an image. Moreover, it can reveal to us how the image is weaponized and how the image can be brought into confrontation with its own limitations. For de Lauretis, this is feminist labour, for: ‘Women are constructed through gender (and other forms of ideology) and feminism is the practice and consciousness of that ideology’s limits, a “de-re-construction”’ (2007: 3). This is, fundamentally, a kind of cinema that is not merely made by, but for women; that is, it places the male spectator in the position of feeling the affects to which a patriarchal regime of images subjects the female body. Coppola’s films are notably marketed at women, and young women in particular. Indeed, distributors of her films have, somewhat infuriatingly, latched on to the pet themes and tones of a postfeminist aesthetic in order to appeal to a highly specific demographic of adolescent girl. I believe that in part, this has worked against Coppola’s credibility and right to be taken seriously as a feminist auteure. To return to my earlier point, critics, viewers and scholars alike are all too ready to obfuscate surface with meaning when it comes to Coppola’s work and

INTRODUCTION . 15

assume readily that the content of her films correlates to the pleasing exterior within which they are packaged; for instance, the DVD of Marie Antoinette in particular was encased in a shade of fuchsia that is normally adopted for trinkets and clothing marketed heavily at very young girls, thus ensuring that the film’s politics of pretty and excess is nullified and infantilized by its own marketing campaign (the film’s reference to this shade of fuchsia was actually meant as a homage to British punk, which its opening-credit sequence renders explicit). However, this somewhat misguided marketing of her films reveals, in essence, a core motif or concern of Coppola’s oeuvre: that she assumes the viewer to be female. Coppola adamantly feminizes her cinematic worlds not in order simply to create a pleasing aesthetic (although her films frequently spur specious use of her visuals within the glossy innards of fashion magazines, proving perhaps how easily she is misconstrued), but in order to characterize vision (that of director and spectator) as female. Coppola’s feminist politics lies in her offering to the viewer a dispositif in which the multifaceted construction of the eternal feminine is revealed as a new form of feminist counter-cinema. That is, Coppola gives to the female viewer (especially the young, white female viewer) what they know already to be true and she demands that the male viewer bear the burden of what it means to be made the object of the gaze; consider, for instance, the tracking shot of Marie Antoinette entering Versailles, in which her point of view registers a series of hostile and objectifying gazes that represent the power and authority of the patriarchal court. Likewise, The Virgin Suicides is a film that works to deconstruct how young girls are already always fashioned into suffocating roles that force them to internalize the role of to-be-looked-at-ness (Mulvey 2001) that patriarchal narratives set out for them. The film adapts the nostalgia and irreparable pain of the original novel, but recuperates the priapic narrative as an absurdity that nonetheless facilities gendered forms of violence and control. To refuse a young girl her becoming, to re-direct her desire, to make her carry the burden of meaning, to force her to be the psychic mirror of man is to destroy her. The film’s dark revelation is that a young woman can kill herself without in fact ever committing suicide. These are films that reveal fundamental truths of what it means to become a woman under patriarchy. Notably, Coppola’s films that centre male experience alongside that of the female (Lost in Translation, Somewhere) render masculinity as a hermetic shell inside of which it is impossible to become or to thrive. And as Kaja Silverman (1992) has argued, to produce an analysis that divides received cultural notions of masculinity into its extant parts is also to decentre and deflate it of its dominance.

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It is therefore crucial that Coppola’s own cinematic dissection of masculinity (and, in particular, its fashioning as a dominant narrative by Hollywood) throws self-same, abiding identity into crisis – indeed, reveals it as, at best, a void and, at worst, a patriarchal farce.

A Feminist Politics of the Image The task of defining the politics of Coppola’s feminist imagery is rife with difficulty; scholars who write on her work often reveal its perplexing nature through their own choice of description. For instance, Amy Woodworth states that: ‘Coppola’s trademark slow pacing, privileging of impression over plot, and development of emotional texture and mood constitute a kind of feminine aesthetic’ (2008: 151, emphasis added). Woodworth’s intricate essay gets to the heart of why it is so hard to pin down what many view as the nebulous nature of Coppola’s oeuvre (a presumption that is only shored up by Coppola’s own reluctance to pronounce on the ‘meaning’ of her films – a track record she broke with only recently in reference to controversy over The Beguiled). In other words, Coppola’s films are defined by mood and tone;15 they are paeans to the fleeting and ephemeral moments in life that are nearly impossible to capture, centred and grounded as they are in subjectivity and embodiment, but that nonetheless come to define the course of a life. Consider, for instance, the sound of Marie Antoinette’s dress delicately caressing the underbrush as she wanders back home to an arranged marriage and away from a lover she knows she will most likely never see again, or the sound bridge that carries over the muted yet explosive sounds of My Bloody Valentine from Charlotte’s taxi ride through Tokyo into the Park Hyatt hotel as Bob cradles her in his arms. Both of these moments are, without doubt, infinitesimal and profoundly altering events for both female protagonists. The slightness or brevity of actual time is distended and subsists within lived experience – that is, within the body. Coppola documents those moments that change us on an atomic level and that we carry with us internally. Yet bittersweet is not a quality that is easily defined; it is felt. This is the magical territory that defines Coppola’s work, which externalizes the turbulence of the inner life. Likewise, the politics of her image is also hard to define because she is describing fractious situations in which any attempt to articulate oneself is thwarted by a patriarchal society that would seek to shut down dissent and to disarticulate the female experience; in

INTRODUCTION . 17

other words, she is often describing a fledgling feminist politics of the body in its moment of inception – a politics to come, if you will. Handyside has aptly noted that this kind of culture: mitigates against connections across gendered, raced and class divisions. In the face of such a society, retreat to the domestic space, the comforts of home, or an attempt to fashion a new glamorous identity through fashion, seems an entirely logical response. It is not so much that Coppola and her female protagonists no longer enact collectivist feminist values, it is more than such collectivities fracture in the face of a society which promotes the model of the citizen as an active entrepreneur of the self. (2017: 31) I concur with Handyside that Coppola’s critical engagement with contemporary postfeminist politics reveals a near-outright rejection of any possibility of thriving within an environment that demands that female agency is reharnessed as the ideal model for late capitalist consumerism. Coppola’s feminist politics, however, are not uniquely focused on the postfeminist moment and its affective damages; her oeuvre engages with a history of patriarchal culture that has sought to subdue, silence, trade and deny the female body and experience. Her feminist politics are wide-ranging and deeply imbricate with the history of cinema as a patriarchal model of subjectivity. In other words, her politics is of the image. As I stated earlier, Coppola’s is not a counter-cinema that adopts strategies of de-aestheticization and reflexivity; it is in no way Brechtian and has negligible allegiance with the epic theatre. She has, in other words, far more in common with 1970s American independent filmmakers and their deployment of tropes of European filmmaking than she does with, say, the nouvelle vague. She enacts a feminist recuperation of the image that is already always based on and in recuperation. This is why Coppola’s engagement with the history of filmmaking is crucial to understanding her aesthetic appeal. Moreover, Coppola’s films positively revel in the decorative and even florid or baroque (see Walton 2016) aspects of the image in order to evince a feminist politics as a question of production design. Coppola’s use of the cinematic cliché (the generic image) is subversive in that she reveals the process by which someone or something becomes an image to be read collectively: how, for instance, the female body is cultivated as specifically meaningful (objectified, sexualized, dematerialized). In doing so, she lays open the mechanic through which an image always comes into being for someone else. Exposing the

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burden of the male gaze as wrought on, in particular, the female form and its detrimental effects lies at the centre of Coppola’s project. It is cinema’s inveterate patriarchal politics that she addresses and its phallic economy of images that she, by extension, seeks to dismantle. Coppola’s fascination with the cliché as a form of cultural shorthand – an image that we already always know how to read and to assimilate – is born out of a wider project: how to free the female body from the burden of iconicity. If this is a position into which phallocentric culture has forced women, it is the aim of a number of feminist filmmakers, of whom Coppola is a prominent visionary, to find alternate paths to express female subjectivity and experience. Yet this is not a task that can be accomplished with alacrity or ease; as Rosi Braidotti, drawing on Irigaray, reminds us, ‘the image of Woman, or of woman-as-other, is a culturespecific, historical system of material and symbolic representation, against which feminist women are struggling. Moreover, insofar as this imaginary has been internalized by women and has constructed female identity, it is by no means external to women and cannot be cast off like an old garment’ (in Burke 1994: 122) It is this struggle, which is played out through external and internal stratification, that Coppola addresses in her films, often to heart-rending or devastating effect. I suggest, then, that Coppola’s films are more appropriately attended to through feminist philosophies of difference (many of which I refer to in this study) rather than purely through postfeminism. I must stress, alongside scholars who have sought to recuperate thinkers such as Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva from utterly inappropriate and naïve charges of essentialism (see in particular Bray 2003; and Burke 1994), that a feminism of sexual difference – despite what many Anglo-American feminists have argued – asserts difference positively so that one may speak strategically as a woman. ‘Woman’ in this sense does not denote a homogeneous, monolithic, static presence that can be exhaustively defined once and for all on behalf of all women everywhere; furthermore, it has nothing whatsoever to do with her biological body and everything to do with her place as a social subject within an ideological discourse that already shapes and delimits the terms and possibilities of her experience. On the contrary, ‘woman’, under these terms, stands in for the site where a nexus of relations constituted by multifarious and complex intersections of class, race and sex may be taken into account. Women are multitudinous and contradictory, and Coppola’s work aims to represent but one margin of such compound and phenomenologically composite female existence in the world. To come to the point, as a filmmaker, she speaks,

INTRODUCTION . 19

thinks, writes and represents through the feminine and as a woman. This is imperative to the feminist project because women have been made to bear physically and symbolically the detrimental effects of white masculine privilege as his Other in order to shore up male identity as dominant.16 Materially, culturally and linguistically, women have been divested of a place from which to speak. Coppola speaks both as a woman and to women as her audience. To enact or activate a feminist politics through the image is vital because this is the site where dominant fictions come into being – the terms under which existence is, or is not, represented and given voice to. The dominant fiction of patriarchy does not exist in abstraction; Kaja Silverman, who defines it as ‘a reservoir of sounds, images, and narratives’, also asserts that ‘it has no concrete existence apart from discursive practice and its psychic residue. If representation and signification constitute the site at which the dominant fiction comes into existence, then they would also seem to provide the necessary vehicle for ideological contestation – the medium through which to reconstruct both our “reality” and “ourselves”’ (1992: 48). What Silverman defines here is a form of feminist counter-politics that attends carefully to the very construction of the dominant narrative that reveals itself through image and sound in order to expose it precisely as a creative fiction. Similarly, Claire Johnston, writing in 1973, called for a determined confrontation with the ideology of mainstream cinema in order to challenge its depiction of women in particular – a representation that she argued is grounded in myths of the eternal feminine that Hollywood’s reality effect helps to pass off as natural and universal. She writes that ‘it is in the nature of myth to drain the sign (the image of woman/the function of woman in the narrative) of its meaning and superimpose another which thus appears natural’ (2008: 120) Critique of the image would therefore facilitate a dislocation between lived experience, identification and representation that would subvert patriarchal ideology and the phallic economy of words and images used to uphold it. It would render lucid the workings of myth (particularly in relation to cinema) as a form of cultural construction that suffocates those that live within its grasp (The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette). Importantly, Johnston does not brook utopian thinking when it comes to forming a feminist counter-cinema (and nor, for that matter, do I). First, she points out that ideology does not function through deception – it is a reality within which we must live and we cannot erase it by mere effort of will. Second, it follows that the cinematic apparatus itself is part and parcel of that reality that we experience ideologically and is thus never neutral. In other words, it is impossible to capture

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the so-called ‘Truth’ of experience. Bearing this in mind, it is therefore jejune to suggest that changing the conditions of production is enough to alter meaning. This concatenation of conditions, for Johnston, demands that new meaning must be made ‘within the text of the film’ (in Grant 2007: 124) – in other words, within the image itself. Johnston, unlike her contemporary feminist counterparts, argues that it is specifically Hollywood’s dependence on stereotypes that renders it especially susceptible or open to subversion. If myth relies upon the use of certain iconographies, it is precisely this taxonomy of images that constitutes its most vulnerable and weak point: to denaturalize the icon, to push it to its limits is to foreground its textuality and, by extension, its place within received cultural discourse. Coppola’s films work on us at the level of the image as a cliché; by drawing on a cinematic inheritance that works as a form of cultural and collective shorthand that serves the dominant narrative, she subverts the image by pushing it to its limit. Coppola’s strategy, I maintain, is to heighten and foreground the decorative and so-called ‘feminine’ aspects of the image in juxtaposition to a mood of crisis, disorientation, melancholy and rupture. The diffuse, light-filled and oneiric qualities of her images are always shot through with a dark and insidious undercurrent. It is within this disjunction between surface and depth, the cliché and its underside, symbol and mood that the feminist politics of Coppola’s films emerge. In what follows, then, I argue that Coppola puts the pretty to ‘critical, even political use’ (Galt 2011: 6). For if, to return to Galt momentarily, ‘the pretty is usually rejected as too feminine, too effeminate, and too foreign, it can surely provide aesthetic-political friction for queer or feminist film . . . Might prettiness in cinema be uniquely able to develop a politics that engages gender, sexuality, and geographical alterity at a formal level rather than simply as a problem for representation?’ (Galt 2011: 6). Coppola, almost uniquely, takes the decorative surface of the image as a matter of high seriousness by addressing not only the problematics of ‘pretty’ as it is culturally conceived (even examining Hollywood masculine prototypes), but also as a way to directly reach questions of gendered identity. In reading Coppola, we must attend insistently to both surface and depth in order to garner meaning, for hers are films in which ‘mood envelops and transfigures narrative meaning (and) . . . overrides conventional plot’ (Sinnerbrink 2012: 161). Indeed, I suggest that mood and form are of far greater consequence in Coppola’s work than narrative, for it is through the former that she decentres the latter as a stifling, if not violent, method of control and containment.

INTRODUCTION . 21

Notes  1.  2.  3.  4.  5.  6.  7.

 8.

 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

See Philip French, ‘Marie-Antoinette – Review’, Guardian, 22 October 2006, https://www .theguardian.com/film/2006/oct/22/philipfrench. See Sean O’Hagan, ‘Sofia Coppola’, Guardian, 8 October 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2006/oct/08/features.review1. See Anthony Lane, ‘Lost in the Revolution’, New Yorker, 23 October 2006, http://www .newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/23/lost-in-the-revolution. See Peter Travers, ‘Marie Antoinette’, Rolling Stone, 20 October 2006, http://www.rollingstone .com/movies/reviews/marie-antoinette-20061020. See Peter Bradshaw, ‘Somewhere – Review’, Guardian, 9 December 2010, https://www.theguard ian.com/film/2010/dec/09/somewhere-review. See Tim Robey, ‘Somewhere, Review’, Telegraph, 9 December 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/film/filmreviews/8192556/Somewhere-review.html. For an excellent attempt at unpacking the critical language used to describe Coppola’s work, see ‘The “Problem” of Sofia Coppola’, It Equals, 8 March 2017, http://itequals.com/arts/theproblem-of-sofia-coppola. ‘If, in conjunction with the so-called international art cinema of the sixties and seventies, the auteur had been absorbed as a phantom presence within a text, he or she has rematerialized in the eighties and nineties as a commercial performance of the business of being an auteur’ (Corrigan, quoted in Wright Wexman 2003: 98). For a recent and interesting celebrity study of Coppola in relation to white privilege, see Soraya Roberts, ‘The Eternal Becoming of Sofia Coppola’, Hazlitt, 19 June 2017, http://hazlitt.net/ longreads/eternal-becoming-sofia-coppola. See, for instance, but one example of a cornucopia of articles that centre on Coppola’s guide to upmarket retail: Lynn Hirschberg, ‘Sofia Coppola’s Paris’, New York Times Magazine, 24 September 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/travel/tmagazine/24coppola.html. Corinn Columpar coined the term ‘auteure’ in her article on Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson (1997). See Columpar 2003. The philosophical framework I employ here has become meaningful to me because I have interpreted these thinkers through Coppola’s images. It is Coppola who has made me understand and assimilate Luce Irigaray’s work on the female body as commodity and object rather than the other way round (Marie Antoinette); it is Coppola who, for me, outlined and clarified Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject (The Virgin Suicides); it is Coppola who made a film that contextualized and took to its logical end Guy Debord’s theory of the spectacle (The Bling Ring); it is Coppola who made Marc Auge’s concept of the nonplace materialize for me (Somewhere); and it is Coppola who made me understand both Camus’ notion of the absurd and Sartre’s existential concept of human consciousness as nothingness (Lost in Translation), and that therefore an ethics of being in the world is always contingently founded as one of Beauvoirean ambiguity. That she has done all of this within the context of making a form of feminist cinema – one that privileges and centres the female point of view as both cinematic subject and cinematic viewer – is an achievement that should never be underestimated. ‘Feminist auteurship entails the impression of feminist authority, not necessarily that of the auteur herself, on screen. What is at stake here is the film’s larger acknowledgment of an informing discourse that is ideological in both form and content. Whether visual, psychoanalytic, aural or

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14. 15.

16.

narrative, this address transcends the personal; both the place and terms of address are derived from an understanding of the film’s relevance to women’ (Ramanathan 2006: 3–4). See Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’ in Sister Outsider (1984). As Robert Sinnerbrink argues, mood is a difficult concept to define precisely because of its obviousness, yet it provides the backdrop to our cognitive and affective understanding of a film: ‘Mood is one of those elements of cinema whose obviousness, like that of the everyday, is deeply mysterious. It is not simply a subjective experience or a private state of mind; it describes, rather, how a (fictional) world is expressed or disclosed via a shared affective attunement orienting the spectator within that world. Although mood remains a neglected topic in film theory, without it we cannot explain how meaning in film is communicated via style and composition’ (2012: 148). Kaja Silverman astutely notes that ‘disavowal also has a crucial part to play within the constitution and maintenance of sexual difference. However, whereas the Freudian account of that psychic mechanism explicitly posits it as a male defense against female lack, “Fetishism” implicitly shows it to be a defense against what is in the final analysis a male lack. Since woman’s anatomical “wound” is the product of an externalizing displacement of masculine insufficiency, which is then biologically naturalized, the castration against which the male subject protects himself through disavowal and fetishism must be primarily his own’ (Silverman 1992: 46).

PART I

Imaging Absence as Abjection and Imaging the Female Gothic as Rage

CHAPTER 1

The Virgin Suicides (1999)

Abjection preserves . . . the immemorial violence with which one body becomes separated from another body in order to be. Julia Kristeva (quoted in Oliver 2002: 236) Whiteness, really white whiteness, is unattainable. Its ideal forms are impossible . . . whiteness as an ideal can never be attained, not only because white skin can never be hue white, but because ideally white is absence: to be really, absolutely white is to be nothing. Richard Dyer (1997: 78) Since its release in 1999, The Virgin Suicides has been prized for its kitsch aesthetic qualities, its on-trend retro soundtrack and its moments of dark, sardonic humour, all of which have been cited as reasons for why the film has attained a form of cult status and has notably been a source of inspiration within the fashion industry; it has, in other words, been mostly understood and appreciated in superficial terms. This chapter aims to overturn a lack of engagement with the film’s substance by a close and careful reading of the surface of its images. For The Virgin Suicides is indeed a film that beguiles its viewer with oneiric and beautiful imagery, but it does so in order to intimate a darkness that lies secreted just beneath its surface and threatens to rupture that surface with its inarticulable truth. It is a film of horror from which horror is abjected and erased. It is therefore a deeply psychological film about the coping mechanisms that are invoked to deal with catastrophic trauma. It is a film about an attempt to narrate, to make sensical, the inexplicable. It is a film about adolescent male desire as an implicitly violent form of control over the female body. It is a film that is steeped in death, in that its principle narrative concern, beyond the titular suicides, centres on the small doses of death that are dealt to young girls on the cusp of becoming women; it is a film about the struggle or refusal to take up normative, patriarchal subjectivities. And

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beyond all of this, it is a masterful adaptation from its literary source (the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides), primarily because Coppola does not simply navigate the immense task of translating affectively words into images, but limns the yearning, aching chasm commensurate with adolescent desire and the sad diminishments of adulthood. In other words, the triumph of The Virgin Suicides lies in its creation of a specific mood and tone that is redolent with the weight of loss; here the palpable and irresolvable feelings of grief are given their correlative images. And thus its images strain to grasp what is always necessarily missed in language (that, as Roland Barthes has put it, we always fail to speak of the things and of the people we love).1 This is a film about a hidden, dark desire to return to the half-light of a past that never really existed in actuality – and for that its nostalgia is insidious and troubling and desperate. For in place of the fleshy, adolescent female body and its effluence, the film offers up (and deliberately so) hollow archetypes and ghosts. The Virgin Suicides relates, via retrospective and acousmatic voiceover, the story of the Lisbon sisters; these five girls, born and raised in a strict Catholic household in suburban Michigan in the 1970s, take their own lives as they are on the cusp of becoming young women. Their deaths trouble, haunt and distend the adult lives of the boys who grew up in their neighbourhood and came to worship the girls; seemingly traumatized by the inexplicable nature of the girls’ suicide pact, the male narrator – who stands in for all of the boys who loved them – states that male adulthood is a place where these men are ‘happier with dreams than with wives’. The Lisbon girls function as the catalyst for these dreams and, by extension, come to represent a lost and halcyon past. The film abounds with entrancing and mesmeric images, but a careful reading of these sequences reveals predication on a host of clichés and wilful acts of re-interpretation. At its most beguiling, the film betrays its own narrative, for as the boys/men desperately attempt to relive, recapture, retell and make sense of this tragedy ( in order to render it meaningful), the lyrical and metaphorical images allude beyond their immediate representative function and elude the grasp of understanding. In other words, the film works on a formal level to unravel the task of making meaning that is set in place by its narrative. The image is used and revealed here precisely as a cliché, as Gilles Deleuze has characterized it. Deleuze writes that as a trope, the cliché ensures that ‘we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather what it is within our interests to perceive’ (2005b: 19). When the cliché functions

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optimally, it works as a form of cultural shorthand that facilitates and eases assimilation without critical thought: we already know what to think about this kind of image because we recognize it instinctively. However, when the clichéd nature of such images becomes more apparent or is heightened to such an extent that we become aware of its inner workings or construction, our automatic modes of comprehension begin to break down or malfunction and what the cliché conceals from us – the underside or what Deleuze has termed ‘the unbearable’ (2005: 20) of the image – begins to slip through. The Virgin Suicides is comprised of threshold images or images that strain at the limits of understanding; their status as clichés serves to indicate states of breakdown and exhaustion, the place where understanding ceases and feeling overwhelms. So what do these images work both to conceal and reveal? It is my belief that Coppola adapts and recuperates her source material from a feminist perspective; if Eugenides’ (admittedly beautiful) novel is fundamentally a male narrative that knowingly draws on well-worn clichés itself (the distorting effects of adolescent male desire and a subsequent onset of specifically masculine crisis), The Virgin Suicides transcribes suicide as an act that goes beyond a subversive refusal of normative, patriarchal subjectivity. If the images the boys/men draw upon to relate the girls’ story have their basis in a plethora of clichés drawn from – as we shall see – advertising and soft pornography, the film, by extension, suggests that any form of subjectivity that reduces, simplifies and renders as surface a person precisely is already a form of annihilation. The Virgin Suicides is a film that revels in beautiful surfaces, but works to subvert those surfaces and reveals them as brittle, hollow and false because it is about a regime and ideology of images – to which the film implies young women are coerced to submit – that forces upon the female body a form of internal death. This is the unbearable or unrepresentable ‘truth’ that the boys attempt to cover over or hide via their narrative. The girls’ deaths, as such, threaten to destabilize or decentre their own masculine subjectivities; indeed, in her doctoral thesis, Michelle Devereaux argues that ‘the film is an almost parodic rendering of the Romantic ideal of the absorption of femininity into the masculine sublime ego’, in which the girls’ suicide pact ‘serves as a rejection of this absorption’ (2017: 131). Beauty, then, is invoked as a kind of psychic abjection: an attempt to cast out the reality of the Lisbon girls as human beings who continue to resist a specific priapic form of narrativization. The film’s cracks, fissures and lacunae that intersperse and break apart a regime of images that serve to hold in place the boys’ attempt to narrate their way out of the tragedy speak to the film’s obses-

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sion with failure.2 For, as Deleuze writes, it is in ‘the disturbances of memory and failures of recognition’ (2005b: 52) that we come closest to the meaning of what troubles us. The reality of the Lisbon sisters’ story – as a feminist hauntology – lies inbetween and on the underside of what we see.3 The film’s central critique is of the implicit violence and control wrought on the adolescent female body, and that critique, as we shall see, subsists as a kind of abject horror that the film’s tentative narrative tries, but always fails, to hold at bay. Moreover, the very structure of the film draws upon the abiding tenets of classical narrative cinema as retheorized by feminist scholars (suture, lack, fetishism and sadism) in order to reveal the mechanics of narrativization as a form of control. As Kaja Silverman has noted, one way to contain the female body is by ‘writing a narrative by means of which she (it) is defined’ (234); this chapter will argue, via recourse to feminist recuperations of classical narratives that seek to ‘other’ the female body and Kristeva’s theory of abjection, that The Virgin Suicides opens up but one site of contestation to classical cinema’s perennial scopic regime.

‘Obviously, Doctor, You Have Never Been a Thirteen-Year-Old Girl’: The Female Body as Abject Object Abjection as a psychological process and the abject as a psychic category are psychoanalytic terms that have been most extensively elaborated upon by philosopher and analyst Julia Kristeva in her study Powers of Horror (2002, originally published in 1982). Kristeva has delineated the abject in relation to how it is invoked to contain and section off the (maternal) female body and those bodies that are deemed to be ‘foreign’ in some sense. As such, the abject acts as a force of estrangement or an attempt to ‘other’ that which we place outside of certain hegemonic categories of identity and being. Although Kristeva has characterized aspects of the abject through focusing on material substances that may seem to revile, revolt and repel (excrement, vomit, blood, the cadaver), this summation serves merely to make manifest what the abject object and the process of abjection represent and enact, since ‘filth is not a quality in itself, but it applies to what relates to a boundary and, more particularly, represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, its other side, a margin’ (Oliver 2002: 259). Indeed, Kristeva stresses that what is at stake in denigrating certain objects or people is not, in actual fact, a lack of cleanliness or integrity, but rather ‘what disturbs identity, sys-

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tem, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (Oliver 2002: 232). For the abject is that which works to obfuscate boundaries and borders. The abject is inherently liminal because it is neither a discrete object nor a nonobject and, by its very threshold status, calls into question the borders between self and other, life and death, and being and nonbeing. As Kristeva puts it, the abject is: ‘Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A “something” that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture’ (Oliver 200: 230). By extension, abjection – as an active mode of (dis)engagement – enables the shoring up of identity via separating out an entity from that which threatens or pollutes its existence as a supposedly sovereign being. As such, the liminal space within which abjection and the abject exist and function brings the subject and that which is its ‘other’ into contact and, in the process of doing so, reveals the compartmentalization and separation on which all identity is predicated. That which threatens our borders and undermines boundaries is therefore by its very nature essential to our identity, however much we may seek to deny or eradicate its existence: I exist by virtue of what I am not. Kristeva writes that the abject object ‘lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated, it beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced’ (Oliver 2002: 229) and that it ‘draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’ (Oliver 2002: 230). The abject object, then, exercises a curious form of attraction and seduction on us precisely because it reveals something fundamental and essential to our own existence and identity. Kristeva argues further that ‘it is true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverises the subject. One can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when the subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than the abject’ (2002: 232). The abject, as the psychoanalyst might argue, is fundamental to our very being precisely because it reveals that which remains latent at the heart of all being, all meaning, desire and language: the want initiated by our entrance into language and the symbolic realm that is always already founded on lack. Taking her cue from Kristeva, film scholar Barbara Creed (1993) has delineated the abject in terms of the dynamics initiated and invoked by the horror genre –

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especially in relation to what she describes as ‘the monstrous feminine’ body. She also suggests that the abject plays a vital role in ascribing and setting up identity because: ‘Although the subject must exclude the abject, the abject must, nevertheless, be tolerated for that which threatens to destroy life also helps to define life. Further, the activity of exclusion is necessary to guarantee that the subject take up his/her proper place in relation to the symbolic’ (1993: 9). At the beginning of this chapter, I set out my argument that The Virgin Suicides is, in fact, a horror film from which all signs of horror are eradicated; this is especially pertinent in terms of the female body and its portrayal in the film as that which functions as the site of inspiration to reverie and the receptacle for phantasy and projection, but also as that which symbolizes an otherness that must be ‘cleaned’ of its abject core in order to be acceptable or useful for narrative purpose. Here, the female body serves both to shore up and secure (male) identity, but also threatens radically to decentre and destabilize meaning and coterminous identities. The adolescent female body, as a spectral entity that hangs between life and death and thus invokes the abject, returns in the forms of haunting, dream and fantasy/ phantasy, but also of trauma. When I say that these moments function as a kind of feminist hauntology, I mean to suggest that these representations work to break apart and decimate the psychic processes that create boundaries and identities in the first place by revealing their very basis within those processes. Yet in order to recognize this dual status or purpose of the female body’s representation within the film, one must be able to read how these corresponding images have been cleaned or effaced of the abject (in particular, of any reference to menstruation). In other words, in what follows I will suggest that the film itself reveals the psychic mechanics of abjection in order to critique narratives predicated on male desire and identity. In short, the film evinces how the female body comes to be viewed as other. The Virgin Suicides opens on two iconic, if somewhat hackneyed, iterations of the feminine or female young body; namely, the literary characters ‘Lolita’ and ‘Ophelia’ as envisaged by Stanley Kubrick (1962) and John Everett Millais (1852), respectively. It is the image of Lux Lisbon as Lolita (she is sucking on a lollipop) that opens the film and introduces a sinister tumescence that lies beneath this initially bucolic-seeming image. The glow of the evening sunset limns Lux’s hair and creates a halo effect around her young, dimpled face. From the outset, as the Latin etymology of her name would suggest, she is associated with light and, suitably, Lux acts as the main source for the boys’ fantasies and reveries. This flat,

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head-on, establishing shot sets Lux apart from the drab, uniform and suburban environment via an eschewal to shift or rack focus: she is a thing of wonder in this pedestrian diegetic world. Indeed, the following sequence of tableau shots establishes the film’s setting as a generic, all-American neighbourhood in which one house is much like any other – conformity and uniformity are the foundations upon which this community is built. Yet, just as the opening image of Lux signals outside of itself and recalls Lolita as at once both seductive and infantile, these scenes of domestic idyll also intimate at more insidious representations of the ‘white picket fence’, such as those in – by way of example – the films of David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) and Todd Haynes (Safe, Far from Heaven). Indeed, the humming sound of crepuscular insects heard in the film’s opening moments does not indicate, as it ordinarily might, the season in which things grow and ripen, but rather the moment in which things turn to rot; for by the film’s conclusion, this small town will be swamped in an algae and insect infestation that manifests itself in a sickly, green tinge that permeates the atmosphere. Returning to the film’s introduction of Lux Lisbon for a moment: she is, undoubtedly, beautiful (in the sense of fulfilling a specific form of iconic American beauty associated with homecoming queens and cheerleaders), but she is also on the threshold of womanhood – a transition that brings ruin and obliteration upon her and, by extension, her sisters.4 If the index of her onscreen presence here is Lolita, the viewer cannot also help but remember that Dolores Haze is a young girl from whom we are kept and thus denied the privilege of really knowing, caught as she is in a narrative of male desire that serves to disguise an irrevocably damaging form of abuse. This sense of subtle and hidden harm effected on the female body is compounded further by the introduction of Cecilia Lisbon in the ensuing sequence. The narrator’s voiceover, which informs us that ‘Cecilia was the first to go’, is ushered in via a close-up shot of a cornucopia of accoutrements, such as lipsticks and perfume bottles, and an overhead shot of Cecilia lying in a bathtub of bloodied water and wearing a white ceremonial gown; clearly, we infer, she has slit her wrists. Yet even in the moment of her (as it turns out near) death, she remains pristine and serene. In her extensive study of aesthetic representation of female death, Elisabeth Bronfen notes that the prevalent presentation of the female corpse throughout the history of art is highly ornate and beguiling, and beautification is invoked in order to rid the female body of threat: ‘Femininity and death cause a disorder to stability, mark moments of ambivalence, disruption or duplicity and their eradication produces a recuperation of order, a return to sta-

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Figure 1.1. Cecilia as Ophelia. Screenshot by the author. bility. The threat that death and femininity pose is recuperated by representation, staging absence as a form of re-presence, or return, even if or rather precisely because this means appeasing the threat of real mortality, of sexual insufficiency, of lack of plenitude and wholeness’ (Bronfen 1992: xii). Implicit within Bronfen’s analysis here is that the female body already denotes a form of lack registered as death that must be aestheticized in order to render its threat obsolete or to cover it over. Yet this is an impossible task since, as Bronfen puts it, ‘the “re” of return, repetition or recuperation suggests that the end point is not the same as the point of departure, although it harbours the illusion that something lost has been perfectly regained. Instead, the regained order encompasses a shift; that is to say that it is never again/no longer entirely devoid of traces of difference. The recuperation is imperfect, the regained stability not safe, the urge for order inhabited by a fascination with disruption and split’ (Bronfen 1992: xii). In other words, the female body is fetishized precisely because it has come to denote lack, yet the fetish both reveals and conceals this threat to stability precisely because of the necessity of its employment in the first place. Aestheticization, in this manner, then, both attenuates and heightens that which threatens stability and order by drawing attention towards the elaborate ruse that is re-presentation. In The Virgin Suicides, this moment of self-abnegation is highly aestheticized in precisely the same way that Millais renders Ophelia as a tragic, sacrificial and

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iconic female figure – indeed, the grooming products in the initial shot are framed and lit so as to resemble sacrificial offerings at an altar rather than the pedestrian items that they truly are.5 Her hair and dress, saturated with water, form a billowing cloud that seems to buoy her fragile frame upwards; her face breaks the water’s film in a way that outlines and frames precisely her gentle, feminine features. Even in near-death, she is brought into lines of symmetry that help to ensure she remains an eternally poised, mysterious and even saintly figure. Her white ceremonial gown, which resembles those worn at christenings, confirmations and weddings, marks her out further as a sacrificial body, since such ceremonies traditionally denote the passing of the (female) body into the sanctified space of Christianity or marriage. Moreover, these rites of passage centre on the purity and integrity of the body undergoing the ceremony as it passes into an arrangement in which that sense of undefiled or unspotted wholeness is breached by that body being offered up to the holy or male body. Like the image of Lux Lisbon that preceded it, this overhead shot of Cecilia flattens out her body against the background of the frame, the effect of which recalls medieval paintings of saints. Once again, we have the female body as icon (mere representation): flattened, simplified and emptied of depth. However, the presence of blood within this image serves to undercut radically its iconic status; indeed, this aspect of the image pertains to an entirely different intention in fact. As a teenage girl, Cecilia’s body is entering adulthood and its coterminous strictures and norms; blood, within this context, represents a refusal to adhere to those norms – to undertake the ideologically laden role of Woman – since this is what her act of self-obliteration symbolically represents, and also functions as the marker of a fertile (and therefore desirable/marketable) female body. Yet blood, as Mary Douglas (1966) has also pointed out, frequently represents defilement, since it sullies purity and breaches the border between inside and outside. Blood is, in anthropological terms, a taboo substance and countless rituals are invoked to contain and eliminate it from public discourse, since it threatens the precarious balance of social hierarchy, gendered differentiation and stratification. as Kristeva puts it: ‘Menstrual blood . . . stands for the danger issuing from within the identity (social or sexual); it threatens the relationship between the sexes within a social aggregate and, through internalization, the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference’ (quoted in Oliver 2002: 260–61). Just as the image of Lux Lisbon also recalls trauma and abuse, this image of Cecilia Lisbon functions at once both to conceal and reveal the psychic dynamics (control, denial, abjection) on which it is founded. Moreover, the insis-

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tent presence of blood within the image (which from this point on in the film will be eradicated/abjected) pollutes the notions of purity and wholeness on which ceremonies that celebrate virginity are based; in fact, as the paramedics lift Cecilia from the bathtub, she drops a laminated picture of the Virgin Mary that she has soiled with her blood. As such, it is the reality of the female body and the radical nature of refusing one’s place as a woman at the point in which one is becoming so that seeps through into this image and works to decentre and displace it. And following on from the image of Lux Lisbon as it does, Cecilia’s iconic status also recuperates and reworks socially sanctioned rituals that dramatize the sanctity of the young female virgin body and its passing over into womanhood as a form of violation and control. Throughout the film, the Lisbon sisters are partially characterized by a miseen-scène of pristine and thus impossible whiteness, and their onscreen presence is informed by a gendered dichotomy that is ubiquitous across all genres of classical narrative cinema: the Madonna and the whore. Their appearance is at once both reminiscent of soft pornography and beauty commercials (in particular those from the 1970s) and recalls the luminous appearance of religious iconography of saints. In fact, Therese, Cecilia and Mary are all named after female saints. The girls are associated – indeed, seem to be intimately intertwined with – celestial light and therefore it is fitting that Lux, whose name literally means ‘light’ and who is the catalyst and location for the boys’ elaborate fantasies, is ‘the last to go’; as such, the light of the diegetic world dies with her. The film abounds with extended and overt sequences of fantastical imagery that place the girls within nature. Coppola herself has remarked that she took inspiration, in particular, from the Breck shampoo commercials and Playboy spreads of the 1970s, in which women appear ‘with back-lit hair, (as) . . . the girl in nature. That was the fantasy girl of that era’ (Hays 2000). In these bucolic sequences, the girls are strikingly childish and simple in their presentation (preoccupied as they seem to be with writing adolescent diary entries, playing with sparklers, flowers, each other’s hair and unicorns – the latter signalling that this is the realm of pure fantasy). Moreover, the use of superimposition and dissolve marks these sequences out explicitly as the site of dream and reverie, and also serves to determine parity between the Lisbon sisters as one face blends into and merges with another; indeed, they are frequently portrayed as an amorphous mass with their sprawling adolescent limbs intertwined in such a way that it is difficult to decipher their bodies as discrete and contained. Coppola implies, then, that although Lux may be marked out as

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especially worthy of reverence, the Lisbon girls are really an indeterminate and anonymous holding space or void for the boys’ most intimate projections. If Lux is the cinematic apparatus – the light – Bonnie, Mary, Therese and Cecilia function as the blank screen. Later on in the film, as they signal to the boys using torchlight, they are rendered as ghostly apparitions or beacons of light that beckon out of the darkness. This association with light is an integral part of their simplification; reduction allows the boys to reconfigure the girls as the repository of all meaning and knowledge – precisely as enlightenment. Indeed, the narrator states that ‘they knew everything about us and we couldn’t fathom them at all . . . they understood love and even death’. Richard Dyer, writing on whiteness and its myriad forms of cultural representation, remarks that: ‘Whiteness, really white whiteness, is unattainable. Its ideal forms are impossible . . . whiteness as an ideal can never be attained, not only because white skin can never be hue white, but because ideally white is absence: to be really, absolutely white is to be nothing’ (1997: 78). He also powerfully delineates how virginity has been cleaved to whiteness in order to mark out the virgin body as unpolluted and uncorrupted – an association that ensures supreme value: ‘the cult of virginity expressed an idea of unsullied femininity (not dirtied by sex), which was held to be visible in the woman’s appearance. It could be intensified by fasting . . . which makes the person look paler and signifies lack of corporeal engagement with the world, the body not dirtied by having had matter stuffed into it’ (1997: 77). Extreme asceticism, abstinence and abnegation are, as Dyer argues, the physical correlates of what virginity denotes only symbolically. Fundamentally, it signals a complete relinquishment of engagement with the world, a drawing away from that which touches, infiltrates or intrudes on the boundary between self and other, self and the world. Yet this unsullied purity (as whiteness) is also coterminous with death, void and absence. This wilful purification of the adolescent female body is a form of abjection – a way of rendering it clean and empty of threat. And yet the extremity of this whiteness – most evident in the somewhat ludicrous nature of the boys’ fantasies that can be contrasted to bathetic effect with Cecilia’s anodyne diary entries, such as ‘today we had frozen pizza for dinner’ – implies the impossibility of siphoning off and denying that which abuts any determinate identity. In other words, the impossibility of these images calls into question and troubles the very motivations that ground such representations of the female form. I suggest that the evidently priapic nature of these moments – that they are revealed precisely as recuperations/clichés – serves the purpose of

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drawing the viewer’s attention towards what this deliberate aestheticization attempts to conceal: the reality of the female adolescent body. In short, whiteness and light as an invocation of purity and virginity works to cover over and neutralize menstrual blood. This is made manifest on a narrative level when one of the boys, rather pathetically, flees from the Lisbon family home after discovering a full cupboard of tampons in the bathroom, but it is also subtly invoked in the scenes centring on Cecilia’s second (and successful) suicide attempt during a party and the school homecoming dance. These two scenes, which transform certain ritualized moments that mark a steady transition into adulthood as the site of disaster, work to make blood conspicuous by its very absence. Cecilia impales herself on the Lisbon family’s garden fence (the traditional symbol of the civilized and traditional home). She lands on her back and, on impact, the railings pierce her young body – and so, we ascertain that this is an extremely violent and unpleasant form of self-annihilation. And yet, this horrific act is presented to the viewer as though Cecilia were performing some bizarre and sinister magic trick; her body seems to levitate – a ghostly effect that is only further compounded by her ethereal white gown, illuminated by the moonlight. Mr Lisbon orders everyone to look away, an injunction that signals towards the real horror of this moment; further, Mrs Lisbon’s gasps of shock at the sight of her daughter’s body also gesture towards the unbearable elements that have been sanitized from what we see. That Cecilia appears to be floating, her young body invoking images both of Christ’s resurrection and demonic possession (The Exorcist (1973)), suggests that this tragedy has been recast and recalled in memory as an attempt at once to keep her alive through beatification, but also to render her as monstrously other. Indeed, it is the former that works to conceal the latter, for Cecilia continues to return from the dead throughout the film; as such, she is cast as an abject body that haunts, subsists and troubles precisely because she does not respect the boundary between the living and the dead. Yet her liminal existence intimates a darker collective truth about the girls – that the strictures and norms of their adolescent existence and their passage into adulthood diminishes their affective possibilities to such an extent that they become the living dead. The boys’ attempt to narrativize the girls is another act of such violence and, indeed, the sanitation and reduction of the girls is indicative of the extent to which they will go to deny their ‘othering’ of the Lisbon sisters.

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If the scene depicting Cecilia’s suicide cites The Exorcist as its source, but in such a way that all signs of horror (blood, vomit, bile) are abjected, the homecoming sequence evokes the same aesthetic organization (framing, lighting) as another iconic horror film, Carrie (1976). Critic Jean-Marc Lalanne notes that there is a striking similarity between Carrie and The Virgin Suicides that cannot merely be attributed to their shared ‘70s aesthetic’ and style of cinematography, but also to the ways in which both films dramatize certain adolescent American rites of passage (see Lalanne 2000: 97). Yet, Lalanne (2000: 97) notes that ‘le sang des vierges’ – the menstrual blood that is so conspicuous and is, indeed, an integral formal and narrative element in Carrie – is notably absent from the frame in The Virgin Suicides. If both films recast the female adolescent rite of passage into adulthood as the transition from life to death, Carrie overtly manifests the violence inherent in the formation of normative subjectivity, whereas The Virgin Suicides induces anxiety in the viewer by strategies of omission and ellipsis. The homecoming sequence is crafted formally, via use of slow motion and close-up, to make Lux Lisbon and Trip Fontaine, the captain of the football team, the focal point of attention. Embodied as they are by the actors Kirsten Dunst and Josh Hartnett – who were both teenage ‘icons’ at the time of the film’s making – this teenage couple symbolizes the status and popularity that is attributed to those whom the school community sets apart. Trip and Lux are the idols of their peer group’s own making and it is inevitable that they are consecrated as such by being crowned homecoming king and queen. This sequence, which is graphically matched with De Palma’s earlier iconic film, induces a sense of anticipation and anxiety via such overt intertextual reference. Yet it is Coppola’s skilful deployment of reference and deferral that not only exacerbates the viewer’s sense of something sinister lurking outside the film frame, but that also spills over into the following sequence, in which Lux loses her virginity to Trip on the open football field. I have argued elsewhere (Backman Rogers 2015: 30) that as the consummate high school ‘jock’, Trip must seal his status as such by sexual conquest. The incontrovertibly damaging effect of such codified and ritualized behaviour for both genders constitutes the essence of this scene. Trip tackles Lux playfully to the ground, yet the viewer cannot remain oblivious to the fact that this form of ‘play’ takes place within a liminal space that sanctions certain forms of traditionally male aggression that are not permissible elsewhere. Moreover, the fluorescent light that bears down on them turns the sexual act, the taking of a young girl’s vir-

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ginity, into a spectacle, but precisely because there is nobody there to witness this from the football stands, the viewer’s own place of voyeurism is made all the more acute. In effect, we take the place of the boys who will spy on the girls through a telescope (and later watch Lux engage in nightly trysts with anonymous men from the neighbourhood on the rooftop of the Lisbon family home) seemingly without impunity or self-scrutiny. As such, what the film foregrounds here is the nature of the prurient and prying (male) gaze that transforms the female body into an object that can be controlled, violated and discarded. And this is precisely what happens to Lux, who wakes up on the football field having been abandoned by Trip (whose code of behaviour is determined by his callous and cold persona as the school ‘jock’). In fact, the sexual act is made troubling and ominous by its very absence because we do not see what Trip actually does to her, since it takes place within an ellipsis (which, in turn, intimates at the ways in which a lack of consent is manipulated within patriarchal narratives due to the very absence of a witness). However, what this disconcerting absence signals is that Trip may very well have raped Lux (she is but one more trophy won out on the playing field); there is, as such, an unbearable moment that remains unspoken and can only be registered as void. Trip does not emerge unscathed from this encounter; the film’s only contemporary sequence presents an older, bloated version of Trip who tells us, from a drug rehabilitation facility, that things changed for him when he left Lux ‘out there on the open field’ and that, quoting T.S. Eliot, she was ‘the still point of the turning world’ for him. Yet it is Lux who is condemned and tainted for all time. Indeed, the glow of sunlight with which she was previously associated is replaced by the melancholy glare of twilight; as ‘light’/lux, this is the point from which she begins to die. It is this sole transgression that begets the permanent incarceration of all the Lisbon girls and determines that Lux must fulfil her own cliché (just as Trip does): her initiation into sex opens her up to the advances of every rapacious, grasping man from the neighbourhood. The double standards that prevail in high school culture ensure that whilst Trip is celebrated, even revered, for his conquest of Lux, she is forced into the position of devaluing her own body for having given it to him (or for having had it taken by force). It is precisely this abhorrent psychic violence enacted on adolescent girls that is symbolized and sublimated through horror and, more specifically, blood in Carrie, but its very absence in The Virgin Suicides renders it even more sinister. For it is in the lacunae, the cracks and the fissures, in the things that do not easily slip into narrative form and thus cannot be articulated or named that the real damage is contained.

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (1999) . 39

‘We Will Never Find the Pieces to Put Them Back Together’: Narrative, Still Images and Fetishization as Symbolic Possession The narrative that the boys construct around the Lisbon sisters is an attempt to lay claim, to possess and to control. It is especially through the hackneyed trope of fetishization that the boys succeed in partially covering over the reality of what the Lisbon girls represent to them: a void or lack that is transcribed into and onto the female body. Yet, the girls’ representation is predicated so manifestly on the cliché that their presence as still image (precisely as a photographic plate, as the French term designates it) works to disrupt and break apart any attempt to form a seamless whole (as Laura Mulvey originally conceived of the female figure as made manifest onscreen). In other words, the very mechanic that is set in place in order to contain and regulate the female body onscreen is also precisely that which threatens to decimate it. Indeed, Christian Metz has argued that fetishism is a psychic process invoked both to reveal and conceal the lack that it pertains to cover over: ‘the fetish is a prop, the prop that disavows a lack and in doing so affirms it without wishing to’ (quoted in Rosen 1986: 271). Writing further of the purpose of the fetish – that is, the impossible task of trying to reclaim completeness and unification – he notes that only ‘lost objects are . . . the ones one is afraid to lose . . . there is a cause only in something that doesn’t work’ (Metz, quoted in Rosen 1986: 275–76). The Virgin Suicides foregrounds the processes by which the female body is made other and the manifold ways in which classical narrative sutures the spectator into the action in order to repress and deny everything that it must conceal. Moreover, if the cinema as an art form has long been associated with phantoms, haunting, spectres and shadows – since, as Metz puts it, ‘every film is a fiction film’ (quoted in Rosen 1986: 248) precisely because of its foundation in absence – it is the female body that returns here to rupture the surface of the image and reveal, by extension, its deliberate distortion and concealment. The female body here is both that which is cleaved onto the lost object as fetish and that which reveals the fetish as psychic structure founded in disavowal. Jacqueline Rose describes the history of the female body as represented through classical narrative forms: ‘the female subject is structured as image around this reference (to the excluded real) and . . . thereby comes to represent the potential loss and difference which underpins the whole system . . . what classical cinema performs or puts on stage is this image of woman as other, dark continent, and from there what escapes of it is lost to the system; at the same time

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as sexuality is frozen into her body as spectacle, the object of phallic desire and/ or identification’ (quoted in Rosen 1986: 229). Narrative can act as an efficient form of abjection since it works powerfully to exclude that which tears meaning and coherence asunder; in psychoanalytic discourse, the female body is radically excluded in order for the social subject to be formed and, most crucially, to enter the symbolic realm. Social, cultural and national identities are often constructed against what is occluded as other, yet this always subsists and remains as a power that can decentre and disrupt; indeed, dominant narratives are dependent for their meaning and coherence on what they exclude. In The Virgin Suicides, it is the female body that comes to represent, to stand in for as it were, both the lost and denied object. As Kaja Silverman, in her work on suture, notes in reference to Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946) and narrative film more generally: ‘film thus poses a temptation . . . the temptation to refuse cultural reintergration, to skid off course, out of control, to prefer castration to false plenitude. That danger . . . is implicit in classic cinema’s scopic regime. It represents a point of female resistance within the very system which defines woman as powerless and lacking’ (Silverman, quoted in Rosen 1986: 235). When I delineate the Lisbon sisters’ presence onscreen as a form of feminist hauntology, this is precisely what I mean – their ability to exceed the narrative tropes that are employed to harness them works as resistance, as that which causes one to ‘skid off course’ or ‘out of control’. The Virgin Suicides is a film that slips between regimes of the image since it both demonstrates the powerful drive for a narrative that would reclaim the lost object – and thus meaning – and the impossibility of creating a coherent, abiding trajectory that serves to contain and expound on the female body, since the female body always exceeds any attempt to delimit it. The Virgin Suicides actively works to accentuate lack, void, ruptures and lacunae. It also demonstrates how every narrative is predicated on what it excludes and that it is this structuring absence that can never be fully eradicated, despite its nonrepresentability and nonarticulability. In The Virgin Suicides, fetishization takes the form of styles of framing that work to still the female form. The presence of the Lisbon girls tends to take events out of narrative flow to such an extent that the obsessive psychic drives underpinning this representation as phantasy/fantasy are elucidated. As such, the film dramatizes and problematizes the original premise of Laura Mulvey that ‘the presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in a normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation’ (quoted in Rosen 1986:

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (1999) . 41

203). The boys’/men’s fantasies are, notably, begotten by photographs of the girls saved from the wreckage of the Lisbon family home after the girls’ demise, but are more deeply informed, as I argued earlier, by clichés recuperated from advertising and pornography. The basis of their narrative, then, is beset by the still image as cliché – as a form of cultural shorthand that should ease assimilation. Yet the overtly apparent status of these images as recuperations pushes the image to its limit so that what the cliché as still image denotes comes to the fore: the passing of time and mortality. If the Lisbon girls are at once simplified and reduced to a form of surface, then this representation also intimates at what is left out of the image. By extension, what escapes or is occluded from the image decentres and destabilizes the priapic narrative it is deployed to uphold. The Lisbon sisters are introduced to us as a group precisely via a fetishistic use of the close-up. The boys take up the position of the cinematic viewer on the pavement opposite the Lisbon family home; the girls are depicted discretely via slow motion, freeze frame and close-up, and each girl’s face is accompanied by a childish font that announces her name to the viewer. In essence, these highly cinematic and reflexive mechanisms afford the boys and, by extension, the viewer a proximity to the girls that is in actual fact impossible given the boys’ distance from the action. This sequence serves to foreground from the outset the highly artificial and manufactured nature of the boys’ narrative that is structured around the Lisbon girls – namely that they are creating a narrative film in their minds. This narrative is predicated on distance – enabling a form of cinematic voyeurism – and fetishization of the female figure. These ‘snapshots’ of the girls, which are facilitated from a safe distance, are indicative of the way in which the female body is simplified and reduced in order to aid the film’s central narrative – for what is complex exceeds explanation. However, rather than telling us anything about the Lisbon sisters, they reveal a desire to control and contain on the part of the boys who are writing a narrative by means of which the female body is defined. Both Susan Sontag (1979) and Laura Mulvey (2006) have noted that the blocking of movement – the moment of pause, as it were – that is so definitive of many aspects of the photograph or still image is an attempt to possess and to control. As Mulvey puts it: ‘The possessive spectator commits an act of violence against the cohesion of a story . . . but more specifically, the sadistic instinct is expressed through the possessive spectator’s desire for mastery and will to power’ (2006: 171). Yet in wanting to possess the image, in enacting a form of violence by stopping movement, the spectator un-

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leashes cinema’s power to evoke what lies beyond the border that separates past and present, life and death. Mulvey notes that analogue film is founded in immobility, since cinema is but the medium of ‘death’ or the still image projected at a speed of twenty-four frames per second in order to create the illusion of movement. As such, cinema is haunted by the still image because it threatens to break apart or rupture the illusion of movement so necessary to the trajectory (that is too often predicated on male desire) that drives narrative film forward. If the boys draw upon prefabricated still images and photographs of the girls in order to construct their story, that story is continually threatened by the stillness of the image that connotes the past and, more broadly, death. At the heart of their desire to control the girls is also a bitter truth of lives lost to time and inevitable mortality. As such, the still image serves a dual role in The Virgin Suicides: it is both cliché (in the French etymological sense of the term) and tends towards the point of breakdown that registers or reveals ‘the unbearable’ contained latently within the image. Sontag, for instance, states that photography ‘turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed’ (1979: 14). And Mulvey notes further that this ‘desire for possession . . . (is) fulfilled in stillness but also in the repetition of movements, gestures, looks, actions. In the process, the illusion of life . . . is weakened, and the apparatus overtakes the figures movements . . . the human figure becomes an extension of the machine . . . ghosts of automata’ (2006: 170). The still image, then, denotes an attempt to lay claim to a subject as object of the gaze, but when drawn out of movement – as is the case so manifestly here – the image also registers its basis in a mechanic that renders the human body as automata or ghost; it testifies to the mutability and vulnerability of the human form as captured and memorialized on film. It is precisely because photographs are but one instant, a slice of time, that they are ripe for projection and interpretation; again, Sontag reminds us that ‘photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy’ (1979: 23). Moreover, by capturing a moment that is already gone even at the moment of its registration, the photograph is also able to conjure up a palpable sense of an inaccessible past, of everything that is displaced and lost to what Sontag calls ‘time’s relentless melt’ (1979: 15). So while photographs ‘actively promote nostalgia’ (Sontag 1979: 15), they are also ‘incitements to reverie’ (Sontag 1979: 16). Furthermore, the power of the photograph is activated by: ‘a sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance’ (Sontag 1979: 16). The still image is essential to

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the construction of the boys’ narrative because it not only allows them to possess the Lisbon sisters – albeit in a purely facile way – but it also re-creates infinitely (as compulsive repetition) the distance or divide so essential to maintaining the desire that drives all life, and thus narrative, forward. This is why the Lisbon sisters are framed uniformly within the same repertoire of shots that vary between long shot and fetishistic close-up repeatedly. As representatives of the lost object, or as that which incites but never assuages desire, the girls are recuperated as the site of both loss and elusive ‘completion’/integrity that is returned to continually. If the girls are, in a sense, iconic images brought to life, the way in which the movement of their bodies is registered accentuates and heightens their fragile and ethereal presence. That is, even in movement, as opposed to stillness, they denote ephemerality and elusiveness. In particular, a passage that the boys find in Cecilia’s diary (itself a talismanic object that precipitates projection, dream and fantasy) in which she writes of a family excursion on a boat that results in the sighting of a whale initiates an impossible piece of ‘documentary footage’. An 8 mm film sequence reveals in grainy, faded and flickering close-up Lux’s face as she touches the whale and smiles towards the camera. The fragile and luminescent quality of the footage affirms both the insubstantiality of her body and the impossible nature of this fantasy; for the boys are imagining themselves into a moment to which they were not present to pay witness. Lux, as their ‘dream girl’ and source

Figure 1.2. Lux Lisbon as dream girl. Screenshot by the author.

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of light, is disclosed as a creature of fiction here, an image of their own making. Moreover, the material texture of the film, a film stock that is prone to disintegration and is increasingly obsolete, conveys this moment as already always lost to a past – and a past that is based in myth. The pathos of this moment is contained in Lux’s beautiful, joyful and young face, for she is the dream girl who is forever unreachable, unattainable and lost to the boys. She is, in short, an impossible fantasy. It is this shifting ground between movement and stillness – and modes of possessive and pensive spectatorship – that registers the impossibility of making sense of the trauma of the girls’ suicides and what they represented to the boys. As ciphers and placeholders for inarticulable loss, they exceed and fracture the strictures that are put in place to make them meaningful as representations. That they are put in service to shore up an especially male narrative of desire is significant because it is the points of rupture, breakdown and failure that intimate a darker truth that cannot be addressed within the narrow confinement of a story that is written about them and not by them. If the girls embody a lost past, they also represent a refusal to take up their place within a patriarchal society that confines them precisely to a form of living death. For it is in the still image – or, more specifically, its dual status as cliché and as that which cannot be grasped because it eludes figuration – that the film’s ‘truth’ is extant: to be rendered as surface, one acquiesces to internal death.

Notes  1.  2.  3.

 4.

 5.

Barthes wrote this in an unfinished manuscript that was found after his death. See Lortringer 2011. This was also the subject of his posthumously published work Mourning Diary (2012). Elsewhere, Judith Butler has written eloquently of the manifold ways in which narrative, and autobiography in particular, is founded on what it occludes or hides. See Butler 2005 and 2006. As Munford and Waters define it: ‘hauntology appears to encompass many of the issues that have beset debates in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries about feminism’s relationship to the past and its potential to intervene in women’s futures . . . it is also a hauntology in a Derridean sense – a way of being that is shaped by anxieties about the past, concern for the future and an overarching uncertainty about its own status and ability to effect change in a world in where its own necessity is constantly thrown into doubt’ (Munford and Waters 2014: 20). Perhaps it will be of interest to the reader to note that the actress who plays the role of Lux Lisbon, Kirsten Dunst, declined the role taken by Mena Suvari in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (1999) in order to make The Virgin Suicides. For a related discussion of Ophelia and Lolita as ‘icons of girlhood’, see Monden (2013). 

Chapter 2

The Beguiled (2017)

It is dangerous to feel sorry for one’s oppressor – women are especially prone in this failing. Shulamith Firestone (1972: 136) Sexual dominion obtains . . . as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power. Kate Millett (1970: 25) Too bad for them if they fall apart upon discovering that women aren’t men, or that the mother doesn’t have one. But isn’t this fear convenient for them? Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in truth, that women aren’t castrated . . . you have only to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing. Hélène Cixous (1976: 885) (or) Why should I worry? I have no phallic symbol to lose. Marilyn Monroe

In 1975, Laura Mulvey infamously described the female body, as represented within patriarchal visual culture, as ‘the bearer of the bleeding wound’ (2001: 712). Woman singularly, as she appears onscreen, is reduced to a spurious archetype that serves merely to be looked at, argues Mulvey. Coded as spectacle, she possesses neither agency nor desire of her own. Subservient, soft and compliant, she props up the male ego by assuring him that, as Hélène Cixous (writing around the same time as Mulvey) excoriatingly puts it: ‘[He] still can . . . it’s still there – men

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structure themselves only by being fitted with a feather’ (1976: 890). It is the dubious lot of women, Cixous argues, to function as the ‘maternal mistresses of their little pocket signifier’ (1976: 890) and thus to act as the very foundation of masculinity; yet, as Freudian theory would have it, Woman (as singular, derivative and, in a descriptive manoeuvre that reveals Freud’s own colonial bigotry, of the ‘dark continent’) is defined by lack: one need not be a master builder to ascertain the compromised solidity of a structure built upon such supposedly ‘weak’ and ‘hysterical’ foundations. It is upon this ruin of masculinity that Coppola constructs her version of The Beguiled as a response to the farcical and scurrilous claims made by not only the film’s original (1971, Don Siegel), but by patriarchal culture at large with regard to the female body and female experience (of which it all too apparently understands woefully little). Coppola’s recuperation of this phallic narrative serves to illustrate that, on the contrary, women lack nothing; in fact, given half a chance, chloroform, a saw and an anatomy book, they are violently potent. In short, in The Beguiled, the Lisbon Sisters are reborn and have their bloody revenge upon patriarchy, and, moreover, they laugh all the while. This is a game of war between the sexes in which women will always outwit men; indeed, war, as an event, is distinctly feminized here, heard only at a dissonant, rumbling low pitch that hardly impinges on the gendered battle being played out within the confines of Miss Martha’s school for young ladies.1 Here, it is the masculine form that is made to bear the visible evidence of the bleeding wound and to become the object of the female gaze; in many ways, then, The Beguiled is an apposite visual correlate to the feminist theory of the 1970s, which notoriously recuperated Freud for its own purposes. As Kate Millett wrote in 1970, in response to the pervasion of Freudian assumptions about female experience and the female body within intellectual and visual cultures at large, ‘the position of women in patriarchy is such that they are expected to be passive, to suffer, and to be sexual objects; it is unquestionable that they are, with varying degrees of success, socialized into such roles’ (1970: 194). Thus, Millett makes clear that women are conditioned and interpellated into such roles, a process that is rarely exposed to questioning. Indeed, she notes further that ‘perhaps patriarchy’s greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity . . . when a system of power is thoroughly in command it has scarcely need to speak itself aloud; when its workings are exposed and questioned, it becomes not only subject to discussion, but even to change’ (1970: 58). It is my contention that Coppola’s work partakes in this feminist deconstruction of patriarchal, phallogocentric visual culture and therefore is part of a catalyst for

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change; moreover, I believe it is with The Beguiled that her feminist intentions are made most apparent to the viewer. Notably, for its consistent foregrounding of the female gaze and its canny reworking of the lubricious original from the female perspective, Coppola’s own vision as a filmmaker was recognized at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017 with the award for best director (the festival at which Marie Antoinette, precisely as cinematic herstory, was met with resounding denunciation by myopic critics some ten years earlier). This is not to say that The Beguiled has been received rapturously by (intersectional) feminists across the board.2 Indeed, the film has proven to be Coppola’s most contentious work to date, due to the fact that she chose to leave out the black female slave character Hallie, who is a central part of both Thomas Cullinan’s Southern Gothic novel (1966) and Don Siegel’s film adaptation. To those who have always believed that Coppola’s brand of cinema is a resolutely white, rarefied and privileged affair with distinctly limited appeal, this omission has not only confirmed their dislike of her work, but has also made her choices as a director seem unforgivably naïve. This film has, of course, emerged within a specific political climate of backlash from the far right, which has in turn enabled a racist sexual predator and open advocate for white supremacy to be elected to the highest political office in the United States; that Coppola would seemingly silence the voice of a black woman at a moment in history, in which public movements such as Black Lives Matter have made it highly apparent that America has hardly moved beyond its egregious basis in mass genocide and slavery, is indeed highly problematic. I will admit that this is not an issue I wish to ‘deal’ with here and thus seemingly condone or explain away. In other words, I intend to allow the vocal condemnation of this film by black feminists to exist alongside and in direct tension with the reading of the film I shall offer in what follows (I am not placing my analysis within a hierarchy that poses one reading as correct and another as erroneous – I have found every feminist response to this film to be germane and pertinent to my own engagement with these images). What I will state explicitly is that, somewhat unusually, Coppola has felt compelled to offer her own defence of her version of these events by way of stating that she refuses to perpetuate a style of narrative and dialogue that has, to her own way of thinking, reduced black voices to the point of offensive cliché and redundancy throughout cinematic history.3 Her obviation of the black female voice seems to have been motivated by what she feels is in part an ethical issue and in part her own admitted inability to deal with racial politics in any satisfying way

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at this point in time. In turn, I can understand that for many, this is not a sufficient response and does not attenuate the urgency of questions resulting from Coppola’s decision made in a fractious political moment. On the one hand, we have the glaring absence of a voice that has enabled a specific power structure to remain in place through enforced and violent subjugation; on the other hand, we seemingly have a female director who is unwilling to speak on behalf of all women and admits the limitations of her own feminist discourse. That The Beguiled has provoked such intense discussion between intersectional feminists is highly curious on several levels: first, given that Coppola’s films, even in historical mode, link the past inextricably with the present moment, this film has precipitated discussion on the deeply entrenched problems of white feminism and the silencing of black female voices throughout the history of the feminist movement; second, an abiding theme of Coppola’s oeuvre precisely is structural absence – the void that provides the tacit ground for, indeed the very possibility for, appearance. In the case of The Beguiled, Coppola is working within a genre that bifurcates into several subgenres (the Southern Gothic and the female gothic) that are predicated on an absence that haunts appearance.4 Subtext and off-frame space are the modes through which (dis)appearance emanates. I need to make clear that I am fully aware of the problematic nature of arguing that absence is as vital to representation as appearance, especially with regard to writing on a cultural industry that has systematically exercised a racist policy of exclusion, the result of which is a paucity of representation of anyone who is not white, heterosexual and wealthy. I cannot emphasize enough that to be rendered as a ghost, to be made to disappear, to remain deliberately unacknowledged, to be absented from visual culture and history precisely is an act of violence. My argument in relation to Coppola, though, is that the void/the offscreen/ the unseen is an enduring theme in relation to her particular form of feminist politics. In this context, her omission is both clumsy and consistent with the broad thematic tones of her work. I cannot speak for Coppola and, as I have said in the introduction to this study, I am not especially interested in her personal politics or opinions; this book is concerned with the politics of the images she produces and my personal reading of those images (which in turn is limited by my own white, middle-class, educated and privileged perspective and subjectivity), and my argument throughout this study is that what is seemingly abjured matters as much as what is seen in Coppola’s work. If the Civil War of Confederate America is recuperated in The Beguiled, then, as a battle between the sexes played out within

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the isolation of a crumbling home that is the symbolic bastion of an ancien régime, which, despite the domestic efforts of its inmates, is on the cusp of implosion, I would suggest that the violence that emerges in this film is not only about feminist rage, but also about the outrageous violence of a social regime of power founded on the violation and disempowerment of an entire people. We need not like the women in The Beguiled, much as we may champion their victory over a man who turns out to be a tyrannical toddler. They too are the perpetrators of violent forms of powerful control over black people from which their own privilege springs. In short, there are two deaths in this film, one literal and one implied or yet to come: that of the male character and that of the world in which the film is set. Coppola’s version suggests, I believe, that both of these deaths are necessary or vital for thriving beyond oppressive forms of power.

A Contextual Overview: On the Meaning of Gothic Beguilement The Beguiled renders explicit the gothic tone, elaborated upon by scholars such as Handyside (2017) and Haslem (2004), that pervades much of Coppola’s work to date.5 Indeed, the film opens on a scene that draws from the quintessential tenets of fairytale and gothic settings: a young girl walks alone on an intermittently lit path within a forest clearing. This opening shot clearly alludes to the motif of a young woman in peril subject to forces (perhaps supernatural) that are beyond her control, whilst the darkness of the forest suggests concealment (a lack of knowledge or what remains obscured from view). Fundamentally, this is a film, after all, that centres on a dynamic within which men and women are always trying to second guess one another’s motives and outwit or outmanoeuvre their opponent or enemy. More often than not, the crisis that has instigated this journey into the unknown is the loss of the central mother figure and, indeed, we find out that the girls who remain at Miss Martha’s school for girls are without the solicitous care of their mothers during wartime. This setting also, of course, invokes the notion of the adolescent rite of passage: that moment when a young girl crosses over into womanhood and a highly specific dynamic of power prevails between men and women. Coppola subtly intimates the battle of the sexes that the film will stage via strategically discarding the rule of 180 degrees: that is, Amelia and McBurney are seen to exchange places several times within the opening frames, suggesting that the positions of dominance and submission will become convoluted

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within the film’s structure. Since it is the female body and gaze that is prioritized from the film’s inception (in contrast to the original, which opens on the predominantly male space of the battlefield), we already sense that McBurney is going to have an exceptionally cumbersome time trying to ingratiate himself within this female community (indeed, Amelia already warns him that he is unlikely to be welcomed). Notably, within these opening moments, we also hear the sounds of war from a distance: muted within the film’s soundscape and only occasionally rupturing the sounds of the natural landscape, this suggests a very female experience of war. Heard from a distance, the activities of men in wartime – often recast as a dubious distinction and honour (the very notion of the war hero, for instance) – hardly impinge as a matter of import on the lives of these women. McBurney’s distinction as ‘Corporal’ matters not one whit to them. As Cixous puts this aptly: ‘unlike man, who holds so dearly to his title and his titles, his pouches of value, his cap, his crown, and everything connected with his head, woman couldn’t care less about the fear of decapitation (or castration), adventuring, without masculine temerity, into anonymity, which she can merge with without annihilating herself’ (1976: 888). That the film also opens on the space that harvests the fruits of his demise (poisonous mushrooms), something in which Amelia is an expert, also seals his fate. If the forest is a place associated with covens and witchcraft, The Beguiled signals quite explicitly from the outset that this is a film that will revel in the darkest of female arts and indeed, poison is often considered to be the female weapon of choice.. His death is foretold from the outset. He will be made to pay for the vanity and arrogance that blinds him to a nearly psychopathic extent. His own ego will be his ruin. Before moving on to discuss the film in detail from within the framework of 1970s radical feminist theory (to which, in essence, I feel The Beguiled is a response), I want to delve further into the gothic genre and what this might tell us about the notion of structuring absence in the film more broadly. Indeed, the film contains a number of sections of black leader that allude directly to this notion of a void that structures and speaks back: a space that is the potentially powerful unmaking of a carefully spun narrative. This is not an attempt to attenuate or lessen in any way the implications of Coppola’s decision to exclude Hallie’s voice and recuperate it within a white female narrative, but rather to provide a theoretical context for Coppola’s abiding aesthetic choices. In other words, somewhat problematically, Coppola combines two subgeneric facets of the gothic in order to craft a narrative of repression and subsequent revenge: the female gothic and

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the Southern Gothic. I opine that it is from this seeming elision of the female body with the black body that the film’s controversy springs because its questionable feminist ethics implies an equivalence between the exploitation of the white female body and the black female body; that is, in choosing to explore the systemic denigration of the female gender as a sex-class through a genre that has been emphatically employed in America as a mode of addressing racial politics, Coppola ostensibly suggests that all female experience can be reduced to the white female experience. Once again, I must emphasize that I am not speaking of Coppola’s own authorial intention here – indeed, she has been most outspoken in her rejection of charges of racism and I, clearly, do not believe her to be racist – but rather my own personal interpretation of the film’s highly specific usage of a historically charged genre that is submerged in violence. The gothic, as a narrative framework or device, is instituted upon – indeed, achieves its particular frisson through – the repressed, the implied and the unseen. It functions in much the same vein as the horror genre, in that its affect is most strongly implied through gesture to the offframe, to that which does not impinge on our daily purview of life (or rather that to which Western, white culture does not want to pay witness).6 The gothic, like horror, has much to do with the transgression of borders and the pollution of what is officially sanctioned and sanitized; indeed, The Beguiled is a film that plays with making bloody the pure, white, virginal female body. This, I suggest, is not merely about the suppression of female rage towards oppressive patriarchal structures, but also the violent distortion and massacre that is the essence of all white men’s wars. The Beguiled implies that the white female body is duly implicated in this bloody history: indeed, her very existence is borne out of the brutal exploitation of black female bodies and labour. Via her eradication of the black female body, Coppola is at once both part of the problem and, by extension, ring-fencing the problem. Absence, as it were, is placed front and centre in the film’s narrative architecture and visual regime. Here, the unseen, the unsaid returns with a vengeance – the house itself, in one significant exterior midshot, is overlaid with the sounds of McBurney’s animalistic screams and, upon cutting back to an interior shot of the house, seems to reverberate with his violent presence within the domestic space. The house, as such, momentarily seems to be possessed by and to embody quite literally a history of violence. We need to read actively for these moments. This is, in fact, the essence of the gothic. In what follows, I do not excuse or condone this void, but I do seek to understand what the gap or fissure in representation is made to mean – structurally and thematically – in this film

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especially (and Coppola’s work more generally). As I said earlier in the introduction to this study, it is my belief that Coppola’s fascination with whiteness evinces the impossibility of its representation as an ideal. That is, I suggest that whiteness itself is posited as a form of death or void in Coppola’s films: whiteness stands in for the unbearable (this is, for instance, highly apparent in The Virgin Suicides). Whiteness in Coppola’s oeuvre, I contend, gestures towards the limit of the image or representation. Therefore, this chapter can and should be read as a development of the thematics of absence and abjection delineated with reference to The Virgin Suicides, but specifically from within the implicit framework of the Southern Gothic as a genre predicated on the return of the repressed. As Juliann Fleenor has argued: ‘the American Gothic is most recognizable as a regional form. Identified with gothic doom and gloom, the American South serves as the nation’s “other”, becoming the repository for everything from which the nation wants to disassociate itself. The benighted South is able to support the irrational impulses of the gothic that the nation as a whole, born of Enlightenment ideals, cannot. America’s self-mythologization as a nation of hope and harmony directly contradicts the gothic’s most basic impulses’ (1983: 4). It is precisely that which is denied in order for national narratives to be upheld to which we must turn our attention here.7 If the female characters in The Beguiled are in denial about the inexorable disintegration of their way of life (and their persistent need to mend, to sew and to repair would suggest so), the film also, perhaps unwittingly, signals towards that which is rendered invisible and thus functions precisely as a void that structures (that which we must acknowledge and to which we must make reparation). Coppola is, I contend, a filmmaker of the void, of the empty moment, of absence; that is, the tacit ground against which all forms of myth, cliché and appearance may be constructed or, conversely, may founder. It is, for instance, striking that a number of Coppola’s narratives are set within the confines of a location that clearly evokes a moment of crisis or historical rupture – that threshold moment in which one finds oneself on the cusp of incontrovertible change. The hermetic and crumbling environment of the Lisbon family home, the glass coffin that is the Park Hyatt hotel in Tokyo, the Château de Versailles besieged by a righteously angry crowd, the fading grandeur of the Château Marmont and Miss Farnsworth’s school for girls, which is being inexorably swallowed by its surrounding foliage: these are all sites of gothic decay in which the past is thrown into crisis by the ever-protean present.8 In Coppola’s worlds, those who are intransigent to change turn to rot

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and die away; these are locations that are literally engulfed by the new world. The empathy we may have for her characters is founded in that recognition we often feel in retrospect: that we did not see it bearing down on us, barrelling towards us – that moment in which everything was irreversibly altered. The gothic, as a broad category, corrals a number of themes, but is deeply imbricated in all its iterations with the subconscious, subjugated and repressed. It thus centres on the excavation of hidden depths through an inherent suspicion of the surface nature of things and what that carapace might conceal; it beckons us in and demands we engage embryonically. As I already stated in the Introduction to this volume, this is a perennial concern of Coppola’s. The film’s title supplies the quintessence of her style as an auteure: to beguile is to deceive, to mislead or to trick through pleasure. Beguilement does not just intimate the use of feminine wiles to trap and (symbolically) castrate the central male figure in this film; it denotes the necessity of looking beneath and askance. In other words, it demands that we see beyond generic clichés towards that which exceeds the image or pushes it to the limit: fundamentally, I am speaking of a violence that breaks apart and ruptures the surface of the beautiful image (the moment in which McBurney shoots to the ground a crystal chandelier is, in fact, an explicit proclamation of the film’s political intent). Violence in The Beguiled is both literal and allegorical. For want of a better phrase, the psychological archaeology that Coppola demands of her viewer is a process that entails recognizing – bringing to the surface – all that is concealed in order to shore up beautiful, tidy, contained narratives. As such, the (female) gothic is the most apposite of genres for Coppola since, as Tania Modleski argues: [It] probes the deepest layers of the feminine unconscious, providing a way for women to work through profound psychic conflicts, especially ambivalence towards the significant people in their lives – mothers, fathers, lovers . . . the genre is used to explore these conflicts in relation to a society that systematically oppresses women. In other words, the Gothic has been used to drive home the ‘core of truth’ in feminine paranoid fears and to connect the social with the psychological, the personal with the political. (1982: 83) Moreover, as is common to Coppola’s treatment of the historical costume drama, her approach here reveals more of the complexity of contemporary feminist politics than the moment of its historical setting. Her version of the female gothic,

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then, is a resolutely modern one in that ‘modern Gothics may inform us that mutilation is truly the gift of gifts, but they also assure us, to our immense relief, that it won’t be extracted from us’ (Modleski 1982: 84). Indeed, if a prevalent tendency of the female gothic genre is to isolate and name ‘the enemy’, The Beguiled takes this to its extreme conclusion by its conviction that ‘the enemy, as an individual, is not as we believe’ (charming and harmless); here, it is ‘the enemy’ who is subject to mutilation and not the female body. It is entirely fitting, therefore, that the film concludes with the outright naming of the enemy signified by the act of tying a blue ribbon on the school’s gate (to declare that the enemy is harboured within – in fact, McBurney’s body has been ceremonially disposed of outside of the school grounds, thus suggesting that the female/feminine space has been reclaimed from his bodily presence). The Beguiled, I suggest, is a feminist, gothic tale of revenge that focuses almost exclusively on (white) female experience and, moreover, screens the male body through the female gaze. The female point of view is foregrounded to such a degree that the very mechanics of the film serve to reclaim and subvert the foundational, patriarchal grammar of classical or dominant forms of cinema. What rises to the surface of the screen here is a mode of viewing the world that is normally occluded from visual culture at large. To come to the point, The Beguiled takes up that question first posed by Luce Irigaray in 1974 – ‘but what if the object started to speak?’ (1985b: 135) – and repositions it in relation to visual culture and the female gaze. Coppola’s formulation, then, might be something like: ‘but what if we see this from a woman’s point of view?’ This concern is also shared by the gothic genre, which, for Anna Barr Snitow (quoted in Fleenor 1983: 13), represents ‘an attempt by women to control sex on their own terms. Sex is treated as a social drama, as a carefully modulated set of psychological possibilities between people’. That is, the gothic genre functions as an almost uniquely female (if not feminist) response to romantic paradigms or grand narratives that assert that a woman’s prime relationship in life is to a man; thus, the search for romantic love, created, upheld and endorsed by patriarchal cultural consciousness at large, pervades a woman’s life to such a degree that she is dispossessed of her own desire and will. This is a specifically female burden. The (female) gothic narrative is formed in response to this priapic model, and its textual ruptures and fissures can be viewed as a formal critique of a culture that, to borrow Shulamith Firestone’s phrase, forces women into a ‘narrow, difficult-to-find alley of human experience’ (1972: 139) and obliterates any other form of potential becoming. This is fundamentally about ex-

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Figure 2.1. The female gaze. Screenshot by the author.

amining the pernicious dynamic of power operative between men and women within a world that is determined by and through patriarchal terms. The battle to thrive, to act, to ensure fundamentally one’s own fate outside of this power struggle is, I would suggest, the central concern both of the female gothic subgenre and of The Beguiled. In what follows, I will concentrate on how the film visually reworks a stratified system of social power that is nearly always configured towards male empowerment and dominion.

The Enemy, as an Individual, is Not What We Believe: The Subjugation of Women as a Sex Class The Beguiled attempts to reverse the dynamics of power, predicated on domination, between male and female bodies. It not only deconstructs the phallogocentric assumptions of the original narrative (replete with specifically male fantasies of rape, incest, domination and triangulation), but also examines the minacious myths upon which most romantic narratives are based and the psychological mores such narratives harness as a form of control over the female psyche. As Kate Millett famously argues in her deconstruction of phallogocentric literary cul-

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tures, ‘sexual dominion obtains . . . as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power’ (1970: 25). That is, the grand narrative of romance reduces a woman to a passive entity who must rely on the approval of men to raise her out of a position of subjugation. Fundamentally, The Beguiled addresses the female experience (for better or worse, envisaged as singular and homogeneous) precisely as this subjugation of women as a sex class. It is not that relations between men and women are impossible (indeed, heterosexuality remains the benchmark against which all other relationships are judged as differing or aberrant from the norm, and this film is not entirely antithetical to that notion in spite of its privileging of ‘girl gangs’), but rather that so long as a specific relation of power prevails, this union is doomed to violent and abusive forms of power play (the central drama on which The Beguiled draws). As Firestone argues, the romantic relationship becomes ‘complicated, corrupted or obstructed by an unequal balance of power . . . love demands a mutual vulnerability or it turns destructive’ (1972: 130). The Beguiled evinces the impossibility of opening up masculinity to vulnerability (and, by extension, love as an ethical relationship of two) because the male character himself reacts in violence at what he views as his enforced castration: that he is doubly disarticulated and made to take up the female position. If disempowerment is the position from which acts of violence often stem, The Beguiled portrays a situation of sustained revenge in response to a parasitical male culture that feeds on ‘the emotional strength of women without reciprocity’ (Firestone 1972: 125). By extension, the film reminds women that it is ‘dangerous to feel sorry for one’s oppressor’ (Firestone 1972: 136). In short, The Beguiled centres on an ethical space in which women refuse to participate in their own subjugation as a sex class any longer. It details the devastating effects of what Firestone has referred to as the sex privatization of women, a process by which ‘women are blinded to their generality as a class which renders them invisible as individuals to the male eye’ (1972: 149). It is the point of realization (embodied so empathically in Kirsten Dunst’s portrayal of Edwina), in which a woman realizes she is not set apart, is not considered remarkable, is not honoured for her individuality, that the film casts as a threshold moment – in other words, the moment in which she must choose between self-destruction and abnegation (self-inflicted violence) or to propel her violent feelings out and away from her own body. However, the cost a woman pays for this realization is considerable, as the film makes apparent. Again, Firestone states that ‘to understand finally that she is no better than other women but completely indistinguishable comes not

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just as a blow but as a total annihilation’ (1972: 150, emphasis added). As such, it is this realization that gives Edwina the strength to push her oppressor (the enemy as she has refused thus far to see him) away from her and towards a slow, inexorable death. It is not that Corporal John McBurney – as he so insistently calls himself – is punished for prizing the young, virginal body (Elle Fanning’s precocious Alicia) over all other female bodies (this is nothing new as centuries of phallic visual culture will attest), but rather his reduction of the female body to the status of object that is being excoriated here. Indeed, Edwina’s carefully ritualistic preparations for McBurney’s visit to her bedroom that conclude with her laying herself out on the bed like a sacrificial object dressed in a virginal gown would suggest that she is fully aware of the power dynamic at play. His ingratitude for her sacrifice and his presumption that every female body is ripe for his taking are met with a momentary outburst of unbridled rage. She realizes that she has been fooled: to him, she is but one unremarkable body amongst many. As Cixous puts it in The Laugh of The Medusa: ‘we’ve been made victims of the old fool’s game: each one will love the other sex. I’ll give you your body and you’ll give me mine. But who are the men who give women the body that women blindly yield to them?’ (1976: 885). To come to the point, Edwina’s realization is the crux, the central point of crisis, of the film: she has been subjected to the same charming act that McBurney exacts on every woman. She has been made an unwitting player in this game – he will not give of what he receives because there is no parity in this exchange between them. She is merely an object and his interactions with her are purely mercenary. Edwina’s humility in front of McBurney, her negative capability (which is also a defining feature of Dunst’s genius as an actress, I would suggest) is born out of a place of generosity and desperation to overcome the limitations of her own sequestered existence. She has, in other words, revealed her fundamental vulnerability to him. This is a magnanimous gesture that places him within a position of power over her because he is too invested in his own sovereignty and phallic dominion to lay himself similarly bare. Indeed, one suspects that his charm is a form of psychopathy that serves to conceal the void from which all forms of toxic masculinity emanate. Coppola’s casting of Colin Farrell as McBurney is entirely apposite since Farrell’s consistent failure to live up to (or embody unequivocally) the charming yet roguish ‘heart throb’ roles of his youth lends each subsequent role he plays an air of diminished expectation, impotence and disappointment. As such,

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Farrell is uniquely suited to manifesting masculinity in crisis – a crisis to which, as McBurney, he tries to resolve with specifically phallic forms of violence (he is suspiciously emotionally attached to the gun he inveigles away from Miss Martha, since there is ‘nothing more frightening than the sight of a woman with a gun’). As such, The Beguiled intimates from the outset that castration (impotence) is a uniquely patriarchal problem that is projected onto the female body (which in reality lacks nothing). Here, it is the male body that is made to bear the visible mark of ‘the bleeding wound’, since McBurney arrives into this specifically female environment as a broken body that solicits female labour, attention and repair (he is indeed literally ‘healed’ – sutured back together – through feminine handicraft). McBurney’s error is to believe that he still occupies a position of power within this environment when he is, in fact, a ‘most unwelcome visitor’. There simply is no space set aside to accommodate him in this world; tellingly, Edwina does not even bother to teach her pupils the masculine third person singular declension of the French verb ‘être’ – why ever would they need it if they can name themselves and their fellow women (‘nous sommes des filles’)? In short, McBurney is trying to asset his patriarchal right within an environment he has failed to recognize as a matriarchy. As Cixous notes, the power of language to shape and define our experience in the world is paramount; it is the impetus to speak against the grain, to form a counter-narrative, to speak as women, that is the project of feminist discourse: ‘by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence. Women should break out of the snare of silence. They shouldn’t be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin or the harem’ (1976: 881). Indeed, she notes further that ‘if woman has always functioned “within” the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this “within”, to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers’ (1976: 887).9 This is, then, a space that is markedly hostile to the male presence precisely for strategic reasons. It is a space within which female discourse is prioritized and vocalized. As a result, what McBurney cannot acquire through charm, he decides to take through force because his failure, his fundamental impotence within this space, is a source of profound humiliation to him, since this impels him to take up the position he associates with the state of being female. He asserts that he is ‘not even a man’ due to the female ‘art of castration’ they have exercised upon

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him – of course, this is a ludicrous statement ripe with hyperbole, but it reveals precisely the extent to which McBurney’s misogyny is deeply ingrained (that he honestly believes that women are in some sense ‘lacking’ – a notion plucked right out of the patriarchal playbook that is shored up, notoriously, by psychoanalytic theory). If he has not gotten his own way in the matter, it is because they have ‘bedevilled’ him and therefore resorted to some opaque, deeply mysterious and feminine form of witchcraft (beguilement). All this, naturally, is a well-rehearsed way of containing female agency. Another way of exerting control over the female body, of course, is through the act of rape. There is a direct correlation between the scene in which Trip takes Lux’s virginity on an open floodlit football field (which I interpret to be by force) in The Virgin Suicides and the scene in The Beguiled in which Edwina (again played by Kirsten Dunst) offers herself as a form (a body) of appeasement to McBurney, who brutally takes her on the hard floor of the bedroom, tearing asunder her clothes and scattering pearl buttons across the wooden floorboards. By framing these two scenes in a markedly similar manner, Dunst’s embodiment of a woman forced into a form of sexual intercourse redolent with violence and control is heightened and brings these two scenes together as a diptych. In both sequences, the female body is tackled into submissive compliance under the weight of a male body that bears down on her and covers her mouth, thus silencing her ability to refuse male dominion over her own body. Kate Millett reminds us that the act of rape is a singular and ferocious embodiment of power: ‘patriarchal force . . . relies on a form of violence particularly sexual in character and realized most completely in the act of rape’ (1970: 44). McBurney’s desire to possess these women is apparent throughout the film: he seemingly begs for Alicia’s clemency by holding on to the bottom layers of her skirt – an act that later finds its correlate in him roughly grabbing and pulling her hair in an attempt to force capitulation from her; he takes Edwina’s hand and tries to ingratiate his way into her life by feigning a shallow form of propinquity based on a fleeting observation of her (‘you and I are outsiders in this place’) – later, of course, he treats her as an object onto and into which he can force himself; he gives Amelia one of his buttons off of his military coat as a sign of his esteem and, taken with his flattery, she treats the button as some kind of talismanic object worthy of saving in a tin box alongside other childish objects of seemingly numinous import – later he will desecrate her most prized possession (her tortoise Henry) by dashing his delicate body on the stone floor of the kitchen. These acts are all equivalent within an economy of

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power predicated on male power over women. Tellingly, Edwina has been humiliated by him and thus offers herself to him, in part, because he is the one person who can raise her up once more from a position of degradation. McBurney knows this is the fundamental power all men exercise over female experience: that to be chosen, to be set apart, is a form of elevation in status. This is also, notably, how abusive relationships function. Edwina’s melancholy realization at the end of the film is that she has been made party to a patriarchal myth: there is no such man who can save her from her loneliness and isolation (heroes do not really exist on or off the battlefield). It is her burden alone to save herself – a knowledge that is also a kind of triumph over naivety or belief in magical resolutions. The deus ex machina is but a narrative device. Edwina, as such, returns herself to the complex matter of living a life in this world by waking up from her daydream of salvation (‘I wish to be taken far away from here’). The extent to which she was willing to be tricked prior to gaining this self-knowledge is palpable in her reaction to McBurney’s utterly spurious declaration of love, which is in and of itself a pathetic attempt to regain power over Miss Martha (who has declared he must leave the premises once his leg is sufficiently healed). The fact that this statement is so baldly absurd that it made female members of the cinema audience I sat amongst on eight occasions laugh out loud is telling. Edwina, crushingly, longs to believe in McBurney’s meretricious speech act as the real thing (‘don’t say that unless you really mean it’), but that belief also proves to be her undoing and to be the birth of her anger. I love you may be a cliché, a pre-given sentiment, but to wield it falsely is cruel and pernicious.

There’s Nothing More Frightening Than the Sight of a Woman with a Gun: Strategies of Subversion and Control As I stated earlier, The Beguiled sets up its agenda from the outset by privileging the female point of view over the male and by depicting the experience of war sonically (and thus, I suggest, it recuperates nineteenth-century warfare, a largely male affair, as a female experience). The film can be read as a direct response to a dominant form of visual culture that casts the female body as lacking and passive. Indeed, the film’s very mechanics work to reverse and subvert the central tenets of such an economy of images by foregrounding female agency and the female gaze, whilst centring the male body precisely as a bleeding and wounded

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spectacle of passivity (McBurney spends most of his time reclining in bed). In other words, this is a narrative within which not only is a battle of the sexes played out, but in which the male body is forced to assume a position of subjugation in relation to the female body. The scene, for instance, in which Miss Martha attends to McBurney’s wounds and washes his body clearly correlates with William Henry Machen’s (1832–1911) depiction of Christ in The Tomb (Coppola is renowned for her encyclopaedic knowledge of images plucked from both ‘high’ and ‘low’ artistic cultures). Yet here, the male body is neither rendered as a sacred object nor as a host for the body of Christ – that is neither elevated in status nor invested with transcendent power – but is presented as highly concentrated in its brute, bleeding physicality. McBurney’s wounds are not a pious infliction of suffering for the greater good of humanity, but rather the physical markings of a man who is already lacking when he enters this female space. His pain is not romanticized; indeed, Alicia in particular is quite happy to leave him to fester into death outside the school gate. The segmentation of the male body into its constituent parts, the literal division of it into brute matter, is composed with precision to elicit a frisson of sexual allure. This scene places the male body at the heart of physical and not spiritual life. Moreover, McBurney’s body has such an effect on Miss Martha as she is focusing on the act of bathing him that she proceeds to shut and lock the door to the music room in which he sleeps; in other words, she views his physicality and charm as a contagious force that needs to be contained. The house in which the protagonists dwell becomes a visual metaphor for separation and control; McBurney has to work very hard to breach the integrity of each threshold until he occupies enough of their space to feel able to exert his control. Once he is outside the dominion of the music room and is no longer confined to his bed, his physical presence ruptures and breaks apart the feminine space; conversations are nearly always conveyed through shot/reverse shot, which is an economical way of suggesting a lack of community and shared space. More crucially, though, his presence pits the women against one another, ensuring that their solidarity as a female unit is broken. Cixous reminds us that ‘men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs’ (1976: 878). Indeed, McBurney wishes for these women to become handmaidens attendant only to his distinctly masculine libido. However, his error, as I have said, is to believe that he is the only person who knows how to charm and beguile. In essence, the title of the film poses a question:

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Figure 2.2. William Henry Machen’s Christ in The Tomb. Public domain image. who is the beguiled here? Who carries out the act of deception and who is the deceived? The organization of time in the film offers one of the most significant indications of a world in crisis in which roles might be ritualistically upturned as if in a liminal moment. In fact, poised between the worlds of the old and new orders, the domestic and natural, girlhood and womanhood, The Beguiled lends itself exceptionally well to an anthropological reading centred on the rite of passage into womanhood and its coterminous awakening of adult sexuality (see Backman Rogers 2015). Although events are seemingly conveyed chronologically in the film, these narrative sections are dispersed and held apart by marked moments of ‘inbetweenness’ that puncture seamless transition. The only definitive date and place we are given is that of Virginia 1864, three years into the Civil War. We do not feel the weight of history’s progress, but rather pay witness to its dying embers. As I have already suggested, this is not a historical tale, but an allegorical one in which teleology or advancement serves no purpose. An example of this might be the way in which McBurney’s labour in the garden is interrupted by sections of black leader or intrinsically liminal moments of time such as twilight and sunrise. The cohesion and integrity of these scenes is ruptured by a sense of the timeless (and pointless) nature of this labour. This world belongs to that moment prior to modernity in which time is not marked by railways, printing presses and pocket watches (a very masculine and official form of time, if you will), but is determined by the environment itself. In this world, it is Miss Martha who is the keeper of time: she watches over the progress of her pupils into adulthood and it is she who, importantly, determines the length of McBurney’s stay within the confines of

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the seminary. By telling him that she believes his leg is healing nicely, remarking proudly on the precision and agility of her stitchwork on his wound, and stating that ‘some would say’ he is already ready to return to the field of war, she makes it clear that however small this feminine space is, she has dominion over him within it. The realization that he has never, in fact, held any position of power determines his fate, for he cannot, however much he may try, overturn the dynamics of this female coven. Several of the scenes set in the garden contain a close-up shot of an intricate spider’s web. I suggest that these seemingly insubstantial moments are actually key to determining the psychological elements at play within the film’s narrative. The web is at once a motif of painstaking craft, but it is also a trap or form of enclosure (indeed, the symbolic power of the spider has provided fecund material for feminist and female artists, such as Louise Bourgeois). Moreover, the spider in its female form is often associated with the deadly Black Widow – a genus that destroys and eats her mate after intercourse. The women in Miss Martha’s seminary beguile McBurney with a set of particularly feminine wiles; they appear to be associated with sweetness and light (pastel colours and the warm, glowing light of a sunlit afternoon), but once his intentions for them are understood, the tone of the film transitions into something decidedly darker and more gothic (some of the concluding scenes are nearly entirely obscured by darkness, crucial details only picked out via strategically placed candlelight). In fact, the tagline of the film reads ‘innocent until betrayed’; innocence is a male projection of fantasy onto the (pure) female body here and once this fantasy is revealed as ill-founded, a mere figment of male imagination, the female body is subjected to forms of violence that seek to bring it back into line or under control. In other words, women are made to suffer the consequences of and are punished for male pain. It is this dynamic, which makes women responsible for the betrayal of a fantasy that was never theirs in the first place, that The Beguiled lampoons. Until the very end, it is the women who determine what McBurney sees and believes: this is revenge by appearance or beguilement. Their carefully ritualistic preparations over grooming and dress are not mere frippery, but an artful form of deception, and the charade is maintained to the end as McBurney suffocates, still in a state of disbelief that mere girls could poison him. That Miss Martha feels no sympathy for his stupidity born out of vanity is rendered comically apparent by her determination to continue with the etiquette of polite dining; she places a delicate morsel of food into her mouth after asking Alicia how her embroidery, replete with blush rosette, is coming along.

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All the while, she watches McBurney flounder into death at the other (head)end of the table. Like opponents in a game played out on a public court, Miss Martha wins game, set and match. The dinner table, a site of heavily ritualized control (since everyone is, technically, armed with deadly weapons) becomes the placeholder for an especially genteel and feminine form of ‘domestic’ violence. In The Laugh of The Medusa, Cixous famously declares that when the repressed of female culture returns, ‘it’s an explosive, utterly destructive, staggering return, with a fierceness never yet unleashed and equal to the most forbidding of suppressions. For when the Phallic period comes to an end, women will have been either annihilated or borne up to the highest and most violent incandescence. Muffled throughout history, they have lives in dreams, in bodies (though muted), in silences, in aphonic revolts’ (1976: 886). The Beguiled is not a film without fault, for it claims to speak on behalf of a group of women at the expense of those who are left out and have suffered (and continue to suffer) a horrific history of exploitation; however, it is, I would suggest, a concerted attempt in the cinematic to rethink the ‘old circuits’ (Cixous 1976: 890) of phallic visual culture. The final shot, which centres, from a respectful distance, the palpable power of a female gaze that dares to stare back is, for me, a remarkable and landmark moment in cinematic herstory. For the destruction of the old world and its racist ideology is also concomitant with the birth of a ‘brand new subject’ (Cixous 1976: 890) who can exist outside of the suffocating strictures of a visual economy that always and already delimits what a female existence can be. Above all, this film tells us that the surface of the image, mere appearance, is often beguiling, but it is very dangerous to believe in everything beautiful that one sees.

Notes  1.

For this idea, I would like to thank Fiona Handyside and our wonderful audience for our illuminating discussion of The Beguiled (and Coppola’s work more broadly) at the British Film Institute on 6 September 2017. Fiona described beautifully the use of sound in the film, which at the time I was yet to see. This idea has stayed with me and is generated out of conversation with Fiona – an important idea that I would like duly to acknowledge.  2. See, by way of example, Clarkisha Kent, ‘Sofia Coppola’s Blatant Erasure of Black Women in The Beguiled Highlights How White Women Are Complicit in White Supremacy’, The Root, 25 June 2017, https://www.theroot.com/tag/the-beguiled; Kirsten Dunst (@kirstendunst), Instagram photo, https://www.instagram.com/p/BM8JSlcAY21; and Richard Brody, ‘“The Beguiled”: Sofia Coppola’s Dubiously Abstract Vision of the Civil War’, New Yorker, 23 June 2017,

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 3.

 4.  5.

 6.  7.

 8.

 9.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-beguiled-sofia-coppolas-dubiouslyabstract-vision-of-the-civil-war. See Sofia Coppola, ‘Sofia Coppola Responds to “The Beguiled” Backlash’, IndieWire, 15 July 2017, http://www.indiewire.com/2017/07/sofia-coppola-the-beguiled-backlash-response1201855684. The term ‘female gothic’ was originated by Ellen Moers in Literary Women (1978). It is curious that Coppola’s work is so readily placed within the gothic genre given that it is, as Teresa Goddu asserts, often ‘associated with the hackneyed, the feminine, and the popular, the gothic lacks respectability and hence must be quarantined from other literary forms’ (1997: 5). As I argue in the Introduction to this study, these are charges that have been levelled at Coppola’s work too. Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) played on these themes to brilliant effect. Teresa Goddu’s groundbreaking work on the American Gothic is central to my argument here, especially since she also utilizes the notion of the abject as a structuring device. It is thus worth quoting her at some length: ‘showing how these contradictions contest and constitute national identity even as they are denied, the gothic tells of the historical horrors that make national identity possible yet must be suppressed in order to sustain it . . . By resurrecting what these narratives repress, the gothic disrupts the dream world of national myth with the nightmares of history. Moreover, it its narrative incoherence, the gothic discloses the instability of America’s self-representations . . . like the abject, the gothic serves as the ghost that both helps to run the machine of national identity and disrupts it. The gothic can strengthen as well as critique an idealized national identity’ (1997: 10). In essence, she argues that the South’s identity ‘has been defined by its particular racial history . . . the South is a benighted landscape heavy with history and haunted by the ghosts of slavery. The South’s oppositional image – its gothic excesses and social transgressions – has served as the nation’s safety valve: as the repository of everything the nation is not, the South purges contrary impulses. More perceived idea than social reality, the imaginary South functions as the nation’s “dark” other’ (1997: 76). Juliann Fleenor states of the gothic ruin that: ‘[It] becomes doubly an expression of rebellion when it symbolizes both chaos or disorder and the female herself. Thus, the female writer adapts the stereotype of women as disordered and chaotic to her own purposes. Yet it also used to express simultaneously an atmosphere of disease. The ruin metaphor joins two contrasting meanings – of rebellion and of the female herself as an ambivalent symbol’ (1983: 13). In any stratified social system predicated on power, argues Cixous, the other (which can take many forms) is denied, suppressed and destroyed through the machinations of the foundational system of power. It is only by altering one’s relation to/with the other that the system itself can be changed. It requires a recuperation and subversive reworking of the language of that system of power: écriture féminine is such a strategy. It implodes the language of the master. It is also important to bear in mind that, for Cixous, true sexual difference is not predicated on patriarchy’s prurient obsession with anatomical difference, for this is simply another way of reinforcing existing power structures. Rather, her concept of difference is based on the notion of a libidinal economy. What she refers to as the feminine economy is a powerful force that works to counteract the strictures and codifications of phallic law and economy; against abnegation, lack and systemic forms of control, the feminine economy manifests itself through jouissance, which, most importantly, does not objectify or seek to assimilate the other. This is a fundamentally different operation of power that is, crucially, based in openness and vulnerability. Hierarchical elements of the phallic system of power are removed.

PART II

Empty Subjectivities and Masculinity as Void

Chapter 3

Lost in Translation (2003)

The being of consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question. Jean-Paul Sartre (2000: 74) If you’re living in the empty moment, identity does not catch up with itself because it is always effacing itself, backing up over its own path . . . Identity emerges as a desperate effort to reconnect the dots of what’s inalterably past, gone. Identity/presence comes forward as a procession of always-already-absent moments. Leo Charney (1998: 63) I know simply that the sky will last longer than I. Albert Camus (1991: 152) To allow a thing to enter into its strangeness. Hélène Cixous (1991: 66) Lost in Translation is Coppola’s most abidingly popular and commercially successful film to date, and it is also her film to which most critical writing and scholarship has been exhaustively devoted. While some critics and scholars have criticized the film for its perceived racism and casual disregard for Japanese culture (for example, see Homay King 2010; Geoff King 2010; Day 2004), others have praised it for its sensitive appraisal of female subjectivity and its distinctive portrayal of states of abject loneliness and lassitude (for instance, Colman in Stivale 2005; Tay 2009; Bolton 2011; Handyside 2016). It is a film that scholars are keen to demarcate as both classical (Geoff King 2010) and avant garde (Tay 2009) in terms of its aesthetics and narrative; it is a film that has been read as both reparative and

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hopeful in tone (Murphy 2006; Bolton 2011) or inchoate and resistant to meaning (McGowan 2007). It is a film that partakes in both the romantic comedy and melodrama genres, but in always pared down and minor modes, and it is a film that is positioned between Japanese and American cultures – on neither of which it gains any cohesive purchase. To come to the point, Lost in Translation is precisely about states and relationships of ambiguity, of the inbetween, of liminality, and it is perhaps for this reason that the film continues to provide such fertile ground for diverse reading. Suitably then, this interpretation sets forth that the film dramatizes – albeit in comic mode – a moment of suspension in which the fundamental opacity borne out of a confrontation between human life and a world that remains indifferent to and outlasts that life is realized. Lost in Translation is, in my opinion, a film that explores through images the existential notions of the absurd and of anguish – as elucidated by Camus (2005) and Sartre (2000) – and, by extension, asks how one may reckon with a sudden loss of meaning.1 It makes us stare into a void by positioning the human body within duration and positing themes of meaninglessness and a loss of identity at the heart of its loose ‘narrative’. Coterminous with the film’s central dilemma (what does it mean to lose meaning?) is the formal audacity with which Coppola makes nothing happen. As such, I suggest that the experience of tourism – a merely useful trope in the film – creates a caesura or fissure within everyday experience that allows the protagonists to re-view the world from the perspective of the absurd in which ‘the world evades us because it becomes itself again. The stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us’ (Camus 2005: 13). This is not to say that I demur with readings of the film that delineate it in terms of renewal and epiphany, but that I will argue that the implicit event at the heart of Lost in Translation is not one that precipitates a state of hopefulness, but rather an acceptance of life’s fundamental obscurity: it is a film that grapples fundamentally with those moments of the inbetween often for which there is no possible translation into meaning. In this way, I believe that the film is closer in tone to the kind of Modernist cinematic sensibilities explored by Leo Charney (1998) inasmuch as the film presents the resolution to a crisis over what to do and how to be as an ability to open oneself outwards to states of drift and ambiguity. Charney writes of the modern experience and, by extension, its representation on film, thus: ‘in the empty moment, what you call identity ceases to be continuous, linear, apparent. It’s hazy and insubstantial, a jumbled, fragmented surface. It skips around from one time to another, from one place to another’ (1998: 64). In

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Lost in Translation, identity – as a source of anguish or existential crisis – is revealed precisely as a form of Sartrean ‘nothingness’ (2000) that plays out within a world that remains impervious to meaning and coherence. Indeed, in her Sartrean reading of the film, Michelle Darnell states that: ‘Lost in Translation projects a study of the ambiguity and complexity of the human situation in part by exaggerating how frequently humans attempt to ignore, or to lie to themselves about their situation and showing how such attempts are futile’ (quoted in Boule and McCaffrey 2014: 103–4). That is, the film exposes the conditions under which such an existential realization is made and the internal bargain that one must make with oneself as a result. Morose and nihilistic as this may seem, this is a film that counsels us to seek comfort in reality, in this world as it is, and not to flee into or take sanctuary in preconceived roles and ideas of what constitutes a good life or how to be a person. As such, I suggest that the realization the protagonists are brought to echoes Camus’ words that when ‘I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as mine, I know it implies obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured that this ignorance explains everything and that this darkness is my light’ (2005: 39). The film’s dramedy, then, plays out as a tension between the refuge that being provides for the subject and the knowledge that at the heart of this being is nothingness. In short, in what follows, I suggest that Lost in Translation is precisely a film about encountering nothing.

‘I Just Don’t know What I am Supposed to Be’: Identity and/as Void A central concern of Lost in Translation is identity: its formation, its various iterations, its dissimulation, and the disjuncture that plays out inbetween public and private moments and spaces. Bob and Charlotte, whilst both suffering from an acute identity crisis, experience this crisis in radically different ways. Charlotte is, as Lucy Bolton puts it, ‘searching for that signifying system that will enable her to express her desire, her multiplicity, and her alterity’ (2011: 123) and, as such, is trying to understand what is at stake in laying claim to personhood, whereas Bob is assaulted from all sides by highly commodified and clichéd images of himself. Amy Murphy notes that ‘being seen by all, Murray’s character is ironically lost to himself … caught in the game of monetary and visual exchange’ (2006: 39). In other words, Charlotte is a young woman who is seeking potential modes of being in the world and Bob is someone who is continually reminded of what he represents by extraneous sources, such as advertising and cinema, all of which re-

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main largely outside of his control. The film’s narrative, centred as it is on the trope of tourism, facilitates a situation in which the habitual and quotidian routines of everyday life are suspended. As such, the action (if it can be called as such in a film that is so marked by lassitude and in which sleep deprivation distends every moment) takes place within a liminal moment in which identity and one’s relation to the other comes radically into or under question. What differentiates Lost in Translation, I would suggest, from a broader American cinematic heritage that has sought to use the foreign location as an exotic backdrop for the exploration and shoring up of American identity is its refusal to yield exhaustive meaning – especially in terms of spiritual epiphany.2 Indeed, Sharon Lin Tay argues that the inchoate sense of loss, of incompleteness, that troubles the protagonists is in no way indicative of ‘losing an object of desire, but a despondency of purpose and a questioning of what was assumed an original plenitude that is now exposed as a farce . . . instead of thinking of cultural and racial identities as an exercise of construction, Lost in Translation deconstructs the myth of achieving stable identity’ (2009: 143). Likewise in his psychoanalytic framing of the film, Todd McGowan states that ‘what makes Bob and Charlotte unique as characters . . . is that they do not fill the void of their subjectivity with some new content. In psychoanalytic terms, they don’t abandon their subjectivity for the sake of any ego identifications . . . their experiences continually uproot any sense of identity and expose the emptiness of subjectivity itself’ (2007: 60). Let me be clear that I am not condoning Coppola’s somewhat lazy and churlish use of physical humour at the expense of Japanese culture, but am rather seeking to couch the film’s narrative framework within a wider cinematic context that has consistently utilized the exotic location as a source of renewal (recent examples being The Darjeeling Limited (2007) and Eat, Pray, Love (2010)). Lost in Translation eschews the foreign as a repository for or counter-balance to identity in order to reveal the fundamental opacity of human subjectivity – if not the bankrupt nature of (aforementioned) narratives that invoke this kind of rite of passage. In fact, the film is highly critical of a specifically American form of culture that is grounded in a near-obsessional focus on the notion of ‘self’. Lost in Translation directly lampoons, via the figure of Kelly (a young, blonde American actress), a culture that is so inwardly invested in ‘actualization’ and ‘externalization’ of the self that it remains blind to the experience of life itself. Indeed, the film posits this as an ethical issue: life is lived outside of the self. Coppola would extend her critique of this culture even further, as we shall see, in The Bling Ring.

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The film centres on two people who are encumbered and restrained by highly specific modes of identity and ways of being that are inimical to their thriving (inasmuch as Charlotte in particular believes she must be something). Charlotte is a recent graduate in philosophy from Yale and she is also somebody’s wife, whereas Bob is an erstwhile popular actor in the ‘action’ genre who is continually reminded of his former glories that exist in stark contrast to his depleted, worn out and ageing body. The crisis of identity, for both characters, plays out on two levels: namely, the inability to cohere tightly enough to their prescriptive roles (graduate, wife, actor, husband, father), but more extensively the confrontation that this liminal experience brings about with their own subjectivity. The former proffers rigid and cohesive identity as a role to which one should subscribe, while the latter entails acknowledgement of the fact that ‘in its coming into existence human reality grasps itself as an incomplete being’ (Sartre 2000: 89). Lost in Translation proffers incoherence and opacity as a form of response to the notion that we are supposed to be anything at all, and, in doing so, makes clear that this is not a comforting or smooth process of reckoning. Moreover, this confrontation brings time to the fore – if Charlotte is someone for whom time is seemingly too long and plentiful (she fills her days with futile attempts to ‘waste’ time), Bob is someone for whom time is running out; his own body functions as a repository of duration that situates him on a timeline in comparison with his former self – a body to which he can never return or assimilate – and Charlotte’s young, fleshy and seemingly unformed body, to which we are introduced in the film’s opening moments, is ripe with so much potential and possibility that it is a source of anguish to her. If Bob is too tightly (in)formed by a suffocating series of images that are exterior to his ‘self’, Charlotte is seeking a role to which she can attach herself that would eradicate her restless and meandering search for identity. Yet, what Lost in Translation stages is a quiet form of suffering in which the need to abide by any specific, prescriptive mode of being results in the attrition of one’s ability to connect, to thrive and to function affectively in the world. As such, the film questions the extent to which one can accept opacity and ambiguity as the basis of existence in this world.

Charlotte Charlotte’s stylish, neutral and pared-down clothing, which she wears as a form of uniform, is a pertinent visual clue to the personal dilemma with which she is dealing.3 Charlotte is a tabula rasa – she is searching for herself, but she cannot

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find her correlate anywhere. Late into the film’s narrative, she confesses to Bob that she is ‘stuck’ and that she does not know what or who she is ‘supposed to be’, but this information is imparted to the viewer much earlier through the desultory and observational nature of her presence onscreen. Charlotte is, undoubtedly, a woman who ‘thinks’ (Bolton 2011), although very few of her internal thoughts are broadcast to the viewer.4 Indeed, her character is delineated through silence and examination of the world and the people surrounding her. She is the still point around which much of the film’s action revolves – its contemplative centre, if you will. She cannot yet function as an agent in the world because she has not decided the course or shape that her action should take. This hesitancy is most strikingly realized through the way in which she occupies space and the reflective role she takes up within these threshold spaces. Lost in Translation implicitly invokes tropes of the melodrama through Charlotte’s body as an internal, private and partially trapped female presence that yearns to break out into public space and discourse. A recurring frame within the film is that of Charlotte, in a state of (de-eroticized and therefore private) undress, gazing down onto Tokyo’s vast cityscape from her hotel window; these moments in the film are characterized by or rendered through the use of a panorama shot that, as Amy Murphy notes,

Figure 3.1. Alone in Tokyo. Screenshot by the author.

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has traditionally signified ‘the illusion of flight, escape, and mobility; (celebrating) transgression and exoticism beyond the domestic’ (2006: 37). Like it did for the cinematic female incarnations before her, then, the pane of glass that stands between her body and the world symbolizes Charlotte’s struggle to take up her place and space in the public realm – a wider landscape – as an agent.5 Indeed, these moments correlate with the excessive emotional landscape of the melodrama that is nearly always displaced aesthetically through attendance to colour and a lugubrious pace of cinematography. Despite being a seemingly personal film that is marked by (a free indirect) subjectivity, there are remarkably few point-of-view shots in Lost in Translation.6 In fact, the sole time that we see through Charlotte’s eyes, when she visits the Jugan-ji temple in the Shinjuku district, we recognize it as such because the image takes on tremulous and halting qualities that the rest of the body of the film does not possess so explicitly. This is, in part, because the questioning and observant nature of the characters is central to the film’s wider existential project – that is, it is a film that questions and observes – but it is also due to the fact that Charlotte especially is yet to become a woman who can inhabit and claim her own space and identity. It is telling, for instance, that a scene in which she observes her own mirror image and ‘plays’ with her appearance by styling her hair and applying lipstick is constructed entirely on the side of her subjectivity. Of course, this can (and should) be read as Coppola’s refusal to objectify Charlotte, since here the emphasis is on her own gaze and the way in which she seemingly forms and controls her own image. As Bolton notes, ‘the camera looks at Charlotte’s face from a three-quarters angle, and it is thereby situated on Charlotte’s side of the mirror, not yet seeing her face as it is reflected in the mirror. The spectator does not see, or stand in for, the reflection; rather, we see her “actual” appearance’ (2011: 120). Yet this refusal to supply a corresponding mirror image or reflection of herself – a potential form of ego-ideal, as it were – is also indicative of Charlotte’s difficulty with identificatory processes more generally. Indeed, later on we see that she has removed her make-up and undone her hair, which suggests that this was one more self-improvisation that did not satisfy her. There is no reflection (including her own) with which she can align. However, this inability to identify is not a critique levelled at Charlotte, but is, on the contrary, revelatory of an error that is, often quite literally, sold to us: this film tells us that the mistake is that one should expect to find anything in that mirror to identify with at all. Indeed, Camus’ delineation of visual estrangement is an apt descriptor of both Charlotte and Bob’s

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encounters with their own images: ‘the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother (sic) we encounter in our own photographs is the absurd’ (2005: 13) If Bob’s image, which denotes a simplification of meaning, is as alien to him as the multiple visual iterations of his own face that surround him, Charlotte’s image signifies an absence or void of meaning for her. Here, identification is always convoluted, troubled, fleeting and illusory. A series of five scenes in the film map out Charlotte’s own sense of disconnection from the people who surround her and, by extension, the worlds or styles of being they represent in the film. These moments centre on, in order of sequence: a visit to a the Jugan-ji temple (which she mistakenly calls ‘a shrine’), where she hears monks performing a daily ritual of chanting; a transatlantic telephone call she makes in a state of anguish to her friend Lauren; a preposterous recording of a guru, entitled ‘A Soul’s Search’, in which he claims to be able to guide listeners to their true calling in life by use of his unique ‘inner map theory’; a press conference for an action film called Midnight Velocity, which provides an actress named Kelly with the occasion to enthuse about her meretricious friendship with the actor Keanu Reeves based on wholly unremarkable coincidences, such as living in Los Angeles, loving dogs, Mexican food and karate; and an Ikebana class in which Japanese women in kimonos fashion elaborate floral arrangements. Taken together, these scenes convey not only Charlotte’s reticence over her place and role in the world, but also intimate the reservoir of tightly controlled emotion that distends her seemingly calm exterior. During the scenes set at the temple, the press conference and the Ikebana class, our viewpoint onto the action is directed over Charlotte’s shoulder; notably, in all three moments, she stands on the threshold of entry and looks in as an outsider or observer. Her placement in the frame is precisely choreographed to convey the discrete and quiet movement of someone who is reticent to be seen by others. Her physical liminality is indicative not merely of her hesitant and thoughtful nature, but is also emblematic of her dissatisfaction with what these short interludes represent. All three modes of life – namely, the spiritual life, and commercial and domestic modes of femininity – are found, unsurprisingly, to be lacking by Charlotte. Moreover, she expresses anxiety to Lauren (who is too invested in her own domestic duties to register Charlotte’s considerable distress) that she was unable to feel anything in response to the ritual ceremony she witnessed at the temple. In other words, Charlotte is someone who is so consumed with the idea of being and doing that this extends to her emotional world; she fears that she cannot

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feel the appropriate emotion in reaction to a given event. The emotion that she expected to feel at the temple falters and then spills over into a solitary moment back in her hotel room in which she articulates and names the true source of her distress: she no longer knows the man to whom she is married. Her mistake, then, is believing that she must feel something in response to a culture that is extrinsic to her (a culture that is frequently misappropriated by Western cultures for bankrupt forms of nebulous ‘spirituality’™); this distinct lack of response, in what she regards as the ‘appropriate’ moment, throws into sharp relief her own inability to fathom or to feel ‘appropriately’ about her own marriage to a man with whom she shares her bed, but from whom she feels increasingly estranged. Later, she examines photographs that her husband John has taken of them – in which they adopt the familiar gestures and poses of a young couple in love – for signs of the physical, palpable reality of this relationship, but the faded and nostalgic qualities of these images (rendered as they are on Polaroid film) suggest the ‘pastness’ of a relationship that seems to mean little to her in the present moment, whilst also being prescient of the kitsch quality of Instagram shots that aestheticize the fleeting and temporary ‘romantic’ moment through a set of prefabricated filters and colour tints. It is fitting, then, that the photographer is her husband, a man who (aside from using too many ‘hair products’) works within the fashion and music industries and is burdened with the task of creating temporarily iconic images of people and moments, all of which will fade into obscurity. I would argue that if these photographs indicate anything to her, it is perhaps what Sontag, as outlined earlier, has identified as the unique ability of the photograph to testify to ‘time’s relentless melt’ (1979: 15); they underscore how the present moment is already always lost to the past. As such, these seemingly inconsequential moments in the film signify how we live on the threshold between a past that is lost to us and projection towards a future, which, by its very nature, remains unknown. If Charlotte has difficulty fathoming her relationship to the past, her anxiety seems all the greater in relation to who and how she should be in the future. Charlotte’s bemused expression as she listens to ‘A Soul’s Search’ also suggests that this is yet another mode of being with which she cannot identify herself. As a graduate in philosophy from Yale, she is presumably rigorously well-read in its branches of ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics and metaphysics, an education that would arguably make her sceptical of philosophical thought systems that sell arcane notions such as fate and destiny – and, indeed, it would appear that she finds the guru’s musings to be somewhat risible. Nonetheless, the fact

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that she is even listening to it would suggest that the idea that she has a correct path in life that is beyond her control or choosing is a potentially comforting way to escape the issues with which she is grappling. She is embarrassed by her fantasy of this refuge enough to claim later to Bob that she does not know to whom the CD belongs. As such, we can ascertain that she knows there cannot be facile solutions to the question of how or what a person should be in this life, and she recognizes the adoption of this solution as an act of bad faith (a knowing and willing lie to oneself).7 She may even be the kind of person who is familiar with Sartre’s coruscating denunciation of psychological determinism as ‘before being a theoretical concept, (it) is first an attitude of excuse, or if you prefer, the basis of all attitudes of excuse . . . it attempts to fill the void that encircles us, to re-establish the links between the past and the present, between present and future. It provides us with a nature productive of our acts, and those very acts it makes transcendent . . . eminently reassuring because they constitute a permanent game of excuses’ (2000: 40) As such, Charlotte is both attracted to and suspicious of the sanctuary that being seems to offer. For assuming a role also entails – as Bob’s situation elucidates – stultification and acquiescence, in part, to extraneous characterization: in being, we are being for someone else or something. The actress, Kelly, played to comic perfection by Anna Faris, functions as a cautionary persona for Charlotte in this respect; as a woman who all too willingly believes in and identifies with her role as a Hollywood actress – the result of which is an inability to engage with others beyond holding forth on the highly dubious virtues of the ‘power cleanse’ and her utterly bogus spiritual belief in reincarnation – Kelly represents someone who is so concerned with upholding her own cliché that she suffocates any possibility of living beyond or outside the remit of her own prepackaged and commodified personality. In fact, the clear implication set forth in the film is that an unexamined life is a brittle and hollow one; such a way of life is embodied precisely in the vacuous and grating presence of Kelly, a character from whom Coppola deliberately alienates us (she is often visually offset against Charlotte, and divides Charlotte and her husband John spatially in the frame by her mere presence, for instance) and who can be extrapolated and summed up via a set of attributes and characteristics. She is, ultimately, a cinematic cliché and Coppola utilizes her as such. The film suggests that to lack or shun complexity is to absent oneself entirely from the tribulations of personhood. The deleterious consequences of giving oneself over to the other is realized both comically and somewhat poignantly in the figure of Bob Harris.

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Bob If Charlotte is a person for whom the absurd nature of human existence is dawning only gradually, Bob is someone for whom life is perhaps defined through the absurd. This daily confrontation with his being and purpose for others is realized through the trope of the cliché in Lost in Translation.8 As I argued earlier, Bob is assaulted by images of his former self or his current avatar as a continual reminder of what he represents outside of his own existence in the world. He is in Tokyo to promote Suntory whiskey, a commission for which he must deploy all the facets and gestures coterminous with his onscreen persona with aplomb. The base nature of this purely economic exchange is conveyed to the viewer from the outset of the film and accentuates the ‘midlife crisis’ that Charlotte identifies astutely as Bob’s lot (‘did you buy a Porsche yet?’ she asks him). He is introduced to the viewer via a sound bridge that announces his arrival at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport; however, the actual location or threshold space of the airport is not shown. This visual ellipsis suggests that regardless of the continent or culture, Bob’s experience remains the same. Fittingly, he is also a celebrity whose assets can be extrapolated and distilled down into the same visual language anywhere in the world. Although, upon his arrival at the Park Hyatt hotel, he is greeted and welcomed formally by officials from Suntory whiskey through a ritualistic exchange of gifts, the sequence is cut in such a way as to emphasize, through close-up, the commercial rather than ‘special’ nature of this relationship. The abstraction of hands from bodies and faces serves to foreground the anonymous and purely monetary value of this transactional relationship. Bob is trading himself in exchange for two million dollars; his face will be used to endorse and promote a product to which he remains somewhat indifferent (‘the good news is that the whiskey works’, he says). Moreover, it is an act with which he struggles, for he knows it has entailed a form of ‘artistic’ compromise: ‘I could be doing a play somewhere’, he tells Charlotte. Indeed, early on in the film, Coppola somewhat clumsily allies Bob with a Japanese prostitute to procure comic effect (I refer to the now-infamous ‘lip my stockings’ scene); however, this scene also serves to set up from the outset Bob’s own relationship of prostitution with Suntory. In accepting the offer of work from Suntory, Bob has acquiesced to the role of performing himself. This is made all the more apparent when he encounters his own former self, translated into Japanese, on his hotel television – a Saturday Night Live appearance in which a considerably younger-looking Bob tries to

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converse with a monkey is intercut with Bob staring at his own former likeness as captured onscreen. The implication of this juxtaposition, which follows on from a scene centring on Bob’s humiliating promotional photoshoot for Suntory, is that he feels like some kind of ‘performing monkey’ who has been employed to ‘ape’ and pantomime his highly crafted persona for the camera (and, as Camus reminds us, ‘this divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity’ (2005: 4–5)). The cut and counter-shot between Bob’s former and current selves is not executed purely for comic effect, for it compresses the history of a man’s life into a moment that serves to register the rather painful fact that Bob’s life has always been lived elsewhere – his body has visibly aged and moved on, but his role in life has not altered; as an entertainer, he exists by virtue of what Sartre terms ‘consciousness of the Other’ (2000: 364). This is an uneasy bargain, for it entails recognizing that ‘the Other is for me simultaneously the one who has stolen my being from me and the one who causes “there to be” a being which is my being. Thus I have a comprehension of this ontological structure: I am responsible for my being for others, but I am not the foundation of it’ (Sartre 2000: 364). The cut also serves to translate visually Bob’s own sense of alienation from himself or, more specifically, his public self that is fashioned out of a set of readily apprehensible character traits (his sardonic retorts and deadpan face, for instance) that render him instantly recognizable as a brand. As such, Bob is someone who seems profoundly aware of his status as an object created by and for other people: indeed, this is the definition by which he exists in the world. As a consummate performer, he also knows how to adopt and appropriate the gestures and expressions of other iconic actors because he understands that a repertoire of repeated movements is tantamount to – or is the summation of – playing a role; or as Camus delineates it, the actor is involved in ‘a mime of the ephemeral, the actor trains and perfects himself only in appearances’ (2005: 78). This is especially apparent in the briefly aforementioned photo-shoot scene in which Bob is asked to imitate members of ‘the Rat Pack’ and, more comically, Roger Moore’s incarnation of ‘007’. Bob’s appropriation of Sammy Davis Jr.’s and Roger Moore’s expressions is heightened for comic effect; his ‘performance’ implicitly foregrounds the nature of his commercial relationship with Suntory, especially its more demeaning aspects – for instance, it seems fitting that he is asked to imitate Roger Moore, the kitsch and tacky version of the suave ‘original’, Sean Connery. The scene is constructed in such a way that it is the very mechanics of constructing a persona (a

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cliché) that is emphasized – we do not see the glossy final product, but rather the intense and repetitive labour that is required to produce promotional material. In order to find the ‘perfect image’ (the French etymology of the term ‘cliché’ is, again, entirely appropriate here) that would shore up ‘Bob Harris’ as the face of Suntory whiskey, he must employ a series of well-rehearsed clichés and stereotypes – in effect, a form of visual shorthand. This is a process or ‘act’ that reduces him to type, a fact to which he remains painfully and acutely aware. As Geoff King notes of such sequences in the film: ‘the key moments in which Murray’s performance is crystallised are presented immediately and performatively to the viewer of Lost in Translation, offering the brief pleasure of the performance itself, but in each case this is closely framed by explicit and more extended acknowledgment of its status as a construct’ (2010: 39). As the camera’s shutter release speeds up, Bob becomes unable to maintain this performative façade and his mask begins to slip. What comes to the fore could be registered as resignation and fatigue, but is rather definitively apparent as a void or blankness (a state that Bill Murray, who plays Bob, specializes in as an actor). As such, what I am suggesting is that these moments of void do not reveal some underlying essence that would define who Bob really is outside of his performance, but rather that all identity is, by nature, performative. Indeed, Bob’s examination of his own reflection in the mirror – a moment that parallels Charlotte’s encounter with her own reflection – posits the face that meets him as a stranger. His reflection or counter-image in the mirror (for unlike Charlotte he is all too aware of what he represents for others) is one with which he is constantly trying to catch up or to outsmart – he blinks at his reflection in a child-like manner as if he does not recognize the face that he finds in the mirror. This disjunction between himself and his own image speaks to a more fundamental dislocation that indicates a void at the centre of personhood. In fact, the solidity and coherence of our public image (our counter-image) often belies the transitory and fleeting sense we have of ourselves internally. As Robert E. Park argues of such a phenomenon: ‘[It] is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously playing a role . . . it is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves’ (quoted in Goffman 1990: 30). Bob’s dilemma does not stem from the fact that he is being asked to play a role (for his role playing is simply a more pronounced version of public life), but rather from the demand that he adhere rigidly to one specific iteration of himself without recourse to other forms of improvisa-

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tion. If Kelly is someone who is too willing – in the sense of bad faith – to abide by the tenets of her public persona, Bob is someone who knows this to be ‘always and everywhere’ simply one more performance. If Bob’s iteration of the members of the Rat Pack and 007 reveals the comic absurdity of the self, his point of view also functions as a focalization of the absurd as disclosed through the human body. And as Camus reminds us, the human body is a discrete vessel for revealing the absurd as: ‘[M]en, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime make silly everything that surrounds them’ (2005: 13). Lost in Translation is a film that locates performance at the centre of a crisis of identity and, in particular, the moments in which the performative nature of identity is accentuated and thus reveal the notion of self-same, abiding and coherent self to be a ruse. The Park Hyatt hotel is populated with a cast of people who perform for a living – the ‘premium fantasy’ prostitute, the somewhat tawdry lounge singers and musicians, Kelly the actress, and even the businessmen who must ‘perform’ efficiently to ensure and maintain their success (which is as much an image as anything else). As such, this liminal moment, afforded through the trope of tourism, crystallizes and reconfigures identity as a universal crisis played out to an audience. The ‘meaningless pantomime’ that becomes apparent once human gestures are evacuated of their purpose is imaged through Bob’s eyes; for instance, a scene set in the hotel swimming pool during an aqua aerobics class explicitly places the viewer within Bob’s visual and auditory fields so that the sound and visual tracks oscillate between the surface and depth of the pool’s water. This discrepancy focuses our attention on the noisy and frenetic environment of the fitness class and the sharp contrast provided by the muted tones of underwater submersion and the clumsy, ungainly movements of the swimmers’ legs; the cut between Bob looking and his point of view of the swimmers explicitly locates this revelation of the absurd within Bob’s outlook on the world. Moreover, an earlier scene set in the hotel’s gymnasium, in which Bob injures himself on an erratic cross-trainer that issues garbled instructions in Japanese, also serves to imply the absurd through Bob’s body. This battle between the human and the machine distils through highly comic mode, the indifference of our environment to our own needs and the disjuncture between human life and its place in the world. In other words, the world remains frustratingly out of hand or reach – and even those machines designed by human beings to do a human’s bidding refuse to cooperate with us.

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Tell Me One Thing More Than This: Modernity and Drift In his study of modernity and drift (1998), Leo Charney argues that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were marked by an acute anxiety to capture the present moment – a dominant fear, he suggests, related to the attrition of presence and the drying up of experience that both Siegfried Kracauer (1987) and Walter Benjamin problematized (2008: 36) in their germinal works on the modern experience and the cult of distraction. Central to this desire to capture the present and passing moment, a preoccupation that has marked modernist movements in literature and art, is a philosophical conundrum, for as Charney makes clear, ‘cognition does not define the entire possibility of presence. If we cannot feel and perceive the moment in the same moment, that inability does not mean that no present presence can occur: it simply means that we only feel it. In a moment, the body receives sensation non-rationally – or, more exactly, pre-rationally. By the time cognition catches up to sensation, the moment is gone’ (1998: 31). To think the present, then, is to eschew the experiential in favour of cerebral abstraction. The birth of cinema, as the modern art form par excellence, provided a form of resolution in its ability to marry intellectual concept and affect: it fed back to the viewer the thrills and vicissitudes of the modern experience from a distance. In other words, the experience offered by cinema threw into relief the everyday experience of modernity: its very form signalled something intrinsic to lives lived out in distraction. Cinema not only responded to but also came to shape fundamentally perception of the world (see Casetti 2008). Charney notes that ‘the possibility that there could be such a thing as a moment – isolated and discrete – arose in response to a modern climate of perceptual overload’ (1998: 55). He argues further that ‘the redefinition of attention into peaks and valleys underlined the sense that modern life was increasingly dominated by moments and fragments rather than by continuity and homogeneity’ (1998: 77). Yet, as he concludes, the notion that the present moment is open to rational capture is illusory, for the only way in which one can experience the present as duration, rather than as an instant conceived after the fact of experience, is through drift – or, as Sartre has outlined it, ‘what we falsely call the present is the being to which the present is presence. It is impossible to grasp the Present in the form of an instant, for the instant would be the moment when the present is. But the present is not; it makes itself present in the form of flight’ (2000: 123). The desire to extrapolate and dissect the present instant into infinitesimal parts speaks to a form of temporal anxiety (which,

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notably characterizes modern experience as a need to consume sights, sounds, places and things at an increased rate). However, to extract the present is not only indicative of the need to try to understand it rationally – to turn it into something meaningful – but is also an attempt to slow down or halt duration. It is a knowing denial of the fact that we cannot stop time, because we are always drifting and thus we are always changing. Life is metamorphosis. Lost in Translation presents two characters who cannot pierce through the state of being to harness the experience of drift out there in the world – indeed, the reflective, glass boundaries of the hotel work to shield and hermetically seal off Bob and Charlotte from the outside world. The film’s very form, which is aesthetically marked by cinematographer Lance Accord’s use of a lightweight, handheld Aaton camera, serves to accentuate the character’s alienation and distance from the diegetic world. That is, the use of high-speed film stock, shallow planes of focus and long lenses works to separate Charlotte and Bob from the world in which they are situated and to isolate them from the people who surround them. Moreover, the use of 35 mm film stock (a deliberate choice on Coppola’s part) renders the filmic action as an already past event. As such, my contention is – as I laid out originally in the introduction to this book – that Coppola’s work is marked by a peculiarly modernist sense of nostalgia for the always already lost present. Moreover, her characters are presented as beings who are profoundly out of step with the modern world. Coppola has expressed her admiration for the films of Michelangelo Antonioni.9 Whilst Antonioni’s austerely existential (and male) filmmaking is perhaps only tangentially related to that of Coppola, his fascination with the effects of technology on human relations is carried forth into her oeuvre. Antonioni, in an extended interview, has remarked that: ‘I am not saying that technology is bad, something we can do without. I’m saying that present day people can’t adapt to it. These are merely terms of a conflict: “technology” and “old-fashioned characters” . . . in Red Desert, I also confronted this technology and these machines with human beings who are morally and psychologically retarded and thus utterly unable to cope with modern life. Modern life is very difficult for people who are unprepared’ (quoted in Cardullo 2008: 85). I suggest, taking my cue from Antonioni, that one of the ways in which Lost in Translation dramatizes the alteration of one’s relationship to the world and to other people is via an impasse created by technology. In short, here it is not the machines that malfunction, but the people. It is not that, for instance, the fax machine and the telephone precipitate a crisis in communication between Bob and his wife Lydia, but that

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these instruments of communication convey his existing domestic problems into his hotel room in Tokyo at inappropriate moments of the day. The fax machine, the telephone and even the automatic blinds in his hotel room are more operative and functional than Bob is. Technology takes on a life of its own in this film, a life with which human beings, such as Bob, struggle to keep up. Technology, which is predicated on function and purpose, throws into relief the nature of human existence that exceeds notions of utility and reductive meaning. Machinery, as it were, reveals the absurd precisely because it can function with ease, rapidity and smoothness in a world that remains indifferent to the human. Human beings struggle to keep up with the rapid alteration and adaptations of technology; one need only see this in the increasingly common scenarios played out in the quotidian work environment where human beings are rendered obsolete by machines. That these machines were designed by human beings in the first place scarcely seems to matter. I stated earlier on that Lost in Translation is not a film that concerns itself with Japanese culture – and for this the film has been roundly (and perhaps rightly) criticized. However, the film draws conceptually on its setting, I suggest, in its subtle but important invocation of ma as a negative or ‘between’ space. This between space could encompass the liminal moment and space that takes Bob and Charlotte out of their familiar environment and away from the strictures and roles they ordinarily occupy at home, but I think it is more germane to the nature of their relationship precisely as a brief encounter and, by extension, their experience of the city. In short, I argue that the film offers the viewer an experience of what it might be like to experience life through a certain negative capability. The film posits, as a form of uneasy resolution to the crisis of identity, notions of ambiguity and opacity. It explores the disquieting sense of freedom that may arise as a result of a reckoning with negative space; that is, it asks how one might continue to exist without recourse to explanation or certainty. Or as Camus outlines this dilemma, ‘it was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning’ (2005: 51). The ambiguous relationship between Bob and Charlotte is a source of revelation to both of them because it is defined in the negative; the film’s action hinges on what does not happen between them, what remains unarticulated and impossible, but it also unveils a gap that defines human existence in the world. As such, the crisis precipitated by their journey to Tokyo is itself revealed to be a response to a culture predicated on what is, what

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exists and, even more acutely, how we must define ourselves in relation to others and the world. Simply put, Lost in Translation reveals that crisis to be a false one because we need not define ourselves finally once and for all. If both Bob and Charlotte, to a certain extent, adopt the persona of that most modernist of identities, the flâneur/flâneuse (Elkin 2017), it is not, finally, to take in at an increased pace the sights, sounds and smells of the city (in fact, they are rather ineffectual tourists), but rather, I suggest, to harness drift. Indeed, in her poignant and excellent analysis of the figure of the flâneuse, Lauren Elkin (2017) suggests that it is only by adopting a meditative and slower pace that life unfolds itself to us. In order to pay witness, we need to become present to the moment. It is my suggestion, finally, that Lost in Translation is a film that reworks the existential notion of alienation from a feminist perspective. Crucially, Sartre’s delineation of this phenomenon famously hinges on nausea. In other words, the extrinsic world is so excessive and overwhelming in its brute existence, so indifferent to human meaning that it becomes repellent and infectious. Sartre writes that: ‘Objects ought not to touch, since they are not alive . . . but they touch me and it’s unbearable . . . it passed from the pebble into my hands . . . a sort of nausea in the hands’ (1975: 22). As such, the experience of alienation is externalized and objectified as a queasy form of bodily affect. I would argue, by contrast, that the experience of alienation in Lost in Translation is transmogrified into a kind of Cixousian wonder at the fundamental opacity of the world and the mystery of its materiality (see also Bennett 2001), as well as a realization that an ethics of ambiguity is always lived out within a community (de Beauvoir 1949). Ultimately, if Bob and Charlotte come to any form of reconciliation out of crisis, it is because they are brought to a place of fundamental respect for the difference they have encountered within one another – they facilitate this epiphany for one another within the encounter of difference. This realization is born out of a form of negative capability or the ability to pass through alienation to an ethical embrace of difference and the unfathomable. In accepting difference that is both internal and external to oneself, Hélène Cixous counsels that it is possible to experience this contact without fear of loss of self. Indeed, as Abigail Bray states, for Cixous, ‘it is only the insecure death-driven phallic subjectivity which perceives the touch of things in the world as nauseous alienation’ (2002: 61) Moreover, fragmentation of self, a certain loosening of one’s boundaries and the cultivation of openness is central to the ethical feminine experience (in contrast to phallic subjectivity of the self-same) of being in the world. For Cixous, there is a certain pleasure in

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being a stranger to oneself, in not acquiescing to the tyranny of the culture of selfhood. Loss of self does not necessarily entail death of oneself, or fear, or alienation or hostility; it can also facilitate or give way to an opening up to the world and to others. It allows the thing ‘to enter into its strangeness’ (Cixous 1991:66), which is, ultimately, a state of wonder at the world. This is an ethical task and is not easy to accomplish, for it demands a kind of leap of faith, a passing through alienation and being willing to risk loss in order to discover the life-affirming possibilities of fragmentation and schism. This process, by extension, reveals that the idea of the coherent and abiding self is a phallic myth – a patriarchal farce! This can only be achieved by immersing oneself within the fabric of the world, by becoming entangled and by welcoming drift. I suggest that this shift in perspective is apparent in the way in which the film’s visual dynamic shifts into a more mobile and fluid perspective of being-in-the-world. This is an embodied form of ethical thinking: a bringing into thought via the body. To return to Charney by way of conclusion, then, the experience of drift makes available an unmooring of ‘our fixation from the single empty present (that) sends us out into a fluid, mobile, bodily activity’ (Charney 1998: 18). Moreover, as Charney suggests, ‘drift wanders, but the wandering does not wander away from a stable linear order that grounds it: the wandering is the thing itself’ (1998: 20). In other words, drift facilitates an experience in which one may exist precisely as void – as a space through which experience flows; this is, perhaps, a form of radical passivity in which we allow the world in its alterity and strangeness to fill us instead of imposing ourselves and preordained meaning onto the world. It is significant, then, that the film’s most affective moments take place in modes of transport and within the hectic bustle of the street; transportation signifies more than its pedestrian sense here, for it also designates a moment in which we are brought out of our discrete and private selves and tumble out into the world. Moments such as the taxi ride back to the hotel, overlaid with the distorted and muted sound of ‘Sometimes’ by My Bloody Valentine, render experience as flow; Charlotte’s face appears as partially concealed via the reflection of the cityscape’s neon colours on the car window. The forces of movement, sound and colour dovetail to unground her as the subjective centre of this sequence – in fact, the camera takes on a floating and disembodied quality here. We know that this has been a significant experience for both of them, but perhaps in particular for Charlotte, as a deft use of sound bridge carries the song over into the following scene (in which Bob carries Charlotte back to her hotel room, where nothing happens between

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them). This experience is retained affectively, as it were, in the body. Fittingly, we leave Charlotte and Bob as they drift in separate directions – she heads back into the commotion of Tokyo’s streets and his point of view from his taxi ushers us out of Tokyo. Their divergence at this point, as dictated by the brief nature of the encounter that brought their paths together, is predicated further on absence. For it is in its rather famous final moments that the film’s truth is impressed upon the viewer. The words that come to pass between Bob and Charlotte in a tender but chaste moment remain inaudible to us. The very moment that, for us as viewers, comes to define their relationship is grounded in absence and void, and, as such, Lost in Translation reminds us that there is always a gap in life that cannot be filled or satisfied. Yet it is perhaps in opening oneself up to nothingness and to drift that life is also found.

Notes  1.

 2.

 3.

 4.  5.  6.

 7.

I am not alone in this conviction; blogger Truman Chen (2015) has argued that the film centres on existential themes of opacity and the absurd in his own analysis of the film. See https://stanfordfreedomproject.com/multi-media-essays-on-freedom/camus-in-tokyo-2. Scholars such as Todd McGowan have sought to defend the film from this reading: ‘after luring the spectator into an association of Japan with excessive enjoyment, Lost in Translation reveals that this mysterious enjoyment does not exist. In other words, the charge that the film is not interested in real Japanese culture is precisely the point’ (2007: 58). Scarlett Johansson’s wardrobe was supplied by niche, upmarket brands such as Araks (whose pink ‘Sonja’ panties feature in the opening title sequence) and French label APC, which perhaps marks her out further as someone who has the distinctly middle-class privilege of having the time and financial resources to question her role in life at a young age. In fact, the only piece of knowledge she imparts definitively is that the writer Evelyn Waugh was a man. For a recent and excellent analysis of women in public space, see Elkin (2017). Although Pier Paolo Pasolini’s conception of free indirect subjectivity in cinema is, in part, evocative of states of mental illness and neuroticism, the coalescence of focalization – that of both the character and of the filmmaker – is a notable aesthetic feature of Lost in Translation. In its rich visual description of boredom, inbetween moments, tiredness and lassitude, the camera takes on the viewpoint of a sleepwalker, although it never strictly identifies with or aligns this outlook with either character. See Pasolini 1976: 542–58. Sartre defines bad faith as the act of ‘hiding a displeasing truth or presenting as truth a pleasing untruth. Bad faith then has in appearance the structure of falsehood, only what changes everything is the fact that in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth . . . a person can live in bad faith, which does not mean that he does not have abrupt awakenings to cynicism or to good faith, but which implies a constant and particular style of life’ (2000: 49–50).

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 8. Chris Rojek argues that the lack of distinction between private and public selves often results in the attrition of mental health: ‘The public presentation of self is always a staged activity, in which the human actor presents a ‘front’ or ‘face’ to others . . . for the celebrity, the split between the I and the Me is often disturbing. So much so that celebrities frequently complain of identity confusion and the colonization of the veridical self by the public face’ (2001: 11).  9. See Greg.org, http://greg.org/archive/2003/08/31/interviewing_sofia_coppola_about_lost_in_ translation.html.

CHAPTER 4

Somewhere (2010)

If we were in possession of an instrument which would permit us to penetrate deep into the innermost recesses of the human psyche, we would find not identity, but a void. Kaja Silverman (1992: 4) [A] world where people are born in the clinic and die in the hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions . . . where a dense network of means of transport, which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures with an abstract, unmediated commerce; a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary, the ephemeral. Marc Augé (1995: 78) Somewhere, initially, seems to be Coppola’s first foray into exploring and delineating male subjectivity, since it centres on the masculine body in crisis; however, when one considers this film alongside both The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, Somewhere emerges as a film that effects a complex parsing out of the notion of identity and, more specifically, an intricate transformation of dominant fictions or narratives that hinge on male identity. R. Barton Palmer argues that: ‘Coppola’s “subject” thus far is at least as masculinist as it is feminist, her films offering sympathetic portraits of men puzzled, frightened, or frustrated by the elusive nature of the feminine’ (quoted in Perkins and Verevis 2012: 53). However, it is my opinion, especially in relation to Somewhere, that Coppola’s sensitive portrayal of the hackneyed trope of ‘masculinity in crisis’ is nearly always put in service more broadly to throw abiding notions of identity into crisis and to effect a change in the fabric of dominant patriarchal fictions precisely as a feminist act. Kaja

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Silverman has argued, after all, that the location of crisis within the masculine body is deeply imbricated with the feminist project because: ‘to effect a largescale reconfiguration of male identification and desire would, at the very least, permit female subjectivity to be lived differently than it is at present. In my opinion, it would also render null and void virtually everything else that commands general belief. The theoretical articulation of some non-phallic masculinities would consequently seem to be an urgent feminist project’ (1992: 3). I will argue in what follows that Somewhere is a film in which identity – and its extension in space – is held in abeyance and thus is reconfigured as nonidentity made manifest through nonplace. This is nothing short of a radical gesture, given that the film’s narrative in fact centres on the specificity of face and place (celebrity/stardom and Hollywood). As such, what Coppola reveals is the void at the heart of subjectivity within and through the very industry that fabricates, markets and sells abiding and dominant notions of identity, such as ‘masculinity’, in the first place. Space and time are vital tenets of the film because of the counterpoint this sets up between chronological/productive time and dead time or time as duration, and space as that which either renders us anonymous or opens up possibilities. As I have argued elsewhere: ‘Somewhere is a cinema of the body, which is to say that it explores the manifold ways in which time makes itself manifest through the body. That the weight of duration is brought to bear on a notably beautiful body . . . is significant. In an industry that tends to prize eternal youth, the process of ageing is akin to a slow slide into death’ (Backman Rogers 2015: 119). As is the case in Lost in Translation, at the centre of Somewhere is a confrontation between the individual and the void both within and without the body. Moreover, that body is placed on a timeline that posits and shores up the existential backdrop against which any human life is lived – namely, that not all things are possible and that death and ageing, regardless of how physically remarkable may be the body on which this process is wrought (in this case a hard, white male body), is a devastating force of equalization. We all come from and return to dust. What the film offers, then, is a sedulous critique of hegemonic and systemic values that suffocate any ability to live otherwise. As Todd Kennedy notes astutely: ‘Coppola creates a film that subtly invokes – and comments upon – American identity, the postmodern culture of Los Angeles/Hollywood, and the central questions of modernity . . . the ability (or inability) of individuals to make a place for themselves in the modern world, a place where they can feel at home’ (2015: 52–53). How images create, delimit and contain processes of subjectivity is the

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implicit concern, as I have argued thus far, of all of Coppola’s films, but Somewhere takes this relation as its central theme, for the film explores specifically the detrimental effects of trying to live up to one’s own cliché. From the perspective of postmodernism – since everything is reduced precisely to its surface appeal and affect – the film works to reveal the fundamentally perfidious nature of identity as created and positioned within a late capitalist context (namely, the film industry).1 If it is the ‘self’ – as a highly particular image of celebrity – that is sold here, the film also suggests that complying too tightly with one’s own manufactured image results in stasis and suffocation of life. Moreover, by rendering its main protagonist – who is sold as a ‘someone’, a consistent, abiding and recognizable entity – as ‘nobody, not even a person’ (as Johnny Marco comes to define himself), the film not only stages a critique of a spurious world in which true connection is always prevented (taking place as it does in a series of contemporary nonplaces and through a series of nonsequiturs), but also makes apparent the lie at the heart of ideologies of selfhood, whether this is made manifest in the form of celebrity culture or vacuous self-help philosophies, that one must be exhaustively somebody. Feminist scholars who have written on male subjectivity, such as Tania Modleski (1991), Kaja Silverman (1992), Susan Jeffords (1994) and Donna Perbedy (2011), Hannah Hamad (2013) and Stella Bruzzi (2013), have argued convincingly that masculinity admits cycles of crisis and fracture in order to re-establish its central convictions all the more strongly. Thus, masculinity is always reincorporated into the dominant grand narrative, precisely as a myth, in order, more often than not, to concretize and affirm identity at the both national (as grand narrative) and local levels. Somewhere, I will argue, is a direct challenge to franchises such as Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, which espouse a version of hard masculinity that Sharon Willis (1997) and Yvonne Tasker (1998) have unpacked through politically driven analysis, in which masculinity and male authority is reinstated all the more effectively and powerfully by the film’s conclusion. Masculinity therefore only brooks crisis in this respect as a liminal moment, a caesura that works to shore up the very philosophy or set of ideals that is thrown into question by the body of its narrative. Johnny Marco, the film’s central character, seems to specialize in or be renowned for – like Bob Harris – a certain kind of action cinema that plays precisely into the mythical ideals perpetuated and effected through an image of hard, white masculinity. Both of these films (but to the greatest extent Somewhere) tear asunder this image by not only revealing it as a cliché (that is, in exposing the very mechanics of this performance), but also by replacing plenitude

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and strength with vulnerability and void. Most importantly, however, Somewhere refuses to assuage the viewer with a resolution of/to the crisis.2 This is a profound gesture on Coppola’s part because, having painstakingly pulled apart central components of identity and myth-making (cinema, advertising, stardom and celebrity culture), she refuses to recuperate this highly specific image as anything other than a void. Without a doubt, the film functions as an indictment of the specious, shallow and reductive nature of the Hollywood industry as machinery (a technology of selfhood), but it also functions as an investigation into the nature of selfhood as it exists within time. The image Somewhere leaves us with is that without genuine community and interaction – that is, if we live in an ethical vacuum – we cease to exist altogether for subjectivity is, indeed, founded upon a void and only comes into being interrelationally.3

Hollywood as a Dominant Fiction In Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992), her study of masculinity and subject formation, Kaja Silverman sets out how our governing ideological reality comes to be disseminated through the mode of ‘dominant fiction’. She argues that ‘it is through ideological belief that a society’s “reality” is constituted and sustained, and that a subject lays claim to a normative identity’ (1992: 15). The normative identity with which we tend to comply unquestioningly is, overwhelmingly, predicated on binary opposition pertaining to gendered stereotypes. Hollywood, precisely as an industry that manufactures and sustains the dominant fictions that come to stand in for reality, promulgates the notion that masculinity is, above all, phallic, potent, hard and active. Moreover, as Susan Jeffords has noted, this hegemonic ego ideal (as image) is powerfully intertwined with national narratives of identity and race so that: ‘[a] nation exists, in other words, as something to be seen. In such a case, examining one of the chief distributors of images in this country – Hollywood films – offers clues about the construction of American national identity’ (1994: 6). The dominant fiction, in other words, plays out at both the national and local levels. We become bound to these images, argues Silverman, through unconscious processes that rely upon psychic mechanisms such as identification, projection and fantasy.4 However, unlike feminist screen theorists of the 1970s, Silverman posits the female spectator, and, by extension, her onscreen surrogate, as a vital presence that helps to confer phallic potency

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upon the male figure (to read, in essence, the penis and Phallus as coterminous with one another): ‘Hollywood cinema conventionally calls upon the female subject to disavow the male subject’s castration, and – by looking at him with her “imagination” rather than her eyes – to confer upon him phallic sufficiency’ (1992: 8). Here, in contradistinction to woman as symbolically representative of void, it is the male body that is marked out as the site of lack and inadequacy; moreover, the female gaze – as made manifest through psychic projection – is crucial to the rectification and reification of masculinity as an image (nonetheless constructed) of plenitude and power. On a national level, the image of omnipotent masculinity is circulated further through the figure of the husband and father (the ultimate manifestation of patriarchal law). As Silverman suggests, ‘our “dominant fiction” or ideological “reality” solicits our faith above all else in the unity of the family, and the adequacy of the male subject’ (1992: 16). Indeed, the nuclear family is a perennial tenet of dominant narratives of ‘happiness’ and the ‘good life’ (Ahmed 2010) to the extent that any alternative existence is either condemned or co-opted (see Ahmed 2004, 2006, 2010) in order to uphold its cultural dominance. It is in attending to the gap – the margin – between dominant fiction as a pervasive and potent set of images and embodied, durational existence as lived reality and the failure to coalesce or ‘stick’ to that fiction that critique is able to come into being. As Silverman sets forth: ‘the dominant fiction doesn’t exist in the abstract. Although I have defined it as a reservoir of sounds, images, and narratives, it has no concrete existence apart from discursive practice and its psychic residue. If representation and signification constitute the site at which the dominant fiction comes into existence, then they would also seem to provide the necessary vehicle for ideological contestation – the medium through which to reconstruct both our “reality” and “ourselves”’ (1992: 48). Somewhere is a film that situates its critique of this dominant fiction about masculinity from within the very industry that manufactures and maintains its hegemony through tropes of projection, disavowal and fetishism. Its dismantlement of that fiction functions through failure: failure to act, failure to identify, failure to cohere and adhere, failure to be ‘somebody’ and failure to go ‘somewhere’. Its very form, constructed out of repetition, stasis, extreme duration, misdirection and misunderstanding, works to undermine the highly specific and cohesive masculine identity that the central male character cannot even identify as part of himself (precisely because it is a myth). As such, Somewhere stages a performance of crisis in extremity and masculinity as performance.

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From the film’s outset, identity is imbricated with performance; moreover, the formal use of repetition (via the calculated use of graphic matches, matches on action, doubling and replication) serves to remind the viewer that performativity, especially in relation to gender norms, functions through exacting, painful and often oppressive forms or repetition.5 In placing emphasis on the trope of repetition, Somewhere examines how the mechanics of identity work on us in the first place. Somewhere opens with a static shot of a Ferrari circuiting a racetrack;6 this shot is held for some two minutes before the driver is revealed to the viewer (a dishevelled Stephen Dorff as Johnny Marco). The car’s engine powerfully pitches and purrs, its sound rising and falling in tempo as the car continues its seemingly endless loop. Time is experienced as duration in potential extremis here and human activity is represented as a repetitive set of gestures that reinforce sameness within duration. This is to say that within the opening moments of the film, we are not only presented with the idea that this character is somehow ‘stuck’ within his environment (indeed, we have a literal representation of this), but that he is, in actual fact, fixed within a recognizable cliché, since the Ferrari stands in as his identity (we know this must be a man in crisis with a point to prove to the world – he’s driving a fast car!)7 Indeed, the fast car, as commonly conceived, stands in for a paucity or lack of prototypical masculinity, since this is predicated on the idea that the man who occupies such a vehicle must feel compelled to make up for something, very possibly his lack of sexual prowess or physical endowment. This image is therefore presented precisely as a cliché – an image that we automatically know how to read and assimilate – but its repetition ensures that the generative force of this cliché comes unstuck. As such, what the film suggests is that Johnny Marco is a cliché that is running on empty and fittingly, we find out that he is a film star associated with action genre franchises that are invested in the exact replication and recycling of stereotypes (especially that of the sclerotic masculinity of myth). Performance, in particular cinematic performance, is often intimately and obliquely linked with commerce and prostitution, especially within the context of gender.8 Indeed, Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (2011, originally published in 1949) allies the figure of the female film star and more specifically the sex goddess (as incarnated through a number of ‘bombshell blondes’ from Jayne Mansfield to Brigitte Bardot to Marilyn Monroe throughout cinematic history) with the prostitute.9 As Mandy Merck, taking her cue from de Beauvoir, argues: ‘the woman star relies upon male protectors and pursues male consumers . . . she may never cross the ambiguous line dividing the display of beauty from its

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direct sale . . . but her function is no different . . . the paradox of such a profession is that its practitioners come to be active, independent subjects only through the strictures of self-objectification’ (1993: 62). De Beauvoir sets forth that the female actress is divested of creativity, power and control, all of which lies only on the side of the (implicitly male) director and producer, to the effect that, she argues, ‘the prostitute who simply yields her body is perhaps less a slave than the woman who makes a career of pleasing the public’ (de Beauvoir 2011: 583).10 This is a problematic claim, but what de Beauvoir foregrounds is the lack of agency an actor or actress has over his or her own subjectivity once that identity is solidified, commercialized and rendered as a commodity. In fact, Merck, following de Beauvoir, asserts that the subjectivity of the film star comes into being precisely for someone else (a presupposed audience). Alienation, as such, exists both in front of the camera (as Walter Benjamin famously outlined already in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2008, originally written in 1936)) as the human figure is reduced to a two-dimensional image that can be infinitely reproduced (effectively as a cliché, as the French etymology of the term suggests) and within the commercial environment that profits from this production of images of stardom. On two separate occasions, Johnny (presumably) pays two female erotic dancers to perform for him in his hotel room. Both of these scenes serve to foreground the perfunctory and commercial nature of these erotic spectacles and, as such, provide a comment on the commodification of (female) sexuality itself. In fact, the women who perform as Cindy and Bambi (identical twins Kristina and Karissa Shannon) work as Playboy ‘bunnies’, and thus their very presence onscreen already reads as a clichéd image. Visually, both women are seemingly modelled on the prototype of healthy, blonde ‘American Beauty’: they are lithe, athletic and spray-tanned; their bodies are hairless, smooth and brown; their hair is bleached to an unnatural shade of blonde and cut into long layers; their teeth are whitened; their attire is chosen to veil selectively their bodies in order to emphasize their near-nakedness. The routine they perform is captured in a static framing that works to de-eroticize their dance as sexual display; a more typical editorial treatment would cut into the dance so as to fetishize and distort the female body precisely as spectacle, but here the static framing naturally fragments the body as it moves in and out of the film frame. They frequently appear as disarticulated figures, without heads or feet; undoubtedly, this is played to comic effect,

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but it also renders the scene implicitly violent, since the static framing represents a supposedly objective viewpoint that works to dissect the body through a dispassionate gaze (which here stands in for that of Johnny’s narcoleptic and indifferent stupor – he extends no care to the ‘products’ he consumes). The corporeal, fleshy nature of their performance resonates as a series of awkward sounds between their limbs and the poles that they work their way up and down. Whilst the symmetry of their appearance (they are identical twins and, in fact, Johnny mistakes Bambi for Cindy) lends the scene an almost grotesquely comic air that serves to undercut such a tired priapic fantasy, their dance is not fully synchronized and comes off as amateur-like and stilted. Moreover, the song to which they perform is the loud and bombastic ‘My Hero’ by the Foo Fighters, the chorus of which proclaims ‘there goes my hero, watch him as he goes, he’s ordinary . . . don’t the best of them bleed it out while the rest of them peter out’ and to which Johnny fittingly falls asleep.11 Taken together, these elements of the scene formally work to foreground the labour behind the production of fantasy and spectacle. As such, a gap is effected between performance and image in order that the latter be reinscribed precisely as construction and notably the tired artifice of this spectacle bores Johnny to the point of losing consciousness. For he is all too familiar with the mechanics of affected public performance; indeed, it is possible that he does not call upon Cindy and Bambi to embody an erotic fantasy for him, but rather because they reveal his own existential predicament to him. The performative nature of these moments and the banal, pedestrian manner in which they are rendered suggests something about the world in which Johnny lives; he too is paid to perform and, at that, to perform a prototypical role that promulgates and shores up ‘strong’ and ‘hard’ masculinity. Outside of this role – which is the mode in which we always observe him – he exists in a provisional and temporary manner, unable to state anything unequivocally about himself. At his press campaign, he spectacularly fails to answer the question ‘who is Johnny Marco?’; in fact, it is his sycophantic assistant who feeds him generic descriptors with regard to how to speak about ‘Johnny Marco’ and assuages his ambivalence about his performance as ‘Johnny Marco’ with a series of platitudes (‘that was awesome!’) There is therefore, I would argue, an implicit link between Cindy and Bambi’s gregarious display that promotes the commodification of sexuality and the insufferable enactment Johnny must go through on a quotidian basis: they are all acting out roles within and for a public space. They come into being

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through performance, but the nature of the performative self is that it ceases to exist within a void or in isolation. Again, Somewhere works to insert a discrepancy or holding space between the actor and the performance in order to characterize the nature of celebrity as fickle, insubstantial and specious. Any sense of self that is constructed on a foundation of public celebrity is too constricted and constricting for anyone to thrive within in its confines, let alone lead a meaningful life.12 A scene that depicts Johnny’s promotional activities in support of his most recent film (Berlin Agenda) foregrounds the ludicrous and highly superficial nature of his celebrity standing within the film world. There has clearly been some former sexual liaison between Johnny and his co-star Rebecca (Michelle Monaghan), but he has proved to be woefully disappointing and predictable by fulfilling that most perennial of all romantic clichés – sleeping with her, but not bothering to call her back. In fact, since Johnny himself is nothing but a host of clichés conjoined together and collectively labelled as a personality, he is perhaps fulfilling or playing his role to the hilt. Rebecca puts forward a well-groomed and attractive presence in contradistinction to Johnny’s dishevelled and rumpled appearance (having broken his arm by drunkenly falling down a staircase at the Chateau Marmont Hotel and thus being unable to wash or dress himself properly). As if to add to his humiliation, Johnny is not of an equal height to Rebecca, who, wearing heels, towers over him in the publicity photographs for the film; in order to rectify this situation, Johnny is forced to stand on a step to adjust the disparity in their heights. Rebecca’s disparaging comments about his lack of sexual prowess are matched visibly by his lack of height and his injured arm. While Johnny tolerates the mortification of Rebecca’s sardonic comments, whispered discreetly into his ear, the pair has to maintain all the while a professional and friendly façade for the photographer, who instructs them to look at one another and smile sweetly. The discrepancy between this farcical errand and the polished publicity campaign that will presumably result from it again serves to remind the viewer of the performative labour that is put into constructing and maintaining the products that Hollywood upholds – products that sell highly specific and unattainable lifestyles and norms of beauty. As if to consolidate his bond, however superficial, with Cindy and Bambi (perhaps, as mentioned earlier, because he recognizes the performative nature of his own public identity in theirs), Johnny tries to mollify his shame over his experience during the publicity campaign by heading directly to their house, presumably to engage in sex with one if not both of them (another clichéd and specifically male fantasy).

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Masculinity as Crisis In her study of the action genre, which she calls ‘Men’s Cinema’, Stella Bruzzi notes that the very form of this kind of film works to attenuate rupture and discontinuity in order to command and convey a highly specific image of masculinity as an omnipotent and dominant force to which we either aspire or submit: [S]uperficial smoothness is used to make and elide ambiguities . . . there is a clear sense . . . that the men are in control and that internalised ambiguities and uncertainties are being suppressed or brushed aside quite literally by the momentum of their walk. In turn, the spectator’s ability to remain impervious to the effects of this momentum is limited. Coupled with the symbolic alliance to sexuality (these kind of) sequences coerce their respective audiences into falling in love with masculinity as well as with power. (2013: 143) One of the central features of men’s cinema is movement, since the narrative centres on tracking the movement of a (male) body through space. It is therefore the trajectory of the male character that binds together the diegetic space of the narrative and, moreover, even determines the temporality of the filmic experience. Since time, in the action-image genre, as Gilles Deleuze (2005b) has delineated is subordinate to movement, we encounter time as a precise, chronological measurement of movement that compliments the Euclidean clarity of the space within which the male protagonist fulfils or acts out his destiny (more often than not to resolve a crisis and domesticate and bring the female body under control). In other words, coherence of time and space affords little opportunity to unpack or attend to the representation of masculinity being proffered, since unity of time and space also ensures unity of thought. This is not to say that one may not read against the grain, but that it is active and hard labour to do so in this case. Men’s cinema cannot admit cracks, fissures and discontinuities that open up its dominant or abiding narrative to questioning. Critique is rarely held within its scope. The ease with which movement seems to take place, which allows us to believe in the male figure who always knows how to (re)act, functions as a force of coherence for this highly specific representation and, in particular, its seeming given-ness or naturalness. As such, this is nothing less than a superstructure that upholds a mythic version of masculinity as dominant phallic power. As Tania Modleski has argued persuasively, Hollywood and its coterminous norms and

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ideals (based in the imaginary) promulgate the allegiance between phallic power (as the centre that holds and to which everything refers or gains subsequent meaning) and the anatomical penis.13 This alliance, though, is in fact highly arbitrary and contingent. She writes that: Lacanian feminists have found it valuable to insist on the discrepancy between phallus and penis and, in their critical practice, to expose or ‘unveil’ the lack at the heart of patriarchal representations, thereby attempting to undermine the stability of the power structure appearing to sustain them . . . Hollywood cinema, easily the largest and most influential such system of representation, has been massively and continually devoted to perpetuating myths of phallic potency. (Modleski 1991: 91) Whilst I am loath to argue that Somewhere is a film that stages a Lacanian feminist intervention in film history, I believe the centrality of discontinuity and void to its very form as a film is vital to understanding what it does extend: a sensitive critique of dominant Hollywood narratives that centre on masculinity. In its refusal to smooth and elide gaps and ruptures – indeed, in its fascination with the liminal and the inbetween – Somewhere opens up a space in which we can parse out this construction of mythic masculinity and its accompanying aesthetic. This is a bold manoeuvre, for, as Silverman suggests: [A] given symbolic order will remain in place only so long as it has subjects, but it cannot by itself produce them. It relies for that purpose upon the dominant fiction, which works to bring the subject into conformity with the symbolic order by fostering normative desires and identifications. When the dominant fiction fails to effect this interpellation, it is not only ‘reality’ but the symbolic order itself which is placed at risk. (1992: 50) At the heart of Somewhere is a character who cannot identify with his own image precisely as a dominant fiction – a situation that results not only in a fracturing of psychic identity, but also the attrition of mental health and the wherewithal to continue carrying on (we infer that Johnny is taking medication for the sake of his mental health, and the activities in which he indulges could also be viewed as a form of anaesthetic or self-medication). Somewhere sedulously examines the coping mechanisms that are invoked to deal with situations that alienate one pro-

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foundly from one’s own sovereignty and a connection to others and the world. In such an environment, life is replaced with indifference and detachment from feeling – there can be no affective mode of being in the world. As such, I suggest that Somewhere recuperates masculinity precisely as a mode of psychic crisis. Donna Perbedy has outlined in her study of the performance of masculinity in crisis that the figure or trope of the ‘angst-ridden’ male is already in and of itself a challenge to the dominant fiction, but it is when crisis is not assuaged or alleviated that a more challenging critique emerges: images of angst-ridden men immediately challenge the idea of a ‘true’ masculinity (Butler) or ‘dominant masculine’ (Buchbinder), no more so than when their narratives fail to be resolved or, if resolved, fail to re-establish gender binaries that reinforce male power and domination. Furthermore, the ‘unmasked’ men . . . exhibit the damaging effect of a ‘true’ masculinity and imply that it is only in attaining a particular standard of maleness that they can be considered successful ‘men’. Their failure to achieve such a standard can be seen as the crux of their downfall. (Perbedy 2011: 173) Moreover, Perbedy asserts that crisis is usually only invoked thematically in order to recuperate and reassert the central tenet of dominant masculinity; therefore, it is rarely utilized inchoately and does not brook ambiguity. Moreover, she suggests that the crisis of masculinity ‘operates according to cycles of crisis and resolution; ultimately, the aim is to restore men and masculinity to their dominant societal position: to reassert patriarchy. If “crisis” occurs when the gendered binaries between masculinity and femininity break down, the threat posed by femininity must be suppressed and the gendered binaries re-established in order for male dominance to be restored (or, at least, the illusion of dominance)’ (2011: 28). I have argued elsewhere (Backman Rogers 2015) that the indeterminate extension of a liminal period, in which there is an alleviation of the norms and ideals in relation to individual and group identities, is a radical gesture precisely because in refusing to attenuate or foreclose a period of crisis, dominant or hegemonic value systems are no longer perceived to be the foundation on which everything else is constructed. It is within that liminal holding space that we can remake and reconfigure dominant narratives. Crisis is made manifest on the level of content, but its infiltration of form is more rare; it is this latter sense of crisis, one that infects the very mode or fabric of life, that is more far-reaching and incontrovertible. In

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relation to masculinity in crisis, Bruzzi argues that ‘normative masculinity is, even in the most ostensibly straightforward Hollywood films, an unrealisable ideal, and it follows that the anxieties and contradictions that surface as a result of this conclusion having been reached will frequently be resolved at a non-narrative level’ (2013: 38). In other words, masculinity, within such a scenario, is played out or inhabited as crisis. Somewhere stages a mise-en-scène of crisis in which masculinity is perpetually conveyed as a crisis mode of being-in-the-world. World and body are deeply imbricated as crisis. This mise-en-scène of masculinity as crisis is effected on a formal level in a manner akin to Deleuze’s delineation of the breakdown of the action-image cinema, the symptoms of which are made manifest as ‘the form of the trip/ballad, the multiplication of clichés, the events that hardly concern those they happen to, in short, the slackening of sensory-motor connections’ (2005b: 3). Additionally, the protagonist in this world is struck by the notion that he or she is living in a bad film that is strung together by an interminable series of clichés and vacuous people with shallow opinions who can only communicate through prefabricated platitudes. In an industry such as Hollywood, this effect is compounded: everything is ready-made and pre-formed in a manner that already delimits how a person may exist and grow (one must adhere to one’s own clichéd image or ‘bad film’). Within this diegetic environment, the protagonist feels struck by something ‘intolerable’ within the context of banal, quotidian life and feels himself or herself to be no longer concerned with ‘love and life’ (Deleuze 2005b: 165). The protagonist is prone to function as a ‘seer’ rather than an ‘agent’ (Deleuze 2005b: 3) who contemplates what is before him or her, but cannot react decisively to it. Here, it is time that comes to the fore, since it is no longer subordinate to the coordinates of an agent who always knows how to act (to choreograph the space around him). From the outset, movement in Somewhere is presented as a circular, repetitious process that leads to nowhere – Johnny’s Ferrari is a sleek machine that facilitates and exacerbates his own lack of direction. Johnny is someone who – despite his onscreen persona – is passive to an extreme extent. His stardom is the result of a happy accident to which he cannot really lay claim as an achievement; he admits to an obsequious male fan that he has had no professional training of any sort and thus, in effect, his career is merely something that has happened to him (he is fortunate enough to possess a beautiful face). Johnny passes his time by driving around the nondescript and anonymous suburbs of Los Angeles; his journeys are conveyed through a discontinuous editing style that foregrounds jump-cuts, vio-

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lations of screen direction, the suturing of noncontiguous spaces and temporalities (for example, the inexplicable transition from day to night in one sequence), and repetitious matches on action that convey a lack of transition or change. As if to emphasize the essential purposelessness of his perambulation, one scene features Johnny pursuing a woman he sees at a set of traffic lights, only to lose sight of her as he follows the seemingly maze-like system of roads that make up the borough he is exploring (lest we forget, this beautiful man is also something of a sexual pest). In other words, his travel proves to be fruitless, aimless and without purpose (other than to fill up time). Moreover, the interior shots taken from inside his car, which taken together characterize these scenes, suggest his essential passivity: it is the car that transports him and, more specifically, cocoons him from the outside world. In other words, there is no transportation effected. Visually, he seems to remain immobile whilst the outside world rushes past him and he misses it. Johnny is someone who misses connections, people and life continuously. Scenes set in the Chateau Marmont Hotel correspond to the lack of movement and passivity evidenced in the sequences set in the car. A series of graphic matches serves to reveal Johnny’s life as a series of tedious routines that allow him to tune out from the world. The prevalent use of dead time is central to our understanding of him as a man who is constantly waiting for something to happen to him. Inbetween moments in which he must promote his celebrity-self as a commodity, we see the void of his private life; namely, that he is entirely absent and disengaged from himself and the world. He leads his life as a mode of nonexistence in which sitting on the sofa, smoking cigarettes and staring into space constitute the major activities of the day – essentially an extreme form of nonactivity. There is no differentiation in his routine – tellingly, he does not seem to know what day of the week it is most of the time – so he cannot distinguish one moment from the next. He lives out his days in always provisional and present mode, passing from moment to moment. This profound detachment from the world in which he lives results in a form of myopia that aesthetically typifies the infrequent but notable use of point of view or focalization from Johnny’s perspective. Like Bob Harris, Johnny is assaulted by a cornucopia of images that seem to sell a highly specific version of ‘self’ via specious product placement; the generic Hollywood star system, which claims to isolate the unique and the special, is recuperated here as a machinery that works to depersonalize and commodify individuality. Indeed, individuality can only be favoured insofar as it is marketable. Airbrushed, digitally altered images emblazon billboards and cut-out cardboard figurines that

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litter the Los Angeles skyline. These dematerialized and flattened images constitute an extrapolation and reduced version of reality, yet are the dominant narrative to which we are told we must aspire.14 Complexity is thus replaced with an artificially constructed and false alternate reality that comes to stand in for – if not erase – what does not fit into this virtual, postmodern reality.15 In other words, one aspires to be a cliché (an image of a person in contradistinction to a person) in a world in which depth is reduced to surface. And as I have argued elsewhere, this revelation of the cliché as an image of crisis reveals an even more pernicious aspect: ‘that when you are not seen (when you are not rendered as “surface”), you cease to exist altogether’ (Backman Rogers 2015: 122). When Johnny tells Cleo’s mother over the telephone that he is ‘nobody – not even a person’, his devastation evinces not only his inability to live up to his own cliché, but also the detrimental effects that this flattening out and siphoning off of one’s affective capacities creates. A life lived on the surface results in a kind of internal death and a flattening out of all experience (Johnny alternates between checking his phone and watching Cleo perform her ice-skating routine; virtual life holds as much sway over him as his vivacious daughter’s embodied reality).

Hollywood and Celebrity as Nonplace and Nonidentity Somewhere is set in the definitive and iconic location of Los Angeles and, more specifically, the Chateau Marmont Hotel; these are locations that are part of collective cultural consciousness, in that we can invoke or conjure images of this landscape – especially from films and advertising – as a visual correlate for predetermined ideas about the specificity of this place. In effect, the cultural signifiers exceed the signified (Los Angeles). Yet one of the most striking features of Somewhere is the manner in which the diegetic space is rendered as anonymous, sterile and transactional, which is to say that Los Angeles is divested of its signification and is presented as a highly fragmented series of spaces that do not connect or cohere – indeed, in which it is hard to find one’s coordinates. Place (this place) is transfigured as space (any space). Moreover, the Chateau Marmont, a hotel that has housed many a Hollywood legend under its roof and is therefore historically tied to the myth of Hollywood and is an integral part of its landscape, is not presented as an aesthetically pleasing and luxurious hotel, but rather as an empty holding place that one might ‘check in’ to in a state of crisis. Coterminous with this

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divestment of iconicity is the manner in which the face – the signifier of extraordinary celebrity and uniqueness – is treated as a tabula rasa. As such, by way of conclusion, I will suggest that Somewhere portrays both Hollywood and celebrity as a void of nonplace and nonidentity, and, by extension, sets forth a critique of the manifold ways in which contemporary Hollywood as a (late capitalist) industry reduces all forms of life to the level of surface image and value. In his study of supermodernity, Marc Augé (1995) outlines a theory of nonplace, which he believes characterizes the contemporary, late capitalist experience. For Augé, historical and definitive (this) space is intimately tied to identity, whereas nonplace effects a decentring of self;16 in nonplaces, the individual becomes an anonymous passenger who travels through space, but is never ‘at home’ there.17 He argues that the world of supermodernity is: a world where people are born in the clinic and die in the hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions . . . where a dense network of means of transport, which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures with an abstract, unmediated commerce; a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary, the ephemeral. (Augé 1995: 78) The world that Augé describes is one of disconnect in which anonymity is the defining feature of space and its population; to be sure, Augé’s study is not a critique of post or supermodernity, but rather an attempt to describe and think through our encounters with the proliferation of nonplaces and why this may precipitate a nostalgic sense of longing for a mythical past.18 I suggest, as I stated in the opening chapter of this study, that in contradistinction to scholars who have described Coppola’s work as postmodern, careful reading of her images reveals that her critique is often situated on the side of modernism. I therefore suggest in what follows that Somewhere offers precisely such a critique of the postmodern environment that is ripe with nostalgia (even the lenses she uses to create the film’s specific aesthetic hark back to the golden age of 1970s and early 1980s American independent cinema).19 What Augé delineates as nonplace could be described as a series of disparate spaces that are not connected organically, but rather that can only be traversed through various modes of transport (car, plane, train); crucially, these are also

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spaces of commerce that are designed purely for functionality and in which the interaction is recuperated as transaction – one is defined by one’s market value and productivity. Moreover, if specificity of place fosters connection and community, nonplace tends to produce isolation, solipsism and void. Since, for Augé, space and identity are imbricate with and implicated within each other, the former determines the latter. Thus, nonplace affords non-identity; as Augé suggests, ‘a person entering a non-place is relieved of his usual determinants: he becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver . . . he surrenders himself to . . . the passive joys of identity loss, and the mere active pleasure of role playing’ (1995: 103). Identity is reduced to a series of tropes which one can be made to abandon at various transit points – as Augé reminds us, ‘it is in the manner of immense parentheses that non-places daily receive increasing numbers of individuals’ (1995: 111). As such, identity is transactional – it is something that is bestowed upon you by appropriate officials and, conversely, can be taken away. In fact, in Somewhere, it is consistently the staff at hotels and airports that recognize and acknowledge Johnny by naming him (he is reduced to his most superficial attribute: his stardom). The nonplace is precisely such a liminal zone in which one is emptied of identifying characteristics and reconfigured into the role of neophyte or passenger (that is, a ritual subject). Indeed, as Augé states, ‘the passenger through non-places retrieves his identity only at customs, at the tollbooth, at the checkout counter . . . the space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude’ (1995: 103). This is identity instilled on a superficial level and does not facilitate connection or community. In fact, the attribution and acquisition of identity has to do with one’s correspondence to type; that is, how well one correlates with a predetermined ideal of what it means to be a person in a public or culturally shared space. This categorization (which is a form of violence) has to do with adherence to (arche)type (racial profiling in airports would be but one example) and is based entirely on spurious assumptions extrapolated from one’s appearance. Vitally, the effective corroboration of certain stereotypes is not internally but externally driven by a visual culture saturated with images purloined from advertising and mass entertainment. Augé notes that this is a distinctive feature of postmodernity and the postmodern subject’s interaction with that world: ‘Assailed by the images flooding from commercial, transport or retail institutions, the passenger in non-places has the simultaneous experiences of a perpetual present and an encounter with the self. Encounter, identification, image’ (1995:

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105). This external identification with an ego ideal (more often than not, an airbrushed, dematerialized body that is reduced to ‘attractive’ prototype) is, Augé argues, predominantly phallic in nature: ‘if these invitations to identification are essentially masculine, it is because the ego-ideal they project is masculine; at present, a credible businesswoman or woman driver is perceived as possessing “masculine” qualities’ (1995: 105). In other words, the superstructure of supermodernity is held in place by culturally dominant fictions, which are often predicated on a potently masculine culture that promulgates certain ideals and ideas about what it means to be a man in a public space (dominant, expansive, extrovert, confident, active). Somewhere recuperates the nonplace as a space of crisis in order to critique ‘the passive joys of identity loss’ and life lived through a series of ahistorical and perpetually present moments.20 The inability to enchain a past to a present, and thus to envision a future, results in nihilism and a repetitive existence. Indeed, the film explores the pernicious effects of leading out one’s life in an always provisional (yet not creative or experimental), clichéd and hedonistic fashion, for it is quite clear that Johnny Marco is someone for whom the failure to live up to his ego ideal (a packaged image of himself) has resulted in the attrition of his mental health (for which he self-medicates). As such, it situates its critique of an industry that is overwhelmingly responsible for the production of dominant fictions from inside that industry. Johnny is but one casualty of the dominant fiction, but we are also reminded that this is a fiction that denies the existence of lives lived otherwise and does not offer anyone existing outside of hermetic clichés, which image a very specific form of ‘the good life’, any form of mirror or representation. In short, it suffocates the actuality, richness and the complexity of daily life in favour of what it promulgates and centres as the common denominator (white masculinity) – the perceived normality of which requires unpacking. That this is a culture that reinforces repetition and homogeneity is not only evident in the way in which Somewhere is structurally built out of, as we have seen, motifs of circularity and sameness, but also in the way in which specificity of place and time work to shore up these themes as well. For instance, Johnny’s itinerant hotel life offers no variation or difference; rather, regardless of whether he is in Los Angeles or in Europe, his routines and outlook remain the same. This is evidenced by a canny match on action that renders a seamless transition between LAX Airport and Malpensa in Milan. Johnny and Cleo travel from one liminal zone to another and never leave the behind the status of passenger. Moreover, Johnny’s rote of distraction contin-

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ues unabated in the Principe di Savoia hotel – and Cleo is noticeably annoyed by the presence of a woman she hardly knows at their breakfast table. Augé remarks that time in supermodernity is defined by the present moment – it is ahistorical: ‘What reigns . . . is actuality, the urgency of the present moment . . . Since non-places are there to be passed through, they are measured in units of time’ (1995: 104). This results in an extreme isolation of the present moment that renders everything (including space) as noncontinuous and fractured: ‘Everything proceeds as if space had been trapped by time, as if there were no history other than the last forty-eight hours’ (1995: 105). Somewhere explores the tension between scientific, chronological (and modern capitalist) time (a teleological timeline that is predicated on productivity and profit) and time as a lived duration felt in the body as ‘the revealer of the deadline’ (Deleuze 2005b: 182). As a cog in the Hollywood machinery, Johnny Marco’s experience of time is sharply binary, which corresponds to the discrepancy between his public and private selves: on the one hand, his every manoeuvre, gesture, statement and appearance is choreographed by a team of personal assistants (his time is not his own) and his star personage is synonymous with a kind of action genre film that precisely subordinates time as the measure of movement; on the other hand, his ‘own’ time is felt as an almost unbearable duration that he seeks to flee from through repetitious routine. His nightly activity of sitting on the sofa, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer and staring into space is not only an attempt to vacate himself from the measured activity of his professional life, it is also an attempt to kill time – to make time, and by extension his life, disappear. Extradiegetically, the viewer experiences these moments as ‘dead’ time in which nothing is quite literally made to happen onscreen. What comes to the fore in such moments is the ‘tiredness and waiting’ (Deleuze 2005b: 183) inherent to human existence that is then sedimented within the body. Notably, this is also not a productive or active body, but one that registers the process of ageing. Throughout Somewhere, key lighting is eschewed in favour of more natural or low-key lighting. In fact, Johnny’s face is frequently underlit or ill-lit, which serves not only to deflate his ‘star’ qualities (since the ‘film star effect’ is in no small part due to the technicalities of manipulative and strategic lighting), but also to immerse him in or merge him with his anonymous surroundings. In the scenes in which he merely sits on his sofa, he appears as one object amongst a world of objects or as part of a still-life portrait – it is only his slight movements that distinguish him from the inanimate world around him.

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Figure 4.1. Dead time. Screenshot by the author. In this regard, a scene in which Johnny has a plaster cast mould made of his face in order to fashion a prosthetic facemask that will artificially age him is, in my view, the fulcrum of Somewhere. After the plaster paste is applied, Johnny is left alone to allow the mask to set and dry. A process of forty minutes is reduced to approximately two minutes of screen time, but despite its relatively short duration, this sequence has a similar effect to the film’s opening scene set at the racetrack. The camera painstakingly tracks inwards in slow motion to hold Johnny’s face in midshot and finally in close-up; the soundtrack, which foregrounds the diegetic noises of the make-up studio, complements the increasing sense of anxiety the scene conveys in spite of its slow pace. As the camera draws into proximity with Johnny, his breathing is heightened within the sound mix and this functions as a form of metronome that precisely measures out the duration of the scene. As the camera pulls in, the foreground and background planes of the image flatten out so that the prosthetic masks of ghouls, zombies and creatures that adorn the studio walls seem to encroach in on Johnny. This moment is, I would suggest, an exemplary use of the Deleuzian time-image – or specifically time as series (2005b: 183) – in which duration is the prevailing and central force of the image in contradistinction to movement. As I stated earlier, in such moments, what the

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image sets forth is ‘the attitudes or postures of the body . . . which puts the before and after into the body, time into the body, the body as revealer of the deadline’ (Deleuze 2005b: 182). Johnny becomes a liminal entity here, for his body contains at once his relatively youthful face and body (although he is on the cusp of middle age and thus perhaps experiences time more pressingly or with greater urgency) and the aged and depleted body that he will inevitably come to inhabit. This is what those ghoulish creatures – themselves inherently liminal creatures called back from the dead – seem to taunt him with. The effects of this scene dovetail together to function as a visual memento mori for Johnny – and, by extension, us. Moreover, the use of the close-up here works to depersonalize rather than isolate and individuate the face. Deleuze reminds us that in close-up ‘the actor himself does not recognise himself’ (2005a: 124), and here the misrecognition that is the basis on which all identification is based (especially in relation to the ego ideal) is extended to the future self. As such, what this moment suggests is that nobody, regardless of the arbitrary gift of beauty, is sacrosanct or kept from the levelling that mortality necessitates. Johnny’s identification with his own commodification as image is damaging and has far-reaching consequences for his ability to exist within the world (a world that views him precisely as an object and wants a piece of him), but it is also highly foolish. The false version of himself – the one he is paid to be – is as ephemeral and fractious as his own beauty. When he finally admits he is ‘nothing, not even a person’, it is because he has confronted, albeit in artificial form, the ultimate or final nothingness that is certain mortality. His life has been parsed out on a different form of timeline to the one his obsequious and shallow team of personal assistants feed him; this is, very possibly, a moment of emergency for him both as crisis and revelation. The question, then, is how to become awake to and not somnambulate through life.

Notes  1.

Todd Kennedy asserts that: ‘Somewhere is, aesthetically speaking, a postmodern film that is about images – the degree to which they are shallow, the degree to which they both attract and repel us, and the degree to which they dominate our identity’ (2010: 59). Furthermore, he suggests, in line with my argument outlined in this chapter, that: ‘In short, the film is, at its heart, about the lack of authenticity and connection available in a postmodern world’ (2015: 62). However, we differ in the sense that I believe the film persuades us that there is not a central core of selfhood from which we have been alienated. It is my contention, therefore, that the film addresses the primarily psychological notion, after Lacan, that subjectivity is founded on a void.

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 2. Todd Kennedy has also noted the film’s lack of resolution or moment of epiphany, but in a different context: ‘By not showing, emphasizing, or showcasing any actual moment of transformation or connection – in fact she denies both – Coppola seems to accept the basic postmodern tenant that authenticity is impossible. That image is all. But, unlike Baudrillard, she refuses to accept that such surface imagery is a desirable destination’ (2015: 64).  3. Silverman suggests that a renegotiation of our dominant fiction would entail that we ‘collectively acknowledge, at the deepest level of our psyches, that our desires and our identity come to us from outside, and that they are founded upon a void’ (1992: 50).  4. As Silverman puts it, ‘this belief is less an effect of consciousness than of identification and fantasy’ (1992: 42).  5. These arguments are now well-known and established through the work of Judith Butler and theorists and writers who have taken their cue from Butler’s theory of gender as performance. See especially Butler’s Gender Trouble (1999) and more recently Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015).  6. I attended a screening of Somewhere at the London Film Festival in 2011. Members of the audience became uncomfortable during the film’s opening sequence and thought that the film had somehow become stuck on the opening shot. Although the scene is relatively short by avantgarde standards, its duration of approximately two minutes was enough to provoke unrest and boredom amongst film viewers, which I found most curious.  7. Coppola already utilized this cliché in Lost in Translation by having Charlotte ask Bob about his midlife crisis, the severity of which she links humorously to whether he has bought himself a Porsche or not.  8. Jean-Luc Godard has made this an explicit concern of his film oeuvre to date in films such as Vivre sa vie (1962), Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1967) and Sauve qui peut (1980), all of which thematically link performance, gender, commerce and prostitution.  9. Simone de Beauvoir wrote an article on Brigitte Bardot and ‘the Lolita syndrome’ for Esquire magazine in 1959; she considered this to be one of her most important pieces of work, despite it being a piece of popular journalism in which she outlined the ambiguity of Bardot’s sexual persona and emphasized the importance of her as an agent of her own desire. See https:// www.scribd.com/doc/106130845/Simone-de-Beauvoir-Brigitte-Bardot-and-the-LolitaSyndrome-1959. 10. The problematics of linking sex work to slavery are addressed in a variety of texts by feminist scholars and writers, but it is not within the scope of this book to provide a full account of this; as such, this spectrum is perhaps best exemplified at either end by Kathleen L. Barry’s Female Sexual Slavery (1984) and Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory (2010). I recommend both of these studies highly. 11. The Foo Fighters are a hard rock band initially formed after the demise of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Their music is a far more palatable, commercial and ‘pop’ packaged version of the grunge sound that made Nirvana a groundbreaking group alongside bands such as the Meat Puppets and Sebadoh. The demographic to which the Foo Fighters now appeal is largely made up of middle-aged men – indeed, Johnny Marco would arguably be one of them. Moreover, the song ‘My Hero’ is a tribute to Kurt Cobain by the former drummer of Nirvana and now lead singer of the Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl, which is to say that while Cobain has been immortalized as a punk-grunge poet (if not god) of rock music, Grohl suffers the distinct dishonour of being a fading rock star who is no longer as ‘cool’ as he used to be and, by extension, his music lacks the cultural cachet that Nirvana’s oeuvre still carries for many fans. ‘My Hero’ is therefore not

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only a testament to Cobain, but also arguably to Grohl’s own former glory and could be read as an anthem for masculinity in dissolution and crisis. The lyrics ‘there goes my hero, watch him as he goes, he’s ordinary . . . don’t the best of them bleed it out, while the rest of them peter out’ is especially evocative of the different trajectories Cobain and Grohl’s public personas have taken: one now immortal and the other middle-aged and tame. 12. Todd Kennedy notes that Johnny: ‘is controlled and commodified by the image-machine that is Hollywood . . . Coppola reveals how culture creates spectacle via images that Johnny fails to live up to. Thus, her depiction of Johnny trapped by an empty world of room service and strippers acts as a treatise on the denied potential for movement in a postmodern world. Her Los Angeles is anything but the “paradise” that some postmodern critics, such as Jean Baudrillard, describe, and Johnny Marco’s powerful Ferrari that circles LA’s freeways never gets him anywhere . . . it is a crisis of identity depicted almost entirely along spatial lines’ (2015: 55). 13. Likewise, Kaja Silverman also contends: ‘indeed, that equation (penis/phallus) is so central to vraisemblance that at those historical moments when the prototypical male subject is unable to “recognize” himself within its configuration of masculine sufficiency our society suffers from a profound sense of “ideological fatigue”’ (1992: 16). 14. Interestingly, Coppola has admitted her admiration for the photography of Helmut Newton (indeed, there is an implicit reference to the car crash in which he died in Somewhere). Newton was celebrated for his images of high fashion models that work through and explicitly reference the male gaze. As such, Newton’s images also deconstruct and thus comment on the commodification of the body as cliché. Images that feature in Somewhere, such as the bare-breasted woman having her hair cut in a blunt Louise Brooks-style ‘bob’ and the models ambling down a corridor in haute couture clothing, could be viewed as an homage to the work of Newton. 15. Todd Kennedy (2015) argues that Somewhere constitutes a critique of Jean Baudrillard’s celebration of the postmodern landscape of contemporary America. In this environment, one is highly constricted in one’s ability to flourish, he suggests. 16. ‘[I]f a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined (as such) . . . will be a non-place’ (Augé 1995: 77). 17. ‘In a world of supermodernity people are always and never at home’ (Augé 1995: 109). 18. For an excellent analysis of Augé’s argument, please see Buchanan (1999). 19. Coppola borrowed the lenses her father, Francis Ford Coppola, used for his film Rumblefish (1983) – a film that is itself an homage to avant-garde new-wave movements, especially the films of La nouvelle vague period (roughly 1958 to 1968). 20. Elsewhere I have argued that Somewhere is a film that utilizes Deleuzian any space whatever in a similar manner to the effects wrought by the nonplace: ‘it is a space in which perception leads not to reaction and action, but rather to delayed reaction and protracted states of contemplation . . . this often transpires as a crisis of the “everyday”, a suffocation from the banal or pedestrian . . . there are many facets to the any-space-whatever, then: as a state of possibility, and as a space of profound crisis (political, personal and existential). Moreover, this space does not need to be extraordinary’ (Backman Rogers 2015: 126).

PART III

The Female Body as Patriarchal Currency and the Commodification of Female Identity

CHAPTER 5

Marie Antoinette (2006)

To this end, the commodity is disinvested of its body and reclothed in a form that makes it suitable for exchange among men. Luce Irigaray (1985a: 180) [W]hat has been frequently assumed to be one of film’s primary limitations with respect to an oppositional project – its identificatory ‘lure’ – may be, on the contrary, one of its greatest political assets, since it represents the potential vehicle for a spectatorial self-estrangement. Kaja Silverman (1996: 85) The rhetoric of cinema has consistently denigrated surface decoration, finding the attractive skin of the screen to be false, shallow, feminine, or apolitical. Rosalind Galt (2011: 2) After its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, critical response to Marie Antoinette was sharply divisive. In a dismissive and excoriating review in Film Comment, Nathan Lee wrote: ‘Coppola’s conception has nothing to do with thinking through the politics, history, morality, or psychology of this milieu, and everything to do with the opportunity it presents to dress up her pet tones, themes and gestures on a grand scale’ (Lee 2006: 25). Similarly, Agnès Poirier, a critic for Libération, expressed consternation at how Coppola had managed to create a cinematic world so utterly devoid, as she viewed it, of political content (Poirier 2006). Although some critics praised the film’s irreverent and playful treatment of its hallowed historical subject matter, this kind of opinion was an anomaly that could not counteract the virulent backlash towards Coppola in particular (whom critics assumed to be the focal point of the film’s narrative – namely that Marie is Sofia). The film’s insistent engagement with surface and cliché as a form of (gendered)

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politics seems to have caused scholars and critics alike to argue that the film’s very form attenuates or precludes any kind of political engagement with the images it sets forth. As we have seen this conflation of the image’s surface with superficiality is an erroneous interpretation that has marred the reception of many of Coppola’s films, but Marie Antoinette’s flagrantly anachronistic and postmodern approach to French history and its indulgent exploration of material culture renders it especially susceptible to critical misunderstanding and misappropriation. It is my contention, alongside Rosalind Galt, that implicit within such cavalier dismissal of the film as being too engrossed in its own superficiality is a misogynist agenda. Coppola’s devotion to exploring feminized and feminist space and female subjectivity through ambiguous imagery that draws directly upon prefabricated forms of visual culture, such as the cliché, precipitates a tendency to elide image and meaning too closely. In the case of films such as Marie Antoinette and The Virgin Suicides, the location of crisis – and, by extension, a politics – within the adolescent female body radically troubles the psychoanalytic notion (after Freud) that a woman is too close, too approximate with/to her own body and specular image to have perspective or knowledge and thus to engender critique. As such, critical eschewal of images that explore female experience through deliberately feminized space, as is the case in Marie Antoinette, is telling: the somewhat jejune assumption being that the ‘feminine’ – or to use Galt’s terms ‘pretty’ or ‘decorative’ – image is devoid of political import and substance. As Galt states: ‘The rhetoric of cinema has consistently denigrated surface decoration, finding the attractive skin of the screen to be false, shallow, feminine, or apolitical’ (2011: 2). As I have argued elsewhere (Backman Rogers 2012a), one of the most contentious aspects of Coppola’s film is how it reframes this notorious historical period through the trope of the adolescent rite of passage into adulthood and, more specifically, through female subjectivity: Coppola’s decision to focus on Marie Antoinette’s arrival in France as a young girl, her initiation into the court of Versailles and her unhappy marriage rather than the infamous downfall of the French monarchy proved to be so controversial precisely because she locates the film’s political content within the female adolescent body and the way in which it is re-fashioned and controlled through various rituals. In giving us a cinematic impression of a young woman in extreme isolation, she radically undercuts the event that most representations of this period focus on (the French Revolution) and, most critically, attempts to

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salvage the figure of Marie Antoinette from a historical legacy that has served to perpetuate her status as a figurehead of hatred. (Backman Rogers 2012a: 81) By way of stark contrast with the majority of critical readings of this film in the vein of ‘all style and no substance’ and scholarship that has characterized it almost exclusively in terms of postfeminism (see Diamond 2011; and Yuneun-Lewis in Holmes and Negra 2011), this chapter will argue that the film elaborates on the theme of commodity fetishism (through both form and content) in order to reframe history as ‘herstory’. In other words, Marie Antoinette delineates precisely the manifold and insidious ways in which a young woman’s body is divested of identity and autonomy, and turned into a commodity to be traded amongst and owned by a divisive, hierarchical and fundamentally patriarchal society. The film’s politics lies in its visual alliance of decorative and pretty objects with the female body. As such, scholars are not mistaken in identifying a postfeminist strain in the film’s mise-en-scène, but I would suggest that the film enacts a critique rather than an outright endorsement of such a depoliticization. Furthermore, the film’s resolutely contemporary and postmodern recuperation of history – which made many critics uncomfortable – enables engagement with, and critique of, both historic narratives that falsely pertain to accuracy and Truth, as well as current and neoliberal forms of feminism. Marie Antoinette may be a film of surface and appearances, but one should not simply infer therefore that its politics is superficial and its form hinders access to interiority, for above all, its very structure demands that the viewer identify with a beleaguered female subjectivity. It is, at its very core, a feminist film.

A Market of the Senses: Your Relations Are of Power Marie Antoinette evinces a fascination with surfaces and materiality; the film abounds with tightly framed shots of food, a variety of libations, fabrics, furnishings, shoes, clothes, hairpieces and jewellery. It is, markedly, a film that is concerned with the mechanics and fetishized objects of rabid consumption. It is also, fittingly, a film that is about images: both historically or culturally inscribed images and images that work on us internally as a form of psychic structure. Its politics lies in the image, then. As Rosalind Galt argues, the film ‘addresses precisely the relationships among rococo style, radical politics, and gender . . . If we regard the

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film as something other than a discourse on girly frivolity, it is possible to read its emphasis on the decorative as precisely the location of its political intervention’ (2011: 22). As she does in The Virgin Suicides, Coppola creates a politics of the female body through tropes of the cliché, recuperation and comparison. Marie Antoinette delineates a cinematic and rarefied world of objects in which its eponymous protagonist is rendered precisely as an object herself. Saige Walton, in an extended reading of the film’s Baroque qualities, argues that ‘feelings of luxury, surfeit and gratification are paramount to the Baroque flesh of this film’ (Walton 2016: 145). That is, the very body of the film itself is imbricated with the central female body on which its narrative hinges. The film evokes its female experience materially. Once again, Galt states that the film ‘stages the fetishistic status of the royal body as a question of production design. The film connects a feminized world of objects . . . with the class and gender politics within which Marie’s body can be owned first by the state and then violently by the people’ (2011: 22), Above all, this commodification of the female body shores up a patriarchal and economic system in which it functions purely symbolically. Indeed, the film painstakingly stages the appropriation, divestment, refashioning and disenfranchisement of a young woman’s life through her body. Marie is subjected to a number of ritual processes that eradicate traces of her burgeoning identity and recast her as a tabula rasa onto which the patriarchal politics of a nation is projected. As such, Marie Antoinette can be read as an allegorical rite of passage, replete with the three stages outlined by Arnold van Gennep (1960) as separation, liminality and reincorporation, in which the female body is subjected to a ceremonial process that serves to disempower her by evacuating her agency and autonomy. In This Sex Which is Not One, Luce Irigaray outlines her critique of a patriarchal, hom(m)osexual economy in which women are traded as objects amongst men; in such a profoundly masculine environment, women ‘always pass from one man to another, from one group of men to another. The work force is thus always assumed to be masculine and the “products” are objects to be used, objects of transaction among men alone’ (Irigaray 1985a: 171). The law that governs this hermetic form of exchange upholds ‘the exclusive valorization of men’s needs/ desires, of exchanges among men’ (Irigaray 1985a: 171). Hence, Irigaray classifies, not uncontroversially, this relationship of exchange as hom(m)osexual because it takes place exclusively amongst men: ‘heterosexuality has been up to now just an alibi for the smooth workings of man’s relations with himself, or relations among men’ (Irigaray 1985a: 172). In order for economical transactions to function

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smoothly, women must internalize the norms and values on which this form of exchange is predicated. In other words, a woman must disown herself by subjugating her identity to that of a form of patriarchal politics that fashions her as ‘a kind of gold standard for the masculine subject . . . (so that) women are prohibited from being agents of exchange and are limited to acting as objects of it . . . Women are circulated as signs and serve to differentiate meaning without having any meaning of their own’ (Bainbridge 2008: 19). To be subsumed within this economy, as a woman, is to experience acute alienation, for in consuming objects or products, she is also consuming herself. Any attempt to gain ‘purchase’ on her identity is immediately thwarted because the very system within which she is forced to operate is dependent on her submission and disenfranchisement. As Irigaray states, ‘the economy – in both the narrow and the broad sense – that is in place in our societies thus requires that women lend themselves to alienation in consumption, and to exchanges in which they do not participate, and that men be exempt from being used and circulated like commodities’ (1985a: 172). Marie Antoinette explores the highly problematic relation of a young woman to her own alienation through consumption. If the film, in some sense, fetishizes objects, it is because those objects function symbolically as a form of exchange within a patriarchal economy – just as the body of its young protagonist does. Stripped (as we shall see literally) of her identity, she comes to stand in for the power relations and discourses that create and ‘fashion’ her body as a commodity. If she herself is so fascinated by the objects that come to define her existence, it is simply because those objects reveal or reflect her own condition and status as a decorative object. Irigaray makes this parity between women and objects clear: ‘Hence women’s role as fetish-objects, inasmuch as, in exchanges, they are the manifestation and the circulation of a power of the Phallus, establishing relationships of men with each other’ (Irigaray 1985a: 183). The film centres on the destructive dynamics of this relationship: the attempt to break a young woman into pieces. The very form of the film not only reveals the tremendous burden of the patriarchal gaze, the weight of an institutional regime, but also the fragmentation and dissection wrought on the female body as a result. Coppola does not need to kill off her queen because she is hung, drawn and quartered well before the film’s conclusion (indeed, critics’ overwhelming concern with the titular queen’s lack of visceral decapitation in the film is highly suspect in my view). The ‘handover’ scene, which takes place astride the border between Austria and France, illustrates how this process of transformation and disenfranchise-

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ment is, in part, effected. Having left the court in Austria, Marie travels with her two female companions and her dog, ‘Mops’, to Schüttern, where she meets officials from the French court and Louis Auguste, her fiancé, for the first time. The journey to the border is conveyed through a series of matches on action, fades and ellipses in order to suggest, of course, the protraction of time and the tedium of travel. Yet this scene also prefigures how Marie will experience time in the court of Versailles – where time will be measured through a series of repetitious and highly elaborate rituals and her own time will be marked by waiting for something to happen to her. As such, she will not have access to a time ‘of her own’. It is also significant that the journey and the ceremony at the handover point take place in the woods. Forested areas are ritually significant places that often mark out a liminal zone – a place of being ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner 1995: 95) – in which the ritual subject is divested of personal attributes and prepared for his or her new role in life. The border between Austria and France marks the threshold between her old life and her new life, and, as van Gennep notes, ‘to cross a threshold is to unite oneself with a new world’ (1960: 20). It is fitting then that this ritual ceremony serves, literally, to ‘refashion’ Marie as a model for the French court – a world that will, for the greater part, remain alien to her. Marie arrives at the border dressed in white with her hair parted at the side and hanging loosely over her shoulders. She has a friendly and pleasing countenance that is prominently marked by the dimples of the actress who plays her – Kirsten Dunst. Here, she is the very epitome of

Figure 5.1. Marie gives herself to France. Screenshot by the author.

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‘girlishness’ and innocence one might associate with a child bride. However, the ceremony she is about to undergo is designed to transform her from a girl into a woman – the attendant values of which she is woefully underage and underprepared to take on. The Comtesse de Noailles, played by a rather dour-looking Judy Davis, greets her. Her attire of heavy dark red velvet serves to emphasize, by way of contrast with Marie’s own simple costume, the extravagance and formality of the court Marie is about to enter. The Comtesse is also somewhat taken aback with Marie’s informality and the ease with which she embraces her – this too signals the rigmarole and stricture of Versailles, where everything is tightly held in place through highly specific and official rituals. As she enters the ceremonial enclosure, which has been constructed precisely astride the border between Austria and France, she is informed that ‘the bride must retain nothing belonging to a foreign court’ (an edict that extends to her beloved pug dog, who is promptly sent back onto Austrian soil along with her female companions). Rendered in a series of close-up shots, her body is unclothed and prepared for her new status in life. These shots – that seem like a form of dissection – inform us that Marie’s hands, her arms, her neck, her face and her slender adolescent body now belong to France. The most striking of the shots that compose this sequence, however, is the midshot taken from behind Marie as her undergarments are removed and she stands naked, facing out onto the country which she will rule, serve and sacrifice her body to. There are four reframings within this shot, which serve to accentuate and concentrate the strength of the courtly – and, by extension, patriarchal – gaze that is upon her. These reframings also guide the viewer’s eyes – seemingly through the tropes of Renaissance perspective – to focus on her fragile and young body. The viewer’s gaze is allied with that of the court members, who stand behind her looking on as she is transformed into the Dauphine of France. As such, we become intensely aware not only of the potentially prurient nature of our gaze (the visual pleasure we are afforded), but also of the rapacious and grasping act of looking at a young woman’s body when she is at her most vulnerable. Moreover, viewed from behind, Marie’s body appears as a dark adumbration, as if to suggest that she has now become the property of a country that will instruct and inform her every move and gesture. She is completely absented of her ‘self’. Fittingly, the sound also drops at this moment, which adds further solemnity and a sense of evisceration to the scene. As she emerges from the other side of the ceremonial enclosure, we see that Marie is clothed now in a corseted dress of pale blue brocade.

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Her hair has been elaborately fashioned with a hairpiece placed on the right side of her head. Her face is also made up in powder and blusher, and she stands formally with her hands enfolded at her waist. She has become a decorative object: a spectacle for consumption. There is symmetry to the framing in this section of the scene, which was absent beforehand. On the Austrian side of the border, her movements were more carefree (she was unaware of how ‘uncouth’ her openness appeared to the Comtesse, for instance) and the bodies and environment surrounding her were not arranged formally. On the French side of the border, however, her body is already hemmed in by her tight clothing and even the symmetry of the deliberately still film frame; fundamentally, she has been ordered and brought under control via a series of ritual processes. For the second time in the film’s opening twenty minutes, Marie meets the viewer’s gaze; this time, though, her look is not one of defiance as it is in the film’s opening, but of emptiness (or possibly anxiety). Moreover, her gaze, which breaks the ‘fourth wall’, makes us feel complicit in her disempowerment. Dress is made manifest as just one of the central ways in which Marie’s body is appropriated by and assimilated into the French court. The film fetishizes fashion in order to reveal the effect (and cinematic affect) of dress as a form of discourse of power or disciplinary technology. As Irigaray reminds us: ‘To this end, the commodity is disinvested of its body and reclothed in a form that makes it suitable for exchange among men’ (Irigaray 1985a: 180). Moreover, her status as a virginal girl

Figure 5.2. The Dauphine of France. Screenshot by the author.

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is intensified by her decorative and ornate appearance. Her market value is intrinsically tied to her biological status: first as a vessel of purity and second as a fertile and desirable young body. Her attire externally marks her out or sets her apart as an object with a highly rarefied exchange value. Once again, Irigaray writes: ‘The Virginal Woman, on the other hand, is pure exchange value. She is nothing but the possibility, the place, the sign of relations among men. In and of herself, she does not exist: she is a simple envelope veiling what is really at stake in social exchange. In this sense, her natural body disappears into its representative function’ (1985a: 186). As such, Marie’s body is divested of personal attributes and distilled down to its nubile, reproductive capabilities. The extravagant and florid nature of her costumes reflects the ostentatious pomp and ceremony of the French court. Marie is fashioned as unadulterated spectacle and functions purely on a symbolic level and – by extension – her sense of self is annihilated. It is fitting, then, that the film’s form partially works to dissect, divide and segment the integrity of her body; indeed, it offsets moments of quiet and intimate subjectivity with bombastic sequences of extreme visual and sonic stimuli. The scene that most apparently explores themes of unbridled and wanton consumerism via a series of rapid cuts or ‘MTV-style’ close-up shots also perform a kind of cinematic autopsy. Many critics have read this sequence as playful, ironic and postmodern, and it undoubtedly possesses these qualities; however, it is also a scene that accumulates and concatenates images to nauseating effect via tropes of stasis, repetition and heightened cinematic affect made apparent in a collision of sound and colour. The human body is delineated here as brute matter; in particular, fractious, fragile female articulations (the ankle, wrist and neck) are emphasized as both erotic fetish and as dead meat. As Walter Benjamin notes, ‘the parceling out of feminine beauty into its noteworthy constituents resembles a dissection . . . the image of a corpse’ (quoted in Brevik-Zender 2011: 17). This scene, like so many others in this film, also evinces a fascination with ingestion. The tightly framed shot of an incarnadined female mouth consuming food is now a stereotypical and sexualized image; here, it is revealed precisely as a cliché because we are held outside the image. In other words, this is an image of consumption, but we do not consume it. The very fact that this seems to be the sequence that most critics and scholars recall from the film would suggest that it is not one the viewer readily or easily assimilates. This moment, I would argue, subsists in the viewer’s mind specifically because its seemingly superficial and disposable nature belies a latent darkness. For implicit within this scene is an eroticization of death. If the

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tone of the sequence, effected via its strategic use of rhythmic editing to highly telling lyrics, is ironic and satirical, it is because its images lay bare the protagonist’s ‘alienation in consumption’ (Irigaray 1985a: 172). It is nauseating because she is consuming her own subjugation. The distance we feel from the images is evocative of the distance she has from being able to control her own body. This moment is edited in such a way as to follow on directly from the revelation that Marie’s sister-in-law, the Comtesse de Provence, has given birth to a healthy baby boy before Marie has even succeeded in consummating her own marriage. The viewer infers, quite rightly, that this dive into consumption is a form of anaesthetic. Yet this form of self-medication compounds the suffocating nature of her situation. She cannot reclaim her body from a patriarchal system that condemns her young body as a failure through the very mechanics that ensure her continued subordination to its ideology. As Irigaray reminds us: ‘participation in society requires that the body submit itself to a specularization, a speculation, that transforms it into a value-bearing object, a standardized sign, an exchangeable signifier, a “likeness” with reference to an authoritative model. A commodity – a woman – is divided into two irreconcilable “bodies”: her “natural!” body and her socially valued, exchangeable body, which is a particularly mimetic expression of masculine values’ (1985a: 180). Women are caught in a double bind in such an economy, for in eschewing their status as commodity, they also risk invisibility, obscurity and social exclusion (just another form of death). In her fascinating reading of the film, Heidi Brevik-Zender takes her cue from Walter Benjamin to argue that: ‘Coppola strip(s) the feminine collective of the agency to use fashions as powerful tools of self expression . . . it serves a patriarchal court that performs its supremacy in the exterior signs of feminine sartorial pageantry in order to justify and reinforce its own power’ (2011: 8). In other words, the film exacts an indictment of a patriarchal regime in which decorative, inanimate objects come to stand in for and subsume the fleshy, experiential reality of the female body. Rendered as an object, the female body can be traded without impunity in an economy that refuses her a subjectivity and agency of her own. Brevik-Zender notes astutely that Coppola’s strategic use of certain garments that are associated with sexual fetishes further compounds the association between bodies and objects – and, by extension, with death: Coppola’s use of the sex appeal of sartorial fetishes, including the tight corset and the constricting choker, subtly underscores the ties between the feminine

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body and death. Thus, although the profusion of luxurious pastel garments works for some of the film to emphasize the giddiness of the protagonist’s youth or the formal nature of courtly life, it is also true that fashion works not to trivialize the story of the French queen but rather to preview Marie Antoinette’s eventual demise. (Brevik-Zender 2011: 18) Indeed, the corset and the choker both work to draw attention to the body’s fragility via restriction – they bring the body under control and inhibit its natural movements. The feminization of the body, then, also serves to restrict and suffocate it. Implicit within the imposition of gender onto the female body and its sexualization via commodification are violent and pernicious forms of control and ownership.

All Eyes Will Be on You: Reversing the Male Gaze Before she leaves for Versailles, Marie is counselled by her mother, Maria Theresa, that ‘all eyes’ will be on her as she takes up her role as the Dauphine, and eventually the Queen, of France. In fact, this is the first line of dialogue that we hear in the film and intimates the ways in which the film will explore the gaze and concomitantly gossip as power structures. The ‘eyes’ that her mother refers to do not only designate her own surveillance, which she will bring to bear on Marie from afar to deleterious effect (and that Marie, in turn, internalizes), but the patriarchal and brutally pervasive observation she will be subjected to by the French court. The film places us inside Marie’s subjectivity so that we feel the violence that is exacted on her as every gesture and word is scrutinized and wilfully misinterpreted. As Todd Kennedy notes: ‘Marie Antoinette openly interrogates a traditional film form that positions the spectator behind a masculine/active protagonist who directs an objectifying look. We enter Versailles fully aware of the female protagonist’s status as the source of spectacle’ (2010: 53). Marie Antoinette conveys to the viewer the power structures and discourses that reconfigure and irrevocably shape identity – specifically female identity – by making the viewer at times strategically complicit with the patriarchal gaze and by delineating the effect of power affectively. The feminist politics of the film lies, partially, in how it reveals the very mechanics of how women are constructed through already-always-gendered ideology. It is thus, I would argue, a film that pushes at the limits of the image. As such, the film

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not only portrays a female experience intimately, but also, I suggest, addresses the viewer as female. Marie Antoinette is a film that partakes in a feminist visual politics that evinces what Teresa de Lauretis has outlined as ‘consciousness of ideology’s limits, a “de-re-construction”’ (2007: 3) in which cinema is characterized as ‘a cinema for, not only by, women’ (2007: 35). In my experience, male viewers have tended to deride or reject the film because it was so openly and aggressively marketed as a ‘girly chick flick’, but it is, in actual fact, the film’s very form that provides a more radical and political form of discomfort by reversing the structural effects of the gaze; therefore, it is significant that this is a film that breaks strategically the fourth wall at various points in its trajectory. In doing so, the film elucidates what de Lauretis, taking her cue from Michel Foucault, has outlined as ‘technologies of gender’ (1987). The refashioning of the female body, as we have seen, is one such technology that is brought to bear ideologically on identity, but the gaze, as we shall now see, is perhaps an even more insidious form of control. Marie Antoinette addresses the ways in which the female body is appropriated and brought under control in a patriarchal economy; it indicts this system of control through its very form, which makes manifest how this kind of power operates. Caroline Bainbridge, expounding on Irigaray, states that: women serve only to reflect back an image of the male subject to himself. The repercussion of this is that women never see a reflection of themselves. Representations of femininity depict elements of the feminine that reinforce notions of the masculine . . . Irigaray suggests that the masculine subject is constructed to produce and exchange and that commodities and patterns of exchange are designed to confirm his status. This shows how women are trapped by their commodification in a system of exchange that denies their specificity. Women become commodities who maintain systems of exchange by participating unquestioningly in the process involved. (2008: 18–19) By making the viewer experience the weight of the pervasive, patriarchal gaze, Coppola creates an impasse or holding space in which critique becomes possible. Our sympathy – or even empathy – for Marie is elicited by our affective knowledge of her situation because we experience it with her and the impossibility of her enacting any form of resistance. As such, the film’s very form mounts a form of resistance against the structural politics that renders Marie helpless. That is, by reversing how the cinematic (male) gaze has been conventionally constructed,

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by making us profoundly aware of Marie’s status as spectacle, the film reveals how power functions. It is for this reason that the central features of the film’s aesthetic are also key descriptors in Laura Mulvey’s delineation of the male gaze (2001). To return to Irigaray once more, we could argue that the film works on the viewer in order to make him or her realize what it feels like to be ‘a mirror value of and for man’; moreover, it explores what is at stake in forsaking one’s body ‘to men as the supporting material of specularization, of speculation’, so that one’s ‘natural and social value’ becomes a ‘locus of imprints, marks, and a mirage of his activity’ (1985a: 177). Marie Antoinette, I would suggest, engenders its politics via offering us access to female subjugation and debasement. Marie’s subjective experience is privileged in the film so that she becomes our point of identification. Yet the viewer is also placed in the privileged position of not only seeing the court of Versailles through Marie’s eyes, but also being given access to the pervasive and anonymous gaze that surveils her – a gaze that is not unlike that of Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the panopticon. We are at once both her ally and are made to feel complicit with the power structures that control her. Kaja Silverman argues that the identificatory process that film makes available to us is not only a practical device for relating narrative, but also affords us the unique position of being able to identify outside of ourselves: ‘what has been frequently assumed to be one of film’s primary limitations with respect to an oppositional project – its identificatory “lure” – may be, on the contrary, one of its greatest political assets, since it represents the potential vehicle for a spectatorial self-estrangement’ (1996: 85). Marie Antoinette, then, proffers a radical politics in asking the viewer to assume the position of one of the most misunderstood, misappropriated, rewritten and vilified female characters in modern history. As such, it enacts an ethics of empathy. Coppola chose to base her screenplay on Antonia Fraser’s revisionist biography of the queen’s life (2002). Fraser’s account of Marie’s life stresses her youthful inexperience, her lack of preparation for her royal role and the abject loneliness of her existence in the French court. Fraser’s intimate and detailed description of the political world that Marie inhabited and the effect of this hermetic environment on her specifically can be contrasted starkly with supposedly more objective attempts to document this historical period. Indeed, the centrality of Fraser’s imagining of Marie’s mind as she is made part of the machinery of Versailles is precisely what differentiates it from more traditional historical delineations. In my view, the privileging of female experience and, more specifically, the female viewpoint alongside its implicit critique of historic narratives that pertain exhaustively

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to objectivity and accuracy are key facets of Fraser’s work that would have appealed to Coppola in making her own revisionist adaptation. From the very outset of the film, Coppola signals to the viewer that this will be a narrative that tackles the most ossified, abiding myths about Marie Antoinette. Interestingly, the relative merits of historical drama – especially Heritage costume drama – is most often assessed based on its ability to coincide with and shore up the collectively informed and understood mental images we possess of a given time period. For instance, the visceral effect of a film such as Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) is predicated on its correlation to the grainy, washed-out tones of Robert Capa’s photographs of the D-Day landings. It is not that the film seems accurate because this is precisely how soldiers would have experienced the terror and confusion of that moment, but that it corresponds with our collective memories of an event to which few of us have access in reality. Moreover, collective memory is informed, at its very core, by cliché – fittingly, as both a form of cultural shorthand and as a photographic plate. It is precisely this understanding of how historical narrative is fashioned around particular subjective and biased accounts of events that gains currency through the powers of image and propaganda that informs Coppola’s irreverent and subversive approach to French history. I contend that some critics lambasted the film precisely because it dares to dismantle the propaganda machine and the coterminous clichés that have served to hold in place certain detrimental images. Marie Antoinette is flagrantly disrespectful of historical clichés – hence their profusion to comic effect in the film. The film sets out its agenda in its opening moments. The film’s initial titles announce its distributor, producers and main actress, Kirsten Dunst. The song we hear is ‘Natural’s Not in it’ by the political punk group Gang of Four. Edited to the electric guitar’s percussive chords, the film’s titles appear emblazoned in fuchsia pink and rendered in a typescript that is recognizably borrowed from both tabloid newspapers and the font of the infamous album cover Never Mind the Bollocks. Here’s the Sex Pistols. The song lyrics that accompany these titles voice the core of the film’s politics: ‘the problem of leisure; what to do for pleasure. Ideal love – a new purchase. A market of the senses – dream of the perfect life’. Within thirty seconds, the viewer already understands that this is a film that will deal in the politics of propaganda and consumerism from a contemporary perspective. A brief, but highly important, vignette breaks apart the title sequence to intimate further the film’s visual politics. Here, the main character appears to us as precisely the wanton and profligate figure of historical myth. Marie reclines on a chaise longue,

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surrounded by pastel pink-and-white cream pastries and cakes. The light blueand-white brocade of the chaise longue matches the interior of the room and of her dress. She wears an absurd headdress of feathers that is in keeping with her layered, florid and purely decorative clothing. A maidservant adjusts a delicate pink satin show on her right foot as Marie inclines her head to scoop out some icing from the cake beside her and place it in her mouth; as she does so, she turns to the camera, meets the viewer’s gaze and lightly smirks and shrugs her shoulders before reclining comfortably back onto the chaise longue. With this image, Coppola, at once, both fulfils and undermines the viewer’s expectations. For this immediately recognizable version of Marie Antoinette is revealed to be a construction: a function of stereotype, historical legacy, propaganda and visual culture. Marie’s direct gaze towards the viewer is indicative of and stands in for Coppola’s immediate dismissal of the set of assumptions that the viewer will undoubtedly bring to her film. Moreover, this Marie Antoinette is introduced to the viewer as the actor Kirsten Dunst before she even appears onscreen; in other words, her presence is read as performative from the outset. Coppola already concedes that what we will see, however sympathetic, is but one more avatar of a historical figure. The difference here, though, is that this film engages directly with its generic legacy through culturally codified images. The patriarchal gaze, as a structure of power, is revealed to be both pervasive and anonymous. This aspect of the gaze, as a will to contain and control, is most strongly sensed during scenes that centre on commensality and sociality in the court of Versailles and, by way of contrast, private moments in which the significant weight of social expectations and the damage that this causes to Marie’s fragile sense of self is revealed. Marie’s entry into Versailles and the scene in which she dines with Louis XV and various members of the court are characterized by a cinematic gaze that stands in for the stately power that serves to socialize and place her within a pre-existing hierarchy. As such, this gaze is not synonymous with any specific character, but can be allied with the patriarchal and controlling systems that perpetuate a form of power from which she herself is disenfranchised and alienated. Marie’s arrival at Versailles is rendered in a handheld and tightly framed style that makes apparent not only her own anxiety, but also the prying and prurient nature of the world into which she is about to enter. Her every move is on display for dissection by an anonymous yet powerful court. Over-the-shoulder shots, which represent Marie’s own timid point of view, are spliced together with unidentifiable points of view from the crowd. Marie’s own

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outlook reveals the heavily powdered, rouged and bewigged appearances of men, women and children who stare at her in an uncompromising and distinctly inimical manner; in contrast to this, Marie’s own countenance is open and gentle. The lack of nondiegetic music in this moment heightens the silence of this anonymous crowd, whose favour she must gain in order to find her place in this world. Likewise, the cinematography during the scene in which she marries Louis XVI features a prominently high-angle overhead shot that can be likened to a form of surveillance – which is, of course, synonymous with power and control. Again, it is significant that this power is made manifest in moments that are ritually significant and are designed to usher Marie into her new identity and role as the Dauphine and, finally, Queen of France. Even when we are given access to her most intimate and emotionally private moments, the camerawork serves to illustrate her isolation and subservience. Two key scenes that detail Marie’s reaction to her mother’s berating correspondence remind the viewer that Marie’s body and identity are no longer her own. In voiceover, we hear her mother rebuking her for ‘snubbing the King’s favourite’, Madame du Barry. The force of her vituperation is matched by the backtracking motion of the camera, which serves to reframe and isolate Marie on one of the balustrades of Versailles. Once again, her body is ordered and placed symmetrically within the frame so that she becomes a diminutive figure within a landscape that subsumes her. This powerful image of control finds its correspondent in a further scene in which her mother counsels her that the blame for the Dauphin’s lack of sexual interest lies entirely with her: ‘everything depends on the wife, if she is willing and sweet. I can’t repeat enough the importance for you to employ charm and patience and never ill-humour to remedy this unfortunate situation’. Marie’s loneliness is compounded by a notable lack of any consideration or concern. Her own mother cannot even extend any comfort to her. It is clear that her inability – through no fault of her own – to fulfil her royal duties and produce an heir to the throne will result in her obliteration, for she cannot exist outside of the strictures of the role into which she has been forced to fit. Coppola conveys to the viewer that Marie is part of the patriarchal machinery that consumes and will destroy her by diminishing her physicality onscreen. As she reads her mother’s unsympathetic and chiding letter, the camera tracks tightly into her face to capture her expressions of exasperation, desperation and finally confrontation with the viewer (or perhaps a silent cry for empathy). Marie’s dress of heavy floral brocade visually compliments the florid wallpaper of her private salon so that she appears to be disintegrating into her luxurious environment. In-

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deed, it is as if the tracking motion of the camera, effected through the use of a telephoto lens that visually collapses background and foreground, pushes her back into the wall behind her. Visually, she is backed into a corner. Here, we have a clear indication of her lack of agency and her status as a commodity. At the very moment in which her mother reminds her that her position in Versailles is highly precarious and, in essence, that she can be replaced and forced into obscurity, she is portrayed as just another ornate, decorative object: one more thing amongst things. As she meets the viewer’s gaze and once again breaks the fourth wall, we are implored to recognize the situation of a young and vulnerable woman who is continually reminded of her fundamental disposability. As I stated earlier, coterminous with the gaze as a form of socializing power is speech – or, more specifically, gossip. Coppola choreographs the scene in which Marie dines with the King and various court officials, such as the King’s mistress (Madame du Barry), for the first time around the act of gossip. There is a distinct discrepancy between the sound and visual tracks in this sequence, which serves to disorient the viewer’s place and thus access to knowledge. The fluid and continuous movement of the camera dovetails with the multilayered soundtrack to suggest a pervasive force that overtakes the characters, structures their social interactions from without and acts upon them anonymously. I have argued elsewhere that ‘the predominance of the dialogue within the diegetic sound (which is placed very high within the sound mix) serves to foreground the malicious and relentless nature of gossip as a social phenomenon. Indeed, this gossip seems to be an inexorable and autonomous power’ (Backman Rogers 2012a: 90). Gossip, which is often a form of asinine and malicious chatter about an absent third person or persons, is for anthropologist Max Gluckman (1963) one of the primary ways in which a society structures itself and establishes its norms and codes of behaviour or convention. It is a socially endorsed and collective form of practice that aids forms of cohesive identification, interpellation with specific ideologies and sanctions only specific kinds of behaviour. Indeed, those who are ostracised from a community are often found to be wanting in terms of their abilities to cohere with prevailing standards and norms set by the community. While the object of gossip is alienated further, those who partake in it shore up their sense of belonging to the group. As Gluckman makes clear, in order to gossip effectively, one must have shared knowledge of both a community and its ancestors and the ‘more exclusive’ a community is, the ‘greater’ will be its ‘amount of gossip’ (1963: 309), making the walls of a closed group often impermeable to outsiders: ‘There is

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no easier way of putting a stranger in his place than by beginning to gossip’ (1963: 313). Marie’s exclusion from this group is heightened by the fact that she cannot take part in the conversation: she possesses neither the right language nor does she know the cast of characters before her (tellingly, she has to ask the Comtesse de Noailles who the King’s mistress is). Since the viewer cannot attribute specific parts of the dialogue to any single character in this scene, the gossip becomes as important a presence as any of the protagonists: indeed, it functions as an independent force that is capable of creating and re-shaping relations of power. (Backman Rogers 2012a: 90) Marie’s status as an outsider is undoubtedly exacerbated here, but the scene also foretells how gossip will play a crucial role in stigmatizing her socially and engineering her downfall, and, of course, refers back to the film’s opening credit sequence that appears in a ‘tabloid slogan’ font. In other words, she has no control over her own image; she will become what the propaganda machine makes of her.

I Want Candy: Rejecting Postfeminist Values Marie Antoinette has both been read and marketed as an outright celebration and endorsement of postfeminist values (see Diamond 2011) and what Hilary Radner (2010) has outlined as ‘girly’ culture. As Todd Kennedy notes: ‘Coppola’s films seem to embody Tasker and Negra’s image of postfeminist culture, which, they assert, “works to commodify feminism via the figure of woman as empowered consumer”’ (2010: 41). However, the film’s irreverent and playful approach to historical details and setting belies its rather complex consideration of how young women are unwittingly forced into a process of expiation for the wanton excesses of a postfeminist lifestyle. To read its images as an ebullient feast for the senses requires denying the affective, melancholic and isolated presence of the eponymous protagonist, who complicates and troubles both the filmic world of surfaces and superficial description. Visually, Marie is often captured ‘in movement’ between Versailles’s official state rooms; her daily existence takes place either in corridors and doorways, or outside in the gardens away from the rigmarole of the

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court. She is figured as a liminal and ambiguous entity who, by her very nature, defies pernicious and finagling attempts to define her: the disjuncture in one scene between her youthful and carefree onscreen presence and the vicious character assassination laid over this image on the soundtrack renders clear the vindictive nature of the gossip machine that functions, in part, to ‘contain’ her. Such moments, which offer the viewer access to Marie’s affective and subjective world, can be sharply contrasted with the film’s presentation of a hermetically sealed world of consumerist and material cultures. If Marie’s private moments are conveyed through haptic and intimate imagery that possesses a tentative and personal quality, the patriarchal and hierarchical world defined by a politics that seeks to objectify her and render her as commodity is marked precisely by an objective viewpoint (that is, the appropriation of Renaissance perspective as an omniscient, disembodied eye onto the world) and a style of editing that has become synonymous with consumerist and postfeminist cultures (MTV). Marie Antoinette is, in my view, a dramatization of the very real tension that exists between a life as it is lived and life as it is repackaged and sold as an aspirational image to be consumed by others. What is at stake here is a feminist politics, which – in the words of Teresa de Lauretis – is predicated on ‘a movement back and forth between the representation of gender (in its male-centered frame of reference) and what representation leaves out or, more pointedly, makes unrepresentable. It is a movement between the (represented) discursive space of the positions made available by hegemonic discourses and the space-off, the elsewhere, of those discourses’ (1987: 26). Marie Antoinette gives us, precisely, this slippage between two regimes of the image and, in doing so, sets forth its critique of a postfeminist culture that is, in essence, but one more form of control over the female body. As Kaja Silverman argues, the normative female subject is ‘simultaneously coerced into an identification with anatomical and discursive insufficiency, and exhorted over and over again to aspire to the ideal of the exceptional woman’ (1996: 33). She must, at once, both approximate a patriarchal ideal of sublime beauty, yet be innocuous and unthreatening. Marie’s failure, in this context, is really her inability to correspond tightly enough to an ideological image that she has inherited and, as a figure who cannot – or in the eyes of the court seemingly refuses – to live up to her role, she is rather troubling. This discrepancy is visualized both charmingly and poignantly through Marie’s analytical and discerning interaction with her own mirror image: her self-surveillance reveals that her adolescent ‘bosom’ (as Louis XV refers to it) is inadequate to the task of filling out her corset generously enough. This image

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is beset simultaneously by aspiration and lack – a dichotomy or disjuncture that underscores a consumerist, postfeminist philosophy. Indeed, Belinda Smaill has argued that Coppola’s films and protagonists have a fundamentally problematic relationship with a postfeminist culture that is saturated in highly specific images of ‘success’ – a politics that is central to Coppola’s elaborate delineation of states of boredom and ennui: ‘Coppola’s women offer an image that is both entrenched in and critiques the sensibility of post-feminism . . . these female subjects demonstrate various attachments to material culture . . . these women have been endowed with a post-feminist capacity for purpose and aspiration and yet this is not sufficient . . . the crisis here pertains to the absence of a desired object when desire becomes almost imperative’ (2011: 158). In Marie Antoinette, Coppola’s subversive and postmodern approach to French history, whilst clearly being a critique of established genres such as the ‘Heritage filmmaking’ tradition that has become so deeply imbricated with false notions of truth and accuracy, enables a detailed and critical exploration of contemporary postfeminist culture and its norms. Coppola’s version of Marie Antoinette proffers, then, as much about celebrity figures, such as Paris Hilton, as it does about the historical figure on which the film is based. Much has, for instance, been made of Coppola’s decision to include one of Converse’s iconic Chuck Taylor baseball boots in the ornate montage of period-specific shoes that was outlined earlier in this chapter. Her astute use of what was originally an error in continuity serves to illustrate the film’s political agenda. This flagrant and jarring anachronism within a single image precipitates a collision between historic and contemporary politics: a comparison that implicates the former in the latter. In other words, if postfeminism dictates that women are the sum of their (consumerist) choices – an edict played out to the hilt in this montage scene that presages the birth of a purely meretricious and superficial Instagram culture that features images of shoes and macaroons in abundance – Marie Antoinette sets forth that our ‘progression’ has been anything but progressive. Just as the ubiquitous Converse boot has been evacuated of its initially practical purpose and cleaved onto a ‘hipster’ youth culture devoid of politics, so too has feminism been recuperated as a vacuous lifestyle ‘choice’. As such, I argue that the film itself effects a critical distance from its rarefied and privileged diegetic world. Just as Marie enacts a form of Irigarayan ‘mimicry’ of certain gender norms and tries to free herself of constriction, so the film’s very form creates an impasse in which both critique and alternative modes of existence can be at least imaged and imagined – even if, tragically, these forms of difference (or

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what de Lauretis terms the ‘space-off ’) are figured as fleeting, fragile or impossibly utopian. By way of conclusion, I would like to explore two facets of the film that adumbrate these alternative modes of existence: namely, mimicry and affect. Irigaray makes an important distinction between strategies of masquerade and mimicry because she believes that masquerade – despite its subversive connotations for many feminist theorists such as Joan Riviere, Judith Butler, Linda Williams and Mary Ann Doane – is still enacted within the boundaries of a fundamentally phallogocentric discourse. For Irigaray, one cannot effect a critique inside of a language and a system that is predicated on masculinity; any attempt to do so merely results in the replication of the very values with which one takes issue. Irigaray notes that masquerade is ‘an alienated and false version of femininity arising from the woman’s awareness of the man’s desire for her to be his other, the masquerade permits woman to experience desire not in her own right but as the man’s desire situates her’ (1985a: 220). As such, a woman may ‘perform’ her femininity and thus reveal it as a cultural construction, but in doing so she also shores up one of the most pernicious aspects of patriarchal culture, namely that to become a normative female subject is to interpellate the male gaze. She exists outside of herself and achieves coherence or recognition as a subject by assimilating and ascribing to herself a set of norms and ideals that have sovereignty over her relationship to her own body and to the world. She does not see for herself, but rather she sees herself as she would like to be seen and, by extension, validated through the patriarchal gaze. By incorporating this dynamic, she consents to her own subjugation. Mimicry, on the other hand, is a tool for creating a radical holding space between Woman as she is constructed in patriarchal discourse and her lived, embodied existence as a human being. She writes that mimicry is ‘an interim strategy for dealing with the realm of discourse (where the speaking subject is posited as masculine), in which the woman deliberately assumes the feminine style and posture assigned to her within this discourse in order to uncover the mechanisms by which it exploits her’ (1985a: 220). The difference between these two strategies is a subtle but crucial one; in effect, the former reproduces the constriction and inhibition of women within masculine culture, while the latter serves to expose the very mechanics by which women’s oppression is promulgated and compounded through the idealized notion of Woman. Mimicry does not simply ‘perform’ femininity to clarify it as a construct – it expounds on the systemic and operative forces that ensure women’s continued subjugation. Moreover, mimicry is invoked outside of patriarchal discourse and thus does not have to extrapolate

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the terms of its critique from within what Irigaray views as a discourse of oppression. Chris Holmlund writes of the importance of this strategy: ‘Irigaray regards “woman” as a linguistic psychic and social construction . . . (and) in order to ask questions about this construction of women as “woman”, she also finds it necessary to posit “woman” as a place outside the vicious circle of patriarchal discourse’ (Holmlund 1989: 108). Marie Antoinette is a film that employs both masquerade and mimicry to lambasting effect, but it is via mimicry that the film creates an internal disjuncture between its images, allowing for the possibility of critique. I think that the film sets forth what de Lauretis has termed ‘the production of woman as text, as image’ and, in doing so, it offers the viewer a chance to ‘resist identification with that image’ (de Lauretis 1984: 36). Some of the film’s most comic moments derive from the ostentatious and hyperbolic forms of dress that Marie adopts; she draws attention to, for instance, the towering, and rather unstable, hairpiece that Leonard (the court hairdresser) creates for her by asking: ‘it’s not too much? Oh, Leonard, you’re the best!’ The camera slowly tracks the considerable length of her hairstyle downwards towards her face, which is heavily rouged, in order to emphasize the ridiculous nature of her attire, but this is not done to mock Marie, for she has deliberately chosen this, seemingly, to parody and skewer her status as a decorative object. One could view such an instance as a playful form of masquerade that affords Marie abatement from the constriction of her role; as such, she can comment upon her situation through her appearance. However, as I have argued by taking my cue from Irigaray, this critique can only take place within the confines of the very system that has bestowed upon her the paltry status of a commodity. I suggest, then, that it is through the manifold formal ways that the film itself explores the processes through which Marie becomes a patriarchal subject that a form of mimicry is achieved. As we have seen, the commodification of the female body is produced via forms of control such as objectification, surveillance and gossip; she is ‘fashioned’ into a role that she is expected to fulfil, one that exists prior to and exceeds her individuality. Her success – and by extension her worth as a commodity – is dependent on the extent to which she can interpellate this normative and impossible ideal. While the film’s historical context situates Marie’s disenfranchisement within the patriarchal codes and conventions of eighteenth-century France, its contemporary aesthetic ensures that the film comments just as lucidly on the insidious encroachment of postfeminism on feminist politics. As such, Marie is defined by

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her place in this world and her sense of self is given extraneously; what the film makes readily apparent is the extent to which she is brought under control by having her agency eviscerated and in such an environment, any form of becoming is stunted or simply denied. As Richard Rushton writes in his Cavellian reading of the film: The world as defined by Versailles is not the kind of world that can offer someone like Marie Antoinette any hope of a fulfilled life. Its rules, regulations, and traditions – and the fact that the court exists in a kind of ‘bubble’ which severs its concerns from the rest of the world ‘outside’; this kind of existence is not one in which there can ever be a successful exploration of oneself. Rather, the system of codes, hierarchies and favours which define the world and society of the ancien régime mitigates against any such exploration. (2014: 123) Following on from Rushton, I argue that Marie Antoinette produces a critique not only of the ancien régime but also of contemporary postfeminist and neofeminist cultures by imagining and imaging a world to come. As Rushton describes it: ‘This is what the film is “about”: the condemnation of one world from the perspective of imagining another’ (2014: 124). This possibility of difference, whilst offering only a fleeting sense of reprieve to Marie herself, resounds outside of the film’s historical setting to figure what I have previously called a holding space for the creation of a life lived otherwise in the contemporary moment. The affective formal appeal of moments imaged from this perspective, namely a brief interlude at Marie’s eighteenth birthday party and the scenes set in Le Petit Trianon, allow the viewer to feel and identify with Marie’s sense of her own liberation. Shot in such a way to emphasize the grain of the film or saturated with light and possessing haptic and improvisational qualities, these sections of the film are markedly different aesthetically from the major body of the film. These are ‘breakaway’ moments that privilege and evoke sensorial qualities and experience, such as the scent of grass and flowers, the rarely seen and ephemeral light of sunrise, the sound of the human body as it moves through undergrowth, the lingering and gentle touch of a lover’s hand, the resonant sound of a finger circling the rim of a glass and the languorous passing of time. Yet, these moments are also fragile and impermanent by their very nature, a quality that is apparent in the disintegrative and grainy texture of the film stock on which they are rendered. This is most apparent in the scene in which Marie watches the sun rise with her friends after her eighteenth

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birthday party. She appears diminutive, luminescent and ghostlike at the very moment in which she passes into adulthood. Indeed, the liminal nature of these scenes – namely, that they take place outside of the court of Versailles – serves to foreground the transience of any possibility of an alternative mode of life. Marie’s obliteration may be foretold by the film’s intimate detailing of a system that we know already will inexorably crush her, but Coppola chooses to end the film with the motif of escape. After Marie flees from the palace with Louis XVI and their children – a flight that we know will not save her from a people who own her fate – an abrupt cut places us back in Marie’s bedroom in the palace after it has been ransacked by an angry mob; the resounding emptiness and silence of this scene prompts us to recall by absence all the bodies that once occupied this space and filled it with life. Light now pours into a room that was once almost overburdened with objects and people, but in the midst of destruction we hear the beating sound of a bird’s wings as it struggles to make its way towards a broken pane of glass and out into the light of the world.

CHAPTER 6

The Bling Ring (2013)

Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behaviour. Guy Debord (2010: 18) This ‘over-reflexive’ expression (personalizing oneself . . . in person etc!) tells the real story. What all this rhetoric says, while floundering about unable to say it, is precisely that there is no one there – no person. The ‘person’ as absolute value, with its indestructible features and specific force, forged by the whole of Western tradition as the organizing myth of the subject – the person with its passions, its will, its character (or banality) – is absent, dead, swept out of our functional universe. And it is this absent person, this lost instance which is going to ‘personalize’ itself. It is this lost being which is going to reconstitute itself in abstracto, by force of signs, in the expanded range of differences, in the Mercedes, in the little light tint, in a thousand other signs, incorporated and arrayed to re-create a synthetic individuality. Jean Baudrillard (1999: 88) Coppola’s fascination with surface reaches its apotheosis in The Bling Ring, her film based on Nancy Jo Sales’ investigative article (2010) for Vanity Fair entitled ‘The Suspects Wore Louboutins’.1 The Bling Ring, which is based on ‘real events’, details the meretricious lifestyles and spurious friendships of a group of young adults who are obsessed with celebrity culture to such an extent that they steal millions of dollars’ worth of high-end designer products from the homes of their idols, such as Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. More specifically, it delineates a world in which subjectivity is ‘fashioned’ and governed by the norms of late capitalist consumerism and tireless social networking, and is thus the film that makes manifest most overtly the imbricate nature of depth and surface that, I have argued, is

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the implicit formal concern of Coppola’s oeuvre to date. The young protagonists do not aspire to be the celebrities to whose specious lifestyle brands they so avidly subscribe, but rather they crave to become the mere representation of those people by acquiring things, adopting certain gestures and poses, and ascribing to ‘lifestyle’ branding. In other words, they do not seek to become people, but to become the images of people that would render themselves meaningful to a social group. As Guy Debord presaged such a phenomenon: ‘The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among women, mediated by images’ (2010: 4).2 Therefore, the film, I will argue, adumbrates a world of extreme superficiality in which people and objects share radical parity, inasmuch as people are treated as objects and subjectivity is reduced to the acquisition of products – a process that is mediated further via an egregious and grotesque display of vacuous selfhood to and for a virtual audience. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has noted of this inextricable relation between people and the objects that they consume: ‘Consumer’s “subjectivity” is made out of shopping choices – choices made by the subject and the subject’s prospective purchases; its description takes the form of the shopping list. What is assumed to be the materialization of the inner truth of the self is in fact an idealization of the material – objectified – traces of consumer choices’ (2007: 15). The Bling Ring investigates precisely this imbrication of the internal and the external in which subjectivity is played out through extreme externalization and commodification. This is, in my view, Debord’s ‘society of spectacle’ in extremis in which an embodied, messy and complex life is absorbed into and decimated by a glossy process of commodification that renders the human as pure, smooth surface, subject only to a virtual nexus of relations:3 ‘Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life, of a negation of life which has become visible’ (Debord 2010: 10). I argue that The Bling Ring reveals precisely the pernicious effects of this negation of ‘real’ life in favour of a virtual and inherently false or debased form of life. Moreover, in this diegetic environment, human contact, and the ethical bond implicit therein, is translated into an absent form of virtual and symbolic currency that is always already deferred; these teenagers can act with impunity precisely because the consequences of their actions are never felt directly as the doing of something to someone; hence the viewer’s incredulity that the film’s narrative could be based on ‘real events’. This is a world in which the recuperation of the actual by the virtual results in a form of ethical death.4

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The young protagonists of the piece are not audacious, but entitled; however, they themselves are the product of market forces, such as advertising, to which they are subjected. If they are unable to move outside of this hermetic and superficial world of surfaces, it is because they are steeped in a culture that dictates a quasi-religious worship of objects through strategic proliferation of iconic (and therefore readily apprehensible and clichéd) images. Sociologist Eva Illouz notes that: ‘At the center of advertising is the metaphor that relationships between people and individuals themselves are mediated by things . . . advertising offers not only a coherent universe of idealized objects, landscapes, and social relationships, but also an aesthetic combining the art of rhetoric with the evocative power of dreams’ (1997: 82). This intoxicating and formidable alchemy that harnesses external ideology and transfigures its power into internalized images forcibly works to shape the subject, the implication of which is that without recourse to sites of contestation or critique, the subject is always already caught up in processes of formation that remain outside of his or her control. By extension of my argument, then, The Bling Ring centres on an ethical dilemma: if the entirety of one’s subjectivity is predicated on the rampant accretion of products and one’s appearance is codified to such an extent that it is only symbolically meaningful if seen by the other for whom it is always already produced – in other words, if one’s sense of self is dependent on continual and ostentatious performative display – how can one be held accountable for one’s actions if, as an agent, one is wholly lacking in any awareness on which ethical imperatives might be based? As such, The Bling Ring stages the actions of its young protagonists as the logical outcome of the superficial culture within which they are inextricably caught. As Sara Pesce has noted of the film’s convergence of celebrity culture, commodification and subjectivity, which is central to the concerns of a postfeminist philosophy: In all of this, fashion plays a key role, making celebrity appear ever more clearly as part of late-capitalist consumer culture, tied to the imperative of economic growth (according to which the star is deployed as a resource to sell more and more). What becomes evident is the increasing influence of fashion branding on social behavior and self-representation among ‘ordinary people’. This coincides with the massive recourse to the global market on the part of major fashion production houses, dating back to the turn of the millennium. (Pesce 2015: 9)

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Figure 6.1. Ironic product placement. Screenshot by the author. In my view, the film’s triumph lies in its portrayal of the heady affects of this postfeminist lifestyle (which is seen to function through extreme externalization to the detriment and demise of an internal world) in service of a critique that never slides into the territory of misogyny. Furthermore, as is the case with The Virgin Suicides, the film sets forth a bleak and dark view of adolescence in which the diminution of identity to pure surface – the very preclusion or abnegation of a person who is, by definition, on the cusp of becoming-other – results in a devastating form of annihilation. If death is already inscribed into the image here, though, the rub is that these young people are so close from the outset to being dead on the inside that they do not care enough to notice their own slow and insidious obliteration into a world of objects.

Girls! Time for Your Adderall: Speeds of Postfeminist Consumption The diegetic world of The Bling Ring is discretely situated in a postfeminist world in which the rhetoric of neoliberal individualism has become increasingly merged with, as we have seen, a form of politics that Radner (2011) has referred to as neofeminist. In turn, neofeminist politics has encroached on and convoluted the distinctly different concerns of feminism as a political movement. Radner has very carefully set out the manifold and crucial ways in which these two forms of politics

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are radically discrete: ‘Neo-feminism, while arising out of the same social conditions as feminism, and sharing some ambitions of second-wave feminism . . . had significantly different goals – goals that coincide not with the reformist agenda of second-wave feminism, but with the individualist and rationalist agenda of neoliberalism’ (Radner 2011: 9). However, Radner is far from the only feminist scholar to have noted this pernicious confluence of values that has served drastically to undercut the central tenets of a collective agenda given voice to by second-wave feminist movements. Nancy Fraser has also commented on how subtle yet incontrovertible this recuperation of feminist principles seems to have been: ‘disturbing as it may sound, I am suggesting that second wave feminism has unwittingly provided a key ingredient of the new spirit of neoliberalism. Our critique of the family wage now supplies a good part of the romance that invests flexible capital with a higher meaning and a moral point’ (Fraser 2013: 220). The allure of this form of co-opted feminist politics, which Nina Power has excoriatingly lampooned as ‘Feminism™’ (2009: 29), lies in its eschewal of feminism’s radical and political import. Feminism is rebranded as a lifestyle choice in which ‘notions of selfexpression, individuality, and self-actualization (often made manifest through consumerist choice) are read as the expression of a feminist impulse’ (Backman Rogers in Backman Rogers and Mulvey 2015: 48). Within this convoluted environment, the young woman especially is appropriated and re-aligned as the ideal mouthpiece or agent to embody and promulgate the norms and ideals of the late capitalist model of subjectivity, a model that incorporates notions of flexibility, autonomy and self-sufficiency that are tantalizingly combined under the aegis of an exhaustive and unfailingly competent identity. As Power puts it: ‘the political and historical dimensions are subsumed under the imperative to feel better about oneself, to become a more robust individual . . . almost everything turns out to be “feminist” – shopping, pole-dancing, even eating chocolate . . . (there is) a remarkable similarity between “liberating” feminism and “liberating” capitalism, and the way in which the desire for emancipation starts to look like something wholly interchangeable with the desire simply to buy more things’ (Power 2009: 27–28). It is precisely this consumerist impulse that is deployed through an egregious neofeminist politics that makes it especially attractive to the young, normative female subject – whose nascent political energies can be reharnessed, abridged and channelled into consumerist choice all too easily; that is, a woman’s right to shoes (a pun played out to rather tedious effect in multiple episodes of the Sex and The City franchise).

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Individuality (or its more powerful and seductive handmaiden ‘self-actualization’), which cultural rhetoric promulgates as the apex of an utterly vacuous ‘feminist teleology’, is ironically expressed through one’s ability to coincide with and subscribe to a normative femininity. This ‘brand’ of femininity, in turn, can only be accessed via the consumption of a cornucopia of products that are heavily marketed at a young female demographic by the beauty and fashion industries (you need a lot of disposable income to embody the late capitalist model of feminism). The form of selfhood at stake here is one predicated not only on a form of superficial perfection, which tends to reduce young women to a prototype despite its basis in ‘individualism’, but also on the ability to accommodate flexibility, perpetual self-invention and availability as the expression of ‘good citizenship and, paradoxically, the sharing of a common culture’ (Radner 2011: 11). This is markedly, and disturbingly, a form of aspirational and self-regulating subjectivity that is liable to induce a fractious and embattled sense of mental health and wellbeing, and, furthermore, a situation in which one is encouraged to take sole responsibility for the detrimental effects of a neoliberal ideology writ on a global scale. That this model of selfhood is invested with a ‘higher meaning and a moral point’ (Fraser 2013: 220) makes it all the more invidious. As Diane Negra has noted: postfeminist status anxiety and the expression of that anxiety (are expressed) through perfectionistic pursuits . . . Shopping as a lifestyle practice, and new concepts of corporeality (in the postfeminist era it seems the body is relentlessly owned, claimed, and managed but it is simultaneously fragmented and ruled by social norms as it has ever been). The themes, values, and lifestyles associated with postfeminism often entail a consumerism that is not only guilt-free but associated with a renewed moral authority. (Negra 2008 117) It is this unbridled form of consumerism made manifest as the affirmation of a social subjectivity, the attendant anxieties over managing that identity, and psychic fractures that this pursuit of recognition induces that forms, I would suggest, the tacit ground against which The Bling Ring is set and the problematics of which it plays out formally. When I say that the film’s politics remains embedded rather than overtly manifest within the diegetic world, I am referring to the fact that the horizon of expectations precipitated by postfeminism functions as a given or an all-encompassing backdrop against which the film’s subtle but incisive critique emerges. However,

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I am not suggesting that the film’s mise-en-scène is at all understated since it works definitively on the viewer to place him or her within the incessant speeds, repetitive cycles and cold, smooth surfaces that impel an unadulterated desire to consume. To be explicit, The Bling Ring is a film that actively immerses the viewer in the unmitigated affects of vacuity, irrational need, nihilistic boredom, selfdestruction and the compulsion to repeat towards self-evisceration. The impact of the film’s opening credit sequence (which functions as an extended establishing shot) hinges on a montage scene of high-end designer shoes, bags, jewellery and make-up that is intercut with excerpts of social media and celebrity news that serve to shore up the value of these products for a particular youthful demographic. It is telling that the objects are named before the people here. As such, Yves Saint Laurent, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Balenciaga and Miu Miu precede the protagonists at the centre of this narrative; indeed, these objects determine the scope of interaction between these characters (possession of high-end designer goods facilitates one’s entry into specific social circles). The film suggests that this specific form of neoliberal politics, which has ushered in the ‘democratization’ of the celebrity lifestyle sponsored by designer goods, is so pervasive that it has come to stand in for or to substitute relations amongst people, which explains why the film’s establishing shot introduces a world of commodities rather than individuals (who are introduced as their virtual Facebook avatars) – moreover, this sequence suggests, through a smooth tracking shot, a parity amongst people, coveted objects and celebrities. As Jean Baudrillard has commented of the effects of consumerism on social relations and our experience of time therein: Strictly speaking, the humans of the age of affluence are surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they were in all previous ages, but by objects. Their daily dealings are now not so much with their fellow men, but rather – on a rising statistical curve – with the reception and manipulation of goods and messages . . . We live by object time: by this I mean that we live at the pace of objects, live to the rhythm of their ceaseless succession. (Baudrillard 1999: 25, emphasis in original) Taking my cue from, and extending, Baudrillard’s thesis, I contend that the film’s implicit concern is the reduction of people to an exchange value measured in terms of material possession and net worth. Moreover, time is experienced as a relentless succession of present moments in which genuine openness and un-

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predictability (the ability to think and to live otherwise) is foreclosed by an iterative structure that is produced by inbuilt obsolescence (fetishize, use, discard, repeat). Coterminous with the reduction of daily experience to ‘object time’ or commodification are sensations of discontinuity, increased velocity and a compulsive need to seek out further visceral thrills. As Bauman identifies: ‘Constant, unstoppable, recommoditization is for the commodity, and so for the consumer, what metabolism is for living organisms’ (2007: 13). This cyclical structure engenders a kind of experience that is not dissimilar from the use of drugs; indeed, time in The Bling Ring is experienced via a succession of interchangeable and fractured ‘moments’, often stimulated by drug use, that are simultaneously felt as real and translated into the virtual via documentation on social media (as an immediate extrapolation and beautification of the real). The final iteration of these sequences explicitly links, through a repetitive cycle of images, use of drugs and social media, dancing and shopping. The music that accompanies this sequence, ‘Fml’ by Deadmau5, suggests an increasingly frenetic pace and, later on, is heard during the scene in which the gang is arrested. The incessant and heavy beat of the song suggests a compulsive drive to repeat, built as it is around a cyclical refrain, even if that compulsion is, ultimately, a self-destructive one. These highoctane, neon-lit moments, which nearly always take place in bars and nightclubs (venues designed to celebrate hedonism and to intensify the present moment as a succession of thrills), are starkly offset by moments of ‘dead time’ in which the protagonists wait for and seek out their next ‘hit’ – sequences that gain in alacrity, partially through the amplified pace of editing. Yet, this peculiarly modern need to break experience into both actual and virtual components creates temporal dysmorphia. Indeed, even if one of the opening moments of the film introduces this theme comically – we hear Nicky’s mother reminding her daughters that they have not yet taken their medication for attention deficit disorder – it also suggests, on a larger scale, a world in which people have a diminished capacity to attend to the irreducible ambiguities and complexities of the present moment or simply to exist in stillness and silence. The very form of The Bling Ring – that is, the sheer rapidity and number of cuts in some of the sequences centring on social interaction – is analogous to the attention span of someone who has too many windows open on their computer screen; notably, this is the first film in which Coppola explicitly employs multiple jump-cuts (most notable in a scene in which Rebecca and Marc snort cocaine whilst driving a stolen car) to suggest discontinuity of

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space and time. In such a noisy and frenetic environment, it is impossible to find coherence or to do something as simple as feel the weight of time’s duration. Indeed, one of the characteristics noted by many users of social media is its ability to make real, lived and embodied life disappear. Alarmingly, hours become days, which become weeks and months; an entire lifespan can be dedicated to living life fundamentally elsewhere (in the ether). Social media manifests, through its endless parade of airbrushed and filtered pictures that document a human existence, persuasive evidence of an essential inability to lead one’s life (for if you are documenting it, you are, by definition, not living it). The present, in this respect, can only exist if one steps outside of it; it did not happen unless it happened as an event on Facebook. Notably, Marc carefully – indeed, almost fetishistically – uploads all his photos to Facebook in an attempt to promote his social currency. His inability to live his life outside of how someone else might see it through the distorted lens of social media not only fractures his own sense of himself and who he may become, but also his ability to cohere as a person in time as duration. We see clearly this sense of disconnect and isolation from the real in the third sequence set in the nightclub that the young protagonists frequent; rendered through a panning shot, which traditionally denotes unison and community rather than separation, Marc and his female peer group are seen to be too absorbed in making the perfect image of themselves that would capture this moment to be able to interact with one another in actuality. Their presence and the very dynamic of their social rapport are mediated via their mobile telephones. They lead their lives under the aegis of objects and self-objectification. This experience of ‘object time’, in turn, demands that the subject be at once inside and outside of duration; in short, it requires that one turn oneself into a mediated object to be read by others instead of immersing oneself in the fluctuation of real embodied existence. This is tantamount to a parsing down or evacuation of the richness of reality as felt before it is narrativized. To ‘name’ oneself as a hashtag is precisely to deny one’s ambiguity and to choose a drying up of existence in exchange for a prepackaged, framed and filtered cliché; that is, to recast oneself as an entirely shallow image. Notably, The Bling Ring marks Coppola’s first use of the digital image and aesthetic. As we have seen, a central feature of her previous films, as is especially the case in The Virgin Suicides, is her thoughtful use of the analogue image and various material forms of film, such as standard 35 mm but also 16 mm and 8 mm, to evoke an oneiric, nostalgic and palpable sense of ‘past-ness’ and memory. By contrast, her use of the digital image, specifically the ways in which she deploys its

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qualities of clarity and shallow depth of focus, serves to emphasize the present, contemporary moment vividly. As such, Coppola invokes visual tropes from social media, enabled by digital forms of image-making, to create a mise-en-scène in which central narrative themes such as superficiality and speed are registered formally. I would argue that these aesthetic choices serve to immerse the viewer within the structural forces that have created the world that the film critiques. As I said earlier, it is to the film’s credit that it manages to create a viewing experience in which the viewer is not invited to lambast the (female) characters as such, but to attend to the values and ideals of the culture into which they have been inculcated. If, for example, their belief system seems meretricious and their lives are governed by a culture that actively encourages them to engage with objects (and people) as disposable, the formal structure of the film suggests to the viewer that our critique should be directed at the hegemonic and dominant social structures that have created and upheld commodity fetishism. In other words, their refusal to privilege people above objects or to engage with ethics is a direct result of a culture that preaches a cycle of fetishization and disposal to its community or, as Debord describes this cycle of use and debasement, ‘the object which was once prestigious in the spectacle becomes vulgar as soon as it is taken home by its consumer – and by all its other consumers. It reveals its essential poverty (which naturally comes to it from the misery of its production) too late. But by then another object already carries the justification of its system and demands to be acknowledged’ (2010: 69). Indeed, another frequently unacknowledged factor both within the fashion industry and its market of consumers is its reliance on and relentless exploitation of Third World labour;5 Coppola intimates at the labour concealed by the glamorous surface of such industries and the lifestyles they enable in one of the film’s final scenes, in which a Puerto Rican woman employed as a family maid is held in the background plane of a tableau shot that images a white, American, upper-middle-class family (who are simply one of many manifestations of absent and indifferent parenting in the film) having breakfast. Unbeknownst to the parental figures here – who are presented in the forefront planes of the image and who are too absorbed in making ‘detox’ juices and reading the newspaper to notice the incremental sound of a police car approaching their house – their daughter Chloe (who is seen apathetically scrolling through internet sites on her smartphone) is about to be arrested for her involvement in the gang’s considerable theft. It is a small but significant moment in a film that, despite its portrayal of a loud, vulgar and brash form of consumerist lifestyle, ex-

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presses its subtle critique through irruptions, gaps and seemingly inconsequential details. It is this moment, which precedes the trial and sentencing of the ‘Bling Ring’ gang, which delivers the film’s most potent form of schadenfreude, for here the critique is clearly levelled at structural orders (economic, state familial institutions) rather than merely one young female who remains so deeply imbricated with the system of which she is a part that she can hardly even register concern for her own welfare. That Coppola’s critique of the postfeminist lifestyle specifically remains implicit in the film’s narrative is also made manifest in her young protagonists’ unthinking allegiance to the central tenets of a postfeminist lifestyle: the young female characters notably never make reference to the emotional and physical labour of historic feminist movements that have enabled their ability even to have a choice in the first place, even if that choice has been reappropriated and expressed as a consumerist impulse. Indeed, throughout the film, they remain unmindful of and therefore unable to reflect critically on the nebulous set of values within which they are already immersed. Nicky, in particular, promulgates nondescript, ridiculous and vague aspirations to become a ‘world leader’ and ‘push for world peace’, whilst being unable to name the African country in which her sister is doing ‘charity’ work for their new-age church founded on a morally bankrupt and commodified form of spirituality (the scientific ‘lifestyle’ philosophy espoused by ‘The Secret’).6 It is this lack of differentiation and distance between the public and the private, depth and surface, performance and internal reflection that characterizes a diegetic environment in which it is impossible for young women to function as affective agents in a wider world. It is significant, then, that The Bling Ring locates its politics, via the use of a framing device, within the young male, queer body of its central protagonist and narrator, Marc. That the film’s focalization coexists with but does not coincide with Marc’s point of view helps to elucidate how Marc’s own struggle to fit in with his social group can be readily cleaved onto the postfeminist narrative in which one’s ability to ‘self-actualize’ is produced and maintained by ‘buying into’ a lifestyle and becoming inextricably bound up with one’s own image (as one would be seen by another person). Indeed, Marc’s transition from awkward and insecure teenager into a young man who is entranced with his own image is notably played out through reflective surfaces and the acquisition of products. That Marc possesses a kind of sensitivity and self-awareness about what is happening to him, an awareness that is strikingly absent amongst his female friends, marks him out as both a knowing

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participant and an astute observer of the dynamics at play in the overwhelming situation in which he finds himself embroiled. In short, he identifies strongly with his female peers (he states that he is in love with Rebecca, the gang’s ringleader) because their attempts to assimilate into a lifestyle that would mark them out as legitimate social subjects – a struggle that they fail to gain enough perspective to identify – is precisely his own. Marc is seduced by Rebecca’s values, just as postfeminism sets up a horizon of expectations to which the young woman is implicitly told it is in her interests to subscribe. Indeed, the film’s most tenderly affective moments, rendered through Marc’s point of view, serve to hold apart Rebecca from the rest of their friendship group via the use of slow-motion and close-up. In a film of which the soundtrack is characterized by loud, abrasive and, at times, misogynist rap music, the use of Oneohtrix Point Never’s hazily distorted and ethereal ‘Ouroboros’ during their interactions serves to mark out Rebecca as the emotional and vital centre of Marc’s adolescent world. It is her attention that illuminates his sense of self-worth, quells his anxiety and gives his life coherence; her approbation renders his fragile subjectivity meaningful and important not only to/for himself, but also, by extension, to his peer group. It is telling, then, that the film’s ethical concerns are grounded through a male voice: a voice that can identify a subtext to which its female characters remain oblivious and to whom the postfeminist paradigm perhaps would not immediately stick. As such, the film demonstrates formally how the struggle for subjectivity and belonging – albeit a false and superficial sense of self and community – is powerfully and seductively aligned with adopting the dominant norms, gestures and beliefs of an ideology that exceeds and supersedes one’s specificity. The Bling Ring does not stage an ad hominem assault on its protagonists, but rather on the zeitgeist that produces this form of unthinking and homogeneous identity politics.

Yo, Sluts: Identity as Currency in the Era of Social Networking The young protagonists of The Bling Ring could be described as so-called ‘digital natives’; which is to say that they have come of age in an era of perpetual online or virtual connectivity in which the media that they consume inherently shapes their identities and the very mores of their social interactions. Moreover, the prevalence of and reliance on this use of (social) media ensures that one acquiesces to a form of continual surveillance. Indeed, Sherry Turkle’s (2011) fascinating – al-

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beit somewhat biased for being polemic – sociological study of the ways in which virtual and social medias are now inextricably bound up with the formation of contemporary (in particular, adolescent) identity suggests that young people tacitly accept that the rules of engagement online brook no privacy or personal space.7 Perhaps the most maleficent aspect of this new form of self-regulation is that its efficiency rests on internalization so that, as Michel Foucault (1979: 195–228) has argued with regard to Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the panopticon, social subjects no longer have to be policed because they have become selfsurveillant, since they assume that they are potentially being watched all of the time. The Bling Ring images a world in which its subjects uncritically assimilate this dynamic and subject themselves to a digital panopticon in order to recast themselves as a brand (Marc and Rebecca’s friendship is cemented in their shared wish to have their own ‘lifestyle brand’); indeed, one of the gang’s nighttime heists is conveyed to the viewer through an aesthetic of surveillance in order to remind the viewer that these adolescents are growing up in a world in which they know they are always being watched. This pervasive surveillance, in turn, compounds anxieties over image-management and is acutely manifest in the fastidious and obsessive ways in which appearance is fashioned and policed. In short, it requires a near-continual form of self-surveillance, at the heart of which is the desire to approximate an ideal as one would like to be seen. Doubtless concerns over appearance have always plagued young adults, but this apprehension of surface and impression is disquietingly heightened in an environment of constant visibility that actively demands that one attend to externality to the detriment of an internal, private life. In such an environment, it is not surprising that one’s identity only becomes apparent once mediated through the gaze of the other, for whom the anonymous and omnipresent eye of social media stands in. This overarching schematic determines and delimits the ways in which these young adults engage with others and how they regard themselves as thinking and affective agents in the world. As Debord states of a society centred on spectacle and visibility in which relations amongst people are reduced to relations amongst images and objects: ‘The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as an instrument of unification. As a part of society, it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness . . . it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness’ (2010: 3). The Bling Ring portrays a world in which every gesture, movement, activity and word is cultivated and choreographed to the point of gratuitous affectation, and then mediated into

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an image for an anonymous audience, the result of which is a reductive homogenization of all appearance and behaviour. However, in this diegetic world, this compliance with, or even courting of, surveillance does not result in a form of self-policing and self-regulating behaviour that serves to uphold the law (as Foucault would have it), but rather results in brazen displays of transgression. In The Bling Ring, this does not constitute a rebellious or politically charged pushing-back against the law, but rather is indicative of the extent to which the lives of these young protagonists have been absorbed and recuperated into the virtual, so that actions played out in the real world do not pertain to having any consequence. As Turkle outlines it: ‘In that (virtual) state, we forget that what we do affects others . . . when we live a large part of our personal lives online, these complex empathetic transactions become more elusive. We get used to getting less’ (2011: 234). The ease with which one can move from the virtual to the actual and, by extension, the failure to differentiate between the two has resulted, as Turkle has argued further, in ‘unsettling isolations of the tethered self . . . tethered to the network through our mobile devices, we approach a new state of the self itself’ (2011: 154–55). A culture of surveillance results here in an impulse to produce images that coincide with and feed into, at alarming speed, hegemonic and highly specific ideals of beauty and power (both of which are associated with wanton consumption) as a form of self-branding; in other words, one’s subjectivity is reduced to the scope of a virtual avatar and one’s ‘authenticity’ is measured, somewhat perversely, through one’s ability to correspond closely enough to that ideal image as virtually mediated and understood. As Pesce reminds us: ‘The specific practices of self-branding revolve around a distinctively contemporary and capitalist search for “authenticity”. They are based on interactivity and are made possible by the contemporary post-feminist context of media commitment and consumption engagement’ (2015:15). People are reduced to the scope of a digital image that resides within a vast databank of images. Fundamentally, this is to the impoverishment of the human subject, since it serves to fix and stultify identity as an object for consumption. As I said earlier, one of the most striking aspects of the film is the way in which it investigates a culture in which objects and people are portrayed as equal precisely because both are subjected to the same market forces that determine exchange value (or, as Debord puts it, ‘the spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image’ (2010: 34)). The Bling Ring suggests that what it means to be a human being – and, by extension, to embark on reciprocal and respectful relationships with others – is

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fundamentally altered and reduced when one acquiesces to becoming an image (to becoming-surface) and, moreover, to becoming a socially mediated form of image (a commodity or brand). In short, what is at stake in coinciding with the cliché is a form of internal death. The most curious manifestation of this culture of surveillance is the phenomenon of ‘the selfie’: an image that, despite being taken by oneself, is predicated on being seen through another person’s gaze. It is tantamount to the production of selfhood as an object created precisely for consumption (as an attempt to see oneself as one would like to be seen by the other). Whereas Foucault’s critique of various forms of state apparatus serves to open up sites of contestation against hegemonic power, the selfie, as deeply emblematic of our contemporary virtual moment, evinces a near-complete assimilation with and acceptance of the norms of dominant structures of power. It is perhaps somewhat trite to point out that we live in an image-saturated culture in which, according to Google statistics, over 93 million self-portraits are uploaded daily to social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but as an overwhelmingly popular – and therefore important – current iteration in the history of self-portraiture, it is a telling indication of the ways in which young people have come to regard themselves through the other (that is, through the structures that surveil them). This wave of socially sanctioned narcissism invokes tendencies amongst people – the overwhelming majority of whom are female young adults and teenagers – to dissect, choreograph, distort, reframe, package, airbrush and filter their own image in order to shore up a virtual, online identity; moreover, the prevailing norms of beauty that govern this form of image-making ensure that these images recuperate and appropriate visual tropes that play to the male gaze. As such, the ‘selfie’ is potentially a malign tool for prompting young women to hail their position as normative female subjects by making them complicit with an oppressive form of patriarchal, regressive politics that posits them precisely as an object through processes of reduction and commodification. What is at stake in this laborious process is not merely approbation by one’s peer group – although this has surely intensified within such a hermetic and false environment – but one’s very sense of self. For what this perpetual cycle of obsessive and compulsive behaviour reveals is that if one is not constantly seen, one ceases to exist altogether. As Debord (2010) and Baudrillard (1994) already predicted with the rise of commodity fetishism and a culture of spectacle, the virtual image has now lost its representative function and has come to stand in for the totality of the person or object it pertains to

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represent. This perverse reversal therefore demands that a woman’s validity depends on her ability to approximate her own virtual and highly artificial image – a dilemma that feminist scholars from Naomi Wolf (1991) to Angela McRobbie (2015) have noted affects women acutely. I believe that female virtual identity – as it is currently manifest – is beset by an obsession with one’s own image as it may be seen by an (implicitly male) observer; indeed, sociologist Ben Agger has claimed that ‘the selfie is the male gaze gone viral’ (quoted in Mirzoeff 2015: 64). The forms of identity it creates are repetitive (by which I mean the ubiquity of certain gestures, repeated framings and hashtags), homogeneous and static. The selfie functions as a clichéd image precisely by evacuating the human subject of her complexity, ambiguity and irreducibility in favour of singularity and superficiality. It is the ultimate fixation of and with identity. The young protagonists of The Bling Ring relate to themselves almost exclusively through their own avatars. They learn to assess their appearance meticulously and continually ask one another to dissect and affirm their own virtual or mirror image; Marc in particular, who has a softness in his facial features that suggests youthfulness and vulnerability, worries that he is ‘ugly’ and not an ‘A list looking kind of guy’. In fact, the girls in particular actively encourage objectification by breaking down their appearance into its components (‘your butt looks awesome!’, Nicky tells Sam) and wear clothes that serve to emphasize and sexualize their bodies. A dominant aesthetic feature of the film is an objective view of one of the girls contemplating her own mirror image. By extension, the film suggests implicitly that these adolescents can only see themselves through the refracted gaze of the other and, more broadly, social media: their sense of self resides almost entirely in images. The film’s repertoire of repetitive shots evinces a fascination with how appearance is cultivated and for whom, and, as such, it is markedly a film about the manifold ways in which we come to objectify each other and ourselves. The hermetic structure of the selfie, namely that it is by its very nature inward-regarding and only refers beyond itself to other images that share its likeness, seeps into the diegetic world. The mise-en-scène abounds with reflective surfaces that function as screens and mirrors; even car windows and sunglasses are rendered as mirrored surfaces that, instead of acting as a frame onto the world, reflect back one’s own image. If the protagonists cannot think outside of themselves and their own situation, it is because their very mode of engagement with themselves and their environment is predicated on insularity and superficiality as a perverse form of self-surveillance.

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The sheer plethora of images they take of themselves – that nearly every social gathering is demoted to an occasion to document oneself – infects the ways in which they interact with each other. In two scenes, the camera takes on the vantage point and aesthetic of a webcam to and for which Marc and, later on, his friends perform. The rub here though is that they are not even performing for each other, but for themselves; disconcertingly, they do not feel abashed or embarrassed about freely electing their own virtual image as a dance partner (these scenes are toe-curlingly tacky). It is a depressing and hermetically sealed exercise that serves no other purpose than to compound their narcissism and to further hone their image as it would be seen by a hypothetical member of their peer group. Power, then, is measured in one’s ability to embody an ideal version of oneself; Coppola shows how power is made manifest in a sequence that is delivered in slow motion and transforms the young protagonists into more iconic versions of themselves. Yet this shot, which prominently features Kanye West’s song ‘Power’, in which they walk towards and beyond the camera (to which they remain oblivious and therefore ‘cool’) alludes to generic cinematic tropes such as the slow-motion shot used in Men’s Cinema, which Stella Bruzzi (2013) convincingly argues works to convey a sense of omnipotence and grandeur to the viewer, and paparazzi footage of celebrities entering and exiting venues. That its point of reference is so overtly the clichéd image debunks, even as it bestows, the very sense of power and recognition that these young people crave. As such, this moment functions more broadly in the film as a demonstration of how power and status are conveyed aesthetically, a form of cultural shorthand in which the young protagonists are exceptionally well-read. It is fitting, therefore, that it is this moment that Coppola chose for the film’s marketing campaign – an image that, in turn, is used to sell the film as a commodity. When not posing for their own camera or those of their friends, they adopt a limited number of poses, gestures and phrases that are seemingly appropriated from black music cultures, in particular rap and hip hop. As such, identity is the summation of a series of reappropriations, recyclings and recuperations that signal towards a wholesale evacuation of authenticity or genuine meaning. This form of identity does not coincide with a postmodern conception of the self, since it does not utilize modes of pastiche and parody as a conscious and political appropriation or recuperation; rather, it is an entirely empty and meaningless form of iteration. In this vein, it is noteworthy that the song to which Sam and Nicky energetically dance when Marc first encounters them, and that functions as a sound-

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bridge into the next scene, suggesting that it is crucial to how he remembers this event affectively, is Azealia Banks’ ‘212’. The song is aggressively sexual in tone and deliberately appropriates derogatory language and profanity to talk about the female body and female relationships both with each other and with men: ‘who are you bitch? . . . I’m-a ruin you cunt! . . . . what you do when I appear? when I premier? Bitch the end of your lives are near. This shit been mine . . . I’m fuckin’ with your cutie q, what’s your dick like homie? what are you into?’ The song, perhaps inadvertently, speaks to the ease with which young women can denigrate one another through use of negative stereotypes (Banks certainly wants to foreground the violence of language here), but it also is a song about many forms of cultural appropriation. Indeed, Banks herself has been excoriatingly vocal about her views on white appropriation of black culture. That Nicky and Sam not only miss the context of the song (which is also overtly about East Coast/New York culture, recuperated here via the LA nightclub scene), but dance in a fashion that mimics a style associated with Black rap and hip hop music suggests a willingness and ability to adopt the guise and gestures of a subculture unthinkingly – indeed, to dismiss or ignore the political context of music that they deem to be purely entertaining. Rather, it is the song’s nomenclature of social relations (bitch, cunt, nigga, dude, homie) that is most meaningfully relevant for their social group. Marc indicates his assimilation into this female peer group by calling the girls ‘bitches’ and they, in turn, call him ‘dude’ and ‘homie’. This acquisition signals a wider allegiance to a postfeminist culture, which entails, as Diane Negra has noted, ‘an aggressive (re)codification of female types. In gestures that often tout the “freedom” from political correctness, postfeminist culture revives the “truths” about femininity that circulated in earlier eras – women are bitches, golddiggers, “dumb blondes”, spinsters, shrews and sluts. The postfeminist twist here is that women are to apply these characterizations to others and sometimes to themselves in a display of their political and rhetorical “freedom”’ (2008 10). What this language enacts, like the selfie, is a reduction of a person and who they may become to type. Crucially, however, Marc’s integration (and inculcation) into this friendship group is facilitated by his acceptance of their language, their fashion and, on a very fundamental level, their superficiality. Marc’s retrospective narration of the events that lead up to their arrest attests to his intelligence, perspicacity and sensitivity – qualities that he must suppress in order to be incorporated into this group of girls. If he is bemused by the fact that, after his arrest, he gains over eight hundred friend requests on Facebook and even has a fan page created in his name, he knows it is

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because America has a ‘sick fascination’ with certain clichés, in this case ‘a Bonnie and Clyde sort of thing’. His social validity, in other words, rests on his capitulation to surface and to stereotype. Turning oneself into an image or re-creating oneself as a brand necessarily entails the siphoning off of ambiguity and, in some sense, of the real. Online, one is compelled to reduce one’s ‘self’ even more drastically; if the virtual is the dominant mode through which we encounter not only other people but also ourselves, this has far-reaching consequences for what a person can become. As Turkle puts it aptly: ‘Online, we invent ways of being with people that turn them into something close to objects. The self that treats a person as a thing is vulnerable to seeing itself as one . . . these are fearful symmetries’ (2011: 168). Moreover, the economic logic that governs interactions – which reduces people to resources to be used up – dictates that human beings can be picked up and dropped at will; as Bauman has it: ‘in the model of a “pure relationship”, just as on the commodity markets, partners are entitled to treat each other as they treat objects of consumption. Once permission (and the prescription) to reject and replace an object of consumption which no longer brings full satisfaction is extended to partnership relations, the partners are cast in the status of consumer objects’ (2007: 21). The Bling Ring is not devoid of poignant and affective moments, and the most notable of these is a close-up shot of Marc’s face coupled with a point of view shot that informs the viewer that Rebecca, on being arrested, has also taken steps to end her relationship with Marc by ‘de-friending’ him on Facebook. Later on, when she is seated next to him in court, she cannot even bring herself to meet his gaze. For Rebecca, her erasure of Marc’s virtual existence coincides with his embodied presence: she simply chooses to refuse to see him. In this way, the film delivers a simple yet startling indictment of how virtual culture, at its very worst, encourages people to treat others as objects to be used and brutally discarded. That Rebecca is seemingly only concerned with what Lindsay Lohan thinks of her actions, but remains unaffected by – indeed, feels no compunction over – the pain she may have caused Marc is revelatory of how shallow her emotional world is. No longer graced with her attention, Marc’s internal world crumbles once more; this plays out as a devastating transition in his face, which is now lit by the harsher grey light of day. This visual conversion suggests not only awareness, but also a return to an unfiltered mundanity – the very antithesis of his dazzling nightlife. His life has come full circle back to the moment we first encounter him in cold daylight, unadorned and painfully unsure of himself in front of his bedroom mirror. The

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subsequent and final shots of him in the film detail his swift transformation and transit into anonymity and incarceration. Here, despite sharing space with others, he remains isolated in close-up. However, this sobering conclusion to the film prompts us to recall that Marc was always a young adult looking to encounter another person in her complexity; he loved Rebecca and, in some hopeful sense, his openness and vulnerability to that remain as a potential force of alteration. If Rebecca is a young woman who has chosen to engage affectively with bad objects, an obsession evident in her need to smell and taste the accoutrements of beauty used by her false idols, Marc is perhaps now someone who craves actual connection outside of a dynamic that objectifies him. Fittingly, the film plays out to Frank Ocean’s ‘Super Rich Kids’, a song that reminds us that ‘super rich kids with nothing but loose ends, super rich kids with nothing but fake friends’ may still yet search for ‘real love’.

Notes  1. Retrieved 23 June 2018 from http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/03/billionaire-girls-201003.  2. The concept of the spectacle is somewhat nebulous, and its applicability, especially to a contemporary context, is open to contestation. Debord’s argument is written in the wake (and style) of Marx’s Communist Manifesto (the first lines of Debord’s polemic being an inversion of those of Marx). Debord dates the inception of the spectacle as a phenomenon from as early as 1927, a year that marked the first televised images and the screening of the first ‘talkie’. Undoubtedly, Debord is talking about a mediated environment. What is not so apparent is whether his theory can be extended to the digitization of images and the widespread usage of social media. In my view, though, this paradigm shift can be very usefully theorized through Debord. Indeed, it is my contention that digital culture and social media, as but one manifestation of the spectacle as a relation of power, is precisely the endgame of what Debord outlines in his theory and is, perhaps, presaged within its pages. We can, at the very least, state that the spectacle is the point at which power (proper) coalesces with representational power and becomes an all-encompassing framework that harbours few sites for contestation; that is, we cannot think ourselves outside of ideology. It is the recuperation of reality into appearance such that there is no discernible difference between reality, appearance and representation. Reality, as it were, is abstracted. Therefore, the spectacle in its purest form is power. It is capital at a degree of abstraction that it has become image in that it functions as a relation of power that mediates relationships between people and between people and their environment. Moreover, the spectacle is both its own means and end: a hermetically sealed and cyclical relation that ensures both its efficacy and its reification. As a closed system, it is totalizing and globalizing. For the purposes of this chapter, which centres as much on neoliberalism and postfeminist economics and ideologies as it does on The Bling Ring, I suggest that there is a marked convergence between the mediated relation Debord delineates

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 3.  4.

 5.

 6.

 7.

as spectacle and, in particular, neoliberalism as a philosophy that determines the extension of market principles into every form of life. Likewise, postfeminism, as a pernicious set of ideals that circulate (as images) amongst women, ensures an intensification of self-scrutiny and surveillance that results in a suffocating obsession with appearance. Young women, harnessed and recuperated as the ideal neoliberal subject, are particularly caught up in this process of specularization, which is only compounded by a forced capacity to consume (inculcated by the beauty and fashion industries). Spectacle, as it were, colonizes everything in such an environment, leading to the attrition of emotional, psychic and physical health. For an extensive analysis of the attention economy and the spectacle as a cinematic mode of late capitalist production, see Beller (2006). In this sense, I am not referring here to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical affirmation of the indecipherability of the virtual and actual as a positive force. In The Bling Ring, the virtual, which is often shown as a literal environment (which should not be misconstrued with Deleuze’s delineation of the virtual), does not represent a horizon of potentiality or possibility, but rather facilitates the foreclosure of who and what a person can become. See Deleuze 2005: 66–80. Baudrillard states further: ‘consumption is a form of magical thinking … In everyday practice, the blessings of consumption are not experienced as resulting from work or from a production process; they are experienced as a miracle’ (2007: 31). Emma Watson’s performance of/as Nicky is chillingly effective precisely because she plays her as a young woman who appears to believe sincerely that her every action should be choreographed for the camera. Perhaps it is of importance that the person she is based on, Alexis Neiers, starred in her own reality television show called Pretty Wild at the time of the events that the film portrays. Privately owned sites, such as Facebook and Google, own all of the information that users divulge online; they can sell this data to companies who use it strategically to market products back to those users. I was surprised that it took the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 for the average consumer of media to realize this.

Conclusion On Beguilement

If women’s experience is defined as inferior to, less important than, or ‘narrower’ than men’s experience, women’s writing is automatically denigrated . . . She wrote it but look what she wrote about becomes She wrote it, but it’s unintelligible/badly constructed/thin/spasmodic/uninteresting, etc., a statement by no means identical with She wrote it, but I can’t understand it (in which case the failure might be with the reader). Joanna Russ, quoted in Sophie Collins’ Who is Mary Sue? (2018: 26) One sets off to investigate you see, to develop the facility to really notice things so that, over time, and with enough practice, one becomes attuned to the earth’s embedded logos and can experience the enriching joy of moving about in deep and direct accordance with things. Claire-Louise Bennett (2015: 40–41) I opened this book on a personal note inasmuch as I admitted to being precisely someone who is beguiled by Coppola’s images – who is taken in by them – and to having my own inevitable prejudices, foibles and preferences. I am the cultural dupe that Modelski describes: I am incontrovertibly shaped by the things that I love and that spark the cerebral junctions of my imagination. I have no desire, then, to conclude this book on an abstract, scholarly note devoid of heart and feeling. I am simply not that kind of scholar. This book has been a concerted attempt on my part to take the surface of the image, its contours and provocations as a matter of utmost seriousness. I have also endeavoured to parse the complex gender politics at play within critical and academic readings of decorative or beautiful images. I hope that, by now, this much is apparent to the reader (otherwise I shall have failed in my task). It is not my intention to reiterate here what I have, to the best of my efforts, already relayed in what precedes these words. Instead,

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I wish to write briefly about the relationship of ‘deep and direct accordance with things’ that Coppola’s films offer us. I also want to say a few words about beauty and beguilement. Sofia Coppola is a connoisseur of the image: it is not earth’s ‘embedded logos’ that she brings us into intimate knowledge with, then, since the image is always at a remove from reality (at best, it can achieve a ‘reality effect’), but the oftenobscured ways in which an image is always already readable; of this she gives us a visceral, embodied knowledge. Her politics is a feminist deconstruction through the image – hence the prevalence of clichés in her visual repertoire. The essential point of her filmmaking is to make us aware of the manifold ways in which meaning, how we read one another, is nearly always pre-given. This is especially minacious when brought to bear on the female body. Coppola’s work palpates the delimitations, the restrictions and the suffocations of a visual economy that governs subjectivity. She painstakingly draws out the implications of what this kind of relationship to the image means for (implicitly female) selfhood; it is no coincidence that her films are redolent with a passing into death for the pivotal caveat contained within the beguiling image is that to become surface, to align oneself with the cliché, initiates one’s death. Therefore, it is perplexing in the extreme to me as to why anyone who pays careful attention to, who comes into that ‘deep and direct accordance’ with, her images would continue to labour under the stunning misapprehension that her work is easy on the eye, but impossible to gain any purchase on intellectually or emotionally. Coppola’s supreme gift as a visual artist is to invoke what we may feel before we can name it: hers is a direct knowledge of things in that she thinks through and in images. This deep form of internal knowledge is conveyed through mood and sensibility. One of the reasons why Coppola’s work has been so readily dismissed as a charming, light soufflé is because the profound matters of mood and sensibility do, in fact, present a vehement if not direct challenge to the acts of extrapolation and intellectualization. As Susan Sontag notes of the camp sensibility, ‘a sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about’ (1964). Indeed, Sontag suggests in Against Interpretation (1966) that exercising one’s intellectual interpretation on a work of art is counter-productive to submitting to an ‘erotics of art’. I would suggest that Coppola’s cinematics is felt before it is understood. This is precisely the experience I conjured in this study’s opening: I did not understand what had happened to me when I saw The Virgin Suicides for the first time, but I did know that I was changed incontrovertibly, that my internal psychic and emotional struc-

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tures had been altered and shifted around by those images. In short, I had been powerfully beguiled. What might be the purpose or place of beguilement in Coppola’s work, then? Intrinsic properties of a beguiling object are beauty and deception. In a sense, we are duped or fooled by that which beguiles us; such an object or person can hypnotize, fascinate, enthral and exert a powerful charm in order to draw one in close and wield control. A beguiling image seduces us before we can read it. It gains purchase on the viewer before that viewer has time to assimilate it critically. The beguiled is closely aligned with the cinematic female body – especially that of the femme fatale, amongst the most punished of women in visual history. Therefore, I would suggest that critical dismissal of Coppola’s work is also a direct and unequivocal result of anger: you promised me beauty and all I got was this wretched sense of melancholy, despair and loss, and where can I take these emotions I cannot quite articulate? The purpose of beguilement is imbricated within Coppola’s feminist deconstructive politics since it enters us as one thing – a pleasing surface which we already know how to read – and takes root as something altogether more troubling. Her process of beguilement is not, essentially, about deception, but rather about easing the passage necessary to articulating what underscores our shared visual and cultural language. Coppola’s films are disquieting because we are left with a nebulous and queasy feeling that is not easy to dissipate or disregard: that at the heart of Western visual culture is a deeply rooted hatred and woeful lack of knowledge with regard to the female body and female experience. I am not at all surprised that male viewers often claim to have a difficult time watching her films, since her purpose is fundamentally to decentre and displace the (white) male experience and body. Indeed, her surgical dissection of masculinity reveals it to be in a state of acute crisis. In place (or perhaps even in response) to this, Coppola offers us a feminine feminist philosophy – akin to that espoused by Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray – as a form of visual counter-politics to dominant or hegemonic phallic regimes of the image. It has been my argument throughout this monograph that Coppola seeks to recuperate and use a dominant regime of images (precisely as a set of clichés) against itself. Hers is a thoughtful and novel visual grammar that breaks apart, tears asunder, those established circuits or ways of understanding the world and each other. If, for instance, the crisis remains markedly and tragically unresolved at the end of The Virgin Suicides, it is because the film centres on a bankrupt and sexist ideology within which one is simply incapable of recognizing the ways in which young

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girls, for instance, are already subjected to horrific forms of internal death and demise in order to transition into adulthood. At the devastating core of so many of Coppola’s films that centre the female body as one struggling for agency is the implication that a hetero-patriarchal capitalist culture is starkly set against is in fact directly hostile to the becoming of the female body, to female solidarity and to female thriving (this is, in fact, exactly the message conveyed in The Bling Ring). During our lively and thoroughly enjoyable conversation at the British Film Institute in the autumn of 2017, Fiona Handyside and I noted that many viewers often express frustration at the seeming passivity of Coppola’s heroines within abhorrently suffocating situations (although suicide is clearly far from being a passive act, I might add). For some, this makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to view her films from within a feminist framework. Indeed, as a brief aside, I have often wondered that Coppola would be ideally suited to adapting Jean Rhys’ characters onto the film screen (with whom readers often express similar levels of vexation and infuriation). This is, though, to miss the point entirely. Coppola’s work is deeply existential in that it dares to ask to what extent one is truly free. I do realize that for many readers, this will leave that terrible taste of spoilt privilege in the mouth: if white, rich, privileged, Western women are not free (as is the case with nearly all of Coppola’s characters), then who precisely is? The limitations they face fade, surely, into obscurity in contradistinction to the very real and daily attritions of poverty and racism from which many people cannot escape (issues that are, admittedly, not addressed in Coppola’s films). I have often been told by people who take it upon themselves to relay their dislike of Coppola’s filmmaking to me at conferences and social interactions that Charlotte from Lost in Translation, for instance, is not worthy of sympathy for this precise reason; in fact, is she not just downright spoilt, insular and annoying? To which I respond: yes, she is! But that is not all that she is (and I shall not be passing on this message to Coppola since we are not acquainted and I doubt that she cares for such tactless opinions anyway). I think Coppola’s question – in fact, the central tenet that determines her thinking on film – is this question of freedom. The seeming consolations of security, whiteness and wealth are, in fact, far from sources of comfort and solace in Coppola’s worlds. Objects, for instance, take on that nauseating quality to which Sartre so infamously referred in his novel Nausea (1975) the world is a constant reminder that we are out of step, out of joint, with our environment. Excruciating loneliness is perhaps the defining characteristic of Coppola’s heroines; they are steeped in isolation from the world and from other fellow beings. Within such a

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world, Coppola asks what does it take to act? Can I, in fact, alter this situation I find myself in? How did I arrive in such a place and position? To philosophize is, perhaps, a luxury, but it is something that I believe that we as humans do instinctively and it is an activity that is central to Coppola’s cinematic provocation. Self-consciousness defines our condition as a species. Coppola’s characters tend to be burdened with self-consciousness and, if they are not (that is, if they lack the ability to self-reflect critically), this has absolutely dire, even catastrophic, consequences (as in The Bling Ring). To come to the point, then: Coppola’s heroines are worthy of our consideration because their mode of being in the world is, in fact, a meditation on a kind of female existence – its strictures and its comforts (but mostly the former rather than the latter). Moreover, I suggest that this female knowledge of sorts is conveyed as a feminist phenomenology; that is, the position of being-girl-becoming-woman. Coppola is highly adept at translating moments of threshold, of transition onto the screen. This inherent ambiguity within her images is also a further reason why critics often do such a remarkably poor and careless job of describing what is at work, visually and philosophically, within her films. Her narratives bring us to the cusp of something and leave us on the margin of alteration. Their work continues outside of the hallowed realm of the screen. These images do no only beguile, they also haunt and return, trouble and subsist somewhere just beneath the skin.1 They penetrate the surface to reach into our core. They urge us into thought.

Note  1.

Further to my comment about Coppola’s suitability to adapt any novel by Jean Rhys, I also believe (in fact not-so-secretly wish) that she would bring Shirley Jackson’s tales of female gothic and domestic horror to the screen.

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Index

abjection/the abject, 25, 28–38, 40 absence, 25, 32, 35, 48, 88 absurdity, 70, 82, 84–85 Accord, Lance, 84 action genre, and masculinity, 92, 99–100 adolescence, 5, 14–15. See also The Bling Ring (2013); The Virgin Suicides (1999) advertising, 5, 27, 34, 41, 106, 141 affect in The Beguiled, 51 in The Bling Ring, 142, 145, 150 cinematic, 2, 83, 122, 123 in Lost in Translation, 87–88 in Marie Antoinette, 126, 133, 137 agency, female, 10–11, 17, 60–61, 163 alienation, 80, 84, 86, 96, 119, 123–124 ambiguity, 70–71, 73, 86, 164 American Civil War, 48–49, 62 American indie films, 8, 17 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 84 Augé, Marc, 105–108 auteur theory, 9 authorship, female, 7–11 Bainbridge, Caroline, 126 Barthes, Roland, 9, 26 Baudrillard, Jean, 139, 145, 153 Bauman, Zygmunt, 140, 146, 157 beauty industry, 2, 5, 14, 144. See also fashion/ fashion industry Beauvoir, Simone de, 95–96 The Beguiled (2017), 3, 45–65 beguilement, 7, 160–162 being being-in-the-world, 87 and doing, 76–78 and masculinity in crisis, 102

and purpose for others, 79–82 Benjamin, Walter, 83, 96, 123 black people, oppression/exclusion of, 47–49, 51 The Bling Ring (2013), 139–159 Bolton, Lucy, 73, 75 Braidotti, Rosi, 1, 18 Brevik-Zender, Heidi, 124–125 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 31–32 Bruzzi, Stella, 92, 99, 102, 155 Camus, Albert, 69, 70, 71, 75, 80, 82 Cannes Film Festival, 47, 115 Capa, Robert, 128 Carrie (1976), 37, 38 castration (impotence), 58–59 celebrity, 79, 92, 95–98, 104–110, 139, 141, 145 ceremonies. See rites of passage Charney, Leo, 70, 83, 87 cinema, marriage of concept and affect in, 83 cinematography Lost in Translation, 84 Marie Antoinette, 121, 123, 130–131, 137–138 Somewhere, 108 The Virgin Suicides, 37, 41, 43 See also close-up shots Cixous, Hélène, 18, 58, 61, 86–87, 162 The Laugh of the Medusa, 45–46, 50, 57, 64 cliché, 17–18, 20, 26–27, 39, 79, 81–82 in The Bling Ring, 153 in Marie Antoinette, 115–116, 123 in Somewhere, 92–93, 95, 102, 104 still image as, 44, 128 See also death, female close-up shots, 31, 63, 110 in The Bling Ring, 150 in Marie Antoinette, 121, 123 in The Virgin Suicides, 37, 41, 43

174 . INDEX

collective memories, 128 commodification, 140–142. See also under female body consumerism, 128–129 and alienation, 123–124 postfeminist, 17, 132–134, 141–150 and social media, 157 Coppola, Sofia awarded best director at Cannes, 47 as a brand, 6 as feminist auteure, 7–11 and privilege, 5 Creed, Barbara, 29–30 critics, on S.C.’s films, 47, 85, 115–117, 128, 162 on aesthetics, 3–4, 37 on aesthetics and narrative, 69–70 on cinematography, 123 critique in Marie Antoinette, 117, 134–135 in Somewhere, 91–92, 94, 100, 105, 107 in The Virgin Suicides, 28, 30 Cullinan, Thomas, 47 Davis, Judy, 121 death, female, 31–33, 123–125, 161. See also cliché; surface Debord, Guy, 139, 140, 148, 151, 153 Deleuze, Gilles, 26–27, 28, 99, 102, 110 designer goods, 145 Devereaux, Michelle, 27 difference, 12, 18–19, 39–40, 86, 137 drift, 83–88 Dunst, Kirsten, 37, 57, 59, 120–121, 129 Dyer, Richard, 35 editing The Bling Ring, 146 continuity editing, 13 in Marie Antoinette, 123, 124, 128, 133 in Somewhere, 96–97, 102–103 Eugenides, Jeffrey, 26, 27 existentialism, 71, 163 Facebook, 156–157 families, nuclear, 94 fantasy, 13–14, 30, 34, 40–41, 42–44, 63

Faris, Anna, 78 Farrell, Colin, 57–58 fashion/fashion industry, 122–125, 141, 148 female agency, 10–11, 17, 60–61, 163 female authorship, 7–11 female body as (abject) object, 12, 28–38, 40, 57 and becoming, 163 commodification of, 12, 96, 118–119, 121–126, 136 and gaze, 121–123 Hollywood’s treatment of, 11, 12 and the male gaze, 7, 17–18 as other, 30, 39 and spectacle/fantasy, 96–97 violence/control wrought on, 13, 28 white/black, 51 See also social media female gaze, 11, 46–47, 54, 60–61, 64, 94 female gothic, 50–55 female spectator, 12–16, 93–94 femininity/femaleness, 3, 135, 144. See also death, female feminism, second wave/neo-feminism, 142–143 feminist counter-cinema, 15, 19 feminist hauntology, 28, 30, 40 feminist labour, 13, 14 femme fatale, 162 fetishism, 28, 37, 39, 40–41, 94, 124–125 Film Comment, 115 film studies, discourses on S.C.’s films, 3–4 Firestone, Shulamith, 45, 54, 56–57 flâneur/flâneuse, 86 Fleenor, Juliann, 52 Foucault, Michel, 6, 9, 10, 151, 153 fragmentation, 83, 86–87, 96–97, 104, 119 Fraser, Antonia, 127–128 Freud, Sigmund, 5–6, 46, 116 Galt, Rosalind, 3, 20, 116, 117–118 gaze, 121–123, 129. See also female gaze; male gaze Gilda (1946), 40 Gluckman, Max, 131–132 gossip, 131–132 gothic genre, 49–55, 63

INDEX. 175

Handyside, Fiona, 4–5, 17, 49, 163 Hartnett, Josh, 37 hauntology, 28, 30, 40 Haynes, Todd, 31 Hollywood myths/ideologies of, 10–11, 12–14, 19–20, 92–98 as nonplace and nonidentity, 104–110 postmodern culture of, 91 horror genre, 25, 29–30, 37, 38, 51 identity and the abject, 29–30 and nonidentity, 91, 104–110 as performance, 81–82, 95 and/as void, 71–73, 75–76 See also social media; space image(s) and context, 2 deconstruction of, 14 feminist politics of, 16–20 public, 81 and subjectivity, 91–92 surfaces of, 2–3, 20, 115–116 thinking through, 8 See also cliché; social media; spectacle individuality/individualism, 142–144 Instagram, 77, 134 intertextuality, 37 Irigaray, Luce, 118–119, 122–124, 127, 135, 162 Japanese culture, 69–70, 85 Jeffords, Susan, 92, 93 Jenkins, Patty, 13 Johnston, Claire, 19–20 Kennedy, Todd, 91, 125, 132 King, Geoff, 81 Kristeva, Julia, 25, 28–29, 33 Kubrick, Stanley, 30 Lalanne, Jean-Marc, 37 Lauretis, Teresa de, 12, 13, 14, 126, 133, 136 Libération, 115 light/lighting, 35–36, 38, 108 liminality, 70, 76–77, 82, 85, 110

Lin Tay, Sharon, 8, 72 Lost in Translation (2004), 69–89, 90, 163 lost objects, 39–40, 43 Lynch, David, 5, 31 male body, 61–63, 93–94 male gaze, 7, 15, 18, 38, 125–127, 135, 153–154. See also gaze male power. See patriarchy Malick, Terence, 5 Marie Antoinette (2006), 115–139 critical response to, 115–116 DVD of, 15 masculinity in crisis, 8, 27, 58, 90–95, 99–104 and male authority/myth, 92–93 and violence, 38, 56, 59, 63 See also patriarchy masquerade, 135 material culture. See consumerism; surface McGowan, Todd, 72 melodrama, 70, 74–75 men’s cinema, 99–100, 155 Merck, Mandy, 95–96 Metz, Christian, 39 Millais, John Everett, 30, 32–33 Millet, Kate, 46, 55–56, 59 mimicry, 134–136 mise-en-scène The Bling Ring, 145, 148, 154–155 as decorative, 4 Somewhere, 102 The Virgin Suicides, 34 misogyny, 13 modernity, 70–71, 83–88 Modleski, Tania, 11, 53, 92, 99–100, 160 mood, 16, 20, 26, 161 movement, 99 Mulvey, Laura, 12, 13, 40, 41–42, 45, 127 Murphy, Amy, 71, 74–75 music in The Bling Ring, 146, 155–156, 158 in Marie Antoinette, 128 See also sound/soundtrack myths. See under Hollywood

176 . INDEX

narratives/narration, 39–44 and abjection, 40 classical, 28, 34, 39–40, 69 dominant fictions, 93–98 and fetishism, 28, 37 and identification, 13–14, 15 Negra, Diane, 132, 144, 156 neoliberalism, 142–145 nostalgia, 26, 42, 84, 105 nothingness, 71, 88, 110

repetition, and performativity, 95 repression, narrative of, 50–51, 52, 53, 64 resistance, 14, 40 revenge, 46, 54, 56 rites of passage in The Beguiled, 62 in Marie Antoinette, 118, 120 in The Virgin Suicides, 33, 34, 37 romantic narratives, 55–56, 70 Rose, Jacqueline, 39–40 Rushton, Richard, 137

the other, 30, 39, 52, 78, 80 Park, Robert E., 81 patriarchy, 46, 59–60 and auteur theory, 9 as dominant fiction, 19 and female alienation through consumption, 119 mimicry within, 135–136 narratives of, 15–16, 17, 54–55 revenge upon, 46 See also masculinity Perbedy, Donna, 92, 101 performance, and prostitution, 95–96 Pesce, Sarah, 141, 152 phallocentrism, 10, 64, 100 photographs, 39–44, 77 place, and nonplaces, 104–110 point-of-view shots, 75, 103 pornography, 27, 34, 41 postfeminism, 4–5, 132–134, 141–150 postmodernism, 91–92 poststructuralism, 9 Power, Nina, 143 present/presence, 83–88, 108 production design, 3, 7–8, 9, 17 projection, 93, 94 prostitution, and celebrity/performance, 79, 95–96 psychoanalysis, 5–6, 28–29, 40, 46, 59, 72, 116 Radner, Hilary, 142–143 rape, 38, 59

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 69, 70, 71, 80, 83 on nausea, 86, 163 selfhood, culture of, 87, 92 individuality, 142–144 selfies, 153–154 Siegel, Don, 47 Silverman, Kaja, 100, 127, 133 on classical narratives, 28, 40 on the female voice, 10 on masculinity/patriarchy, and dominant fictions, 15, 19, 90–91, 93–94 slow-motion shots, 37, 41, 109, 150, 155 Snitow, Anna Barr, 54 social media, 134, 146, 147, 150–158 Somewhere (2010), 90–112 Sontag, Susan, 41, 42, 77, 161 sound/soundtrack The Bling Ring, 150, 155–156 Lost in Translation, 16, 87–88 Marie Antoinette, 16, 131–132 Somewhere, 109 See also music space negative space, 85–86 and nonplace/nonidentity, 104–110 public space, and identity, 74–75, 107 See also time spectacle, 3, 140, 151, 153 spectatorship, and violence, 41 spectatorship, female, 12–16, 93–94. See also female gaze Spielberg, Steven, 128 stereotypes, Hollywood, 20. See also cliché

INDEX. 177

still images, 39–44 supermodernity, 105–108 surface in The Bling Ring, 139–140, 142 as decoration, 3–4 in Marie Antoinette, 115–116 in The Virgin Suicides, 118 surveillance, 125, 130, 136 modern culture of, 150–155 self-surveillance, 133, 151 Tasker, Yvonne, 92, 132 technology, and absurdity, 84–85 time and commodification, 145–147 dead time, 91, 103, 108–109, 146 liminal moments of, 62 and movement, 99 and space, 91 and temporal anxiety, 83–84 See also photographs; space tourism, 70, 72, 82

trauma, 25, 30 Turkle, Sherry, 150–151, 152, 157 Vanity Fair, 139 Vidor, Charles, 40 violence absence as, 48 gendered, 15, 37–38, 56, 59, 63–64 and spectatorship, 41–42 See also gothic genre The Virgin Suicides (1999), 2, 6, 15, 25–44, 59, 90, 116, 161–162 as horror film, 30 surfaces in, 27, 118 visual pleasure, 7, 12. See also gaze; spectacle voice, female, 10, 11 black, obviation of, 47–48 voiceover, narrative, 26, 31, 130 white feminism, 48 white supremacy, 47 whiteness, 11, 25, 34, 35–36, 52 Wonder Woman (2017), 13 Woodworth, Amy, 16