The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola 9781350244306, 9781350244337, 9781350244320

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO SOFIA COPPOLA

THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO SOFIA COPPOLA Edited by

SUZANNE FERRISS

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Suzanne Ferriss, 2023 Suzanne Ferriss has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Ben Anslow Cover image © Screenwriter and director Sofia Coppola on the set of Focus Features’ atmospheric thriller THE BEGUILED. (2017) (© PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive / Alamy) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any ­information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-4430-6 ePDF: 978-1-3502-4432-0 eBook: 978-1-3502-4431-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Camilla

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  xi Acknowledgments  xv

Introduction  1 Suzanne Ferriss

PART I  The Big Screen  19 1 The Virgin Suicides The Cinematic Style of Loss: Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides  21 Justin Wyatt 2 Lost in Translation Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation: Liminality, Loneliness, and Learning from An-Other  35 Lucy Bolton 3 Marie Antoinette The Journey: The Reception of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette  50 Nicole Richter 4 Somewhere Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere: The Most American of European Films  61 Todd Kennedy 5 The Bling Ring Surface Play: Aesthetics and Performance in Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring  75 Maryn Wilkinson 6 The Beguiled The Knowledge of Feeling in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled  91 Michelle Devereaux

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7 On the Rocks Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks and “Personal” Filmmaking  106 Suzanne Ferriss

PART II  Small(er) Screens and Streaming  123 8 Music Videos “If You Don’t Have At Least Two Careers, You Don’t Fit In”: Transmedia Authorship and the Music Videos of Sofia Coppola  125 Mathias Bonde Korsgaard 9 Short Film Girls Rule in Sofia Coppola’s Lick the Star  139 Cynthia Felando 10 Television Rewriting the (Christmas) Genre: The Legacy of Robert Altman in Sofia Coppola’s A Very Murray Christmas  155 Todd Kennedy 11 Advertising Fashion Campaigns: Sofia Coppola’s “Mini-Films”  169 Caryn Simonson

PART III “Coppolism”  187 12 Cinematography Sofia Coppola’s Minimalist Mystique  189 Cameron Beyl 13 Fine Art and Photography Art on Film/Film as Art: Sofia Coppola’s Cinema  205 Suzanne Ferriss 14 Music The Feeling of the Moment: Music in the Cinema of Sofia Coppola  222 Tim J. Anderson 15 Design Designing Luxury: Sofia Coppola’s Production Design  237 Saige Walton

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16 Acting Sofia Coppola, Indiewood, and Performance  255 Cynthia Baron and Yannis Tzioumakis

PART IV Interpretations  279 17 Auteurism Sofia Coppola: Commodity Auteur  281 Pam Cook 18 Curation Sofia Coppola: The Auteur as Curator  289 Lawrence Webb 19 Feminism “You Cannot Go Deaf to Women’s Voices”: Feminism and the Films of Sofia Coppola  304 Anna Backman Rogers 20 Postfeminism Postfeminist Approaches to Sofia Coppola  321 Fiona Handyside 21 Race and Class Making Whiteness: The Absent Presence of Race and Class in Sofia Coppola’s Feature Films  338 Jamie Ann Rogers 22 Place Psychogeography and Cinema(car)tography: Cinematic Tourism and Sofia Coppola’s Films  355 Laura Henderson 23 Celebrity Celebrity in Sofia Coppola’s Cinema: The Aesthetics of Performance  371 Delphine Letort Part V  Reception  383 24 Critical Reception “All That Style Overwhelms the Substance”: The Critical Reception of Sofia Coppola’s Work  385 Katarzyna Paszkiewicz

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25 Academic Response Sofia Coppola in the Curriculum: Feminist Film Pedagogies  403 Emma McNicol, Whitney Monaghan, Grace Russell, and Belinda Smaill 26 Popular Reaction Sofia Coppola, Cosmopolitan Icon  418 Sara Pesce Sofia Coppola: A Timeline  435 Select Bibliography  439 Filmography  442 List of Contributors  446 Index  452

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book. 1.1

The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018 1.2 The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018 2.1 Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003 2.2 Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003 2.3 Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003 3.1 Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006 3.2 Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006 4.1 The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols © Embassy Pictures Corporation 2014 4.2 Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2011 4.3 Modern Times, directed by Charlie Chaplin © The Criterion Collection 2010 4.4 Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2011 5.1 A beige color palette marks the suburban and Caucasian affluence in Chloe’s house while evoking catalogue-style advertisements. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013 5.2 The Bling Ring constantly shifts its own aesthetics along the surface, as in this digital “collage” of paparazzi shots of reality-television personality Audrina Patridge, which mimics the “skimming” of a gossip magazine. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013 5.3 In The Bling Ring, Nicki Moore as played by Emma Watson both captures and relays the Bling Ring’s fascination with fame, media, and performance. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013 6.1 The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017 6.2 The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017 6.3 The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017

22 29 40 45 46 53 56 68 68 71 71

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6.4 7.1 7.2 7.3 8.1

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9.1 9.2 9.3 10.1 10.2 10.3 11.1

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12.1 12.2 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 15.1

The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017 99 On the Rocks, directed by Sofia Coppola © Apple TV+ 2020 115 On the Rocks, directed by Sofia Coppola © Apple TV+ 2020 116 On the Rocks, directed by Sofia Coppola © Apple TV+ 2020 117 In Kevin Shields’ “City Girl,” Coppola reuses this signature shot from Lost in Translation. Kevin Shields, “City Girl,” directed by Sofia Coppola © Emperor Norton Records, A Warner Music Company, 2003 131 The third shot in Phoenix’s “Chloroform” singles out the lead singer, Thomas Mars—Coppola’s husband—as the object of the female audience’s longing gaze. Phoenix, “Chloroform,” directed by Sofia Coppola © Glassnote Records, 2013 133 Lick the Star, directed by Sofia Coppola © Sofia Coppola 1998/The Criterion Collection 2018 143 Lick the Star, directed by Sofia Coppola © Sofia Coppola 1998/The Criterion Collection 2018 144 Lick the Star, directed by Sofia Coppola © Sofia Coppola 1998/The Criterion Collection 2018 145 A Very Murray Christmas, directed by Sofia Coppola © Netflix 2015 162 A Prairie Home Companion, directed by Robert Altman © New Line Cinema 2006 166 A Very Murray Christmas, directed by Sofia Coppola © Netflix 2015 166 Catherine Deneuve in 1978 archive advertising film footage. “In Homage to Mademoiselle,” directed by Sofia Coppola for the Mademoiselle Privé Tokyo Exhibition, October 2019 © Chanel 172 The Mademoiselle Privé door to Chanel’s atelier. “In Homage to Mademoiselle,” directed by Sofia Coppola for the Mademoiselle Privé Tokyo Exhibition, October 2019 © Chanel 173 Coco Chanel on the mirrored staircase in her atelier. “In Homage to Mademoiselle,” directed by Sofia Coppola for the Mademoiselle Privé Tokyo Exhibition, October 2019 © Chanel 178 The mini-film for the Chanel 19 handbag incorporates DIY cut-outs in a collage style. Directed by Sofia Coppola and Roman Coppola, 2020 © Chanel 179 Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003 194 The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017 200 An Ed Ruscha print propped against a wall in Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2011 207 John Kacere, Jutta, 1973 © John Kacere. Image courtesy Louis K. Meisel Gallery 209 John Kacere, Maude, 1977 © John Kacere. Image courtesy Louis K. Meisel Gallery 209 Yelena Yemchuck, Sasha, New York, 2010. Courtesy of Yelena Yemchuck 213 Layered images and barred effects in The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017 243

ILLUSTRATIONS

15.2 Coppola’s “punctuative” design in Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003 15.3 “Embellished” production design, theatricality, and artifice in Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006 16.1 Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003 16.2 Kirsten Dunst in The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017 16.3 Kirsten Dunst and Colin Farrell in The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017 17.1 Sofia Coppola for Louis Vuitton 19.1 The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018 19.2 Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006 19.3 Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006 20.1 The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017 20.2 The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013 20.3 On the Rocks, directed by Sofia Coppola © Apple TV+ 2020 21.1 The white women before their white house in The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017 21.2 The “Asphyxiation Ball” in The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018 21.3 On the Rocks, directed by Sofia Coppola © Apple TV+ 2020 22.1 Marie and her daughter blend into the landscape in Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006 22.2 Bob awakens abruptly in Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003 22.3 Utagawa Hiroshige’s Hakone; Kosui (1833–4). Reprinted with permission from The Metropolitan Museum of Art 22.4 Stills illustrating Coppola’s tendency to include close-up images of hands grasping at haptic elements in the environment. Lost in Translation (left), directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003 and The Virgin Suicides (right), directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018 23.1 Kirsten Dunst makes a cameo appearance in the nightclub, an effortless performance of celebrity that contrasts with the self-conscious performance of the teen wannabes. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013 23.2 Bill Murray’s acting talent shines through the photographic silent frames of Bob Harris in Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003 26.1 A Facebook post by Kouta Kanamori, March 6, 2021 26.2 A Facebook post by Nobuko Photography, January 24, 2018

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246 249 270 271 273 286 308 311 312 327 330 333 344 347 351 358 359 359

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375 422 422

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Table 25.1 Table activity provided to students in Google docs format to encourage collaborative work

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Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this volume came from Camilla Erskine who, at the time she proposed it in May 2020, was filling in for Anna Coatman at Bloomsbury. I’m grateful to Camilla for her guidance in shaping the initial vision of this volume and to Anna for enthusiastically supporting the project and seeing it through to publication with the able assistance of Veidehi Hans. Above all, my thanks go to the volume’s contributors, who eagerly embraced the idea of a comprehensive guide to Sofia Coppola’s work and graciously contributed their ideas and time—all while working separately from various locations around the world during a global pandemic. It has been an honor, a privilege, and a pleasure to work with such talented professionals as they devoted their individual expertise and ingenuity, from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, to illuminate the multifaceted dimensions of Coppola’s prodigiously varied work. As always, I was supported by my equally far-flung friends and family, most of all by Steven, who, among other kindnesses, kept a stock of Sofia sparkling wine in the fridge.

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INTRODUCTION Suzanne Ferriss

Writer-director. Director-star. Fashion designer-icon. Award winner. Multi-hyphenate, multitalented, Sofia Coppola has won accolades for her work across a range of creative platforms. Best known for her filmmaking, she retains the distinction of being the first American woman nominated for an Academy Award for directing, for Lost in Translation (2003). (While she lost to Peter Jackson, she did win the Oscar for best screenplay.) Multiple award nominations followed, with Somewhere (2010) capturing the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and The Beguiled (2017) earning Coppola the best director trophy at the Cannes Film Festival. In over two decades she has produced seven feature films united by a distinctive, signature style. But her achievements extend beyond those intended for the big screen. She has also created projects for small(er) screens: music videos, commercials, a Christmas special, and a limited series. Trained in the fine arts with experience in fashion, she has curated an exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s photos, directed an opera for Valentino, and created sets for a show at Chanel. As a creative artist of such distinction and range, Coppola has attracted not only popular and academic attention, receiving accolades, but also public scrutiny and criticism. Fulllength books and countless articles have been devoted to her cinematic artistry, yet some critics continue to dismiss her films as preoccupied with surface and sensibility. Her films are praised for their psychological depth and cultural critique by some, while charged as elitist, privileged, and racially insensitive by others—or sometimes all at once. Her forays into commercial work and well-documented professional and personal relationships with fashion designers, musicians, and artists can be seen as distractions from the serious work of cinema or key to appreciating her creativity as a filmmaker and beyond. Without question, her films and her related work merit serious consideration and detailed study. This volume is the first comprehensive reference work devoted to the entire body of Coppola’s work. While focused on her films, it also considers her engagement with music video, television, advertising, fine arts, and photography, providing an unparalleled overview of her creative output. It brings together contributions from an international team of leading scholars and emergent voices, including those in the film industry, drawing on a diverse range of approaches in film, music, fashion, celebrity and gender studies, visual and material culture, reception studies, and more to capture the complexities of Coppola’s work and its cultural significance.

2The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola

Life and Work In retrospect, it might appear a foregone conclusion that Sofia Coppola would become a film director. She was born on May 14, 1971, the daughter of two filmmakers—Francis Ford and Eleanor (née Neil) Coppola—and had a cinematic christening of sorts when she appeared as an infant in the baptism ceremony at the end of her father’s film The Godfather (1972). Her older brother Roman followed in the family tradition, establishing a career as a producer and director of music videos, but Sofia initially and deliberately chose another path. “I was really proud that I had interests outside of my family,” Coppola says. “Everyone in my family worked in film so it made me less inclined to.”1 Nonetheless, she was conscripted by her family members and received an informal education at home and on set. She did take acting classes and had small parts in her father’s films in the 1980s, memorably receiving excoriating reviews for her appearance in The Godfather Part III (1990). While some have assumed the criticism turned her away from a career in film, the director claims otherwise: “since I never wanted to be an actress it wasn’t devastating for me.”2 Her experiences support this contention. At the time she stepped in for Winona Ryder—who had pulled out of the film owing to illness—she was studying art history at Mills College in Oakland, California. She had collaborated the year before with her father, but as a writer and costume designer. She coauthored the script for Life Without Zoe, her father’s segment of New York Stories (1989), and designed the costumes, selecting Chanel for its characters. In the 1990s Coppola decided to attend art school, first at the California Institute of the Arts, with designs on being a painter. “I wanted to be a painter. They told me I wasn’t.”3 So she transferred to the ArtCenter College of Design to study photography. Her artschool experiences allowed her to transcend disciplinary boundaries and immersed her in a network of artists working in multiple fields. She met Lance Acord, who would become her cinematographer for Lick the Star, Lost in Translation, and Marie Antoinette, on the set of a fashion shoot with Bruce Weber. She was drawn to music, appearing in music videos directed by her friends, and collaborated with Spike Jonze on a 1993 video for Walt Mink’s “Shine” before the two wed in 1999. Rather than following her husband’s lead into directing, however, she dabbled as his producer and, with her friend Zoe Cassavetes, hosted a short-lived music television series Hi Octane (1994). With another friend, Stephanie Hayman, she launched the clothing line MilkFed in 1994. She also did some modeling, served as a contributing editor for Details, a men’s fashion magazine, and took fashion photographs for Dune magazine in Tokyo. However, she was eventually drawn to directing as the best way to combine her artistic interests. In 1996, she codirected Bed, Bath and Beyond (with Andrew Durham and Ione Skye) and, on her own, directed the Flaming Lips’ “This Here Giraffe” (1996) music video. But it was directing her short film Lick the Star (1998) when “something clicked professionally.” She realized that “movies incorporated all the things I liked: clothes, music, photography.”4 She capitalized on the talents of her creative friends, collaborating with co-designer Stephanie Hayman on the script and selecting Lance Acord to film in black and white, a choice that underscored the dark nature of the clique-ish high-school drama while also granting its protagonist a glamour befitting her pretensions. The film aired on

INTRODUCTION

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Bravo and the Independent Film Channel and, in 2018 was packaged as an extra on the special edition Criterion Collection DVD of The Virgin Suicides, implying the parallels between the two films for their shared attention to teen suicide. As Cynthia Felando argues, however, Lick the Star deserves attention on its own as “as a bold, subversive, and modern short film that reflects the era’s sensibility by featuring the fascination of one middle-school-aged girl for another along with the shifting power dynamics among a crew of popular girls.” But, more so, as she demonstrates, the film has been unappreciated as an historically important short film in general. The origins of Coppola’s first full-length feature came from a musician friend, Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth), who gave Coppola a copy of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. Inspired by its original cover image of long blonde hair, she began writing an adaptation of his story of the Lisbon sisters, told retrospectively from the perspective of the neighborhood boys obsessed with them. Initially intending it as an exercise, she realized that she could, collage-style, piece the boys’ memories together to form an entire script.5 With the assistance of an executive at her father’s production company American Zoetrope, she contacted Muse Productions (Roberta and Chris Hanley) who already had the rights and their own screenplay. After reading Coppola’s, they abandoned theirs and signed on as coproducers with Coppola to direct.6 As Justin Wyatt details in his analysis, Coppola’s adaptation can be seen, in part, as a reaction to the death of her brother GianCarlo (Gio) in a boating accident when she was fifteen. Its evocation of the novel’s 1970s setting showcases her facility with the imagery of the period in what Wyatt terms “visual bursts.” He also notes that while she profited by association with American Zoetrope, who provided connections to actors (Kathleen Turner, Danny De Vito, Scott Glenn, and Kirsten Dunst), producers (Francis Coppola, Fred Roos, and Fred Fuchs), as well as coeditor Melissa Kent and sound designer Richard Beggs, the first-time director asserted her own vision. The film was praised as an auspicious debut, with critics noting its dreamy aesthetic and fidelity to Eugenides’ book. It introduced elements that would come to characterize Coppola’s cinema: distinctive selections and uses of music, a preference for visual storytelling over dialogue, stylish cinematography influenced by fine arts and photography, and thoughtful pacing. Twenty years after its initial release in 1999, the film was selected for rerelease as part of the prestigious Criterion Collection, a testament to its enduring resonance with audiences. The success of her first film emboldened the director to try her hand at another adaptation, this time of a nonfiction text. In 2001, Coppola optioned the rights to Antonia Fraser’s biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey and worked for several months on a script. Dissatisfied with the results, she set it aside and began work on an original story idea.7 What would eventually become the script for Lost in Translation began as an experiment in writing a short story.8 As she transformed the story into a screenplay, she had Bill Murray in mind for the male lead and elicited his participation by using Wes Anderson and screenwriter Mitch Glazer as intermediaries. During production, Coppola gathered what we can now see as the original members of a core team of collaborators: she again chose Lance Acord as cinematographer and Nancy Steiner to design the costumes. She brought production designer Anne Ross on board, who would go on to work with Coppola on all her features with the exception of Marie Antoinette. She retained

4The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola

sound designer Richard Beggs, who has worked on all her features, and selected Sarah Flack to edit, as she has all Coppola’s subsequent films. Working on a small budget (approximately $4 million) and without permits, the team filmed using actual locations in Tokyo and Kyoto, including the Park Hyatt hotel. Using handheld cameras, they shot scenes, often at night, in city streets, on subway platforms, at a local hospital, an arcade, a karaoke bar, and other actual locales to capture contemporary realities of the urban landscape, already familiar to Coppola from her work in the city for MilkFed and from promotional tours for The Virgin Suicides and The Godfather Part III. The film’s narrative about two unhappily married jet-lagged travelers, combined with its focus on acting and celebrity endorsements, has prompted speculation that it is a roman à clef about Coppola’s marriage to Jonze, with Murray’s costar Scarlett Johansson standing in for the director. Not only has she denied this, the film’s continued appeal to audiences proves that its import transcends its assumed autobiographical basis. In her chapter in this volume, Lucy Bolton ascribes this to “the balanced, reciprocal relationship of mutual renovation at its heart.” Its most memorable scene is the final wordless exchange that precedes the characters’ separation, a bravura example of Coppola’s ability to emotionally engage viewers without using a single word. Lost in Translation remains Coppola’s most lauded film to date. In addition to Coppola’s Oscar nomination for directing and Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the film was nominated for 128 others, across all key categories, earning 96 more.9 The AFI (American Film Institute) named it one of the ten most outstanding movies of the year in 2003 and the BBC named it one of the twenty-first century’s greatest films (#22 of 100) based on responses of 177 international film critics.10 As Bolton argues, “the film consolidated Coppola’s concerns with isolation, liminality and girlhood, already expressed in The Virgin Suicides.” Her third film, Marie Antoinette (2006), extended these same concerns, leading many to refer, in retrospect, to Coppola’s first three films as a trilogy about young women coming of age, based in part on the director’s own admission that it’s a continuation of the other two films—sort of about a lonely girl in a big hotel or palace or whatever, kind of wandering around, trying to grow up. But in the other ones, you know, they’re always sort of on the verge. This is a story about a girl becoming a woman. And in this, I feel like she does.11 The success of Lost in Translation earned Coppola major studio support and a budget ten times that of the previous film, dispensed lavishly on production design and costumes created by Milena Canonero. On a grander scale than in her previous productions, the film enabled Coppola to showcase her aesthetic interest in fashion, interior decoration, art, and music. French admiration for Lost in Translation was credited with granting Coppola unprecedented access to Versailles and its grounds, where she filmed for over twelve weeks in the spring of 2005.12 In keeping with its revisionist source text, Marie Antoinette focuses on the young Austrian archduchess’ transformation into the queen of France. The film elicits sympathy for its protagonist by making her experiences relatable to contemporary audiences through

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its casting of Kirsten Dunst as Marie, defiantly anachronistic music selections, and scenes of luxurious consumption and lavish parties. The young girl’s letters to her mother granted Coppola access to the inner life of an historical figure maligned by pamphlets and political accounts. She said she could imagine “the real person behind the sarcastic teenage voice in her letters.” She was a “real girl,” Coppola asserted, who “tried to find her own way.”13 Booed at its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival before receiving a standing ovation, the film provoked a polarized response. Some condemned it as frivolous fluff that distorted history, while others saw it as a biting critique of aristocratic excess and patriarchal constriction viewed through contemporary lenses. Its ten-year anniversary prompted rounds of reassessments of the film as well as its two-disc soundtrack. It’s difficult to imagine Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite (2018) or The Great (2020–) in the absence of Coppola’s example. In this volume, Nicole Richter describes the film’s production history and reception “as a story equally if not more spectacle-driven than the film itself.” She notes the confluence of marketing strategies and audience expectation that led to initial criticism and contends that, over fifteen years later, the film has belatedly been acknowledged as “a conscious act of feminist resistance within the confines of a highly commercial industry.” The big-budget studio experience of Marie Antoinette proved overwhelming to Coppola, and for her next project she was determined to “do something on a smaller scale.”14 False rumors circulated that she was adapting Sarah Water’s Tipping the Velvet (with stars Eva Longoria and Beyoncé Knowles). She did consider a film based on Alysia Abbott’s memoir Fairyland (but signed on as producer with friend Andrew Durham as director). Instead, she was working on a vampire story and a Hollywood movie star character popped up who, she recounts, “kept coming into my thoughts and demanding my attention, and I figured that he really needed his own movie.” The result was the audaciously original screenplay for Somewhere (2010), starring Stephen Dorff as Johnny Marco, an actor undergoing an identity crisis whose life is altered by the arrival of his daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning). Filmed in the summer of 2009 at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles and the Principe de Savoia in Milan, Coppola again chose locations with personal history: she had stayed with her family in both hotels. Romulo Laki the “singing waiter” who serenades Cleo in the film plays the same song he played for Coppola as a child. In 2004, she had encountered famed fashion photographer Helmut Newton in the hotel’s elevator on the day his car sped out of control from the driveway and crashed into a wall, killing him.15 Coppola’s own fashion connections were evident in the film’s premiere, hosted by Louis Vuitton and its creative director, her friend Marc Jacobs, at the Chateau, where she had launched MilkFed with a fashion shoot in 1994. As an intimate portrait of the nature of celebrity, the film also picks up a narrative thread from Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, one that extends into subsequent films. It was Coppola’s first feature to employ cinematographer Harris Savides, who had worked with her on a 2008 commercial for Dior perfume. The film’s title was originally temporary, but Coppola thought it reflected her character’s existential state: “he needs to go somewhere but he doesn’t know where exactly.” Described as a “tone poem,” the film is even more verbally spare than her earlier films— the script was only 43 pages, when the average length for a Hollywood film is 120— and confounded some viewers and critics with its studied pacing and quasi-still images.

6The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola

Others classed it alongside European examples of art-house cinema, as Coppola’s take on the French New Wave. In his analysis here, Todd Kennedy counters that the film is not a stylistic experiment in European minimalism but instead a character study centered on a man who is literally “directionless.” As such, he writes, “Coppola draws upon what may well be the central trope of American cultural identity: that of imagining American identity in terms of its relationship to movement across space.” The film was far from a popular success, with a limited theatrical distribution that grossed less than $2 million in the United States. It did, however, earn critical praise. Awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the film has attracted increasing respect and recognition. Coppola received the 2010 Special Achievement in Filmmaking Award from the National Board of Review (an honor she had previously received in 2003 for Lost in Translation), and Somewhere was included on multiple best-of-the-decade lists appearing in 2019, including those from the Associated Press, Time magazine and The New Yorker. Her next film, The Bling Ring (2013), appears the inverse of Somewhere, a gaudy docudrama depicting the real-life exploits of a group of teenaged burglars targeting celebrity homes. Coppola got the idea for the film while reading Nancy Jo Sales’ Vanity Fair article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins” while on an airplane. After listening to Sales’ interviews with actual Bling Ring members, the director opted to fictionalize their actions. Like Somewhere, the film is set in LA. Stephen Dorff put Coppola in touch with Paris Hilton, one of the ring’s victims, who agreed to allow the crew to use her mansion as a set. The crew scouted locations in Calabasas to find the peach-colored McMansions that represented the bland suburban reality the teenagers sought to escape. Filmed by Harris Savides (who died in October 2012, six months after the end of principal photography), it adopts the digital format to replicate the aesthetics of reality television and social media that shaped the group’s celebrity obsessions. Production designer Anne Ross worked closely with costume designer Stacey Battat to create the luxury-branded world coveted by the teens. After its premiere in the Un Certain Regard program at Cannes, A24 bought the distribution rights and mounted a savvy promotional campaign, including a cheeky official website modeled on an online shopping experience, helping it to earn over $19 million worldwide. While the film did appear on many best-of-2013 lists, viewers and critics were divided in their reactions. Some praised the film as a sly, biting critique of celebrity and consumerism, while others missed its irony, taking it as an unthinking reflection of the director’s own privileged status and accusing it of whitewashing for excising undocumented Mexican immigrant Diana Tamayo from its ensemble cast of characters. Current events unfolding in its wake, such as the glorification of wealth embodied by the Trump family, have made “it easier to see the threads between late-stage capitalism and the desire of [the Bling Ring] to find validation in greed.”16 The film’s embedded references to Facebook now appear prescient, early allusions to the social influencer phenomena unleashed by social media, including Instagram, YouTube, and Tik Tok. Scholars have tended to concur, characterizing the film as part of a trilogy of celebrity, grouping it with Marie Antoinette and Somewhere as self-reflexive meditations on fame.17 In her analysis here, Maryn Wilkinson argues not only was the film ahead of its time in its narrative

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depiction of celebrity culture, cinematically it represents and critiques contemporary media forms: “The film’s politics and punch, its smarts, reside in its engagement with of its own surface—its aesthetics, its ‘look’—and the way it plays with ideas of artifice and performance in relation to contemporary media consumption.” Shortly after the release of The Bling Ring, Coppola signed on in 2014 to direct a liveaction version of The Little Mermaid (the original Hans Christian Andersen fairytale, not the Disney version) to be produced by Universal Pictures and Working Title. She withdrew from project in June 2015, explaining that her plan to shoot underwater may have been too ambitious and that the increasing scale of the production had made “business . . . a bigger element than art.”18 News of Coppola’s attachment to the project did, however, result in a parody trailer for Funny or Die, complete with a revised version of the iconic opening of Lost in Translation featuring a mermaid reclining on her side.19 Instead, Coppola pursued a smaller project for a smaller screen, a Netflix special titled A Very Murray Christmas, before beginning work on The Beguiled. The show continues the self-reflexive exploration of the “triology of celebrity,” played more broadly for laughs. A postmodern parody of the televised holiday special, it stars Bill Murray as himself under the thinly veiled pretense that he is hosting a star-studded Christmas show at the Carlyle in New York to be broadcast nationwide, that is, until a blizzard shuts down the city leaving Murray alone with Paul Shaffer and without his celebrity guests. The show that unfolds is purportedly improvised, with the assistance of a few real celebrities and musicians—some playing themselves, others masquerading as hotel staff and guests. As an exercise in genre filmmaking, Todd Kennedy argues, the show recalls the work of Robert Altman, especially A Prairie Home Companion (2006), for “Just like A Very Murray Christmas, Altman’s final film features a large, ensemble cast as it actively interrogates (and deconstructs) the production of a genre-based musical special anchored by a celebrity host.” Kennedy uses Altman as “a lens to understand what Sofia Coppola has to say about genre, realism, and the deconstruction of both.” The feature film that followed the special, The Beguiled, can likewise be seen as an exercise in genre (and gender) bending. As with The Virgin Suicides, the idea for Coppola’s adaptation came from a friend, in this case her long-time production designer Anne Ross, who suggested Coppola watch Don Siegel’s 1971 film about a group of Confederate ladies who discover a Union soldier outside the gates of The Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies where they are sheltering during the Civil War. The director recognized she could reinterpret the source material, Thomas Cullinan’s 1966 novel (A Painted Devil), as a gothic melodrama told from the point of view of the women, rather than the male soldier. Before he died, Harris Savides had suggested Philippe Le Sourd as his replacement and Coppola hired him to shoot on location for six weeks in the fall of 2016, using Madewood plantation in Napoleonville for the exterior of the school and the New Orleans’ home of actress Jennifer Coolidge for its interiors. The film premiered in Cannes in May 2017, where it earned Coppola the Best Director prize, making her only the second woman to win the award in the festival’s history. The marketing team at Focus Features turned Colin Farrell’s curse “Vengeful Bitches” into a catchphrase on social media in advance of the film’s release, sending T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase to Instagram celebrities and the stars of The Real Housewives of New York.20

8The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola

As with The Bling Ring, Coppola faced charges of whitewashing for excising the slave character Mattie. She countered that she did not want to “brush over such an important topic” as slavery and disagreed with how both the novel and 1971 film had depicted the African-American character. Instead, she sought to focus on the women left isolated by the war after the slaves fled and represent the battle between the sexes within their finishing school as a personal civil war of Confederate ladies against the Union soldier. “My intentions in choosing to make a film in this world,” she wrote, “were not to celebrate a way of life whose time was over, but rather to explore the high cost of denial and repression.”21 In her chapter on the film, Michelle Devereaux argues that Coppola’s reinterpretation appears at times as “a response, or even a retort” to Siegel’s version, a “grand guignol of male victimhood.”22 By contrast to both the source novel and 1971 film, Coppola’s adaptation is in Devereaux’s view “about the knowledge of feeling—what we can’t know about the true nature of the feelings of others, specifically how they feel about us, which can lead to a skepticism that undermines our ability to fully participate in the world.” In 2019, Coppola reunited with Bill Murray for On the Rocks, the first feature in A24’s partnership with Apple TV+, which released the film on October 23, 2020, during the global Covid-19 pandemic. While it had been rumored that Apple would enter the film in the Cannes Film Festival prior to a theatrical release, the pandemic upended those plans and the film premiered at the New York Film Festival, with the producer-writerdirector and cast attending the screening at a drive-in. Based on an original screenplay, the film centers on a father-daughter relationship and reliably aroused autobiographical speculation, augmented by the fact that the character of Laura is married, like Coppola, with two daughters whose demands have upended her preferred writing schedule. Set and filmed in Manhattan, it features locations associated with the director: the SherryNetherland, where she stayed as a child and where Life Without Zoe was filmed; a Soho apartment not far from her townhouse in the West Village; the Carlyle hotel bar, which also features in A Very Murray Christmas. However, as I argue, the film may be less autobiographical than personal, embodying the director’s recurring themes, preoccupations (particularly with the fine arts), and distinctive cinematic style. The narrative focus, as in all of Coppola’s films, is on internal dramas that unfold in a complex audiovisual design, with music and image tailored to each of its protagonists. While the film was faulted by some reviewers for depicting the privileged world orbiting the art dealer played by Murray, it does not do so uncritically, extending the self-reflexive critique evident in the director’s trilogy of celebrity. In its focus on marriage and motherhood, it likewise reveals Coppola’s continued interest in representing the phases of women’s lives. While several critics deemed it a minor work, the film appeared on several best-of-2020 lists, including Vogue’s and Richard Brody’s for The New Yorker. It also earned Coppola’s long-time editor Sarah Flack her second nomination for an American Cinema Editors Eddie award. (She was previously nominated for the award for Lost in Translation in 2004. She did win the BAFTA award for Best Editing for her work.) If Coppola has benefitted from her family connections, in her turn, she has conscripted her family’s participation in her filmmaking. Her brother Roman has often served as her

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second unit director and the production company American Zoetrope, founded by Francis and George Lucas in 1969 and now co-owned by Roman and Sofia, has supported each of her projects. Her mother Eleanor filmed the “making of” documentaries for The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette. She met her husband Thomas Mars while working on the soundtrack for The Virgin Suicides in 1999, when his friends and fellow French musicians in the band Air asked him to sing and play drums (under the name Gordon Tracks) on the single “Playground Love.” Though Coppola and Mars did not become romantically involved until later, eventually marrying in 2011, the music of his band Phoenix has appeared in each of her subsequent films. The band members also made cameo appearances as musicians in Marie Antoinette and as chefs in A Very Murray Christmas. Despite an impressive roster of features, filmmaking has never been Coppola’s sole profession. Throughout her career as a director, she has engaged in other creative pursuits. A glance at the timeline included at the back of this book shows that while she was working on Lost in Translation, she was also directing music videos and, with John Ridley, created Platinum, a short-lived television series about brothers in the hiphop record business. Following Marie Antoinette, she collaborated with Marc Jacobs on bags for Louis Vuitton and directed commercials for Dior perfume. After the release of Somewhere, she curated an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s works and directed a commercial for H&M’s Marni collection. In the wake of The Bling Ring, she directed commercials for Gap and Marc Jacobs’ Daisy perfume, guest edited W and Vogue Paris, and directed a production of La Traviata in Rome. On the heels of On the Rocks, as pandemic lockdowns continued, she directed a short film for the New York City Ballet’s virtual 2021 spring gala and orchestrated a fashion spread for W’s Directors Issue featuring her stars Kirsten Dunst, Rashida Jones, and Elle Fanning. This pattern of mixing creative projects and modes, commercial work and cinematic production, art and advertising, music and fashion remains consistent and defines her career. For this reason, Jeff Smith has dubbed Coppola a “transmedia audiovisual stylist,” who has developed a distinctive fusion of audio and visual cultures.23 As we’ve seen, her first forays into directing came through music videos, but Coppola did not abandon the form once she embarked on a career in feature film. She directed Air’s “Playground Love” video in 2000, which can be seen as an extension of, or companion to, The Virgin Suicides, which featured the song on its soundtrack. The video incorporates footage from the film and the script appears as a prop, as it transitions to a backstage scene of the director filming the homecoming dance and selecting the cover for the soundtrack—a clever instance of cross-promotion that prefigures Coppola’s advertising work. “City Girl,” the 2003 video she directed for Kevin Shields, follows a similar strategy, in this case for Lost in Translation. In this volume, Mathias Korsgaard argues that Coppola’s music videos merit more sustained analysis. His analysis places her in relation to a history of “transmedia directors” and considers the “aesthetic and thematic resonances across the . . . director’s body of work.” While Korsgaard compellingly situates her video for The White Stripes’ “I Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” (2003) in relation to Coppola’s features and typical collaborative process, a case could be made for taking it as an experiment in commercial video. Filmed

10The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola

by Lance Acord in black and white and starring model Kate Moss, it prefigures her televised ads for perfume and clothing, especially the series for Calvin Klein underwear she created in 2017. Coppola’s advertising work to date has focused exclusively on fashion brands. Perfume ads for Miss Dior Chérie (2008, 2010), Miss Dior Blooming Bouquet (2013), and Marc Jacobs’ Daisy (2013, 2014) exploited her famed facility in fusing music and image to sell an intangible product. But Coppola has proven equally adept at creating silent, moving fashion stories for H&M’s Marni collection (2012) and Cartier’s Panthère watch (2017), as well as a unified “mini-film” series for Gap (2014) in addition to Calvin Klein.24 Caryn Simonson focuses here on Coppola’s fashion mini-films, providing detailed analyses of her most recent productions for Chanel, to demonstrate the fundamental interdisciplinarity and plurality of her creative work.

Art and Artistry As this brief overview of Coppola’s achievements already indicates, her life and career have been shaped by thorough immersion in visual, material, and music culture. The result is a distinctive cinematic style that has been dubbed “Coppolism,” characterized by deliberate pacing, spare use of dialogue, meticulous mise-en-scène, arresting musical selections, natural lighting, and muted colors.25 Here, we devote individual chapters to key components, acknowledging that the style identified with the director has emerged out of collaboration with cinematographers, costume and production designers, and music supervisors, a team anchored by Sarah Flack, who has edited all but one of her features, and Richard Beggs, who has been the sound designer on all of them. In 2021 Coppola accepted the American Society of Cinematographers’ Board of Governors Award, an honor, as they describe it, “reserved for industry stalwarts who have been champions for directors of photography and the visual art form.”26 Cameron Beyl notes that while Coppola’s visual aesthetic has a “remarkably consistent foundation,” it has been enriched through collaboration with cinematographers Edward Lachman, Lance Acord, Harris Savides, and Philippe Le Sourd. Beyl, an award-winning filmmaker, offers an insider’s perspective on the technical and thematic approaches they have employed to create her distinctive style. To achieve her desired visual aesthetic, Coppola often shares images with her cinematographer and production teams, creating “look books” composed of photos (her own or those of professional photographers), movie stills, reproductions of paintings— and, in the case of The Beguiled, a mood board. This may explain what Beyl describes as the pictorial approach to composition, lighting, movement, and coverage characteristic of her films. In “Art on Film/Film as Art,” I document the ongoing exchange between her cinema and the fine arts, including photography and commercial images, tracing recognizable allusions to individual artworks and artists. However, in more general terms, the fine art aesthetic at the core of her films—cinematic and commercial—makes them artworks as well. Across the body of her work, I argue, Coppola has created “a visual universe where fine art, commercial imagery, and film intertwine synergistically to shape viewers’ perception of art, cinema and, ultimately, the world.”

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Cinema is as much a business as an art, however, and Cynthia Baron and Yannis Tzioumakis remind us that Coppola’s films have been influenced by their industrial context: they “have been made within the industrial-institutional context of indiewood, which has been shaped by the major entertainment conglomerates’ strong investment, generally via specialty film divisions, in the independent film sector.” This production context has enabled Coppola to attract high-profile actors, whose participation facilitates financing and promotion. However, within it, Coppola has carved out a distinctive style that affects actors’ performances. Her minimalist narratives emphasize “atmosphere and emotion over plot development”27 and, as Baron and Tzioumakis add, “her framing, editing, and lighting choices are designed around actors’ portrayals to highlight the ephemeral traces of emotion they convey.” They examine key performances in her films to show how indiewood cinema has evolved—and continues to evolve—owing to her participation. The actors on screen are, as Saige Walton describes, intimately connected to the spaces they move through. Famed for the detailed, textured mise-en-scène of her features, Coppola works closely with production and costume designers to establish the feel as well as the look of her films. Walton notes that the material dimensions of her cinema reflect a central, recurring preoccupation with the embodied dynamics of luxury, wealth, and power, as well as their implicit critique. The characters inhabiting luxurious spaces experience psychological discomfort and “by way of her production design and her use of expressive surfaces, Coppola suggests that the accumulation of ‘bling’ (be it historic or contemporary) gives way to its own decline.” While her sound designer Beggs has described Coppola as a “visual thinker,” film is an audiovisual medium and her films are as lauded for their music as their images—or, more precisely, for their combined effects, an alchemical fusion created by editor Sarah Flack. In his discussion of her music videos, Mathias Korsgaard argues Coppola fits the definition of an “auteur mélomane,” a filmmaker whose music has become a part of her directorial signature. In his chapter, Tim J. Anderson details how music functions in Coppola’s feature films to “generate palpable moments that affectively engage the audience.” He argues that “instead of adhering to the need to drive the narrative forward, musical moments in Coppola films are often distended, stretched to assert the feeling of the moment” and that such moments “offer audiences a visceral understanding of existing in moments of decision, movement, and encounters.”

Themes, Interpretation, Reception If Coppola has an identifiable cinematic aesthetic, in terms of settings, subject, and tone, her features are radically divergent. They cross the world—from Japan to France— and hop around the United States: Michigan, California, Louisiana, New York City. They encompass four centuries, from the late eighteenth century to the present. They alternate between adaptations (The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, The Bling Ring, The Beguiled) and original screenplays (Lost in Translation, Somewhere, On the Rocks)— with the pattern continuing with an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the

12The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola

Country currently in production as a limited series for Apple TV+. They inventively toy with generic expectations: The Virgin Suicides is a teen movie or “a horror film from which all signs are erased”; Lost in Translation is a romantic comedy where the couple does not get together at the end; Marie Antoinette is far from a conventional historical biopic or costume drama; The Bling Ring is a crime story where the perpetrators are revealed at the start; The Beguiled transforms the Southern Gothic into “a fairy tale, . . . a horror movie, a quasi-western, and a revenge melodrama”; On the Rocks is a father-daughter drama, a screwball comedy and a buddy film.28 Somewhere has been called a poem, rather than a film.29 Not a single one is exclusively a comedy or a drama. Still, there are reoccurring themes and overarching consistencies. In this volume we consider some of the most noticeable. For instance, one consistent preoccupation across Coppola’s work is with celebrity existence and its effects. Interestingly, the celebrity characters in Coppola’s films are often male, from fictional stars Bob Harris and Johnny Marco to males who act like them by performing for others’ attention, such as Corporal McBurney or Felix Keane. Yet Marie Antoinette has been described as the original celebrity and the Lisbon sisters are the “stars” in the neighborhood boys’ narrative. All members of the Bling Ring are at least celebrities in their own minds and on social media. As Delphine Letort discusses, “celebrity as a theme runs through Coppola’s filmography and defines the filmed relations to objects and to human beings, offering a metaphysical reflection on the status of celebrity itself.” She argues that Coppola’s films critique the power of celebrity as a cultural and commercial construct. A hallmark of “Coppolism” is that the director films on location—Tokyo, Versailles, New York—and in distinct spaces, from suburban homes and celebrity mansions to Southern plantation homes and luxury hotels. Laura Henderson examines how they affect and alter the characters who inhabit and explore them, but also how their representation influences the films’ audiences. “Articulated in a sensual, tactile way,” she writes, they offer viewers “their own form of spatial exploration,” a form of “cinematic travel.” They do so, she contends, through a cinematographic style that mirrors the neural underpinnings of human perception: “She invites the spectator’s body to illusorily occupy the landscape she creates.” Henderson notes that Coppola’s “characters are frequently recast by their location,” that spatial transitions map psychological transformations, as in the passage from Austria to France that propels the young Marie Antoinette into marriage and motherhood. Alternatively, enclosed spaces, such as bedrooms or hotel rooms, confine and constrict— psychologically as well as physically. In other words, “Places are not neutral; they constitute her character’s subjectivity. Time and again, we see a character’s aesthetic style, emotion and even ontology altered by their geography.” These recurring thematic concerns, in combination with Coppola’s distinctive audiovisual style, suggest she be considered a contemporary auteur. The classic definition—a filmmaker who pursues a personal vision—has been redefined, as Dana Polan argues, to refer “to the study of poetics or stylistics, the material engagement with filmic form on the part of the director.” To some degree, both definitions apply to Coppola.30 Pam Cook argues, however, the term “also extends discussion of cinematic authorship beyond the primacy of the film text and authorial intention towards branding

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and performance.” She makes the case for considering Coppola as the prime example of a “commodity auteur,” a director-star whose fame is leveraged to promote not simply her own films but also other products. Cook notes the confluence of Coppola’s European-style art cinema and her personal style, which has been associated with France from at least 2006, when she and Thomas Mars purchased a home in Paris. Coppola’s Frenchness is as visible in her film Marie Antoinette as in her commercials for Dior, her own effortless chic style, and in her collaboration with French fashion house Louis Vuitton on a signature handbag. The development of this dynamic interchange can be seen not only in her “mini-films” for Chanel but also in her selection by designer Valentino to direct La Traviata for the opera house in Rome—an invitation he extended after seeing Marie Antoinette. “What is different in Sofia Coppola’s case,” Cook argues, “is the intersection of celebrity culture with her profile as an artist, with each dependent on the other.” Her profile as an artist has been bolstered by her curatorial work, as in the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit she was invited to organize for the Galerie Thaddeus Ropac in Paris in 2011. Lawrence Webb takes this as exemplary, contending that the idea of “auteur as curator” unites public perception of her films and her public image. He writes, “From the subcultural cool of her compilation soundtracks to the deployment of fashion, props, artwork, and locations, her films are offered to the viewer as curated texts that can be disassembled into a series of intertextual references, stylistic choices, and commodity objects.” Her work and life are united by one idea: “Sofia Coppola has taste.” As Sara Pesce documents, audiences have indeed done as Cook and Webb anticipate, transforming her into a cosmopolitan icon by circulating Coppola-related content globally on social media, image-sharing sites, and YouTube. “Outside cinemas and theatrical venues,” Pesce writes, Coppola has achieved “global acclaim through ancillary markets that are manifestly not ancillary anymore.” Both Pesce and Cook situate the director at the heart of an evolving industry engaged in a dynamic interchange with consumers. As Pesce puts it, “Hollywood cinema participates in a network of rebounds and reverberations between films, consumption of material goods, and user-generated content.” Coppola’s auteur status has also been linked to gender, with her personal identity as a female director leading to claims that she is a “feminine auteur.”31 Critical discussion of her films, rather than her person, has reflected the divisions within contemporary feminism. While Anna Backman Rogers has made the case for reading her films in relation to feminist philosophies, others, like Todd Kennedy, have resisted calling them “ideologically feminist,” aligning them with postfeminism in their depictions of “the feminine as a source of both pleasure and consumption.”32 Backman Rogers’ chapter for this volume extends the analysis she initiated in her books American Independent Cinema (2015) and Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (2019) to include On the Rocks. She argues that “Coppola’s work evinces a radical form of feminist politics (often allied with feminist theories of the image and the gaze from the 1970s and feminist philosophies of difference).” Likewise, Emma McNicol, Whitney Monaghan, Grace Russell, and Belinda Smaill discuss the value of The Virgin Suicides for feminist film pedagogies. They document their experiences in teaching the film at Monash University in Australia, showing how

14The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola

it can stimulate discussion of the formal and narrative expression of female subjectivity and introduce students to theories of the male gaze, genre, and female point of view. Simultaneously, they reflect on the film and these concepts within the context of the contemporary feminist classroom. Fiona Handyside notes that, by contrast, other scholars have “established clear connections between her films’ narratives, style and tone, her director-star persona, and a postfeminist cultural sensibility.” In her chapter, however, Handyside argues that this postfeminist sensibility comes under critique itself in Coppola’s films: they “express the paradoxes, contradictions, and sheer fatigue of how it feels to be living as a femaleidentified subject in a society shaped by postfeminist ideology and its convoluted relationship to feminism, femaleness, and femininity.” Taken together, the chapters emphasize the depth of gendered cultural critique in Coppola’s films and reject frequent criticism that their stylish visual aesthetics are mere surface decoration, or worse, that they glamorize consumption. Katarzyna Paszkiewicz traces how this line of criticism—what she calls the “surface over substance” meta-narrative—has had a paradoxical effect: on the one hand, it has “allowed her to carve out a recognizable authorial brand, but on the other, it has sometimes delimited recognition of her work as a filmmaker who has enjoyed an exceptional position within the Hollywood industrial context.” She surveys US and UK film reviews to demonstrate how they have alternately authenticated and delegitimized Coppola as an auteur. The competing critical meta-narrative has been that Coppola’s features reflect a privileged, elitist, and relentlessly white worldview. These criticisms are addressed throughout this volume, particularly in the chapters devoted to individual films. But, as with the “surface over substance” meta-narrative, issues of race and class across Coppola’s oeuvre merit a chapter of their own. In hers, Jamie Rogers contends that while Coppola’s films do critique masculinist image regimes and consumer culture, as others have suggested, they do so by eliding race. Following Toni Morrison’s example, Rogers demonstrates “Black bodies and oblique references to Blackness are used to prop up and expose whiteness: white loneliness, white guilt, and ultimately, white capitalist patriarchy.” In other words, Coppola’s films “minimize the particularity of patriarchy as a race- and class-based system.” We intend this volume to offer a comprehensive snapshot of Sofia Coppola’s work—in its various forms—to date. Naturally, there is some overlap among chapters, and, at times, the contributors disagree provocatively in their interpretations, as we might expect given the richness and diversity of Coppola’s oeuvre. As the director, already prolific, continues to create, there will inevitably be more to write about. Nor are the approaches here the only ones possible. The contributors reference additional sources, and we append a select bibliography as a guide to existing scholarship on the director and her work. A timeline offers a chronological account of her prodigious output across multiple artistic fields. We hope readers will consider this book as beginning an ongoing conversation about Coppola’s work and all it touches on, including visual and material culture, celebrity and fashion studies, and the economics of contemporary cinema.

INTRODUCTION

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Notes 1 See Keaton Bell, “Sofia Coppola on the 20th Anniversary of The Virgin Suicides: ‘It Means a Lot to Me That It Has a Life Now,’” Vogue, April 21, 2020, https://www​.vogue​.com​/article​ /sofia​-coppola​-interview​-the​-virgin​-suicides​-20th​-anniversary. This outline of Coppola’s biography draws on “Sofia Coppola,” in Fifty Contemporary Film Directors, ed. Yvonne Tasker, 2nd ed. (Oxford and London: Routledge, 2011): 126–34; Susan Dudley Gold, Great Filmmakers: Sofia Coppola (New York: Cavendish Square, 2015); Mary Hurd, Women Directors and Their Films (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007); Vincent LoBrutto and Harriet R. Morrison, The Coppolas: A Family Business (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012); and Ian Nathan, The Coppolas: A Movie Dynasty (London: Palazzo, 2021). 2 Christopher Rosen, “Francis Ford Coppola Finally Gets to Release His Version of The Godfather Part III,” Vanity Fair, September 3, 2020, https://www​.vanityfair​.com​/hollywood​ /2020​/09​/the​-godfather​-part​-iii​-death​-of​-michael​-corleone​-cut. 3 Qtd. in Carrie Rickey, “Lost and Found,” DGA Quarterly, Spring 2013, https://www​.dga​.org​/ Craft​/DGAQ​/All​-Articles​/1302​-Spring​-2013​/Sofia​-Coppola​.aspx. 4 Qtd. in Lynn Hirschberg, “The Coppola Smart Mob,” The New York Times Magazine, August 31, 2003, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2003​/08​/31​/magazine​/the​-coppola​-smart​-mob​.html. 5 Joey Nolfi, “Sofia Coppola: Studio was ‘Afraid’ of Girls Watching The Virgin Suicides,” Entertainment Weekly, April 23, 2018, https://ew​.com​/movies​/2018​/04​/23​/sofia​-coppola​ -studio​-girls​-virgin​-suicides/. 6 LoBrutto and Morrison, The Coppolas; Hirschberg, “Coppola Smart Mob.” 7 Eleanor Coppola, Notes on a Life (New York: Applause, 2008), 276. In an interview marking the fifteenth anniversary of Marie Antoinette’s release, Coppola recalls “When I got stuck on Marie Antoinette I would just work on my script for Lost in Translation.” See Keaton Bell, “‘It Was Like Hosting the Ultimate Party’: An Oral History of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” Vogue, October 29, 2021, https://www​.vogue​.com​/article​/oral​-history​-of​-marie​-antoinette​ -15th​-anniversary. 8 Hirschberg, “Coppola Smart Mob.” 9 See the Internet Movie Database: https://www​.imdb​.com​/title​/tt0335266​/awards​?ref_​=tt​_awd. 10 “The 21st Century’s 100 Greatest Films,” August 23, 2016, http://www​.bbc​.com​/culture​/story​ /20160819​-the​-21st​-centurys​-100​-greatest​-films. 11 Kristin Hohenadel, “French Royalty as Seen by Hollywood Royalty,” The New York Times, September 10, 2006, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2006​/09​/10​/movies​/moviesspecial​/french​ -royalty​-as​-seen​-by​-hollywood​-royalty​.html. On the trilogy, see Gold, Great Filmmakers and Amy Woodworth, “A Feminist Theorization of Sofia Coppola’s Postfeminist Trilogy,” in Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema, ed. Marcelline Block (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), 138–67. Fiona Handyside cautions against reifying the films into one triology. Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), Kindle loc. 634). 12 Hohenadel, “French Royalty as Seen by Hollywood Royalty.” 13 Sofia Coppola, Marie Antoinette (New York: Rizzoli, 2006). 14 Todd Gilchrist, “Interview: Sofia Coppola,” IGN, October 17, 2006, https://www​.ign​.com​/ articles​/2006​/10​/17​/interview​-sofia​-coppola​?page​=1. 15 Grace Coddington, “Sofia Coppola,” Face to Grace, M2M: Made to Measure TV, October 10, 2018, https://m2m​.tv​/watch​/sofia​-coppola. The car crash in Somewhere—with flowers around it—is an homage.

16The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola

16 Matthew Monagle, “‘The Bling Ring’ Is Sofia Coppola’s Ode to Entitlement & White Privilege,” The Playlist, July 15, 2020, https://theplaylist​.net​/the​-bling​-ring​-essay​-20200715/. 17 Sara Pesce, “Ripping off Hollywood Celebrities: Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, Luxury Fashion and Self-branding in California,” Film, Fashion & Consumption 4, no. 1 (March 2015): 13. 18 Kate Erbland, “Sofia Coppola Explains Why She Left Her Ambitious Take on ‘The Little Mermaid,’” IndieWire, June 21, 2017, https://www​.indiewire​.com​/2017​/06​/sofia​-coppola​-the​ -little​-mermaid​-1201844829/. Also see Jason Gay, “The Cinematic Life of Sofia Coppola,” WSJ Magazine, May 24, 2017, https://www​.wsj​.com​/articles​/the​-cinematic​-life​-of​-sofia​ -coppola​-1495549685. 19 “Sofia Coppola’s Little Mermaid,” Funny or Die, May 13, 2014, https://www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=YPT4bdo1kZw​&list​=PL6​iyk3​0Xgu​JgNJ​huXw​dyMQ​TWkQ​7rV0KF0​&index​=2​&t​=2s. 20 Kevin O’Keefe, “What On Earth Is the Marketing Strategy for ‘The Beguiled’?,” Mic, June 23, 2017, https://www​.mic​.com​/articles​/180514​/what​-on​-earth​-is​-the​-marketingstrategy​ -for​-the​-beguiled. Jason Gay reported “The film was a quick production, shot in six weeks in Louisiana, about an hour’s drive west from New Orleans. The budget was kept tight. The entire cast and crew stayed at a Hampton Inn.” See Gay, “The Cinematic Life of Sofia Coppola.” 21 Sofia Coppola, “Sofia Coppola Responds to ‘The Beguiled’ Backlash,” IndieWire, July 15, 2017, https://www​.indiewire​.com​/2017​/07​/sofia​-coppola​-the​-beguiled​-backlash​-response​ -1201855684/. 22 Guy Lodge, “Sofia Coppola: ‘I Never Felt I Had to Fit into the Majority View,’” The Guardian, July 2, 2017, https://www​.theguardian​.com​/film​/2017​/jul​/02​/sofia​-coppola​-beguiled​-i​-never​ -felt​-i​-had​-to​-fit​-into​-the​-majority​-view​-interview. 23 Jeff Smith, “Our Lives in Pink: Sofia Coppola as Transmedia Audiovisual Stylist,” in Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers, and Lisa Perrott (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 75–91. 24 See Justin Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides: Reverie, Sorrow and Young Love (New York and London: Routledge, 2019); Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Celebrity, Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 25 See Richard Brody, “The Beguiled: Sofia Coppola’s Dubiously Abstract Vision of the Civil War,” The New Yorker, June 23, 2017, https://www​.newyorker​.com​/culture​/richardbrody​/ the​-beguiled​-sofia​-coppolas​-dubiously​-abstract​-vision​-of​-the​-civil​-war. On the elements of Coppolism, see Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 101–2. 26 ASC Staff, “Sofia Coppola to Receive Board of Governors Award from ASC,” The American Society of Cinematographers, February 18, 2021, https://theasc​.com​/news​/sofia​-coppola​ -asc​-board​-of​-governors​-award. 27 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 105. 28 Anna Backman Rogers, “And That I See a Darkness: The Stardom of Kirsten Dunst in Collaboration with Sofia Coppola in Three Images,” Film-Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2019): 114–36; Handyside, Sofia Coppola; A. O. Scott, “‘The Beguiled’: Sofia Coppola’s Civil War Cocoon,” The New York Times, June 22, 2017, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2017​/06​/22​/ movies​/the​-beguiledreview​-sofia​-coppola​.html. Belinda Smaill argues her films “play on audience knowledge of what are considered female genres, such as the romantic comedy, the melodrama (Lost in Translation) and the costume drama (Marie Antoinette).” Belinda Smaill, “Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 156.

INTRODUCTION

17

29 A. O. Scott, “The Pampered Life, Viewed from the Inside,” The New York Times, December 21, 2010, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2010​/12​/22​/movies​/22somewhere​.html. 30 Dana Polan, “Auteur Desire,” Screening the Past, March 2001, http://www​.screeningthepast​ .com​/2014​/12​/auteur​-desire/. 31 Todd Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur,” Film Criticism 35, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 37–59. 32 Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head,” 41.

18

PART I

THE BIG SCREEN

20

1 THE VIRGIN SUICIDES THE CINEMATIC STYLE OF LOSS: SOFIA COPPOLA’S THE VIRGIN SUICIDES Justin Wyatt

Terrence Malick with Badlands (1974). Spike Lee with She’s Gotta Have It (1986). Claire Denis with Chocolat (1988). Robert Rodriguez with El Mariachi (1992). Occasionally a feature debut illustrates a command of cinematic techniques and style that makes the work innovative and ground-breaking. In these rare cases, the filmmaker’s approach to cinematic storytelling—through editing, cinematography, production design, costuming, performance style, and other key elements—constructs a distinctive and expressive cinematic world. Sofia Coppola, at the age of twenty-eight, made her feature debut with her adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Virgin Suicides. Eugenides pictures mid-1970s Michigan in his tale of a “suicide free-for-all” that marks a middle-class suburban family. Filled with minute, exacting details of the characters and their environments and nonlinear narrative developments, the book might have seemed almost impossible to adapt for the screen. Sofia Coppola, however, created a film closely matching the tone and substance of the book. She understood perfectly how to use cinematic means to express the content and themes of Eugenides’ book. Consider, for example, just one scene from the book and film: the boys arriving at the Lisbon household to take the sisters to the prom (see Figure 1.1). Coppola stages the scene to illustrate that it contains a mixture of emotions beyond those derived from the simple narrative action. The complexity of feelings partly comes through Coppola’s manipulation of cinematic technique: the production design shows many elements that suggest a stressed environment from the worn carpeting to the door number

22The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola

Figure 1.1  The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

(7) which has lost its mooring; the composition within the frame emphasizes how the characters are divided, including the shot of the four boys separated from Mrs. Lisbon (Kathleen Turner) by the staircase; the performances suggest layers of disturbance or upset such as Mr. Lisbon’s (James Woods) awkward chuckle after kissing his spouse, hinting at the family’s fear of his staunch wife, or Mrs. Lisbon’s brief look of despair and panic after the boys have left, suggesting volumes of anxiety within; the editing and music highlight the girls slowly walking down the staircase, reflecting the grandeur and romanticism of the event. All these cinematic notes create a depth and texture to the narrative. The scene shows how Coppola leverages multiple cinematic elements to create a mood of sadness, regret, and discord even within a seemingly happy moment of the film. Coppola’s skill at setting mood, emotion, and environment anchors the telling of this disturbing story. Mirroring Jeffrey Eugenides’ book, the film concerns the Lisbon family: a high-school math teacher, his solemn and religious wife, and their five daughters, ranging in age from thirteen to seventeen. Taking place in a quiet suburban neighborhood, the story begins with the attempted suicide of Cecilia (Hanna Hall), the youngest daughter. Encouraged to offer more social outlets for Cecilia, the parents plan an innocuous basement party at the Lisbon home. The event is cut short when Cecilia jumps from her bedroom window and is impaled on the fence in the front yard. Afterward, the family is “tainted” within the neighborhood, with people gossiping about the suicide, the reasons behind it, and the family dynamics at play. After a group date goes south when the most rebellious girl Lux (Kirsten Dunst) stays out all night with her dashing prom date Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), the Lisbon parents pull the girls from school. In their isolation, the girls start a fractured communication with the local male

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES

23

neighborhood teenagers through postcards and playing pop songs to each other over the phone. One night the girls summon the boys to the Lisbon home after the parents have gone to sleep. The surprise for the boys is one of tragedy and self-violence rather than romance and escape. Coppola’s artistry in adapting The Virgin Suicides can be appreciated through three specific areas: the use of music, visual bursts linked to salient moments in the storytelling, and directorial choices leading to an enhanced intellectual engagement with the dramatic situations. Together these techniques foster a sense of loss and dislocation. As the homecoming date scene illustrates, the pervading sense of melancholy, even amidst moments of joy, is the basis for Coppola’s interpretation of Eugenides’ novel.

Context: Next Gen Coppola Sofia Coppola’s engagement with The Virgin Suicides is linked to elements within her personal biography and her connection to the production company American Zoetrope. Patriarch Francis Coppola continually created opportunities for Sofia to experiment creatively while growing up, from acting in Rumble Fish (1983) and The Godfather Part III (1990) to cowriting the script for his segment Life Without Zoe in New York Stories (1989). On its release in December 1990, The Godfather Part III’s reviews were dominated by a single recurring thread: the disastrous performance of Sofia Coppola. Entertainment Weekly’s cover story (“Storm over Sofia Coppola”) referred to the press coverage as “one of the nastiest Hollywood controversies in years.”1 Critics took aim at Sofia’s “Valley Girl” accent, her bland line readings, and her utter lack of emotional range. Most critics were laser focused on demolishing the young actor’s acting prospects. These early acting efforts did, in fact, create a space for expression in a public way for Sofia, even if the critical reaction was sometimes hostile. This traumatic public humiliation follows on a devastating event in the Coppola family a few years before. The death of Sofia’s brother Gian-Carlo (Gio) at age twenty-three in a tragic 1986 boating accident is reflected in many of the Coppola family projects after that date: Sofia and Francis’ Life Without Zoe in which a young girl living by herself tries to reconcile her estranged parents; mother Eleanor’s memoir Notes on a Life detailing each day after the death of Gio; Roman’s own American Zoetrope debut feature CQ (2000) offering a hero adrift abroad, separated from his family and facing creative bankruptcy. The strain throughout much of these efforts, including The Virgin Suicides, is loss, which might even be considered a structuring absence. These events would seem to be, on the surface, scarring and potentially harmful to the development of the teen and young adult Sofia. However, psychoanalytic and psychological literature suggest a different trajectory, that mourning and creativity are closely linked. Melanie Klein posits that “reparative drives” restoring loved objects form the basis for creativity and sublimation. For Klein, mourning becomes productive at its most acute state.2 The creative process is not seen as the end point of the mourning, but rather as a working through, an attempt at “mourning work.” As such, mourning work can be seen as one way to move forward through loss rather than focusing on the

24The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola

absence of the loved one. From a psychological perspective, “survivor guilt” over the loss of a family member inspires energy that can be channeled productively into artistic endeavors. Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides dovetails with this theme in the Coppola family’s response to the tragic loss of Gio. Both the filmic and real events center on the loss of a young life, its impact on a family, and the surrounding public inquiry and curiosity. Further, The Virgin Suicides is situated as a memorial, narrated by one of the neighborhood boys now twenty-five years after the tragedy. For Coppola, the creative act of making The Virgin Suicides is memorializing also, sifting through the loss of a sibling and attempting to reclaim his role and presence in the family. From an institutional standpoint, the Coppola family facilitated Sofia’s first feature through Francis’ production company, American Zoetrope. Eventually transferred to Sofia and her brother Roman Coppola, American Zoetrope began life for their father as Zoetrope Studios in 1969. As part of the “next generation” of Coppolas, Sofia was able to utilize the structure, organization, and creative talent of American Zoetrope for her debut feature. This yielded actors (e.g., Kathleen Turner, Danny De Vito, Scott Glenn, Kirsten Dunst) familiar to American Zoetrope films and creative/executive talent (producers Francis Coppola and Fred Roos, executive producer Fred Fuchs, coeditor Melissa Kent, sound designer Richard Beggs) as well. Crucially, Coppola augmented these industry veterans with creative talents early in their career, such as coeditor James Lyons, costume designer Nancy Steiner, and the French electronic duo Air as the soundtrack composers. The American Zoetrope connection offered Sofia Coppola a “safe harbor” to experiment aesthetically in an environment of familiar and trusted artists. Indeed, American Zoetrope had a lengthy history of sponsoring both cinematic auteurs (Wim Wenders, Jean-Luc Godard, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, Akira Kurosawa) and firsttime directors (Caleb Deschanel, Carroll Ballard, Phillip Borsos, Godfrey Reggio, Victor Salva). Through American Zoetrope, The Virgin Suicides was financed independently, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and was picked up for domestic distribution by Paramount Classics. The Virgin Suicides allowed Sofia to bid farewell to the image of the precocious child which had been cultivated somewhat by Francis and popular criticism. Immediately, the choices she made demonstrated a unique perspective. Consider casting. Certainly, Coppola was able to leverage actors who had appeared in American Zoetrope films, but the specific casting choices could be called “against the grain.” Most obviously Danny DeVito, who had appeared two years previously in Francis Coppola’s The Rainmaker (1997), was cast as the psychiatrist Dr. Hornicker. DeVito’s diminutive stature, snarling personality, and quick comic wit set a strong image in comedies such as Ruthless People (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker, 1986), Throw Momma from the Train (Danny DeVito, 1987) and Twins (Ivan Reitman, 1988). Even in supporting roles in largely dramatic films, DeVito conveyed a whiff of outrage and humor. Consequently, DeVito as the psychiatrist questioning a young teen after a suicide seems disconcerting at first. The choice telegraphs Coppola’s iconoclasm, pairing one of the key authority figures of her film with comic DeVito. The casting throws into question Coppola’s “take” on the role of psychiatry and therapy in a film that will supposedly be about both.

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The value of the film lies as much in Coppola’s cinematic storytelling as in the fidelity of the adaptation. These cinematic stylistics range from the visual and the aural to the leveraging of technique to create feeling and meaning within the film. Examining each of these three levels in depth helps to situate Coppola’s wide-ranging abilities to craft the film from key cinematic elements separate from the narrative. Aurally, Coppola operates through the incidental music of the electronic band Air and from realizing how the characters and their situation are defined through popular music of the era. Part of Coppola’s technique is linked to visual bursts setting a mood and echoing advertisements from the era of the film. Both aural and visual elements are combined in key compositional strategies that evoke loss and melancholia through precise arrangements of cinematic technique, building an intellectual reaction to the events even more than an emotional one.

Music, Storytelling, and Young Love During the decade between her appearance in The Godfather Part III and her directorial debut, Sofia Coppola engaged in a wide variety of artistic and creative pursuits. Many of these endeavors were connected to the world of music. Coppola appeared in music videos for, among others, The Black Crowes, Madonna, Sonic Youth, and The Chemical Brothers. At the same time, Sofia’s brother Roman was beginning to become a recognized director of innovative and bold music videos, for bands such as Green Day, Daft Punk, and especially Fatboy Slim’s memorable Christopher Walken dancing opus, “Gangster Trippin’” (1998).3 In 1998, Roman directed the video for the hit song “Sexy Boy” from Air’s Moon Safari album. Given this activity and the connections, it is hardly surprising that Sofia’s debut feature draws heavily on the power of music to create meaning and to elicit emotion from the viewer. While Eugenides’ novel includes some fleeting references to music, Coppola’s musical choices help to create an identity for the project as separate from the novel. The narrative line remains similar in outline, while the aural and visual choices made by Coppola become defining. In this way, the music becomes a key element in the film’s style. The Virgin Suicides operates on a dual register in its use of music, via French electronic band Air’s evocative score and soundtrack album, and a carefully selected set of 1970s pop, folk, and rock songs. At first glance, the music may seem incidental, lacking a core connection to the drama. The brief soundtrack appearances of both the Air score and the existing 1970s songs belie their importance to the film. The musical accompaniment builds the drama and the creation of her cinematic environment in clear ways. Closer analysis, however, illustrates that Coppola is, in fact, also strategic in her choices for both musical worlds. Through understanding how music operates in the film, the viewer can appreciate a deeper social and cultural context in The Virgin Suicides world. Coppola commissioned the French electronic duo Air (Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin) to construct the soundtrack. Their 1998 debut album Moon Safari was heavily indebted to aspects of the 1970s “analog sound” through Moog synthesizers and valve amplifiers. Crucially, the “chilled out” essence of the music is not a camp exercise.

26The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola

The duo earnestly embeds melancholy themes through the tracks rather than looking for a camp treatment from a musical genre popular twenty-five years earlier. The Air soundtrack to The Virgin Suicides follows directly from Moon Safari. Anchored by the single “Playground Love,” the soundtrack is essentially variations on the themes of young love, memory, and loss, all played out in lush, synthesized tones more appropriate to 1975 than to the late 1990s. Coppola uses Air’s music sparingly and strategically in the film, attuned to the dramatic potential for music followed abruptly by silence. This feels like the aural equivalent of a jump cut. The viewer is lulled by the hypnotic score only to be thrown back into the harsh narrative development. In the opening scenes, for instance, the tranquil shots of the neighborhood and the sunlight through the trees matched with the instrumental score drops suddenly with the narration “Cecilia was the first to go” and an image of the bathroom with Cecilia’s suicide attempt. The shot of Cecilia lying in the bathtub is followed by reactions from the neighbors as she is taken away by the ambulance. As soon as the film cuts to the neighbors, the instrumental track continues. The “shock” of Cecilia’s suicide attempt halts the music, as well as the tranquil mood and atmosphere. Similarly, when student Peter Sisten uses the girls’ bathroom in the Lisbon home, the track (“Bathroom Girl”) is amplified as he sensually explores the world of their perfumes, lipstick, and cosmetics. Air’s music track is cut abruptly as Lux knocks on the door: Peter’s reverie is broken and so is the accompanying music. Coppola therefore offers another shock cut using the music and then silence to jolt the audience back to reality. Coppola effectively integrates the Air soundtrack with the mise-en-scène and mood of the film. The centerpiece of Air’s score is the song “Playground Love,” used in its entirety over the end credits of the film. At several points earlier, Air employs the instrumental refrain and a piano accompaniment of “Playground Love” as incidental music. The audience is therefore familiar with the instrumental version before hearing the full song over the credits. The song was commissioned by music supervisor Brian Reitzell after the score was completed. Consequently, the echoes of the preexisting tracks make sense. The vocals are by Gordon Tracks, a pseudonym of Thomas Mars from the band Phoenix. Each musical component—synthesizer, piano, strings, saxophone—is added one by one so the basic structure and melody of the song are always present. The track is slow, deliberately paced in a way that suggests a vague melancholy or lethargy, fitting for the film overall. Mars’ vocals seem drained of emotion. The lyrics become almost a recitation rather than a vocal accompaniment. Echoes of easy listening come to mind, as well as a drug- or alcohol-induced teenage ennui. The title “Playground Love” perfectly captures the tension between innocence and experience crucial to so much of the film. Initially, it may seem as if the title refers to a young, prepubescent affection; only schoolchildren use a playground and love would then be entirely innocuous. The opening lyrics (“I’m a high school lover, and you’re my favorite flavor / Love is all, all my soul / You’re my playground love”) shift the context to high school when “love” can have a much greater charge and a more serious consequence. So, the song is pitched in the area between the young and old, innocence and experience. The remainder of Air’s song offers several archetypes of teen love: “my hands are shaking”; “I’m on fire”; “you’re the piece of gold”; “anytime, anywhere.”4 The song fails to carry a

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narrative line. It is composed, instead, of a few images conjuring passion and obsession among teenagers. Lines are disconnected, and the listener is left with discrete images and feelings, nothing more. Coppola saves the other musical set piece for late in the film. When the shutdown of the Lisbon home occurs, the boys first start to “interact” with the girls through ordering the same travel catalogues and imagining shared trips. The boys eventually decide to call the Lisbon sisters. Rather than risk rejection, instead of talking, the boys merely play a song and hold the phone receiver to the record player. Tim Anderson, in “As If History Was Merely a Record: The Pathology of Nostalgia and the Figure of the Recording in Contemporary Popular Cinema,” suggests that playing records comments on the past and can hinder a character’s ability to communicate in the present.5 In this way, the boys choose to substitute their music choices for conversation. The structure of this record communication, by design, places a great significance on which records are chosen by the groups. Each song is a chance to express feelings and make a link to others. Robynn J. Stilwell notes that, since Mrs. Lisbon has either burned or disposed of Lux’s rock records, the girls are left with the more innocuous singersongwriters.6 The first record—“Hello, It’s Me”—is played by the boys with a curt “call us” before they hang up after the song ends. Apart from the obvious salutation, the song by Todd Rundgren also connects to the earlier recreation room party scene which used Rundgren’s “A Dream Goes on Forever.” Like that earlier song, “Hello, It’s Me,” presents someone pining after an unrequited love. Certainly, the song works as a way for the boys to express their need for connection. It also obliquely gestures to the girls’ confinement and to the boys’ desire to offer support and companionship. The follow-up song for the boys, the Bee Gees’ “Run to Me,” pushes the connection even further. Rather than offer a neutral greeting, the boys’ second song issues a call-to-action: “Run to me whenever you’re lonely (to love me) / Run to me if you need a shoulder.”7 The boys’ choice of songs creates a simple narrative, ending with the girls seeking refuge through the boys. The girls’ song choices are more alarming, but just as revealing as the boys’. In response to “Hello, It’s Me,” the girls return by playing “Alone Again (Naturally).” The ballad was a huge hit in 1972 for Irish singer Gilbert O’Sullivan, spending six weeks as #1 on Billboard magazine’s Hot 100 Singles Chart. The song tells of a man desperate after being left at the altar by his fiancée. The message is clearly stated: you cannot rely on others, and all routes lead sooner or later to the grave. The boys’ response to “Alone Again (Naturally)” is the Bee Gees’ “Run to Me.” The girls return this call with Carole King’s “So Far Away.” The song is a wistful ballad mourning being apart from a special person, longing for connection but knowing that it cannot happen. In the context of Carole King’s work, Sheila Weller believes that the song is one of three that “puzzle out a new idea of ‘home’.”8 The song suggests that we are ruled by impermanence (“Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?”9). Clearly, there is a longing for home, but no solutions or opportunities are presented. The parallels of the song to the Lisbon girls’ situation are persuasive: despite being locked in the house, the girls have lost all the positive associations (warmth, comfort, support) with home. They are emotionally adrift like King’s narrator. The Lisbon girls similarly have no idea if “home” is even possible anymore given their circumstances. King denounces impermanence yet fails to suggest

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any solutions or hope. Do the Lisbon sisters feel that there are no solutions, that “home” has been lost? Further, if the song is viewed as a response to the boys playing “Run to Me,” the Lisbon sisters appear to be saying that any kind of union is impossible. They can’t run to the boys, leaving them forever “so far away.” The framework of these songs helps to explain the devastating mass suicide. If the boys had paid attention to the specifics of the girls’ song choices, they would have been alerted to the suicidal ideation, the depression, and the apparent lack of options open to the girls. The boys’ songs are pushing for the girls to join them, in romance and friendship. Rather than comprehend the message given by the girls, the boys imagine an escape ride for all of them gliding down the highway, with sunshine, open windows, and laughter. The boys have committed to their fantasy of uniting with the girls, disregarding the signs offered to them. Rather than an opportunity of a “third space” for building relationships, ultimately the records are another failure of communication. The boys believe that the girls want an escape trip. They show up at the Lisbon home with an elaborate plan to take the girls on a vacation, a plan created entirely from the perspective of the boys. The girls, in fact, are asking the boys to be witnesses to their termination of life. Music in The Virgin Suicides allows for self-expression, but it cannot build a bridge between the Lisbon girls and the neighborhood boys.

Visual Bursts: Aesthetics and Advertising Culture Although much of The Virgin Suicides plays out as a straight melodrama with conventional shooting and editing choices, Coppola highlights certain important visual elements. These moments break the diegetic world, creating a space for joy and happiness for the characters. Dreamlike in design, these reveries represent a high-water mark for the characters: their dreams and fantasies become real through these bursts of visual energy. The first sustained instance of this visual style occurs in the scene of Peter Sisten using the bathroom after dinner at the Lisbon home. He smells the girls’ perfume, opens the bathroom cupboard to find boxes of tampons, and raises a lipstick to his nose for the fragrance. At that moment, the music swells and the screen fills with a backlit Lux tossing her hair and closing her eyes seductively. Peter’s imagination of Lux is tied deliberately to the exploration of products in the bathroom. As critic A. O. Scott notes, Lux’s naming is deliberate: “not for nothing does Lux share her name with a brand of dishwashing detergent.”10 Through accessing the bathroom products, Peter conjures the image of a seductive Lux. The image, however, is impersonal, devoid of a personal connection to Peter. It is just a fantasy inspired as much by the product advertising as by Lux’s flirtations at dinner, a point highlighted when his reverie is broken by Lux tapping on the door. This bold appearance by Lux, apparently existing in the imagination rather than the real world, is repeated at several times in the film. Coppola uses close shots of Lux directly addressing the camera (e.g., winking at the camera before the titles), isolating intimate moments of Lux (e.g., brushing the grass off her shoulder while flirting with a boy), and

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even in “enhanced” moments of real action. The latter would include the shot of Lux turning to Trip on meeting him for the first time. Coppola offers a little CGI glint from Lux’s eye: her eyes literally sparkle at Trip. The other visual bursts are connected to specific stimuli within the film: Cecilia’s diary, the travel catalogues, and the final imaginary road trip taken by the sisters and the neighborhood boys. As with Lux’s appearances, these visual stylistics evoke a joyful, exuberant mood. These visuals present moments of bliss from the perspective of the neighborhood boys and each of these is either directly or indirectly linked to advertising of the period. Since for the teen boys the world of mass media is the place most often associated with pleasure, fantasy, and wish fulfillment, their dreams borrow from the styles and treatments illustrated in the commercials and advertising.11 There are differences worth noting in the manifestations of these visual bursts by the neighborhood boys. In the first sequence, the boys are reviewing Cecilia’s diary, supposedly obtained through nefarious means from the plumber’s son. The images appear to be from the perspective of one of the boys, although it is unclear whether we are seeing the narrator’s vision or that of the boy who is reading from the diary at that moment. Certain scenes are dramatized directly from the diary text, such as Lux stroking a whale. Others, however, are unanchored: Cecilia writing in her diary sitting in a golden field, a close-up of Lux’s eye, and the sisters playing on a swing. Still other images connect with words in the diary, although they are not narrated directly by the boys, such as the appearance of a unicorn. The sequence starts with a direct dramatization of the diary’s contents but ends in a torrent of unrelated images testifying to the beauty, joy, and mystery of the Lisbon sisters. The viewer is left with a sister playing with a sparkler, blowing on a dandelion, and hula dancing (see Figure 1.2). Images once static are sometimes combined: Lux jumps

Figure 1.2  The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

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up and down in split screen with the unicorn; Cecilia writes in the field superimposed on a close shot of Lux’s eye and hair gently moving in the wind; Mary blows on the dandelion while Lux stares on, in a split-screen composition, invoking a visual device often associated with 1970s films. The specific reference to the diary dissolves into an array of images connoting fun and abandonment. The fleeting images of the girls, especially Lux, could easily be part of an ad campaign. The mood is light, fun, and energetic, which matches any number of ads targeting teens and young adults. Print advertising from the era evokes many of the same visual and emotional appeals as the clips from the film. The period foregrounded the “blonde next door” from Cybill Shepherd (who started in modeling) and Farrah Fawcett-Majors, linking directly to the blonde “goddesses” of Coppola’s film. Visual touches from The Virgin Suicides appear to be inspired, directly or indirectly, from the ads of the era: the goldenhued background, figures sitting adrift in a field, extreme close-ups of faces, and, of course, the bold yellows characteristic of the decade. With the visual bursts, Coppola isolates specific images and moments filtering them through typical advertising icons from the era. The style is fragmentary, but also evocative. Just as advertising promises a better life and world through consumption of the product, so does Coppola with the visual bursts. Keep in mind that these are motivated by the neighborhood boys, and connected to products, worlds, or figments of their imaginations. The boys’ fantasy of the Lisbon girls is coded into the mini narratives of advertising and commercial culture. Through these reference points, the boys can contain and control their passion for Lux and the other sisters. While advertising may construct a perfect world, this promise carries a host of other messages. The fetishization of the female form and the ability to manipulate, control, and devalue those objectified also are at the heart of much of this advertising, especially from the decade of the 1970s. Anna Backman Rogers makes a larger argument that images of the Lisbon sisters—from close-ups to the snapshots discovered by the boys—are central to the film; as Backman Rogers describes it, “This narrative is predicated on distance—enabling a form of cinematic voyeurism—and fetishization of the female form. 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 aid the film’s central narrative—for what is complex exceeds explanation.”12 So, while the visual bursts in Coppola’s film may on the surface feel upbeat, these advertising-like images align with the voyeurism and fetishism of the female figure, placing the images in a more disturbing frame of reference. As the narrative of The Virgin Suicides unfolds, the visual bursts are also set against horrifying events, from Trip abandoning Lux on the football field to the doomed encounter on the girls’ last night. Visual bursts are complicit with sexism, voyeurism, and, ultimately, emotional and physical domination and deterioration. In contrast, Coppola also integrates the occasional static composition, such as Cecilia sinking into her bathtub after her first suicide attempt or Lux waking up, in a close shot, against the blue skies of the stadium. Unlike the other visual bursts, these ones are emotional, but in a negative sense. They are associated with a sadness that infuses so much of the film. Unlike the upbeat images, these melancholy ones have either slow or no movement. Coppola is interested in a quiet contemplation of the image rather than creating a positive mood or environment.

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Loss in the Style of The Virgin Suicides The Virgin Suicides evidences several means to convey loss through the visual stylistics of the film. Certainly, the mise-en-scène is rich and detailed; Coppola evokes mid-1970s Michigan with specificity and care. The director harnesses the mise-en-scène to maintain the central enigma of the book (i.e., Why did the Lisbon sisters commit suicide?). This is accomplished through three key strategies. First, Coppola refuses to align the viewer with key characters and the drama of their situation. As the novel is told by a plural omniscient narrator (the middle-aged men recalling their youth), the tale shifts between different modes of storytelling and the reader is left unanchored, at times, over which perspective or point of view is being represented. Coppola retains this structure in her film. While there is only a single male narrator (voiced by Giovanni Ribisi), the narrator continually refers to the plural “we” throughout the film. In addition, the viewer does not know which boy (now middle-aged man) is narrating the film. Editor James Lyons has stated that Coppola was pressured into identifying which character was narrating, but she deliberately chose not to single out one of the boys.13 Through reflecting the narrational structure of Eugenides’ book, Coppola sets in motion the more general stylistic tendency to keep the viewer at bay. Instead of shooting the film with a typical medium and close-up shots connected to the characters and their dramatic situation, Coppola uses strategies that block these methods to elicit emotion and a bond with the film. Certainly, the film elicits an emotional response, but, through many choices, Coppola chooses not to deliver the expected or usual emotion from a scene or circumstance. So, for example, when Trip Fontaine talks to Mr. Lisbon about the parents’ decision to take the daughters to the dance, the scene is shot through a closed door. From a small window in the door, the viewer can see Trip and Mr. Lisbon in long shot. After Mr. Lisbon proclaims, “My wife and I have had a little talk and come to a decision on your request,” the door is closed and then the viewer cannot hear the crucial dialogue concluding the scene. Coppola elides the most significant emotional “payoff” and the way that audience would connect more closely with both Trip and Mr. Lisbon. Second, Coppola’s camera placement acts in a similar manner, to distance the viewer. Consider, for instance, two adjoining scenes. In the first, Lux wakes up on the football field. The scene begins with a medium shot on Lux, bathed in a soft blue light, with Air’s ambient soundtrack playing in the background. The scene opens like a dream, with Lux waking after a night of high-school triumph (becoming homecoming queen and a romantic liaison with Trip). This initial reaction is undercut as the camera pulls back to reveal Lux alone on the huge football field. Trip has left hours before and she is greeted by the harsh morning light. Appearing initially as a moment of bliss and quiet contemplation, aided by the swath of soft blue light, the scene is revealed to be one of abandonment. After a brief cab ride, Lux arrives at the Lisbon home. Coppola and cinematographer Ed Lachman cover this incident in a single long shot. The confrontation between Lux and her upset parents is barely heard. The attention in the scene is, instead, deflected to the cab backing out of the driveway (the only element in motion). The expectation would be to cover the scene with close-ups showing the intense drama between the three characters.

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Coppola does not allow for that conventional approach, leaving viewers searching for an emotional connection. Not all of Coppola’s strategies of loss involve limiting the viewer’s access to the characters, action, and drama. In fact, a third strategy to convey the loss derives from Coppola making explicit connections and parallels that are left either unstated or in the background of Eugenides’ novel. The novel is incredibly detailed, with rich visual allusions and very specific references to the world of the young characters. While stunningly textured, the novel is also very much a “memory book,” that is, it depends on the narrator(s) to either offer or to recall specific incidents from the past. In an on-set interview, Eugenides explained how the actualization of the novel shifts the meaning: “The book is not character-driven at all. The only character, in a sense, is the collective narrator. You get a fragmentary knowledge of a lot of the characters—Mr. Lisbon, Mrs. Lisbon— of what they’re like in the book. Now they’re actually embodied by these really terrific actors. They become bigger characters than I’d imagined in the book.”14 The details from the novel are anchored by their physicality in the film through actors, but also through a myriad of other choices in screenplay adaptation, production design, costuming, acting style, and staging. These choices emphasize Coppola’s mise-­en-scène of loss and regret. This process highlights certain aspects of Eugenides’ novel and leaves others unexpressed. Tellingly, Coppola can create a stronger cause-and-effect based around loss compared to the book. Cecilia’s party, for instance, is a key incident in both the book and film. This is the event immediately preceding Cecilia’s second (and successful) suicide attempt. In the book, the narrator(s) are focused on their own engagement with the party. The reader follows their navigation of the party through their interactions with the sisters and the space of the chaperoned party. This includes a detailed description of “Joe the Retard,” to use the offensive nickname of the narrators. As they comment, “We were happy when Joe the Retard showed up.”15 Their interactions with Joe are capped with “The party was just beginning to get fun when Cecilia slipped off the stool and made her way to her mother.” The next incident is Cecilia throwing herself from the upstairs bedroom window. Coppola’s adaptation sticks closely to the outline of these scenes in the book. Coppola is able, however, to focus attention on the interactions with Joe, showing Joe, the sisters, and the neighborhood boys huddled together. The scene plays out so that the viewer sees Cecilia’s blank expression, refusing to foster the humiliating banter with Joe. The cramped space of the den, the vivid choices of the costuming (especially Joe’s blazer and the too formal clothes of the teen boys), and the frenzied interactions between the characters all foster a greater sense of the claustrophobia and discomfort. Whereas Eugenides, speaking through the neighborhood boys, portrays the situation as lighthearted and “fun,” Coppola exposes the bullying and the sadism of the scene through her choices. With Cecilia’s action directly—and quickly—after these events with Joe, Coppola suggests a stronger causation for the suicide. Eugenides offers this clue, as one among many, while Coppola’s dramatization of the scene presents a different interpretation: the bullying of Joe was the “final straw” for Cecilia, confirming her dark world view and pushing her to commit suicide. Through translating the sometimes oblique and multifaceted novel to the

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screen, Coppola has created a physical and temporal space for the action. This process facilitates the linear storytelling and causation in action in a way avoided by Eugenides in his novel. These strategies—formal compositions limiting access to character and drama, cinematography doing the same, and the explicit storytelling devices used nevertheless to create a linearity in the film—all lead to the same end. The viewer becomes deeply invested in the loss of the Lisbon sisters, although this loss is engaged more on an intellectual than an emotional basis. This is perhaps surprising since the subject matter and development of the film would seem ripe for emotional exploitation. Coppola is more interested in having her viewer understand the dynamics at play within the characters and their relationships rather than seeking emotional effects. The film certainly achieves some emotional impact, but, in my estimation, more pressing is Coppola’s ability to create a space for considering familial and social issues splintering the psyche. Near the end of the film, Coppola surveys the contents of the nearly empty Lisbon home. Placed against static shots of each room and icons/artifacts (e.g., Lux’s homecoming tiara, the Instamatic camera) from earlier in the film, the narrator explains, “In the end, we had pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how put them together, gaps remain.” Coppola’s stylistic choices privilege these gaps and fissures.

Further Contemplation, No Closure The Lisbon sisters remain a mystery to the neighborhood boys despite all their efforts to uncover the reasons behind the tragedy. The enigma of the girls is largely one of identity: the teen boys have no idea how to engage with and connect to the girls. They also fail to understand the girls’ concerns in any substantive way. The mystery of identity becomes a trauma for the boys who are forever stuck in the 1970s Michigan suburbs of their minds. Linked to the narrative through personal tragedy and public humiliation, director Sofia Coppola transformed Eugenides’ narrative into a compelling cinematic experience. Her ability to orchestrate sound and image in a context far apart from the usual Hollywood norms distinguished her remarkable feature debut. The closure in the film is incomplete: no perfect explanation, no emotional resolution and, if anything, a deepening of the original questions behind the mass suicide. Coppola’s cinematic technique and her design of sound, image, and narrative leave the viewer to contemplate the issues and ideological criticisms within her film for a long time. The model of Coppola’s debut film set a course for the director’s future efforts. Consistently the post-Virgin Suicides films address the concept of identity in flux or in process through a battery of cinematic techniques manipulating time, space, and narrative. These techniques are employed largely outside conventional genres and extend the vocabulary of cinematic storytelling. With their deep engagement with the frailties of human nature, Coppola’s work feels closest to humanist storytelling. For Coppola, the quiet observation of the human condition, in both positive and negative terms, began with The Virgin Suicides and continues to this day.

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Notes Sections and ideas in this chapter were published in an earlier version in my book The Virgin Suicides: Reverie, Sorrow and Young Love (Routledge, 2018). I thank Routledge and my editors for the opportunity to revisit this scholarship. 1 Melina Gerosa, “Goddaughter,” Entertainment Weekly, January 25, 1991, 12–17. 2 George H. Pollock, “The Mourning Process, the Creative Process and the Creation,” in The Problem of Loss and Mourning: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, ed. David R. Dietrich and Peter C. Shabad (Madison: International Universities Press, 1989), 33–4. 3 Even though Air composed the soundtrack for The Virgin Suicides, Coppola used an instrumental track from Fatboy Slim’s “Right Here, Right Now” in the film’s trailer. Her allegiance appears to be strong to this brand of electronic and ambient music. 4 Air, featuring Gordon Tracks, “Playground Love,” by Thomas Pablo Croquet, Jean-Benoît Dunckel-Barbier, Nicolas Godin, released January 17, 2000, Revolvair Music. 5 Tim Anderson, “As If History Was Merely a Record: The Pathology of Nostalgia and the Figure of the Recording in Contemporary Popular Cinema,” Music, Sound and the Moving Image 2, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 51–76. For additional analysis of music in the films of Sofia Coppola, see also Tim Anderson, “Lost in Transition: Popular Music, Adolescence, and the Melodramatic Mode of Sofia Coppola,” in Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers after MTV, ed. Arved Ashby (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 63–83. 6 Robynn J. Stilwell, “Vinyl Communion: The Record as Ritual Object in Girls’ Rites of Passage Films,” in Changing Tunes: Issues in Music and Film, ed. Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2006), 152–66. 7 Bee Gees, “Run to Me,” by Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb and Maurice Gibb, recorded April 12, 1972, Universal Music Publishing. 8 Sheila Weller, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and the Journey of a Generation (New York: Washington Square Press, 2008), 323. 9 Carole King, “So Far Away,” by Carole King, recorded January 1971, COLGEMS-EMI Music. 10 A. O. Scott, “Evanescent Trees and Sisters in an Enchanted 1970’s Suburb,” The New York Times, April 21, 2000. 11 Suzanne Ferriss offers a compelling argument that images within the film are filtered through 1970s photography. See Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 105. Coppola’s reference to Bill Owens’ picture of an eighth-grade graduation dance, for instance, impacts the visuals in the prom scene. Beyond these specific references, the film certainly evokes the colors, graphics, and style associated with the 1970s. 12 Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019), 41. 13 “Film Editor Jim Lyons on the Amorphous Nature of ‘The Virgin Suicides,’” Manhattan Edit Workshop, September 23, 2015, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=g64zbmk1at0. 14 “Making of The Virgin Suicides,” dir. Eleanor Coppola, The Virgin Suicides DVD, dir. Sofia Coppola, Paramount 1999. 15 Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 25.

2 LOST IN TRANSLATION SOFIA COPPOLA’S LOST IN TRANSLATION: LIMINALITY, LONELINESS, AND LEARNING FROM AN-OTHER Lucy Bolton

Sofia Coppola’s first feature-length original screenplay, for which she won an Academy Award, is a contemplative study of alienation and stasis, which manages to be both joyful and melancholy. Lost in Translation features a young philosophy graduate, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), and a middle-aged actor, Bob Harris (Bill Murray), who are both displaced from their ordinary lives during a stay in the Park Hyatt Tokyo hotel. Charlotte is married to a celebrity photographer, whose profession she does not respect, and is accompanying him on a work trip because she has no meaningful occupation of her own. Bob is shooting an advertisement for Suntory whisky, which will offer him money but not artistic fulfillment. Frustrated by his career and facing difficulties in his marriage, Bob cuts an uninspired and solitary figure, until his interest is sparked by the similarly solitary Charlotte. Both are stuck: in their marriages, in their careers, and physically, as they struggle within the timeless capsule of the international hotel with jetlag and their inability to sleep. They strike up a friendship arising out of their shared cynical detachment from their surroundings, but this grows into a meaningful relationship, as each experiences transformation on their own and as a playful, compatible couple. This chapter will examine the moods and meanings of the film, and its exploration of identities in isolation and with an-other. Drawing out the film’s themes, this chapter will analyze the construction of time, space, and immersion within the film, and the balanced, reciprocal relationship of mutual renovation at its heart. The film consolidated Coppola’s

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concerns with isolation, liminality, and girlhood, already expressed in The Virgin Suicides, and also opened her to criticism in terms of its politics of race and class: it can readily be framed as the tale of rich white girl ennui from an Orientalist perspective. With this relatively low-budget film that is autobiographical and personal, yet international and high profile, Sofia Coppola announced herself as a major filmmaking talent and created a landmark film of enduring cultural influence.

Context of the Production The impetus for the film arose out of Coppola’s own journeying in Tokyo in her twenties, when experiencing a creative and personal crisis post-college and post-marriage to Spike Jonze.1 Coppola claims that the film Brief Encounter was on her mind at the time she was writing the screenplay, and she has subsequently described how she was moved by the moment at the end when Alec (Trevor Howard) puts his hand on Laura’s (Celia Johnson) shoulder.2 The influence of the unspoken love between Alec and Laura on Coppola’s depiction of the relationship in Lost in Translation is clearly evident, as I will develop further in this chapter. The film is a sublime example of saying a great deal with no words, which Coppola states is clearly a tone and dynamic that she loves.3 As David Rooney noted in his review of the film for Variety, Coppola “generates an out-of-body feeling,” as the film is “coaxing an evocative sense of the sweet agony of unarticulated sentiments.”4 The motivation to write the screenplay was consolidated by Coppola’s love for Tokyo, which she revived when staying in the Park Hyatt Tokyo to promote The Virgin Suicides in 1999. Lost in Translation was financed by Focus Features, American Zoetrope, Tohokushinsha Corporation, and Elemental Films. This multiparty financial arrangement enabled Coppola to retain control over her production and final cut in the editing suite, keeping the film as close to her personal vision as possible. The film was shot in twenty-seven days, toward the end of 2002. Director of Photography Lance Acord, a regular Coppola collaborator, shot using natural light as much as possible, using high ASA film stock, and followed Coppola’s aim to create “this kind of dreamy feeling of when you’re jet lagged.”5 Much of the filming around Tokyo was shot documentary-style, without permission, as Coppola wanted the film to “be based on the way a snapshot looks.”6 The film’s musical soundtrack was supervised by Brian Reitzell, using compositions by Kevin Shields to convey the “melancholic, romantic” sound that Coppola wanted.7 The songs convey dreamy, jet-lagged haziness and yet also wonderment and thoughtfulness, and, in a film with a significant number of sequences without dialogue, form a major part of the evocation of mood and state of mind. The film had a successful festival release at Telluride and Venice, and was tipped for Oscar success from the outset. Released in the United States in September 2003 and the United Kingdom in January 2004, the film did very well at the box office. The budget for the film was $4 million, and in its opening weekend in the United States took in more than $9 million, with its cumulative worldwide gross now in excess of $118 million.8 It also garnered critical appreciation, notably for Bill Murray’s performance and Coppola’s screenplay. At the Academy Awards in 2004, Coppola won the Oscar for best original screenplay, and the film was also nominated for best director, best film, and best actor for

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Murray. The film won Golden Globes and BAFTA awards as well, and attained the status of “intelligent indie,” creating a mood, pace, and visual style that built on that displayed in The Virgin Suicides, demonstrating Coppola’s skill and craft in creating a thoughtful and highly original exercise in subtlety and mood.9

Masculinity and Femininity The film is widely described as being about alienation, and indeed we see Bob and Charlotte spending a lot of time on their own, as well as engaging in encounters with others, even their respective spouses, that reveal a lack of connection. They each appear disconnected, in different ways. Charlotte is a young woman who studied philosophy at Yale and graduated a year ago. She does not know what she wants to do with her life. She married John (Giovanni Ribisi) two years ago, relocating from New York to Los Angeles, and is now a “trailing spouse”: she has accompanied him on this trip because she wasn’t doing anything herself. We first meet Charlotte in the film’s opening. In a medium shot that is hazy, dreamlike, and rosily lit, we see the back of a young curvaceous female’s pale white lower body, clothed in see-through pink panties, lying on a bed. She shifts her body slightly, drawing attention to her inner thighs rubbing together. This is quite an unexpected shot, as it is so intimate and faceless, in a film we know has been written and directed by a young woman. Why would such a seemingly objectifying shot be chosen as the introduction to this film world? Brian L. Ott and Diane Marie Keeling describe this shot as “a taunt, a tease.”10 In previous work on the film, I have argued that this image of the partially clothed body of a young woman is complicated by the way in which the film’s title appears incrementally over the pink panty-clad backside. This is an indication that the depiction of Charlotte may not be straightforward: This signals that the usual meanings of on-screen femininity may be effectively “lost” in their translation into a new filmic mode that foregrounds female subjectivity . . . the way in which Charlotte is represented re-works these familiar elements of femininity in a realm of intellect, sensation and consciousness that develops her character beyond the stereotype our initial encounter with her might suggest.11 This opening shot forms part of the association of Charlotte with the color pink throughout the film, throwing conventional femininity into focus but also in contrast with the reality of Charlotte’s more unconventional character: the pink panties and the gray sweater, the pink wig and the exaggerated performance of coquetry in the karaoke box, the cherry blossom lampshade that Charlotte fixes in her room, and the pink lipstick that she applies but also appraises. These encounters with pink items represent the intricate landscape of femininity that Coppola constructs in this film as in her others. While partially embracing a girlish aesthetic, Coppola gives the character of Charlotte a biting edge: she is surly, snobbish, taciturn, and—in her own words—“so mean.” This is not femininity as sugar and spice, but rather as one element of a thoughtful, intellectual personality grappling with existential angst.

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Masculinity in the film is no less complicated. Bob is first seen being driven from the airport to his hotel, jet-lagged, and confronted by a huge billboard photograph of himself in a previous advertisement for Suntory whisky. These are our first sightings of Tokyo, and we see them through Bob’s eyes, with the dreamy track “Girls” by Death in Vegas accompanying our shared taxi ride through the neon lights and monumental animated advertisements, lights playing across Bob’s face as he gazes at the disorientating spectacle. When Bob arrives at the Park Hyatt, he is greeted by friendly Japanese staff and work contacts, who bow, give him gifts, and welcome him. Bob is tired and a little awkward while trying to be polite as well. Attention is constantly drawn to his physical size, either by his being head and shoulders above everybody else, or the shower being too low, or the hotel slippers too small. He is older than most people around the hotel and in the city, and appears listless and washed out. His telephone calls with his wife, and the faxes that she sends him in the middle of his night, are generally irritable; she makes jibes about Bob forgetting his son’s birthday and testily enquires about domestic decoration decisions. Barbed comments, such as “they’re getting used to you not being here” and “I’m glad you’re having fun,” convey Lydia’s lack of enthusiasm for Bob’s trip and also a lack of loving connection between them. In one of the pricklier exchanges, when Bob tells her that he wants to eat less pasta and more Japanese food when he gets home, Lydia replies, “well why don’t you just stay there and you can eat it every day?” Bob has to confront his age, his career decisions, his status in his wife’s life, and the youth of Charlotte, all throwing into focus his wrinkles and aged body, his missed opportunities, and the contrast between his star image and his real life. When two young American businessmen in the hotel bar congratulate him on doing his own stunt driving in a film that they love, he cannot wait to get away from them and their adulation of his macho star persona.

Marriage The film presents two marriages that are not meetings of minds, and, challengingly, the idea that connections between couples change and dissipate. Bob says that he and Lydia “used to laugh all the time,” but that she doesn’t need him any more now that they have children. He confides to Charlotte that the day you have children “is the most terrifying day of your life—your life, as you knew it, is gone.” Charlotte notes that “nobody ever tells you that,” but she is already estranged from John after two years of marriage. She confesses that she is “stuck,” unable to decide what she should be, having tried photography, painting, and writing. But also, she is alienated from John by his investment in celebrity culture, his work as a photographer, and the fact that he uses hair products. Lydia and John are not presented as bad people: both marriages are characterized by a lack of connection between husband and wife, and distance based on the feeling that Bob and Charlotte are not truly seen or known by their respective spouses. This is not played for sentiment or pity; instead, it underlines the emotional isolation that Bob and Charlotte each feel, and underscores their connection with each other, as they seem to understand one another and enjoy each other’s company so much.

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Building Connection Bob and Charlotte first see each other in an elevator in the hotel. Charlotte smiles at Bob, briefly and politely, and then exits. It is in the hotel bar, after Bob has had one day of shooting the Suntory advertisement, that they begin to connect with each other through their mutual perspective on their surroundings. Charlotte and Bob acknowledge their amusement at how the jazz singer in the bar is attempting “to turn ‘Scarborough Fair’ into a torch song.”12 The shot-reverse-shots of Bob and Charlotte establish their focus on each other and their exchange of amused glances. Charlotte sends over to Bob a bowl of something that looks like olives, in a gesture of friendly teasing, as one would expect a drink to be delivered to the table in this way. Bob raises the bowl to toast Charlotte, then leaves the bar, with his makeup on and jacket clips still in place all down his back from the photo shoot, and Charlotte’s amused gaze follows him as he recedes. Bob then looks at his reflection in the elevator: he looks old and tired. We next see him tackling the cross-trainer in the hotel gym, which he fails to master and from which he has to leap unceremoniously. This sequence begins to establish the footing for their relationship: Charlotte is amused by Bob, and her interest prompts him to reflect upon his own ageing masculinity and dissatisfactions. In their room, Charlotte is unable to sleep and asks if John is awake, but John is having no difficulty, dropping off to sleep again and snoring after a matter of seconds. She leaves their room and goes to the hotel bar where she is seated next to Bob, who is similarly suffering from insomnia. They introduce themselves to each other quite formally and yet also honestly. Bob says he is taking a break from his wife, has forgotten his son’s birthday, and is getting paid two million dollars to make an advertisement when he could be doing a play. Charlotte suggests he may be having a mid-life crisis and enquires whether he has considered buying a Porsche yet: she is totally aware of the potential cliché that this man represents. She tells Bob about her graduation and lack of occupation, and that she decided to come along with her husband on the trip. Bob reassures her that she will “work out the angles” and they toast to everything working out. They share their mutual wish that they could sleep, and the two-shot of them sitting at the bar establishes their equivalence and companionship (see Figure 2.1).

United Against the World Having established that Bob and Charlotte are solitary figures, the film begins to demonstrate how they connect with each other in their viewpoints on the world around them. We have been aligned with Bob in his feelings of alienation during the photo shoot, not being able to understand the Japanese photographer, and having to oblige when asked to recreate archetypes of mature Western masculinity, such as the Rat Pack’s Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and Roger Moore’s incarnation of James Bond. We have also been aligned with Charlotte when she displays dismay and disgust at movie actress Kelly’s (Anna Faris) shallow and excitable conversation with John about his being her

40The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola

Figure 2.1  Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003.

favorite photographer; flattered, John goes to put his arm around Charlotte’s back but she peels it off. As Kelly and John chatter and giggle, Charlotte, center-screen, has an expression of disdainful detachment. Kelly tells John that she is staying in the hotel under the name of Evelyn Waugh; Charlotte comments that Evelyn Waugh was a man, to which John replies, “not everybody went to Yale,” siding with Kelly against Charlotte’s perceived snobbery. Through the framing of Charlotte between John and Kelly, and the focus on Charlotte’s appraising, judging, expression, we are aligned with her perspective on the other two. We are therefore positioned now, by this stage in the film, alongside Bob and Charlotte as individuals in a variety of situations, and—as their empathetic relationship with each other develops—we begin to share their fellow-feeling as well, through a shared understanding of their perspectives and experiences.

Racial and Cultural Otherness As well as the people in their respective personal lives, a major part of Bob and Charlotte’s feelings of alienation are aroused and conveyed by the film’s depiction of Tokyo and the Japanese people. Coppola has stated that she wanted the film “to look the way Tokyo looked to me when I visited.”13 This touristic gaze is an element of the film that has attracted criticism for its Orientalizing and othering attitude, particularly for how the perspective is co-opted by the film in order to bolster the audience’s identification with Bob and Charlotte, in a shared perspective on the Japanese. Homay King observes, “the film prompts snickers of amusement from its Western audience,” but notes that Japanese audiences and critics found the film to be stereotypical and discriminatory. The criticism is not clear cut, however, as King develops: “Lost in Translation does not claim to represent Tokyo authentically, objectively, or thoroughly; rather, every image has

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the fresh quality and provisional status of a first impression.”14 King is describing how Coppola’s lens frames Tokyo from the perspective of the outsider, and shows Bob and Charlotte having that perspective too: the film shows Tokyo from their viewpoints and has been described as “merely the setting or backdrop for the exploration of missed or potential encounter between these two compatriots.”15 Coppola can also be criticized for not making this perspective abundantly clear. As King further explains, “When Japan appears superficial, inappropriately erotic, or unintelligible, we are never completely sure whether this vision belongs to Coppola, to her characters, or simply to a Hollywood cinematic imaginary.”16 There are certainly moments in the film that appear to consist of cheap humor at the expense of the Japanese people. In particular, there is the running gag of the “confusion” between Ls and Rs, resulting in Bob’s difficulties in understanding the call girl instructing him to “rip my stockings” and when the photographer tells him to imitate the “Rat Pack” and “Roger Moore.” Bob perpetuates this when he cites Charlotte’s “Black Toe” as a potential sushi delicacy in the restaurant and entreats her to wish him a “safe flight” at the end of the film. The scene in the sushi restaurant is especially offensive, as Bob says “Black Toe” in an exaggerated Japanese accent, suggests they should cut off Charlotte’s bruised toe as someone would want to order it, and challenges the cook about his straight-faced expression. This is a routine that Bob puts on for Charlotte’s amusement, and it does make her chuckle, but Charlotte does not generally go along with this type of humor. Interestingly, this performance for Charlotte was improvised by Murray: Coppola had simply written “he tries to make her laugh.”17 Charlotte’s travels around Tokyo show her observing the city and its inhabitants. Her expressions vary from surprise at the image of a woman with huge breasts in a manga magazine being read by the boy standing next to her on the subway, to amusement at the energetic and cool ways in which teenagers play the games in the video arcade, to her observational tourist gaze over a Buddhist ceremony in a Kyoto temple. Charlotte’s reactions are not spoken; instead, we follow her eyes and trace her facial movements in order to understand her position and responses, which are open and receptive. Kendra Marston analyzes Charlotte’s gaze in the context of a melancholic burden which she sees as being traded in by Coppola’s cinema: “a type of painful yet pleasurable neurasthenia, experienced only by the white and privileged, that the protagonists are unable to alleviate.” Like other Coppola heroines, Marston argues, Charlotte demonstrates “a melancholic, despondent attitude to the image-obsessed worlds within which they reside and with whom the audience is encouraged to empathise.”18 Marston sees this as a basis for Bob’s admiration of Charlotte, seeing her as a kindred spirit, because they share a disenchantment with the circulation of superficial, celebrity images. He feels self-loathing for taking the advertising job rather than acting in a stage play, and, as we have seen, his image is available as part of the backdrop of the Tokyo barrage of brightly lit advertisements, always in motion. It is, as Marston identifies, the “heavily stereotyped depiction” of Japanese characters that ensures that the emphasis of the film remains focused on upon “the soul searching of the white American characters”: “The ‘unknowability’ of the Tokyo environment aids in perpetuating a cinematic mood characterised by sustained periods of white melancholia.”19

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While it is certainly the case that Tokyo and the Japanese people are figured as “Other” in the film, I would urge a view that recognizes that the depiction is not “one-note,” and that a variety of impressions and representations are on display. One of the main shifts in the mood of the film, from what Ott and Keeling describe as from “Alienation and Dislocation” to “Immersion and Intensity,”20 occurs when Bob joins Charlotte for a night out with Charlie Brown (Fumihiro Hayashi) and his friends. Charlotte invites Bob to join her when they run into each other in the corridor, both in bathrobes, having been swimming. As soon as Bob calls for Charlotte at her hotel room, from his high-energy repeated knocking on her door, to her laughter at his bright camouflage T-shirt (which he turns inside-out in response) and their giggling departure from her room, their energy has clearly shifted to playful, mischievous, and fun. As Ott and Keeling describe, “The sense of alienation and dislocation that dominates the first third of the film is replaced by a feeling of intensity, energy, electricity, and engagement, which is sustained by total sensory immersion (envelopment).”21 The distance and dislocation that Bob and Charlotte have experienced up to now are brought to a joyful end by their immersion in this fun-packed night out. The evening consists of drinks, where Bob chats about surfing to one of Charlie Brown’s friends, a forced exit from the bar when trouble starts, as they are pursued by angry bar owners with BB guns, a house party where they meet other friends, chat, dance, and drink, and a karaoke session where Bob sings “(What’s so Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” and Charlotte sings “Brass in Pocket.” The group sit together, clap, singalong, sway, and enjoy each other’s performances. Charlie Brown performs “God Save the Queen” thereby repeating the real-life performance he had given for his long-time friend Sofia Coppola, which she had realized was something she had to capture on film.22 Outside the karaoke booth, Charlotte sits with a cigarette and is joined by Bob, who has a puff, then they sit in companionable silence, as Charlotte rests her head on his shoulder. This image confirms Bob and Charlotte as a unit, a pair, even a couple, but only on a break from the others they are with, not in a superior or judgmental way. On their way home in the taxi, Bob dozes and Charlotte smiles benignly at the sight. Back at the hotel, Bob carries a sleeping Charlotte to her room, places her in bed, covers her with the quilt, and turns off her light. Charlotte opens her eyes to smile at him, but then goes back to sleep. Bob’s expression is hard to read but is perhaps one of resignation that she has fallen asleep and “that’s his bad luck,” although there isn’t any suggestion of them getting together sexually. Bob leaves her hotel room, shuts the door, and checks it is shut properly, conveying care for her and a sense of responsibility for her safety. Back in his room he makes a telephone call to his wife, to tell her all about the evening, where he waxes lyrical about the fabulous people he has met and the great music he has heard. It is a bad time for his wife, however, and the telephone call ends abruptly, with Bob saying “I love you” a few seconds too late for Lydia to hear and him concluding that making the call was a stupid idea. While the otherness of Charlie Brown’s social scene is what Bob and Charlotte love about it, this exoticization is not based in stereotypes and distance but rather in points of connection with these friends of friends: connections through conversation, managed despite language differences, through music, dancing, and singing. Tokyo has been transformed into somewhere “teeming with life, diversity, intrigue and attraction,”23 in which the audience is immersed as well as Bob and Charlotte. The evening inevitably comes to an end, however. Marston concludes:

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The allure of the exotic Other occupies a source of transient fantasy that remains in the realm of wishful thinking, never promising a lasting transcendence over the melancholic state and yet also importantly working to preserve the text’s primary interest in the mysterious nature and nostalgic idealisation of white feminine identity.24 This observation pinpoints how the night out, as wonderful as it was, serves only to consolidate their white American loneliness. Bob tries to share his experience with his wife, but the gulf between them is too vast; the next day Charlotte heads off on the bullet train on her own to Kyoto, where her investigations and wanderings further highlight her isolation. Charlotte visits several temples and shrines, and observes a wedding procession moving through a park. She looks closely at the bride’s made-up face, expressions, and hand gestures, and is moved by the innocence and hopefulness of the spectacle. She carefully negotiates stepping-stones over a pond and ties a piece of paper onto a wishing tree. We see her crossing a large courtyard, looking small and isolated in the fading light. These images demonstrate the privilege that Charlotte has, in that she is clearly financially able to undertake these travels, both to and within Japan, and has the time to explore. As Marston observes, Charlotte’s vacation is one “on which she does not have to work, care for others or carry out routine chores,” which provides her with the space and time to reflect on her life.25 Undoubtedly her lack of responsibility and her financial means are the envy of many, but, as in many of Coppola’s films, they also contribute to her ennui. As So Mayer notes, “Complicitous critique is always present in Coppola’s beautifully executed films, where a cool and withdrawn intelligence surveys the excesses, but thus also presents the seductions, of turbo-capitalism.”26 There is no doubt that these exquisite shots of Kyoto are captivating and mesmeric when accompanied by the wistful and emotive track “Alone in Kyoto” by Air.27 But what the film does not do is suggest that these touristic encounters offer succor or transformation. When Charlotte weeps at the sight of the bride, she is clearly now able to feel something, compared to her emotional inertia when she first visited the chanting monks. The suggestion is that she is moved by the vision of hope that the wedding procession offers, in the knowledge that her own marriage has not lived up to what she hoped it would be on her wedding day. And perhaps the connection that she is feeling with Bob is driving home to her how disconnected she is from John.

The Park Hyatt Tokyo The hotel is a significant character in the film. For Coppola, it was an integral part of the film’s conception: It’s just one of my favorite places in the world. Tokyo is so hectic, but inside the hotel it’s very silent. And the design of it is interesting. It’s weird to have this New York bar . . . the jazz singer . . . the French restaurant, all in Tokyo. It’s this weird combination of different cultures.28 Bob and Charlotte occupy various spaces within the hotel, move around between them, and pass through others. Charlotte explores the hotel in a similar way to her investigations

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of the city. She moves around the corridors, coming across different scenes in different rooms. She witnesses Kelly spouting glib banalities at a press conference, and comes across a room where some Japanese women are arranging flowers in various vases and invite her to take part. Although hesitant at first, she accedes to their invitation, which is offered through the gentlest of coaxing physical gestures, and begins to place branches covered in buds into the flower arrangements. These experiences engage Charlotte’s senses of touch, smell, and sound, as well as sight, and create an immersive cinematic experience for the spectator. The slowness of these scenes, of both camera movement and performance style, as well as the minimal dialogue, creates a mood of exploration and experimentation, albeit one without direction or any sense of time. Bob tries the hotel gym and also swims in the pool, observing an aqua aerobics session, where the bouncing and cavorting of the participants contrasts with his smooth underwater progress. The sound design of the scene captures the unmistakable soundscape of the swimming pool—filtration systems humming, water splashing, hard surfaces rebounding noise, and shouting voices—as well as conjuring up the alternate sounds of being under and over water. While not progressing the narrative in any way, scenes such as this, and Charlotte’s flower arranging, evoke a mood of immersion and engagement of the senses in the present moment. This not only locates Bob and Charlotte in the here and now, conveying their occupation of this labyrinthine hotel cocoon, but also suggests a stasis that is productive: observing others in a way that takes them out of themselves and draws their attention in objectual, less solipsistic directions. In other hotel room scenes, Charlotte sits on the windowsill or lies in the bath, contemplating the vista of the city below. In these contemplative scenes, “Charlotte’s high-rise viewpoint creates a feeling of isolation but also of security in her surveillance.”29 Once her husband has gone on his work trip, she is alone in her room in a state that is meditative and private. Bob is seen to be uncomfortably occupying his hotel room, as the curtains open without warning, the shower head is too low and the water too cold, and he looks out of place in the ill-fitting hotel kimono and slippers. However, Bob’s suite is far less private than Charlotte’s. First, Lydia repeatedly invades the room with noisy faxes and parcels of carpet samples, thereby colonizing Bob’s room with his domestic discomforts. The sex worker organized by one of Bob’s business associates invites herself into his room and proceeds to stage a melodramatic fantasy sequence which results in Bob tangling with her on the floor and the bed in order to resist her advances. And Bob awakes to find the jazz singer from the hotel bar singing in his bathroom, having spent the night in his bed: the sight of a champagne bucket and two glasses reminding him of the previous night’s sexual encounter. He visibly cringes at the realization and then has to confront Charlotte at his door, who soon gets the measure of what has happened. In this way, Bob’s hotel room is effectively a microcosm of his mid-life crisis, throwing his masculinity, marriage, and sexuality into compressed focus. In the only scene where they share a hotel room, Bob sends a note to Charlotte’s room in the middle of the night, knowing that Charlotte will also be awake, because of their shared insomnia, and Charlotte goes to join him in his suite. They watch La Dolce Vita in the original language, with Japanese subtitles, drinking sake and reminiscing about the first time they saw each other (see Figure 2.2). In a nod to the Italian movies that Coppola loves,30 the scene

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Figure 2.2  Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003.

of Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni at the Trevi Fountain in Rome presents images of timeless movie magic and emphasizes Bob and Charlotte’s shared connection as Americans. They tease each other about their first impressions and spend time together which is relaxed and intimate. A cut takes us from the two of them sitting on the floor to lying on the double bed, where they speak frankly and succinctly about the main challenges in their lives. Bob having discussed the challenges of married life and Charlotte having described her difficulties with being “stuck,” they both fall asleep. As they do, Bob’s hand rests on Charlotte’s foot in a gesture of intimacy and reassurance that seems to be unknown to the already sleeping Charlotte and unconscious to the falling-asleep Bob. This gentle but visceral gesture demonstrates affection and comfort, as well as showing that they are able to fall asleep when they are together, as opposed to the insomnia they experience apart. The gesture recalls Coppola’s comments about the significance of the hand on the shoulder in Brief Encounter. As she describes this moment in Life Cinematic, When he touches her shoulder . . . you know exactly how she feels and it just projects so much emotion; it’s such a small detail, that you could feel is like nothing if someone just described it, but you feel the intensity of the emotion. I love this movie, it’s so simple.31 Coppola says that the moment in Brief Encounter directly inspired her by the way in which so much is said in one little gesture. This tiny gesture here, as Bob touches Charlotte’s foot, carries immense meaning and conveys great intimacy, as it shows a connection that arises out of closeness and leads to a desire to be in empathetic physical contact. Demonstrating her understanding of the power of cinema to show, rather than tell, Coppola’s description of the way in which a moment might not feel significant at all if simply described in words certainly applies to this moment between Bob and Charlotte.

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“I Love You” Both Bob and Charlotte say “I love you” to their respective spouses, but these utterances seem either to fill in a gap in conversation or to be tagged onto awkward conversations, for example, when John is leaving to go on his trip and when Bob telephones Lydia after he has left Charlotte to go to sleep. Both these conversations are stilted and conflicted, and both end with a glib “I love you” as if simply part of a habitual farewell or for lack of something else to say. We do not hear Charlotte and Bob tell each other that they love each other. This lack of any explicit declaration, however, in no way minimizes the evocation of the strength of feeling they have for one another. The way in which Charlotte’s disappointment shows in her face when she realizes Bob has spent the night with the singer conveys how hurt she is by what feels like a betrayal. The insults that they trade with each other over the badtempered lunch that follows shows they know how to hurt each other: she attacks his age and declining career; he highlights her need for attention. But when they meet outside the hotel in the middle of the night because of a fire alarm, their affection and deep feeling for each other cannot be denied. They go to the bar and Bob confesses he does not want to leave, to which Charlotte replies, “then don’t; stay with me and we’ll start a jazz band.” This hints at the unrealistic prospect of them being able to maintain their playful Tokyo sojourn, but the sincerity of their gaze upon each other, and the holding of each other’s hand, conveys the depth of feeling and the dread of being parted (see Figure 2.3). Significantly, this scene takes place in the neutral public space of the bar, as it keeps their physical intimacy curtailed. Similarly, in the elevator, as they share an awkward goodbye kiss, the exquisite timing of their hesitation means that Bob misses his floor and they have to repeat the kiss at the next floor. These public spaces put the brakes on the expression of their feelings for each other, alongside the clear obstacles to their

Figure 2.3  Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003.

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relationship, including their marriages and ages. The issue of sexual attraction is not explicit, but Charlotte’s jealousy of the one-night stand with the singer suggests that her feelings toward Bob are not simply platonic. There is eroticism in the karaoke booth, as Charlotte performs seductively for Bob, and in the hotel bar, as they share plans to hatch an escape; the evening spent in Bob’s hotel room is intimate and sensual, as well as sincere and intense. These connections are conveyed in such honest and convincing exchanges and moments, with performances evoking emotion and restraint, that the final scenes of the film are remarkably touching and moving.

The Future The verbal wordplay and companionable silences that Bob and Charlotte have shared, as well as their playful adventures in Tokyo, make the shift to the pain of separation all the more marked. The morning after their clumsy farewell kiss in the lift, Bob calls Charlotte from the hotel lobby ostensibly to ask for his jacket back, but plainly to try to speak to her before he leaves. While a glamorous blonde woman tries to attract Bob’s attention to express her admiration for him, Bob only has eyes for Charlotte as she emerges from the lift with his jacket. They say goodbye, and Charlotte leaves the lobby looking straight ahead without making eye contact with Bob, who looks after her with an expression of desolation and anguish. When Bob spies Charlotte walking along the street and stops his taxi to go after her, it isn’t until she turns around that we see the tears in her eyes and the joyful relief at seeing him again. In the film’s famous final exchange between the two, we hear Bob mumble into Charlotte’s ear as he cradles her head firmly. They kiss and part, with positivity and transformed faces. Although we cannot hear what Bob says to Charlotte, the mood of the film is uplifted, as he backs away, a grin spreading across his face, and the opening bars of “Just Like Honey” set an optimistic, positive tone.32 We are left to wonder whether they will meet up again when back in the United States, or whether he has imparted some information that changes the status of their relationship, or simply described the extent of his feelings: whatever he says, the film ends in a way that suggests movement toward a future. Bob heads for the airport, the car takes us with him away from Tokyo, and Charlotte heads off into the Tokyo crowd and into a future that we cannot help but feel will be transformed by this romantic encounter, for it has lifted her out of her “stuck” state and indicated a way of being in the world which is playful, connected, and genuinely reciprocal. She has seen that there is a more fulfilling way of relating to another and the potential for a more honest and satisfying life.

The Legacy of an Indie Hit In 2018, the fifteen-year anniversary of Lost in Translation prompted a flurry of articles considering the lasting appeal of this dreamy, romantic, melancholy evocation of a

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fleeting romance in a foreign city. From the opening pink-panties shot, to the mumbled final words, and the touristic snap shots to the dream-pop soundtrack, the film has been culturally influential in many ways. Coppola regarded it as a personal, self-indulgent project and was surprised that people connected with it so much.33 The freedom from studio control meant that this personal creation could be just how Coppola imagined it to be, and the moments of contemplation, connection, attention, and immersion that the film conjures enable it to live on in our imaginations, meaning what we want it to. Ott and Keeling describe how the film “is a temporary medicine for (release from) the alienation and dislocation of our contemporary moment.” They explain how the film presents “a mode of being-in-the-world that need not be restricted to one’s time with the film.”34 It is this lingering quality, the diffuse mood of the film, and the acuity of the observations about loneliness and connection that enable the film to enter into our consciousness and embed itself in our memories.

Notes 1 Simon Bland, “‘I Never Expected People to Connect with It So Much’: Sofia Coppola on Lost in Translation at 15,” Little White Lies, August 26, 2018, https://lwlies​.com​/articles​/sofia​ -coppola​-lost​-in​-translation​-interview/. 2 Sofia Coppola, Life Cinematic, BBC Four, November 27, 2020, https://www​.bbc​.co​.uk​/iplayer​ /episode​/m000pr04​/life​-cinematic​-series​-1​-4​-sofia​-coppola. 3 Coppola discusses the influence on her of what she calls “the Italians,” which she used to watch with her father, in the BBC Four program Life Cinematic in November 2020. See Coppola, Life Cinematic. 4 David Rooney, “Lost in Translation,” Variety, August 31, 2003, https://variety​.com​/2003​/film​/ awards​/lost​-in​-translation​-6​-1200539681/. 5 Bland, “Sofia Coppola on Lost in Translation at 15.” 6 Wendy Mitchell, “Sofia Coppola Talks about ‘Lost in Translation,’ Her Love Story That’s not ‘Nerdy,’” IndieWire, February 4, 2004, https://www​.indiewire​.com​/2004​/02​/sofia​-coppola​ -talks​-about​-lost​-in​-translation​-her​-love​-story​-thats​-not​-nerdy​-79158/. 7 Mitchell, “Sofia Coppola Talks.” For a fuller discussion of the soundtrack, see Tim J. Anderson, “Lost in Transition: Popular Music, Adolescence, and the Melodramatic Mode of Sofia Coppola,” in Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers after MTV, ed. Arved Ashby (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 63–83. 8 Box office figures obtained from The Numbers​.co​m: https://www​.the​-numbers​.com​/movie​/ Lost​-in​-Translation​#tab​=summary. 9 For a discussion of the “indie” status of the film, see Geoff King, Lost in Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 10 Brian L. Ott and Diane Marie Keeling, “Cinema and Choric Connection: Lost in Translation as Sensual Experience,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 4 (2011): 376. 11 Lucy Bolton, Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 104–5. 12 Bolton, Film and Female Consciousness, 111. 13 Mitchell, “Sofia Coppola Talks.”

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14 Homay King, “Lost in Translation,” Film Quarterly 59, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 45. 15 Erica Burman, “Between Orientalism and Normalization: Cross-Cultural Lessons from Japan for a Critical History of Psychology,” History of Psychology 10, no. 2 (2007): 193. 16 King, “Lost in Translation,” 45. 17 Mitchell, “Sofia Coppola Talks.” 18 Kendra Marston, Postfeminist Whiteness: Problematising Melancholic Burden in Contemporary Hollywood (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 175. 19 Marston, Postfeminist Whiteness, 177. 20 Ott and Keeling, “Cinema and Choric Connection.” 21 Ott and Keeling “Cinema and Choric Connection,” 372. 22 Mitchell, “Sofia Coppola Talks.” See also Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). 23 Ott and Keeling, “Cinema and Choric Connection,” 372. 24 Marston, Postfeminist Whiteness, 180. 25 Marston, Postfeminist Whiteness, 178. 26 Sophie Mayer, Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 110. 27 Tim Anderson notes that the music is not identifiably Eastern or Western. See Anderson, “Lost in Transition,” 65. 28 Mitchell, “Sofia Coppola Talks.” 29 Bolton, Film and Female Consciousness, 110. 30 Coppola discusses her love for mood and moments that speak volumes with no words in A Life Cinematic. 31 Coppola, Life Cinematic. 32 Several critics have noted that Coppola rarely uses dialogue at moments of real emotion. See Hannah McGill and Isabel Stevens, “Hotel California,” Sight and Sound 21, no. 1 (January 2011): 16–19; Amy Woodworth, “A Feminist Theorization of Sofia Coppola’s Postfeminist Trilogy,” in Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema, ed. Marcelline Block (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), 138–67. 33 Bland, “Sofia Coppola on Lost in Translation at 15.” 34 Ott and Keeling, “Cinema and Choric Connection,” 379.

3 MARIE ANTOINETTE THE JOURNEY: THE RECEPTION OF SOFIA COPPOLA’S MARIE ANTOINETTE Nicole Richter

Sofia Coppola is a director whose work has consistently inspired divided response from mainstream audiences, popular critics, and academics, none more so than her highaesthetic representation of late 1700s Versailles, Marie Antoinette (2006). Following the successes of indie-darling The Virgin Suicides (1999) and the award-winning Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette was Coppola’s most visible and (by far) her most expensive film to date. Marie Antoinette sets itself apart from the rest of Coppola’s work in several ways, most notably by its blockbuster budget. Lost in Translation’s enormous success, both critically and financially, secured the sizeable $40 million budget for the film and created substantial pre-release hype. Released in theaters on October 20, 2006, the film’s opening netted a mere $5.3 million at the box office, and it was quickly pulled from theaters. The controversy surrounding the film’s release is the stuff of legend, a story equally if not more spectacle-driven than the film itself, a response that tells us so much about expectations placed on female directors, about audience reception practices, about a moment in film history that unexpectedly resulted in backlash. Marie Antoinette was a harbinger, an albatross even, reflecting a dark moment in film history, that has only recently begun to be addressed. The world had no idea what to do with it. The majority of critical attention paid to the film focuses on the marketing strategy by major studio Sony and its contribution to the failed popular reception of the film by audiences and critics alike. In essence, audience expectations about the film, based on the marketing strategy, guaranteed the film’s failure.

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Looking back, it seems all but inevitable that the film was doomed. On the surface, it didn’t make sense as a follow-up to her first two features, it didn’t follow the rules of big-budget Hollywood filmmaking, and it attempted to recuperate the image of a woman universally reviled. All of Coppola’s other films were received as understated and subtle, spoken about in hushed tones and murmurs, occupying just as much space as they “should,” giving us just as much distance from them as we needed to praise them openly in academic circles and at small dinner parties. Marie Antoinette was messy, a tooobvious stain on the rug, a party foul that never got properly washed away. To be frank, viewers wanted the guillotine. In this piece, I address the public and critical responses to Marie Antoinette, specifically arguing that they serve as parallels to the representation and criticism of the titular character, who herself can be seen as representing Coppola in her position as a heavily criticized female director from a “royal” Hollywood dynasty. The film is a conscious act of feminist resistance within the confines of a highly commercial industry. The film explicitly speaks to the difficulties of Coppola’s own position—as a filmmaker who is both on the inside looking out and on the outside looking in. Though set in the eighteenth century, the film is a postmodern ode to girl culture that captures the loneliness and alienation of the fourteen-year-old Dauphine—and eventual Queen—as she leaves behind her homeland of Austria and marries France’s Louis XVI. It also offers an illuminating perspective on Coppola’s unique cinematic style, for its audiovisual excesses simultaneously speak to and complicate Hollywood’s trend toward big-budget, high-concept moviemaking. Coppola’s film may appear to be almost (if not equally) as spectacle-driven as those produced by the place, or series of places, we know as Hollywood. However, she uses codes of superficiality and visual overload differently to express a subjective point of view and assert her creative, professional, and authorial agency. Ultimately, Marie Antoinette speaks to the constructed nature of representation, and through the film, Coppola positions knowledge (including historical knowledge) as unrepresentable. By making no pretense toward “truth” or “fact,” she sets the stage for feminist (self-)representation, “revealing her own view of her location within the American and global film industry.”1 Rosalind Galt draws an intelligent and germane connection between the fetishistic (feminized and denigrated) image, the female body, and consumerism: Marie Antoinette stages the fetishistic status of the royal body as a question of production design. The film connects a feminised world of objects (for instance, a deliberately anachronistic discourse on the shoe as commodity fetish) with the class and gender politics within which Marie’s body can be owned first by the state and then violently by the people.2 A comprehensive overview of the film’s critical reception is provided here, as well as an account of the significant scholarly work devoted to the film over the last fifteen years. At the Cannes press screening, the film was infamously booed by audience members, a fact that instigated a feverish witch-hunt against the film and its director. Media outlets had a feeding frenzy. Reporter Robert Nelson vividly captured the mood at the Cannes

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Press Conference: “The French revolutionary film reporters joined an international coalition that seemed bent on collecting the head of Sofia Coppola.”3 The New York Times had a less extreme take: Manohla Dargis reported that “though no one called for the filmmaker’s head, Marie Antoinette filled the theater with lusty boos and smatterings of applause.”4 It seems clear that while making the film Coppola and her star Kirsten Dunst did not have it at the front of their minds that they were making a radical or shocking piece of cinema. Interviews surrounding the moment of the film’s release indicate a sleepy confusion surrounding its reception, as if Coppola and Dunst can’t fathom what is happening or why. In an early interview after the premiere Coppola admitted, “I don’t know about the boos. It’s news to me,” and resignedly commented, “Well, that’s disappointing to hear.” During the press conference, Coppola looked “beseechingly” at her star, in a manner “that seems in the context of this conspicuously consumptive movie to say, ‘can we go shopping now?’”5 Andre Caracos, then-Senior Vice President of Publicity at Sony Pictures, acknowledged there was booing at the Cannes debut, but claimed it wasn’t “as thunderous as perhaps reported. It wasn’t a debacle, but it could’ve gone better for sure.”6 Coppola’s later recollection was that a few people booed at the press screening but that the headlines were overstated. Producer Ross Katz was “pissed off” by the inaccurate media reporting that ended up overshadowing the film’s positive reception. According to Coppola and Katz, the audience gave the film’s premiere a standing ovation and Dunst recounts, “Our premiere got a standing ovation and we had the greatest after-party of all time. Once the film actually came out, it hit me that people didn’t really seem to like it.”7 The negative response to the film did not end at Cannes. Marie Antoinette is the only film directed by Coppola to be financed by a major Hollywood studio—Columbia Pictures—a distinction that speaks volumes about Coppola’s place within the American and global film industry. Her intentional and strategic cultivation of her “indie-boutique” brand was in many ways at odds with a Hollywood studio approach and has as much to do with the film’s complicated, and in many ways “failed,” reception by audiences, given the traditional, blockbuster approach used to market the film. While the film’s financing still relied on Coppola’s creative approach to funding, utilizing global co-distribution deals with Japan’s Tohokushinsha Film Corporation and France’s Pathé, its association with a major studio did it no favors. Hybrid production and distribution strategies have been essential to Coppola’s global success, along with Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope playing a small, but essential role in all of her feature filmmaking. Marie Antoinette was released at the height of what Thomas Schatz calls “Conglomerate Hollywood,” when blockbuster-driven franchises dominated global media making and independent film was being flattened and consolidated. As Christina Lane and I explain, Coppola finds financing for smaller-budget, more aesthetically daring pictures through complex international co-production and distribution deals. She has engaged in a tactical, mirroring maneuver that aids her ongoing professional survival. In an environment governed by brand-name franchises, serials, and remakes, Coppola’s films—which are more lyrical, poetic, and character-driven—have succeeded not

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necessarily through counter-strategies of financing but rather by exploiting and aggressively co-opting reigning economic structures.8 The film is remembered as a commercial disaster of epic proportions (however, the film grossed $61 million worldwide, making it neither a success nor a failure). Coppola and her crew were proud of the film they had made and did not anticipate its chilly reception: “nobody saw Marie Antoinette at the time. People didn’t seem to know what to make of it. . . . I thought that young girls would be into it, but I just don’t think it ever found its way and the marketing didn’t find that audience.”9 It was the conclusion to a trilogy of sorts, her first three feature films thematically connected to finding one’s identity during the transition from girlhood to womanhood, that mimicked in many ways Coppola’s own personal journey. Especially insightful given her age at the time (twenty-four), Dunst intrinsically understood the importance of the work and the gendered undertones of the surrounding conversation: “Sofia is the only one telling stories about intimate women, what they go through in their personal lives. . . . There are plenty of ‘mopey-man’ movies, but there’s no things about girls being introspective, their struggles in the world, their relationships.”10 As Coppola has acknowledged, the film represents the final part of a triptych with The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, “both of which explore alienated subjectivities and the creation of female identity,” and, as Anna Backman Rogers argues, “Marie Antoinette is best read within this context.”11​ Reportedly, Sony had attempted to give Coppola notes to make the film more “marketable,” but she didn’t follow them and had final control over her vision. Sony attempted to make it more conventional, for example suggesting additional voiceover narration to make the story clearer to audiences. The central role played by then-Sony Pictures Entertainment co-chairperson Amy Pascal in getting the film made and helping supply the enormous $40 million budget grew from Pascal’s absolute faith in Coppola as

Figure 3.1  Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

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a director. She explains, “My belief is that you find filmmakers you wanna work with and then you back them. There’s nobody else like Sofia. She’s one-of-a-kind and when you decide that you’re gonna make a movie like Marie Antoinette with a filmmaker like her, there’s no point in curtailing their vision.”12 Coppola felt fully supported by Pascal, given the budget to make the movie the way she wanted: “She totally got it, whereas some straight guy at another studio maybe wouldn’t have.”13 Too bad nobody else got it. The film was dismissed by many critics for what they saw as a highly stylized objectification and fetishization of the female protagonist and her surroundings. The film has also been criticized because of its obvious disregard for historical accuracy, and it struggled to connect with wider audiences in the way that Lost in Translation did, specifically in North America, though it did quite well in Antoinette’s home country of France as well as with critics such as Roger Ebert, who saw it as a film “centering on the loneliness of being female and surrounded by a world that knows how to use you but not how to value and understand you.”14 Agnès Poirier criticized the film as being cold and emotionless, claiming the film is shocking because it is empty, devoid of a point of view, because the person who has made it has no curiosity for the woman she is portraying and the time that her tragic life is set in. The film director seems as unconcerned by her subject as Marie-Antoinette was indifferent to the plight of her people and the world she lived in.15 Coppola’s decision to allow all the actors to speak in their own accents and the script, which is decidedly modern and full of slang, caused consternation with many film critics. This contrast of opinion was reflected in the awards and nominations the film received. While Cannes nominated it for the prestigious Palme d’Or, North American judges focused exclusively on its aesthetic aspects, such as costumes, makeup and hair, and art direction. Belinda Smaill makes the case that the director’s biographical details have become bound up with the reception of her films in ways that dismiss her films as too preoccupied with frivolity and privilege. Coppola’s important position as a female director of independent features, specifically her unique position as a successful woman working in the masculinized arena of independent Hollywood, and her place within a lineage of women’s cinema, is frequently elided in discussions of her success and style. It is the question of Coppola’s status as a female director, the ambivalent process by which this status is acknowledged and disavowed in the reception of her work, that is most compelling for feminist film theory.16 Katarzyna Paszkiewicz argues for a reading of the film understood through traditional genre theory and places the film in the established tradition of the heritage film. She highlights the overreliance on reading the film through an authorial lens, but argues, In fact, the film draws heavily on familiar generic tropes, and it can be easily inscribed within the recent resurgence of the biopic. . . . Marie Antoinette certainly fits into this category, as much as Coppola denies its adherence to this genre. Coppola’s resistance

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has a lot to do with her authorial branding and practice as an independent director, which seems to be at odds with the genre so strongly associated with Hollywood studio filmmaking.17 Arguing Coppola is embedded in the “commerce of auteurism,” Paszkiewicz acknowledges she actively participates in constructing her public image and branding her films by providing them with a recognizable niche identity, “as an indie-boutique ‘arthouse’ director who has a solid grasp of mainstream popular culture within a changing studio system that relies increasingly on mega-blockbusters and remains overwhelmingly male-dominated.”18 Given this context, Paszkiewicz provides a nuanced genre reading of the film’s reception: All in all, the debates about authenticity, historical accuracy and the issues of representation or misrepresentation have always accompanied the historical biopic. In this regard, Marie Antoinette is not an exception. However, what is markedly different here is the gendered discourse that surrounds the film, in which the authorial persona of Sofia Coppola—in particular, her status as a female director—has had a considerable influence on how her work has been read and evaluated.19

The contemporary assessment of the film couldn’t be more different from its historical reception. Vogue used the occasion of the fifteen-year anniversary of the film (October 2021) to provide a stunning oral history of the experiences and understanding of the people that contributed to its making, in the most expansive and holistic accounting of the film to date. Writer Keaton Bell strongly argues for the film’s ultimate success: “it went on to develop the sort of fervent cult following that every filmmaker dreams of.”20 Reading this recent accounting of the film is surreal to say the least but for the most basic of reasons. The article simply treats the film like any other important work of art and approaches the history of its making with journalistic neutrality. As the author of one of the earliest academic essays that argued for the film’s brilliance and importance in cinema history, I never thought this day would come. Like Coppola’s refusal to show the violent death of Marie in the film, instead letting her have a last intimate moment saying goodbye to Versailles, it feels as if we are living in an alternative timeline where the rejection and attacks on the film never happened. When a work of art becomes accepted and integrated into culture, it is taken for granted that it was always that way, the rough edges smoothed over into an easily understood narrative. Seemingly the entire history of the film is traced by Vogue, beginning with the inspiration for the film, originating in Coppola’s reading of British historian Lady Antonia Fraser’s best-selling biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey. Coppola’s recounting of her experiences making it were primary, of course, but she serves more as an organizing influence that brought together dozens of brilliant artists devoted to their craft, rather than being positioned as the ultimate auteur, constructing her visions from the top down. All of the main cast—Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Molly Shannon, Asia Argento, and Marianne Faithfull—offered their own understandings of the work they were contributing to and their roles within it. Key players in the crew were treated with equal interest by

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writer Bell, giving readers intimate access to the thoughts of music supervisor Brian Reitzell, producer Ross Katz, chairperson Amy Pascal, production designer K. K. Barrett, set decorator Véronique Melery, costume designer Milena Canonero, cinematographer Lance Acord, even shoe designer Manolo Blahnik. The obviously sexist criticisms leveraged against the film by male critics as being pretty but vacuous, all surface and no meaning, mere “eye-candy,” visually rich but intellectually meaningless, have their origin in her incredibly detailed and ornate mise-en-scène, which was painstakingly created by the team of brilliant artists invited to speak to Vogue. While Coppola was given unprecedented access to film in Versailles, she was restricted to shooting one day a week. A 150-person crew built set replicas of the rooms in Versailles, attempting to build identical recreations that were historically accurate. The one place the film attempted to be historically accurate down to the finest detail was in the production design and it shows, yet this is the place the film is paradoxically given the least credit. Shoe designer Manolo Blahnik was enlisted to supply an entire collection of shoes for the film, having a deep, personal connection to Marie as a figure, having grown up with his mother reading Stefan Zweig’s biography to him. The jewelry supplied for the film by luxury jeweler Fred Leighton was $4 million, Lost in Translation’s entire budget.​ Critics weren’t wrong to comment on the film’s sugary aesthetic. Oscar-winning costume designer Milena Canonero was given a box of pastel Ladurée macarons as a gift from Coppola, as well as to give inspiration for the color palette of the film. The error was seeing this as negative in Coppola’s case, while praising the OCD construction of miseen-scène in say a Wes Anderson or Stanley Kubrick film. Coppola paid attention to the smallest detail and expected the same of her team: “Milena was a complete perfectionist. Watching her work on a batch of silk flowers was a highlight of my life.”21 More recent scholarship has, in fact, focused on Coppola’s attention to detail, granting previously derided concerns related to femininity and style in cinema serious consideration.

Figure 3.2  Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

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Paszkiewicz, for instance, sees it as an extension of Coppola’s deep engagement with genre: Coppola’s engagement with familiar conventions is far more complex than current analysis of her work has acknowledged. By way of contrast with the majority of critical readings of the film in the vein of ‘visual beauty’ and scholarship that have characterized it almost exclusively in terms of authorship, I argue, drawing predominantly on genre theory, that Coppola’s fascination with surface and materiality—made evident by her shots of food, fabrics and furnishing throughout the film—is not something exclusive to her authorial style.22 Rosalind Galt connects the film’s production design with politics and control over the female body: Marie Antoinette stages the fetishistic status of the royal body as a question of production design. The film connects a feminised 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. . . . This discourse on the historical objecthood of the female body strikingly refuses to blame the woman for her out-of-control consumption.23 Paszkiewicz, however, posits another reading, attributing Coppola’s aesthetics “not so much to her quintessentially ‘female’ identity or authorial subversion, but to the historical processes of the recombination already included in the generic.” In this analysis, the work is to be understood as traditional and an extension of genre history. “The filmmaker destabilises the oppositions between art and commodity culture, creative and passive, originality and reproduction, mobilizing the powers of repetition and ritual.”24 In the most comprehensive treatment to date of Coppola’s oeuvre, Suzanne Ferriss prioritizes fashion as the foundational form of expression structuring the director’s worldview.25 The book maps the intersection of fashion, culture, and celebrity within the context of Coppola’s films, arguing for the filmmaker-as-aesthetic-auteur, highlighting Marie Antoinette as the most direct, expressive celebration of fashion-as-tool to empowerment. Writing in Fashion Theory, Pamela Flores likewise argues fashion played a central role in the film, offering a useful avenue for the titular character to express her selfhood and carve out a space for her existence within the heavily regulated and politicized regime of Versailles.26 Fashion gave subjective autonomy to Marie, a vital way for her to create her identity through resistance to dominant hierarchies of power. Thus, while it is often argued that fashion is a superficial form of consumption, rather than a productive utilization of aesthetics, the film utilizes fashion as a form of communication for Marie, who is both outsider and perpetual other to the sovereign authority of the state embodied by Louis XVI. “Like the war that France is fighting abroad, her body is contested terrain. It becomes a cultural battlefield.”27 Anna Backman Rogers calls attention to the way truth and spectacle are mapped onto the female body:

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One of the most radical tactics Coppola takes in the film is to reveal, via sustained focus on mechanistic ritual, how female identity, in particular, is constructed and imposed. By extension, Coppola also examines the manifold ways in which historical “truth” is created and sustained. In contrast to classical Hollywood films that often posit the female body as the site of spectacle, Coppola delineates how that body is harnessed and regulated via ritualistic processes: how it is turned into a spectacle and, by extension, a commodity to be owned by a patriarchal institution and, then, by the state.28 Heidi Brevik-Zender places the discussion of fashion in the context of Walter Benjamin’s accounting of modernity and postmodernity, providing additional insight into the director’s historical positioning of the queen: The film’s modernity lies more interestingly in the way in which its self-conscious reinterpretation of linear history makes it a successful expression of the modernity theorized by Walter Benjamin. Fashion is a crucial signifier that enables Benjamin to articulate the temporal instability that is, for him, constitutive of modernity; fashion is also a vital tool used by Coppola to overlap her life with the modern Marie Antoinette that she creates in her film. Yet despite Coppola’s prominence as a contemporary maker of style, her insistence on her primary role as maker of movies invites us to read her interpretation of the life of the Austrian dauphine as a commentary on her own experience as a contemporary woman filmmaker, one that has proven to be as problematic as Marie Antoinette’s eighteenth-century experience as the queen of France.29 Ultimately, Coppola succeeded in her intention to give audiences a different image of Marie, one that centers around empathy and undercuts simple villainization of her character. Fraser sees the film as very different from her book, contending that in focusing on the intimate portrayal of Marie’s ultimate loneliness, it has led to a reconsideration of her image. The film continues to influence the collective imagination about Marie and her perception among younger generations growing up in the film’s wake. Coppola’s once revisionist history has become inextricable from our contemporary understanding of Marie. Lynn Hunt, Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, argues, It’s hard to imagine a male character arousing the same range of feelings that Marie Antoinette did. The film came at a moment when there was a transition in the view of Marie from an overloaded symbol of everything wrong with the aristocracy to more of a tragic figure. She’s a very different kind of character than she was even two decades ago. There’s an incredibly more sympathetic view of her among historians, and the film helped push that ideology forward.30 Given this opportunity to look back, Coppola confesses her relief at the film’s changed reception: “I’m so happy it has an audience now because at the time it was not successful. People didn’t go see it; they didn’t really know what to make of it. . . . It means a lot to

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me that it continues to live on.”31 Coppola’s intention to tell a story that showed how fourteen-year-old Marie has been misrepresented by historians and misunderstood by the world, both in the moment of her life and in a modern sense, has finally been fully seen, embraced for what it is. The circle has been completed. As Fraser wrote in the author’s note to her biography, “The elegiac should have its place as well as the tragic, flowers and music as well as revolution.”32 Reflecting today on the aesthetic excesses of the film, Coppola acknowledges the toll it took on her as an artist, I feel lucky that I got to indulge that maximalist side of myself, because I’d never done something on that scale before. It was really difficult and when it was all over I didn’t wanna make another movie ever again. Somewhere was totally a reaction to Marie Antoinette and my desire to just work with two actors in a room at the Chateau Marmont. I’m working on another period piece right now and in the mood for that kind of opulence again, but it took 15 years to get my energy levels back up. Let’s hope this time around we are ready for it.

Notes 1 Christina Lane and Nicole Richter, “The Feminist Poetics of Sofia Coppola: Spectacle and Self-Consciousness in Marie Antoinette (2006),” in Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema, ed. Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2011), 189. 2 Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 22. 3 Robert Nelson, “Let Them Eat Whatever,” Cinema Scope 27 (2006): 80. 4 Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, “Cannes Journal: ‘Marie Antoinette’: Best or Worst of Times?” The New York Times, May 25, 2006, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2006​/05​/25​/movies​ /25fest​.html​?mcubz​=2. 5 Nelson, “Let Them Eat Whatever,” 80. 6 Keaton Bell, “‘It Was Like Hosting the Ultimate Party’: An Oral History of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” Vogue, October 29, 2021, https://www​.vogue​.com​/article​/oral​-history​-of​ -marie​-antoinette​-15th​-anniversary. 7 Kirsten Dunst quoted in Bell, “An Oral History of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.” 8 Lane and Richter, “The Feminist Poetics of Sofia Coppola,” 191–2. 9 Sofia Coppola quoted in Bell, “An Oral History of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.” 10 Kirsten Dunst quoted in Bell “An Oral History of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.” 11 Anna Backman Rogers, “The Historical Threshold: Crisis, Ritual and Liminality in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006).” Relief 6, no. 1 (2012): 22. 12 Amy Pascal quoted in Bell, “An Oral History of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.” 13 Coppola quoted in Bell, “An Oral History of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.”

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14 Roger Ebert, “Pretty in Pink,” Rogerebert​.com​, October 19, 2006, https://www​.rogerebert​ .com​/reviews​/marie​-antoinette​-2006. 15 Agnès Poirier, “An Empty Hall of Mirrors,” The Guardian, May 26, 2006, https://www​ .theguardian​.com​/commentisfree​/2006​/may​/27​/comment​.filmnews. 16 Belinda Smaill, “Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 150. 17 Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 183. 18 Lane and Richter, “The Feminist Poetics of Sofia Coppola.” 19 Paszkiewicz, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, 175–6. 20 Bell, “An Oral History of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.” 21 Coppola quoted in Bell, “An Oral History of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.” 22 Paszkiewicz, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, 183. 23 Galt, Pretty, 22. 24 Paszkiewicz, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, 194–5. 25 Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021). 26 Pamela Flores, “Fashion and Otherness: The Passionate Journey of Coppola’s Marie Antoinette from a Semiotic Perspective,” Fashion Theory 17, no. 5 (2013): 605–22. 27 Lane and Richter, “The Feminist Poetics of Sofia Coppola,” 197. 28 Backman Rogers, “The Historical Threshold,” 82. 29 Heidi Brevik-Zender, “Let Them Wear Manolos: Fashion, Walter Benjamin, and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” Camera Obscura 26, no. 3 (2011): 1. 30 Lynn Hunt quoted in Bell, “An Oral History of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.” 31 Coppola quoted in Bell, “An Oral History of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.” 32 Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette: The Journey (New York: Anchor Books, 2001), xvii.

4 SOMEWHERE SOFIA COPPOLA’S SOMEWHERE: THE MOST AMERICAN OF EUROPEAN FILMS Todd Kennedy

Following the release of her most ambitious and controversial film Marie Antoinette (2006), Sofia Coppola retreated to the world of smaller budget, independent filmmaking with her 2010 film Somewhere, starring Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning. As with much of Coppola’s filmography, the critical response was sharply divided. In fact, the only thing critics seemed to agree upon was that it was Coppola’s most “European” film, citing its subject matter, pace, style, cinematography, and enigmatic nature. Specifically, multiple critics drew a direct connection to the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. This chapter will counter that assumption. While European influences are undoubtedly present in all of Coppola’s work, especially Somewhere, I argue that the film can best be understood in its relationship to the trope of the hobo (which is itself central to American identity) and, specifically, American film history. Prime examples include Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936), The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), and Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)—all of which are referenced by both the plot and cinematography of Coppola’s film and all of which thematically help us understand Somewhere’s enigmatic ending. This ending, moreover, only makes sense if understood on a metaphoric level drawn from American road culture. For these reasons, Somewhere may perhaps be Coppola’s least European film, best understood as a reimagination of one of the most common tropes of male-dominated 1970s American auteurship. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Coppola received a special honor from the National Board of Review, and many major critics lauded the film, such as The New York Times’ A. O. Scott, who called the film “exquisite, melancholy, and formally

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audacious.”1 Rene Rodriguez of the Miami Herald cited the film as evidence that Coppola was among an elite class of “great directors” who “aren’t just masters of technical craft” but also “artists capable of showing you the world through their eyes.”2 The more common reaction, however, tended toward evisceration. Somewhere’s experimental pacing and approach seemed to allow some critics to expand upon tones, opinions, and more subtle criticisms they had previously expressed about Coppola’s earlier work. Writing for the Detroit News, Tom Long claimed Coppola “dares to have nothing very interesting at all going on.”3 In the New York Post, Kyle Smith said Somewhere “isn’t an artistic effort” but, rather, “a vacant lot whose signpost reads: ‘Space available. Movie can be made here. Or not. Whatever.’”4 In Australia, James Berardinelli claimed, “Coppola has strayed into an area of pretentiousness that we have rarely seen since the height of the French New Wave.”5 Slate’s Dana Stevens was even harsher, asking if “maybe Sofia Coppola is even more of a tastemaker than a filmmaker.”6 The assertion of the film’s perceived European nature persisted in the attacks, but, as I mentioned earlier, it was also the lone commonality among those who wished to defend the film. In a positive review in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Joe Williams stated that “Somewhere is a distinctly European exercise in observational nuance and tonal restraint in which Coppola stretches static images to the breaking point.”7 Hollywood Reporter’s Deborah Young said, “Despite its subject, Coppola seems to be exercising more of her European than American sensibility in the small-scale intimacy of this portrait.”8 Peter Travers claimed in Rolling Stone that Coppola “gives Somewhere the hypnotically deliberate pace of a European art film” as she “defies American audiences who want their films like their food: fast.”9 Meanwhile, attacks on the film seemed simultaneously and perpetually divided between those who felt the problem was too much of a return to Coppola’s early work and those who expressed shock that someone who had directed Coppola’s first three films could create this one.10 I contend that part of the explanation of this divide, as well as the split opinion on the film in the first place, lies in the misguided assumption—on both sides of the aisle—that Somewhere is Coppola’s first, or even most, European film. To begin with, Coppola’s earliest films were also heavily influenced by European cinema. In particular, she seemed deeply interested in interrogating the influence of the French New Wave upon the generation of American filmmakers that dominated US cinema starting in 1967 with The Graduate and Bonnie & Clyde (Arthur Penn), continuing at least through the 1970s. This generation of filmmakers—often grouped under the term “New Hollywood” (or even “American New Wave”)—channeled European filmmaking and brought New Wave approaches to American film topics. It was also a generation of filmmakers headlined by Coppola’s own father. In particular, her first short film, Lick the Star (1998), makes multiple, direct references to François Truffaut’s Les 400 coups (1959), and Lost in Translation (2003) opens with a direct reference to Jean-Luc Godard’s Le mépris (1963).11 As I discuss in my article “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur,” Coppola employs these foundational French New Wave films to “reposition their male aesthetic as wholly feminine—pertaining to female characters, feminine pleasures of consumption, and a filmic point of view that portrays women as dominated by the environment surrounding them.”12 More to the point, Coppola’s

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brand of feminine, personal auteurship has always found its primary roots in European cinema. This is true in her approach to pacing, cinematography, verisimilitude, and nondiegetic plot moments. Meanwhile, none of these characteristics are unique or original to Somewhere—at most, they are slightly more foregrounded. In fact, Somewhere marks the moment when Coppola stops primarily using European films for her direct references, turning instead to American films as she approaches the most American of tropes—that of defining one’s identity by one’s ability/inability to move across space. On its surface, Somewhere seems to be entirely about stasis. The lifestyle of the rich and famous, for Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), seems a slog. Renting a suite at the Chateau Marmont, Johnny is living the stereotypical dream—surrounded by an excess of visual, sexual, and culinary consumption. But, reminiscent of Lost in Translation’s interest in the off-putting nature of excess,13 Somewhere deconstructs excess by focusing its aim on the lack that dominates Johnny’s existence—an inability to feel emotions or to feel connection, purpose, or meaning. He is, quite literally, directionless, never “getting” anywhere in either a metaphoric or literal sense. That is, until the film’s final sequence, when, finally, his powerful Ferrari finally moves him somewhere—even if the enigmatic ending leaves the question of where he is going and what, if anything, it will improve about his life, entirely open. In other words, if we see the film as a character study, it is one in which progress (or lack thereof) is represented almost entirely upon spatial lines. In so doing, Coppola draws upon what may well be the central trope of American cultural identity: that of imagining American identity in terms of its relationship to movement across space. As a nation of immigrants, Americans have time and again linked their identity to images of mobility, particularly perpetual motion. To quote Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again: Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America—that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that was how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.14 This trope is a particularly American concretization of modernism, which Marshall Berman defines as “the process” of “modern men and women asserting their dignity in the present—even a wretched and oppressive present—and the right to control their future; striving to make a place for themselves in the modern world, a place where they can feel at home.”15 Based on its distinctive spatial imagination, American culture therefore returns to figures that I have previously termed hobo-heroes, which I define as someone who is “portrayed as heroic because he rejects the society that entraps him, instead choosing a life of ceaseless wandering. In other words, if the human condition is one of uprootedness to begin with—as modernism claims—then the hobo-hero at least retains a sense of agency unavailable to his static counterparts.”16 Such figures can be found in almost every facet, historical period, and genre of American cultural production, ranging from John Dos Passos to Jack Kerouac, from Fennimore Cooper’s Natty Bumpo to the musical figure

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of John Henry, from Walt Whitman to Bob Dylan, from Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) to Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2001). It is this tradition that Sofia Coppola draws upon via a film in which a transient, directionless celebrity attempts—and fails—to create a home inside of hotels, before, eventually, abandoning material possessions in order to walk in search of something seemingly ambiguous even to the searcher. My article “On the Road to ‘Some’ Place: Sofia Coppola’s Dissident Modernism against a Postmodern Landscape” pays particular attention to the modernist implications therein, as Coppola “openly questions postmodernism’s assertion that attempts to preserve authenticity are ‘neither possible nor desirable,’” as, “faced with a postmodern world in which everything is a shallow, baseless, non-redemptive image,” she uses “this particular image, of a hobohero claiming to preserve a sense of integrated self by turning to a life of wandering.”17 More pertinent to the aims of this chapter, the image she draws upon as metaphor at Somewhere’s end is one of the most dominant tropes of twentieth-century American filmic production, the defining trope of Hollywood Westerns and road-buddy films, themselves two of the most influential US film genres, and a trope that can probably best be classically defined in Chaplin’s Modern Times, itself a modernist text. While Modern Times is technically a sound film, it follows a silent-film aesthetic, reserving spoken sound for voices of authority—always filtered through mechanical devices.18 The film’s protagonist (played by Chaplin) embarks on repeated, failed attempts to find his place in modernity, all of which are thwarted by his inability to adapt to the industrialized world which dominates his identity. This search is made concrete by the imagination of an idealized, romantic “home” that he and a young girl think about in a dream sequence, but, comically, the only real-life house they set up literally falls down around them and the closest the protagonist comes to actually finding such a destination is a prison cell in which he embroiders a “home sweet home” sign. Unsuccessful on every level, the couple take to the road. Shown sitting tired and miserable along the roadside, the young girl asks, “What’s the use of even trying?” Chaplin has no real answer, yet he asks her (and the spectator) to feel a vague sense of hope anyway as he replies, “Buck up—never say die. We’ll get along!” The couple then walk confidently toward the horizon as the credits begin to roll. In so doing, Modern Times takes one of the oldest American cultural tropes and makes it filmic, amplifying an imagination of American identity as spatial, often embodied by a character turning to the life of a hobo-hero. As with Johnny Marco’s undefined, improbable journey, such a choice is typically imagined as difficult, dark, and uncertain. It is not romanticized. Most commonly, the trope is invoked at the end of a text, when a protagonist who has been without autonomy and/or identity enigmatically takes to the road toward an uncertain future that offers little certainty but at least a smidgen of hope relative to the complete absence that comes by submitting to stasis. Rarely in contemporary cinema has any film dedicated as much effort to making the spectator so completely share the protagonist’s lack of direction—and it starts from Somewhere’s first shot. One of Coppola’s defining thumbprints as an auteur is that she likes to set the tone for her entire movie by opening almost all of her films—particularly the early ones—with an unorthodox first shot (typically in a still frame, usually non-diegetic).19 In Somewhere, she begins with a still camera in the California desert, without non-diegetic sound. A Ferrari drives in circles while we listen to the engine for an excruciating two

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and a half minutes. The car disappears off screen to the right, reappears crossing to the left, disappears, and reappears again. We watch this happen repeatedly, as Johnny Marco drives in circles, getting nowhere. While it is unclear how the shot fits into the film’s diegesis, it is a complete and concrete embodiment of what follows. Immediately after, Coppola cuts to the Chateau Marmont, where we endure an almost silent twenty minutes of the film. Johnny wallows in isolation and depthless pleasure within the hotel’s confines, where he parties, drinks, gets massages, and plays video games with his daughter. The still camera, silent soundtrack, and Dorff’s facial expressions emphasize the utter lack of connection, comfort, and pleasure he experiences. At one point, he stares at a wall, smoking a cigarette, for nearly two minutes. Two separate scenes ask the spectator to watch strippers for upwards of five minutes, to the point that their actions become banal and dull. Marco feels the same, falling asleep in the first scene and applauding unceremoniously in the second. The film blankly shows Marco shaving, eating hamburgers, watching random women flash him their breasts, walking past models at a photo shoot as if it were an everyday occurrence, and falling asleep while performing oral sex during a one-night stand. Even the film’s break from the Chateau Marmont, when Johnny takes his daughter to Italy, ends inside of another famous hotel where sex leaves Johnny unfulfilled, he is given a joke of an award at a show where no one wants to hear him say anything, and his daughter swims laps in a ridiculously short pool, again, getting nowhere. Johnny’s professional life is equally stagnant, marked not only by the shallow award ceremony but also by the depthless questions asked at a press junket and a threeminute sequence in which we watch a facial mold solidify around Johnny’s face. He is surrounded by an environment of excess and consumption, similar to Lost in Translation’s Tokyo and Marie Antoinette’s Versailles, and Coppola depicts a life of endless pleasure as being simultaneously alluring and superficial. Marco—like his audience—is hopelessly adrift and bored. Above all, he remains static. While the aesthetic of this character study may, as Joe Williams claimed, be “European” in its “observational nuance and tonal restraint,”20 it exhibits the same detached, nuanced camera work and tonal restraint embodied by all of Coppola’s early work. That said, it should come as no surprise that some might point to the work of Michelangelo Antonioni and/or Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) as lenses for understanding Somewhere.21 Not only have such works been a clear influence upon Coppola’s brand of auteurship from the beginning, but they are also particularly pertinent to the plot and tone of Coppola’s fourth feature film. In Antonioni’s own words, “The theme of most of my films is loneliness. . . . Often my characters are isolated. They are individuals looking for social institutions that will support them, for personal relationships that will absorb them. But most often they find little to sustain them. They are looking for a home.”22 Similarly, in Akerman’s film, Jeanne Dielman searches for meaning as she tries to keep up her perfectly organized home, a home she tirelessly, and methodically, cleans and organizes as she tries in vain to find meaning/direction, all while the audience watches for an intentionally excruciating, mundane, and repetitive 201 minutes. Returning to Antonioni—but in ways I think are also pertinent to Akerman— Stephen Dalton comments “he defined cool modernism on screen, setting his characters adrift in a world defined by alienation and loneliness” as his films “typically featured jaded

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lovers in middle-class urban settings, their lives blighted by quiet desperation, joyless sex and existential ennui. His open-ended plots were elliptical, elusive and experimental.”23 It would therefore be impossible for Somewhere’s tone, plot, and pacing not to draw these works to mind; they are, to me, the most obvious cross-comparisons available. Yet, I would argue that what is most telling about these comparisons is that they are not the ones that Coppola chose to emphasize. Yes, in Somewhere, we find Coppola wholly and confidently embracing the European aesthetic and tone that define her early filmography, and, yes, she actively (albeit indirectly) invokes the themes and tone of Antonioni and Akerman, but Somewhere is also the film where she breaks her own habit of directly referencing European artistic tradition,24 choosing instead to directly reference American films, American themes, American tropes. Antonioni typically leaves his characters without clear hope or any way out of their existential loneliness—we are asked to feel their pain, and we continue to feel it as the film ends. Akerman shows Jeanne Dielman essentially giving up, breaking out of the status quo by killing one of her clients in an act that will almost surely make her situation worse. Instead, Coppola ends on a note of hope, as the hero walks confidently in the direction of the limitless horizon, offering a promise of identity and maybe even home. In so doing, Coppola directly invokes one of US cinema’s most masculine tropes/genres to interrogate and invert its gender implications. As Anna Backman Rogers aptly claims, “Somewhere emerges as a film that effects a complex parsing out of the notion of identity and, more specifically, an intricate transformation of dominate fictions or narratives that hinge on male identity.”25 It may mark Coppola’s first use of a male screen surrogate, but it is one of very few films to draw upon hobo-hero imagery in order to deconstruct its traditionally masculine nature (and is most assuredly one of the most thoroughly effective).26 Not only does this ending draw upon American film and literary traditions, but the American tropes are subtly foregrounded throughout the film. Whereas Akerman’s film asks us only to know and think about the inside of Jeanne’s apartment, offering the spectator a sense of discomfort and bewilderment in the few scenes when she ventures out, Coppola uses the prop of the automobile to keep her spectator fully aware of the possibility of motion, change, and renewal, even as we experience Johnny’s lack thereof. From the moment the film opens with Marco driving, literally, in circles, the image and the sound of his black Ferrari is never allowed to stray from the spectator’s consciousness. We see him drive around Los Angeles’s roads, highways, and freeways, always with the sound of the engine and the smooth change of gears as he accelerates the only soundtrack. The camera follows his car in long tracking shots as he slides seamlessly on and off LA’s throughways, driving underneath road-signs that never represent any actual destination because, time and again, the camera next finds him right back where he started: the Chateau Marmont. His motion is accompanied by a sparse soundtrack marked by the sounds of other cars passing outside. Thus, while Coppola constantly reminds us of the possibility of such effortless fluidity of movement, she seems equally interested in reminding us how ineffective it is as means of actually getting anywhere. As Backman Rogers notes, Johnny’s “lack of focus and direction is visualized in the frequent scenes that are set in his car, which often seem to violate continuity of space and direction. . . . The moments that the main character ‘drives’ forward actually convey circularity and

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confusion.”27 In one specific instance, drawing heavily on Hollywood film tradition and tropes, Johnny pulls up at a red light next to an attractive, scantily clad woman whom he checks out and then proceeds to tail. Typically, this trope ends one of two ways: sexual conquest or comic sexual rejection. Instead, we follow Johnny for a minute and a half of screen time only to watch the woman turn up a driveway, an electric gate closing behind her, without any indication she even realized she was being tailed. It is, in short, a big nothing, and the narrative immediately returns to Johnny sitting idly inside the Chateau Marmont. While Coppola invokes the trope of the automobile throughout the film, Johnny’s lack of direction is further emphasized by direct and indirect invocations of iconic and influential American New Wave Films, specifically Nichols’ The Graduate and Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. Both films depict privileged, male screen-surrogates struggling to find identity, meaning, and purpose in environments that stifle them. Both films spend the majority of their time depicting that lack of direction rather than what comes afterward. Both imagine the quest for identity via spatial metaphors. Both films end by asking the spectator to find a first, fleeting emotion of hope as the protagonists begin a difficult journey toward an uncertain destination, rejecting their previous lives and the environments which had prevented them from finding themselves. Crucially, both films are iconic examples of the period of American filmmaking in which European filmic techniques and approaches, particularly those of the French New Wave, began to influence Hollywood production. In addition to sharing slow pacing, elusive endings, and flawed, awkward protagonists, both films break Hollywood technical rules. In The Graduate, Benjamin’s lack of voice is emphasized via cinematography and editing; our view of Benjamin is perpetually blocked by inanimate objects and other actors and, at the moment he first sees Mrs. Robinson nude, jump cuts make the spectator share his sense of shock and inability to focus his gaze. In Five Easy Pieces, we find a camera that wanders and roams, often leaving the focus of the shot in the periphery, emphasizing the environment over the individual. The Graduate’s Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) offers a particularly insightful lens for approaching Coppola’s character Johnny Marco. While Benjamin shares neither Johnny’s confidence nor fame, the entire film is about a vain search for identity and purpose within a restrictive environment that he is repeatedly told should offer him everything he desires. Benjamin’s lack of direction is most specifically emphasized by extended sequences depicting him drifting on and around his parents’ pool, not really getting anywhere, while a soundtrack provided by Simon & Garfunkel provides awareness of time passing and the degree to which this represents the sum total of his daily existence (outside of occasionally meeting Mrs. Robinson at a hotel for sex). The film’s dialogue showcases this lack even more explicitly when, at the end of an extended two-song sequence of Benjamin drifting, his father awakens him from a nap on a pool floatation device by asking him “what are you doing?” Ben’s reply is direct but unhelpful: “I would say that I’m just drifting. Here in the pool.” The best justification he can provide is that “It’s very comfortable just to drift here.” When he admits he has not thought about graduate school, his father pointedly asks him what was the point of his “hard work” and “four years of school,” prompting Ben to comically respond, “You got me!” Such shots are mirrored almost exactly in Somewhere toward the end of the film, in two separate pool scenes. The

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first is a prolonged, two-minute scene of Johnny and his daughter, Cleo, playing in and around the pool. While Coppola’s scene is sentimental, offering a brief, stylized respite of happiness before Johnny takes Cleo to summer camp, Johnny’s final trip with Cleo will, yet again, show that their time together has not really led to progress.28 Upon his return to the Chateau Marmont, Johnny’s aimlessness is, much like The Graduate, emphasized in a second pool scene via an extended shot from above of Johnny drifting on a floatation device with his arms posed in the exact same position as Benjamin Braddock’s (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2). The shot angle and mood almost directly mirror those of The Graduate, with the notable exception that Coppola goes a step further: she allows Johnny Marco to literally drift out of the entire frame. Like Johnny, Ben’s most prized possession is a sports car, which everyone comments on and which he drives everywhere, always returning to the same environments which

Figure 4.1  The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols © Embassy Pictures Corporation 2014.

Figure 4.2  Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2011.

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stifle him, namely his parents’ home and the hotel where he has his affair with Mrs. Robinson. In one key scene, toward the film’s end, Benjamin races toward Santa Barbara, trying to stop Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine’s wedding, the first real sign of hope for change in the film. The non-diegetic soundtrack (Paul Simon’s guitar) runs synchronously with the motor, and, as he starts to run out of gas, the soundtrack slows down accordingly, eventually leaving us with a natural, bare soundtrack as Benjamin’s car comes to a full stop. This approach is used by Coppola to some degree in a scene in Los Angeles when Johnny’s car breaks down, but it is even more directly invoked in Somewhere’s final scene, in which a suddenly empty soundtrack allows the spectator to hear the car sputter and slowly die as it runs out of gas. As for Benjamin, he now must run to the church, and he is shown in long shot to emphasize the degree to which, even while sprinting, he does not seem to be getting anywhere. And while he does convince Elaine to run off with him, he arrives at the wedding after the vows have already finished, the marriage complete. As Ben and Elaine escape her parents, jumping on a passing bus, soundtrack and image ask the spectator to be happy for their escape, but, just as the young couple’s faces slowly turn to shock and concern, the film reminds us that their journey forward is uncertain and risky. Their search for identity is costly, against nature (the long shot of Ben running), society (arriving after the vows), and family wishes. However, as in Somewhere, it is a search the film suggests is the only possible alternative to submission. Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces follows a similar pattern and provides a similarly useful lens from which to approach Somewhere. Robert Dupea (Jack Nicholson) is a classically trained pianist from a privileged background who avoids home and expectations by working the oilfields of Southern California and sharing an apartment with Rayette, an attractive, but unchallenging, girlfriend who wants nothing more from life than to follow in Tammy Wynette’s footsteps. Eventually he travels home to his well-bred family in the Pacific Northwest, girlfriend in tow, to see his dying father. But the one thing that the oilfields, his apartment, the road trip, and time with his family all have in common is that Robert, much like Benjamin Braddock, remains completely out of place in all of them. As Roger Ebert observed, Five Easy Pieces “is about a character who doesn’t fit in the movie. There’s not a scene where he’s comfortable with the people around him, not a moment when he feels at home.” It was, Ebert continues, “a revelation. This was the direction American movies should take: Into idiosyncratic characters . . ., into a plot free to surprise us about the characters, into an existential ending not required to be happy.” It represents “a fusion of the personal cinema of John Cassavetes and the new indie movement that was tentatively emerging.”29 The first time Coppola seems to invoke this connection comes immediately prior to her first Graduate-inspired pool scene, as Johnny and Cleo play an awkward game of ping pong in which both have to retrieve lost balls. This scene is reminiscent of an important one in Five Easy Pieces in which the family dynamics play out as Robert and his brother first play ping pong, and then Robert talks to his sister about the family while his brother slowly retrieves a lost ball. But the most important connection is, again, the film’s ending. While The Graduate ends with its protagonist aboard a motorized vehicle feeling ambivalent (yet hopeful) about his journey toward an unknown future, Five Easy Pieces’ invocation of the American hobo-hero is

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even more direct. Parked at a gas station, Robert abandons his girlfriend, his car, his wallet, and even his jacket, before hitching a ride with a trucker toward an unknown destination. The film ends in static long shot, credits rolling over a mostly empty parking lot as Rayette searches for Robert, the truck he is hitching a ride upon already fading into the horizon. After an intentionally slow-paced character study of Johnny Marco’s inability to find purpose, identity, or sense of home—always metaphorically linked to his spatially static existence in temporary hotel rooms—Coppola leaves us with a character fully aware of his lack of depth. His daughter gone, no actual progress or change achieved, and no longer able to maintain the confident image of celebrity he has exuded throughout the film, Johnny sits on the floor of his hotel room sobbing. He calls his ex and expresses the blunt truth: “I’m fucking nothing. I’m not even a person.” The best she can offer before hanging up the phone is suggesting he volunteer his time to charity—another shallow, empty celebrity image. Instead, the camera sits with him as he continues to sob, alone. The next morning, he calls the front desk and announces that he is going to check out of the hotel. He seems uncertain about his future and unconcerned about what happens to his possessions. He climbs into his Ferrari and drives the same Los Angeles highways we have watched him drive throughout the movie. The non-diegetic soundtrack provides a dissonant sound, not quite in tune, not quite in time. But, instead of the cyclical patterns of driving depicted throughout the movie, we begin to see the city slowly fade away as we find Johnny on increasingly rural roads. Finally, he is on a completely desolate two-lane road, pointed toward a mountain on the skyline. The non-diegetic soundtrack disappears, and, as in The Graduate, we hear the Ferrari sputter and run out of gas. Johnny exits the vehicle, leaving the key in the ignition, which creates a loud, jarring soundtrack of the car beeping. He walks toward the skyline in an image framed almost precisely like the end of Modern Times (see Figures 4.3 and 4.4). Then the camera reverses its shot so that we see Johnny’s face walking toward us. Finally, the camera snaps to black and an uplifting, redemptive sounding, non-diegetic soundtrack (Phoenix’s “Love Like a Sunset Part II”) replaces the obnoxious car beeps. Johnny Marco’s journey thus begins after the movie has ended. He walks toward an unknown destination, facing obstacles, having given up his hotel, his possessions, his prized Ferrari. Refusing all the excess his environment has offered him, he chooses to be alone, with the spectator asked to find hope in movement across space. At the end of an excruciatingly subtle character study of a directionless man, Coppola suggests the possibility that maybe, just maybe, something better waits ahead of him “some” where, rather than in the stasis of any specific location or identity. Only through this lens does Somewhere’s ending, and with it, an otherwise directionless film, make any real sense. The inability to find connection and identity, often marked by a search for a place one can consider “home,” is a central tenet of a wide swath of twentieth-century filmic production. Think of Berman’s definition of modernism referenced earlier in this chapter. It is shared in common by European and American filmmakers—filmmakers as diverse in style and interests as Antonioni, Akerman, Chaplin, Nichols, Rafelson, and Cuarón (and countless more). But Coppola’s entire film builds to the most American of endings, one in which the

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Figure 4.3  Modern Times, directed by Charlie Chaplin © Criterion Collection 2010.

Figure 4.4  Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2011.

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search for home—destinationless travel—is the closest thing one may ever get to actually getting anywhere. Johnny walks toward the image of an unlimited horizon, as the whole of the American continent lies in wait before him.

Notes 1 A. O. Scott, “The Pampered Life, Viewed from the Inside,” The New York Times, December 22, 2010, http://www​.nytimes​.com​/2010​/12​/22​/movies​/22somewhere​.html. 2 Rene Rodriguez, “Sofia Coppola Movie Review,” The Miami Herald, January 31, 2011. 3 Tom Long, “Coppola’s Somewhere Takes Us Nowhere,” Detroit Free Press, January 14, 2011, http://www​.detroitnews​.com​/article​/20110114​/ENT02​/101140329. 4 Kyle Smith, “Audiences Would be Better Off Somewhere Else,” New York Post, December 22, 2010, http://nypost​.com​/2010​/12​/22​/audiences​-would​-be​-better​-off​-somewhere​-else. 5 James Berardinelli, “Somewhere,” ReelViews, December 21, 2010, https://www​.reelviews​.net​ /reelviews​/somewhere. 6 Dana Stevens, “My Sofia Problem,” Slate, December 2010, http://www​.slate​.com​/articles​/arts​ /movies​/2010​/12​/my​_sofia​_problem​.html. 7 Joe Williams, “Sofia Coppola Makes Somewhere the Place to Be,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 4, 2011, https://www​.stltoday​.com​/entertainment​/movies​/reviews​/sofia​-coppola​ -makes​-somewhere​-the​-place​-to​-be​/article​_ee0cd5c6​-becb​-5646​-adb2​-2ebf0cd88fd1​.html. 8 Deborah Young, “Somewhere—Film Review,” Hollywood Reporter, October 14, 2010, https:// www​.hollywoodreporter​.com​/review​/somewhere​-film​-review​-29932. 9 Peter Travers, “Somewhere,” Rolling Stone, December 22, 2010, http://www​.rollingstone​.com​ /movies​/reviews​/somewhere​-20101221. 10 Reflecting a common trend to assert Somewhere is a blatant attempt to return to her earlier films, Jim Schembri calls it a “cosmically overrated, emotionally vacant micro-drama . . . that unspools as a limp, cynical attempt to replicate the nuance-rich tapestry of her 2003 gem Lost in Translation.” See Jim Schembri, “Somewhere Movie Review,” The Age, December 27, 2010. The contrary position is exemplified by Newsday’s Rafer Guzman, who wrote, “It seems impossible that this heavy-handed, self-serious movie comes from writer-director Sofia Coppola.” See Rafer Guzman, “Somewhere Seems to Go Nowhere,” Newsday, January 14, 2011, https://www​.newsday​.com​/entertainment​/movies​/somewhere​-seems​-to​-go​-nowhere​-1​ .2604915. 11 For a more detailed reading of these connections, see Todd Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur,” Film Criticism 35, no. 1 (2010): 37–59. In short, Lick the Star substitutes a middle-school girl as our screen surrogate as she and her friends are overwhelmed and bullied by their powerful, masculine environment—an environment that they slowly emulate. Just as in Les 400 coups, the film is shot in black and white, includes a whistle-blowing gym teacher from whom the students sneak away, and graphically copies images from Truffaut’s film. It is also not without irony that the primary voice of masculine authority (which the film asks you to laugh at) is that of the principal, played by Peter Bogdanovich, a major player in the 1970s era of personal, auteur-based cinema. The opening shot of Lost in Translation seems a direct reference to a scene Godard was forced by his producer to include of a nude Brigitte Bardot lying face down on a bed. Godard chose to use awkward cuts and filters to de-sexualize the scene. Coppola goes a step further to give it a wholly feminine perspective.

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12 Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head,” 40. 13 For the best discussion of Lost in Translation as a treatise on excess, see Todd McGowan, “There Is Nothing Lost in Translation,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24, no. 1 (2007): 53–63. 14 Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (New York: Scribner, [1940] 2011), 53. 15 Marshall Berman, All that Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Penguin Books, [1982] 1988), 11. 16 Todd Kennedy, “Bob Dylan’s Highway Shoes: The Hobo-Hero’s Road Through Modernity,” Intertexts 13, no. 1 (2009): 40. 17 Todd Kennedy, “On the Road to ‘Some’ Place: Sofia Coppola’s Dissident Modernism Amidst a Postmodern Landscape,” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 52 (2015): 64. 18 The film includes diegetic sound, but the only spoken voices stem from machines and/or machine-reproduced human voices, such as record players, radios, and a futuristic video/ voice monitoring system the factory boss uses to spy on his workers. The only exception comes when Chaplin’s character finds his “voice” as a performer near film’s end, but what he utters is nonsensical. In short, he discovers that words do not matter. 19 For instance, Lost in Translation opens with a close-up of Charlotte’s (Scarlett Johansson) panty-clad rear end that lasts a full thirty-six seconds—long enough to become completely unnerving and awkward for the spectator. Marie Antoinette opens with the young queen (Kirsten Dunst) reclining in a low-cut bustier and licking cake icing from her finger. At the precise moment she wholly embodies the object of the gaze, she breaks the filmic fourth wall and returns the spectator’s gaze. While The Bling Ring’s opening shot is diegetic, it does break the film’s otherwise chronological editing by opening with security camera footage from one of the last robberies the teens commit. Instead of verisimilitude, the scene utilizes sound to establish mood and tone for the remainder of the film. 20 Williams, “Sofia Coppola Makes Somewhere the Place to Be.” 21 Fiona Handyside pays thorough attention to the influence of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), citing the use of helicopters and the film’s opening sequence. I do not include it here because while I think La Dolce Vita’s influence on Coppola’s overall filmography is clear, I think Somewhere’s opening scene works quite differently and seems far more directly influenced by American road-story cinema than by Fellini’s use of helicopters. My perspective is much closer to Handyside’s own assertion that what’s “more striking” are the “differences” and that Somewhere is more closely “aligned” with “American smart cinema.” See Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London: I.B. Taurus, 2007), 29–30. 22 Quoted in Roger Ebert, “Interview with Michelangelo Antonioni,” Roger Ebert​.com​, June 19, 1969, https://www​.rogerebert​.com​/interviews​/interview​-with​-michelangelo​-antonioni. 23 Stephen Dalton, “What Antonioni’s Movies Mean in the Era of Mindfulness and #MeToo,” BFI, January 16, 2019, https://www​.bfi​.org​.uk​/features​/michelangelo​-antonioni​-modernity. 24 I have already spoken about Lick the Star’s relationship to Les 400 coups and Lost in Translation’s relationship to Les mépris, but my article “Off with Hollywood’s Head” also details Marie Antoinette’s intentional and repeated invocation of classic examples of European painted art. Similarly, The Beguiled draws heavily from Peter Weir’s Australian murder-mystery Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). 25 Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York: Berghahn, 2019), 90. 26 In this regard, an interesting comparison exits between Somewhere and Cuarón’s Y tu mama también (2001). On its surface, it is possibly the most macho road-buddy story in film history.

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However, after a close reading, the entire film emphasizes (1) that the boys’ masculinity is itself a social construct and (2) the narrative is not theirs to begin with. Throughout the film the narration and cinematography take a feminine perspective, always reminding the spectator of the nuance the boys are oblivious to on their journey. Then, by the film’s end, we find Louisa to be the source of knowledge, the example of someone on a true search, and the closest thing the film offers to a hobo-hero. 27 Anna Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 115–16. 28 During their last car ride with each other Cleo cries from missing her mother and the fact that Johnny “is always gone.” Johnny has nothing to say to allay her feelings, other than telling her not to cry. In their final scene together, Johnny tries to yell something more meaningful, but she is unable to hear it because of the noise of a helicopter. This scene has been criticized for copying Lost in Translation’s final scene, but it actually works in a contrasting manner. Whatever Bob whispers to Charlotte in Lost in Translation is untransmutable to us, the spectator. It remains intrinsically between them. In Somewhere, we know full well what Johnny says; it is Cleo who cannot hear. This difference emphasizes Johnny’s isolation and inability to connect. As much as they have enjoyed their time together, nothing has quantifiably changed about their relationship. And the next shot snaps us back to the Chateau Marmont, perpetuating the cyclical pattern that dominates the film. 29 Roger Ebert, “Great Movies: Five Easy Pieces,” Roger Ebert​.com​, March 16, 2003, https:// www​.rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/great​-movie​-five​-easy​-pieces​-1970.

5 THE BLING RING SURFACE PLAY: AESTHETICS AND PERFORMANCE IN SOFIA COPPOLA’S THE BLING RING Maryn Wilkinson

The Bling Ring (2013) is perhaps Sofia Coppola’s most befuddling film. Her fifth feature, it tells the story of the real-life band of teenagers who robbed celebrities’ houses in Beverly Hills in 2008–9. The crimes were covered extensively in the media at the time, including an article by Nancy Jo Sales in Vanity Fair that served as the basis for the script.1 The film introduces us to a group of bored, privileged Los Angeles high-school girls, Rebecca (Katie Chang), Chloe (Claire Julien), Nicki (Emma Watson), and Sam (Taissa Farmiga), who “adopt” the gay new kid, Marc (Israel Broussard), into their popular clique. Building on their shared knowledge of fashion and celebrities, the teenagers break into the homes of Paris Hilton and other LA-based stars while they are away, taking clothes and valuables to show off at parties, in clubs, and on their social media accounts, until the media and police finally catch up with them, and they are arrested and brought to trial. In an interview with British newspaper The Guardian, Coppola explained that she adapted the story because she “saw the kids’ quotes and it sounded like it had the elements for a fun pop movie.” She admired their “ingenuity” and “guts,” and was inspired by what the story says about “celebrity culture now.”2 This seemingly rather casual motivation for the project—fairly typical of Coppola’s public comments about her own work—significantly underplays the profundity of the film’s critical voice, and the ways in which the film anchors and pivots Coppola’s authorial style. When it opened at Cannes in 2013, many critics failed to recognize the film’s value and quickly dismissed it for its superficiality and shallowness. Stephanie Zacharek called it “an empty shell.”3 Claudia Puig said it was “the cinematic equivalent of the vapid, superficial kids it features—all

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visual panache and minimal substance,”4 while Catherine Shoard argued “[the] blankness runs deep”5 and Keith Uhlich concluded, “There’s little that’s smart about [this film].”6 Such early comments demonstrate how easy it is to dismiss the film and miss its point: the film is rich and provocative precisely because of what it says about its own shallowness and its lack of depth. The film’s politics and punch, its smarts, reside in its engagement with its own surface—its aesthetics, its “look”—and the way it plays with ideas of artifice and performance in relation to contemporary media consumption. The film marks an important turning point in Coppola’s oeuvre, both aesthetically and thematically. It is Coppola’s first film shot on digital, and this allows her to bring together a wide range of visual styles and textures; the resulting eclectic “collection” of cinematic moments makes the film an assemblage of sorts. Although the film builds on themes established in her earlier films—of girlhood, becoming, consumption, isolation, feminine feelings, and dreamlike flânerie—The Bling Ring pushes such components further into postmodern self-reflexivity and, indeed, into a political critique of the American media landscape. The film also explores the role the teenage girl plays within late American capitalism and how this figure relates to media, celebrities, and commodities. Even though the film ferments Coppola’s interests in fashion, music, photography, pop culture, fame, and the teenage experience, it engages these areas in new ways. Through an elaborate play with its own image, and its explorations of branding, artifice, performance, and plasticity, the film investigates the affective potentials of surface and (cinematic) disengagement. In my opinion this development becomes key to understanding Coppola’s larger body of work. In 2021, it was announced that British broadcaster Channel 4 had commissioned a three-part television documentary series on The Bling Ring’s real events. Larry Walford, creative director at Double Act Productions, explained the series will offer “a tantalising take on popular culture at a time when reality TV, the paparazzi and social media conspired to create a new type of celebrity.”7 This renewed (or ongoing) fascination with the subject matter reveals that Coppola’s film was ahead of its time; Coppola’s instinct about what the story says about “celebrity culture now”8 is perhaps even more relevant today than when it was released. The film’s portrait of real-life teenage robbers of celebrity houses highlights the interconnectedness between important contemporary cultural waves: the digital turn, hyper-consumerism, immaterial labor, postfeminism, and postmodernism/ meta-modernism.9 It explores the extent to which social media, media literacy, and media saturation shape our current human condition. It looks at how and where America’s ongoing obsession with celebrity, brands, and luxury goods intersect—and the ease with which the demands of immaterial labor (and its accompanying digital skillsets) allow its users to attain what they desire, without any moral boundaries or consequences. All the while, the film examines the “plasticity” of the figure of the teenage girl (even, as I will explain later, in its presentation of a teenage boy) and celebrates how this figure transitions between target and shaper of consumer culture, between subject and object, victim and perpetrator—and yet remains elusive and impalpable. The figure of the (white, upper-middle-class, American) teenage girl has become the ideal icon, the poster child par excellence, for our neoliberal times: she is a figure marked by self-construction, selfpreservation, consumption, commodification, performance, display, immaterial labor,

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adaptability, and malleability. On top of this, Coppola’s film reflects and explores its own nature, its own culpability, in our current media-saturated and globalized world. It insists on using the same imagery it critiques and plays with its own surface, performance, and artifice, without ever quite being “pinned down”—much like the teenagers at the heart of its tale. In this chapter, I explore the complexities in The Bling Ring across two sections that address different aspects of the film. In the first section, I explore the aesthetics of the film and how it emulates the media consumption that the film itself addresses. The film promotes a sense of “skimming,” which I’ve argued elsewhere is “a term that references both the casual skimming of a glossy magazine, or celebrity gossip sites, as well as the criminal act of ‘skimming,’ as the stealing of excessive luxury goods.”10 I argue that the postmodern character of the film, and the essence of its critique, resides in its profoundly self-reflexive nature and its play with cinematic surface. In the second section, I examine how the film presents its most central figure, the teenage girl, as a distinctly performative role: the “teenage girl” here becomes a vessel, a hollow avatar of sorts, that enables its “user” to transgress, time and time again. I also look at how the film presents the relationship between these girls and the things they desire: luxury items, wealth, and (celebrity) status. By showing off such “commodities,” yet stripping them of their function and content, the film offers a critical commentary on contemporary immaterial labor practices and (media) consumption. With the film’s unbridled promotion of hyper-consumerism/materialism on the one hand and its simultaneous depiction of expensive goods (and media hypes) as disposable and fleeting on the other, the film examines not only late American capitalism and the role (teen) consumers and producers play within it but its own place within the consumer market as well. The Bling Ring is a film that both celebrates and critiques—as it floats on, and engages with, its own surface. It plays with performance(s), mimicry, and artifice, and in doing so, ultimately takes the profoundly postmodern character of Coppola’s work to ever greater depths.

The Glam, the Gloss, the Glitter . . . Right from the start, The Bling Ring references, emulates, and critiques America’s hypermediated landscape by playing with its own aesthetics, and layering ideas about access, transgression, and mimicry/artifice into the visuals and sounds. The film opens with a shot of a gated driveway, from the perspective of a sepia-toned night security camera. In doing so, the film immediately engages with the nature of its own cinematography: the film’s principal camera here has become another type of camera. This “transgression,” seemingly trivial, sets the tone for the film’s entire thematic and aesthetic project. The “surveillance camera” opening shot shows a group of teenagers approaching (their clothes, agility, and posture clue us in to their age), as they jump the fence and effortlessly walk onto private property.11 The static camera image barely “skims” its targeted vista for points of light in the night, allowing us only to vaguely infer what is going on. It plays with what we are seeing and hearing. From this grainy perspective, the round post light

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in the street doubles as a full moon, while the sounds of crickets and birds chirping in the silent night seemingly suggest a calm and “natural environment,” where these teens can fluidly move through the space (denying the criminality of the trespassing action) without causing upset. The discrepancy between what things “look like” and what they actually are (or what its content is, what the action actually is) is emphasized from the very beginning. Within the opening shot, the teenagers appear only as dark silhouettes, as shadowy avatars, coming in from the edge of the frame, from out of nowhere, in this affluent neighborhood. That the protagonists are introduced as silhouettes again emphasizes shape and form over content. The teenage figure is brought to us in medias res here, without setup, and introduced only as a mere figure, an outline, a shape. The film cuts to a handheld color-film camera—the camera itself shapeshifting in character—to take on the point of view of someone within the group walking onto the property. Suddenly the viewer is one of the teenage gang, among the bodies all hooded and unidentifiable from behind. This brings the culpability of the camera (and by extension the viewer, as well as the film itself) into play; we too are drawn toward the expensivelooking house, moving inescapably forward. The teens walk past a shimmering swimming pool and approach the glass façade of the property. The shiny appeal of these set elements draws the eyes briefly to their surface and quickly onward and inward, while the play with materials and textures introduces a world of shiny reflections and apparent transparency, a world that, in and of itself, is all about surface, display, access, and transitory movement. The teens’ second attempt to open a sliding glass door proves successful and the camera follows the group into the house. (The sliding door is a significant element: it slides across its own surface, rather than opening inward or outward, and it never quite concealed to begin with.) The soundtrack suddenly breaks into a loud, repetitive, upbeat, poppy electronic guitar riff. One of the girls (later identified as Rebecca) walks past a brightly lit collection of bags on a shelf, and, as though she has found her spotlight within the light reflecting off a silver bag, turns to face the camera directly (breaking the fourth wall, as if this too provides no “barrier”) and smilingly says “Let’s go shopping!” before sliding open a large wardrobe to reveal the edges of fur coats hanging inside. And just like that, the break-in becomes a visit to a mall. The complex layering of ideas about transgression and shapeshifting continues throughout the opening sequence in an interplay between story and aesthetics. As the music swells with added instrumentation, the camera cuts into a montage sequence that recalls the opening of 1980s teen-film Valley Girl (Martha Coolidge, 1983) or shopping scenes from Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995) or Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004), where teenage girls are shown to “ooh and aah” at a wide range of clothes and accessories. In a playful reference to a familiar teen-film genre trope,12 the teens’ fleeting consumer gaze and mall-style flânerie is visualized in a rapid pop succession of quick-fire close-ups, that flash the glam, gloss, and glitter of expensive clothes, bags, jewelry, shoes, and lacy underwear, as hands slide open drawers, pick things up, and stuff items into bags. Some items are more directly on display for the camera, which too has transitioned once more; it now takes on the style of well-lit, glamour advertisement photography (showing overhead and head-on shots of symmetrical rows of commodities). The montage sequence then shapeshifts into the film’s title sequence, as the pop music swells further to support the

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appearing credits. In large, bright yellow letters, “The Bling Ring” splatters across the screen, on top of an aerial shot of LA at night—and the names of the film’s cast and crew run across tracking close-ups of rows of shoes and other luxury items. The montage shifts again when the chronology of events is suddenly thrown out of order. Through intercutting, we now see shots of the teenage characters later on in the story, during their arrest, before moving back to the “now” where they try on items in the house. We see close-ups that specifically highlight the brands of the luxury goods (Chanel, Louis Vuitton, etc.). Other flashy inserts and jump-cuts show social media pages with pictures of the teens later wearing the items they “find” in the house. We see “real-life” footage of celebrities, like Rachel Bilson, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan, caught by paparazzi, or at red-carpet appearances, posing in front of brand-sponsored backdrops, juxtaposed with the teens’ photographs. Then, the camera returns to its starting position as a surveillance camera (but now from a slightly different angle than before, showing the teenagers in green, not sepia) as they leave the house with goods in hand and drive off—a scene that, incidentally, will be repeated later in the film. The opening scene concludes with a final tracking shot of glittering jewelry laid out on display with a notice of “evidence” next to it (as though part of a later police examination), where a necklace that spells out “RICH BITCH” takes center position between the non-diegetic titles “Written and directed by” and “Sofia Coppola” that overlay the screen. There is so much to unpack in these first two minutes of the film—even before the main story of the film “begins.” Its play with materials, with sound, with visual textures (shadows, outlines, light, shimmer and shine, transparency and reflection), and with sliding gestures (fluid access, shapeshifting, mimicry, and transgression) sets the tone for a film that is preoccupied with engaging its own surface and performance. The wide range of different visual styles and formats introduced here (from static surveillance footage to handheld point of view, from glamorous commodity photography to Facebook pages, paparazzi footage, red-carpet shots, and so on) play with what film is, and what this film in particular is trying to do. By taking on the character of many other media formats and becoming one with the (increasingly digitized) mediated landscape it references, the film obscures where one ends and another begins. This approach is continued throughout the film; the aesthetics constantly shift and move along the surface, changing the look and feel of—and our engagement with—the screen, in a way that can only be understood to mark its own self-reflexivity. As the story takes us, in flashback (though not strictly presented in chronological order), through how the gang formed and “transgressed” into criminal behavior, the film presents its scenes more as a collection of events than it does as a clear linear progression; it is structured more like a (social) network, with its own web of internal connections, or like a smorgasbord of scenes and commodities posted on a vision board. The film’s visuals further underpin such ideas: the interiors of the teenagers’ suburban homes are presented in limited palettes of beiges, pastels, and whites, as though the images are lifted directly from glossy interior design magazines, or Ikea, Habitat, or Pottery Barn catalogues (see Figure 5.1). (The irony of the expense of this constructed “nude” environment is unmistakable here, also as a “marker” of whiteness and Caucasian power.) The nightclub scenes, by contrast (in rhyme with Hollywood’s typical presentation of nighttime Los Angeles) are dark, glittery, and neon-lit—and more readily laced with

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Figure 5.1  A beige color palette marks the suburban and Caucasian affluence in Chloe’s house while evoking catalogue-style advertisements. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013.

cues for criminality. The scenes in the schoolyard or on the beach are overexposed and washed out. The reflections of palm trees glide by on the surface of fast cars, as the characters inside look out; the advertisement-style “glimmer and shine” of the city consciously projected and laid over yet another gleaming and polished surface in the set design. In other scenes, cinematographers Harris Savides and Christopher Blauvelt deliberately introduced digital noise into the frame by “punching in and blowing back up” the digital image to create a visible grain and simulate phone cameras.13 Handheld camera shots are juxtaposed with slow zooms, and minimal cutting is juxtaposed with rapid-fire montage and split-screen designs. The sounds of crickets, coyotes, and sirens are placed alongside the repetitive digital beats of electronic pop music, while each of the burglary scenes at the celebrity houses has a distinct editing and visual pattern. (The burglaries were all designed to “look different.”14) When characters discuss their vision boards during a home-school session, or try on a range of items in a shopping sequence, or dance in a club, or flip through the pages of a fashion magazine, or browse gossip sites online, the film itself takes on those styles and formats, moving not only between different teen-film genre tropes (like a makeover scene or a slow-motion dance sequence) but between the visual styles of fashion vlogs, music videos, phone and laptop footage (Skype style), advertisements, and tabloids (see Figure 5.2). In such instances the film becomes a web page, a Facebook page, a collage, a laptop screen, a paparazzi perspective—or at least, and perhaps importantly, an artificial version of those formats. The film may look like these media forms, but it also seems to be underscoring the fact that it isn’t really that, especially through the very speed with which it constantly shapeshifts. The point, then, seems to lie precisely with the practice of emulation, with taking on the shape of it, the appearance of it. The constant modulation of shape, surface, and appearance in the film’s

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Figure 5.2  The Bling Ring constantly shifts its own aesthetics along the surface, as in this digital “collage” of paparazzi shots of reality-television personality Audrina Patridge, which mimics the “skimming” of a gossip magazine. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013.

aesthetics, and its play with reproduction and artifice, is precisely what gives the surface of the film its depth here. As I wrote previously, in an article on surface strategies in postmodern cinema, films that engage ideas about surface often do so differently.15 In The Bling Ring, the surface aesthetics, and the film’s strategies of invoking these aesthetics, shape our affective engagement with the screen as moving through a hypermediated world frenetically, continuously, horizontally. It is an approach that might therefore best be read in terms of acts of “skimming.” Skimming the pages of a magazine—as we also see the teens do repeatedly in the film—infers a quick and hasty “surface” browse, where information or input is swiped through in hastened, unfocused, and semi-distracted flânerie. Skimming merely engages a temporary, fleeting, bouncy (first) impression of that which resides on the surface, or on the “face of it.” One may skim a magazine, a catalogue, internet search results, or the news, to just get the gist of it, to get the headlines—to locate the glimmer, the glamour, the gloss, the glitz. Skimming redirects the act of looking into a search for potential access points within the surface—not the focused reading that might follow later, or any other in-depth engagement with what potentially does (or does not) lie underneath. Skimming is about a swift surface engagement with the “first look of things.” The fleeting access that skimming media entails becomes part and parcel of the narration here. The strategy of surface skimming both evokes and performs the casual consumption/conglomeration of multiple (simulated) media forms in the film, and informs the aesthetics and mode of storytelling throughout. What is inside or outside the diegesis (what is or was actually “real” or not), what is surface and image or content, what is hollow or full, subjective or objective, can no longer be separated. Moreover, the separation here

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no longer matters. The film itself positions us, as viewers, to “merely” skim the surface— and it is this movement, this action, this practice, that is relevant here. Ours becomes the wandering eye that flickers across a scrolling internet page or the pages of a magazine— admiring but never engaging with the realities of the glitter, the glam, the gloss. In this way, we experience how acts of skimming are intricately intertwined with the criminal acts of skimming (of “surplus” excess[-ive] goods) that form the film’s narrative as well. The aesthetics and shapeshifting in The Bling Ring performs a “skimming” of networked media and as such constantly thrusts its own performance (as a fleeting, mediated commodity itself—a commercial retelling of these events) back to the surface. The film becomes about the swiping consumption of the tale, the skimming of it, and about the indistinguishable role the film plays within the media circus, while celebrating the fluidity of its own media form. In doing so, the film seems to reject a more typical cinematic reliance on classical, “logical” indexicality, and/or anchoring of meaning (which favors content). The film invites us to reflect on who we are, as viewers, if we are “merely skimming” this content too. It challenges us to consider how we relate to the (criminal) activity on display there, if we too are moving into and past it at such a great pace, forever shapeshifting along the way. Are we ever engaged? Are we disengaged? Is the film (and, by extension, are we as viewers) “guilty” of promoting/reproducing/upholding the sham of the glitter, the glam, the gloss, the stars, the commodities, the scandalous events that it addresses? Are we morally culpable for what we consume here or does consequence evade us? Is the film the result (the victim?) or an active perpetrator of our media consumption habits? It seems to me that for Coppola, the answers to such questions are not important. Answers are not relevant in the act of skimming. An important key to the film’s political critique then—or in any case, part of the “smarts” of its self-reflexive character—resides in the way the film becomes unidentifiably one with the mediated landscape it portrays. It not only relays contemporary (digital) media-consumption as a transgressing (and a transgressive) surface engagement but traps the viewer into those actions as well.

The Girls, the Goods . . . Alongside its self-reflexive play with surface aesthetics, The Bling Ring also revisits a figure central to so much of Sofia Coppola’s work: the teenage girl. Whereas Coppola’s earlier films were primarily interested in exploring the emotional histories and complex feelings involved with teen-girl “becoming,” The Bling Ring holds the figure at a greater affective distance and critically explores the role she plays within late American capitalism. As a cultural construction, the teen-girl figure has become both a key shaper of, and subject for, contemporary consumerism—especially in a time where immaterial labor produces more value than traditional forms of labor16 (and where “immaterial” commodities, such as profile data, or the “likes” that “steer” taste and consumer behavior by feeding into algorithms, produce more “value” than material commodities). Immaterial labor demands work from its subjects 24/717 and it exploits particularly the “unpaid” labor (the reproduction of consumer habits, for instance) performed by the teenage girl. The Bling Ring navigates this premise by examining the teenage girl’s consumer and media habits,

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and by highlighting the performative aspects of the figure of the teenage girl. As was the case with the “act” of skimming introduced earlier, recognizing the film’s emphasis on the “performance” of a teen-girl identity (as an action in and of itself) becomes central to understanding the political critique in the film. Revealing teen-girl “performances” as such adds another layer to the film’s investigation of shapeshifting and culpability in our contemporary media culture. The film’s exploration of teen-girl “performance” can already be found in the film’s casting. Despite Coppola’s established reputation at this point in her career, the film presents a group of relative unknowns as the members of the Bling Ring, with the notable exception of Emma Watson. Watson, at this stage, was known mostly for her work as Hermione in the Harry Potter film series, a role that had allowed viewers to see her “grow up” in front of the camera and that had endowed her character with a sense of intelligence, ingenuity, and (wizarding) female power. At the time of casting, Watson was a staple of the fantasy genre and an actress defined by a strong level of “British-ness.” This makes her a rather remarkable choice for the role of Nicki Moore, the teen celebrity-wannabe from Calabasas, California. The character of Nicki is based on Alexis Neiers, the only “already famous” (albeit D-lister) member of the real-life Bling Ring, who had her own MTV-reality program during the time of the burglaries. Coppola does not include this aspect of the Nicki/Alexis character in the film but presents Nicki as a wannabe model-actress-celebrity (Nicki speaks often of prepping for auditions, meeting managers or advertising scouts, and boasts about how Jude Law will not stop texting her). The choice of Watson as Nicki provides a performative layer to the film from the start: Watson offers the viewer an instant “recognizability” that sets her apart from the rest of the group (which also aligns her a little with Neiers’ status at the time of the actual Bling Ring events). The casting thereby does some of the work that the story in the film also addresses, by offering its own “performance” of glamorous “celebrity” content. The first scene after the opening sequence of the film directly plays with Watson’s “performance” and celebrity status. We see a close-up of a sunglass- and pearl-necklacewearing Watson, as she addresses flashing news- and paparazzi cameras and speaks in an American accent about how this was all a “big learning experience” for her, and how she wants to “run a huge charity organization” or “a country someday,” for all she knows (see Figure 5.3). There is again plenty to unpack here: the shot presents an actual part of the story, as we see Nicki relish in her own newfound quasi-celebrity status after her arrest, but it also showcases both Nicki and Emma Watson’s talents for media-related “performance,” making it evident for the viewer that the character is feigning innocence and philanthropic commitment for the cameras in the scene (as well as perhaps reminding the viewer of Watson’s “real” do-good commitments). The fact that Watson is known for her British-ness layers another level of “performance” into the scene. By presenting the “celebrity Watson” as central to the interest of both the diegetic and extra-diegetic cameras, the viewer is held at a bit of a distance here, as if positioned to ask, with a more cynical eye: “what is real, what is not real here?” (One could argue that these kinds of “winks” to the viewer were already introduced with the “RICH BITCH” letters around the Sofia Coppola credit too, since this plays with the viewer’s extra-diegetic knowledge of Coppola’s heritage and public persona.) The viewer is invited to marvel

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Figure 5.3 In The Bling Ring, Nicki Moore as played by Emma Watson both captures and relays the Bling Ring’s fascination with fame, media, and performance. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013.

at the “performance” on display here, and to consider the construction of this aspect of “celebrity” culture. In this way, the film cleverly has its cake and eats it too: it upholds the “rules” of glamour and plays into our fascination with stardom and celebrity, while simultaneously exposing the artifice of the construct. The idea of revealing “performances” returns throughout the film. All the teenage girls in The Bling Ring are shown to play with, sculpt, and manage their appearance and character. We see them rapping, miming, and singing along to hip-hop or playacting certain character traits, easily slipping in and out of different voices and roles.18 The girls use words like “bitch,” “slut,” “dawg,” and “homie” in their conversations, in a highly stylized California/Clueless-way of speaking that now “naturally” incorporates gang and hip-hop slang. Throughout the film, their lines of dialogue (and especially phrases like “That’s soooo cute,” “it’s fine,” and the listing of brand names) circle and repeat on the soundtrack—creating loops that initially seem to read authentic and indexical, but that later merely defer or strip meaning from the phrases. The girls are constantly presented in and alongside mirrors in the frame, which reinforces that their world is fueled by outer appearances, perception, and image management, but also literally “doubles” their presence in the frame: we see them looking in mirrors, standing next to mirrors, filmed in rear-view mirrors, or using their cell-phone cameras as mirrors, as they flip their hair, switch and discuss outfits, touch up their lip gloss, or pout and pose for selfies. At the same time, the editing and setup of the scenes constantly underscore the very construction and manipulation of these girls’ “performances”: Nicki Moore’s “I wanna rob” proclamation cuts directly into a close-up of her proclaiming her innocence in an interview later; we see her lower the zip of her top and reveal more of her breasts before she lets in the “water boy”; her apologetic and seemingly sweet and sincere comments to Marc’s

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father about potentially “making too much noise” are undermined by the fact that we see her holding a smoking cigarette behind her back and the notable eye roll she offers Marc as she returns to her regular and brazen speaking voice after closing the door. Nicki sternly corrects her mother’s (Leslie Mann) interruptions when she is being interviewed at the end of the film; her “media savviness” appears both innate and “larger than life,” as it is placed in sharp contrast to her mother’s more sincere and naïve approach. Even the constraints of the filmic text itself (the diegesis) prove no boundary for her “performance,” when Nicki’s character concludes the film by breaking the fourth wall and addressing the viewer directly, as she urges them to continue to follow her story online, by going to nickimooreforever​.co​m. The fascination with the figure of the (white, upper-middle-class, American) teenage girl as a culturally mediated construction takes center stage in The Bling Ring. The figure here is offered more as an avatar of sorts: a malleable, elusive figure marked only by her ongoing acts of “performance” and persistent manipulation of her “outer shell.” She is a plastic, hollow figure onto which nothing quite “sticks” (including criminal liability), and into which a whole range of other identity markers are easily absorbed and “neutralized.” Rebecca’s ethnicity and background are barely made relevant in the film; what matters is her knowledge of brands, of who and what to admire or wear, of how to attain the goods and carefully manipulate her own image.19 Marc—the only boy in the group—is easily absorbed into it as “one of the girls”; he is addressed as one of “two women” by Chloe in a rap song, and his knowledge of brands and celebrities, his taste for boys and luxury items, and talents for styling (his dad is “in the biz”) quickly align him with Rebecca and the other girls. He wears pink high heels and lipstick, addresses anxieties over his appearance to a reporter, and sings along to “Drop it Low” as he pouts and dances seductively in front of his laptop camera in his room.20 Nicki’s and Sam’s backgrounds are similarly “inconsequential” to the successful performance of a teen-girl identity; their alcoholic and drug-addicted parental histories are easily “overwritten” by a readiness for close-ups and their knowledge of which outfit will look better on camera, or in court, which, combined with the presumed innocence ascribed to their “natural” age, forms enough of a basis for them to ultimately evade justice. The film relishes the slippery, agile nature of the performing teen-girl figure. The camera lingers in slow-motion images of them dancing at the club or trying on, discussing, and showing off a wide range of different outfits. The slippery nature of the girls allows them to literally slip in and out of spaces and different states with great ease: they enter houses through dog doors, are arrested for DUIs and yet are quickly “free” once more (the DUI headshots in the film are presented almost as if to verify the girl’s incoming “celebrity” status—it is a type of photograph that has become synonymous with celebrity public missteps), they playact with guns, and “perform” phrases of sexual objectification to one another, as well as “mock” allegations of sexual assault. The boundaries between artifice and authenticity, between public and private, between playacting and being “real,” between victim and culprit become entirely blurred. Rebecca’s outspoken desire to be like “one of the Hills’ girls” plays with this, too; the emulation of this kind of “reality-tv star”-celebrity-lifestyle in and of itself brings with it complex ideas about artifice and media construction. (The Hills is a well-known example of a staged and scripted reality show,

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where what is “real” and “fake” is all absorbed into the same realm.21) The emphasis on their “performance” shifts Rebecca and the other girls swiftly along the surface, as though they too can simply slot “next” into place, into the celebrity houses they break into, and publicly mediated roles, as though they are simply answering what Alison Hearn calls the capitalist “insert yourself here” invitation posed by reality programs or the “How to Be More Like Lindsay” articles in women’s magazines.22 There is yet another layer of political critique to all this, which revolves around how the girls’ knowledge of brands, celebrities, and luxury goods so easily extends (or flows) into criminal behavior. As mentioned previously, The Bling Ring presents a commodified American landscape marked by immaterial labor, the labor that, as Maurizio Lazzarato argues, “produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity” and which includes all the “activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, norms and public opinion.”23 The teen-girl figure is presented in The Bling Ring as both the ideal object and subject of this kind of labor. Although the girls are not paid for their labor, their primary activities in The Bling Ring revolve around the reproduction of taste and consumer behavior in a world that is infused by the networks of information and communication. The teenage girls here are presented as “naturally” within it, with an innate ability to recognize value, steer taste, and opinion, and reproduce this kind of knowledge (“This is the Birkin that Lindsay has!”). But shopping itself is conflated with criminal behavior right from the start, when the break-in presented in the cold open becomes like a mall shopping scene. The film seems to suggest the teen girls’ knowledge of commodities, media, and manipulating performances is precisely what allows them to transgress so easily; they can simply resituate, extend, and apply this knowledge elsewhere. The spotting of brands in celebrity magazines becomes useful knowledge for selecting the most valuable item to take from an unlocked house. The teen habit of navigating online “celebrity” pages gives them the knowledge they need to break into and enter celebrity houses. Their access to clubs where “celebrities” hang appears to “naturally” transition into their “hanging out” at Paris’ or Rachel Bilson’s. It is precisely because these figures know how to shop, how to act, how to model, how to identify which commodities are desirable to own and which celebrities to emulate—how to perform as a “teen girl”—that they, seemingly instinctively know how to break, enter, and rob. Morality is a moot point, because in this landscape, desiring the right commodity, constructing the right image, and navigating the media is the superlative exchange and the formative practice. It seems the film (at least partially) acknowledges that this in and of itself is already criminal. The Bling Ring continues to play with notions of performativity and surface appearance, by hollowing out the content and function of the goods at heart of the theft too. The desired commodities shimmer and glimmer only ever so briefly on screen, in endless variety. Brand names are proudly, transiently, called out in the dialogue (“Look at all the Louboutins! Chanel! It’s Hervé Leger! They’re Rolexes!”), as the girls try on and “perform” with one commodity after the other, one item after the next. Much like the film’s teen-girl performances and its aesthetics, the commodities on display in The Bling Ring swiftly move along the surface; they are presented as mere props in a world of mediation that requires nothing more of them than that. The products are merely “selfied” once, as it

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were—briefly shown off at school, at a party, or on Facebook—to secure and promote a specific subjectified image, before they are discarded. An acquired excess of celebrities’ designer goods (much like the excess that was skimmed from the celebrity houses to begin with) is now stowed away under beds, and in a grandmother’s garage, or resold for a fraction of their monetary value. A box of Rolexes is sold to a club owner under price (“Aren’t they worth a lot more?” Marc asks) and designer bags are resold on Venice Beach for fifty dollars, right next to fakes. In this context, it does not even matter whether the goods are “real.” In terms of their image, they are the same as the fakes. The commodities star in the girls’ self-promotion and self-branding; they are merely “skimmed” for their surface appearance, for their performative abilities, and not their function. The goods become empty, superficial props that bolster the immaterial labor that the girls perform— and in the end become only evidence scattered on a table, a testament to, or tracing of, crime. The commodities themselves carry no weight; they are transitory, symbolic, and performative—and The Bling Ring presents them simply as part of the image culture that drives the girls’ actions. And yet, the constant listing of brands emulates and “performs” marketing strategies and product placement, especially as relayed through the film’s advertisement-style glamour aesthetics. And so again, the film gets to have its cake and eat it too: the film promotes and reproduces the same brand- and celebrity-recognition culture that it suggests is at heart of what corrupts our behavior and society.

Conclusion The Bling Ring is an incredibly rich and provocative film. It uses its own aesthetics to both illustrate the story it tells and thrust its own “performances” (as a film, as part of the media landscape it addresses) back into the viewers’ faces. It offers a complex interlacing of form and content that adds new layers of depth to its surface. The aesthetics create a slippery, “skimmable” Möbius strip of a screen, where there is no (clear) beginning or end, no (clear) lineage of accountability or culpability. The act of skimming, of continuous fleeting consumption (of celebrity, immaterial and material commodities) engaged by and through the media—of which the film itself is a part—is exactly what the film is, what it performs, and what it is about. The film refigures the teenage girl as a postfeminist construction marked by performance and simulation: “girlhood,” now taken as a performative category, is presented as an ongoing process of image construction, of elusive shapeshifting, that absorbs all other identity markers and evades culpability. The Bling Ring reveals that this plastic teen-girl figure is both willing and, crucially, able to do anything to attain what she desires. She is the spearhead driver of immaterial labor and the poster child for neoliberalism. In the end, the film both promotes/celebrates this aspect of the teenage girl and exposes it as such: the environment and teen-girl construction are part and parcel of the same systemic performance and mediated network that ultimately corrupt. Over the years, critics have re-evaluated Coppola’s befuddling film. Jessa Crispin has since called it a “perfect film.”24 I think The Bling Ring builds beautifully and skillfully on the themes and ideas that Coppola established in her earlier work, and yet adds a more

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detached, self-reflexive, and politically critical (even cynical) eye to its depiction of the teenage girl—especially through its use of digital techniques and layered references to other media forms. It offers a new direction for Coppola’s postmodern cinema: one that no longer offers audiences clear answers or affects, or apologies for Coppola being a “rich bitch” filmmaker. Here we see Sofia Coppola having her cake and eating it, too.

Notes Please note this chapter builds on and includes work previously published in Maryn Wilkinson, “Leisure/Crime, Immaterial Labor, and the Performance of the Teenage Girl in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012) and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013),” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 12/13 (Spring/Fall 2017): 20-37 and “On the Depths of Surface: Strategies of Surface Aesthetics in The Bling Ring, Spring Breakers and Drive,” Film-Philosophy 22, no. 2 (2018): 222–39. 1 Nancy Jo Sales, “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” Vanity Fair, February 3, 2010, https://www​ .vanityfair​.com​/culture​/2010​/03​/billionaire​-girls​-201003. 2 Ryan Gilbey, “Sofia Coppola on The Bling Ring: ‘What These Kids Did Really Took Ingenuity,’” The Guardian, July 4, 2013, https://www​.theguardian​.com​/film​/2013​/jul​/04​/sofia​-coppola​-the​ -bling​-ring​-interview. 3 Stephanie Zacharek, “The Bling Ring Is Gorgeous, If Sometimes Absent,” Village Voice, June 12, 2013. 4 Claudia Puig, “‘Bling Ring’ Is Shiny, but Ultimately Emotionally Cheap,” USA Today, June 14, 2013, https://eu​.usatoday​.com​/story​/life​/movies​/2013​/06​/13​/the​-bling​-ring​-review​/2367027/. 5 Catherine Shoard, “The Bling Ring—Review,” The Guardian, July 6, 2013, https://www​ .theguardian​.com​/film​/2013​/jul​/07​/bling​-ring​-review. 6 Keith Uhlich, “Cannes 2013: Heli, Young & Beautiful, The Bling Ring,” TimeOut, May 15, 2013, https://www​.timeout​.com​/newyork​/film​/cannes​-2013​-heli​-young​-beautiful​-the​-bling​-ring. 7 K. J. Yossman, “‘Bling Ring’ Revisited: Channel 4 Unveils New Doc Series Re-Examining the Hollywood Heist,” July 13, 2021, https://variety​.com​/2021​/tv​/news​/bling​-ring​-channel​-4​ -series​-1235018004/. 8 Gilbey, “Sofia Coppola on The Bling Ring.” 9 Many of these concepts have garnered elaborate academic positionings, but here are starting points of reference. For the digital turn, see Wim Westera, The Digital Turn: How the Internet Transforms our Existence (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2012). For hyper-consumerism, see Simon Malpas, The Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 2005); Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang, The Unmanageable Consumer (New York: Sage, 2015); Frenchy Lunning, Fanthropologies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Danielle Todd, “You Are What You Buy: Postmodern Consumerism and the Construction of Self,” Hohonu Academic Journal of University of Hawaii 10 (2012): 48–50. For immaterial labor, see Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2001). For postfeminism, see Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminism and the New Cultural Life of Feminism,” Diffractions 6 (2016): 1–8; Todd Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur,” Film Criticism 35, no. 1 (2010): 37–59; Fiona Handyside, “Girlhood, Postfeminism and Contemporary Female Art-house Authorship: The ‘Nameless Trilogies’ of Sofia Coppola and Mia Hansen-Løve,” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 10 (2015):

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1–18: Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017); Sarah Projansky, Spectacular Girls (New York: New York University Press, 2014). For postmodernism/meta-modernism, see Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York and London: Routledge, 2003); Anne Friedberg, “Les Flâneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition,” PMLA 106, no. 3 (1991): 419–31; Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Catherine Constable, “Postmodernism and Film,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Steven Connor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 43–61; Catherine Constable, Postmodernism and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2, no. 1 (2010): 5677; Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen, “Periodising the 2000s, or, the Emergence of Metamodernism,” Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (2017): 1–19; Jeffrey Sconce, “Smart Cinema,” Contemporary American Cinema (2006): 429–39, and Jeffrey Sconce, “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film,” Screen 43, no. 4 (2002): 349–69. 10 See Maryn Wilkinson, “On the Depths of Surface: Strategies of Surface Aesthetics in The Bling Ring, Spring Breakers and Drive,” Film-Philosophy 22, no. 2 (2018): 222–39. 11 It is perhaps interesting to note that the real-life gang actually cut fences and engaged in more obvious criminal behavior to access the properties. See Sales, “The Suspects Wore Louboutins.” Their actions presented here are “cleansed” as one of fluid motion, of effortless access. 12 Coppola apparently also used films like Foxes (Adrian Lyne, 1980) and Over the Edge (Jonathan Kaplan, 1979) for inspiration for the visual style of the film, choosing to deliberately play with, and reference, the teen-film genre, both in a “straight” way (The Bling Ring bears the hallmarks of the teen-film genre after all), and in an “ironic” way, since it is such a hypermediated text, and the characters mostly evade moral consequence in its conclusion. See Matt Patchet, “Cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt Talks Taking Over ‘The Bling Ring’ for Harris Savides,” MTV News, June 20, 2013, http://www​.mtv​.com​/news​/2770795​/ christopher​-blauvelt​-interview​-the​-bling​-ring/. 13 Patchet, “Cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt.” 14 Patchet, “Cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt.” 15 See Wilkinson, “On the Depths of Surface.” 16 Immaterial labor is the labor that, as Maurizio Lazzarato argues, “produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity.” This includes all the “activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, norms and public opinion.” See Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” 133. 17 See Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London and New York: Verso, 2013). 18 Suzanne Ferriss makes a compelling argument about the complex layers of appropriation at work in the girls’ “rapping”; we see white privilege at work in the ease of the re-appropriation of black voices and heritage on the one hand, and the ironic layering of ideas of crime and theft on the other. See Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 64. 19 Alison Maria Virginia Hearn, “Reality Television, The Hills and the Limits of the Immaterial Labour Thesis,” tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 8, no. 1 (2010): 67–8. 20 Ferriss beautifully addresses the complexity of Marc’s performance in this scene, which plays with the male gaze, the lyrics of the song, and the fluidity of gender identity, self-presentation, and experimentation. See Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 38.

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21 See, for example, Mustafa Gatollari, “‘The Hills’ Looks Painfully Staged, but Is the Show as Fake as a Pair of LA Lips?,” Distractify, July 7, 2021, https://www​.distractify​.com​/p​/is​-the​-hills​ -scripted. 22 Hearn, “Reality Television, The Hills and the Limits of the Immaterial Labour Thesis.” 23 Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” 133. 24 Jessa Crispin, “Six Theories About Sofia Coppola,” Caesura, May 27, 2021, https:// caesuramag​.org​/posts​/jessa​-crispin​-six​-theories​-sofia​-coppola.

6 THE BEGUILED THE KNOWLEDGE OF FEELING IN SOFIA COPPOLA’S THE BEGUILED Michelle Devereaux

As in much of her work, feminine desire and gendered power dynamics are the principal concerns of Sofia Coppola’s sixth feature The Beguiled (2017), a Civil War melodrama set in a girls’ boarding school on an isolated plantation in the American South. A dual reimagining of Thomas Cullinan’s 1966 novel (originally titled A Painted Devil) and the 1971 Don Siegel film starring Clint Eastwood, it marks her second fiction adaptation, following her debut feature, The Virgin Suicides (1999). While The Beguiled echoes The Virgin Suicides both narratively and aesthetically, it engendered a controversy the earlier film never suffered. After being met with allegations of “whitewashing,” Coppola insisted her decision to excise a slave character from The Beguiled and instead feature an allwhite cast was done out of “respect” for an experience she is not qualified to give voice to. Instead, she chooses to “explore the high cost of denial and repression” on a coterie of well-to-do white girls and women, after an injured Union Army soldier throws their carefully calibrated, circumscribed lives into disarray.1 Under Coppola’s direction, Cullinan’s Southern-Gothic potboiler and Siegel’s lurid and baroque quasi-exploitation film are transformed into an ambiguously told female revenge fantasy featuring the filmmaker’s characteristic delicate touch. The trauma of being born a girl in the nineteenth century is internalized by Coppola’s imprisoned Southern belles— formidable school headmistress Martha (Nicole Kidman), lonely and meek teacher Edwina (Kirsten Dunst), and a gaggle of bored schoolgirls—only to be exorcised by Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell). Despite being a poor immigrant, McBurney feels so secure in his privileged male status he falls prey to punishment for the crime of trespassing on

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this solely female space. Throughout the film, Coppola’s stylistic choices express her characters’ sense of longing for freedom and their fear of its consequences. Coppola has stressed that she approached the film as a “reinterpretation” from “the women’s point of view,” not as a remake.2 At times her version feels like a response, or even a retort, to Siegel’s film, in which McBurney—in the novel a silver-tongued Irish lad and pathological liar—is personified by Eastwood, the quintessential American tough guy actor of the 1970s. The earlier film’s sympathies lie squarely with McBurney, even though he’s as much a ne’er-do-well as he is in Cullinan’s novel; Siegel himself bluntly stated his film concerns “the basic desire of women to castrate men.”3 Coppola’s reimagining is a welcome rejoinder to this “grand guignol of male victimhood,”4 hewing closer to Cullinan’s commitment to multiple female perspectives but eliding many of the book’s Southern-Gothic clichés (notably the incest subplot, which figures prominently in Siegel’s adaptation). In her version, there is more giggling than squabbling, and the Technicolor garishness of the earlier film is traded for the soft, romantic palette typical of Coppola’s work: muted compositions are lit with diffuse natural light; the dark mourning garb of the novel is replaced with airy pastels and ditsy floral prints; and a preponderance of candelabras punctuate the setting’s often cocoon-like darkness.5 Like Coppola’s previous films, The Beguiled is about feeling more than story and plot. But unlike Siegel’s over-ripe tale, Coppola’s emphasis on mood, tone, and visual composition stresses the emotion bubbling just beneath the surface.6 This sense of restraint has led at least one critic to claim the film “suffers a bit from the absence of melodrama.”7 But melodramas without “melodrama” are something of a Coppola specialty. Feeling is not typically portrayed through histrionic tears, violent outbursts, and angry recriminations— although to be fair, these all occur eventually in The Beguiled (a ripped bodice is even thrown in for good measure). Instead, it is mostly sourced in texture and detail: the fluttering of a lace curtain, the color and cut of a satin gown, a well-timed fleeting glance. But perhaps more than any of her films since The Virgin Suicides, The Beguiled is as much about knowledge as it is about feeling. More specifically, it is about the knowledge of feeling—what we can’t know about the true nature of the feelings of others, specifically how they feel about us, which can lead to a skepticism that undermines our ability to fully participate in the world. If this idea of the inaccessibility of “other minds” is a universal one, The Beguiled shows that it manifests itself differently in terms of gender. Vengeance is an implicit theme in The Beguiled, but what is being avenged is never fully articulated, nor likely even understood, by its characters. Rather, the film conveys the sense of a revenge of the unconscious, born of deep-seated conflicts between desire and destiny, self and other. Stanley Cavell writes that melodramas “classically tell stories of revenge.” For Cavell, this revenge is linked to skeptical feelings about others, a skepticism that is itself “readable” as a story of revenge, “a kind of violence the human mind performs in response to its discovery of its limitation or exclusion, its sense of rebuff by truth.”8 It’s related to the problem of “unknownness”: we can perceive and surmise, but we can never unequivocally verify what another is truly thinking or feeling. This leads to feelings of alienation, a split between self and world and between self and other. For Simone de Beauvoir, the place of such skepticism is one “that women live . . . all the time, or at least potentially all the time, in this ‘male world.’”9 According

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to Nancy Bauer, for Beauvoir “the question of how to tether herself to a world, to the world, cannot be answered apart from finding the room in this world, a world whose inhabitants’ judgment of her as (merely) a ‘woman’ threatens to suffocate her, to pose it.”10 The girls and women of Miss Martha Farnsworth’s Seminary for Young Ladies believed they had found not just a room of their own but a whole cavernous, if slightly dilapidated, mansion. But their picturesque home becomes as much gothic prison as safe haven from the male “taint of villainy”11 that circulates all around it, threatening to breach its foreboding wrought iron gates. Even as they fear and loathe male power and privilege, they seem to be reacting as much to the impending loss of their steadfast position within the patriarchal construct that imprisons them as they are merely taking revenge for their place in it. When the enemy finally crosses the threshold, he not only disturbs their sanctuary by awakening frustrated libidinal desire, his arrival heralds a “battle of the sexes” that rests as much on subjectivity as it does on sex.

“Something else in the world besides lessons”: Libidinal Looking and Being Seen The Beguiled is a film about looking. Anna Backman Rogers argues that its “insistent foregrounding of the female gaze” reveals Coppola’s “feminist intentions.”12 In Coppola’s melodrama, female looks fly fast and furiously, the vast majority of them falling on McBurney’s handsome face and muscular frame. But what’s most intriguing about the idea of the female gaze in The Beguiled is that the women and girls of the Farnsworth school were born and bred not to look but to be seen. In the libidinal economy of the Old South, women of a certain pedigree (well-heeled and white) were raised for the sole purpose of serving a man by producing his heirs and adorning his arm. It’s ironic, then, that in Edwina’s French lessons the students only conjugate the feminine form of the verb être (to be), since they’re taught the language to demonstrate good breeding in order secure a proper husband. (Martha’s penchant for pointlessly sprinkling her conversation with French words and phrases like a genteel Miss Piggy is an amusing, pointed nod to the sad superfluity of their education.) When they aren’t tending the vegetable garden or fetching water for meal preparation, the girls wile away the hours completing their finishing-school tasks as the war rages outside the school grounds: they practice their penmanship while canon fire booms in the distance; they perfect their embroidery, replete with blush rosettes. “If we learn our lessons properly when young, we can expect a calm and happy life when faced with the distractions of the world, n’est-ce pas?” replies Miss Martha, after Alicia (Elle Fanning) suggests that the presence of a man might remind them there is more to life than school. But his presence, his distraction, underlines what those “calm and happy” lives are supposed to be about. McBurney may have wandered into a wholly feminized space, but historically that space has had one clear raison d’être: to produce the comely wives, and future mothers, of prominent men.

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Coppola reflects on this womanly conscription when she says, “I wanted the film to represent an exaggerated version of all the ways women were traditionally raised there just to be lovely and cater to men—the manners of that whole world, and how they change when the men go away.”13 Clearly, the socioeconomic realities of this slavery-era Southern plantation are rightly doomed, but if these sequestered girls and women are in denial of it, as Coppola says, it is because they fear a loss of place with the erosion of their “crumbling way of life”14 as much as they secretly despise that life. What happens when their chance to fulfill their calling, through war or simple bad luck, is stripped away? And what happens when the men “go away” but then come back? McBurney’s gaze, his very presence, causes a shift in the equilibrium of the household. If the girls (and the women) are thrown into a tizzy at the arrival of the dashing “corporal,” it is not simply due to a “sexual nervous breakdown.”15 Even the prepubescent tomboy Amelia (Oona Lawrence), the youngest girl, falls under the beguiling spell of his gaze, and this is not portrayed as sexual in Coppola’s film, unlike Siegel’s. The denizens of the Farnsworth school are especially excited because now they can once again exist through a man’s eyes, defined by his subjectivity and his feeling for them. They become objects of his look, and through that look, his elevated social status elevates them all. “Trés jolie,” Miss Martha says, complimenting Edwina on a brooch she hasn’t seen fit to don since last Christmas. It’s clear the pin is for McBurney’s benefit, just as Alicia’s cheek-pinching and Marie’s earring-stealing are. They are all desperate for his esteem, if nothing else. The Virgin Suicides is also about looking; the boys in the film scrutinize visual clues to the inner life of the doomed Lisbon girls, even as they are more interested in preserving their mystery. In that film, the girls are treated by the boys as pure objects of the look, a condition of their passivity that can only be refuted with their eventual suicides.16 Backman Rogers suggests that in The Beguiled “the Lisbon sisters are reborn and have their bloody revenge upon patriarchy,”17 but the signature tone of the film lends itself to a more ambiguous reading. Coppola’s films tend to oscillate between intimacy and distance, sympathy and critique, and male and female perspectives. She has long been considered a filmmaker of surfaces, but her work is just as concerned with the depths of feeling that those surfaces reveal or conceal. We only have access to the “outside” of other people, after all. So Coppola imbues these surfaces with a sense of emotional mystery, a mystery that’s never quite solved. In her films, the world of ambivalence and ambiguity is the space of womanhood itself. In The Beguiled, that ambiguity is most apparent in the exchange of the masculine and feminine gaze. Nowhere is the film’s emphasis on that exchange more evident than when the ladies serenade McBurney in the music room as he lies prostrate on a nearby sofa, his leg still badly injured from battle (see Figure 6.1). The girls and women are arranged in an artful, decorous tableau around the room’s upright piano as they face McBurney as if on stage. The piano is flanked by Edwina and Martha in the foreground, but the two women adopt contrasting poses. Edwina is viewed in profile as she clasps her hands demurely, while Martha adopts the stance of a conquering general, her arm outstretched on the mantle as if to claim ownership of the house and its bevvy of fine young ladies. She looks directly toward the camera, toward McBurney, barely containing her delight in being able to show him the fruits of her labor. But she also evinces an air of defiance, as if

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Figure 6.1  The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017.

to remind McBurney that she is the one in control in this matriarchal space. The sexually precocious Alicia, the eldest student, gazes at McBurney while sitting in front of the piano, presumably to give him a better opportunity to admire her. Coppola covers this exchange using one solitary medium close-up of a slightly befuddled McBurney, but the reverse shots are as varied as the number of ladies present: they are framed in close-up, medium shot, long shot, in profile, staring at their shoes, and staring down the camera. McBurney’s static position and framing are contrasted with the dynamic looks of the women, whose eyes (at least those of the eldest three) never fail to eventually rest on the hobbled prisoner. Aside from Martha’s, these looks are generally fleeting, but they clearly convey not only their desire for and curiosity about McBurney but also their awareness of being looked at, the desire to be admired as objects of his gaze. That desire seems to fuel their excitement as much as the man himself. Pointedly, that man is nothing particularly special. He is certainly handsome, if arguably past his prime. But in Coppola’s film, McBurney is not terribly remarkable: gone are the steely machismo of Eastwood and the quick charm and infectious charisma of the McBurney of the novel. Farrell’s subtle characterization highlights the shifts in sympathy that take place from Siegel’s film to Coppola’s. McBurney is simply a man, and almost any man will do.18 As McBurney works outdoors, pruning trees and cutting away overgrowth—displaying his desire for physical mastery and sovereignty, despite his injured leg—he exchanges a series of looks with Edwina, who is sitting nearby tending the garden. While he sharpens his knife, a near-cartoonish symbol of phallic power, he gazes at her brazenly. This echoes a similar scene in The Virgin Suicides when teenage Lux (also played by Dunst) sunbathes in front of the knife sharpener, who gives her “a 15-minute demonstration for free” in order to leer at her in her bikini. Here Coppola emphasizes the confused sense of power Lux finds in being made an object of desire. But in The Beguiled, Coppola places

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McBurney on bodily display and privileges Edwina’s desiring, if furtive, glances. Later, as she stares through the window at McBurney while he continues his chores, Coppola emphasizes both Edwina’s sense of separation from worldly desire, and the world in general, and her longing to express that desire. She is framed by the window, boxed in by its panes, a sheer lace curtain between her line of sight and the object of her gaze (see Figure 6.2). “The curtain both reveals and conceals,” writes Suzanne Ferriss, emphasizing the ambiguity and hesitancy of her desirous look.19 McBurney spies her at the window, and Edwina is instantly aware of being assessed, studied, sized up by him. There is no place for her from which to look without being looked at, and McBurney’s gaze signals a form of possession. “Nothing is more ambiguous than a look,” writes Beauvoir, “it exists at a distance, and that distance makes it seem respectable: but insidiously it takes hold of the perceived image.”20 Miss Martha and her students perhaps envy the power that comes with McBurney’s status; even though a conscript and an invalid, he seems effortlessly free. “I appreciate your desire to be active,” Martha tells him, but her clipped tones and general mien convey the sense that she may be a little resentful as well. The constant surveillance of the outlying grounds—a student is tasked with keeping watch by telescope from the plantation’s balcony at all daylight hours—underscores her obsession with aggression and transgression, sexual or otherwise, but always male. It also highlights a general sense of suspicion regarding male power. When McBurney is first brought into the home, Alicia insists that Union Army soldiers “rape every Southern woman they come across” (although it’s soon revealed she is more interested in attempting sexual overtures than repelling them). The doubt engendered by McBurney, about his true feelings, desires, and motivations, is a regular topic of conversation between the women and girls.21 Martha

Figure 6.2  The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017.

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seems to be the most convinced of his inability to be trusted—she even suggests they shouldn’t bother to learn his name—and is forthright with McBurney, confronting him in this early exchange: MCBURNEY: You can trust me in your place, ma’am. MISS MARTHA: I don’t know you. MCBURNEY: Well, I think if you knew me, you would. MISS MARTHA: You won’t be here long enough for that. If the ladies are wary of McBurney’s intrusion, even as they welcome his gaze and approbation, Coppola composes various shots to reflect this ambivalence. She often frames them in compositions of “girl tableaux,” which emphasize female solidarity within a highly feminized, “pretty” aesthetic.22 In one such scene, the girls gather around each other for evening prayers, the skirts of their voluminous party dresses forming a closed circle (see Figure 6.3). The mingling silk—rendered in lustrous French-macaron shades of yellow, blue, lavender, and pink—forms a united front as McBurney is pushed into the background of the shot, swathed in shadow. He is, in essence, being choked by their femininity, even as he assumes the girls have fallen hook, line, and sinker for his debatable charms. The ambiguity of feeling generated by McBurney creates internal confusion in the girls and women. As Beauvoir notes, writing almost a century after the events that take place in The Beguiled, once the “autonomy” of childhood ends, the girl must “renounce her

Figure 6.3  The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017.

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sovereignty . . . a conflict breaks out between her originary claim to be subject, activity and freedom, on the one hand, and on the other, her erotic tendencies and the social pressure to assume herself as passive object.”23 Things have certainly changed since Miss Martha’s time and, indeed, since Beauvoir’s, but the psychological processes Beauvoir delineates, which create a “doubling” of the feminine self,24 still persist. In this way Coppola’s historical film offers a “space for critique” of contemporary culture, even as her work often evinces a sense of historical elision.25 Given her past irreverence for the historical record—most notably with Marie Antoinette (2006)—it’s curious that Coppola has used claims of historical accuracy as a defense against the charge of racial erasure that has dogged The Beguiled.

“The slaves left”: History, the Gothic, and “Structural Absence” In any meaningful discussion of The Beguiled, attention must be paid to what isn’t depicted as much as to what is. By removing the character of Hallie (or Mattie, as she is known in the novel), Coppola’s film was charged with the erasure of painful history, Black subjectivity, and the complicity of white Southern women within the historical slave economy.26 The Guardian suggests the move was an attempt to manipulate audience sympathies, arguing “the movie is at pains to stress that their slaves have already ‘fled’ so they themselves [the women] do not appear tainted.”27 Coppola insists her decision came from a place of “respect,” for “to treat slavery as a side-plot would be insulting.” As a white artist, she contends she felt uncomfortable with the idea of “giving a voice” to a Black slave character, appropriating her story and the pain that accompanies it.28 She also argues her decision was historically sound given that in the time of the film, “many slaves had departed, and a great number of white women of the South were left in isolation, holding on to a world whose time had rightly come to an end—a world built on slave labor.”29 Regardless of the motivations behind it, the change results in a quietly radical shift. In the novel and in Siegel’s film, while the girls and women must now labor in the fields and in the home, they can still operate under the illusion of racial superiority: Hallie/Mattie is an enduring symbol of the cultural abject that they can look to in order to maintain the notion of their elevated status. In Coppola’s version, the story ostensibly becomes one about a rude historical awakening for its characters, stripped as they are of this false sense of security. “Just filming on a real plantation, and when you see those trees that have seen so much, the Spanish moss, you just feel there’s so much history,” she says in an interview about the film’s locations (see Figure 6.4). “There’s a darkness and a beauty that I think brought so much to the film.”30 While that darkness is in a large part hidden by the beauty of The Beguiled (in which even the most shadowy corners of the Farnsworth manse feel more enveloping than eerie), history becomes more of an implication. Scratch the lustrous veneer of Coppola’s beautiful surfaces and you will likely find the historical patina of societal and personal rot. If skepticism, for Cavell, renders sufferers as “ghosts of [them]selves,”31 unable to truly see and be seen, then the unheard voices and unseen

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Figure 6.4  The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017.

faces of the fictional Hallie and her historical counterparts become lingering specters sowing the seeds of radical doubt: ghosts beget ghosts. Pointing to the untended plantation gardens as a “an unavoidable visual marker for the labor of black people,” Angelica Jade Bastién writes that on viewing The Beguiled, she “was struck by how often the absence of black characters felt like a commentary in and of itself, and how distinctly this absence could be felt.”32 This chimes with Backman Rogers’ view on the film’s treatment of slavery and race. “[A]n abiding theme of Coppola’s oeuvre precisely is structural absence—the void that provides the tacit ground for, indeed the very possibility of—appearance,” she writes. In The Beguiled this is related to the “connection of the gothic to absence” where “subtext and off-frame space are the modes through which (dis)appearance emanates.”33 This absence is made most obvious by Coppola’s refusal to show the removal of McBurney’s leg, which plays out in gruesome detail in Siegel’s film. Instead, she cuts to black, excising the excision, showing only its emotional aftermath. Coppola’s use of the gothic themes of feminine repression and oppression stretches back to The Virgin Suicides, in which the Lisbon sisters are imprisoned in the family home.34 Like that earlier film, The Beguiled creates an impressionistic, overtly feminine sense of the gothic through its delicate, mournful mise-en-scène; it’s in this mythical, Grimm fairytale-like space that its dark history is sourced. As in The Virgin Suicides, beauty and femininity do their best to cover over cracks of darkness and despair. But The Beguiled also conjures the Southern Gothic of authors such as Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor, as well as the mid-twentieth-century films inspired by it (including Siegel’s). In addition to themes of imprisonment, repression, and madness, the Southern Gothic contains a strong undercurrent of “repressed racial tensions”35 that, depending on opinion, is either blithely ignored or strongly suggested by omission in The Beguiled.

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In her defense of her film, Coppola contends that it is about “universal themes . . . desire and male and female power, dynamics that could relate to all women.”36 That this commitment to universality covers over the cracks regarding a vastly different historical reality for the Black American woman is, as Backman Rogers writes, “both clumsy and consistent with the broad thematic tones of her work.”37 While it’s ironic that a film so preoccupied with ideas of freedom and power would forego tackling the intricately imbricated topics of slavery and racial oppression, Coppola chooses to explore her themes—isolation, desire, the trap of feminine subjectivity—through the eyes of dissimilar women who are nevertheless also very much alike.

“I love anything wild, wild and free”: The Lives of The Beguiled’s Girls and Women During The Beguiled’s theatrical release, when asked how she has changed as a filmmaker since her debut feature, Coppola had this to say: The Beguiled seems grown-up and darker . . . I have more of a perspective of the different ages and maturity of the women [since] I’ve been the age of each of them. I’ve been that age when you’re discovering how you affect men, and I know what it’s like to be the prospective mother.38 The quotation is revealing not only of Coppola’s changing perspective as an artist but also of The Beguiled’s relationship to femininity and the feminine point of view. If, before The Beguiled, Coppola’s films could be characterized as a “cinema of girlhood,”39 the film represents a shift toward a cinema of womanhood—that is, one encompassing the breadth and depth of the changing experience that follows a woman from girlhood to sexual maturity and on through to mid-life. Taken as a unit, the three central female characters in The Beguiled can be seen as a representative sample of the life cycle of one woman, a sort of case study of female experience. The physical similarities of the three actors portraying the women—extremely fair skin and blonde tresses in matching shades of Champagne—are striking, and once again make Coppola susceptible to charges of exclusionary whiteness. But the film’s casting emphasizes the trajectory of one woman’s experience (as does its promotional poster, which features the three women shown from different angles, as if viewing one from three varying perspectives). It’s quite possible Edwina was once like Alicia, an excitable girl enamored by her newfound sexual power; it’s not difficult to envision Martha at Edwina’s age, less skeptical of men and more hopeful in general; and it seems inevitable that a disillusioned Edwina will only grow more embittered like Martha, but also, necessarily, a bit stronger and wiser. Through these women, The Beguiled portrays what Beauvoir calls the “ambivalence of desire and anxiety” experienced by the feminine subject.40 Coppola’s film explores the sense of suspicion that arises in a gendered war—the anxiety of exposing ourselves and the fear of the “otherness” of others. Its “battle of the sexes” is a battle, like skepticism, over knowledge: knowledge of the other, who has the right to possess it, and who has

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the obligation to give it, willingly or not. As Backman Rogers observes, “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.”41 If The Beguiled highlights the woman’s sexually desirous gaze, as well as her desire for personal autonomy, it also evinces her desire to be “made object” by a man, to renounce her freedom and with it the responsibility for her own life, what Beauvoir calls “the anguish and stress of authentically assumed existence.”42 According to Beauvoir, while both women and men view each other as an other, “for her this Other appears in the essential mode and she grasps herself as the inessential opposite him.”43 The girls and women of The Beguiled, left to their own devices due to war, have perhaps come to see themselves as essential, operating as active subjects in charge of their own fates, or are at least moving toward such a revelation. (Martha seems every inch the independent woman at first, but her nostalgic remembrances of her father’s lavish parties and her admission that there was a man in her life before the war paint a more nebulous picture.) With the arrival of McBurney, their subjectivity is thrown into extreme doubt. Early on, the girls visit him, one by one, in his convalescent room, in order to introduce themselves and tend to his wounds. As they do so, their excitement at his arrival and desire for his approval is palpable. He chuckles to himself after each one leaves, enjoying their jockeying for his attention. And why not? On the battlefield, he is a poor, lowly foreigner of dubious rank and bravery. Here, despite being hobbled, he is the sole man among women, and his newfound status suits him nicely. “I love everything wild, wild and free,” he tells Amelia, a pure expression of his narcissism. He loves what he considers so because it flatters his sense of self. Through this picturesque “coven,” as Coppola calls her assembled women, he “achieve[s] and sustain[s] his independence” through their devotion “to being his mirror and reflecting back to him a ‘stone image’ of himself as powerful, creative, and free.”44 For McBurney this is pure fantasy, and it’s one the girls and women tend to indulge out of a sense of ingrained obligation. But this coven is held together by a powerful bond of femininity in isolation, which elicits a profound suspicion of masculine intrusion despite its assumed commitment to male ego-boosting. Even Edwina, as much as she is attracted to this “sensitive” soldier, can’t help being wary of him. “Please don’t ever say that unless you mean it,” she tells McBurney after he declares his love for her so quickly as to seem notionally absurd. Later, when she goes to him in a furious passion after his violent drawing-room tirade, she exercises a profound sense of agency, and exorcises her desire, in a way she likely never has before. But that desire seems to reside in the need to assert McBurney’s subjectivity more so than her own. She allows herself to become the pure object of McBurney’s passions, offering her body to provide him with a restorative sense of transcendence after the violent shock of losing his leg. In this moment, she seems to be licking McBurney’s wounds, rendering him whole again if not in body than in spirit. Backman Rogers compares the scene to that of Lux’s loss of virginity in The Virgin Suicides (which she considers a rape scene), noting the similar body placement of Dunst under her male lover in both. While Edwina initially seems in control, as they tentatively embrace, McBurney almost immediately begins to push her to the floor. He rips her dress,

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sending its delicate pearl buttons skittering wildly to and fro. Ferriss notes that in this moment, “decorative feminine objects are brutally cast aside” in deference to masculine might.45 Backman Rogers writes of how he “bears down on her and covers her mouth, thus silencing her ability to refuse male dominion over her own body.” This staging is indicative of Edwina’s surrendering to his passions in the hopes that, even as he pins her to the ground, “he is the one person who can raise her up once more from a position of degradation.”46 Once again, Coppola renders a scene of feminine subjectivity and agency as intimately connected to feminine passivity and subjection. Both the women and McBurney are, in essence, beguiling each other in service of a complex psychological game of subjects and objects, knowledge and denial. In the “melodramas of the unknown woman” Cavell discusses, he sees in the woman who rejects the man’s quest for knowledge and control over her an assertion of self-reliance, a proclamation of her own “voice” as an active subject in the world.47 Ultimately, the girls and women of The Beguiled decide to remain “unknown” to the world of men through their rejection of McBurney—all except for Edwina, that is, who has the decision unceremoniously foisted upon her. She accepts her fate begrudgingly, perhaps realizing that McBurney offered her little hope for a better life, even if he had managed to free her from her decorous prison. Beauvoir writes that through the woman’s “rejection of the world, from her unsettled waiting, and from her nothingness, she can create a springboard for herself and emerge then in her solitude and her freedom.”48 While McBurney’s murder constitutes, in part, the girls’ and women’s embrace of independence in solitude, it also speaks to an ironic predicament: Edwina, after all, still cannot fathom what would be required to free herself, to speak with her own voice after McBurney’s hand is removed from her mouth. Cavell links a “willingness for visibility” and the “exposure of ourselves to the consciousness of others” as an antidote to skepticism,49 but Martha, Edwina, and their students ultimately prefer to remain out of sight and out of earshot. Their initial desire to be seen by McBurney rested in the urge to relinquish their subjectivity, to be trapped by his gaze, not in the will to say “I am.” While they renounce his ownership of them, they seem to have nothing to fill the void left in his place. In the film’s final image, they become almost literally trapped by Coppola’s camera as it slowly zooms past McBurney’s shrouded body to peer at them, caught behind the school’s iron gates. The imposing, dark solidity of the bars is juxtaposed with the ladies’ wistful femininity while they silently pose as if waiting for something, anything, to take them “far away.” Their tentative bodies and gazes also convey a conflicting desire: to stay right where they are, for fear of exposure to the encroaching turmoil beyond. But it is not so much the “War Between the States” as it is the war within themselves that spurs them to withdraw. McBurney’s murder is at once a declaration of independence and a shoring up of their defenses against the world, one in which they no longer seem to be guaranteed a place. If “finally—finally!—Coppola is letting her girls get violent,”50 that violence is directed inward as much as outward, at least psychically. In Coppola’s hands, The Beguiled, like much of her oeuvre, becomes a dark fable that questions the social constructions and constrictions of girlhood and womanhood as much as it celebrates girls and women.

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Notes 1 Sofia Coppola, “Sofia Coppola Responds to ‘The Beguiled’ Backlash,” IndieWire, July 15, 2017, https://www​.indiewire​.com​/2017​/07​/sofia​-coppola​-the​-beguiled​-backlashresponse​ -1201855684/. 2 Guy Lodge, “Sofia Coppola: ‘I Never Felt I had to Fit into the Majority View,’” The Guardian, July 2, 2017, https://www​.theguardian​.com​/film​/2017​/jul​/02​/sofia​-coppola​-beguiled​-i​-never​ -felt​-i​-had​-to​-fit​-into​-the​-majority​-view​-interview. 3 Sheila O’Malley, “The Beguiled Review,” RogerEbert​.com​, June 23, 2017, https://www​ .rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/the​-beguiled​-2017. 4 Lodge, “Sofia Coppola.” 5 Although set in Virginia, Coppola’s film, like Siegel’s, was shot in Louisiana. The rural Madewood Plantation stands in for the Farnsworth school’s exteriors, kitchen and dining room, while the rest of the interiors were filmed in the New Orleans home of actress Jennifer Coolidge. See Mike Scott, “Where Was ‘The Beguiled’ Filmed? A Tour of Louisiana Shooting Locations,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, July 22, 2017, https://www​.nola​.com​/ entertainment​_life​/movies​_tv​/article​_e7156fb3​-ed35​-5a59​-89bc​-d91559eae35c​.html. The sultry, darkly romantic ambience of its location links the film to a long tradition of Louisiana-set Southern-Gothic fables both “high-brow” (Suddenly, Last Summer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959) and “low” (Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Robert Aldrich, 1964), although Coppola’s more naturalistic shooting style softens these connections. 6 Michelle Devereaux, The Stillness of Solitude: Romanticism and Contemporary American Independent Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 88. 7 O’Malley, “The Beguiled Review.” 8 Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 90. 9 Nancy Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 74. 10 Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism, 75. 11 Cavell, Contesting Tears, 85. 12 Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (London: Berghahn, 2019), 47. 13 Lodge, “Sofia Coppola.” 14 Coppola, “Sofia Coppola Responds.” 15 Peter Bradshaw, “The Beguiled Review,” The Guardian, July 13, 2017, https://www​ .theguardian​.com​/film​/2017​/jul​/13​/the​-beguiled​-review​-sofia​-coppola​-nicole​-kidman​-colin​ -farrell​-kirsten​-dunst. 16 Devereaux, Stillness of Solitude, 82. 17 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 46. 18 The very casting of Farrell lends itself to this reading. As Backman Rogers notes, Farrell is an actor who was showered with media attention as the “next big thing” early in his career, but never quite lived up to his early promise. Consciously or not, this echoes in a performance that “plays an air of diminished expectation, impotence and disappointment” (Sofia Coppola, 57). 19 Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 68.

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20 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Board and Sheila MalovanyChevallier (London: Vintage, 2010), 375. 21 As Ferriss notes, they have good reason to doubt McBurney—not so much because he fights for the Union, but due to his mercenary status: “His uniform, which brands him as a Yankee and enemy solider, is merely a costume donned for financial gain, a paid performance.” McBurney’s elaborate “masquerade” has him adopting a variety of guises (sensitive confessor, masculine soldier, man of nature) in order to beguile his various captors. This sense of performative identity is an enduring theme in Coppola’s work and is often expressed sartorially. See Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 31, 15. 22 Devereaux, Stillness of Solitude, 93. 23 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 359. 24 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 360. 25 Andrew Higson, “Nostalgia Is Not What It Used to Be: Heritage Films, Nostalgia Websites and Contemporary Consumers,” Consumption Markets and Culture 17, no. 2 (2014): 140; Heidi Brevik-Zender, “Let Them Wear Manolos: Fashion, Walter Benjamin, and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” Camera Obscura 26, no. 3 (2011): 5. This is especially true of Marie Antoinette, another Coppola film about crumbling, outmoded power structures that uses femininity as a bulwark against female powerlessness (Devereaux, Stillness of Solitude, 145). Suzanne Ferriss details The Beguiled’s subtle costume anachronisms, which evoke not just the time the story is set but also the era when the novel and original film were released, the 1960s/1970s, through references to the Victorian fashion revival of the time. See Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 70. 26 Nadra Kareem Nittle, “Erasing Hallie: Sofia Coppola’s Race Problem Predates ‘The Beguiled,’” Bitch, July 13, 2017, https://www​.bitchmedia​.org​/article​/the​-beguiled​-whiteness​-review. 27 Bradshaw, “The Beguiled Review.” 28 Coppola, “Sofia Coppola Responds.” 29 Coppola, “Sofia Coppola Responds.” 30 Sofia Coppola quoted in Scott, “Where Was ‘The Beguiled’ Filmed?” 31 Cavell, Contesting Tears, 71. 32 Angelica Jade Bastién, “How The Beguiled Subtly Tackles Race Even When You Don’t See It,” Vulture, July 10, 2017, https://www​.vulture​.com​/2017​/07​/the​-beguiled​-subtly​-tackles​-race​ -even​-when​-you​-dont​-see​-it​.html. 33 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 48. 34 Fredric Jameson has characterized the gothic as “a class fantasy (or nightmare)” surrounding economic privilege, in which the privileged class is protected from other people, but that sense of protection induces an ironic paranoia, leading to the fear those others are “preparing to give assault.” See Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1992), 289. For a discussion of the gothic in The Virgin Suicides, see Devereaux, Stillness of Solitude. 35 Thomas Ærvold Bjerre, “Southern Gothic,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia, June 28, 2017, https://oxfordre​.com​/literature​/view​/10​.1093​/acrefore​/9780190201098​.001​.0001​/acrefore​ -9780190201098​-e​-304. 36 Coppola, “Sofia Coppola Responds.” 37 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 48. 38 Kristen Lopez, “In Conversation with Sofia Coppola,” Film School Rejects, May 19, 2017, https://filmschoolrejects​.com​/interview​-director​-sofia​-coppola​-beguiled/.

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39 Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: Cinema of Girlhood (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017). 40 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 376. Like Coppola, Beauvoir has been criticized for a too-narrow conception of womanhood, one that is invariably western, white, and middle class. See Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 58. Undoubtedly, in part two of The Second Sex Beauvoir traces a phenomenological account of feminine experience that relates to a rarefied conception of womanhood, but I take this, in similar fashion to Coppola’s film, to be something of a provocative case study, one not meant to encompass the breadth and depth of experience of half of the world’s population. I would also argue that Beauvoir’s delineation of women’s experience in relation to objectivity and Otherness is a near-universal one in patriarchal society. As Nancy Bauer writes, “Beauvoir tries to show that nonetheless there really is something that can plausibly be called the situation of women, despite wide variations in women’s concrete circumstances across cultures and across time, from the prehistoric era through the present day.” See Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism, 183. 41 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 49. 42 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 10. 43 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 353. This leads Beauvoir to surmise that women become complicit in their own oppression, for “refusing to be the Other, refusing complicity with man, would mean renouncing all the advantages an alliance with the superior caste confers on them.” See Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 10. According to Elizabeth V. Spelman, Beauvoir in particular sees this in white, middle-class women’s desire to hold onto the privileges of their race and class at all costs, pointing to her assertion that “During the War of Succession no Southerners were more passionate in upholding slavery than the women.” See Beauvoir quoted in Spelman, Inessential Woman, 63. This highlights a missed opportunity for Coppola’s film to draw parallels between her characters’ ambivalence regarding the gendered status quo and their complicity in upholding the racist hierarchy of the South. 44 Lopez, “In Conversation with Sofia Coppola”; Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism, 219. 45 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 69. Ferriss also draws a direct link between the destruction of feminine decoration and the women becoming emboldened to hatch their murder plot, which occurs shortly after McBurney destroys an ornate chandelier. 46 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 59–60. 47 Cavell, Contesting Tears, 66. 48 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 383. 49 Cavell, Contesting Tears, 71. 50 Fiona Handyside, “Going Gothic: Anticipating Sofia Coppola’s ‘The Beguiled,’” Another Gaze, June 11, 2017, https://www​.anothergaze​.com​/going​-gothic​-anticipating​-sofia​-coppolas​-the​ -beguiled/.

7 ON THE ROCKS SOFIA COPPOLA’S ON THE ROCKS AND “PERSONAL” FILMMAKING Suzanne Ferriss

Sofia has her own world, her own universe, and it just doesn’t look or feel like anybody else’s. You know very specifically when you’re entering her atmosphere. —RASHIDA JONES

Sofia Coppola’s seventh feature marks a series of departures from her previous films. On the Rocks (2020) was the first the director created for the streaming service Apple TV+, rather than for cinematic release. While screenings at film festivals and limited release in theaters prior to its launch may have been in the works, distribution plans were fundamentally altered by the global Covid-19 pandemic. Instead, the film had its official American premiere at the New York Film Festival, with the producer-writer-director and cast attending the screening at the Queen’s Drive-In on September 22, 2020. Moviegoers in countries with fewer restrictions (Japan, the Netherlands, and Sweden) had the chance to see the film in cinemas starting on October 2, with limited releases elsewhere in Europe and Australia. By October 23, the film was streaming globally on Apple’s TV+ service.1 Coppola’s deal with Apple proved fortuitous, given that many major studios indefinitely postponed theatrical release or scrambled to secure online release either through virtual film festivals or streaming services. The film differed stylistically, as well. In place of Coppola’s signature openings, viewers confronted a black screen. Her previous films were each prefaced by what Annette

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Insdorf calls an “overture,”2 in Coppola’s case, a quasi-still image before the title sequence establishing the character, theme, and tone of the film. Think of the famous preludes to Lost in Translation (2003) or Marie Antoinette (2006). Instead, On the Rocks opens on a blank, black screen as Felix Keane (Bill Murray) is heard in voiceover speaking to his young daughter, “And remember, don’t give your heart to any boys. You’re mine. Until you get married. Then you’re still mine.” This substitution of words for image deviates from Coppola’s established cinematic practice and prefigures the film’s enhanced use of dialogue, a departure from Coppola’s famously spare scripts. (At 98 pages, the script comes close to the length of a commercial screenplay—120 pages—whereas Lost in Translation clocked in at 70 and Somewhere [2010] at 43.3) Fundamentally, however, the film reflects the cinematic and personal preoccupations of the director. In fact, it may be Coppola’s most personal film. By “personal,” I’m not suggesting that it is autobiographical or that it solipsistically reflects the filmmaker’s private life (as her critics have frequently charged).4 Instead, the film invokes recurring themes, employs the director’s signature style, and alludes directly to both her cinematic and commercial work. The opening, for instance, while eschewing image in favor of dialogue, nonetheless retains the function of Coppola’s visual overtures: it neatly and efficiently introduces the film’s linked themes. It is simultaneously about father-daughter and marital dynamics. Felix’s words echo in the film as he inserts himself into Laura and Dean’s marriage, vying for his daughter’s attention and heart. The competition between father and husband is registered sonically and visually: in contrast to Felix’s words, we see Laura (Rashida Jones) and Dean (Marlon Wayans) at their wedding, as Chet Baker’s “I Fall in Love Too Easily” plays on the soundtrack. She has given her heart to a boy, as their romantic glances convey. Yet, the song, associated with Felix’s preference for jazz and “old” New York society, asserts his continued influence and participation in her romantic life. The wedding scene contrasts with another that introduces the second dynamic at play. An aerial shot shows the couple fleeing the reception down a spiral staircase, then a floor-level pan reveals pieces of their formal attire strewn on the hotel’s pool deck before Laura, wearing only her veil and panties, jumps in to join Dean. Following the title card, we review a matching scene showing Laura’s bare feet walking past discarded items— not clothing jettisoned by the couple before their romantic skinny dip, but toys and socks deposited by unseen children. In place of Chet Baker’s lyrics on the soundtrack, comedian Chris Rock shouts from the television, “once you get married, you’ll never fuck again.” The title card, On the Rocks, inserted between these scenes, invokes the dueling dynamics at play throughout. The phrase implies marital strife. Oppressed by domestic and professional demands, Laura and Dean’s marriage is “on the rocks.” It also represents Felix’s attachment to a romanticized New York past embodied by its storied bars and restaurants where he bonds with Laura while discussing Dean’s possible infidelity over cocktails. In case we missed the suggestion, over lunch at The Sentinel, Felix orders Cutty “on the rocks.” While the opening follows Coppola’s general cinematic preference for an “overture,” the film makes more specific allusions to individual films in her oeuvre. Most obvious is

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the casting of Bill Murray, who appeared previously in Lost in Translation and A Very Murray Christmas (2015). He reprises his role as a star, not a broadcast celebrity but a successful art dealer with a penchant for scene stealing, be it through storytelling or singing. (His music was produced by Paul Shaffer, his on-screen accompanist in A Very Murray Christmas.) Murray’s performance earned raves that echoed those he received for Lost in Translation. For instance, in his review for WBUR, Sean Burns claimed, “‘On the Rocks’ is Murray’s best performance since ‘Lost in Translation’ and his loosest work in ages, irresistibly gallivanting.”5 As in Lost in Translation, Murray is paired with a younger female star, Rashida Jones, who appeared fleetingly in a similar role—as a bride—in A Very Murray Christmas. In interviews, Coppola recalled that when she workshopped the script for Lost in Translation during an acting class, Jones took the role of Charlotte.6 In On the Rocks, Jones plays a similar character, a young wife experiencing doubts about her marriage, her career, her purpose. Laura is, however, slightly older than Charlotte, with two young children and an established—though stalled—career as a writer. On the Rocks flirts with the ambiguities of Bob’s relationship with Charlotte in Lost in Translation: Does he think of her as his potential partner in a May-December romance or is he proffering fatherly advice and guidance? Felix embodies both dimensions: he is Laura’s father but steps into her husband’s shoes to escort her to the “21” Club for her birthday, gift her a watch, and whisk her away to Mexico. As he had said in the opening, she is still his, not her husband’s. They drink, dine, and drive in New York as Bob and Charlotte do together in Tokyo, with Felix’s beachside performance of “Mexicali Rose” substituting for Bob’s karaoke performances of “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” and “More Than This.” These parallels gesture toward another staple of Coppola’s films. While the male characters dominate the screen through staged performances and Murray’s comedic persona, the female characters command attention and direct the viewers’ gaze. On the Rocks replicates the mise-en-scène of Lost in Translation, placing its female star alone in urban spaces, looking out over the cityscape through windows or walking its streets, centered in the frame to convey her isolation. Her male counterparts are active and often absent, occupied by work and external demands, while she appears inactive, confined to domestic spaces. Yet, as many have noted, this is Coppola’s dramatic focus: the contemplative activity that goes unnoticed but occupies much of actual, everyday life.7 Contemplation is, in fact, the women’s professional occupation and personal preoccupation. In Lost in Translation, Charlotte was a philosophy student; in On the Rocks, Laura is a writer. Their business is reflection and speculation, and, in a moment of personal and professional distress, they engage in introspection. This confluence of cerebral activity is manifested in On the Rocks through a writerly device: experiencing writer’s block, Laura transfers her inclination for plotting to her marriage. She speculates about Dean’s behavior, perceiving clues to a possible affair with his assistant Fiona (Jessica Henwick), and embarks with Felix on a plot to entrap him. Under Felix’s influence, her internal turmoil manifests itself as a screwball-like caper, complete with nighttime surveillance. After Laura learns that she has turned Dean into a character, that her husband is not the womanizer her father is, Dean observes, “at least we know you can write a good detective story . . . or not so good.”

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Laura’s fictive speculations ally her with the characters in Coppola’s film world who tend toward romantic idealization, from the boys in The Virgin Suicides (1999), who try so desperately to imagine the lives of the Lisbon sisters, to Marie Antoinette, who fantasizes about the dashing Count Fersen. In both films, their visions play out on screen: as the boys read from Cecilia Lisbon’s diary, we witness their romanticized images of the girls, filtered through lenses of 1970s advertising and soft-core porn.8 They insert themselves into imaginary travel snapshots conjured out of the pages of the vacation catalogues the girls receive. Marie daydreams about her Count, mounted on horseback against a backdrop of cannon fire, an image of chivalric heroism derived from literary romance (and period artwork). Pointedly, these sequences highlight their artifice: they are constructed, like Laura’s plot, out of preexisting images and scripted narratives. The same could be said of the teenagers in The Bling Ring (2013) who cast themselves in the roles of the celebrities they emulate and mimic their poses, or the women in The Beguiled (2017) who (at least initially) each craft a distinct image of Corporal McBurney as her admirer and fancies herself as his favorite. In every instance, fantasy is revealed as deceptive, even deadly. The gauzy, sunlit images of the Lisbon girls blind the boys to their suicidal tendencies. McBurney is not a chivalrous gentleman but a desperate opportunist. The celebrity wannabes are exposed as thieves and the French queen’s luxurious excesses incite the commoners’ revenge. The fairytale romance of Marie Antoinette’s fantasy is undercut early in On the Rocks in a scene with an overt reference to Coppola’s previous film. Laura’s daughter (Alexandra/ Anna Reimer) tries to slip her foot into a pink bejeweled slipper, a nod to the famous montage sequence in Marie Antoinette that opens with a pan over pairs of dainty, candycolored shoes, trimmed with feathers, bows, and other ornaments. The film princess singles out a pink pair to model. The montage incorporates a pointedly anachronistic reference: a pair of lavender Converse hightops. The same contrast—between luxury and practicality, historical romance and contemporary realism—appears in On the Rocks as the slippers rest side by side with a pair of yellow-and-white checked sneakers. Laura laughingly scolds her daughter, “put the real shoes on,” encapsulating her own jaded view of romance. Ironically, however, while her fairytale image of marriage has burst under the weight of domestic routine, her imagination is fueled by an alternate and equally timeworn plot featuring the wronged wife and the cheating husband. The stultifying effects of routine manifest themselves in the film as repeated daily rituals. Laura walks her daughters to school, waiting in line to hand off the elder of the two (Maya [Liyanna Muscat]), while engaged in conversation with Vanessa (Jenny Slate). The same sequence occurs five times, with the details Vanessa shares about her love life growing more elaborate, finally culminating in an exchange about having discovered her boyfriend is married. The repetition works on two levels, as reminders of Laura’s sense of being stalled and as reinforcement of her fears that Dean is, in effect, like Vanessa’s boyfriend. When Vanessa says he should have said, “by the way I have a wife and a family,” she verbalizes what Laura imagines her husband should say to his mistress. Laura’s repeated rounds recall Somewhere, which opens with a scene of Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) driving his Ferrari in circles in the California desert that conveys the

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stagnation he feels in his career. He is in motion, yet stalled, repeatedly moving forward but going nowhere, rather than somewhere. The comedic nature of Laura’s exchanges with her fellow mom deflects from the similarities to the earlier film. Laura’s school-dropoff rounds appear as meaningless as Johnny’s circles in the desert. Coppola pictures both characters repeatedly in the same set, in conditions of stasis. Laura sits at her desk confronting the blinking cursor on her laptop or rearranging items on her desk. Johnny lies in bed at the Chateau Marmont, watching others on screen or in live performance, including twin strippers who dance for him twice. The duplication effectively conveys his sense of being stuck—in his room, in his career, in his life. Coppola employs the same technique in On the Rocks to the same effect: the film duplicates the opening shot of Laura, barefoot, picking up after her children, punctuating it with a shot of Dean on the couch, preoccupied by his work as she goes about the repetitious chores that detract from hers. Much has been written about Coppola’s focus on interiors (and interiority), on the “gilded cages” of her characters: the girls’ bedrooms in The Virgin Suicides and The Bling Ring, the hotel rooms in Lost in Translation and Somewhere, the queen’s chambers in Marie Antoinette and the domestic quarters of the plantation house in The Beguiled.9 Laura’s office space in their SoHo apartment is another. And as in the previous films, her sense of confinement is heightened visually. Characters in Coppola’s films survey their surroundings from a height and at a distance. Scenes of Charlotte perched on the windowsill in her room at the Park Hyatt Tokyo show her isolation, capturing her from behind, looking out. A Very Murray Christmas alludes to these scenes, with images of Bill Murray in Charlotte’s place looking out over New York to show he is confined to the Carlyle by a snowstorm. Scenes of Laura peering down from her office window recall these, but with a difference: viewers do not look with her, as they do with the protagonists in the previous films, but at her. She is shot from outside her office, from below. This produces a heightened sense of her containment and separation, as though she is preserved under glass. The angle sets her above us, conveying her privileged position and possibly undermining our sense of empathy. We see her isolation but from a distance, rather than sharing her point of view. Effectively depicting the characters’ isolation hinges on the contrast between interior spaces and the locations outside the walls: in Marie Antoinette, expansive outdoor spaces at Versailles, including the pastoral construct of the queen’s hameau at the Petit Trianon, stand in relief to the stuffed and suffocating interiors at court. The suburban streets of The Virgin Suicides with their diseased elms, like the woods and gardens of The Beguiled, contrast with domestic spaces. Coppola’s films have previously evoked storied cityscapes: Tokyo in Lost in Translation and LA in The Bling Ring and Somewhere. Repeatedly in her films, characters experience exterior spaces while in motion, through the frame created by car windows which duplicate the moving camera panning along streets or landscapes. The shot appears first in The Virgin Suicides, as Lux returns home in a taxi and we witness her view of the suburban streets passing by. Shots of her through the taxi window convey the imprisoning nature of her cloistered existence at home. Similar shots show Charlotte and Bob in Lost in Translation viewing Tokyo through taxi windows that reflect the commercial district’s vibrant nightlife. Marie Antoinette experiences the

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transition from Austria to France through the window of a carriage, and in her final passage to her execution she surveys the palace she leaves behind through yet another. Johnny Marco drives aimlessly through Los Angeles, seeing the scene from his car window as though watching a film. On the Rocks employs the same strategy, as Laura is piloted by Felix in his convertible or by his private car’s driver. She is a passive passenger, along for the ride. Repeated shots of her sitting by his side emphasize her dependence. These moving images of New York invoke the city’s cinematic history. The critic who complained, “the film’s scrubbed-up vision of New York has an air of warmed-over Woody Allen about it. Coppola can do better than this,”10 missed the point: any film set in New York inevitably conjures up preexisting cinematic treatments of the city. As James Sanders argues definitively in Celluloid Skyline, New York’s “fictive existence” on screen is “so complete and compelling” that it rivals “the real city in its breadth and power.”11 However, in Coppola’s films visual allusions are enormously complex, revelatory of the characters’ point of view. As I’ve previously argued, all of Coppola’s films emphasize that our perceptions have been shaped by a history of still and moving images, a point repeatedly invoked in fantasy sequences: for instance, Marie Antoinette dreams of the dashing Count Fersen as a moving version of Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon on horseback; denied the chance to stage a star-studded Christmas variety special, Bill Murray concocts one as he sleeps in A Very Murray Christmas.12 The iconic images of New York associated with Allen’s films are pointedly romanticized as well. The opening scenes in Manhattan (1979), edited to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” are presented as projections of the protagonist of a novel-in-process. Images of the city change to fit the writer’s opening gambits, heard in voiceover: He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion. Uh, no. Make that “He romanticized it all out of proportion.” The film’s black-and-white cinematography and music likewise emerge out of the character’s imagination: “this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.” These elements invoke earlier films set in Manhattan, including The Thin Man series, which also inspired the plot and locations in Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). The deliberateness of Coppola’s reference to Allen is clear even in her title design: white script on black in a font that resembles the one Allen has used for almost all his title sequences and credits since Annie Hall (1977).13 Given that Laura and Felix engage in wild speculations about Dean’s infidelity, it is fitting that their escapades take place against a backdrop conjured out of the films set in Manhattan that reflect their imagined narrative. Since Felix guides their caper plot, the cinematic allusions correspond to his era and tastes. Coppola mentioned The Thin Man series (1934–47) and its boozy detective seems a match for Felix. Laura assumes the part played by Mirna Loy, unwittingly drawn into the plot out of her own curiosity.14 Laura was named after the title song from Otto Preminger’s 1944 film that also features a detective making the rounds of tony New York apartments. It includes a scene that resembles Coppola’s plot in miniature: a father-surrogate plants the suspicion that Laura’s fiancé is having an affair, bolstered by a pricey bauble as evidence (a cigarette case).15

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“The ’80s New screwball of ‘Arthur’ seems like another” influence, according to the L.A. Times, and other reviewers mentioned that its sequel was titled Arthur 2: On the Rocks (Bud Yorkin, 1988). Felix and Laura’s madcap drive through the city surely invokes the films’ style and tone, and Felix’s red vintage 1959 Alfa Romeo Giulietta is a match for Arthur’s equally extravagant red 1937 Packard 120.16 The screwball elements of both The Thin Man and Arthur series resonate in the scene of Felix and Laura at the Mexican resort, hiding in the bushes to catch Dean and Fiona in the act. The disjunction between the broad comedy of scenes featuring the father-daughter in action and the more reflective moments with Laura alone reinforces their contrived nature. Both New York and Mexico appear filtered through romanticized cinematic stories. The film’s music augments these filmic associations. Felix appears in On the Rocks as though accompanied by a soundtrack that emerges from his romanticized image of New York, composed of the jazz standards popular when The Thin Man and Laura were released, and indelibly associated with Allen’s films. Combined, these aural and visual associations convey the impropriety of Felix’s ideas and behavior. His ruminations on male-female relationships are throwbacks to a previous century when casual observations like “it’s nature—males are forced to fight and dominate to impregnate all women” or “men were attracted to adolescent females because they were easier to catch” might have gone unquestioned. Allen’s films, despite their indelible, glamorized portraits of New York, are notorious for their persistence in casting the director as lead alongside much younger women. Coppola’s deliberate invocation of Allen’s locations, music and romantic pairings adds another layer for interpreting Felix: not only are his ideas inappropriate, so are his efforts to supplant his daughter’s husband as her romantic partner at her birthday celebration and in Mexico. It is also worth noting that Felix names his daughter after the love interest in Preminger’s film. As in all of Coppola’s films, music is paramount in reinforcing the visual depiction of interior spaces and states. The jazz standards associated with Felix not only associate his references and ideas with an earlier era, they emphasize his manic plotting. The band Phoenix (Thomas Mars, Deck D’Arcy, Christian Mazzalai, and Laurent Brancowitz) supervised the soundtrack, composed the score, and wrote the end-credits song. While Coppola suggested Chet Baker for the opening song, Brancowitz “recommended ‘In Orbit,’ an antic 1958 jazz instrumental by Thelonious Monk and the Clark Terry Quartet” for Felix and Laura’s frenetic drive in his vintage red convertible. Mars selected a 1959 Italian pop song “Nessuno” to reflect Felix’s “bon vivant” personality. Even Felix’s choice to play Schubert in the backseat of his limousine is a nod to a past model of masculinity: Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970).17 In other words, the songs that accompany Felix broadcast his self-styled position as the director-star of their caper. By contrast, the music associated with Laura subtly, rather than overtly, positions her as a supporting character, as directionless. “In Re Don Giovanni,” based on Mozart’s opera, serves as her “de facto theme song.” Mars explained the significance of its repetition: We use Giovanni the same way as “All That Jazz” used Vivaldi, when Bob Fosse wakes up, takes his pills and does his morning ritual. Laura’s life is very scheduled and organized, but she’s not really deciding things for herself. We wanted the music to show that.18

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The music is paired with Laura’s image of New York: a repeated shot of the city’s expanse at sunrise, captured as though from a window of their apartment. Another instance of repetition reinforces Laura’s despair: Chet Baker reappears on the soundtrack, singing “I Get Along without You Very Well (Except Sometimes),” as she forlornly drinks a martini at Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle hotel with Felix, who has convinced her of Dean’s infidelity. The slow-motion drop of her tear into the glass is superfluous, for the song’s lyrics already express the sadness she feels. However, the confluence makes a critical statement: part of her emotional distress comes from sustaining the fantasy of coupledom pictured in the film’s opening scene. Nonetheless, some critics overlooked the complexity of Coppola’s musical and cinematic references, faulting the director in her turn for unthinkingly glamorizing Manhattan and its privileged denizens. A review in Another Gaze claimed, what seems to be intended both as a loving homage to New York City and a film about female self-discovery succeeds only in anointing the trappings of intense wealth with cinematic finesse. As it aestheticises and romanticises a life lived in elite society, On the Rocks reifies the haute-bourgeois world it depicts.19 The Australian Financial Review put it more plainly: “On the Rocks is not a love letter to the city, it’s a LUXE guide, with Bill Murray as our celebrity tour leader.”20 More disturbing was a current of criticism that turned charges of elitism against the director, rather than her film, vilifying her with scarcely disguised personal venom. In the National Review, Armond White wrote, Sofia Coppola’s cinema-of-privilege has gone past the Cinderella stage and into political smugness. It’s apparent in the film’s casual “post-racial” subtext: two generations of mixed marriages among people whose “diversity” is camouflaged by wealth. Sofia Coppola is a culturally vapid movie brat.21 The persistent subtext here is that, since the director is part of the cultural and economic elite, the film reflects her privilege. Unreflective biographical associations run through commentary on the film, propelled by the father-daughter relationship. Many critics described it as “personal.” It’s a beguilingly personal picture, with the First Daughter of American cinema making a movie about a woman trying to find her own light in the shadow of a larger-thanlife dad. It can’t be a coincidence that she cast Quincy Jones’ kid as her on-screen surrogate, who even dresses like her director in the cool-mom Beastie Boys and RunDMC T-shirts. (I could swear I saw Coppola wearing one of these sweaters last time she appeared at the Harvard Film Archive.)22 In other words, Rashida Jones plays Sofia Coppola, with Bill Murray as Francis’ surrogate. The settings, including the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, are as the BBC put it, “part of Sofia Coppola’s reality.”23 Why stop there? The director has two daughters and a husband

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whose work takes him away from his family to tour. She has spoken of difficulties in writing, including the script for On the Rocks, which she tinkered with for years. Laura tells Felix to “have a French 76 for me,” invoking a variant of the director’s favorite cocktail, the French 75. Naturally, these are incidental associations. The plot was inspired, in fact, from an episode recounted by a friend.24 They elide the writer-director with her characters and mistake fiction for fact, diminishing Coppola’s artistry, as well as her teams’, to say nothing of continuing to chain her career to her father’s. Richard Brody, always attentive to the stylistic complexities of Coppola’s films, offered a more compelling take on the “personal” resonances: As if doing a painful intellectual and emotional archeology of her life and sensibility, she looks sharply and critically at the conveniences of wealth and the prerogatives of privilege; she confronts the attitudes and assumptions of which old-school charm and commanding manner reek. The movie’s movingly confessional, even penitent tale of private and public abuses of power looks askance at Hollywood mythologies, too, including the ones of the early classic movies that Felix reveres and those that brought Murray to stardom.25 Without question, the world represented on screen is that of the monied Manhattan elite, with private cars and private schools, expensive art and luxury goods. An article in Slate asked, “What Is the Bougiest Status Symbol in Sofia Coppola’s New Movie?” and affixed prices to objects, from purses to chairs, name-checked designer clothing and shoes, and estimated the cost of Dean and Laura’s apartment and the Monet Felix shows her in another at the Sherry-Netherland.26 However, to conclude that the mere presence of such goods equates to an unthinking endorsement of luxury means ignoring their appearance in narrative and cinematic context. Laura is a daughter of privilege. The apartment and the art displayed on its walls, which includes a painting by Ellen Gallagher, a light sculpture by John Wigmore, and an Irving Penn poppy on her bookshelf, were selected by production designer Anne Ross and set decorator Amy Beth Silver, along with many other works, to show Felix’s pervasive influence: Ross says she, Coppola, and Silver, decided that although it is never stated, part of Laura’s backstory is that her father probably helped her buy her apartment. “Laura is one of those few working artists in NYC who can live in such a comfortable fashion. We envisioned her as a person with a good eye for design, raised by people in the arts. The walls are covered with art we thought of as coming from Felix, which means he is, in a way, always present,” says Ross.27 The art appears amidst a jumble of household items, from books to children’s toys, and stands in contrast to the children’s art, family photos, and political stickers affixed in a haphazard collage on the door. When he visits, Felix, lounging on the floor with his granddaughters in his seersucker suit and white Bucks, seems as out of place as the art.

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Paired scenes taking place at the Sherry-Netherland building offer a masterful example of how Coppola employs a complex fusion of cinematography, editing, production, and sound design to convey Laura’s distance from, and critique of, the monied elite Felix reliably courts. An establishing pan up the building’s façade efficiently conveys the elevated station of its denizens before a wide, long shot captures the lavishly decorated apartment belonging to Mrs. Morris (Waltrudis Buck), the ninety-year-old owner of a Cy Twombly painting Felix covets. We witness him, in contrast to his usual loquacious self, standing in rapt attention to a slim socialite (Catherine “Deeda” Blair), who dominates the room with her graying bouffant with white streaks that match her white column dress, as she describes a contemporary sculptor’s work.28 We hear snatches of her pretentious disquisition: “she did the Venice Biennale”; “historically she’s doing something beautiful”; “she makes rocks as light as a feather.” The discontinuity of dialogue combined with the ambient noise of the party invoke the modernist techniques of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” where “women come and go talking of Michelangelo” as the protagonist skewers their pretensions and superficiality. Coppola registers Laura’s critique not verbally but visually, as the shot appears from her point of view. She is seated apart from the conversation on a couch next to the Twombly’s owner. The painting, Untitled (Rome) (1961), is only partially in view above their heads and they sit with their backs to it, a potent expression of its meaninglessness to them (see Figure 7.1). By contrast, as Laura and Felix exit the party, they pause before the Monet called out by Slate as the costliest item in the film. In context, however, the painting is “something special.” Unlike the Twombly, it has value beyond its potential price on the art market, a point underscored by dialogue and mise-en-scène. Father and daughter stand side by side framing the painting, shot from behind so we look with them at Monet’s waterlilies, as Felix recounts

Figure 7.1  On the Rocks, directed by Sofia Coppola © Apple TV+ 2020.

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Figure 7.2  On the Rocks, directed by Sofia Coppola © Apple TV+ 2020.

seeing them for the first time with Laura’s mother in the Tuileries (see Figure 7.2). The painting is “special” not as an art object but as a sign of the romance Laura’s parents once shared—as well as its loss, the fate she fears for her own marriage. Costume design also reveals how Laura resists her parents’ embrace of luxury goods as tokens of real value. She throws a jean jacket over a white T-shirt spotted with holes to take her daughters to school, pointedly contrasting with the “put-together moms,” as the script describes them, in their designer athleisure wear. (As the Slate article points out, Vanessa wears a $250 Rodarte sweatshirt in one scene and a pink hoodie from Louis Vuitton designer Virgil Abloh’s collaboration with “the dairy-free latte boutique Cha Cha Matcha” in another.29) When Laura makes a short visit to her grandmother (Barbara Bain), she is upbraided for her fashion choices (a striped T-shirt and jeans). Gran tells her, “If you’re going to dress that way, you could make more of an effort.” The prominent placement of two branded consumer goods does carry direct associations with the director: Laura’s classic Chanel quilted bag and the Cartier Panthère watch Dean gives her as a gift. Coppola’s affiliations with both fashion houses are widely known. She interned with Chanel when a teenager and, in 2019–20, was commissioned to bring a “modern vision” to the brand. She produced a short film and recreated Coco Chanel’s Paris apartment as the set for its December 2019 fashion show at the Grand Palais.30 With her brother Roman she later released a short commercial for the iconic Chanel 19 bag, the same design Laura carries in the film. In 2017, the director released a short film based on Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980) to advertise the rerelease of Cartier’s Panthère watch. The company had previously announced Coppola as one of its brand ambassadors.31

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But even these commercial Easter eggs are anchored by the plot and bestow value on the goods. They are not disposable fashion items but pieces that define character and commemorate relationships. Laura carries the Chanel bag alongside a canvas tote from the Strand bookstore, encapsulating how she straddles two worlds: inherited family wealth on one side and her professional aspirations for a career as a writer on the other. The same dichotomy encircles Cartier’s watch, which acquires meaning in relation to a vintage Jaeger-LeCoultre watch belonging to Felix, which he gifts to Laura on her birthday.32 Felix bought the watch after his first big sale (a de Kooning painting). More than an expensive bauble, it memorializes the start of the career as a gallerist and dealer that he has recently stepped away from. Giving it to his daughter marks this moment of personal transition. The gesture also symbolizes his love for his daughter (he remembers she liked to wear it as a child)—but, simultaneously, the fantastical moorings of his ideas. Having had Dean followed, Felix knows he had shopped at Cartier. When Laura receives a kitchen gadget rather than a “little red box” as a present, Felix steps in to substitute his watch—at the table where Humphrey Bogart proposed to Lauren Bacall. While well intentioned, his actions are misguided and inappropriate: Dean has not purchased jewelry for his mistress, nor should Felix aspire to take his place. His actions are a direct embodiment of his words at the opening of the film: “You’re mine. Until you get married. Then you’re still mine.” He usurps the husband’s place, and the watch is like the bangle he identifies as “a reminder that women were once men’s property.”33 When Dean produces the “little red box” containing a Panthère watch, it affirms his commitment and his role. It also reveals Felix’s narrative of the cheating husband to be a complete fabrication. Dean was at Cartier to purchase the watch for Laura and have it inscribed. In typical Coppola fashion, we cannot read the inscription (just as we do not hear the final words exchanged between Charlotte and Bob at the end of Lost in Translation).34 In her films, genuine moments of intimacy remain private, even from the film audience (see Figure 7.3).

Figure 7.3  On the Rocks, directed by Sofia Coppola © Apple TV+ 2020.

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If, then, we can consider On the Rocks Coppola’s most personal film, it has little to do with any biographical associations with the director. Instead, the film embodies the cinematic practices we have come to associate with her work. In narrative terms, it focuses on internal drama, on Laura’s crisis of faith in her professional abilities and her marriage, while critiquing unchecked tendencies to idealize or fantasize. The film’s complex audiovisual design reflects this narrative tension, alluding to the cinematic origins of Felix’s “spy scenarios” through the film’s representation of New York, including its location choices, but equally in the soundtrack that trails Felix’s appearances, and in his excessive chatter, a nod to the iconic screwball comedies and the films of the 1980s they inspired, that are inseparable from the city’s image in the popular imagination. By contrast, Laura’s sonic and visual universe conveys her sense of stasis and lack of agency. Finally, as in other Coppola films, spaces and objects associated with privilege are as complexly contextualized, represented with fidelity on screen but not uncritically, embodiments of the elite world orbiting Felix from which Laura distances herself. By the film’s end she has told her father, “You blew your own marriage” and that she’s “sick of how you take over everything, making it all about you all the time and what you want.” Unfazed, he recommits to his life as a bon vivant, turning the criticism against her: “What happened to you? You used to be fun.” The film ends with each embarking on an “adventure” in keeping with their bifurcated worlds: Felix departs for a cruise on the QE2, while Laura rejects his invitation to join him, committing herself instead to writing and to her family. Unchanged, he acts out a fantasy, while she scripts one out of her imagination. The film is as reticent about her novel’s contents as it is about the inscription on her watch, but we can be certain it is not the “not so good” detective story she concocted with Felix.35 In other words, the film distinguishes art from life. At the same time, it reminds us that, as its writer-director-producer, Coppola has invented a cinematic universe that reinforces her distinctive artistry in creating audiovisual worlds.

Notes 1 See IMDB: https://www​.imdb​.com​/title​/tt9606374​/releaseinfo​?ref_​=tt​_dt​_dt​#akas. 2 Annette Insdorf, Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 3 A copy of the screenplay can be accessed here: https://deadline​.com​/wp​-content​/uploads​ /2021​/01​/OTR​_Green​-Revised​-Script​_070119​-1​.pdf. Geoff King, Lost in Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 7; on Somewhere, see Susan Dudley Gold, Great Filmmakers: Sofia Coppola (New York: Cavendish Square, 2015), 57. 4 For instance, Agnès Poirier contends, “Cinema is for Coppola a mirror in which she looks at herself, not a mirror she holds to the world.” See Agnès Poirier, “An Empty Hall of Mirrors,” The Guardian, May 26, 2006, https://www​.theguardian​.com​/commentisfree​/2006​/may​/27​ /comment​.filmnews. Academic critics, particularly of the first three films, tended toward autobiographical interpretations. For instance, Sharon Lin Tay noted the “exceptional personal quality” of her films. See Sharon Lin Tay, Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 126.

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5 Sean Burns, “Bill Murray Is at His Best in Sofia Coppola’s ‘On the Rocks,’” WBUR, October 22, 2020, https://www​.wbur​.org​/artery​/2020​/10​/22​/bill​-murray​-sofia​-coppola​-on​-the​-rocks​-review. 6 Joey Nolfi, “Sofia Coppola Reveals Rashida Jones’ Sweet Connection to Lost in Translation,” Entertainment Weekly, August 13, 2020, https://ew​.com​/movies​/sofia​-coppola​-rashida​-jones​ -lost​-in​-translation/. 7 See, for instance, Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019), 16, and Amy Woodworth, “A Feminist Theorization of Sofia Coppola’s Postfeminist Trilogy,” in Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema, ed. Marcelline Block (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), 152. 8 See Anna Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 33; Justin Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides: Reverie, Sorrow and Young Love (New York and London: Routledge, 2019). A. O. Scott wrote in his review of the film, “In the boys’ fevered imaginations, Lux and her sisters appear in golden meadows, or superimposed on rolling cloudscapes like the silent heroines of a mid-70’s soft drink or shampoo commercial. (Not for nothing does Lux share her name with a brand of dishwashing detergent).” See A. O. Scott, “Evanescent Trees and Sisters in an Enchanted 1970’s Suburb,” The New York Times, April 21, 2000, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2000​/04​/21​ /movies​/film​-review​-evanescent​-trees​-andsisters​-in​-an​-enchanted​-1970​-s​-suburb​.html. The sequence was shot by Coppola’s brother Roman. “Revisiting The Virgin Suicides,” The Virgin Suicides, DVD, directed by Sofia Coppola (New York: Criterion Collection, 2018), DVD Extra. 9 Tay discussed a critique of “gilded cages” as linking Coppola’s first three films. See Tay, Women on the Edge, 131–4. 10 David Sterritt, “The New York (Virtual) Film Festival,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 38, no. 1 (2021): 2. 11 James Sanders, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 15. Coppola’s film incorporates the conventions Sanders identifies with filmed New York: skyline scenes, car chases, indoor scenes focused on character, and outdoor scenes shot on the real streets of the city. 12 Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 119–43. 13 She uses what has been identified as OS Bold for the main titles and ITC Tiffany for the credits, which is similar, though not identical, to the Windsor Light Condensed that Allen prefers. See Andreas Kofler, “On the Rocks (2020) Key Art and Credits,” Fonts in Use, November 10, 2020, https://fontsinuse​.com​/uses​/36469​/on​-the​-rocks​-2020​-key​-art​-and​ -credits; Stephen Coles, “Woody Allen Film Titles (1977-2012),” Fonts in Use, September 17, 2012, https://fontsinuse​.com​/uses​/2147​/woody​-allen​-film​-titles​-1977​-2012. The font also resembles that used for the end titles of A Very Murray Christmas, FB Cheltenham. See Stephen Coles, “A Very Murray Christmas End Titles,” Fonts in Use, December 29, 2015, https://fontsinuse​.com​/uses​/11437​/a​-very​-murray​-christmas​-end​-titles. 14 There are a few connections between the films: The Thin Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1934) does feature a doting daughter to a father who has divorced his wife after she discovered his affair with his secretary, and Nick gives Nora a wristwatch as a Christmas present. However, rather than engaging in rampant speculation, Nick is the voice of reason in the film—in other words, the opposite of Felix. 15 For more on the connection to Preminger’s film, see Tim J. Anderson’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 14). 16 The car is the exact model of one Francis Ford Coppola purchased with screenwriting prize money in 1963. See Ian Nathan, The Coppolas: A Movie Dynasty (London: Palazzo,

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2021), 233. Arthur (Steve Gordon, 1981) has production ties to Woody Allen: the credits include Allen’s long-time producers Charles H. Joffe and Jack Rollins and editor Susan E. Morse, and the film was produced by Orion pictures. Other resonances between Arthur and On the Rocks include using a piece of jewelry as a sign of commitment (the ring Arthur’s grandfather gave to his grandmother that he gives to his fiancée, which she returns) and art collecting/trading as a sign of wealth (Arthur’s grandmother unwraps “Woman Admiring Pearls,” a recent purchase, while a Rembrandt and Van Gogh are visible on her walls). Not only do both Felix and Arthur drive red convertibles, they are also chauffeured in private cars by loyal drivers who are men of color. Finally, both Felix and Arthur engage in a performance prior to a significant revelation related to the romance plot. (Bill Murray was also considered for the title role.) Despite the overlap in titles alluding to the confluence of drinking and marital discord, the connections between Coppola’s film and Arthur 2: On the Rocks are far more tenuous, given its melodramatic turn and focus on adoption. A New York gallery space does feature prominently, a thin thread connecting its gallerist character Susan Johnson to Felix. 17 Hugh Hart, “French Band Phoenix Finds All the Right Grooves for ‘On the Rocks,’” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2021, https://www​.latimes​.com​/entertainment​-arts​/awards​/story​ /2021​-02​-05​/phoenix​-band​-thomas​-mars​-sofia​-coppola​-on​-the​-rocks​-music. The article also notes: “For the film’s original score, Phoenix took inspiration from Miles Davis’ approach to Louis Malle’s 1958 movie ‘Elevator to the Gallows.’ As Mars explains it, ‘Louis Malle grabbed Miles Davis as soon as he landed in Paris and convinced him to see his movie in a theater: “We will set up your gear to record, and you can play to the film.” So we did the same thing.’ In a Paris screening room, Mars and his bandmates improvised music in the moment as action unfolded on screen.” 18 Hart, “French Band Phoenix.” 19 Georgie Carr, “An Unwavering Self-Regard: Sofia Coppola’s ‘On the Rocks’ (2020),” Another Gaze, November 16, 2020, https://www​.anothergaze​.com​/unwavering​-self​-regard​-sofia​ -coppolas​-rocks​-2020/. 20 John McDonald, “A Rocky New York Caper,” Australian Financial Review, October 10, 2020, https://www​.afr​.com​/life​-and​-luxury​/arts​-and​-culture​/a​-rocky​-new​-york​-caper​-20201005​ -p5625w. 21 Armond White, “Sofia Coppola’s Cinema-of-Privilege,” National Review, October 20, 2020, https://www​.nationalreview​.com​/2020​/10​/movie​-review​-on​-the​-rocks​-sofia​-coppola​-cloying​ -cocktail​-class​-race/. 22 Burns, “Bill Murray.” 23 Caryn James, “On the Rocks Review: A ‘Lovely, Elegant, Funny Little Film,” BCC, September 25, 2020, https://www​.bbc​.com​/culture​/article​/20200925​-on​-the​-rocks​-review​-a​-lovely​ -elegant​-funny​-little​-film. James also notes similarities between On the Rocks and Lost in Translation and Somewhere. 24 In interviews, Coppola said a friend told her a story about “about hiding in the bushes to spy on her New York playboy father.” See Keaton Bell, “Sofia Coppola on Dressing Her Characters, Working with Her Husband, and Why We Need a Love Letter to New York Right Now,” Vogue, October 31, 2020, https://www​.vogue​.com​/article​/sofia​-coppola​-on​-the​-rocks​ -interview. 25 Richard Brody, “‘On the Rocks,’ Reviewed: Sofia Coppola’s Self-Questioning Film About a Father’s Destructive Dazzle,” The New Yorker, October 22, 2020, https://www​.newyorker​.com​ /culture​/the​-front​-row​/on​-the​-rocks​-reviewed​-sofia​-coppolas​-self​-questioning​-film​-of​-a​-fathers​ -destructive​-dazzle.

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26 Sam Adams, “What Is the Bougiest Status Symbol in Sofia Coppola’s New Movie?,” Slate, October 23, 2020, https://slate​.com​/culture​/2020​/10​/sofia​-coppola​-on​-the​-rocks​-movie​ -bougie​-accessories​.html. 27 Rachel Wallace, “Sofia Coppola on Finally Making a New York City Movie with On the Rocks,” Architectural Digest, November 6, 2020, https://www​.architecturaldigest​.com​/story​/sofia​ -coppola​-new​-york​-city​-movie​-on​-the​-rocks​-set. 28 We do not hear her name, but she is Sarah Sze. See Chapter 13. 29 Adams, “Bougiest Status Symbol.” 30 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 157–60, 187–8. 31 Passion Horlogère, “Cartier and Sofia Coppola,” Passion Horlogère, March 23, 2016, https:// passion​-horlogere​.com​/cartier​-and​-sofia​-coppola/. 32 David Schanker identifies the watches in this article: Danny Milton, “Culture of Time: Why ‘On the Rocks’ is the Watch Movie of the Year,” Hodinkee, December 21, 2020, https://www​ .hodinkee​.com​/articles​/on​-the​-rocks​-is​-the​-watch​-movie​-of​-2020. 33 For a feminist interpretation of Felix’s words, consult Anna Backman Rogers’ chapter in this volume (Chapter 19). 34 See Hannah McGill and Isabel Stevens, “Hotel California,” Sight and Sound 21, no. 1 (2011): 19. 35 We do see one shot of Laura correcting pages and can make out a few words and phrases: “who he used to be,” “vanished,” “brutal thing.” She has crossed out a passage that reads, “what would people make of that face. What has [illegible] done to it? Were his murders drawn on its surface?” We can assume that the initial novel-in-process is a thriller but we learn nothing of its contents later in the film.

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PART II

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8 MUSIC VIDEOS “IF YOU DON’T HAVE AT LEAST TWO CAREERS, YOU DON’T FIT IN”: TRANSMEDIA AUTHORSHIP AND THE MUSIC VIDEOS OF SOFIA COPPOLA Mathias Bonde Korsgaard

Sofia Coppola inescapably carries with her the baggage of her family name. It seems that any academic study of her work will eventually touch upon these family ties, at least to some degree. It is thus customary to note how she was “born into a family of film-makers”1 and “grew up in the cinema,”2 to the point of it being almost equally customary to criticize this very tendency for critics to invariably read her films “myopically through the lens of her own family history.”3 However, to the extent that such family relations matter at all, it might be just as illuminating to note that while she may have been born into filmmaking, she is wedded to music—both in the concrete biographical sense that she is married to Thomas Mars, the lead singer of Phoenix, and in the sense that music permeates much of her creative work. She would thus seem to fit squarely into Claudia Gorbman’s concept of the auteur mélomane, that is, a music-loving director who treats music as a key “marker of authorial style.”4 Indeed, many of the extant auteurist explorations of Coppola’s films point to the prominent role played by music in her cinematic style,5 even to the extent of locating her work within a specific “post-MTV auteurism”6 or “post-pop cinema.”7 Several of her films are thus characterized by soundtracks consisting of chic and carefully curated popular music, her directorial style being not merely visual but equally sonic.8

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But Coppola’s work also extends well beyond the world of filmmaking, with the “diversity of her activities” also including her being a “music video and commercials director, photographer, actress, fashion model and costume designer.”9 Following Jeff Smith’s understanding of Coppola as a “transmedia audiovisual stylist,”10 this chapter zeroes in on a specific corner of her transmedia activities, namely music videos. While others have touched on her music video work—including Smith himself, but also Geoff King11—no sustained analysis of her music video work exists. This is, of course, hardly surprising: having directed a total of only six, Coppola’s music videos seem to occupy a marginal position in her oeuvre—and with the latest dating all the way back to 2013, it does not seem unlikely that she may have even left music videos behind for good.12 Nonetheless, exploring the work of an auteur through the transmedia connections between films, music videos, and other tangential formats and genres opens up discussions about authorship in the current transmedia landscape (and, implicitly, of contemporary auteur studies in general) while simultaneously also shedding new light on the director’s main work: the films themselves. In other words, exploring the music video production of a director mostly associated with feature filmmaking may reveal surprising resonances between these otherwise separate endeavors; bring into focus the transmedia foundation of many contemporary directors; and invite discussions about collaboration, media hierarchies, and aesthetic cross-fertilization.

Music Videos and Transmedia Authorship While so-called “transmedia directors”13 have historically taken up anything from feature films to documentaries, television series, short films, commercials, and more, music videos tend to be a fixed component in the work of most. For this reason, the particular relation between music video and cinema can be seen to form a kind of transmedia nexus, with the traffic of talent between these two spheres having been taken to imply lines of mutual influence between music video and cinema—and thus such interrelations have also garnered some scholarly attention.14 The careers of directors who have produced both films and music videos seem to follow one of two typical trajectories: either music videos are the starting point, providing a training ground for aspiring film directors, or music videos provide a welcome and playful break from filmmaking for established film directors. Directors have followed the former trajectory since the 1980s, and some of the most famous examples would include David Fincher, Michel Gondry, and yet another person with a direct biographical link to Coppola, her former husband Spike Jonze, who originally made a name for himself directing music videos in the 1990s. The latter category of established filmmakers to have directed music videos during the course of their careers is indeed comprehensive, also dating back to the 1980s, and includes David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Martin Scorsese. As David Fincher expressed in a personal interview with Carol Vernallis, music video was a “sandbox, where I could try anything.”15 In fact, this description would seem to hold equally as true for those young directors who use music video as a potential entryway into the film business—in messing around in the sandbox they learn their trade and potentially develop a personal style—as for the

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established directors who can try out new technologies and half-baked ideas without the same economic pressure that typically rests on their filmmaking activities. As for Coppola, it may be true that her “initial cinematic experiments were music videos”16 for Walt Mink’s “Shine” (1993) and The Flaming Lips’ “This Here Giraffe” (1996), but two music videos are hardly enough to build an actual career as a music video director, so she fits into the second category of directors who are identified first and foremost as film directors with the occasional foray into music video. Her remaining four music videos seem to confirm this assessment: two of them, for Air’s “Playground Love” (2000) and Kevin Shields’ “City Girl” (2003), were made only on the occasion of her first two films, The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Lost in Translation (2003), with the songs deriving from the films’ soundtracks and the majority of the footage lifted from the films themselves. Put another way, this means that since she took up directing films Coppola has in fact only directed two standalone music videos: for The White Stripes’ “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” (2003) and Phoenix’s “Chloroform” (2013). Undoubtedly, music videos and films are altogether different enterprises on a number of levels. Formally, films are much longer than music videos; aesthetically, music videos tend to be more visually fragmented than films and less interested in narrative and character but more interested in atmosphere, visual experiments, and (obviously) music; economically, films are much more costly to produce (especially today); and in terms of their modes of production, music videos invert the conventional filmic process by adding images to music and not the other way around. With these differences in mind, it naturally follows that directing music videos and directing films will also involve dissimilar degrees of authorial control. In one sense, it may be true to some extent that “the director’s auteurship may even seem stronger in music video than in film” since “music video directors have a hand in every phase of production.”17 But in another sense, the director’s auteurship is typically lessened by the fact that the creative purpose is subordinated to the music and thus in the service of someone else’s work (and the commercial interests of selling the music to the viewer). Unless the musicians take to directing their videos themselves, the authorship of a music video is thus always a “shared authorship” between the director and the musicians with the result inevitably being “shaped strongly by the music and/or its creators.”18 However, this also points to something that music videos and films have in common—and something that is true of all the creative endeavors of a transmedia director: collaboration is key. As Holly Rogers has observed about David Lynch, his openly collaborative creative process appears to reconfigure or even entirely “undo the classic concept of the auteur as a singular force,” noting that Lynch’s directorial signature “develops through multiple close collaborations.”19 The same holds true for Coppola. This basis in collaborative efforts also means that any film, music video, or other audiovisual text typically “carries with it the ghosts of authors not mentioned.”20 Due to her famous family lineage, the general viewer of Coppola’s films may know (or notice from the credits) that her father served as a producer on her films up until The Bling Ring (2013), or that her brother, Roman Coppola, is her most frequent collaborator, having been involved in all of her films to date. It is probably less well known that Thomas Mars is the only other person apart from Roman Coppola to have consistently played

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some part throughout her entire filmography.21 In music videos, ghostly authors abound, which historically even used to apply to the directors as well, since MTV did not directly credit directors until 1992—and who even knows who edited Coppola’s six music videos, where the credit information is typically quite sparse. Music video was not always an auteur medium. In relation to the understanding of Coppola as an auteur mélomane, another frequent and important collaborator is Brian Reitzell who has functioned as music supervisor on more than half of her films to date: The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette (2006), and The Bling Ring. Reitzell gets involved in the production of the films at an unusually early stage for a music supervisor, providing mix CDs that set out the sonic identity for the films in advance, working in close accord with Coppola from the preproduction phase.22 As such, the stylishness and general impact of the music in these four films is very much indebted to Reitzell’s efforts. While Coppola may indeed be an auteur mélomane in the direct sense of the word—that she “loves music” and has a refined musical taste—this does not necessarily mean that she possesses specialist knowledge about music. Tim Anderson quotes an interview in New Musical Express where Coppola admits as much, noting specifically that she had a difficult time explaining what she wanted from Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine for the music he made for Lost in Translation: “I love music, but I don’t really know how to talk about it. It’s very abstract to me.”23 Referring to an interview with Reitzell, Liz Greene and Danijela KulezicWilson claim that getting an insight into his working process and the general nature of the collaboration between music supervisors and directors equally “disperses some myths about the know-it-all approach of director-mélomanes.”24 Indeed, the importance of the creative contribution of the music supervisor has come increasingly into focus in recent scholarship on music and media.25 Even so, music supervisors often rank among those ghost authors whose names and contributions are not necessarily registered consciously by the audience—and certainly not to the same degree as that of the director. However, such dependency on collaborators does not disqualify Coppola as an auteur or bring her creative agency into question. If anything, the fact that transmedia authorship is generally taken to be “collaborative authorship”26 by its very nature has only consolidated the belief that being successful as an auteur means knowing how to select the right collaborators. Indeed, the very interview that Greene and Kulezic-Wilson cite reveals that Reitzell himself sees it the same way: he acknowledges that Coppola deserves “full credit” for the musical style of her films—precisely because she hired him.27 As an auteur and brand, “Sofia Coppola” is thus an amalgam of such collaborative partnerships and the result of a competent managing of these partnerships. Several different accounts of Coppola’s work have noted her flair for collaboration. In Anna Backman Rogers’ understanding of Coppola as a feminist auteur, Coppola is “the agential or centrifugal force that determines the aesthetic for which these films are renowned” in that she “knows precisely who can help her evoke these particular shades, tones and moods.”28 To Geoff King, the repeated use of the same collaborators is a “qualified mark of the auteur and one that has particular currency in the case of Coppola”29 due to her strong network of creative individuals, both inside and outside the family. Fiona Handyside similarly claims that her status as an auteur “is reinforced by her method of repeatedly working with the same or similar crews.”30 This

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combination of family ties and a careful selection of the right collaborators also extends to much of Coppola’s music video production.

Sofia Coppola’s Music Videos Analyzing Coppola’s music video work as its own independent part of her entire oeuvre is perhaps to impose an auteurist perspective where it is uncalled for. After all, for some of the reasons mentioned previously, directing music videos typically requires less effort than making films—sometimes music videos seem to be simply made by fiddling about, and the music preexists the images and helps give them structure and coherence. In this way, music video is a visually flexible medium where more or less anything goes. Therefore, there is probably a risk in endowing them with too much authorial intent. To rephrase these doubts as a question: Why should we expect Coppola’s videos—shot in different stages of her career, across three decades (the 1990s, the 2000s, and the 2010s), made for quite different genres of music and for different purposes—to express any coherent authorial common features? And since music videos and feature films belong to different industrial circuits and involve dissimilar modes of production, why would they exhibit direct stylistic continuity with Coppola’s films? In King’s words, engaging in such retroactive auteur readings “is perhaps to stretch towards the limits of credibility,” amounting to nothing but “an auteur-obsessed over-reading.” Nonetheless, King admits that it is in fact “possible to seek out some points of continuity across her wider body of work,”31 an assessment also shared by Smith who asserts that we can discern “crucial continuities across Coppola’s body of work”32 when understanding her as a transmedia director. Moving forward from these claims—but also with the aforementioned precautions in mind—the following analysis approaches Coppola’s music videos chronologically in pursuit of such continuities. Even before directing her first music video, Coppola had appeared as an actress in videos for Sonic Youth, Madonna and The Black Crowes in the early 1990s, and reportedly she also worked with her brother Roman on some of the videos he directed in this period.33 After meeting Spike Jonze—allegedly they first met on the set of another Sonic Youth music video34—the two went on to collaborate on Coppola’s first directorial effort, the video for Walt Mink’s “Shine.” It is a fairly conventional performance video that shows the band playing among a group of young people on a sunny day around a pool. Without question, it is not a remarkable or canonical video. Its main significance may be that it was Coppola’s directorial debut. While the video is not nearly as accomplished as Coppola’s future films—it probably required minimal effort to stage a poolside summer day of leisure—it does contain elements that point forward to what was to come (if we actively look for them, at least). After an opening shot of a blank blue sky, the second shot shows a girl lying on her back on the grassy lawn—presaging a comparable shot from Marie Antoinette where Marie similarly lies down in a field of grass and an earlier scene of four girls in Coppola’s short Lick the Star (1998) lying in a star-formation on the school field. A few other shots also bring to mind specific scenes or signature shots from the films she would later go on to direct: some underwater imagery in the pool prefigures

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that in Somewhere (2010), and at one point, the sun behind the bass player, Candice Belanoff, reflects into the lens as she moves back and forth—a lens flare common to several of Coppola’s films, most notably The Virgin Suicides. The video’s leisurely feel and focus on youth also connects it to some of Coppola’s work-to-be, as does the generally elliptical nature of the clip—something that is of course endemic to music video but also characteristic of Coppola’s future work. These techniques capture the dreamy, carefree moments of adolescence, which is a recurring theme of her films. Finally, the video alludes to Coppola’s collaboration, especially with family, for Jonze edited the clip and the video was filmed at the Coppola estate.35 Coppola’s second video, for The Flaming Lips’ “This Here Giraffe,” also mixes the performance mode with other types of loosely connected imagery. At certain points, the video commits what is normally considered a music-video sin—visualizing the lyrics literally: as Wayne Coyne sings “this here giraffe laughs”36 we see shots of an actual giraffe, followed by images of people smiling. Most often it is a blonde girl softly smiling directly into the camera, as Lux Lisbon does in the opening of The Virgin Suicides and as Marie Antoinette does in breaking the fourth wall in the overture to Marie Antoinette. That Kirsten Dunst plays both roles reinforces the connection. The shots from a moving vehicle passing through the suburbs may be the first instance of what Suzanne Ferriss has called Coppola’s signature shot, that of “a character in a moving vehicle looking out the window”37 (even though the windows are missing as the car in question is a pickup truck). Other aspects of what Ferriss identifies as the cornerstones of Coppola’s visual style38 are also present in these first two videos: the color palette is muted in contrast to the bright, bold hues common to other music videos, and the lighting is natural. As it is a music video, it is probably no surprise that the unhurried pacing that Ferriss takes to be another Coppola trademark is not fully present. Still, the beginning does not progress as quickly from one scene to another as we normally expect of a music video. Instead, it spends around 50 seconds with Wayne Coyne singing along to the song and strumming his guitar in the domestic setting of a house, mostly in what appears to be the room of a teenage girl, a setting that becomes one of the common features of films as disparate as The Virgin Suicides and The Bling Ring, even in their historic variants in Marie Antoinette and The Beguiled (2017). Like the Walt Mink video, there is also a leisurely feel to this video, particularly as the band spend their time strolling the zoo together with Coppola herself. The video is quite simply and unpretentiously about hanging out—in someone’s room, going for a drive, or on a trip to the zoo—something that also connects the video to the meandering quality of some of Coppola’s films.39 Coppola’s two next videos were made in relation to her first two films so they inevitably employ her cinematic style. Air’s song “Playground Love” plays during the closing credits of The Virgin Suicides and the video also takes most of its imagery and pacing directly from the film, with people leisurely playing basketball in the driveway or walking their dogs in the suburbs. The video for Kevin Shields’ “City Girl” follows something of the same template: both the track and the imagery come directly from Lost in Translation (see Figure 8.1). Both videos concretely resemble Coppola’s films and involve the same collaborators. In essence they are nothing more than “music video counterparts to more conventional movie trailers.”40 This use of music videos as part of the promotional cycle

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Figure 8.1  In Kevin Shields’ “City Girl,” Coppola reuses this signature shot from Lost in Translation. Kevin Shields, “City Girl,” directed by Sofia Coppola © Emperor Norton Records, A Warner Music Company 2003.

of films is not uncommon, including in Sofia Coppola’s case. Such a strategy also directly links cinema and music video together. Both videos do contain images that are not in the films themselves, though. In “City Girl,” it is simply unused footage from the film, but “Playground Love” also tells the romantic “story” of two pieces of pastel-colored gum, chewed on and passed around by the characters of the film.41 This quirky subplot also suddenly brings us self-reflexively onto the set of the film, where we also see Coppola at work and spot Thomas Mars in a brief cameo. Mars’ cameo also features in the humorously self-reflexive, streamof-consciousness video Roman Coppola directed for Phoenix’s “Funky Squaredance” (2001), a video that further strengthens the “family ties,” in that it features home video recordings, private family photos (including of Sofia who is also mentioned by name a few times), and an email from the band to Roman where they send “baisers to Sofia”—French for “kisses.” In the same year as “City Girl,” Coppola also directed a video for The White Stripes’ “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” arguably the most famous of Coppola’s videos, due to both the popularity that The White Stripes enjoyed in this period and the iconic on-screen pole dancing performance of Kate Moss (retrospectively calling to mind, perhaps, the pole dancing scenes in Somewhere). As such, it is the one that most directly resembles a traditional music video, especially because the visuals at times act in direct rhythmic accord with the music. While the music of The White Stripes would not have seemed out of place in the anachronistic soundtrack of Marie Antoinette, Coppola has never used their music in her films. The video also looks nothing like her films: shot in black and white in a studio setting, it lacks the natural light or pastel colors typical of her style. It does, however, very much resemble a campaign Coppola created for Calvin

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Klein in 2017, a series of ads featuring, among others, Coppola mainstays Kirsten Dunst and Rashida Jones and, on the director’s cut compilation, music by Phoenix (who else?). These surface differences, however, belie the thematic links to Coppola’s films. The lyrics provide some indirect connections. It remains unclear who it is that does not know “what to do with myself.” In the context of the video, it is most likely Kate Moss who takes up pole dancing out of boredom. Or is it the viewer who does not know how to respond to Moss’ sexy performance? (To summon the lyrics of Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not in It,” a song that occupies a prominent place in the beginning of Maire Antoinette: the problem of leisure, what to do for pleasure, indeed.) The White Stripes’ cover version slows the tempo and elongates the notes and words. The visuals reinforce their version, moving at a calm pace. Moss appears directionless, literally going in circles, repetitively around the pole. The pole dancing scenes in Somewhere also seem relevant in this context: Johnny watches the dancers out of boredom (even falling asleep), and he is equally directionless, concretely driving in circles in the desert in the opening scene of the film. The video is also a clear example of Coppola’s gift for choosing the right collaborators. The video was released shortly after the premiere of Lost in Translation and represents the best of three worlds: an It-Band meets an It-Director in a music video featuring an It-Girl, all three being at highpoints of their respective careers. While neither The White Stripes nor Kate Moss are Coppola stalwarts, other familiar collaborators were involved in making the video. Lance Acord was the video’s cinematographer as was also the case on Lost in Translation (as he also was on some of Spike Jonze’s music videos and early films). Robin Conrad choreographed the pole dancing as he did later for the pole dancing twins in Somewhere. In a The New York Times Magazine feature about Coppola’s so-called “smart mob” that details parts of the video shoot, Conrad is even described as “a typical Sofia find.” In the same feature, Wes Anderson (both Coppola’s colleague and friend) is quoted as saying that the dynamic of the Coppolas is indeed exactly how they “collect interesting people” and “like to add members to the family.” This chapter takes its title from the same article: fashion designer Marc Jacobs says, “In this crowd, if you don’t have at least two careers, you don’t fit in.”42 Coppola, of course, was not limited to two. Moreover, “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” was produced by The Directors Bureau, the production company founded by her brother Roman. The Directors Bureau was also responsible for other of Coppola’s music videos (“Playground Love” and “Chloroform”) and commercials (including the Calvin Klein campaign). Yet another family business, the company’s featured work includes four videos that Roman Coppola directed for Phoenix, including his most recent one for the track “Identical” (2020), which plays over the closing credits in On the Rocks (2020). The company’s credits also include a commercial for Francis Ford Coppola Winery, and Gia Coppola, Sofia and Roman’s niece, is also on the roster with several music videos and commercials—as is Wes Anderson. The connections in Coppola’s network branch out and fold back in. In the final video Coppola has directed thus far—for Phoenix’s “Chloroform”—she returns to the genre of the performance music video, but the focus is less on the performers than on the audience. The video self-reflexively focuses on performance and, as such, like her video for The White Stripes, invokes recurring themes in her feature films—here particularly the theme of celebrity. Celebrity culture is also the dominant theme of The

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Bling Ring, but meta-reflections on celebrity similarly occur in Lost in Translation (with Bob Harris being a celebrity actor), Somewhere (with another celebrity actor in the leading role) and A Very Murray Christmas (with Bill Murray and other celebrities playing themselves). “Chloroform” consists of only four shots, thereby exhibiting her signature languid pacing. The first shot shows the band performing in silhouette. The second shows an all-female crowd with close-ups of beautiful young women in glorious slow-motion looking longingly at the band, some of them even crying. The third shot clarifies the specific object of the women’s gazes: Thomas Mars, singled out from the rest of the band (see Figure 8.2). The fourth and final shot shows us the crowd again, with a girl fainting at the very end (played by Claire Julien who also plays the role of Chloe in The Bling Ring from the same year, connecting this video even more strongly to the celebrity focus of that film). In Coppola’s own words, she wanted the video “to be about the girls losing it over the band, and that feeling you have when you think a band is romantic.”43 Like the video for The White Stripes, this video is stylistically somewhat removed from Coppola’s films and probably closer in kind to her commercials with its lavish and classy black-and-white aesthetic. But the biographical aspect lends the clip some of the subtle humor that also characterizes Coppola’s other work: there is a strange selfreflexively autobiographical wittiness to the fact that it is Coppola’s own husband that the women look at. For one thing, one must assume that she knows personally what it feels like to look at Mars in this way, and for another, the video also seems to be saying, tongue in cheek, that she knows that she is privileged enough to have this object of other women’s desires and romantic gazes—Mars, the rock star—all to herself. The Coppola-directed Netflix special, A Very Murray Christmas (2015), features a similarly meta-reflexive moment. The band members of Phoenix play the part of the hotel chefs but are revealed to be competent musicians as they perform. After their performance, one of Coppola’s most favored actors, Bill Murray, comments (perhaps on her behalf): “And you guys can cook too. Wow, you’re gonna be a real catch.” But this of course also applies the other way around: as a director-star/fashion icon, Coppola is also a celebrity in her own right.

Figure 8.2  The third shot in Phoenix’s “Chloroform” singles out the lead singer, Thomas Mars—Coppola’s husband— as the object of the female audience’s longing gaze. Phoenix, “Chloroform,” directed by Sofia Coppola © Glassnote Records 2013.

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While this analysis has primarily accounted for the connections the music videos have with Coppola’s films, it is worth adding that there are also some connections the other way around. The music in the films supervised by Reitzell is frequently popular music as we also expect from music videos. In particular, Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring have a music video feel to them in certain moments (for instance, the “I Want Candy” scene in the former and the introductory scene with music by Sleigh Bells in the latter). Ferriss points out that in Marie Antoinette Count Fersen also directly channels one of the musicians heard on the soundtrack, Adam Ant,44 and in a “Making of” featurette found on the DVD-release of the movie, Coppola even says on the set of the film: “This could totally be an Adam Ant music video.”45 The films not supervised by Reitzell are typically less driven by popular music, though, especially The Beguiled.46

Conclusion Even as this auteurist exploration of Coppola’s music videos has established connections with her other work, it affirms that none of Coppola’s videos are as rich in meaning and as stylistically accomplished as her films. As I have claimed before, “there are still only relatively few directors that are equally accomplished as directors of music video and of feature films.”47 This also holds true for Coppola. As King has argued, “It is entirely legitimate to identify what appear to be reasonably substantial continuities in subject matter, themes or formal dimension—up to a point.” Identifying this point where “the auteur-based reading of particular detail ceases to be ‘reasonable’ or the continuities ‘substantial’” is the difficult part, especially as these authorial correlations are perhaps only present to “those actively seeking out such connections.”48 Holly Rogers has indicated something similar, in suggesting that the idea of “a ‘strong signature’ style can hold things together at the level of reception.”49 It is mainly (or perhaps even only) at the level of reception, and not at the level of the text itself, that the auteurist perspective comes into play in a meaningful way. At the same time, however, this analysis has also demonstrated how Coppola’s transmedia engagement with music video has depended on collaboration and that biographical detail is relevant in understanding the network she relies on. She proves that connections are crucial to success as a director in today’s collaborative transmedia landscape.50 And, in the case of the music videos, she is notably also not only present at the level of reception, but also sometimes concretely on-screen, further encouraging biographical and auteurist understandings (as can also be witnessed by browsing the comments of the YouTube versions for most of the videos mentioned here, which often include the name Sofia Coppola). Exploring film directors’ music video output—too often considered tangential—has the potential to reveal aesthetic and thematic resonances across the relevant director’s body of work. Recognizing Coppola as a transmedia director depends on being an active, engaged interpreter of her work, including that beyond her feature films. While we may assume that being a music video director does not lead to winning awards at Cannes or Venice, music video may in fact be part of what bridges the gap

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between the European and American sensibilities that many commentators take to be among the strongest characteristics of Coppola as a film director.51 Smith has noted that the European art-cinema tradition and music video—as unlikely an alliance as that may seem—actually have something in common, namely an elliptical approach and the prioritization of “mood and atmosphere over narrative salience.” He characterizes Coppola’s films as mixing “the observational style of the art house with the bursts of colour, rhythm and flow seen in music videos.”52 In Coppola’s work, music video and cinema thus affect each other in a mutual process. With all the attention paid to collaborators both inside and outside the family, it seems fitting to end this chapter on a biographical note. As Smith also mentions, Coppola’s most direct acknowledgment of her sources of inspiration occurred when she gave her acceptance speech at the 2004 Oscars. After thanking, among others, her father and brother, she went on to recognize some of the directors who inspired her, “a list that included Antonioni, Wong Kar-Wai and Godard.”53 As Smith rightly notes, these are all directors who hint at a certain global art-film sensibility. But this is not the only thing they have in common with Coppola. As Ferriss points out, Coppola shares with many other successful film directors that she has also created filmed advertisements, mentioning both Jean-Luc Godard and Wong Kar-wai54—and, though missing from Ferriss’ list, Antonioni could be added as well, having directed an ad for Renault in the 1980s. And even though we tend to think of these three directors as ranking among the absolute masters in the history of cinema, they are all also—believe it or not—music-video directors.

Notes 1 Jeff Smith, “Our Lives in Pink: Sofia Coppola as Transmedia Audiovisual Stylist,” in Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers and Lisa Perrott (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 75. 2 Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 6. See also Todd Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur,” Film Criticism 35, no. 1 (2010): 39; Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, “‘She Looks Like a Little Piece of Cake’: Sofia Coppola and the Commerce of Auteurism,” Interférences littéraires/ Literaire interferenties 21 (2017): 107; Belinda Smaill, “Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 148. 3 Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York and Oxford: Berghan, 2019), 5. 4 Claudia Gorbman, “Auteur Music,” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 149. 5 For just a few representative examples, see Smaill, “Sofia Coppola,” 155 (“music is central to the overriding sensibility of the films and Coppola’s signature style”); Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 149 (on Coppola’s “facility for fusing music and image”); or Geoff King, Lost in Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 115 (on how it “is very often the music that does the primary work in overtly establishing tone and mood”).

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6 Tim J. Anderson, “Lost in Transition: Popular Music, Adolescence, and the Melodramatic Mode of Sofia Coppola,” in Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers After MTV, ed. Arved Ashby (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 63–83. 7 Jesse Fox Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film (Westport and London: Praeger, 2007), 169–81. 8 This general idea of a “sonic style” or even “sonic auteurism” is becoming increasingly widespread, as witnessed, for instance, by the book Music, Sound, and Filmmakers: Sonic Style in Cinema, ed. James Wierzbicki (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). Wierzbicki also edits a book series of concise monographs in the Routledge Focus format on the sonic style of individual directors under the title “Filmmakers and Their Soundtracks.” 9 Pam Cook, “Sofia Coppola,” in Fifty Contemporary Film Directors, ed. Yvonne Tasker (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 131. 10 Smith, “Our Lives in Pink.” 11 King, Lost in Translation, 53–6. 12 Or perhaps she has simply substituted her commercial work in its place. Her ads frequently make use of popular song: think of her commercials for Dior perfume, for instance, her Gap ads, even her homage to American Gigolo in her ad for Cartier’s Panthère watch (which uses Donna Summer). Her ad for Chanel’s Mademoiselle Privé exhibition uses one of Grimes’ songs, too. 13 Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers, and Lisa Perrott, eds., Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). 14 See for instance Marco Calavita, “‘MTV Aesthetics’ at the Movies: Interrogating a Film Criticism Fallacy,” Journal of Film and Video 59, no. 3 (2007): 115–31; Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, “Projections of Image on Sound: Reassessing the Relation Between Music Video and Cinema,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening, ed. Carlo Cenciarelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 619–38; John Mundy, Popular Music on Screen: From the Hollywood Musical to Music Video (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 224ff; John Richardson, An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 58ff; Carol Vernallis, Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 69ff. 15 Carol Vernallis, “‘The Most Terrific Sandbox’: Music Video Directors, Style, and the Question of the Auteur,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 25, no. 5 (2008): 404. 16 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 59. 17 Vernallis, “Music Video Directors,” 404. 18 King, Lost in Translation, 56. 19 Holly Rogers, “The Audiovisual Eerie: Transmediating Thresholds in the Work of David Lynch,” in Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers and Lisa Perrott (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 247–8. 20 Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnston, “Introduction: The Problem of Media Authorship,” in A Companion to Media Authorship, ed. Gray and Johnston (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 2. 21 In The Virgin Suicides, he provides the vocals for Air’s “Playground Love” and has a brief cameo at the prom night; Lost in Translation features a track by Phoenix; in Marie Antoinette, there’s a brief scene where Mars serenades Marie Antoinette together with the rest of his band; Phoenix provided the score for Somewhere; The Bling Ring also features a Phoenix track; and for both The Beguiled and On the Rocks, Phoenix once again provided the score.

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22 King, Lost in Translation, 115; Anderson, “Lost in Transition,” 65. 23 Anderson, “Lost in Transition,” 75. 24 Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 9. 25 See, for instance, Tim Anderson, “From Background Music to Above-the-Line Actor: The Rise of the Music Supervisor in Converging Televisual Environments,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 25, no. 3 (2013): 371–88; Bethany Klein and Leslie M. Meier, “In Sync? Music Supervisors, Music Placement Practices, and Industrial Change,” in The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound, ed. Miguel Mera, Ronald Sadoff and Ben Winters (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), 281–90; Jeff Smith, “Taking Music Supervisors Seriously,” in Cinesonic: Experiencing the Soundtrack, ed. Philip Brophy (North Ryde: Australian Film, Television and Radio School, 2001), 125–46. 26 Lisa Perrott, “Transmedia, Authorship, Assemblage,” in Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers and Lisa Perrott (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 15. 27 Meghan Joyce Tozer, “Interview 3: Mixing Punk Rock, Classical, and New Sounds in Film Music—An Interview with Brian Reitzell,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 266. 28 Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 9. 29 King, Lost in Translation, 50. 30 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 32. 31 King, Lost in Translation, 54–5. 32 Smith, “Our Lives in Pink,” 76. 33 Susan Dudley Gold, Great Filmmakers: Sofia Coppola (New York: Cavendish Square, 2015), 20. 34 Gold, Great Filmmakers, 20. 35 According to Cameron Beyl’s film blog, The Directors Series, in a post titled “Sofia Coppola’s First Works (1993-1998),” July 12, 2016, https://directorsseries​.net​/2016​/07​/12​/sofia​ -coppolas​-first​-works​-1993​-1998/. 36 The Flaming Lips, “This Here Giraffe,” by Wayne Micheal Coyne, Steven Gregory Drozd, Michael Lee Ivins, Ron Lee Jones, recorded 1995, EMI Blackwood Music/Lovely Sorts of Death Music. 37 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 52. 38 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 101–2. Ferriss identifies four elements: a preference for natural lighting; a muted, neutral, subdued use of pastel colors; languid, slow, gliding, unhurried pacing; and a mastery of mise-en-scène. 39 On the meandering plots in Coppola’s films, see Anderson, “Lost in Transition,” 63; Cook, “Sofia Coppola,” 130. 40 Smith, “Our Lives in Pink,” 86. 41 On a side note, this story of the two pieces of gum is somewhat reminiscent of another music-video classic made only the year before, for Blur’s “Coffee & TV,” where boy and girl milk cartons fall in love—and die. 42 Lynn Hirschberg, “The Coppola Smart Mob,” The New York Times Magazine, August 31, 2003, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2003​/08​/31​/magazine​/the​-coppola​-smart​-mob​.html. 43 Ashley Young, “PopRally Exclusive: Sofia Coppola on Directing Phoenix’s “Chloroform” video,” Inside/Out, MoMA blog, November 12, 2013, https://www​.moma​.org​/explore​/

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inside​_out​/2013​/11​/12​/poprally​-exclusive​-sofia​-coppola​-on​-directing​-phoenixs​-chloroform​ -video/. 44 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 76–7. 45 The Making of Marie Antoinette, directed by Eleanor Coppola, Marie Antoinette, DVD, dir. Sofia Coppola (Sony Pictures, 2007), 8m10s. 46 For more on this shift of direction, see Tim J. Anderson’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 14). 47 Korsgaard, “Projections of Image on Sound,” 630. 48 King, Lost in Translation, 55. 49 Rogers, “The Audiovisual Eerie,” 248. 50 This perspective is also backed up by Pam Cook who writes: “The close connections between her life, persona and films are essential to the fabrication of the Sofia Coppola brand that operates across different media to promote her work and, crucially, to give it a distinctive identity.” See Cook, “Sofia Coppola,” 31. 51 See Smaill, “Sofia Coppola,” 150 (“although they are firmly entrenched in the sphere of American cinema, Coppola’s films reflect a European sensibility”); Cook, “Sofia Coppola,” 130 (“The enigmatic narratives and aimless characters of European art cinema were incorporated into Hollywood movies”). 52 Smith, “Our Lives in Pink,” 87. On the same page, Smith also claims that the “consistency with which Coppola employs this elliptical approach demonstrates the degree to which she has absorbed the influence of MTV.” 53 Smith, “Our Lives in Pink,” 83. 54 Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 144.

9 SHORT FILM GIRLS RULE IN SOFIA COPPOLA’S LICK THE STAR Cynthia Felando

“A lot can happen in a few days.” This early prediction proves to be an understatement in Lick the Star, a melodramatic and often amusing girl-centered, middle-school saga about power, stardom, poison, treachery, and survival. Lick the Star (1998) is Sofia Coppola’s first solo-directed film and her only narrative short. Despite a relatively brief running time, it packs a lot of narrative weight and stylistic complexity into its fourteen minutes. Over the years, it has fascinated critics due, at least in part and not surprisingly, to its status as an early Coppola film. Accordingly, many detailed analyses have focused on its narrative and stylistic continuities with Coppola’s previous and subsequent work. But it’s also significant on its own, as a bold, subversive, and modern short film that reflects the era’s sensibility by featuring the fascination of one middle-school-aged girl for another along with the shifting power dynamics among a crew of popular girls. So far, however, its status as a short film specifically—in terms of its use of the form’s generic conventions—remains unaddressed. Such an approach enables an appreciation of the strengths of its storytelling and stylistic strategies. To that end, this chapter includes attention to Lick the Star as a significant title in Coppola’s filmography and in the short film canon too. As previous critics and scholars have observed, it is also a remarkably open text that has elicited a range of interpretations. To reflect the film’s contemporaneous contexts and expand the perspectives used to read it, this chapter considers a set of issues that reflect the cultural milieu within which it was made and released. In particular, rather than reading the film as others have in terms of how it conforms to a male or otherwise sexualized and objectifying gaze, or how it reflects “masculine” characteristics and influences, the aim is to address the ways in which Lick the Star represents girl culture and a contemporary “girl’s gaze.” As a result, it situates the film in relation to then influential and generally familiar cultural and artistic currents

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associated with Riot Grrrl, the radical feminist youth and cultural movement that emerged in the early 1990s. Before embarking on the production of Lick the Star in 1998, Coppola was well versed in the short form. Several years before, when she was seventeen, Coppola collaborated with her father Francis on the Life Without Zoe segment he directed for the 1989 omnibus film New York Stories. (She also designed the costumes.) With a thirty-four-minute running time, it falls at the longer end of the shorts spectrum, which is reflected in its complicated story featuring several characters and locations. Set in midtown Manhattan, New York City, Life Without Zoe is a fanciful and lavishly produced fairytale. At its center is Zoe (Heather McComb), a super-wealthy twelve-year-old girl with a closet full of Chanel whose charming butler looks after her—due to her often-traveling parents. When Zoe finds herself in the midst of a robbery at her grand hotel, luck is hers when the robbers drop a package and she manages to grab it on the sly. The package turns out to be from her father’s safety deposit box, containing an enormous diamond earring that was a gift from an Arab princess in admiration for his beautiful flute playing. But because the princess’ husband is bitterly and perhaps murderously jealous about the gift, and because her son also happens to be Zoe’s classmate, a caper ensues that involves an elaborate kids’ costume party and a scheme to return the earring. Life Without Zoe anticipates Lick the Star mostly by way of its girl protagonist, comedic intentions, and a relatively complex plot that includes a school setting.1 Thereafter, Coppola began her career as a director by making two music videos (which are discussed in the previous chapter in this volume) and codirecting the narrative short Bed, Bath and Beyond in 1996, with her friend Ione Skye (who also wrote the script) and Andrew Durham. Unfortunately, the short is unavailable, though descriptions suggest a preoccupation with stardom, which would later be reflected in Lick the Star, Lost in Translation (2003), Somewhere (2010), and The Bling Ring (2013).2 Although less often discussed than her feature-length films, Lick the Star, since its debut, has enjoyed a high profile as an art film. After its premiere in 1998, it was shown several times on the cable network IFC and is an extra on the Film Movement DVD for the feature-length film HOP (Dominique Standaert, 2002). In 2018, the Criterion Collection released a special edition restoration of The Virgin Suicides (1999) that includes the film. Currently, it is available on the prestigious cinephile subscription streaming service, the Criterion Channel. Lick the Star’s story concerns the shifting dynamics among a small clique of middleschool girlfriends and the combination of drama and intrigue they add to the routine events in their insular suburban lives, which is established early on with protagonist Kate’s doomladen voiceover in which she laments: “I dreaded going back. Missing school is like a death wish.” Set in a real-life suburban school, the film features four popular girls, three of whom lord their power over their schoolmates by bullying, snubbing, and ganging up on them. The fourth, Kate (Christina Turley), is a quiet, observant girl who returns to school after a few days away with a broken foot and crutches, and relates her concerns about going back in voiceover during the film’s opening moments. The use of past tense indicates that Kate recounts the events she describes from an indeterminate period of time after they occurred. (A similar strategy is used in The Virgin Suicides, but with an adult male voiceover.) In particular, Kate’s apprehension is that because things can change so quickly

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and ruthlessly, she will find herself excluded from the popular girls’ group. As she explains, “When Sam was out with the flu, everybody decided she was a big lesbian and she spent the rest of the month eating lunch in the library.” However, as Kate soon learns, “Things didn’t seem that different this week except it was Wendy eating lunch alone, not Sam.” But most important is her observation that “Chloe was still the queen of seventh grade.” What has changed is that Chloe (Audrey Kelly), and her two mean-girl minions, Sara (Lindsy Drummer) and Rebecca (Julia Vanderham), are conspiring to enact some gender revenge by way of a nasty plot to poison a few of the schoolboys to “weaken” them. The plan seems to be a response to the boys’ casual harassment, as when one schoolmate, Greg (Robert Schwartzman), torments Chloe by lifting her skirt to see her underwear and further provokes her by saying, “Little Mermaid, huh, Chloe?” whereupon she immediately slaps him. Soon though, Chloe’s plan loses steam due to petty disagreements with her fellow conspirators. The decisive end of the poison plot corresponds with the termination of Chloe’s reign as middle-school queen when an ignorant comment she makes after a class lesson on American slavery is mischaracterized. Her claim that if it weren’t for the Civil War, their schoolmate, Nadine, “might be a slave,” gets the gossip chain distortion treatment when her original remark becomes, in turn, “could be a slave,” and then “should be a slave.”3 Once she is deemed a racist, Chloe’s friends divulge her “kill the rats” scheme and proceed to relentlessly taunt her about it. Likewise, the students she bullied earlier seize their opportunity to turn the tables by bullying her. The result is drastic, as Chloe becomes the former queen of seventh grade. Then, after a dramatic bathtub scene in which Chloe submerges herself in the water while clothed, gossip spreads that she tried to kill herself. Kate, however, remains neutral in her apparent refusal to join in the bullying of and gossip about Chloe and her preoccupation with her continues. So, Kate is there, at the end, to watch the formerly chatty and commanding girl as she stoically faces her exile. The short film is a genre with its own specificities, including several related to storytelling, narrative, and character conventions that differentiate it from the feature-length film. Lick the Star uses several of the conventions that theorists identify as effective for realizing the particular strengths of the short form: an economical and brief story time; episodic, chronological organization; and an orientation to character rather than plot. In addition, shorts tend to have simple stories with fewer characters.4 So, as the plot’s description earlier suggests, Lick the Star is unique for its complex story and ensemble cast of characters. Moreover, like Lick the Star, the short form often focuses on “fragments of everyday reality” or “slices of life.” Closely related to the emphasis on fragments of time are stories that feature a significant turning point, crisis, or “moment of truth” for protagonists. Story theorist Mary Louise Pratt characterizes the “moment of truth” strategy as one that presents “a single point of crisis in the life of a central character, a crisis which provokes some basic realization that will change the character’s life forever.”5 And although the moment of truth involves a change in the protagonist’s life, the short form tends not to be associated with character development.6 Lick the Star shares these short form conventions inasmuch as Chloe’s “crisis” involves an abrupt downfall; however, she does not undergo significant development as such. In terms of organization, Lick the Star is largely structured around Kate’s point of view, and the subject of her gaze and rapt attention throughout is Chloe. Indeed, the

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film’s first and last images of Chloe are from Kate’s perspective, as Chloe walks toward the camera near the beginning and, at the end, as she walks away. The foregrounding of Kate’s gaze is established in the film’s opening, with the first shot that shows her looking out the window of a moving car (which Suzanne Ferriss refers to as Coppola’s “signature shot”).7 That initial shot is followed by a reverse shot that reveals what she sees and establishes the film’s suburban setting: a row of stucco ranch-style suburban tract houses that lead to the school. Lick the Star’s other significant point-of-view shots are from Chloe’s perspective—of an apparently older boy she seems to be curious about, and then, more dramatically, at film’s end, of a poem she is writing in her journal. In addition, early on, Kate’s inquisitive gaze prompts her to ask about the poison-theboys scheme. Her interest is piqued when she sees visual clues: stars inked on the ankles of Chloe, Sara, and Rebecca; their copies of the V. C. Andrews’ novel Flowers in the Attic, which they’re reading together; and the phrase “lick the star” inscribed on a notebook—all of which are shown from Kate’s point of view. When she asks the girls about the meaning of “lick the star,” after some resistance they confess their plan, including that “lick the star” is backward code for “kill the rats,” which is inspired by a character in Flowers in the Attic who uses rat poison to weaken and kill her children. Oddly though, Kate does not seem surprised by or opposed to the plan but instead intrigued by it. As for its visual strategies, Lick the Star was shot on location at a middle school whose students appear as extras, which adds a bit of documentary-style authenticity. There are several montage sequences as well as interstitial fragments (kids passing in the halls, hanging out at lunch, and a water sprinkler in action) that enable the film’s unity. As would become Coppola’s practice, visuals are favored over dialogue, especially by way of the montages accompanied by song fragments. Not surprisingly, film critics and fans routinely address Lick the Star’s striking visuals, especially the black-and-white imagery, which was a popular choice among directors of many now-classic, low-budget, independent art films in the 1990s. Their stark, high-contrast, richly toned black-and-white made for beautiful shots and worked with more affordable 16mm stock. As scholars have noted, Coppola’s imagery in Lick the Star, especially the first shots of Chloe, recalls the artistry of glamorous photographs of Hollywood movie stars, like Greta Garbo.8 Filming in black and white serves another purpose, too, as several exterior shots have harsh, high-noon sunlight and minimal shadows, a style that adds to the oppressiveness of the suburban California middle-school setting and underscores the popular girls’ more sordid impulses. Several visual details convey the femininity and girl culture of Chloe and her crew, such as the stars inked on their ankles, the images of models and movie stars on their locker doors and bedroom walls, a poolside pedicure, their shared reading of the classic girls’ novel Flowers in the Attic, and their several chat and gossip sessions. Coppola has addressed her predilection for such details, saying, “My favorite thing is to create an atmosphere. . . . In my eyes, plot is secondary.”9 Lick the Star also includes some intertextual film references. Most prominently, the overhead shot that shows the four girls lying on the grass with the tops of their heads together as Chloe holds court with a nonsensical tale of “aliens” breeding with humans recalls a well-known pattern of similar shots in the popular lesbian rom-com from a few years earlier, Go Fish (Rose Troché,

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1994), which features an ensemble of young women friends and was also shot in rich indie-art film black and white. Lick the Star’s boldest and most strikingly shot and edited sequence, a montage, is devoted to Chloe’s entrance, which brings together several of Coppola’s creative fascinations with fashion, music, and photography. Often cited, it is worth addressing in some detail here for its expert economy of characterization and edgy, contemporary style. In addition to adding a jolt of energy, it immediately conveys Lick the Star’s art-film bona fides too. Befitting her status as seventh-grade queen, or star, Chloe’s introduction begins before we see her, with Kate’s voiceover when, just after Kate greets the school’s most recent social outcast, Wendy (Rachael Vanni), she looks off-screen (see Figure 9.1) to note in voiceover (as mentioned earlier) that “Chloe was still the queen of seventh grade.” The reverse shot from Kate’s point of view initiates a slow-motion montage with jump cuts as Chloe strolls toward the camera, fashion-show style, before opening the classroom door and entering with a casual toss of her head. Ferriss captures the spirit of the moment: As Chloe enters, she glides confidently along the corridor, her slow motion walk toward the camera contrasting with the frantic action of the students behind her scrambling to get to class before the bell. Shown in full length, Chloe appears model-like, nonchalantly carrying a leopard-print bag in one hand while holding a cigarette in the other. . . . In Lick the Star, the iconography and gestures of the catwalk are linked directly to the film’s story.10 The construction of the sequence is deft and fairly intricate, in its combination of slowmotion cinematography with rapid editing rhythms, including the jump cuts and freeze frames that are, as in many music videos, driven by the beat of a non-diegetic song. Its dynamism is enabled by a series of three quick jump cuts that correspond with the song’s guitar-based chord progression and drum beat, and freeze frames that show the following: first, a medium-close-up shot of Chloe, head tilted as she looks almost directly into the camera; second, an extreme close-up of her carefully lipstick-defined and darkened mouth, which is highlighted as the freeze frame occurs just as her lips

Figure 9.1  Lick the Star, directed by Sofia Coppola © Sofia Coppola 1998/The Criterion Collection 2018.

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come into focus and the film’s superimposed title appears; and third, a slightly high-angle extreme close-up of her eyes as she slowly blinks, revealing her glittery eye shadow. In this case, the freeze frame occurs precisely when she opens her eyes to look directly into the camera. In addition to her assured gaze at the camera, Chloe’s singular style and self-aware status as a middle-school queen are accentuated and perhaps parodied by way of her accessories, including a sparkly rhinestone tiara with matching necklace and earrings (see Figure 9.2). However, Chloe’s is a somewhat unconventional femininity as these bits of feminine accoutrements contrast with her studded dog-collar bracelet and men’s style white shirt. The Chloe-introduction sequence’s power and intensity are given a boisterous assist by the non-diegetic punk-rock song and lyrics, which not only establish Chloe’s eminence, especially to Kate, but also initiate a pattern of using music to convey tone and highlight character and story details. As Jeff Smith notes, Coppola’s careful use of music as a “general template for her audiovisual style . . . often emphasizes rhythm, gesture, atmosphere and mood over narrative.”11 The propulsive punk song that plays as Chloe walks along the hallway to her classroom is from “Tipp City,” by the all-woman band, The Amps, whose lyrics and their triumphantly dissonant delivery by lead singer Kim Deal underscore what the visuals convey: that Chloe is a fierce, powerful, and unapologetic girl. Indeed, as Chloe opens and walks through the classroom door, the lyrics that accompany her are suggestive, as is the near-scream meets growl of their delivery: “Whoa—yea! You got me going, / You got me going.”12 As other film critics have noted, Chloe’s entrance anticipates the introduction of the handsome high-school boy, Trip (Josh Hartnett), in The Virgin Suicides. Like Chloe’s, Trip’s montage also appeals to a girl gaze as he saunters toward the camera through a school corridor, much to the pleasure of the dazzled girls along his path. His effect on them is emphasized, and amusingly so, by the non-diegetic rock song, “Magic Man” by the women-led band Heart. In both Lick the Star and The Virgin Suicides, in addition to adding considerable energy and momentum to particular sequences, the songs reflect the girls’ moods, as indicated by their admiring gazes, as well as Chloe’s and Trip’s own apparent

Figure 9.2  Lick the Star, directed by Sofia Coppola © Sofia Coppola 1998/The Criterion Collection 2018.

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confidence.13 Also compelling in Lick the Star is that Kate’s and Chloe’s separate entrances convey the sharp differences between them, in terms of physical presence and attitude. That is, unlike Chloe’s assured stroll, Kate’s walk toward the camera is labored and halting due to her crutches and foot cast, and it’s funny when she mentions in voiceover that, “My dad ran over my foot by mistake and I couldn’t go back until Thursday.” Chloe’s introduction and other sequences in Lick the Star are arguably impressionistic in their privileging of Kate’s point of view and subjectivity. Later in the film, for example, a striking shot of Chloe in a low-angle, medium close-up shows her as she looks directly into the camera and winks while holding a pinwheel, which is superimposed with a shot of a tree’s leaves (see Figure 9.3). The shot occurs after another of Kate looking offscreen and suggests her subjectivity in its dreamy idealization of Chloe, who is then at the peak of her star power. It also anticipates several shot superimpositions in The Virgin Suicides of the film’s most idealized character, Lux (Kirsten Dunst), which represent the neighborhood boys’ subjective fantasies about her, including one that matches the framing and composition of the shot of Chloe in which Lux winks at the camera. A similarly impressionistic sequence occurs during the bathtub scene, after Chloe’s downfall. Wearing a delicate, white, slip-style dress, she slides—in slow-motion—under the rose-filled water, after extinguishing a candle. Some have read the scene as suggestive of suicide.14 For example, Justin Wyatt claims that “Chloe’s attempted suicide is shown with a haunting image of her sinking slowly into the bathtub after overdosing.”15 In addition, Anna Backman Rogers claims that Chloe “tries to commit suicide by overdosing on aspirin, a fact that the audience understands only after the event as it is related through snide gossip in the school corridor.”16 However, the scene’s purported connection to a suicide attempt can be read differently, as an impressionist projection on the part of Kate or the other girls. In the context of Lick the Star’s own narrative and imagery, it recalls the idealized shot of Chloe holding the pinwheel. Like that image, the bathtub scene is stylistically self-conscious, with its slow-motion cinematography, as well as its romantic and melodramatic mise-en-scène, including the candle and roses.17 Its truth value is further suspect in the context of the chatter about Chloe, when the newly unexiled

Figure 9.3  Lick the Star, directed by Sofia Coppola © Sofia Coppola 1998/The Criterion Collection 2018.

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Wendy shares a rumor from her mother that Chloe tried to kill herself by taking a bunch of aspirin. The claim seems dubious, both because it is simply gossip with no supporting visual evidence and the girls’ gossip had earlier been established as untrustworthy by way of the telephone-style distortion of Chloe’s “Nadine might be a slave” comment. Such a reading also anticipates the teenaged boys’ fanciful tales in The Virgin Suicides, as when they brag about watching Lux having rooftop sex, although there is no visual confirmation of their claims, which are also doubtful given their penchant for fantasizing about Lux and her sisters.18 It is similarly echoed in the bathtub scene in Marie Antoinette (2006) when the queen, wearing only diamonds, says, “Let them eat cake,” before a cut reveals the scene to be an imagined projection of anti-royalist sentiment being read out loud by one of her ladies-in-waiting from pages of the popular press.19 Critics and scholars have addressed Coppola’s auteur preference for using songs to establish and emphasize the mood and spirit of scenes and to add character details. Such strategies are introduced in Lick the Star and, as noted above, are explored again in The Virgin Suicides and subsequent feature-length films. Backman Rogers, for example, mentions the use of “resolutely modern soundtracks” in her films in general.20 Coppola herself said that, in thinking about becoming a filmmaker, she daydreamed about “romantic and flamboyant characters while listening to Prince’s [album] ‘Purple Rain.’”21 Certainly, Lick the Star’s bold visual style is complemented by its high-octane song fragments, especially during dramatically intense montage sequences. The lyrics and vocal delivery of the non-diegetic music from contemporaneous “girl bands” highlight the perhaps unorthodox feminine force of both individual characters, like Chloe, as well as the emotional weight of the girls’ experiences in junior high in general. As in several of her subsequent films, Lick the Star features a group of girls and their angst, solidarity, and conflicts as they negotiate their self-defined identities and the judgments of others. The tendency of popular and academic critics has been to address the film retrospectively as a harbinger of Coppola’s auteurism by identifying the thematic and stylistic strategies it shares with her feature-length movies. Wyatt’s observation is typical: that Lick the Star “serves as a perfect ‘test pattern’ for many of the stylistic flourishes and themes in The Virgin Suicides.”22 Likewise, Backman Rogers observes the film’s stylistic continuities with her later work, such as the use of long takes and superimpositions, saying, “Lick the Star is suggestive in both its form and content of what has become Coppola’s recognisable themes and style.”23 But, by far, the most often commented upon continuity between Lick the Star and her feature-length films concerns the thematic origins of her focus on girls, girl culture, and coming of age. For example, Backman Rogers references her “abiding fascination with the young female’s rite of passage and body,” while Fiona Handyside notes that “All Coppola’s films pay close attention to the experiences of girls and young women.”24 Others have observed that Lick the Star shares her predilection for featuring girls who live in suburban enclaves of homogeneity, ennui, and repression. The New York Times’ Graham Fuller put it well: “‘Lick the Star’ revealed [Coppola’s] particular taste for images of bland suburban landscapes and of adolescent girls caught in a state of dreamy selfabsorption.”25 Coppola traced the origins of Lick the Star and her enduring interest in depicting girls and their often emotionally fraught challenges and cruelties to her own

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experiences and observations in middle school. As she explained in an interview with AV Club: I just remember seventh grade as being really difficult, because there’s nothing meaner than a girl at that age. You gang up on people, and it’s traumatic. It wasn’t so bad for me, but there’s a woman I know who’s still traumatized by junior high. At that age, everything seems like a huge deal. Coppola also addressed the age-related continuities and her interest in authentic portrayals of teenagers that informed both Lick the Star and The Virgin Suicides, saying, “There’s something about being a teenager that’s so sincere. Everything is more epic, like your first crush. I feel that it’s not always portrayed very accurately.”26 There is absolutely no nostalgia in the film for teen culture’s social hierarchies and hostilities, which Coppola revisited again in Marie Antoinette. Indeed, she specifically linked the two films and explained the similarities between them: “I have the impression that Marie-Antoinette is facing the same problems as a high school student. . . . In [Marie Antoinette] and its palace intrigues, there are echoes of my first short film about girls’ stories in high school [sic], competition, gossip.”27 Lick the Star has a subversive style and story that combines low-key humor and high drama, and whose appeal is due in large part to its representations of less rigid conceptions of femininity, which reflect the era’s rejection of the male-oriented perspectives that were (and still are) used to interpret female-dominated stories, characters, and formal strategies, including music. Critical responses to Lick the Star convey some of the then-current tensions around shifting notions of femininity and female authorship and the tendency for female-centered and female-produced films to be analyzed using increasingly untenable, increasingly outdated stereotypes about femininity and female agency or, alternately, in terms of “masculinity.” For example, regarding Lick the Star’s representation of femininity, particularly in relation to the character of Chloe, several critics have read the film as suggestive of what they argue is a sexually objectifying but not-necessarily-male gaze. Backman Rogers claims that the introduction of Chloe “conforms to the tradition of the female as a still, passive object . . . [intended] to provoke desire in the viewer.”28 And, in his analysis, Todd Kennedy argues that Coppola “asks [the] audience to identify with the gaze of powerless women,” which “sexualizes and objectifies Chloe.”29 It should perhaps be emphasized that although she might look older, as in the high-contrast shots that highlight her makeup, the character of Chloe is a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl. Also, arguing against such readings, one can note the frequency with which we see Chloe from Kate’s point of view. Chloe’s catwalk introduction, for example, is more evocative of a girl’s gaze of fascination rather than a male gaze of desire and objectification, or a so-called powerless women’s gaze. Also, arguably, the issues at stake in Lick the Star do not involve sexuality. As a result, critics whose analyses posit a demeaning and objectifying gaze direct it at Chloe’s appearance and performance of femininity, especially in the introduction sequence. But Chloe’s body is neither objectified nor sexualized, even in her first appearance. Her outfit is simple and hardly revealing: a white-collared shirt with sleeves, a less-than-form-fitting straight, lace skirt that hits her knees, and plain Mary Jane

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flats. Although she has an undeniable glamour, by way of her makeup and confidence, that too does not necessarily conform to a sexually objectifying gaze, since we’re seeing her from Kate’s point of view.30 The suggestion that she is a powerless woman is also confusing since the non-diegetic fragment of the “Tipp City” song seems to be motivated by Kate’s impression of Chloe as confident and powerful. Finally, even when Lick the Star was made, to equate conventional femininity with sexual objectification fails to reflect its third-wave feminist inspirations. In this regard, the Riot Grrrl movement and its contexts are useful for reading Lick the Star and its representation of femininity, girl culture, and the girl gaze. Cultural historians associate the movement with third-wave feminism for its celebration and promotion of sisterhood between teenaged girls and young women, for whom second-wave feminism was, in many ways, remote to their realities. Emerging only a few years before Coppola made Lick the Star, Riot Grrrl was unabashedly political and included outreach to and networking among girls and young women who found camaraderie and self-empowerment in their shared understanding of sexism in its many forms. As self-identified Riot Grrrls found each other and created spaces in which they could freely share their experiences of sexual abuse, rape, and harassment, their stories enabled not only validation of their individual realities but also the recognition that problems like sexual harassment were systemic and affected even middle-school-aged girls.31 Although there is not much in the way of enduring girl solidarity in Chloe’s girl group, Lick the Star reflects the kind of feminist refusal advocated by the Riot Grrrl movement when, for example, Chloe immediately responds to her male schoolmate Greg’s casual skirt-lifting harassment with a swift and severe slap to his face as his friends look on. Then, as Chloe and her girlfriends walk away from the boys, they chant “kill the rats,” which suggests the harassment is routine and might be the impetus for their longer game, to “weaken” the boys by poisoning them. Additional support for the film’s reflection of Riot-Grrrl-style resistance occurs when the exasperated P.E. teacher catches Kate with a cigarette and sends her to the principal’s office. The officious principal (played by the legendary New Hollywood director Peter Bogdanovich) delivers a nonsensical punishment by declaring that Kate will be a “non-student” for the rest of the school year. It is a paradoxical decree, since Kate will continue to attend school but, as he explains, she “will not be able to participate in school activities—sports or school dances.” When he barks, “Do you understand?!,” Kate delivers a deadpan “Sure.” In part, the scene uses comic exaggeration, both in Bogdanovich’s dialed-up performance of self-importance and institutional power and in Kate’s couldn’t-care-less response. And, when Kate tells Chloe and Rebecca about her punishment, Rebecca responds with a wickedly sarcastic, “What a tragedy.” The girls’ shared apathy about the principal’s power is suggestive of Riot Grrrls’ political aims to collectively and individually refuse and ridicule systemic male-based power, harassment, and stupidity. Handyside, too, reads the character of the principal as indicative of the power men use to control girls and boys. As she explains, one can read “the pettiness of his actions as a nod to the ultimately arbitrary nature of social power and rules and the system which gives adult males the right to control the behaviour of those younger or of a different gender.”32 Although Handyside does not reference the Riot

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Grrrl movement’s ethos specifically, she evokes the awareness it encouraged among its adherents. As she puts it: Coppola’s films consciously address the difficult job of growing up female, and attempt to carve out new spaces for the expression of female subjectivity that embraces rather than rejects femininity. The vulnerable, childlike and abject associations of girlhood are not denied, but held in careful counter-balance with forthright examination of its pleasures and possibilities.33 Handyside’s reference to carving out “new spaces” for female subjectivity and embracing femininity is very much like the Riot Grrrl meetings at which girls felt free, often for the first time, to express themselves and to insist that they could define and construct their own femininities.34 Such insistence recalls the Riot Grrrl declaration that “Girl Love Is . . . wearing makeup and tight clothes because we want to.”35 In addition to its third-wave feminist ideology, the Riot Grrrl movement was deeply influenced by punk-rock music and culture.36 For example, the bands Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, whose members started the Riot Grrrl movement, took inspiration from an earlier generation of women performers from the 1980s, like Kim Gordon and Kim Deal, who were both prominent members of independent punk bands and later fronted their own female-led bands. Especially important was Gordon, whose feminist presence in the experimental punk band Sonic Youth made her a touchstone and a source of motivation for other girls and young women to speak up, including the Riot Grrrl originators who formed Bikini Kill. Gordon, whose appearance was often conventionally feminine, also modeled a modern feminism in her cool resistance to sexism in songs like “Kool Thing,” released in 1990, whose anthemic lyrics of refusal are “I don’t wanna, / I don’t think so.” It is not surprising that Lick the Star evokes Riot Grrrl sensibilities and songs from the musicians who inspired them. Coppola came of age during the Riot Grrrl movement’s emergence and as it became a cultural force to be reckoned with in journalism and the popular media. She also was friends with Gordon and appeared in the music video for Sonic Youth’s song, “Mildred Pierce,” in which she enacts a silly and flamboyant version of the character played by movie star stalwart, Joan Crawford. It is also significant, contextually speaking, that songs from Gordon’s band, Free Kitten, are used in Lick the Star, as well as the song from Kim Deal’s band, The Amps, that accompanies Chloe’s entrance. It is worth noting here that despite the Riot Grrrls’ commitment to females and femininity and their objection to defining themselves in relation to boys, men, and masculinity, at least one scholar has read Chloe’s introduction in masculine terms based on the music that’s used. Specifically, by aligning Riot Grrrl created punk rock with masculinity, Tim Anderson asserts that the “Tipp City” song excerpt expresses “an attitude of adolescent yet masculine confidence and bravura” that informs “Chloe’s swagger.”37 However, the tendency to define punk music, and rock music in general, in masculine terms has been challenged not only by Riot Grrrls but also by scholars like Marion Leonard as anachronistic. Leonard argues that critics who claim female punk musicians in the 1990s were “offering masculinity in drag” discount not only decades of women rockers but also those who were specifically committed, like Gordon and Deal,

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to feminism and alternatives to conventional femininity, including in their music.38 Also, to read Chloe’s entrance in masculine terms is to overlook that the song excerpt serves to affirm the character’s decidedly modern girl energy. Coppola’s choice to feature Gordon’s and Deal’s songs also likely resonated with many of the young women who had been Riot Grrrls or who identified with the movement at the time of the film’s release in the late 1990s.39 For example, the inked tattoo-style stars on the girls’ ankles would have been familiar to young women who came of age during the era, including Coppola, as a signifier of Riot Grrrl affiliation. In fact, leaders in the movement encouraged teen girls and young women to code themselves as fellow Riot Grrrl comrades by inking stars and other symbols on their visible skin.40 One film critic characterized Lick the Star as a “deft moral fable” because Chloe’s plan to poison-the-boys leads to her comeuppance.41 But perhaps it is more accurate to characterize it as a fable without a moral. Certainly, Lick the Star is hardly a study of girl solidarity; instead, it is, in part, a meditation on the kind of “stardom” that school hierarchies can enable, if only temporarily.42 And there’s an intriguing ambivalence about the girl culture and characters depicted in the film, along with a refusal to invite easy categorization of the girls, especially Chloe. In many ways, the characters must be reckoned with on far more than simplistic levels. On the one hand, for example, Chloe is often an anti-heroine to whom her friends and schoolmates defer, as when she behaves like a prison yard bully by squirting catsup on a smaller girl’s dress and stealing another’s lunch with Rebecca’s help. But, on the other hand, to her credit, Chloe fights back when Greg harasses her. As a result, Chloe is both a figure of girl self-empowerment in her unwillingness to ignore shameless and perhaps routine harassment, and simultaneously a mean girl who deserves her fate. A further complication is that Chloe does not defy her banishment. She knows the rules. Such an equivocal characterization suggests a resistance on Coppola’s part to providing superficial depictions dependent upon broad stereotypes. Instead, Lick the Star honors the emotional intensity and anxieties, and their significance, for girls in middle school, and does so without judgment. Wyatt offers a persuasive argument about the film’s avoidance of characters who conform to stereotype: The film isn’t a “mean girls” story, but rather a more nuanced view of how power is maintained and dispersed within a female group. In fact, the short confounds expectations as the designation of girls as “good” or “evil” is remarkably fluid, a single girl may occupy either role depending on the circumstances and the moment in junior high school.43 A characteristic, enduring and arguably subversive, yet mostly overlooked, aspect of Coppola’s auteurism concerns the often dry and wry comedy that inflects her work in general, including her music videos, commercials, television shows, and films. Smith deftly observes the tendency to feature “moments of levity, whimsy and absurdist humour” in her work, which is also well realized in Lick the Star.44 Throughout the film (as noted a few times above), there are several comically exaggerated and otherwise amusing moments, much of it visual, which begin with Kate’s mordant “death wish” comment. Although there

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are too many to discuss in detail, it’s worth recalling the principal’s absurd “non-student” edict and Bogdanovich’s histrionic delivery; the girls’ Zero for Conduct–style escape from P.E. class; and Chloe’s casual and audacious cigarette. Likewise, Chloe’s nonsensical alien monologue is both stupid and hilarious, as is the response it elicits. After she claims, “they [aliens] abduct women and they fertilize them . . . when they have a child it’s part alien and the aliens take them away . . . and there’s a whole race that’s part alien . . . and so each time . . . they’ll just become more and more human like,” Sara deadpans: “I don’t know if I can really believe that.” And for low-key snark, Sara and Rebecca’s whispered commentary in class that “she’ll never be a model. I mean, please,” immediately after Chloe’s model-like entrance, and precisely at the moment the girl giving her “What is Beauty” speech says, “I’m going to be a model,” is both savage and funny, and quickly establishes their mean-girl credentials. Especially noteworthy for its ingenious construction and payoff is the bad-girl montage when Chloe and her consiglieres, Sara and Rebecca, make progress on their poison conspiracy that plays, in its entirety, as a rather complex joke—and does so with brilliant economy in only thirty-five seconds. A question from Chloe about which boy will be poisoned first (“Come on you guys, who’s it gonna be?”) leads into the montage proper, which begins with a clever medium shot of Greg, the “Little Mermaid, huh, Chloe” boy, as he warily takes a bite of his lunch sandwich. The shot continues with a swish pan that shows Chloe, Rebecca, and Kate very openly watching that hesitant bite, which plays with the possibility that Greg might soon become “weak” with poison. The montage continues with Sara in the school library doing “top secret” research on arsenic and its antidotes, which is followed by another quick sequence that features some decidedly over-the-top silent-movie-style visual comedy when Sara and Rebecca, “disguised” in sunglasses, rush into the local general store and clumsily steal several giant boxes of rat poison. The non-diegetic song that accompanies the montage complements the visual humor: the song is “Bouwerie Boy,” by Kim Gordon’s punk band Free Kitten. Its frantic rhythm matches the girls’ hurried walk, movements, and gestures but its lyrics have little (or nothing) to do with the on-screen action, except perhaps to convey the girls’ and the sequence’s nervous energy: “Every time you look at me my heart goes thump, it’s a mystery, every time.” The song fragment ends there, mid-lyric and corresponds with the joke’s payoff at the precise moment that the still alive and healthy Greg slams his locker shut. There’s also an enjoyable call-back to the joke later when the purloined boxes of rat poison fall out of Chloe’s “lick the star” graffiti-covered locker. Also witty is the short’s title that works on a couple of levels, from the adoring “lick” of an abstract or literal star, that is, Chloe then Rebecca, to the reverse—their defeat. At the end of the film, the queen’s torch is in Rebecca’s hands, which is confirmed when she mimics one of Chloe’s homophobic slurs by saying, in reference to her alleged suicide attempt, “That’s so gay.” But, more importantly, both Kate’s and Chloe’s girl gazes are juxtaposed in the film’s final sequence. First, as Chloe sits alone on the grass, she’s writing in her journal, which we see from her perspective in a point-of-view shot. The subjectivity of the moment is underscored by Chloe’s voiceover (her only one) as she crafts the often-cited poem that reads, “Everything changes / Nothing changes / The tables turn / And life goes on.” Although it is most definitely trite and, as Backman Rogers

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suggests, “typically melodramatic and adolescent,” her words are also true in practical terms.45 Furthermore, they recall and recontextualize an earlier bit of commentary from Chloe, when she responds to the teacher’s request for her thoughts about her fellow student’s just completed oral essay with the immediate, smiling, and cheeky reply: “I laughed. I cried.” Like her poem, if one were summarizing life in the fewest possible words, that critique would be spot on, existentially speaking. When Chloe completes her verse, she tucks it into a book, which is the biography of another deposed “queen,” Edie Sedgwick.46 Sedgwick experienced her own dramatic fall, after becoming a darling of and star in Andy Warhol’s factory orbit, before being exiled in the mid-1960s. Handyside addresses the relevance of the Sedgwick biography, saying it invites “us to speculate that [Chloe] sees her individual tale of bullying and victimization as part of a wider commentary on American cultural life and its practices.”47 And, although Chloe is alone at the film’s end, as her poem predicts, she will not be destroyed by her ostracism. She will survive. In that regard, the film’s penultimate shot is suggestive: it is a wide-frame composition that immediately follows Chloe’s point-of-view shot and reveals that Kate’s captivation with her continues, as she stands nearby gazing at Chloe. Indeed, the last two shots complete the pattern introduced with its first two: after a medium shot of Kate looking off-screen, the film’s final shot is a long-duration one from her point of view as Chloe walks alone into the distance, as life goes on.

Notes 1 For their discussions of Life Without Zoe, see Justin Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides: Reverie, Sorrow and Young Love (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 23–8; and Anna Backman Rogers, “Great Directors: Coppola, Sofia,” Senses of Cinema, November 2007, http://www​ .sensesofcinema​.com​/2007​/great​-directors​/sofia​-coppola/. 2 See the synopsis from Letterboxd: “Dominique is desperate to play the title role in her husband Jean Claude’s bio-pic ‘No Sunrise for Selena,’ but why won’t Jean Claude cast his voluptuous British bombshell wife as the beloved Tejano pop star? Could it be the influence of his Latina temptress of a maid, Isobelle? Somewhere among big houses and bad shoes, bulimic husbands and waxers with whips is . . . Bed Bath and Beyond.” Of course, this description sounds problematic, especially its reference to a “Latina temptress.” See https:// letterboxd​.com​/film​/bed​-bath​-and​-beyond/. 3 The many critics who have made convincing cases for the homogeneity of Coppola’s nearly all-white casts can find further support for their claims in Lick the Star. Not only is the cast apparently all white, except for Nadine, but Chloe’s casually racist comment about Nadine and the cavalier and cruel way in which her white friends continue to repeat her name in relation to it are problematic, at best. 4 See Cynthia Felando, Discovering Short Films: The History and Style of Live-Action Shorts (London: Palgrave, 2015), 47, 48–9. 5 See Mary Louise Pratt, “The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It,” in The New Short Story Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), 99. 6 See Paul March-Russell, The Short Story: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 120.

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7 Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London: Bloomsbury Academic), 52. 8 See Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 122; and Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides, 17. 9 Quoted in Laurent Rigoulet and Louis Guichard, “Sofia Coppola, auteur de ‘Marie-Antoinette’ Princesse Sofia,” Telerama, May 19, 2006, https://www​.telerama​.fr​/cinema​/14919​-sofia​ _coppola​_auteur​_de​_marie​_antoinette​_princesse​_sofia​.php. 10 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 122–3. 11 Jeff Smith, “Our Lives in Pink: Sofia Coppola as Transmedia Audiovisual Stylist,” in Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers, and Lisa Perrott (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 77. 12 The Amps, “Tipp City,” by Kim Deal, released October 9, 1995, Period Music. 13 Ferriss likewise observes the similarity between the character-introduction sequences in Lick the Star and The Virgin Suicides. See Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 123. 14 As Wyatt notes, Lick the Star’s bathtub scene is echoed in The Virgin Suicides when Cecilia tries, also unsuccessfully, to commit suicide. See Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides, 18. 15 Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides, 18. 16 Backman Rogers, “Great Directors.” 17 See Graham Fuller for his suggestion that the imagery in the bathtub scene recalls John Everett Millais’ painting, “Ophelia,” in “Sofia Coppola’s Second Chance,” The New York Times, April 16, 2000, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2000​/04​/16​/movies​/film​-sofia​-coppola​-s​-second​ -chance​.html. Another writer compares the flowers-and-candle imagery in the sequence to the Vanitas symbols that “bear reminders of fragility and mortality.” See Elise Schumacher, “Lick the Star Isn’t the Feminist Film We Asked For, But It’s the Feminist Film We Have,” MediaFactory​.org​, October 23, 2017, https://www​.mediafactory​.org​.au​/2017​-everyones​-a​ -critic​-studio​/2017​/10​/23​/lick​-the​-star​-isn’t-th​e-fem​inist​-film​-we-a​sked-​for-b​ut-it​s-the​-femi​ nist-​film-​we-ha​ve/. 18 For a discussion of gossip in Lick the Star, see Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 51–2. 19 See Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, “Marie Antoinette: Fashion, Third-Wave Feminism, and Chick Culture,” Literature/Film Quarterly 38 (2010): 107. 20 Backman Rogers, “Great Directors.” 21 Rigoulet and Guichard, “Sofia Coppola, auteur de ‘Marie-Antoinette’ Princesse Sofia.” 22 Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides, 16. 23 Backman Rogers, “Great Directors.” 24 Backman Rogers, “Great Directors”; Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 5–6. 25 Fuller, “Sofia Coppola’s Second Chance.” 26 Scott Tobias, “Interview: Sofia Coppola,” AV Club, May 3, 2000, https://film​.avclub​.com​/sofia​ -coppola​-1798208052. 27 Rigoulet and Guichard, “Sofia Coppola, auteur de ‘Marie-Antoinette’ Princesse Sofia.” 28 Backman Rogers, “Great Directors.” 29 Although Kennedy discusses the film’s attention to Kate’s gaze, the conflation of her gaze with that of “powerless women” is confusing since Kate is a girl. See Todd Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur,” Film Criticism 35, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 44. 30 A curious claim about Chloe is that, at the end of the film, she walks “swiftly away” while “defiantly flaunting her sexualized posterior both at Kate and the audience.” Such a

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“sexualized” reading of the character and shot is, perhaps, the critical projection of a maleoriented gaze and interpretation of a seventh-grade girl whose agency is, by definition, limited. See Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head,” 43. Also see Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides, 18, and the claim that “female sexuality is at the center [of Lick the Star], but uncontained by the male gaze or male desire.” 31 Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), 113. 32 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 168, fn. 53. 33 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 5. 34 Marcus, Girls to the Front, 6–9, 88–93. 35 Cherie Turner, The Riot Grrrl Movement (New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2001), 30–1. 36 See Marion Leonard for her discussion of the Riot Grrrl movement’s identification “with a continuing punk tradition” in Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 124. 37 Tim Anderson, “Lost in Transition: Popular Music, Adolescence, and the Melodramatic Mode of Sofia Coppola,” in Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers after MTV, ed. Arved Ashby (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 69–70. 38 Leonard, Gender in the Music Industry, 97. 39 Marcus, Girls to the Front, 161. 40 Marcus, Girls to the Front, 145–6. 41 Fuller, “Sofia Coppola’s Second Chance.” 42 See Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 21, for her discussion of Lick the Star’s tendency not to “idealise female solidarity.” 43 Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides, 18. 44 Smith, “Our Lives in Pink,” 78, 91. 45 Backman Rogers, “Great Directors.” 46 The biography is Jean Stein, Edie Sedgwick: An American Biography (New York: Knopf, 1981). 47 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 53.

10 TELEVISION REWRITING THE (CHRISTMAS) GENRE: THE LEGACY OF ROBERT ALTMAN IN SOFIA COPPOLA’S A VERY MURRAY CHRISTMAS Todd Kennedy

Released in December 2015, the hour-long A Very Murray Christmas marked Sofia Coppola’s first use of online distribution, first reunion with her most famous lead (Bill Murray), and, arguably, her first full-fledged foray into genre filmmaking.1 Backed by a Netflix budget and platform, the film offered an all-star cast and a marketing campaign that promised an homage to the classic genre of celebrity television holiday specials. While Coppola’s holiday special does, in typical Coppola fashion, have a lot to say about celebrity and spectatorship, the film in many ways works to deconstruct the holiday special at least as much as pay homage to it. In so doing, the special invites parallels between Coppola and the American filmmaker Robert Altman, best known for his repeated toying with genre filmmaking. In particular, it brings to mind A Prairie Home Companion (2006). Just like A Very Murray Christmas, Altman’s final film features a large, ensemble cast as it actively interrogates the production of a genre-based musical special anchored by a celebrity host. More to the point, this comparison offers the opportunity to concretize more abstract connections between the two filmmakers’ styles that seem central to Coppola’s auteurship. Namely, both filmmakers embrace the aesthetics of realism even as their films break verisimilitude and comment on cinema via an active viewer. As such, neither fits into

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a realist tradition, even as both borrow heavily from its aesthetic. This approach is highly distinctive and effective, even though it sounds antithetical on the surface. In short, this chapter uses Robert Altman as a lens to understand what Sofia Coppola has to say about genre, realism, and the deconstruction of both. Both directors’ approaches rest on a dichotomy: they employ a realist aesthetic while actively undercutting authenticity. This might be most succinctly—and most pertinently for this chapter—embodied in the use of place. The third chapter of Fiona Handyside’s Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood, titled “‘There’s No Place Like Home!’ The Exploded Home as Postfeminist Chronotope,” pairs two epigraphs—one from Mikhail Bakhtin and one from Coppola herself—in order to make a point about the use of setting in Coppola’s films. Bakhtin claims, “a definite and absolute concrete locality serves as the starting point for the creative imagination,” and “this is not an abstract landscape” but, rather, “a piece of human history, historical time condensed in space.” Coppola states, “It’s so cool to be in the real places. There’s something that just gets you in the mood. They let us shoot in places people weren’t allowed to normally. . . . They were like, ‘this is your home.’” Pairing the quotes, Handyside observes that “for . . . Bakhtin, place brings together time and space and renders two abstract concepts concrete, an idea pursued by Coppola in her assertion . . . that ‘something’ about shooting in real places is key to her films’ narrative, style, and themes.” This is incredibly cogent, and it applies similarly to Altman, as both directors go to great lengths to make “the influence of space” central to their “spectacular use of location,” which is a focal point of their realist aesthetic.2 More to the point, I would add an important caveat: both directors use the concrete locality to engage in an open and direct conversation about the way in which film itself is a constructed space of abstract thought. Nowhere is this use of setting more clearly foregrounded in either director’s filmography than in A Prairie Home Companion and A Very Murray Christmas. Both films depict, from a behind-the-scenes perspective, a (mostly failed) attempt to construct a celebrity-driven, on-screen performance of a musical show that attempts to recreate and recapture a genre defined by nostalgia, particularly nostalgia for a type of “home” that seems lost in contemporary media. What is most uncanny, however, is the degree to which they both use setting as a means of concretizing the larger aims of their films. In the case of A Prairie Home Companion, Altman abandons the painstakingly authentic, on-location sets that define his filmmaking. While it is set (and shot) at the famous Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, the emphasis constantly remains upon the clearly fake sets. We follow the characters around the space of the theater, making it feel as “real” as any of his other locations, but only in ways that emphasize the artificiality of the set of the on-screen show. It is a set constructed to give the illusion of a romantic imagination of an old-time, country front porch, but the spectator is constantly reminded it is temporary, artificial, and about to be placed in the trash heap by a corporation, removing any future home for the radio show. When, on rare occasions, the on-stage performance succeeds, Altman’s camera wanders backstage, to other conversations, other concerns, treating the performance as background noise. A Very Murray Christmas is also filmed on location, at New York’s Carlyle hotel (particularly Bemelmans bar), a similarly iconic setting that has attracted many other filmmakers, a spot to which Coppola herself returns in On the Rocks

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(2020), and a place, on the surface, similar to her other spectacular locations, such as the Chateau Marmont, Versailles, and Paris Hilton’s private residence. In the space of this film, however, we are constantly reminded that this hotel (the antithesis of a home in its own right), is nothing more than an inauthentic set for Murray’s special, a set in which we are shown empty chairs, lights, booms, cameras, and the artifice of filmmaking. The closest the film comes to achieving a unified, nostalgic performance comes in an over-the-top, too-genre-fulfilling-to-be-believed dream sequence filmed on what we are explicitly told is a “soundstage in Queens.” In short, both films use the artificial construction of space to comment on the very realist aesthetic both directors consistently embrace only to reject across their careers. Coppola and Altman use place in both of these films much as they use realism across their films, as a tool to expose artifice. While the connection between Coppola and Altman has not been directly examined in scholarship, the context already exists for comparing Coppola and filmmakers from the French and American New Wave film movements. Coppola herself has cited Terrence Malick as a direct influence on her films, as well as, obviously, her father. Countless critics, as well as academics such as Handyside and Suzanne Ferriss, have pointed to filmic connections with European filmmakers like Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Chantal Akerman.3 My article “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur” traces how key scenes from Lick the Star (1998), Lost in Translation (2003), and Marie Antoinette (2006) make direct reference to French New Wave films by JeanLuc Godard and François Truffaut in order to “reposition their male aesthetic as wholly feminine—pertaining to female characters, feminine pleasures of consumption, and a filmic point of view that portrays women as dominated by the environment surrounding them.”4 Elsewhere, in the fourth chapter of this collection, I explore how Somewhere (2010) attempts a similar repositioning, via direct references to American films by Mike Nichols and Bob Rafelson. Sharon Lin Tay even labels Coppola “an auteur in the spirit of the American New Wave” whose early films should be viewed as “extended explorations of female spaces” which “reopen [Robert] Kolker’s enquiry into the auteur-led American cinema of loneliness.”5 While the idea of viewing Coppola’s work as an inversion of maledominated 1960s and 1970s auteurship is well established, the Altman comparison is unique in that it comes not via intentional filmic reference, but rather through a shared cinematic vision exhibited across each of their oeuvres. This connection is even more surprising when one considers it is most clearly articulated in a made-for-television Christmas special and a feature-length comedy about a real-life, old-time music radio program. For this very reason Coppola’s and Altman’s relationship to realism, genre, and deconstruction has much farther reaching implications. For context, Altman’s filmic thumbprint is typically embodied by the combination of naturalistic mise-en-scène, large ensemble casts, slow pacing, cinematography marked by long shots that often—like a documentarian’s camera—subtly direct the spectator’s gaze, and overlapping, naturalistic sound that makes spectators feel like they are in the room. Through these strategies, he creates a sense of filmic realism that runs contrary to Hollywood approaches to similar subject matter—such as the gruesomely realistic hospital scenes in his Korean War comedy M*A*S*H (1970) and the primitive, muddy, segregated, immigrant-filled, prostitute-inhabited mountain town in his Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller

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(1971). As Robert Kolker points out, Altman thus “dissociates himself from the closed forms of classical Hollywood storytelling, turning the screen into a wide, shallow space (he uses the 2.35 to 1 anamorphic ratio almost exclusively) filled with objects and people, with movement, with talk and sounds and music woven into casual and loose narratives that create the appearance of spontaneity and improvisation.”6 More than anything, he employs such an approach to create films that directly, and intentionally, invoke classic Hollywood genres, that technically fulfill all the expectations of said genre, only to have the movie really be about something else altogether. For instance, Gosford Park (2001) hits all the stereotypical notes of a murder mystery—foreshadowing of suspects, motives, murder weapons, and so on—only to treat the murder as an afterthought by film’s end, and focus, instead, on the social class distinctions embodied in the complex microcommunity that was a 1930s British country estate. Similarly, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is far more interested in feminist concerns and the threat monopoly capitalism poses to independent businesses than it is in the legacy of loner-heroes played by the likes of John Wayne.7 It is important to note, however, that while Altman uses realism to begin his deconstruction of genre, it is never his goal; in fact, to call his films “realistic” would often seem a stretch altogether. While he draws on realism as an aesthetic, he is uninterested in joining any of the cinematic realist traditions exemplified by directors as diverse as Vittorio de Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Jean Renoir, or even Richard Linklater. Similar to Sofia Coppola, Altman actively wants his spectators to never forget they are watching a movie. For example, in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Altman does go to painstaking lengths to have a realistic-looking Western boomtown slowly grow around the characters, who are themselves cast to give a more authentic depiction of those who would have been living in the American West, and he captures his characters through the aforementioned naturalistic cinematography and sound, choices antithetical to the typical Western. We, as spectators, know how the space and the layout of the town works, and we struggle to understand words spoken in loud barrooms, or even to figure out which is the important conversation we are supposed to be listening to. But, while that may seem more akin to the historic West than a Hollywood Western, it requires an incredibly active viewer to make any sense of what is happening. The struggle with sound alone is profound enough to make spectators fully aware of their own spectatorship. In short, to reiterate Kolker’s point, Altman’s style simply strives to achieve an “appearance” of verisimilitude, an appearance that he wants his spectator to be actively aware of in order to strengthen his deconstruction of genre. And for this reason, he has no problem breaking realistic plot points, such as the entirely nude runway show that serves as metaphor at the end of Prêt-à-Porter (1994) or the multiple, improbable plot twists found throughout films like M*A*S*H, Nashville (1975), and Dr. T & the Women (2000). Altman’s willingness to actively abandon his own attempts at realism extends well beyond plot. Rather than let the film delve fully into documentary-like realism, Altman will sometimes use his camera to awkwardly and jarringly zoom in on the focus of the shot, as in several scenes in M*A*S*H where just as the spectator adjusts to a wide shot of confusion and disorder in the hospital tent, the camera instantly (and too quickly) zooms

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into a close-up of blood and gore. Additionally, again like Coppola, Altman routinely resorts to intentionally heavy-handed shots that match and invoke other, well-known filmic images, in Altman’s case, usually stereotypical shots from the genres he wants to deconstruct. In McCabe, for instance, he uses a low-to-the-ground camera below and behind the protagonist, his hand on his gun as he meets a lone rider come to town, a shot stolen from countless Westerns. The scene is defused when it turns out it is just a young cowboy looking for a brothel, and the final shootout undercuts such filmic, high-noon shootouts as a scared McCabe hides around town, shooting enemies in the back. But such allusions to Hollywood Westerns draw spectators’ attention to how Altman’s film inverts filmic tradition, and therefore to the fact they are indeed watching a film. Similarly, in M*A*S*H, the scene in which the women’s shower tent is intentionally dropped to expose a fully nude Hot Lips Houlihan, positions the spectator with an audience of onlookers that foregrounds the filmic spectator’s participation in a sexualized, male gaze.8 Of particular interest to this chapter, Altman’s chosen genre in A Prairie Home Companion, a filmic adaptation of the final recording of a themed radio hour of old-time music, shares much in common with Coppola’s relationship to the Christmas genre. Altman’s genre is no less prescriptive and no less linked to nostalgia for it is a narrative associated with romanticized imaginations of home. Altman’s roving camera makes the spectator constantly aware that the front porch that serves as the show’s set is a façade on a theater stage, and his tendency to abandon the most pleasing on-stage performances emphasizes the narrative’s artificiality. But Altman’s deconstruction of a nostalgic genre reaches further. For all his efforts to provide a realism of space and sound, we are guided around the theater by a comically fake screen surrogate, the theater’s chief of security, Guy Noir (Kevin Kline), played as a parody of the film noir genre. The few scenes set outside the theater, shot on the street and/or in Mickey’s Dining Car, are depicted in deep sepia tones which, again, emphasize nostalgia and artificiality. The film opens with a shot of radio towers and a soundtrack switching, without hesitation, from channel to channel, emphasizing the finite nature of narrative, an idea reinforced by the film’s plot—in which a corporate executive is en route to cancel the show. Any characters who express nostalgia for the show’s demise are openly mocked by other characters for thinking anything will (or can) last. The backstage death of one of the show’s stars is played for laughs, culminating in jokes about how his body keeps passing gas. Altman even goes so far as to metaphorically manifest death in the character of a nameless woman, who, claiming to be an angel, orchestrates the death of the corporate executive (not in time to save the show) and eventually, at film’s end, returns to take another soul, walking directly at the spectator in a point-of-view shot. The only exception to Altman’s avoidance of showing a complete on-stage performance comes in the final, genre-traditional, group sing-along, which takes a happy-toned approach to death via the traditional jazz-funeral standard “In the Sweet By-and-By.” This scene, however, occurs outside of the film’s diegetic narrative structure, after story’s end, with the music continuing even after the performers leave the stage and the screen fades to black. Essentially, Altman is willing to accept nostalgia as beautiful and hopeful, but only so long as we all accept that it is, in fact, nostalgia, that it is performative, that it is, in reality, just

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another aesthetic used in a genre film that is really “about” something else altogether, in this case death and the death of narrative.9 Although Coppola’s relationship to cinematic realism obviously manifests itself differently than Altman’s, and typically is invoked for quite different aims, the tension between embracing the aesthetics of realism and undercutting cinema as a realist endeavor is central to much of her filmography (and, I would argue, is partially responsible for the divisive reactions to her films from critics who, at times, are confounded by their inability to pigeonhole her).10 Coppola utilizes an unobtrusive, documentary-like camera that, like Altman’s, slowly guides the spectator’s focus. Her pacing is notoriously slow, allowing things to play out, seemingly, in real time. For example, there are entire scenes in Somewhere where nothing happens other than Johnny smoking a cigarette. Meanwhile, as I discussed at the beginning of this chapter, she is invested not just in shooting on location, but in using that location to provide a sense of authenticity and comfort to her spectator. Her attention to detail in terms of mise-en-scène and costuming are iconic and demonstrate a keen interest in recreating spaces that feel, look, and evoke a sense of authenticity related to the periods in which her films are set. In short, the very aesthetic that some of her harshest critics are troubled by—her “languid” pace and camera, her “overly subtle” style11—is a realist aesthetic, but a realist aesthetic that is tough for those critics to quantify because it does not represent nor define her goals. It is an aesthetic she uses as tool. As with Altman, her willingness to break her own realist aesthetic is present across all aspects of her filmmaking. For instance, while Coppola’s mise-en-scène evokes a sense of time and place of setting, her films use a non-naturalistic color palate, as in the use of pastels in The Virgin Suicides (1999). Often, her cinematography choices are intentionally obtrusive, meant to match and invoke a cinematic imagination of a specific time period rather than to make the spectator forget they are watching a movie—think of The Virgin Suicides’ use of bleach-bypassed 35mm to evoke films from the 1970s, The Bling Ring’s use of digital to capture the spirit of the social media generation, or Lick the Star’s use of black and white to emphasize her inversion of Truffaut’s Les 400 coups. In at least three of Coppola’s early films—Lick the Star, The Virgin Suicides, and Marie Antoinette—a young, sexualized protagonist pointedly breaks the fourth wall and confidently returns the spectator’s objectifying gaze in a manner that defies verisimilitude. Similarly, Coppola does not hesitate to utilize a jarring, x-ray iris shot through one of the Lisbon girls’ dresses to show her boyfriend’s name written on her panties. Nor is Coppola dedicated to realism when, in Marie Antoinette, she inserts a pair of Converse All-Stars into a shot and uses a post-punk soundtrack for a film set in the eighteenth century—a soundtrack that, at one point, becomes diegetic as French nobles dance in time to Siouxsie and the Banshees. As I have already discussed, many of her shots directly reference and invoke iconic images from film (as well as painted art and the history of fashion) in order to control her spectator’s relationship to these films, such as the shots in The Beguiled (2017) that are informed by Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).12 Even Somewhere, the film in which Coppola seems most thoroughly dedicated to a realist aesthetic, is bookended by a non-diegetic opening scene in which Johnny inexplicably drives in circles, getting nowhere, and an illogical

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concluding sequence in which he drives toward the horizon, runs out of gas, and starts walking. As I have argued, the scenes “do not make logical sense within the narrative” but, instead, can “best be understood as a parable—a parable made richer because it is an allusion to . . . literary and filmic traditions and images.”13 This relationship between Coppola’s employment of a realist aesthetic and her interest in exposing the artifice of filmic realism is essential to any understanding of A Very Murray Christmas’ relationship with the Christmas genre, a genre that is one of the most prescriptive, performative, and nostalgia-driven in all of media. While the genre began to establish its boundaries with the film White Christmas (1954), it was most firmly defined in the form of television specials, beginning in the 1950s and peaking in the 1970s, hosted by a range of celebrities, such as Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, Cher, John Denver, Julie Andrews, Johnny Cash, and many more. For a time, it seemed like every celebrity, particularly every musical celebrity, had one. Mostly, they follow a precise formula with little variation: one-hour specials in which a celebrity hangs out at their “home” (almost always an obvious movie set), where they are visited by a series of celebrity guests who stop by to hold a mug with a spiked beverage (from which they rarely sip), talk about (and promote) their most recent projects, and eventually sing a traditional Christmas song, potentially as a duet with the host. The specials proceed with a thin veneer of verisimilitude in terms of plot, and almost always devolve, at some point, into a pitch-perfect group sing-along featuring all the guests. In some cases, they are joined by highly costumed, professional dancers, as in the 1976 Donny & Marie Osmond Christmas Special, which opens with the Rockettes dressed in sexy-Santa costumes performing choreographed leg kicks as they skate across an obviously fake pond next to the Osmond’s obviously fake cabin. Other times, the specials completely, and abruptly, abandon plot altogether in order to embrace the aesthetics of other nostalgic Christmas images, such as the 1972 Sonny & Cher Christmas Show, where Cher steps out of the couple’s supposed living room and onto a street straight out of a Dickens-inspired play. Cher puts her hands in a muff and sings “O Holy Night” as fake snow descends on both her and fifty Victorianclad back-up singers.14 In short, the genre is defined by attempts to reinforce a sense of holiday nostalgia, linked to harmonious performativity, and centered around an idyllic sense of “home” that the spectator knows to be inauthentic, even as the show insists it is not. Meanwhile, this formula is almost never altered or questioned in the most corporate and sacred of genres.15 The holiday genre Coppola wishes to deconstruct thus shares uncanny similarities to the genre Altman deconstructs in A Prairie Home Companion: a nostalgia-driven spectacle centered around a romanticized construction of an idea of “home.” A Very Murray Christmas directly invokes the formula for 1970s television Christmas specials as its celebrity host (Murray) is surrounded by a host of celebrity guests, including Paul Shaffer, George Clooney, Chris Rock, Jason Schwartzman, Rashida Jones, and Miley Cyrus, among others, most of whom, playing themselves, join Murray in song. Unlike the 1970s specials, however, Coppola frames this as inside of a special-within-a-special, thus, like A Prairie Home Companion, forefronting performativity. More to the point, Murray, a non-singer, seems comically out of place singing, and the entire show-within-a-show falls apart when, first, none of the planned guests show up owing to a blizzard, and then, the

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electricity goes out. Coppola also breaks precedent in avoiding nostalgic, pretty Christmas songs, rejecting the spectator’s desires with mostly out-of-tune performances played for humor. The only exceptions—moments when we get memorably “pretty” songs—happen (1) in a dream sequence that works within the tradition of travesty, (2) a nontraditional, punk Christmas song that suddenly sounds “pretty” and loses its most punk verse, and (3) an original Christmas song, performed by chefs at the drop of a hat, that is not actually about Christmas at all. In typical Coppola fashion, the results left critics divided, with reactions ranging from “droll,” to “indulgent,” to “beautiful and haunting and commercial and cringe-worthy” as it “takes the traditional cliches of the Celebrity-Driven Christmas Extravaganza . . . and makes Murray of it.”16 Ted Pigeon, writing for Slant, was more ebullient, and, arguably, more insightful, claiming the special “addresses a fundamentally deeper range of feeling than most Christmas specials” as it “doesn’t so much expose the Christmas season itself as fraudulent as it shines a light on the heightened sense of personal despair associated with the season that the manufactured holiday songs and television specials strategically ignore.”17 Almost nothing about Murray’s special-within-a-special goes as strategized. Coppola’s film opens with Murray, wearing a ridiculous pair of antlers, singing a blues song about sadness at the holidays, and hiding in his hotel room from producers who want to make him fulfill his contract even though none of his guests can make it through the blizzard. Forced downstairs, Murray discovers a set littered with empty chairs “reserved” for absent celebrities, comically ranging from Iggy Azalea to Pope Francis. Coppola’s camera briefly merges with that of the special-within-a-special, showing a sparkly title shot highly evocative of 1970s Christmas specials (see Figure 10.1), before pulling back to the producers’ attempts to convince Murray they can create a “Christmas miracle” by cutting from live-shots of Murray on stage to pre-taped reaction shots of his “guests.” Murray

Figure 10.1  A Very Murray Christmas, directed by Sofia Coppola © Netflix 2015.

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points out the shots “won’t match” because they are “clearly from last year’s Golden Globes,” but the producers simply reply, “what does it have to match? It’s all just fantasy, right? We are the weaver of dreams, the makers of merry. It’s all just an illusion.” The artificiality of production brought to the forefront, Murray stumbles through a couple of cringe-worthy starts to his show, including a comically emotionless (and out-of-tune) duet of “Little Drummer Boy” with Chris Rock, whom he literally drags on stage against his will after a chance encounter in the lobby. Evocative of the infamous (and pitch-perfect) Bing Crosby-David Bowie duet of the same song in Crosby’s 1977 special (also performed leaning against a piano), the song, and the entire special, comes to a halt when the entire city loses power, Rock runs for the exit under the cover of darkness, and the producers gleefully flee, asserting insurance has “saved” them. What comes next, a twenty-five-minute sequence set in Bemelmans bar, serves as the heart of Coppola’s special. Wedged between two sequences which foreground artifice and performativity, the failure of the special-within-a-special and the over-the-top dream sequence that ends the film, the bar sequence marks a return to Coppola’s typical, realist aesthetic, in terms of camera, pacing, and dialogue. It is also the section in which she comes closest to embracing the structure of a traditional special, albeit by replacing the fake, television idea of home with an empty hotel bar filled by misfits with nowhere to go for the holidays. The bulk of Coppola’s celebrity guest list appears, as characters huddle for the warmth and light provided by the bar’s generator and sing songs at Murray’s direction. As Suzanne Ferriss claims, “each plays a stock character, underscoring the artifice of the device, which is heightened since the audience recognizes the stars are playing at playing roles.”18 But even as Coppola’s use of celebrity highlights artifice, the plot and songs work toward a very real, emotional understanding about connectivity, lack thereof, and the loneliness caused by that lack—atypical subject matter for a Christmas special. These themes are evident in the extant relationships between almost every character in the bar. As such, Coppola manages an Altman-like achievement as she dutifully fulfills all the requirements of genre only to make her film about something else altogether. Coppola explicitly draws her spectator’s attention to the ways in which the sequence matches and defies genre via her selection of songs, which emphasize the themes of connection or lack thereof far more than Christmas, and, eventually, mark the progression of Murray’s attempts to reunite a young couple (Jones and Schwartzman) whose wedding has been wrecked by the blizzard. Early in the sequence, surrounded by a gorgeous display of food and champagne, matching the image of countless Christmas specials before it, Murray declares, “something is missing. We have food, booze, attractive people. We need Christmas music.” Having explicitly invoked the requirements of the genre, embodied both by what is in the shot and what is “missing,” Murray cajoles three successive people to “dig deep” to their “infancy” to find an appropriate carol. Each attempts a super-traditional carol from the Old World: “12 Days of Christmas,” “O, Tannenbaum,” and “Good King Wenceslas.” Murray cuts off and rejects each offering before the conclusion of the first verse. Instead, in this section of the special, we are only offered songs set at Christmas but not actually about Christmas: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” “Alone on Christmas Day,” “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” “Fairytale of New York,” and, inexplicably, a

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rousing, ensemble performance of Todd Rundgren’s 1972 pop hit “I Saw the Light,” a song not linked to Christmas in any way, shape, or form. All these songs are about connection (or lack thereof), and the performances work to create feelings of community and authenticity that build throughout the section, even as Coppola rejects the pitch-perfect, highly performative versions the spectator has grown up with. In particular, the song Murray settles upon at the end of the auditions, “Alone on Christmas Day,” steps far away from Christmas themes and turns, instead, to the dominant themes of Coppola’s fourth feature film, Somewhere. In over-the-top fashion even for a Christmas special, the chefs (played by the rock band Phoenix) orchestrate, play, and sing, in Murray’s words, “a song that nobody knows.” They do so without notice, on the spot, using instruments they “find” amidst the buffet. The song’s lyrics embody the trope of the hobo-hero. Dogged by “sad” memories, physically separated from a lover, the speaker is repeatedly told “all you can do is keep moving on,” as perpetual motion across space, alone, is seen as the only remedy to the modern condition.19 Immediately after this invocation of the hobo-hero, Murray pointedly tells the groom to “listen” to “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” a song about how happiness depends upon reunion with one’s lover. Murray next orchestrates a group sing-along of “I Saw the Light,” a song about the inability to avoid being with the one you love—which serves, within the plot, to reconcile the young couple. The sequence concludes with the most complete (and successful) group sing-along, “Fairytale of New York,” which emphasizes the nuanced and intrinsic changes in relationships over time. In short, the progression of songs matches the progression of the couple’s relationship, and this sequence achieves the warmth and community embodied in the genre precisely because it focuses on larger concerns not limited to the holidays. Having contrasted performativity with semi-realism, A Very Murray Christmas devolves into an over-the-top dream sequence that embraces travesty. Travesty, as defined by Pam Cook, “irreverently wrests its source material from its historical context, producing blatantly fake fabrications that challenge accepted notions of authenticity and value” as it “collapses boundaries of time and place through pastiche” in order to “demonstrate that the past is always viewed through the filter of the present, and represents the vested interests of those who reinvent it.”20 At the end of the last sing-along in Bemelmans, Murray drinks yet another alcoholic beverage and passes out next to Shaffer’s piano. He wakes atop a snow-white piano, played by an all-white clad Shaffer, on an all-white set replete with Christmas trees (with white lights), a band, backup singers, and the Rockettes. Murray is immediately joined by George Clooney and Miley Cyrus—two celebrities whose absence had been pointedly referenced earlier in the special— pulled on set in a sleigh by Rockettes wearing antlers. Clooney makes martinis atop the piano, Cyrus and Murray duet twice, Cyrus performs a haunting version of “Silent Night,” the Rockettes kick and dance, and (obviously) fake snow falls from the ceiling. This section of A Very Murray Christmas thus unabashedly embraces the aesthetic of the genre in a brazen manner meant to draw attention to itself. Coppola, it seems, is only comfortable embracing this aesthetic once it has been established as just that, an aesthetic—and only after the audience has been asked to experience other emotions not linked to nostalgia at all. At one point, as Murray and Clooney leave the stage to let

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Cyrus perform, Murray proclaims, “Gosh it’s beautiful, isn’t it?” to which Clooney replies, “Yeah, for a soundstage in Queens.” Coppola thus offers a “blatantly fake” sequence that simultaneously fulfills the spectator’s desire for nostalgia and draws attention to the artificiality inherent in both the genre and film form itself. Coppola wants her spectator aware that it is, as always, her interests, her nostalgia that drive the film—and that this is true of every filmmaker. That knowledge, that it is her perspective, her sense of realism, is fundamental to the final two minutes of Coppola’s special. As the obviously fake snow falls from the soundstage ceiling, it slowly morphs, via graphic montage, into powdered sugar falling upon Murray’s pancakes, as his assistant wakes him in his hotel room for Christmas breakfast. The film returns to Coppola’s trademark realist aesthetic, with a slow-moving camera and a shockingly quiet (in contrast to the dream sequence) naturalistic sound. Murray sings a heartfelt, out of tune, single-verse rendition of “We Wish you a Merry Christmas” to Shaffer and his assistant, and then walks to the window and says, “Merry Christmas, everyone.” Yet, even as Coppola returns to a sense of realism, she openly invokes not Christmas memories, but, rather, memories of her own filmic images. The final shots of the film, the shots in which we stare over Murray’s shoulder out the hotel windows at a snow-blanketed New York below, almost exactly mirror Coppola’s iconic shots of Scarlett Johansson staring at Tokyo in Lost in Translation, itself Coppola’s most famous film. The film therefore ends with a note of simplicity and authenticity— of emotion, connection, and holiday spirit—as Murray (and Coppola) wish spectators a “Merry Christmas.” But it is an authenticity and connection achieved with a mutual awareness that it is built upon genre and performativity. Much like the end of Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, where the angel walks directly at the spectator, essentially breaking the fourth wall and reminding the spectator that they too will one day die, Coppola achieves an illusion of intimacy between filmmaker and spectator precisely by bringing the artifice of film form to the forefront. Thus, in the end, it may be the genre-prescribed sing-alongs—Altman’s “In the Sweet By-and-By” and Coppola’s “Fairytale of New York”—that best embody these two filmmakers’ use of (and attraction to) genre, nostalgia, and realism. Coming at the end of the Bemelmans’ section, after the couple is reunited, the entire barroom joins in a rendition of the Irish punk band The Pogues’ famous song. In its original form, the song is a duet about a couple’s shared nostalgia, even as it imagines that nostalgia as nuanced, incomplete, at times negative, and always difficult to quantify. The performance in Coppola’s film skips the verse with the harshest lyrics, and the cast achieves one of the most ear-pleasing, harmonious, and pointedly un-punk performances of the entire special. Much like the cast of the sing-along at the end of A Prairie Home Companion, the cast of Coppola’s special stands in a line, arm in arm, smiling and sharing lead vocals, thus alternating perspectives (see Figures 10.2 and 10.3). Within the narrative of both films, the characters have achieved a sense of home and connection, while the directors achieve Kolker’s “appearance of spontaneity and improvisation.” Neither Altman nor Coppola attempt to thwart this feeling of wholeness. In fact, both embrace it. But they embrace such pleasure-in-filmic-genre only through approaches that have made it abundantly clear that it is, in fact, an appearance, an

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Figure 10.2  A Prairie Home Companion, directed by Robert Altman © New Line Cinema 2006.

Figure 10.3  A Very Murray Christmas, directed by Sofia Coppola © Netflix 2015.

illusion constructed to match desires forged by film history, film form, and film genre. In each of these sing-alongs, in each film, the camera remains in motion, the song’s perspective shifting, the sound naturalistic. Both directors embrace the aesthetic of realism, using place (and genre) to, as Bakhtin claims, “render two abstract concepts concrete,” but they do so within a context that serves as a treatise on the fact that film is, itself, an abstract form.

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Notes 1 I am not implying that most of Coppola’s films do not interact with genre. In particular, Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette play with winter-spring romance and historical biopic genres in ways pertinent to my comparison of Coppola and Altman. What I mean to imply is that A Very Murray Christmas represents her first, full endeavor within the bounds of a prescriptive genre. Arguably, On the Rocks (2020) is the next time she fully engages in genre filmmaking, which is ironic considering it marks her reunion with Bill Murray and Rashida Jones. 2 Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London: I.B. Taurus, 2017), 96–7. 3 Rickie Carrie, “Lost and Found,” Directors Guild of America Quarterly (Spring 2013), https:// www​.dga​.org​/Craft​/DGAQ​/All​-Articles​/1302​-Spring​-2013​/Sofia​-Coppola​.aspx. 4 Todd Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur,” Film Criticism 35, no. 1 (2010): 40. 5 Sharon Lin Tay, Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 126–7. 6 Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 273. 7 Similar comments could be made for the relationship between film noir and The Long Goodbye (1973), crime/heist films and Thieves Like Us (1974), comic book movies and Popeye (1980), and so on. 8 Not only does the camera position the spectator with the group of spectators, but it uses diegetic sound—a guitar playing anticipatively and a trash lid used as a cymbal for climax—to emphasize the performativity of the “prank,” as well as our own complicit participation in a Mulvey-like gaze. This scene therefore shares similarities with anti-gaze tactics deployed in Coppola’s early films. 9 It is worth noting that not only is this Altman’s final film, but, due to his deteriorating health, he knew it was likely to be his final film while making it. Thus, the film serves as a treatise on death, narrative, and the finite nature of artistic production. 10 For a thorough exploration of the divisive and polarized reactions to Coppola’s filmmaking, as well as the gendered implications therein, see my article “‘Off with Hollywood’s Head’ and Belinda Smaill, ‘Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director,’” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 148–62. 11 Peter Brunette, “Sofia Coppola’s Overly Subtle Lost in Translation,” IndieWire, September 17, 2003, https://www​.indiewire​.com​/2003​/09​/sofia​-coppolas​-overly​-subtle​-lost​-in​-translation​ -79460/. 12 Such direct references to dominant images from media culture are widely documented. In particular, I recommend Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). 13 Todd Kennedy, “On the Road to ‘Some’ Place: Sofia Coppola’s Dissident Modernism Amidst a Postmodern Landscape,” Miscelenea 52 (2015): 64. 14 It is worth noting that this scene apparently had a profound impact on Paul Shaffer, who co-stars, produces, and serves as musical director for A Very Murray Christmas. Shaffer recounted his memories of this scene almost every Christmas on The Late Show with David Letterman. 15 One of the few examples of a celebrity Christmas special deviating from this structure is Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations Christmas Special (2011). Featuring Christopher Walken,

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Norah Jones, and Samantha Brown, the episode invokes traditional specials largely to make light of Christmas nostalgia. 16 Brian Tallerico, “A Very Murray Christmas Nails Its Target Audience,” RogerEbert​.co​m, December 2, 2015, https://www​.rogerebert​.com​/streaming​/netflixs​-a​-very​-murray​-christmas​ -nails​-its​-target​-audience; Josh Bell, “Bill Murray Croons and Swoozes in A Very Murray Christmas,” Las Vegas Weekly, December 2, 2015, https://lasvegasweekly​.com​/ae​/film​ /2015​/dec​/02​/bill​-murray​-croons​-and​-schmoozes​-in​-a​-very​-murray/; and Megan Garber, “A Very Murray Christmas Captures the Spirit of the Season,” The Atlantic, December 4, 2015, https://www​.theatlantic​.com​/entertainment​/archive​/2015​/12​/bill​-murray​-netflix​-a​-very​-murray​ -christmas​-sofia​-coppola​/418791/. 17 Ted Pigeon, “Review: A Very Murray Christmas,” Slant, November 25, 2015, https://www​ .slantmagazine​.com​/tv​/a​-very​-murray​-christmas/. 18 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 258. 19 For a full explanation of the hobo-hero and Coppola’s use of it, see my article “On the Road to ‘Some’ Place.” 20 Pam Cook, “Portrait of a Lady,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 11 (November 2006): 38.

11 ADVERTISING FASHION CAMPAIGNS: SOFIA COPPOLA’S “MINI-FILMS” Caryn Simonson

Sofia Coppola’s fascination with fashion—from clothes and design to lifestyles and consumption—is evident in her early career as an intern at Chanel, as a model, as a cofounder and designer of the MilkFed brand, and as Marc Jacobs’ “muse,” well before her incorporation of fashion in her cinematic films. It is not surprising, then, that she has been invited to collaborate with fashion brands and produced a growing body of work that takes its form as fashion film. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of Coppola’s work beyond cinema, specifically her commercial work through fashion “mini-films.” Coppola’s agility as a filmmaker, designer, photographer, muse, and model is an expression of interdisciplinarity, demonstrating creativity’s plurality and richness. Her use of a range of platforms, digital and cinematic, through which to express her ideas and values, and to make meaning, continues to grow. It embraces changes in marketing tools, audience, and consumer mindsets that demand a “closer” relationship to brands and a more experiential encounter.

The Fashion “Mini-Film” The fashion “mini-film” or “fashion film” has become a vehicle for fashion brands to expand their advertising campaigns beyond still images and editorials. In his book of the same name, Nick Rees-Roberts defines the “fashion film” as including all that encompasses this connection, from cinematic films that emphasize fashion to films about fashion and the industry (mostly spotlighting the careers and lives of well-known designers working within a Eurocentric fashion context). However, he rightly notes Marketa Uhlirova’s caution

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against conflating these very diverse vehicles representing fashion and fashion worlds and the need to differentiate.1 For this reason, I prefer the term “fashion mini-film” to distinguish short, commercial films from other fashion films of longer duration or for noncommercial purposes. Storytelling has become fashion’s way of luring the consumer into a deeper focus on the “fantasy” of fashion’s “worlds” that represent a desired lifestyle and brand signature, to draw the viewer into the secret world of the behind-the-scenes activity, encouraging the consumer to feel part of the representation.2 Collaborations between film, fashion, and advertising are not new but collaboration has taken on a new purpose, becoming the indispensable marketing exercise of the twenty-first century, enabling brands to align themselves with others who they feel either share their brand’s values or who can invigorate a brand’s identity to attract new audiences or add value through kinship. Coppola’s work and Coppola herself as image form a brand identity, making her the filmmaker of choice for fashion designers from Marc Jacobs to Chanel. Coppola created her first fashion “mini-films” following the release of her first three feature films—The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), and Marie Antoinette (2006)—all for perfumes marketed to young women. In 2008, “Moi Je Joue,” a commercial for Miss Dior Chérie perfume filmed by Harris Savides, who would later work with Coppola on Somewhere (2010) and The Bling Ring (2013), premiered during an episode of the popular television series Gossip Girl. Subsequent mini-films for perfume appeared in succession: another for Miss Dior Chérie (“City of Light”) in 2010, “La Vie en Rose” for Miss Dior Blooming Bouquet in 2013, and two for Marc Jacobs’ Daisy line (in 2013–14). This initial commercial work clearly established links between her cinematic brand and the fashion brands. The signature visual motifs that recur time and time again in her cinema also appear in her mini-films: shots of nature, looking up at the sky through trees, rays of sunlight, lens flares, characters laying on their backs shot from above—in bed, on a football pitch, on fields of long grass—swimming pools, sunglasses, driving, lingering looks, dreaminess. She rolls these motifs over into her commercial work as if without these it wouldn’t be a Coppola work, thus creating her own commercial brand. The advertisements for Miss Dior Chérie (2008) and Marc Jacobs’ Daisy perfume line deliberately employ her signature cinematic style. Her advertising for Daisy perfume, as Justin Wyatt has argued, “fits directly into the [Virgin Suicides] world,” with the commercial’s blonde models substituting for the Lisbon sisters.3 They echo the visual aesthetics of Coppola’s early films—lens flares, close-ups—with girls dancing through fields of grass on dreamy, lazy, hazy sunny summer days, carefree as if there is nothing else in the world to worry about. As such, the commercials equally allude to the nature scenes in Marie Antoinette, as Suzanne Ferriss notes.4 The repetition of the word “daisy,” as in “daisy, daisy, daisy” spoken by the girls, emphasizes how language, flowers, and their associations reinforce stereotypes of femininity. As Ferriss describes, The ads for Dior and Marc Jacobs marshal Coppola’s film aesthetic and its ties to a nostalgic, romanticized image of youthful femininity created by marketers in the 1970s to sell perfume to young women. The product names—Miss Dior and Daisy—

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broadcast their demographic, making their allusions to The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette, with their girls-in-transition protagonists, apt.5 Subsequently, Coppola crafted mini-films for clothing and jewelry, and the allusions to the director’s cinema are less overt (though Wyatt contends her 2012 spot for H&M’s Marni collection “transports the fantasy road trip from [The Virgin] Suicides to the town of Marrakesh”6). A series of four holiday commercials for Gap (2014) appeared before the release of a Christmas special for Netflix, perhaps suggesting they were exercises or experiments in genre filmmaking. The others—a campaign for Calvin Klein underwear filmed in black and white (2017) and a mini-film for the rerelease of Cartier’s Panthère watch (2017)—equally demonstrate Coppola’s facility in emulating commercial and cinematic conventions. She admitted the Calvin Klein ads took their cue from “the old Avedon commercials with Andie MacDowell [and] the ’90s images of Kate Moss” and the Cartier spot, as Ferriss details, alludes directly to American Gigolo (1980), presaging the shift in point of view she would undertake in The Beguiled (2017).7 Nonetheless, if Coppola’s later commercial work is not as directly related in terms of visual style to her features, there are commonalities that link her mini-films to her directorial brand. For instance, most display the director’s lauded use of popular music—from using Brigitte Bardot’s “Moi Je Joue” and “Je t’aime . . . moi non plus” by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin for Dior to Bryan Ferry’s “Avalon” for Marni and Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” for Cartier. This extends to her mini-films for Chanel. “In Homage to Mademoiselle” (2019), for instance, is edited to Grimes’ “Oblivion” and the mini-film she cocreated with her brother Roman for the Chanel 19 bag (2020) is set to the remastered 2015 version of “The Village” by New Order. Her commercial work is also linked positionally, if not stylistically, to her features. In an interview for BBC Four, Edith Bowman invited Coppola to talk about her most inspiring films and her most recent film On the Rocks (2020). Coppola describes her own work as putting “women center stage,” which can be used to describe most of the films she selects in the interview for the series Life Cinematic.8 This is also played out in her fashion advertising work. In what follows, I analyze Coppola’s work for Chanel to show how the director participates in the fashion-film collaboration characteristic of the contemporary moment through her ambition to celebrate “woman” through her representations. What is the “woman” that Coppola depicts in her fashion advertising and how does this amplify her oeuvre? What are the consequences for Chanel’s brand—and Coppola’s? And what are the limitations?

Becoming “Woman,” Becoming Coppola, Becoming Chanel “In Homage to Mademoiselle” was made for the Mademoiselle Privé exhibition in Tokyo, the fifth exhibition venue after it toured to London, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. The film is bookended by the opening of a door at the start and the closing of a door at the

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end. As an insider and long-standing “Friend of the House,” Coppola leads the viewer through a door that Catherine Deneuve invites them into at the beginning, before closing it behind her. In this way, the viewer is set up to appear privileged to be invited in and to cross the threshold of the door to the Chanel atelier. Deneuve appears in front of the doorway, close-up and intimate (see Figure 11.1). Archive footage of the actor, the “face” of Chanel in the late 1970s, sets the opening tone: she says, “It’s a woman’s prerogative to be contrary, to not always be co-operating.” The statement presents the Chanel woman as strong, one who “knows her mind.” Her statements on “woman” feel like a response, an affirmation in defiance of—whom? Who is her audience? There is no doubt this viewer is female and, like Coppola’s “woman,” is likely to be white and privileged. It is an exclusive world that defines who is let in through this door and who is not by virtue of the absence of difference. Only those who belong to this club gain entry. As for most luxury brands— including Coppola’s—this world of exclusivity is heightened by the choice of the seemingly open and subsequently closed doors.9 “In Homage to Mademoiselle” ends with a shot of a door closing (see Figure 11.2), reminding us that the consumer has had an exclusive, private view through the glimpses behind the door, playing to the current preoccupation with behind-the-scenes access and entry into the secret world. As Chanel’s president Bruno Pavlovsky explained, the title of the exhibition “Mademoiselle Privé” relates to the door granting access to Chanel’s studio. “Only authorized people could go through this door.”10 Starting with the clip of Deneuve, Coppola manipulates found footage from Chanel’s archive in her chosen sequence to create meaning and structure. Deneuve’s reference to “woman” recalls Simone de Beauvoir’s famous pronouncement, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”11 Coppola has said, “My movies are not about being but becoming.”12 And the sequence that follows represents this process of becoming woman—becoming the Chanel woman—through an edited “patchwork” of archive imagery: still and moving images, film footage and print advertising featuring clothing,

Figure 11.1  Catherine Deneuve in 1978 archive advertising film footage. “In Homage to Mademoiselle,” directed by Sofia Coppola for the Mademoiselle Privé Tokyo Exhibition, October 2019 © Chanel.

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Figure 11.2 The Mademoiselle Privé door to Chanel’s atelier. “In Homage to Mademoiselle,” directed by Sofia Coppola for the Mademoiselle Privé Tokyo Exhibition, October 2019 © Chanel.

perfume, and jewelry. The Chanel website describes “In Homage to Mademoiselle” as “a video collage.”13 Through the “stylized repetition of acts,”14 gender as performance is played out not only through the individual faces of Chanel but also through the collective “collage” of “woman” performing and being “performed” repeatedly. Deneuve’s dialogue further complicates this notion of the “becoming” woman, always in process and not (to be) fixed: A woman is not all the time the same. Sometimes we are very co-operating, but sometimes we are very difficult but being difficult is possibly being co-operating, no?! So let’s have a pact, just you and Catherine Deneuve, Don’t ever change anything. There are no words for this mystery, We know what it is . . . Chanel. Deneuve’s Chanel woman appears to suggest a contrary nature as being “essential” to “woman”—one of cooperation/noncooperation. On the one hand, this presents a highly problematic “fickleness” that reinforces patriarchal stereotypes of woman as “indecisive,” while at the same time inferring that this, as the “mystery” of “woman,” is a position to boldly lay claim to. She addresses the viewer directly through her language (“let’s have a pact, just you and Catherine Deneuve”) and through her gaze (directly to camera). Up close and whispering, she shares this like a “secret” to be imparted only to the viewer who by inference has to be a “woman.” So, although it is clear who the “us” in “let’s” and the

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“you” with whom the pact is being made are meant to be, it gives “us” no choice as “we” are implicated in the rhetoric and ideas of the “woman” presented. The choice of this clip as the opening scene, like a cinematic “establishing” shot, is pertinent to what is to come in the “collage” that Coppola puts together of “woman,” of the Chanel brand—and to the Coppola brand. It links to her cinematic film content that puts “woman center stage” and to her sense of “becoming woman.” In her article “The Coppola Smart Mob,” Lynn Hirschberg says of Coppola, “She doesn’t sweep across history,”15 yet this is exactly what she does in “In Homage to Mademoiselle.” It is short and snappy at two minutes thirty-nine seconds. Unlike a lengthy feature film that sweeps across history, it is a “survey” of Chanel past and present, nonlinear, with the faces of Chanel reappearing as a backstory, sitting side by side, cut by cut, with their contemporary counterparts. This allows each generation of “woman”—note cisgender woman—who has worn Chanel perfume or clothing to be reminded of their own moment of wearing Chanel, their own time or perhaps times, and to strengthen their bond through retro advertising that looks back at the far, the near, and the now. The sense of all faces being part of a collective, group membership is a clever move to revive interest in sales of Chanel through memory and scent, memory and image. In this way, this fashion mini-film advertising aligns closely with Coppola’s many cinematic films that are intergenerational, featuring women at various stages, from girlhood to adulthood. But these are not Coppola’s “woman.” These are Chanel’s. A wider range of “woman” is depicted through the many “faces of Chanel.” By sampling the archive footage and compiling this overview, Coppola in turn re-represents the Chanel “woman.” Although Coppola puts “women center stage,” as she states, her feature films offer a limited portrayal of femininity and representation of “woman.” She has been widely criticized for her focus on white, privileged female characters and for modeling her characters in her own image.16 Only On the Rocks, starring Rashida Jones, marks a step toward diversifying the representation of women in her films. Kristen Lopez points out that “Jones’ casting immediately sticks out; she’s the first female lead of color for Coppola.”17 Coppola’s collaboration with Chanel, however, has afforded her the possibility of representing greater difference and diversity in the range of “women” who appear in her mini-films. “In Homage to Mademoiselle,” in particular, draws on the back catalogue of Chanel advertising campaigns, each of which identify “the face of Chanel” for that campaign, year, or period of time. The viewer witnesses Catherine Deneuve opening the scene, hears Marilyn Monroe’s infamous response to “what do you wear at night?,” catches sight of Kristen Stewart, Soo Joo Park, Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, and a flash of the only male face, Pharrell Williams. Coppola’s film moves from Deneuve, a well-known lesbian and queer icon,18 at the start to include models and actors such as Kristen Stewart and Cara Delevingne who have contributed to paving the way for visibly queer women represented in the fashion industry. So, almost by default, Coppola is able to redefine her identity as a filmmaker. She shifts her limited field of representation as a filmmaker by virtue of association—the association with Chanel’s more recent alliances with a more diversified cast of models, actors, and celebrities.19 This “brand” coupling holds significant benefits for Coppola in that it enables her to represent and be represented simultaneously.

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Several academics have highlighted the importance of her cinematic work as a female film director and its role as a postfeminist “politics of pretty”20 that offers “visual pleasure”21 among other valuable contributions she makes through representations of the feminine and femininity. For Anna Backman Rogers “her politics is a feminist deconstruction.”22 I concur with some of this work and experience a critical unfolding in Coppola’s work that is not overt but mostly subtle and implicit—the more I watch and re-watch, the more is revealed. Coppola’s feature films reveal aspects of female experiences that may go largely unnoticed or spoken about, such as loneliness and isolation. For Belinda Smaill, “Central to Coppola’s plots is an alternation between what happens and what fails to happen. Her films highlight ‘waiting’ and feature recurrent images of time passing,” and a “female ennui” which Smaill discusses within the context of feminist filmmaking and representation.23 Repeatedly, in films from The Virgin Suicides to The Beguiled, the director has represented the gendered constraints on female characters. Lost in Translation and Somewhere depict the bankruptcy of celebrity culture. Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring undercut the pleasures of consumption. It has also been widely acknowledged that her films have received considerable criticism. While I see critique in her cinematic filmmaking, in her fashion advertising there is little sense of critique or reflexive intention. For example, she does not problematize the versions of femininity that are represented through her selection of archive Chanel footage, through what she puts in or leaves out. She does not problematize diamonds, their colonial history and links with slavery but readily displays them as part of the Chanel “homage.” Of course, she is in the position of being a collaborator and has a particular job to do with her commercial films. Her role is to “celebrate” the House of Chanel, the “Maison,” not to bring it down. Yet fashion advertising wields significant power that can be harnessed to influence who and what is represented and how. Coppola chooses not to take on the challenge or responsibility of engaging with a more critical visual storytelling in her fashion-film work. Consider, for instance, the contrast between Coppola’s collaboration and that of the musician, model, and designer Pharrell Williams. The Spring/Summer 2019 Pharrell X Chanel collaboration also emerged out of a longstanding association and friendship with Chanel’s Karl Lagerfeld.24 Yet Pharrell’s capsule collection and its accompanying fashion mini-film actively represent Otherness. The clothing takes its bold colors and style from Pharrell’s social media platform I am OTHER. The fashion mini-film launched the capsule collection in Seoul, S. Korea (note: not in Paris, challenging the hegemonic Eurocentricism in the fashion industry and Paris as the fashion center of the world) and Pharrell uses the motorcycle, gender fluidity, and difference to influence and challenge the status quo of this luxury brand. Pharrell cast a diverse group of models from South Sudan, France, Russia, Korea, and Japan. The film is intersectional in its ambition. Pharrell says of himself and his online platform I am OTHER: “I serve and represent the OTHERS because I am one myself. OTHERS defy expectations and stereotypes.” The Chanel capsule collection consciously uses bold and primary colors similar to those used in the graphic design of his I am OTHER platform: the letters move through the colors of the rainbow.25 To contextualize

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how Pharrell makes other links to color, equality, and diversity, he says of his Supercolor sneaker collaboration with Adidas: Supercolor is a celebration of equality through diversity. With 50 colors of the Superstar, everybody will be able to select his or her color. It is more diverse than any pack ever before and therefore it is more individual than any pack ever before. With every shoe treated exactly the same, all colors are equal.26 While fashion needs to avoid being complicit in the commodification of Otherness, it has the potential to harness its media and communication powers to shift mindsets. Pharrell Williams’ capsule collection, in contrast to Chanel’s iconic structured woven jackets and suits, brings “unstructured” in the form of soft oversized colorful hoodies. The mini-film reimagines the future—an evolving Chanel. The contextualization of Pharrell’s collection in the film and his participation as himself/as model could be seen as a form of political resistance played out through art, culture, science fiction, environments, clothes, and music. The hoodie—a symbol of the street—is the clothing item permeating the house. Pharrell de-centralizes the French château, dismantles the “Maison” and haute couture as the highest form of fashion, thus subverting the dominant hegemonic fashion system and shaking up the foundations upon which these stories and myths are built. Pharrell’s collaboration is full of contradictions but one that shifts Chanel’s brand identity and looks to a future media landscape that is more inclusive and representative. His collaboration with, or intervention into, the white European canon of the House of Chanel, marks out a potential new future. He speaks of needing bridges not walls in a behind-the-scenes video.27 Coppola’s film, by contrast, looks backward—uncritically—to Chanel’s past.

Time and Form in Coppola’s Mini-Films Coppola’s fashion mini-films also depart from her cinematic brand in terms of structure and pacing. The speed of the editing and splicing together is fast. Alicia Lansom describes “In Homage to Mademoiselle” as “stitching together the brand’s most iconic moments.”28 Instead of creating a new narrative and storytelling approach through fashion mini-film as other collaborations have shown, and which Coppola has the expertise to do, to date she tells the Chanel stories through collage and creates a quasi-narrative through their structure. Both of Coppola’s Chanel mini-films differ from other commercial fashion films she has produced as their fragmented collage style evades a typical linear narrative. For example, in Coppola’s mini-film for Marc Jacobs’ Daisy Trio fragrance collection there is still a sense we are caught in the middle of one of her cinematic films with their familiar visual aesthetics and protagonists. Although it has neither a beginning nor end to its story, viewers find themselves interrupting a possible narrative with the models/actors lounging

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in long grass, making daisy chains, paddling in the river, and gently rocking in a hammock, evoking a sense of a “before” and “after.” Within the fashion mini-film genre, one can find examples with a greater sense of linear story and others that experiment with narratives where the “narrative” is more of a series of provocations. Consider the collaboration between Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele and film director Gus van Sant, Ouverture of Something That Never Ended, released in November 2020, described by Michele as “a stream of tiny accidental events and delicate relations.”29 By contrast to her other mini-films, Coppola’s Chanel films are nonlinear and nonsequential in time. They do not follow a conventional narrative story that flows but instead splice together fragments from still and moving images to form their own “story,” more photo album or scrapbook in style, representative, perhaps, of looking back at Chanel’s history and iconic advertising and artifacts, and looking at the “here and now” of the contemporary fashion moment. Like turning the pages of an album or a scrapbook, the viewer can flip forward and backward following Coppola’s edited and curated path or choose to stop or start the digital film at any point. It is worth noting she studied photography at the ArtCenter College of Design before moving into film. Her ability to capture a moment in time through the frame underpins her visual approach to filmmaking. However, in comparison to the lingering shots and dreamy quality of most of Coppola’s cinematic films in which the stories unfold slowly, the Chanel mini-film “dream” is more staccato, with strobe-light-like pacing. It depicts flashes of insights into Chanel’s advertising history and, almost like subliminal advertising, the viewer cannot capture all of it in one go. As viewers, we get glimpses, some of which we will remember, some we will forget. The digital format and streaming enable playback, the option to stop and start. Each viewing offers the potential for a different story, the sight of a different face, a different moment in time of the Chanel oeuvre. And each viewer will experience a slightly different unfolding story. Structurally, “In Homage to Mademoiselle” echoes the form of the famous mirrored spiral staircase in Chanel’s atelier (see Figure 11.3), which itself appears in the film.30 Just as the mirror offers fragmented, replicated images, the mini-film provides flashes and glimpses of figures as they move from one frame to the next. Whereas on the staircase the viewer is moving, creating a live, frame-by-frame film as they ascend or descend the staircase, in the case of the mini-film the viewer stands still as the film moves. The replicated image in the film of the staircase underscores Coco Chanel’s motion, the proliferation and duplication of her image conveying simultaneously her legacy and the changing reflection of her work undertaken by her successors at the house. It also reflects Judith Butler’s notion of gender as the “stylized repetition of acts” since the repeated image of Chanel or “woman” ascending or descending the staircase is both literally and metaphorically a “stylized repetition.” The film’s alteration between black-and-white and color footage likewise denotes temporal change—not only of the fashion house but of fashion itself. In their book Time in Fashion, Caroline Evans and Alessandra Vaccari describe fashion’s bond with temporality: Rooted in the “now,” it creates its own past through the process of rapid style change. Fast-moving, it is always on the verge of becoming something else. Uniquely poised

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Figure 11.3  Coco Chanel on the mirrored staircase in her atelier. “In Homage to Mademoiselle,” directed by Sofia Coppola for the Mademoiselle Privé Tokyo Exhibition, October 2019 © Chanel.

between the past and the future, fashion has a curious affinity with unorthodox models of time.31 They go on to describe ways of looking at fashion beyond past, present, and future. The book’s second section on “antilinear time” asks readers to look at fashion design as “a ceaseless process of quotation, reconstruction, and recombination of motifs, in which nostalgia and revivals play their part.”32 Their insight applies equally to the structure of Coppola’s video collage but also the short mini-film she codirected with her brother Roman for the Chanel 19 bag.33 Sofia and Roman Coppola created the film as part of Chanel’s Fall/Winter 2019 campaign.34 In kaleidoscopic style, it splices together the Coco Chanel double “C” logos, camellias, and quilted bags. The kaleidoscope turns and twists, drawing the viewer in close to a central focus, then fanning out. Images of products are chopped up and layered, double images colliding, collage-style. It incorporates DIY cut-outs and montages reminiscent of 1970s/1980s stop-motionstyle animation (see Figure 11.4). The film appropriates the signifiers of bricolage culture and aesthetics to market a brand synonymous with luxury and heritage craftsmanship, using the symbolic language of DIY to create a youthful mood with its cut-out style. But the 1990s stop-motion animation and editing software that creates visual effects that mimic retro graphic styles bring a sense of nostalgia in. Ironically, Coppola borrows

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Figure 11.4  The mini-film for the Chanel 19 handbag incorporates DIY cut-outs in a collage style. Directed by Sofia Coppola and Roman Coppola, 2020 © Chanel.

from street aesthetics, punk-style resistance, and anti-bourgeois styles deployed for the deconstruction of elitist cultural forms.35 These are appropriated here to bring a sense of the anarchic and anti-establishment into an arena that embodies establishment. As in the previous film, the filmmakers borrow from the Chanel archive, though here to remix and mash-up. In its sampling, we sample. The mini-film features oversized, exaggerated images of Chanel’s iconic signature material surface (quilting) and chains blown up in size. They echo the “bling” of The Bling Ring, as does the commercial’s pop style, which invokes the color, youthfulness, and pacing of that film. The Chanel bag colors are primary and bright. The bling of the logo and chain come into focus, showing the consumer what’s deemed important to spotlight: to show off their conspicuous consumption. Even Paris’s iconic architecture is reduced to “motif,” digitally cut-out as imagery that floats across the pictorial frame amidst the bling of bags and logo. In “Let Them Eat Cake,” Pamela Danziger remarks that “Luxury” is not about the product but the experience—it is about time and freedom. She gives an example of this: “Luxury is an escape with nature.”36 Danziger draws on Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich’s work to emphasize experience over product which states that “experiences are viewed more positively than ‘material possessions’ by consumers.”37 But in the Chanel 19 bag campaign there is an emphasis on product through a bombardment of bags and bling. While there are some images of women wearing the bag in context and of Paris’s tourist attractions, offering the viewer consumptive aspirational lifestyle images—experiential context—the main thrust of the campaign is product: bags and lots of them. Backman Rogers’ analysis of the opening credit sequence in Coppola’s The Bling Ring perfectly illustrates how pervasive the products are. She points out its

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focus on “products before people” and how it “functions as an extended establishing shot” that 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 . . . [The] shot introduces a world of commodities rather than individuals.38 In The Bling Ring, and likewise in the Chanel 19 bag mini-film, gone are the trademark muted and pastel shades of Coppola’s other feature films. Instead, the clothes, surface textures, shoes, and environments paint bold and brash brushstrokes throughout both films. Both of Coppola’s Chanel mini-films draw upon archive vintage footage. However, in contrast, “In Homage to Mademoiselle” treads an overall subtler visual aesthetic tempered inevitably by its vintage color-film footage and advertising, monochrome photography, and hand-painted drawings. Similar to “In Homage to Mademoiselle,” the Chanel 19 bag mini-film incorporates refracted images of Coco Chanel, cut-outs overlaid in succession. A montage of the bag links past to present: it appears in black with a caption “1955” then in a succession of bright colors, before a stilled image of the same bag in black appears, captioned “2020.” The effect is similar: to suggest fashion’s “antilinear time.” Fashion reinvents itself through telling its own backstory or collapsing time through a layering up of time whether this presents itself in the clothes themselves or in their advertising (e.g., the fashion mini-film). Both commercial luxury fashion films and the “behind the scenes” mini-films that often accompany them bring together “old” and “new” luxury and draw upon the craftsmanship and heritage of the brand to authenticate their legacy. As I have previously explored in my work on fashion mini-films and motorcycle brand coupling, examples include Joe Wright’s 2011 promotional campaign for Chanel’s Coco Mademoiselle perfume starring Keira Knightley on a cream classic Ducati, and Longchamp’s mini-film Keep on Riding: A Wild Ride Through Paris (Fernando de Azevedo, Fall 2011) and print advertisements featuring Audrey Marnay on a slick black Norton motorcycle that promote the brand’s leather accessories. The Longchamp film’s close-ups of the bags’ stitching depict the craftsmanship, underscored by scenes of the atelier where the craftspeople are working. This film, with its reference to its history and craftsmanship and unlikely alliances of the motorcycle with Longchamp, brings together the ethos of both old and new luxury. Similarly, Coppola’s “In Homage to Mademoiselle” intersperses images of the Chanel “woman,” perfume and clothing, with imagery that attests to the heritage and craftsmanship of Chanel’s haute couture and its ateliers. We see flashes of the hand at work: toiles being pinned and formed on tailor’s dummies, close-ups of hands stitching fabrics, and the textures of the textile surfaces, sketchbook design drawings of motifs, and three-dimensional forms for the jewelry—all strengthening the brand’s history and “authenticity” as markers of quality and luxury, time invested in making and the commodification of labor. According to Danziger:

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Old luxury was about the attributes, qualities and features of the product, and much of its appeal was derived from status and prestige. New luxury defines the category from the point of view of the consumer. Today’s new luxury consumers focus on the experience of luxury embodied in the goods and services they buy, not in ownership or possession itself.39 The Chanel 19 bag commercial appears to privilege “product over people” yet at the same time brings old and new luxury together. Its visual connections to The Bling Ring can also be seen in its form. Backman Rogers notes that this is the first film “in which Coppola explicitly employs jump-cuts . . . to suggest discontinuity of space and time.”40 She describes these as a “succession of interchangeable and fractured ‘moments,’” “a repetitive cycle of images” accompanied by music that builds a “frenetic,” “high-octane” pace.41 Fiona Handyside also discusses the form in The Bling Ring observing that “visual and narrative repetitions operate at a structural level in the film, showing how the teens and the celebrities they emulate/ copy are never satisfied but driven by an insatiable desire.”42 The Chanel 19 commercial can be described in similar terms. This commercial depicts both bags and people as “product”: bags in successive visual repetition are followed by the many “faces of Chanel” as collaged cut-outs of female figures popping up one after the other displayed like a fan opening out. The “becoming woman”/”becoming Chanel” theme is manifested in a heightened, speeded up version compared with “In Homage de Mademoiselle” while still performing literally and metaphorically Butler’s “stylized repletion of acts.” So although most of Coppola’s feature films do not link easily with her later fashion advertising, there are parallels with structure, pace, and form here.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have explored the notion of “becoming woman” and “becoming Chanel.” Several academics have also explored and described the “becoming” of Coppola as brand.43 Coppola’s close friendship with the House of Chanel since her internship with Karl Lagerfeld when she was fifteen and the ties between their brand and hers are cemented further and made even more publicly overt through her collaboration with Chanel on these two fashion mini-films. Additionally, her appearance in the behind-the-scenes film that documents the opening of the Mademoiselle Privé exhibition in Tokyo and the behind-thescenes film she was commissioned to make documenting the Métiers d’Art collections also strengthen their already established kinship.44 She often appears wearing Chanel clothing, whether it be a classic Chanel suit or couture embroidered item. Enveloped in the cloth of Chanel she fuses “becoming Chanel” with “becoming Coppola.” Coppola celebrates Chanel and aligns her “brand” with all that Chanel stands for including the “becoming of Coco Chanel,” for the designer’s persona in the fashion world is wrapped up in her identification with leading change in women’s dress and “liberation” through dress.

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The two Chanel fashion mini-films I analyzed in this chapter also depart from Coppola’s other fashion advertising films as both ask her to pay “homage” to the Chanel brand past and present. In this respect she takes on a more curatorial role in piecing together found footage. I have, however, explained how this process of constructing meaning through reconstructing narrative, time and pacing, form, music, and image selection invoke Coppola’s directorial input, with more tentative links to her cinematic films (such as the Chanel 19 bag film with The Bling Ring). It seems that Coppola, as the author of fashion films, has yet to explore this platform fully as a vehicle that enables her to invest the same level of underlying critique evident in her feature films. And Coppola’s collaboration with brother Roman Coppola is itself open to scrutiny. The fast-moving imagery of their mini-film echoes the pace of advanced capitalist consumption practices and this celebratory style, promoting fashion consumption, jars. Their timing is out of synch with current and forward-thinking goals—the need to reduce current over-consumption habits and damaging material and production processes in a world context of diminishing resources, environmental disaster, and climate crisis. At the time of writing this chapter, reviewing Coppola’s fashion films repeatedly in the comfort of my home during a world pandemic (Covid-19 virus), is hard viewing, seeing luxury fashion presented in this reverential and glorifying way, its relevance put into question ever more poignantly. Although the late Karl Lagerfeld said, “fashion is not about saving lives but is about having fun,”45 fashion nevertheless makes meaning through its visual signifiers, influences through its communication platforms and invites criticism as a cultural phenomenon. Fashion theorists emphasize the value of fashion as a vehicle for serious academic study.46 Handyside has noted that Coppola repeatedly works with the same crew on her films.47 Her fashion-film work also reinforces this practice as she has repeatedly worked with Chanel and Marc Jacobs. It is part of her Coppola brand and signature, it is what makes her brand unique and at the same time criticized. In the article I mentioned earlier, Lopez asks where Coppola will go next in her directing and whether in her casting of Rashida Jones in On the Rocks “she is admitting that she should be actively searching for actors and collaborators of color.”48 The question is, Will she forge new partnerships and be an ally? And will she expand her fashion brand collaborations, casting, and content to include, represent, and therefore engage a wider audience? I am not saying that Coppola needs to be all encompassing in her work or to be all things to all women in either her film or fashion work. Or to necessarily be queering her representation or embracing all current and emerging issues around climate change and consumption. Others are doing that. Her valuable cinematic work contributes to a larger body of work of an established and growing community of women filmmakers each with their own “brand” of content, style, and form and each bringing their own position and politics to their work. However, she is in a position through all the creative media platforms she embraces (and their reach) to consider what is important right now and consider how her work may evolve both within the context of film and fashion film, bringing the critique evident in her films as well as newer critical positions to bear on both. She is in a privileged position to contribute to change. In this sense, it will be interesting to see Coppola’s

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“becoming filmmaker,” to see how her creative oeuvre will continue to have impact and relevance, be critical and be critiqued.

Notes 1 Nick Rees-Roberts, Fashion Film: Art and Advertising in the Digital Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 4–5, 12. 2 Since 2012, I have regularly presented papers at the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies (IJMS) conferences that explore luxury fashion mini-films and editorials that use storytelling and brand collaboration that deploy alliances between fashion and motorcycling imagery and symbolism. 3 Justin Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides: Reverie, Sorrow and Young Love (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 79. Also see Anna Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 33. 4 Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 146. 5 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 146. 6 Wyatt, Virgin Suicides, 79. 7 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 147–53. 8 Life Cinematic, Series 1:4: Sofia Coppola, BBC Four, 2020. 9 The Mademoiselle Privé door also makes an appearance in Sofia Coppola and Roman Coppola’s Chanel 19 bag campaign, ajar with another “face of Chanel” appearing from behind its opening, sustaining the continuity of the atelier’s mystique. 10 Loic Prigent, “CHANEL: Sofia Coppola, Pharrell and Ayami Nakajo Give You a Tour!,” YouTube, November 16, 2019, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=IBWMY0Oofxk. Pavlovsky explains the door in the exhibition was an “interpretation,” embroidered by Lésage in “a nod to the craftsmanship” of the house and Lésage’s technique. Even the scratches on the painted door are represented in stitch. 11 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 1973), 301. For further reading, see also Judith Butler’s essay “Sex and Gender in Simone De Beauvoir’s Second Sex,” Yale French Studies 72 (1986): 35–9. 12 Sofia Coppola qtd. in Carrie Rickey, “Lost and Found,” DGA Quarterly, Spring 2013, https:// www​.dga​.org​/Craft​/DGAQ​/All​-Articles​/1302​-Spring​-2013​/Sofia​-Coppola​.aspx. 13 “Sofia Coppola for Mademoiselle Privé,” Chanel.com, October 13, 2019, https://www. chanel.com/gb/fashion/news/2019/10/sofia-coppola-for-mademoiselle-prive.html. Several scholars have noted that Coppola’s film practice resembles collage. See Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 120, 134; and, for more detail, Lawrence Webb’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 18). 14 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 140. I also reference this from Butler in relation to my practice work on the frill as a form that repeats and also has come to symbolize certain stereotypes of femininity in dress. See Caryn Simonson, “Hidden Garments: Caryn Simonson Discusses the Performative and Her Practice,” Women’s Art Magazine, January/February 1996: 28. 15 Lynn Hirschberg, “The Coppola Smart Mob,” The New York Times Magazine, August 31, 2003, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2003​/08​/31​/magazine​/the​-coppola​-smart​-mob​.html.

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16 Kristen Lopez states, “Her films are incredibly white and privileged, leading to valid critiques of her work being inaccessible and aimed at white feminism.” See Kristen Lopez, “Why Sofia Coppola’s ‘On the Rocks’ Could Change Her Directing Game,” Forbes, January 17, 2019, https://www​.forbes​.com​/sites​/kristenlopez​/2019​/01​/17​/sofia​-coppola​-directing/. Also see Anna Backman Rogers for further commentary in relation to Coppola’s 2017 film The Beguiled in Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 47–8. 17 Kristen Lopez, “Why Sofia Coppola’s ‘On the Rocks’ Could Change Her Directing Game.” Lopez also acknowledges Katie Chang’s role in The Bling Ring: “One could argue this title previously went to Katie Chang in Coppola’s 2013 feature The Bling Ring, but that film emphasizes its white leads Israel Broussard and Emma Watson more.” 18 See Andrew Asibong, “The Killing of Sister Catherine: Deneuve’s Lesbian Transformations” and Fiona Handyside, “Belle Toujours: Deneuve as Fashion Icon,” in From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve, ed. Lisa Downing and Sue Harris (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007). 19 This is not to say that the Chanel brand is all-inclusive, equal, and diverse per se. 20 See Jacki Wilson, Being Gorgeous: Feminism, Sexuality and the Pleasures of the Visual (London: I.B. Tauris and Co Ltd, 2015) and Broey Deschanel (aka Maia), “Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Pretty,” YouTube, September 2, 2020, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=65lUqc​ _fCig. 21 In addition to Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, and Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, see Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017). 22 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 161. 23 Belinda Smaill, “Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 157. 24 He has also modeled for Chanel wearing an oversize handbag. 25 See Pharrell’s introduction to the platform here (2013): https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​ =3ut2Zg3OtLg. 26 Pharrell Williams quoted in Josephine Cruz, “adidas Originals Superstar ‘Supercolor’ Pack,” Hypebeast, March 5, 2015, https://hypebeast​.com​/2015​/3​/adidas​-originals​-superstar​ -supercolor​-pack. 27 Naheed Ifteqar, “This Is Why Pharrell Williams Is Thanking Chanel,” Vogue, March 25, 2019, https://en​.vogue​.me​/fashion​/chanel​-pharell​-williams​-collection/. 28 Alicia Lansom, “Sofia Coppola’s New Short Film is the Ultimate Homage to Chanel,” Refinery29, October 18, 2019, https://www​.refinery29​.com​/en​-gb​/sofia​-coppola​-chanel. 29 Mandalit del Barco, “With ‘No Particular Roadmap,’ Gus Van Sant and Gucci Make a Fashion Film,” NPR, November 19, 2020, https://www​.npr​.org​/2020​/11​/19​/936506736​/with​-no​ -particular​-roadmap​-gus​-van​-sant​-and​-gucci​-direct​-a​-fashion​-film​?t​=1646093495211. 30 Coppola collaborated with Chanel’s new creative director Virginie Viard to recreate Coco Chanel’s 31 rue Cambon apartment as the stage for its “Métiers d’Art” show at the Grand Palais in December 2019, including the legendary mirrored staircase. See Elizabeth Paton, “After Karl, Chanel Keeps Close to Home,” The New York Times, December 5, 2019, https:// www​.nytimes​.com​/2019​/12​/05​/fashion​/chanel​-metiersdart​-virginie​-viard​-paris​.html. 31 Caroline Evans and Alessandra Vaccari, Time in Fashion: Industrial, Antilinear and Uchronic Temporalities (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 11. 32 Evans and Vaccari, Time in Fashion, 11.

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33 Chanel 19 Bag Short Film, codirected by Sofia and Roman Coppola, October 23, 2020, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=q​_CdKYEccZk. 34 Although the departure in her films for Chanel from her typical signature style of slow lingering shots and edits could be attributed to working with her brother on the Chanel 19 bag short film with its fast edits and pacing, she has repeatedly worked with him on her feature films. See Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 32. 35 See Ted Polhemus, “Trickle Down, Bubble Up,” in The Fashion Reader, ed. Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun (London: Berg, 2007) and Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Taylor and Francis Group, 1981), 105–6. 36 Pamela N. Danziger, Let Them Eat Cake: Marketing Luxury to the Masses—As Well As the Classes (Chicago, IL: Kaplan Business, 2005), 130. 37 Van Boven and Gilovich quoted in Danziger, Let Them Eat Cake, 36. 38 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 145. 39 Danziger, Let Them Eat Cake, 7. 40 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 146–7. 41 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 146. 42 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 149. 43 See, for instance, Smaill, “Sofia Coppola”; Pam Cook, “Sofia Coppola,” Fifty Contemporary Film Directors, ed. Yvonne Tasker, 2nd ed. (Oxford and London: Routledge, 2011), 126–34; “History in the Making: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and the New Auteurism,” The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, ed. Tom Brown and Belen Vidal (London: Routledge, 2014), 212–26; and Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola. 44 “Mademoiselle Privé Tokyo Exhibition Opening Party,” October 19, 2019, https://www​ .youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=V6FkbY9XIAo; “Sofia Coppola Collaborates with Chanel on a Film Series to Celebrate the Latest Métiers d’Art Collection,” Harpersbazaar​.com​, July 21, 2020, https://www​.harpersbazaar​.com​/uk​/fashion​/shows​-trends​/a33375845​/sofia​-coppola​-chanel​ -metiers​-dart​-film/. Also see Alice Newbold, “Sofia Coppola Shares her Personal View of Chanel’s ‘Cool Parisian,’ Virginie Viard,” Vogue, July 10, 2020, https://www​.vogue​.co​.uk​/ fashion​/article​/chanel​-film​-sofia​-coppola. 45 “New Allure: How Virginie Viard Is Making Chanel Her Own,” Good Morning Vogue, October 8, 2021, https://www​.vogue​.com​/article​/good​-morning​-vogue​-chanel​-virginie​-viard. 46 Fashion and clothing have been academically analyzed at least since seminal texts by psychologist J. C. Flügel (1930) and sociologist Georg Simmel (1957) and emerged as a field of fashion theory that has established itself through essays, books and journals by key fashion studies thinkers and particularly through Fashion Theory (established 1997 and formerly published by Berg and now Bloomsbury/Taylor Francis Group), and subsequent journals including Fashion Practice and Vestoj: the Platform for Critical Thinking on Fashion (http:// vestoj​.com/). 47 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 32. 48 Lopez, “Why Sofia Coppola’s ‘On the Rocks’ Could Change Her Directing Game.”

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PART III

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12 CINEMATOGRAPHY SOFIA COPPOLA’S MINIMALIST MYSTIQUE Cameron Beyl

In 2021, the American Society of Cinematographers announced its decision to award Sofia Coppola with their Board of Governors Award—unique among the ASC’s official accolades in that it is the only one that can’t be awarded to a cinematographer. Previously bestowed upon the likes of Ridley Scott and her own father, Francis Ford Coppola, the Board of Governors Award honors filmmakers who have made a “significant and indelible” offering to the art form via cinematographic means. Whereas her father’s body of work offers up a chameleonic array of visual styles, her own aesthetic has retained a remarkably consistent foundation even as it has evolved with each successive effort. Characterized by dreamy, melancholic images that look inward to the quiet depths of her protagonists’ malaise, Coppola’s technical approach is immediately recognizable. Her storytelling emphasizes a minimalist mise-en-scène that values clarity. Even her work outside of the theatrical realm—music videos, commercials, fashion films, or even Netflix’s hipster holiday revue, A Very Murray Christmas (2015)—bears her distinct, inimitable stamp. Of course, the cultural value accorded to her style does not stem from raw talent alone; it is also a product of several collaborations with world-class cinematographers— Edward Lachman, Lance Acord, Harris Savides, and Philippe Le Sourd—each of whom has enriched Coppola’s eye with his own.

Edward Lachman: The Virgin Suicides While the skeletal foundations of Coppola’s aesthetic were laid in partnership with Lance Acord on her 1998 short Lick the Star, The Virgin Suicides (1999) established

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the muscular contours of her artistic worldview. An ideal blend of sensibility and subject matter, The Virgin Suicides spins a nostalgic, melancholy yarn about five teenage girls— the Lisbon sisters—taking their own lives in the ultimate act of revenge against their strict, overbearing parents. Her first—and to date, only—collaboration with cinematographer Edward Lachman is instrumental in this regard. Lachman has built up a formidable résumé shooting for independent filmmakers with bold visions; his credits include Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich (2000), as well as Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven (2002) and Carol (2016)—both of which earned Academy Award nominations. Lachman was acquainted with cinema from an early age; his father worked in the distribution side of the industry and owned a theater. His early love for cinema blossomed into a wider appreciation for fine art, eventually leading to a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting at Ohio University following stints at Harvard and the University of Tours in France. In an interview for British Cinematographer, Lachman elaborated on how his studies in art led to film as his chosen medium: “I realized that painters came from different personal social and political positions—why they paint and how they painted. So I thought you can do that in film, too. The important thing is the ideas behind the images, rather than making them into only an aesthetically beautiful construction.”1 Lachman’s subsequent mentorships with a diverse array of world-class cinematographers, including Robby Muller, Sven Nykvist, and Vittorio Storario, provided him with an unusually wide range of aesthetic influences.2 Many working cinematographers are sought after for their clearly defined visual style, while others defer to the conspicuous technical approaches of their directors. Lachman’s experience would seem to position him somewhere in the middle, placing the burden of creative responsibility squarely on story. “I feel every story has to find . . . its own language,” he explains, going on to assert artistic strength in his lack of a tangible signature.3 This approach has led him to work repeatedly with first-time directors who wish to push the established boundaries of cinematic grammar. Lachman found in Coppola a kindred spirit—a fellow collaborator with a deep appreciation for the wider world of art and its disparate mediums of expression. Naturally, the film’s 1970s setting compelled Coppola and Lachman to draw inspiration from films of the era. Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) proved a key touchstone for the visual articulation of an adolescent perspective—a clarity of perception un-muddled by the complexities of adulthood.4 They also looked to the work of photographers like Bill Owens, whose photography book Suburbia balances impressions of “normalcy” with an inherent absurdity, as well as Takashi Homma, whose images of suburban Japan grant an aesthetic appeal to the banality of homogenous residential areas.5 The finished product achieves these aims rather effectively, showcasing a 1970s-era suburban setting that is as vibrant and tangible as it is mundane. The decision to shoot on 35mm color film in 1998 was not the loaded choice that it is today, but the organic texture of a photochemical source nevertheless imbues The Virgin Suicides with a warm tactility. The most substantial creative choice that Coppola makes is her adoption of the 1.66:1 aspect ratio. Colloquially known as “European widescreen,” the 1.66:1 aspect ratio is the native dimension for Super 16mm film and is achieved with 35mm by cropping the frame on the top and bottom. Beyond its international art-house

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affectations, Coppola’s use of the 1.66:1 frame envelops her mise-en-scène in the rosetinted glow of nostalgia. If it can be said that a deliberate perspective is key to a unified cinematographic approach, then The Virgin Suicides distinguishes itself as a story told by inactive participants—the young boys living across the street from the Lisbon girls, helplessly watching from the outside in. As such, Coppola and Lachman frequently place the audience at a physical remove from the action. Moments of third-party omniscience, like vignettes that show the elder neighbors gossiping about the Lisbons, provide a sobering counterbalance to the roiling teenage hormones on display. Several scenes also unfold behind closed doors, depriving the audience of a narrative intimacy usually taken for granted. A memorable example finds Mr. Lisbon (James Woods) pulling Josh Hartnett’s Trip Fontaine into his classroom to give his blessing to take his daughters to the big dance. With our viewpoint planted firmly out in the hall, their conversation is inaudible. However, Trip’s big grin as he emerges provides all the information needed about this development. Deployed at key moments throughout the narrative, this compositional technique reinforces the film’s themes of secrecy and isolation, and is complemented further by Coppola’s withholding of close-ups in favor of considered wide shots. When close-ups do appear, they possess an electric charge that captures the alluring mystery of the Lisbon girls (Kirsten Dunst’s Lux, in particular). The overriding sense is that we are watching vignettes as imagined by the boys whose perspective the film adopts: the missing pieces to the puzzle that would consume them for years.6 Other technical aspects of The Virgin Suicides’ cinematography, such as exposure and camera movement, further reinforce this deliberate perspective while laying the foundation for the immediately identifiable “Coppola look.” Golden highlights convey a nostalgic feeling, replete with lens flares and other sun-kissed signifiers of a distant, yet still tactile, past. Bright colors rage against the beige carpets and floral wallpapers of the characters’ suburban environs. Coppola’s languid camerawork appropriates the classical approach of films from the era, eschewing the documentary immediacy of handheld movements in favor of elegant dolly moves and static, locked-down compositions. The Virgin Suicides also introduces a signature compositional conceit Coppola frequently employs throughout her work: a traveling shot from the perspective of a character looking out on the world from inside a moving vehicle. While this particular shot would evolve as her own voice developed, her first iteration of this idea assumes a first-person view, as the audience watches the Michigan suburbs roll by as sunlight sparkles through the trees.7 In contrast to the relative straightforwardness of Coppola’s subsequent work, The Virgin Suicides utilizes mixed formats to create a kind of postmodern pastiche—an effect that Coppola and Lachman meant to suggest the “fantasia” of one’s teenage years. This turbulent, beautiful bloom of hormones finds representation in a collage of disparate mediums: stills, time lapses, dreamily abstract double exposures, 8mm home movie footage, and even a fourth-wall breaking testimonial from a present-day Trip Fontaine— now a middle-aged burnout living in what appears to be a rehabilitation facility. These flourishes cement The Virgin Suicides’ backward-looking perspective as a haunting, collective daydream. In her program notes on The Virgin Suicides for LA’s Beverly Cinema, Kim Morgan observes that the film’s dreamy cinematography seems to

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suggest that the Lisbon girls “already feel a bit like memories or, at least young women on the edge of becoming memories. The Lisbon girls are tragic beauties . . . figures of myth even while alive.”8 The Virgin Suicides directs its heavy emphasis on cinematography toward two key ends: to place the audience in a time and place as tactile as it is atmospheric, and to communicate the technical and thematic signifiers of Coppola’s artistic worldview. While Coppola and Lachman have yet to collaborate again, his singular contribution to her filmography is no less vital than that of subsequent cameramen. Indeed, Lachman reinforces Coppola’s dreamy, navel-gazing vision with a pronounced appreciation for the technical tools and practices that make it possible.

Lance Acord: Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) and Marie Antoinette (2006) further refined her voice through a set of shared themes—the interior mysteries of womanhood, beauty in captivity, the vibrancy and uncertainty of youth, and the achievement of self-realization through the subversion of societal norms. Coppola’s inextricably feminine worldview shapes both, albeit in markedly different ways. Lance Acord shares Lachman’s appreciation for art but belongs to the same generational cohort as Coppola. Born in 1964 in Fresno County, CA, Acord pursued photography for most of his life, studying at San Francisco Art Institute before moving to New York City to serve as assistant to noted fashion photographer Bruce Weber.9 His resourcefulness proves a key asset in capturing Coppola’s vision of an affecting emotional affair amidst Tokyo’s vibrant urban landscape—even while dealing with intimidating logistical restrictions and a non-English-speaking crew. Coppola and Acord imposed a further challenge on themselves by shooting Lost in Translation on 35mm film, when high-definition video offered a lighter footprint and increased sensitivity to light. Films like George Lucas’ Star Wars Episode II: Attack of The Clones (2002) had become high-profile case studies in the viability of HD video for cinematic applications, and Coppola’s own father encouraged her to adopt the format after spending several decades experimenting himself with video in a form he described as “electric cinema.” However, the younger Coppola was determined to prove celluloid’s resiliency against digital’s encroaching dominance. She had come to see film as the antithesis to video’s implications of a present-tense immediacy. In her own words: “film gives a little bit of distance, which feels more like a memory to me.”10 When shooting in sometimes hostile locations, Coppola and her collaborators had to maintain an extremely small production footprint. Function had to precede form: their gear had to be scaled down to an absolute minimum. In short, they had to accomplish with film what video already—and easily—could. Coppola and Acord would opt for tungstenbalanced Kodak stock almost exclusively, with a preference for 500T’s wide latitude and 320T’s fine-grain structure and shadow detail. This distinct combination of stocks allowed Coppola and Acord to push their exposure to a level approximating the sensitivity of a

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digital sensor, resulting in an image that producer Ross Katz described as “glowing, . . . beautiful”—a luminous reward for their leap of faith.11 Coppola and Acord’s choice in camera would be no less crucial a decision in their ability to shoot in actual locales. The Arriflex 435 Extreme, Aaton 35-III and the Moviecam Compact were deemed the right tools for the job. The Aaton was especially helpful in the run-and-gun approach to location shooting, as was a set of Zeiss MKII Super Speed primes to complement their film stock’s low-light advantages. This allowed Coppola and Acord to keep their crew to the bare minimum and take advantage of existing light to grab shots wherever they wanted. Lost in Translation was shot in the ubiquitous 1.85:1 aspect ratio, suggesting an unadorned approach to composition that falls very much in line with the observational nature of Japanese filmmaking espoused by directors like Yasujirō Ozu. Each composition is thoroughly considered—even in the seemingly haphazard, documentary-style setups achieved via guerilla means in stolen, uncontrolled locations. Transparent or translucent framing devices—reflections, prisms, lens flares, and glassy textures—break up the image’s natural lines into smaller segments, adding a degree of abstraction to otherwise simplistic coverage while reinforcing a thematic undercurrent about the compartmentalization of contemporary urban life.12 A common complaint levied against Lost in Translation is that “nothing happens.” This may be true of Coppola’s wisp of a storyline, but the cinematography offers a counterargument: stories need not be filled with consequential “events” if they can create space into which the audience can infuse their own experiences and sympathies. Lost in Translation is a highly suggestive story about the small epiphanies of clarity as experienced by a young woman threading the needle between two competing visions of herself: the quiet, supportive housewife to a hotshot young photographer and a spontaneous, independent woman with the vibrancy of the outside world at her fingertips. Coppola and Acord devise a clever visual dichotomy to reinforce this idea, drawing a marked distinction between the tranquil, refined Tokyo contained with the executive-class Park Hyatt hotel and the chaotic urban sprawl just beyond its walls.13 Sequences set in the cavernous hotel often unfold via wide, observational compositions whose shallow depth of field abstracts the surrounding city lights into glowing orbs floating in a sea of black. Pools of concentrated light suggest a cocoon, insulating the hotel guests from the outside world’s garish neon billboards. Conversely, Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte’s (Scarlett Johansson) forays into the city achieve a handheld, “you-are-there” kind of energy, faithfully replicating the vibrancy and unpredictability of urban life with a chaotic mix of color temperatures. There is, of course, a plane in which Bob and Charlotte can exist in both places at once: the backseat of a moving car (see Figure 12.1). Though this particular composition has become a recurring signature in Coppola’s subsequent work, it serves as a genuine reflection of Lost in Translation’s aesthetic principles. Enclosed in a bubble of glass and steel, the characters can remove themselves from the world even as they move through it. Only when they engage on foot can they truly connect with their surroundings; if they truly want to experience all the world has to offer—excitement, laughter, connection, heartbreak—then they must be willing to submit themselves to the chaos.14 By abdicating the most-protected component of the filmmaking process—control—Coppola and Acord

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Figure 12.1  Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003.

transcend artifice to capture a delicate, ethereal moment in time and space. It is life, in motion—the very essence of cinema. Easily the most lavish and resource-intensive production of Coppola’s career, Marie Antoinette leverages her cinematographic signatures to subversive effect in the recreation of the titular French queen’s turbulent reign. Marie Antoinette’s polarizing style stems from Coppola’s mixture of anachronistic elements that evoke the contemporary tabloid dramas of Paris Hilton or any Kardashian of choice. The film’s plot and dialogue remain faithful to historical authenticity, yet the mise-en-scène continually references our contemporaneous present: 1980s New Wave music, Converse sneakers, and outsized economic inequality. Coppola and Acord achieve this atmosphere via the combination of the genre’s expected visual grandeur with the edge of modern influences. The regal ghost of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) haunts nearly every frame, but one can also detect the presence of Terrence Malick in its allusive, elliptical approach to coverage. Again, Coppola and Acord turned to the textured clarity of celluloid to properly capture their ambitious vision. At the time, Kodak had just released its line of Vision 2 film, the earliest generation of the medium designed with a digital post-production workflow in mind. The filmmakers used Kodak’s 250D and 500T-rated offerings, choosing 250D for its enhanced ability to handle a variety of mixed lighting situations, while the 500T stock’s wider latitude could maintain a clean image across the extremes of exposure. The finegrain structure shared by both stocks results in a texture that approaches the clinical purity of digital without sacrificing the medium’s organic warmth, creating a luxurious aesthetic befitting the subject matter. Slower stocks require more in the way of lighting, necessitating a balance between a larger production footprint and a logistical sensitivity to the antiquity of their surroundings. Toward this end, Coppola and Acord subvert any expectation of a “classical” approach by employing the combination of Aaton 35-III camera

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and Angenieux Optimo zoom and Zeiss prime lenses that infused Lost in Translation with its gauzy romanticism and vibrant immediacy. Marie Antoinette’s 1.85:1 aspect ratio also evidences this desire to avoid the well-trod conventions of the “costume drama” genre. Indeed, one could argue that the 1.85:1 frame is the most “modern” of aspect ratios, almost fitting the entirety of the average flat-screen television. It also places the audience’s focus on character, eschewing the epic vistas implied by 2.35:1, the art-house affectations of 1.66:1, or the old-fashioned (and recently resurgent) narrow confines of 1.37:1. A key challenge would lie in avoiding tableau framing: the stately, yet flat, approach that compresses the image into a kind of miniature diorama meant to invoke classical art. “We were careful about when and where to use period paintings and etchings as reference,” Acord would later note. Cinematography, then, becomes an important tool in mapping out Marie Antoinette’s (Kirsten Dunst) interior struggle; exposure and camera movement balance a sense of stately decorum with an evocative naturalism. Lens flares, appearing most often during Marie Antoinette’s escapes to her private villa, evoke her inner volatility with their forceful resistance to the parameters of the frame. Handheld camerawork unmoors Marie Antoinette from the anchors of a pre-ordained history so that she may experience it with all the hope and despair of a life being lived in the present tense. That said, Coppola and Acord don’t shy away from the power of tableau framing at key junctures. A wide, painterly shot of Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) practicing swordplay with a friend in the woods, a slow zoom that pulls out to increasingly reveal the crushing weight of the stone halls that surround Marie Antoinette in a moment of bleak despair, a transitory montage that depicts the loss of a child via attendants switching out a royal portrait for one with fewer faces—these are some of the most memorable images of the film and they all use the regal visual grammar of the costume drama to subversive effect. They are the chains that keep Marie Antoinette tethered within a stifling environment of tradition and ritual that’s increasingly disconnected from humanity. Despite the quiet, searching nature she often projects in interviews, Coppola is well known to her collaborators as an artist with a clear vision and the ability to effectively articulate it. A major component of her vision, however, leaves ample room for their own ideas and perspectives. What results is a compact of artistic trust between all members of production, compensating for the risky avoidance of storyboards with a mix of guided consideration and off-the-cuff improvisation that takes into account the spontaneity of life—the idiosyncrasies of location, the shape of existing light, the invigorating discoveries of rehearsal. All of this informs each and every composition, giving Marie Antoinette the sense of a life being lived and of decisions not yet made, rather than one of history unfolding toward an inevitable conclusion. As of this writing, Marie Antoinette stands as the terminus of Coppola and Acord’s partnership. Coppola’s artistic aesthetic has diversified and flourished in the years since, but Acord’s contribution nevertheless forms a technical cornerstone, empowering Coppola with the tools necessary to better articulate her unique vision within and beyond the confines of established dogma. The projects to follow would share a consistent through line of aggressive cinematographic experimentation designed to push the bounds of her technical expertise in pursuit of evocative emotional truths.

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Harris Savides: Somewhere and The Bling Ring Coppola’s subsequent feature, Somewhere (2010), built on her strengths as a visual storyteller—not by addition but by subtraction. Instead of diversifying her aesthetic repertoire, she distilled her core, animating ideas to their very essence. Her 2013 followup, The Bling Ring, blends a mix of several digital mediums to emulate the whiplashing attention spans and stylistic aggressiveness of its teenage subjects. Uniting the two disparate looks: the elegant eye of the late cinematographer Harris Savides. Boasting one of the most celebrated careers in the discipline, Savides has infused the works of filmmakers like David Fincher, James Gray, and many others with a painterly, earthy atmosphere. Characterized by an endless appetite for the soulful pleasures of artmaking, Savides excelled in the same kind of responsive cinematography as Acord. “I light a room and let the people inhabit it, as opposed to lighting the people,” Savides once said. “There’s a constant battle between the best light for their face and the best light for the story.”15 In retrospect, his two eventual collaborations with Coppola seem inevitable. A graduate of The School of Visual Arts in New York, Savides built the foundations of his career in the fashion photography circles of his world-class hometown, as well as further flung international locales like Milan and Paris.16 He and Coppola had much in common and their personal chemistry shines through in their professional collaborations. With Savides behind her camera, Coppola’s sensibilities are further refined; a dreamy aesthetic infused with the youthful mystique matures into an enigmatic adulthood. Had Savides not succumbed to illness in 2013, he and Coppola might have been one of the great director/ cinematographer pairings of contemporary American cinema. Like Coppola’s previous films, Somewhere stitches its real-world shooting location into the very fabric of the narrative, thus necessitating a cinematographic approach that factors in the location’s delicate nature. In setting the story of a burned-out movie star’s emotional reawakening via a concentrated bout of father-daughter bonding at the historic Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, Coppola must once again tailor her aesthetic to the particular demands of her location. Thankfully, her location scouting had been performed over the course of her formative years, having gathered an intimate familiarity with its cavernous, slightly ramshackle spaces during her previous life as an adventurous socialite. In designing Somewhere’s distinct look, she and Savides used high-speed film stock to retain an organic texture while exposing with existing light. Toward this end, 500T-rated Super 35mm stock was chosen for its ability to retain a cleaner image between the polar extremes of the exposure spectrum. The filmmakers shot using the cost-efficient 3-perf method, finding further savings by finishing out to a digital intermediate in 2K resolution (as opposed to a conventional film-out). The benefits are twofold, helping Coppola to justify the economics of shooting celluloid when digital could rival the look of film for a fraction of the cost, as well as further pushing the limits of the image’s latitude via a digital post workflow. Presented in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio, Coppola’s compositions balance a casual naturalism with a formal minimalism that seeks to achieve maximum narrative impact with concise subject placement. In constructing her film in this manner, Coppola conveys the interior purgatory her protagonist, Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), finds himself in. More evocatively, however, she creates a pointed reflection on the male gaze. Popularized by feminist film

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scholar Laura Mulvey, “the male gaze” is an ideological theory that posits the camera as a natural extension of its operator—who, in the broad sweep of the medium’s evolution, has been predominantly male. Negating the camera’s ability to achieve true objectivity, the male gaze asserts a reductive worldview that objectifies women while suggesting that a male filmmaker’s intuition for composition is inextricably tied to his masculinity.17 Whereas The Virgin Suicides touched on this conceit, romanticizing the Lisbon sisters as ethereal objects of male fantasy, Somewhere uses its playboy protagonist to fully critique the dehumanizing effects of the male gaze. Toward this end, minimal coverage and extended shot lengths create an extreme sensation of observation, more akin to voyeurism. The camera seems to leer at the women in the frame, regarding them as potential conquests and not autonomous human beings. The unwavering concentration of Coppola’s camera compels us to look closer—only to discover she has weaponized the male gaze against its own beholder. These potential conquests begin to push back on his objectification; one woman meets his stare from a distance, her breasts exposed in mocking defiance. The camera even denies him the intimacy of human connection, rendering an afternoon tryst with a stranger across the hall via a close-up of a creaking headboard. The only female character afforded the full range of humanity is Johnny’s adolescent daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning). Completely innocent in her father’s eyes, the “corruptions” of sexual maturation have not yet begun their deleterious effect. That Coppola’s storytelling achieves such nuance and emotional resonance primarily through cinematographic means is a testament to her technical prowess. The perceived “emptiness” of her style is, in actuality, an inclusionary worldview—an invitation to her audience to fill in the gaps with their own experiences and perspectives to give the story more impact and resonance than she alone can convey. In her embrace of narrative and technical minimalism, Coppola distills her aesthetic to its very essence, constructing a new baseline from which to expand her artistic horizons. The Bling Ring takes the inverse approach, emphasizing flash and exaggeration to underscore the intentional vapidity of its story. Coppola’s first all-digital production adopts the technical sensibilities embraced by her teenage, screen-addicted protagonists: so-called “digital natives” whose smartphones are natural extensions of their own limbs. Savides oversaw Coppola’s smooth transition into the format, albeit from the proverbial backseat. His rapidly deteriorating health forced him to bring a second cinematographer, Christopher Blauvelt, aboard. A third-generation film craftsman, Blauvelt has since gone on to assert himself as an effective director of photography for directors like Gus Van Sant (Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, 2018) and Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women, 2013; First Cow, 2019). He was no stranger to Coppola’s work, having served under both Savides and Acord in the electrical department before moving up to become the former’s first assistant camera operator.18 The Bling Ring, then, was the final test of Blauvelt’s apprenticeship, with Savides relinquishing a great deal of control to his protégé as early as preproduction. The decision to go digital—specifically, the 4.5K RedCode Raw format offered by the Red Epic X camera—would be a relatively uncomplicated one, with Blauvelt and Coppola intuiting that the medium would better evoke the protagonists’ particular world.19 Unable to perform the full duties of his position due to his failing health, Savides chose to focus

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his remaining energies on formulating The Bling Ring’s distinct look. He had been putting various digital cameras through their paces in the preceding years, working with DIT Jeff Flohr to see how hard the Red and Arri sensors could be pushed without the image falling apart. In an interview for British Cinematographer, Blauvelt elaborates on how this process informed The Bling Ring’s aesthetic: “the look was discovered . . . by using very high ASAs and introducing digital noise into the image.”20 He noted that noise is reminiscent of film grain when the frame is rescaled to punch in closer on a certain detail. The choice to finish out to a 2K digital intermediate makes this delicate approach much more tenable, as the 4.5K source resolution provides a surplus of pixels for manipulation and cropping without sacrificing image quality. To further suggest the organic qualities of celluloid, Coppola and Blauvelt deployed a set of Zeiss Super Speed lenses, taking advantage of their “softening” effect on an otherwise crisp image. Coppola’s signature style does not waver in the switch to the digital, which affords her a highly malleable image that adequately covers the spectrum of looks that must be emulated. Framing in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio, Coppola adopts a low-contrast, somewhatdesaturated color palette that at times resembles an Instagram filter with rose-tinged highlights and bluish shadows.21 Her camerawork emphasizes the bland beige of Calabasas McMansions with locked-off static compositions while opting for handheld setups that infuse the glitzier, moodier Hollywood scenes with a seductive restlessness. Other stylistic flourishes help to set The Bling Ring apart from Coppola’s larger body of work, like the emerald night vision of security cameras or garish phone-camera stills posted on Facebook. The overall effect—appropriate to a story about misguided teenagers—is one of the digital medium struggling to find its identity as it comes of age.22 Like the pintsized burglars trying on their celebrity role model’s flashy fashion accessories, The Bling Ring’s dizzying array of looks suggests a search for distinction from the century-old film format and its relative uniformity. Though Savides’ influence is less tangible in the broad sweep, his final collaboration with Coppola (indeed, his final film) nevertheless left her with several striking moments that serve to lift The Bling Ring out of its genre trappings. One such shot is a single, extended setup that slowly zooms in on a dramatic glass house in the Hollywood Hills as the characters rob it blind, affording only glimpses of their manic silhouettes as they flit past the windows. The sequence stands, arguably, as one of The Bling Ring’s most inspired compositions, and yet it almost was cut from the film entirely had it not been for Savides’ insistence.23 It’s not just a memorable moment that would have been lost, but a concise and highly resonant visual symbol for the particular chemistry of his working relationship with Coppola; by fusing his eye with her own, Savides effectively lives on through her continued artistic evolution.

Philippe Le Sourd: The Beguiled and On the Rocks It would seem that Savides had one last gift for Coppola: Philippe Le Sourd, the cinematographer for Ridley Scott’s A Good Year (2006) and Wong Kar-Wai’s The

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Grandmaster (2013). Like Blauvelt, Le Sourd had been welcomed quite generously into Savides’ fold when he came to work in the American film industry from his native France. During one of their last interactions in 2012, Savides recommended Le Sourd to Coppola for an upcoming commercial project.24 This eventually led to further longerform collaborations: a filmed version of Coppola’s stage production of the classic opera La Traviata in Rome in 2016, her slow-burning Southern-Gothic thriller The Beguiled (2017), and then the abrupt tonal pivot of 2020’s On the Rocks. With each successive collaboration, they have further forged the quiet sophistication that has become a hallmark of Coppola’s latter-day artistry. The Beguiled marked a sublime—if hard-fought—return to 35mm film. If the production of The Bling Ring had proven anything to Coppola about the digital format, it was that her vision could indeed be served by an inherently malleable and exponentially cheaper format. It also seemed to offer a major technical advantage over celluloid in its ability to capture a clean, usable image in low-light conditions, a note of particular interest considering that she wished to shoot The Beguiled’s many nocturnal sequences by candlelight.25 However, Coppola and Le Sourd knew how to expose and process the film to achieve the desired result, drawing from a varied set of influences like nineteenthcentury tintypes, Edward Steichen’s evocative black-and-white photography, and the oil paintings of Renaissance artists like Caravaggio.26 Where many filmmakers might opt for a dramatic, low-key look befitting the narrative’s thriller leanings, Coppola and Le Sourd had a different approach in mind. Splitting the difference between antebellum-themed fashion film and gothic haunted-house horror, The Beguiled’s oppressive grayness was achieved primarily by pulling exposure by one stop in the lab.27 “I was reaching for something almost like a gray light, trying to awaken the soul of the darkness that you would feel in the middle of the Civil War,” Le Sourd later explained in an interview with Variety.28 Toward this end, Coppola and Le Sourd chose tungsten-balanced Kodak Vision 3 film rated at 500 ASA, which features a proprietary dye layering process that affords higher detail in the shadows and an additional two stops of latitude in the highlights. When one is already balancing on the razor’s edge of exposure, the extended range can make all the difference. Coppola and Le Sourd’s armory of lenses strikes a unique balance of sensitivity and texture, comprised of Panavision Ultra Speed MKII lenses capable of opening up to a T1.9, in addition to Primo lenses that could open up as wide T1.1 (deployed primarily for nighttime sequences). A set of vintage Cooke Panchros were also chosen for more than just the fabled “Cooke look”—characterized by a sharp dimensionality and pleasing warmth—but also for what Le Sourd would describe as “the femininity” of light.29 He was looking to convey a palpable sensuality by evoking the creamy textures of human skin. By frequently shooting with these lenses wide open, he creates an ever-present dreaminess, wherein the ensuing bokeh becomes a kind of character in and of itself. Indeed, Coppola and Le Sourd would accentuate the bokeh of certain compositions with an emulation of a Petzval lens, whose distinct visual qualities—swirling out-of-focus fields that encircle the subject—feature most prominently in portrait photography from the 1860s.30 In order to replicate this effect, Le Sourd commissioned Panavision’s lens experts to manufacture a specialized filter that would approximate the look, attached to the front of the lens via a magnetic ring (see Figure 12.2).31

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Figure 12.2  The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017.

The tactile “no-light” approach evident throughout The Beguiled’s cinematography is rather literal: “I didn’t use any light,” Le Sourd claimed, embellishing how little he relied on artificial lighting.32 As in a Vermeer painting, natural daylight and candlelight emerge as primary, motivated sources of key light. Artificial film lights, like 18 kW Fresnel HMIs and Kino LEDs were used to further shape what was already there. Indeed, Le Sourd’s interest lay more in introducing black via negative fill.33 Harder light conveys deliberate ideas; for instance, Colin Farrell’s injured soldier is often lit in more angular light than his female counterparts—a deliberate choice that uses the technique’s masculine connotations to present the character as less of a human being and more of the unconscious “idea” of a man (as perceived by women who are rarely in the presence of one).34 These strivings for a vintage patina are further embedded in The Beguiled’s approach to composition and camera movement. The 1.66:1 aspect ratio establishes this mood right away. In wanting to evoke the narrative’s claustrophobic sense of confinement, they considered narrower ratios like 1.37:1, but ultimately opted for 1.66:1 to give the characters a little more room to maneuver inside of their compositional “cage.” Anything wider might have inadvertently placed too much focus on background or landscape, which would have defeated Coppola and Le Sourd’s desire to maintain the purity of their protagonists’ subjective viewpoint. Each composition is calibrated to a surgical precision in terms of narrative significance, while also holding just enough information back to maintain the ghostly fog of mystery surrounding the Seminary. These static compositions are integral to the film’s painterly aura, a formal rebuke to modern notions that immediacy must be conveyed through documentary-style handheld camerawork. Tracking shots are used sparingly, so as to maintain the characters’ position in the frame as they move through space, but The Beguiled remains firmly rooted in the idea of body language as the primary means of visual storytelling.

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Coppola has mastered her allusive, suggestive visual sensibility out of necessity as much as artistic inclination. A film like The Beguiled simply did not have the budget to convey the kind of sweeping scope that larger Civil War pictures can convey, so Coppola used black smoke on the horizon and the booms of distant cannon fire to suggest the conflict—belonging to the world of so-called “civilized” men and their ideological animus— as an encroaching menace that threatens to tear the women’s fragile, isolated existence asunder. This suggestiveness stands as the source of The Beguiled’s emotional power; it is an exercise in genre minimalism that invites the audience to immerse themselves more fully in Coppola’s visuals via their imagination. Coppola and Le Sourd’s next collaboration—On the Rocks (2020)—subverts our understanding of “suspicious spouse” tropes that have long figured in Hollywood comedies to give dramatic weight to a relatively simple plot. Indeed, “simple” is the operative word when it comes to On the Rocks, but not in the sense we might expect. “Beautifully simple” is the phrase that Le Sourd would later use in an article for MovieMaker magazine, referring to the natural elegance Coppola wanted to achieve with an unadorned aesthetic.35 Befitting its storyline about a successful writer who inadvertently recruits her wealthy and worldly playboy father for an investigation into her husband’s suspected infidelity, large stretches of the film take place at night, making the choice of film or digital acquisition a particularly urgent matter to resolve. The shoot occurred in Manhattan, buzzing with mixed ambient light that both formats could adequately capture; the transition to LED streetlamps in major urban centers has been a boon to filmmakers wishing to shoot at night, raising the overall level (and quality) of available light. The filmmakers performed their due diligence with both mediums, testing new digital cameras like the Sony Venice, but Coppola’s affection for celluloid ultimately won out. The decision was made to pull the film in the lab for scenes shot at night, with the intention of bringing out additional detail in the shadows.36 Their selection of stock—Kodak’s 500T and 200T 35mm offerings—boosts this approach, with both featuring wide latitude and a reduced grain field. The 200T stock in particular offers a unique benefit, positioning itself as two stocks in one by combining the low grain of 100 ASA with the higher 200 speed. This characteristic makes it a fine choice for both controlled interiors and contrast-y exteriors—such as a busy city street after dark. When combined with a set of Panavision Super Speed MKII lenses, the result is a soft, lowcontrast look that complements Coppola’s established aesthetic while suggesting itself as more “refined” than comparatively grungier renditions like that in Somewhere. For all its self-attributed “simplicity,” a fair amount of design complexity drives On the Rocks’ particular look. The 1.85:1 aspect ratio does not call attention to itself or even to the idea of “compositions” in the aesthetic sense of the word. Coppola and Le Sourd’s coverage is purely functional, opting for medium two-shots that frame the top half of characters as they converse or for conventional close-ups when nuanced facial performances are required. Very rarely do they shoot wide to showcase Manhattan landmarks, such is their singular focus on story at the human scale. Indeed, characters seem to meld into the fabric of the city around them. A shallow depth of field unifies her setups, creating a pronounced bokeh while affording Coppola ample opportunity to direct our attention to exactly where it needs to be. Her camera work echoes the quiet confidence of her compositions, primarily capturing the action from static setups limited to the occasional pan or tilt so as to better

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follow the performers as they move within the bounds of the frame. A light-hearted car chase that occurs midway through the film stands as the one major exception to the rule, tracking along with vehicles speeding down empty streets. The abrupt injection of speed is appropriate, owing to a rare moment of delirious delight and mischief-making on behalf of Rashida Jones’ otherwise-buttoned-up protagonist. Though the palette prioritizes muted cool hues and pale neutrals, color plays a surprisingly integral role in On the Rocks’ cinematography. Diffuse daylight, oftentimes acquired at late afternoon or early evening, eliminates shadows to such an extent that there is no “mystery” anymore to the protagonist’s existence; no place to hide from a nagging unhappiness that spoils an otherwise “perfect” life. By contrast, the world of exclusive dining rooms that Bill Murray’s character inhabits is steeped in shadow—not in a lurid way as in film noir, but in a sophisticated old-world fashion that evokes his detached worldliness via the visual grammar of fine art. A bolder application of color eventually emerges, saved exclusively for a sustained detour to Mexico. There, the sunlight takes on a warmer, more angular glow while shadows stretch across the beach. Restaurant walls are painted in a lively shade of plum red. Jones dons a canary yellow cocktail dress: a sharp rebuke to her monochromatic wardrobe back in New York. These images are the chromatic equivalent to the burst of kinetic speed in the aforementioned car chase scene—visual signifiers of Coppola’s subtextual message about the importance of this particular daughter-father relationship to her protagonist’s renewed sense of self. Cinema runs through the blood of the Coppola clan, from father Francis Ford and mother Eleanor, to her brother, Roman, and even members of newer generations like her niece, Gia. Arguably more so than any of them—the family patriarch included—Sofia has achieved a purity of photographic intent, her films seemingly possessed of a revealing intimacy even as her actual inner life remains elusive. Hers is the cinema of sensual suggestion, of minimalist mystique. By methodically stripping away the artifice of commercial-scale image-making, Coppola has arrived at an elegant simplicity of style that is as inviting as it is aloof. We see only what she directs our eyes to see, trusting in the power of the moving image to elicit our response. She is a true filmmaker in every sense of the word.

Notes 1 Birgit Heidsiek, “‘Every Story Has Its Own Language’—Ed Lachman ASC,” British Cinematographer, https://bri​tish​cine​mato​grapher​.co​.uk​/every​-story​-has​-its​-own​-language​-ed​ -lachman​-asc/. 2 Chris O’Falt, “Ed Lachman Looked to the Past to Expand the Cinematographer’s Paintbox,” IndieWire, https://www​.indiewire​.com​/2019​/12​/influencers​-ed​-lachman​-1202192737/. 3 Qtd. in Heidsiek, “‘Every Story Has Its Own Language.’” 4 “Sofia Coppola and Ed Lachman Talk ‘Virgin Suicides’ at FTF Screening,” Lost in Coppola, Livejournal, March 4, 2013, https://lostincoppola​.livejournal​.com​/15458​.html. 5 O’Falt, “Ed Lachman”; “The Virgin Suicides: About the Production,” Cinema Review, May 7, 2005, https://web​.archive​.org​/web​/20050507145944​/http:/​/www​.cinemareview​.com​/ production​.asp​?prodid​=959.

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6 Cameron Beyl, “Sofia Coppola’s ‘The Virgin Suicides’ (1999),” The Directors Series, July 25, 2016, https://directorsseries​.net​/2016​/07​/25​/sofia​-coppolas​-the​-virgin​-suicides​-1999/. 7 Beyl, “‘The Virgin Suicides.’” 8 Kim Morgan, “Kim Morgan on the Virgin Suicides,” Beverly Cinema, May 12, 2019, https:// thenewbev​.com​/blog​/2019​/05​/kim​-morgan​-the​-virgin​-suicides/. 9 “Lance Acord,” Park Pictures, https://parkpictures​.com​/directors​/lance​-acord​/bio. 10 “Lost in Translation,” Focus Features, October 1, 2003, https://web​.archive​.org​/web​ /20031001195147​/http:/​/lost​-in​-translation​.com​/qaPopup​.html. 11 “Lost in Translation.” 12 Cameron Beyl, “Sofia Coppola’s ‘Lost in Translation’ (2003),” The Director Series, August 5, 2016, https://directorsseries​.net​/2016​/08​/05​/sofia​-coppolas​-lost​-in​-translation​-2003/. 13 Beyl, “‘Lost in Translation.’” 14 Beyl, “‘Lost in Translation.’” 15 “Harris Savides,” IEC, https://www​.cinematographers​.nl​/PaginasDoPh​/savides​.htm. 16 “Harris Savides.” 17 Scott Oris, “Feminism and the Art of Banality: Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere,” Cinemablography, http://www​.cinemablography​.org​/somewhere​.html. 18 “Iconic Obsession: Christopher Blauvelt/The Bling Ring,” British Cinematographer, https://bri​ tish​cine​mato​grapher​.co​.uk​/christopher​-blauvelt​-the​-bling​-ring/. 19 “Iconic Obsession.” 20 “Iconic Obsession.” 21 Cameron Beyl, “Sofia Coppola’s ‘The Bling Ring’ (2013),” The Directors Series, September 26, 2016, https://directorsseries​.net​/2016​/09​/26​/sofia​-coppolas​-the​-bling​-ring​-2013/. 22 Beyl, “The Bling Ring.” 23 Beyl, “The Bling Ring.” 24 Philippe Le Sourd, “Interview with Cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd, AFC, about His Work on Sofia Coppola’s ‘The Beguiled,’” AFCinema, May 28, 2017, https://www​.afcinema​.com​/ Interview​-with​-Cinematographer​-Philippe​-Le​-Sourd​-AFC​-about​-his​-work​-on​-Sofia​-Coppola​-s​ -The​-Beguiled​.html​?lang​=fr. 25 Le Sourd, “Interview.” 26 Hunt, “Philippe Le Sourd AFC || The Cinematography of the Beguiled,” Cinelinx, July 13, 2017, https://www​.cinelinx​.com​/interviews​/philippe​-le​-sourd​-afc​-the​-cinematography​-of​ -the​-beguiled/; Alexander Huls, “‘Beguiled’ Cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd on the Mechanics of Mood,” Pond5 Blog, July 19, 2017, https://blog​.pond5​.com​/15708​-beguiled​ -cinematographer​-create​-mood​-film/. 27 Cameron Beyl, “Sofia Coppola’s ‘The Beguiled’ (2017),” The Directors Series, March 18, 2019, https://directorsseries​.net​/2019​/03​/18​/sofia​-coppolas​-the​-beguiled​-2017/. 28 Christine Champagne, “‘The Beguiled’ Brings Civil War to Life with Celluloid,” Variety, June 21, 2017, https://variety​.com​/2017​/artisans​/production​/sofia​-coppola​-celluloid​-the​-beguiled​ -1202473720/. 29 Hunt, “Philippe Le Sourd.” 30 Hunt, “Philippe Le Sourd.” 31 Le Sourd, “Interview.” 32 Huls, “Beguiled.”

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33 Le Sourd, “Interview.” 34 Hunt, “Philippe le Sourd.” 35 Philippe Le Sourd, “On the Rocks Cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd Worked to Understand Sofia Coppola’s Vision—Then Embraced Questions,” MovieMaker, October 22, 2020, https:// www​.moviemaker​.com​/on​-the​-rocks​-cinematographer​-philippe​-le​-sourd​-writer​-director​-sofia​ -coppola​-vision/. 36 Le Sourd, “On the Rocks.”

13 FINE ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY ART ON FILM/FILM AS ART: SOFIA COPPOLA’S CINEMA Suzanne Ferriss

Directing is a bit like try to paint a watercolor from four blocks away through a telescope, over a walkie-talkie, and 85 people are holding the brush. DAVID FINCHER

In a scene in Sofia Coppola’s 2020 film On the Rocks, a father (Bill Murray) and daughter (Rashida Jones) stand before one of Monet’s Waterlilies (1908). As viewers, we look with them, over their shoulders, while he reminisces about seeing Monet’s paintings for the first time in the Tuileries and then driving with his wife to Giverny, the site of their composition. He departs, leaving his daughter—and us—to reflect on the image, as an aesthetic object in its own right but also as an artwork capable of invoking memory, narrative, and emotion. Reproduced in the cinematic artwork that is Coppola’s film, Monet’s painting accrues additional meaning, through a doubling of pictorial representation that inspires reflection on both media—painting and film—and on the nature of visual art itself. The scene encapsulates Coppola’s complex engagement with art across her work— commercial as well as cinematic. It showcases the filmmaker’s reverence for the fine arts while positioning her filmmaking as a form of art. However, just as her films are commercial products, art can be as well. The Monet hangs on the wall of a private collector in New York, not in a museum. It is a commodity, like the Cy Twombly over the collector’s sofa that Murray’s character Felix, an art dealer, covets. His business is art, as it is for the filmmaker. As this chapter outlines, Coppola’s work profits—aesthetically and materially—

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from extraordinary attention to art history and photographic practice, focused especially on representations of fashion. The result is a visual universe where fine art, commercial imagery, and film intertwine synergistically to shape viewers’ perception of art, cinema, and, ultimately, the world. Coppola’s fine art training began early, through her parents. Her mother Eleanor introduced her to art fairs, initiating a lifelong interest in collecting. The Coppolas also socialized with famous artists—one of her father’s favorite memories is of an eleven-yearold Sofia sitting on Andy Warhol’s lap.1 As filmmakers, both Eleanor and Francis offered their children an informal education in cinema, and Sofia spent time on her father’s sets in the 1980s, appearing in small roles, while also interning at Chanel.2 They collaborated on Life Without Zoe, his contribution to New York Stories (1989), with Sofia coauthoring the screenplay and designing the costumes (which naturally featured Chanel goods). At the time, however, she “wanted to be a painter” and enrolled in classes at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) where they told her she wasn’t, so she switched to photography, studying at the ArtCenter College of Design, where her instructor, LA photographer Paul Jasmin, praised her point of view.3 She later worked as a fashion photographer before launching her own clothing line—MilkFed—and directed music videos with her friends in the late 1990s before producing her first short, Lick the Star in 1998. In other words, fashion and photography dominated her artistic practice for nearly a decade before she turned to cinema.4 It’s no wonder, then, that savvy viewers of Coppola’s films delight in an art-school kind of “Where’s Waldo?,” unearthing appearances of notable works. Naturally, given that Felix is an art dealer, these abound in On the Rocks. An Ellsworth Kelly painting rests on the mantel in his apartment and his daughter Laura appears to have benefitted from her father’s largess. The walls of her home are graced with works by Ellen Gallagher, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Jennie C. Jones, Leslie Hewitt, and Julia Rommel.5 A light sculpture by John Wigmore is prominently displayed in the living room and one of Irving Penn’s poppies appears on the bookcase in her office. These deliberate placements reflect the film’s narrative purpose, establishing Felix’s career and professional prominence, as well as suggesting that Laura’s upbringing in an artistic household may have fostered her own creativity as a writer. They equally anchor the film’s New York setting, conjuring up the city’s preeminence in modern and contemporary art, and collecting as the privileged practice of its moneyed denizens. The Twombly and Monet are as essential in establishing authenticity as the high-level apartment in the storied Sherry-Netherland building where they hang. In Somewhere (2010), a framed Ed Ruscha lithograph, Cold Beer Beautiful Girls (2009), is propped on the floor against a wall in the room at the Chateau Marmont where Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), its celebrity protagonist, temporarily resides (see Figure 13.1). Its casual (and precarious) placement reflects his itinerant existence, but also the film’s LA setting, for Ruscha is synonymous with the city.6 The protective plastic wrapper still encasing the print—and a label affixed by production designer Anne Ross—transformed it into a prop emblematic of Marco’s affluent, aimless existence, as if it were recently purchased on one his desultory tours through LA in his Ferrari.7 The print’s text bluntly calls out the other objects that recur as props of his celebrity lifestyle and populate his hotel-room set.

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Figure 13.1  An Ed Ruscha print propped against a wall in Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2011.

However, Coppola’s engagement with visual art runs far deeper than these readily visible allusions. Coppola’s sound designer Richard Beggs has said, “Sofia is fundamentally a visual thinker and her ideas are basically cinematic. She’s not a writer who’s making movies and translating something into a visual medium. I believe that she thinks in terms of images.”8 This may seem on the surface to be an obvious point: cinema is a visual medium, so it’s only natural that a filmmaker would be a visual thinker. However, film is, in fact, a multimedia form, fusing narrative and dialogue to sound and music, while juxtaposing images within its individual frames and among them through its essential tool, editing.9 Coppola’s films are distinct for their heightened emphasis on the visual register, a fact acknowledged repeatedly by popular and academic critics. New Yorker film critic Richard Brody calls her works “startlingly, straightforwardly visual” and contends that “perceptions, appearances and impressions are crucial facts”; scholar Anna Backman Rogers has written an entire book devoted to “Coppola’s outstanding ability to think through and in images.”10 Thus, more prevalent in Coppola’s films than direct appearances of artworks are complex cinematic allusions to identifiable still images—paintings as well as photographs. And just as with the placement of specific works in the film set, these too are motivated by cinematic considerations relevant to character and narrative. Often in interviews, the director herself has guided viewers to the allusions, further reflecting the deliberateness— and detail—of these visual references. The first work Coppola ever purchased—Bill Owens’ photograph of an eighth-grade dance—inspired the homecoming scene in her first feature The Virgin Suicides (1999), particularly the tinfoil stars over the dancers’ heads. Repurposed in the homecoming dance scene, the stars encapsulate the highschool event experience—identifying a theme, creating the props, decorating the stage, dressing up—and thus equally allude self-reflexively to cinematic practice. Owens’ work,

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originating in the 1970s, like the yearbooks costume designer Nancy Steiner brought on set, served as a means of establishing verisimilitude for the film’s recreation of the era. However, the stars over the film stars’ heads engage with the narrative as well: the Lisbon sisters star in a wistfully nostalgic film replaying in the memories of the neighborhood boys twenty-five years after their suicides. Each girl is introduced as though in a title sequence, with hand-lettered script matching that of the film’s title card announcing her name. Establishing shots present the boys seated side-by-side along a curb facing the Lisbon family home, in the position of a theater-going audience, watching as the girls exit their wood-paneled station wagon, reinforcing the conceit that the film unfurling before us is theirs. Even the original film poster sustains this conscious doubling, with the actors’ names spelled out in girly script matching that in the boys’ vision.11 Not only does the director think in images, so do her characters, particularly those, like the neighborhood boys, whose point of view is replicated on screen. Especially when engaged in remembering or in reverie, the characters’ visions are projected on screen as filtered through the preexisting images affecting their perceptions. If the director’s visual style repurposes recognizable art works, so do her characters’ fantasies, layering interpretation and meaning. For instance, in Marie Antoinette (2006), the young queen (Kirsten Dunst), bored by games and conversation at court, gazes out a window. The film cuts, not to the object of her external gaze, but to the images playing out internally in her imagination. We see her romanticized vision of Count Fersen (Jamie Dornan) on horseback. In Coppola’s hands, it is not a generic cliché—a knight in shining armor. Instead, she creates a cinematic version of Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801). Dressed in exactly the same martial style as the French general, down to his red cape and tricorn hat, Fersen rears up on his white steed, against the same dramatic backdrop of battle. Unlike in The Virgin Suicides, the image does not reflect the period recreated on screen—nor does it mirror its themes. Instead, like Marie Antoinette in general, it is deliberately anachronistic, pointedly modern, in keeping with the film’s reimagining of the queen from a contemporary perspective of young womanhood. David’s painting reflects his embrace of the French Revolution, the political movement leading to her execution.12 In Coppola’s imagination—and Marie’s—Napoleon’s revolutionary ardor becomes Fersen’s sexual passion. Napoleon’s fierce, militant gaze at the painting’s viewer is transformed by a close-up into the gaze of sexual desire: Marie pictures Fersen turning toward her—a revisionist move not lost on female viewers. Fans may have missed, however, the subtlety of the reference. Paired with scenes of Marie reading aloud from Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the meadow at her hameau, Coppola’s recreation of David’s painting positions the queen as sympathetic to revolutionary politics—and contradicts the received image of her elitist “let them eat cake” indifference. The allusion that has garnered the most attention opens Coppola’s award-winning sophomore effort Lost in Translation (2003). In its near-still shot of a reclining female form (Scarlett Johansson) wearing pale pink panties and a gray sweater, the overture invokes the photorealist paintings of John Kacere (see Figures 13.2 and 13.3). Critics have identified Jutta (1973), which features a female figure in a similar pose wearing a black negligée and panties, as Coppola’s reference, and the posture of the reclining female in Kacere’s painting does match Charlotte’s in the film. However, the director identified

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Figure 13.2  John Kacere, Jutta, 1973 © John Kacere. Image courtesy Louis K. Meisel Gallery.

Figure 13.3  John Kacere, Maude, 1977 © John Kacere. Image courtesy Louis K. Meisel Gallery.

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Maude (1977) in an interview streamed online that included an image of Kacere’s painting. The pastel coloring, not the model’s pose, echoes in Coppola’s moving reproduction. But the reference is likely more general than exact, given that Kacere obsessively depicted the same pose.13 The enhanced size of his paintings (Maude measures 36 × 54 inches, Jutta 53 × 78½) and their bright, Pop-art lighting direct attention to details of fabrics and skin: the sheen of satin, the filigree of lace, the shadows cast on a hip by a silk ribbon or along the spine and between the thighs. The effect is akin to commercial fashion photography, where garments are abstracted from the female form. By contrast, Coppola’s recreation naturalizes both the clothing and the form: natural light and natural materials—cotton panties and T-shirt, wool sweater—combined with the subtle movement of her body stress the realism of the figure and ground the image in the film’s narrative.14 The darkened room, the reclining body, the gentle motion of breathing and shifting legs efficiently convey Charlotte’s jetlag, and her isolation in the frame gestures toward the disconnection she feels from her husband. The static nature of Coppola’s moving image captures the “photo” part of Kacere’s works, while naturalism and motion, however minimal, augment its “realism.” Coppola thinks in images and often, as here, alludes to specific artists or individual works. Yet viewers have not been constrained by her intended references; they think in images as well, calling up visual associations the filmmaker may not have intended. Equivalences between Coppola’s cinematic images and works of fine art attest to more general affinities between her film style and visual artistry. The opening of Marie Antoinette is a good example. Film scholar Michelle Devereaux takes the scene of Marie reclining on a blue-and-white chaise as a “parody of a neoclassical pose, such as the one found in Jacques-Louis David’s Portrait of Madame Récamier (1800).” She notes, however, that her costume, hair, and the profusion of pastries surrounding her transform the image into a “‘Still Life with Queen,’ a tableau vivant of decadence that reduces Marie to a prop.”15 The painterly effect, Devereaux explains, comes from its “planimetric composition,” a flattening of perspective that David Bordwell has identified in the works of New Wave filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard.16 Thus, she detects affinities in Coppola’s style with painting and with European art cinema. The scene’s “planimetric composition” in combination with its luxe décor equally invoke photography and Coppola identified a commercial fashion image, a 1977 advertisement for Charles Jourdan taken by Guy Bourdin, as her model for the shot.17 If, as Devereaux observes, Marie appears as a prop, it may be because she replicates the pose of the model in Bourdin’s image, a decorative object whose foot is propped up to display a product. Both Bourdin’s photo and Coppola’s scene include a maid intently focused on placing the shoe on her mistress’ foot. In combination with the reclining woman’s posture of entitled indolence, the maid’s presence screams elitism and privilege. Coppola adds decorative embellishments and color to the black-and-white décor in Bourdin’s original: the blueand-white brocaded chaise that matches the ornately carved panels behind it and a profusion of pink-hued pastries that obviously invoke the “cake” the queen purportedly told her subjects to eat. As in the overture to Lost in Translation, these material transformations and the addition of movement are purposeful. Whereas Coppola’s transformation of Kacere’s

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work grounded the central figure in her film’s narrative, here she does the reverse: at the end of the scene, Marie turns directly toward the camera, breaking the fourth wall and acknowledging the artifice of the image. As Mallory Young and I have argued, the scene contrasts with the representation of the queen in the film that follows, separated from it by the black-and-pink title card, as does a later scene of a diamond-collared Marie in a bathtub reciting the “let them eat cake” line directly to the camera. In both, Coppola highlights the artifice of representation: these are staged scenes created for a camera. By implication, the received image of the heartlessly imperious queen is also a creation, a fiction the film’s alternative narrative seeks to dispel by illuminating the unseen, private moments of Marie’s life.18 The overture to Marie Antoinette invokes painting, art cinema, and commercial photography simultaneously, suggesting the fluid boundaries in Coppola’s films among media and genres, as well as between art and commerce. Her films reinforce the implicit claim that our perceptions have been shaped by a proliferation of images in art, advertising, cinema, and television. To capture how the boys’ perceptions were shaped by 1970s visual culture in The Virgin Suicides, Coppola duplicates candid snapshots taken by Mr. Lisbon’s Instamatic camera and replicates the experience of viewing travel slides. The images retain the accustomed format and amateur mise-en-scène, foregrounding the vintage apparatuses. We see Mr. Lisbon in the action of snapping a photo of his daughters in their homecoming dresses; the slide show includes the sound of the cartridge advancing as a black screen imitates the transition between photos. The boys remember the girls as they might have photographed them. As in scenes influenced by 1970s advertising styles, these are inventions, particularly the travel slides which present impossible shots of the boys posing before tourist sites with the Lisbon sisters, including Cecilia, who had committed suicide.19 Near the film’s conclusion, as the boys describe the sale of the Lisbon home following the remaining sisters’ suicides, they confess they “took the family photos that were put out with the trash,” identifying one source of their imagined images. As they complain that “gaps” in their narrative remain, the pan of the now-empty home shifts to a sequence of still shots, as though the slideshow has resumed without the girls, registering the “oddly shaped emptiness” that remains in the house and in their memories. As the pan resumes across a table of discarded belongings, we glimpse Mr. Lisbon’s abandoned camera. The Bling Ring (2013) reproduces the aesthetics of still images posted on social media and the moving images broadcast on television, on TMZ or E!, to reinforce how the teenage burglars’ worldview was shaped by the reality-television and celebrity culture dominant in the 2010s. Filmed on digital, it incorporates actual footage of celebrities, embedding images the teens consumed, but it also stages scenes of them snapping group selfies or photographing each other with their cellphones for posting on Facebook pages created for the actors and reproduced on screen. The film’s opening sequence, as in Coppola’s previous films, offers a complex preface in the context of visual media: grainy, filtered images of the teens exiting a celebrity’s home with stolen goods, shot as though captured by a security camera, introduce the narrative focus on crime but equally comment on the pervasiveness of digital surveillance. An arresting montage replicates the same strategy of the travel slideshow in The Virgin Suicides, updated for

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a digital era. Just over a minute long, it consists of thirty-eight images captured from moving sources—footage of models at a Victoria’s Secret fashion show, celebrities on the red carpet—cut together so that they pass so quickly each barely registers.20 As Maryn Wilkinson has argued, the effect is like “skimming,” referring simultaneously to the experience of consuming images on screens of digital devices or flipping through pages of magazines, and to the activity of stealing, “skimming” off the excess of goods owned by the celebrities (a point made overtly in the film when Paris Hilton appears in cameo at a club where one of the teenaged burglars is wearing a dress stolen from her closet— and the celebrity doesn’t notice).21 While in The Virgin Suicides the amateurish works representing how the boys’ perceptions were shaped by contemporary photographic media appear in heightened contrast to the film’s cinematographic artistry, The Bling Ring does the opposite: with few exceptions (notably an extended sequence filmed from a distance as two teens roam through Audrina Patridge’s glass-paneled home), viewers remain immersed in the same digital landscape as the teens. This led critics to complain about the film’s “ugliness,” its lack of artistry, when in fact this is the point of the film: the amateurishness and accelerated pacing spawned by reality television and celebrityobsessed media has resulted in an aesthetic that is the inverse of art cinema. Coppola’s other films acknowledge the influence of art-cinema aesthetics on her own distinct film style, self-referentially acknowledging that cinema, like other arts, can fundamentally influence how we perceive the world. Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979) inspired the look of The Beguiled (2017). Like Coppola’s, the previous films represented nineteenth-century femininity using images of girls in pale cotton dresses against dark, forested backdrops. Significantly, Coppola admitted she had never seen Weir’s film, only stills from it, reinforcing the overarching importance of its visual aesthetic.22 As one reviewer noted, “If the story’s first half is shot to look like ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock,’ its second might owe more to ‘Stoker.’”23 Coppola clearly watched Park Chan-Wook’s stylish 2013 Southern-Gothic thriller based on Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943). It, too, casts Nicole Kidman in a plot that centers on the arrival of a mysterious male interloper, who attracts not only Kidman’s character but her daughter. (There’s even a reference to poisoning—though suspicion in this case falls on the man, rather than the women.) The scene of Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) looking down at Corporal McBurney (Colin Farrell) from a window is a match for one in Park’s film of the daughter watching her uncle work in the garden, which similarly uses their exchange of glances to convey the sexual tension between them. Coppola has said, though, that her scene was inspired by a fashion image by Yelena Yemchuk of a woman looking through lace (see Figure 13.4).24 The version in Coppola’s film omits dialogue, relying solely on image, and introduces a lace curtain that adds complexity to the play of gazes between the characters: Edwina looks through the curtain as though it disguises her desire, but McBurney sees through it, recognizing that he is its object. As a barrier separating the masculine world of work and war outside from the female space within, it is imperfect, with its open weave offering the thinnest of protection and barely concealing the women’s intentions. Coppola has gravitated toward the visual aesthetic of a director whose work has been described in similar terms: Terrence Malick. According to his cinematographer Néstor

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Figure 13.4  Yelena Yemchuck, Sasha, New York, 2010. Courtesy of Yelena Yemchuck.

Almendros, “He has an exceptional visual sense and an equally exceptional knowledge of painting,” as well as photographic techniques.25 His films “are most distinguished for the primacy and beauty and poetry of their imagery, which reminds the viewers of the fact that the most primal and direct way in which cinema engages its audiences is via the power of images.”26 Coppola watched Badlands (1973) as preparation for filming The Virgin Suicides, and Days of Heaven (1978) inspired the nature montage in Marie Antoinette.27 With great fidelity Coppola replicates signature Malick gestures in both films: wide shots of girls isolated in sun-dappled fields, lingering close-ups of hands brushing against long grasses, inserts focused on natural details absent human presence (fields of wildflowers, sunlight filtered through leaves). Coppola’s appropriations serve each film’s specific ends. In The Virgin Suicides they reinforce that the boys’ image of the Lisbon girls as epitomizing natural beauty is filtered through the lenses of their memories of the 1970s, shaped by film as much as advertising and commercial photography. By contrast, in Marie Antoinette, allusions to Malick’s visual style pointedly emphasize nature to demonstrate that Marie has embraced Rousseau’s principles advocating a return to nature and the rejection of civilization—in other words, that in her retreat to Le Petit Trianon she casts off the aristocratic excesses of court life at Versailles. Moreover, as Malick’s cinematography appears layered over advertising images in The Virgin Suicides, in Marie Antoinette it is accompanied by references to impressionist works by Claude Monet and Berthe Morisot that reinforce the queen’s embrace of naturalism in dress.28 As these examples have already suggested, the visual touchstones in Coppola’s cinema—moving and still—center on clothed bodies, whether paintings of historical

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personages, photographs of models, or filmed footage of costumed actors and expensively dressed celebrities. Anne Hollander argues in Seeing Through Clothes that a history of fine art images has shaped our perceptions, that we view others “not so much directly as through a filter of artistic convention. People dress and observe other dressed people with a set of pictures in mind—pictures in a particular style.”29 This observation applies to Coppola’s films in a heightened sense. She identifies the origins of her visual references to the 1980s, when as a teenager she looked at fashion magazines.30 So it’s not surprising, as I’ve argued elsewhere, that her films acknowledge how artistic conventions derived from fashion photography have influenced contemporary visual perception. Shots of Johnny Marco in bed in Somewhere were directly inspired by Bruce Weber’s portrait of Matt Dillon and John R. Hamilton’s of Clint Eastwood. Elsewhere the allusions are less overt: the opening of Coppola’s short film Lick the Star, for example, introduces its protagonist in close-up shots framing her face that appear indistinguishable from the black-and-white celebrity portraits pioneered by Edward Steichen for Vogue and Vanity Fair. Staged groupings of characters—the Lisbon sisters gathered in the high-school bathroom or their bedroom, the ladies of the Farnsworth school posed around the piano performing for McBurney or huddling together against the kitchen wall away from him— draw on similar tableau-style framing in fashion photography, exemplified in the works of Cecil Beaton and Irving Penn.31 Coppola’s own commercial work has, to date, exclusively served fashion brands and, as much as her feature films, her “fashion mini-films” demonstrate facility in adapting fine art and photographic techniques, albeit for more obviously commercial purposes. It has been frequently noted that she borrowed from her own cinematic practice in directing ads for Marc Jacobs’ line of Daisy perfumes.32 They certainly resemble scenes from The Virgin Suicides with their images of young girls in pale dresses dallying in sunlit fields of wildflowers. However, since these scenes in Coppola’s film originated in a 1970s visual aesthetic derived from Malick’s films, shampoo commercials and Playboy photographs, the references are more layered and diffused. As such, it’s also possible to find parallels to scenes of Marie Antoinette sitting on the lawn reading from Rousseau to her friends. Rather than simply repurposing her films for commercial use, Coppola creates mini-films employing the same visual thinking she does for her features. Her series of shorts for Calvin Klein’s underwear (2017) reprises the format Avedon used for his televised ads in the 1980s—a woman speaking directly to the camera—as well as the style of the black-and-white photos of Kate Moss taken by Herb Ritts and David Sims that appeared in print in the 1990s. Tasked with creating an ad for Cartier’s rerelease of its Panthère watch in 2017, she drew visual inspiration from the era of its original release, repurposing Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980) with such fidelity that its opening scene duplicates one featuring Lauren Hutton. As in The Beguiled, however, Coppola transforms the male-directed precursor to emphasize the woman’s point of view: the commercial’s star (Courtney Eaton) assumes the role played by Richard Gere, initiating a sexual encounter and even piloting the same Mercedes as his character did in the film.33 Simultaneously, though, Coppola demonstrates her facility with commercial photography, foregrounding the product in close-ups. Like Grace Coddington repurposing Alice in Wonderland (or even Coppola’s Marie

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Antoinette or Somewhere) in Vogue, the director cleverly borrows a familiar narrative as the scaffolding for displaying products. A more recent commercial Coppola created for Chanel is perhaps a better example. Granted access to Chanel’s archive, Coppola selected from a preexisting visual collection, and her choices illustrate the range of her visual thinking. The spot, advertising the 2019 Mademoiselle Privé exhibition in Tokyo, opens with a clip from a television commercial for No5 perfume directed by Helmut Newton in 1976, starring Catherine Deneuve. With an efficiency resembling that of the overtures to her features, the clip positions Coppola’s film in a decades-long legacy of fashion photography and broadcast advertising, as well as film history, a point emphasized in a later shot of Romy Schneider wearing Chanel in Luchino Visconti’s Boccaccio ’70 (1962). Pointedly titled “In Homage to Mademoiselle,” the film invokes Gabrielle Chanel using black-and-white stills, but focuses primarily on the fashion house and the goods it produces that carry her name, embedding images of Karl Lagerfeld, the designer who carried Chanel into the twenty-first century (and died the same year the exhibition opened). Edited by Chad Sipkin, the film cuts rapidly among an array of moving and still images: footage of runway shows, photos of celebrities associated with the brand (from Marilyn Monroe to Pharrell), moving images of seamstresses’ hands pinning and stitching, and still shots of products (including the iconic No5 perfume bottle, bouclé jacket, and jewels from the “Bijoux de Diamants” collection designed by Coco Chanel in 1932). These are intercut with collages of vintage print advertising and magazine covers featuring Coco herself and others modeling her designs. In essence, the film is a collage that distills Coppola’s visual thinking by aligning photography and film, artistry and commerce, under the capacious tent of fashion.34 The film closes on a title card with the words “as seen by Sofia Coppola,” rather than “directed by.” Combined with a subsequent card listing over forty visual credits, the choice emphasizes Coppola’s curatorial skills. In addition to works by Newton, Coppola selected from Chanel’s vast archives still and moving advertisements by noted fashion photographer Richard Avedon, as well as images by William Connors, Jean-François Clair, and Jean Chevalier, who all produced covers for Elle in the 1950s and 1960s, and contemporary practitioners Philippe Biancotto, Pascal Chevallier, Karim Sadli, and Jean-Paul Goode, who produced the striking image of Estella Warren in flowing red, entwined in an enormous No5 logo. She included examples of the celebrity portraiture referenced in her own films, including Bob Beerman’s photos of Marilyn Monroe in bed wearing nothing but Chanel No5 and Leïla Smara’s images of Kristen Stewart. In addition to selecting clips from Visconti’s film, she included French New Wave director Robert Bresson’s photos of the “Bijoux de Diamants” collection, taken before he turned to cinema.35 She also incorporated footage from documentary sources (Hearst Newsreel and the Gaumont Pathé Archives), including footage of Chanel from an appearance on the French investigative news program Cinq Colonnes à la Une, directed by Henri Carrier in 1959, and “Mademoiselle Chanel” directed by Jean-Vincent Fournis a decade later for the French cultural series Panorama. These appear alongside still images of the designer at work, captured by legendary photojournalist Douglas Kirkland. Fiction mingles with nonfiction, stillness with motion, the past with the present. Bresson’s photos of Chanel’s jewelry appear alongside shots by Julien Claessens & Thomas Duchamps of

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the contemporary 1932 Collection designed by Karl Lagerfeld based on Chanel’s original designs. The jacket appears on models in archival and contemporary catwalk footage, on film on Coco and on Romy Schneider, and in stills of Jackie Kennedy and Kristen Stewart. No5 appears in its unchanging bottle and, presumably, on Monroe, Deneuve, Warren, and Lily-Rose Depp. Together, this cinematic collage conveys the timelessness of Chanel’s designs—“don’t ever change anything,” as Deneuve instructs us—but equally the endurance of fashion photography and celebrity portraiture as art forms, all owing to Coppola’s extensive yet discriminating selections. She had previously curated an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos for Galerie Thaddeus Ropac in Paris in 2011, following the “eye-to-eye” model of previous shows curated by Cindy Sherman in New York and David Hockney in London: “the idea is to have a contemporary artist bring his or her take on an œuvre as significant as that of Robert Mapplethorpe’s.” Coppola selected little-known works and promotional materials for the show stressed the installation was “very much in step with her world,” noting her reputation for using photographs as inspiration for her films. In fact, “The viewer could easily imagine the photos to be a mood board for a future film.”36 Fiona Handyside followed the gallery’s lead in noting that the chosen subjects—children, animals, women, flowers—“feminize” Mapplethorpe’s works, reflecting the emphasize on girlhood she traces in Coppola’s first three films.37 Photos such as Honey (1976) and Andes (1979), however, depict children far younger than Coppola’s stars, whose direct gazes at the camera appear unsettling.38 Instead, these choices mirror the director’s attention to mise-en-scène: both girls occupy the middle of the frame with their eyes at its center. The rich contrasts in Mapplethorpe’s black-and-white photos associate them with the traditions of celebrity portraiture, albeit indirectly in these images. However, Coppola also included overt examples, portraits of socialites Stella Astor (1976) and Katherine Cebrian (1980), designer Paloma Picasso (1980), and actress Marissa Berenson (1983). Shot in black and white, the photos heighten attention to decorative details and textures—of clothing, hair, jewelry, and décor—allying them with the deliberately formal composition and high-contrast lighting common to the traditions of fashion photography and celebrity portraiture. In an interview about the installation, Coppola confessed, “The truth is, I’ve always wanted to be an art director.”39 But she has also said repeatedly that she wanted to be a fashion editor like Diana Vreeland.40 In effect, she has fused the two in her directing practice, but also in work she has produced as guest editor of French Vogue in 2004 and 2014, and W in 2014.41 Her contribution to W magazine’s 2021 “Directors Issue” encapsulates the blending of film, fashion, and fine art characteristic of Coppola’s work. The spread “stars” actors from her films (Elle Fanning, Kirsten Dunst and Rashida Jones) and the director identifies the source of her visual narrative as the 1980s, when she came to photography through fashion magazines. Produced under restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and in reaction to the casualness of dress that reigned during lockdown, the spread invokes a period renowned for ostentation: power suits, saturated colors, and bold accessories. Coppola’s vision, however, comes not from middle-class trends but is filtered through W magazine’s history of elitist representations of “society hostesses posing in their glamorous settings, in those ballgown skirts.” Her editorial

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envisions its leisured starlets as “lying around like they’re tired after trying on so many gowns.” The result is, as the author of the accompanying article says, “as if the Lisbon sisters from The Virgin Suicides had grown up, married Tom Wolfe–ian Masters of the Universe, and discovered couture.”42 Directing photographer Zoë Ghertner remotely, Coppola does pose Dunst reclining in a Beverly Hills bedroom as though a grown-up Lux, in gowns by Rodarte and Valentino, whose pastel palette recalls that of the film—and the flowered drapes behind Dunst and Jones match those featured in the film’s suburban interiors. Elle Fanning, in a Gucci dress composed of multiple pastels, lies on the white carpet of “a peach-toned bedroom fit for Marie Antoinette.” In another shot Jones reclines on the grass, recalling similar poses in The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette inspired by William Eggleston’s photo of Marcia Hare (c. 1975),43 underscored by an image of Dunst as Lux included at the end of the piece. However, in other images, the actresses assume more formal postures: Jones is seated before a dressing table and in a chair next to an elaborate floral arrangement. Many occupy an intermediate position: Dunst laughingly holds an Armani Privé gown in Marie-Antoinette pink before a doorway; Fanning sits on a bed on her knees in a creamcolored Celine by Hedi Slimane dress or cross-legged in a black Carolina Herrera skirt. Still, their postures are not stiff and the actresses are barefoot, details that undercut the haute-couture luxe of their garments and jewels with the naturalism common to Coppola’s films. A photo of a smiling Jones turbaned in a towel, wearing a bathrobe supplied by the stylist, might appear indistinguishable from a celebrity portrait were it not for the prominent placement of a pair of blue Van Cleef & Arpels pendant earrings dangling from diamond clips. As the copy notes, the diamond jewelry seen throughout may hint at Coppola’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, whose characters could be considered “prototypical versions of the ‘80s hostesses embodied here.” (And I cannot help but see an allusion to a publicity shot of Wharton at her desk, her gaze turned to the camera, as inspiring the shot of Jones before the dressing table.) Befitting the focus of her cinematic vision on socialites of the past, Coppola takes her photographic cues from the portraits of the upper-class women that shaped her perceptions in the 1980s, rather than from the most prominent fashion photographers of the era—Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, and Bruce Weber—with their heightened attention to artifice and provocative eroticism, or the moody alternative created by Deborah Tuberville. Her spread in W, then, demonstrates in miniature how the director’s perceptions—molded by immersion in photographic traditions—shape the construction of a visual narrative using actors, costumes, sets, and cinematography. Evidence of the influence exerted by Coppola’s visual thinking abounds. Fans have created artworks inspired by her films. One Instagram user inserted an image of Charlotte with an umbrella into a collage of women with parasols painted by Renoir. Others post their own drawings or paintings of characters and scenes from her films. Casual references pop up in popular press: “Run your hand through some necklaces like a Coppola heroine feeling the air out a car window.”44 Fashion brand Doen’s “sepia-toned social media feed suggests a Sofia Coppola adaptation of ‘O Pioneers!’.”45 Even the director’s own vision has been shaped by her films. She has said, “I love [Christina] Hejtmanek’s fuzzy

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landscapes and have a photo she took of daisies in a field that reminds me of The Virgin Suicides and ’70s nature shots.”46 In a circular fashion, art images—1970s nature shots from advertising, photography, and Malick’s films—shaped Coppola’s film, which now influences how she herself perceives artworks created in its wake. Such is the power of cinematic art, particularly films like Coppola’s, which are so thoroughly attentive to the potential for still and moving images to shape human perception. Deliberately and self-reflexively, Coppola’s films—long and short, from her features to her commercials—acknowledge the influence of painting, photography, and cinema in altering our views of each other and the world. On that basis, they are works of visual art in their own right, with the same possibility to transport and transform us.

Notes 1 Evgenia Peretz, “Something About Sofia,” Vanity Fair, September 2006, 352. The meeting took place when the family was living at the Sherry-Netherland hotel featured in On the Rocks. 2 Coppola has said she was homeschooled in the language of film. See Carrie Rickey, “Lost and Found,” DGA Quarterly, Spring 2013, https://www​.dga​.org​/Craft​/DGAQ​/All​-Articles​/1302​ -Spring​-2013​/Sofia​-Coppola​.aspx. For additional details, see Peretz, “Something About Sofia,” 352. She recalled, “I learned through osmosis all those years and didn’t realize I knew how to do it from all those years with my dad.” See Keaton Bell, “Sofia Coppola on the 20th Anniversary of The Virgin Suicides: ‘It Means a Lot to Me That It Has a Life Now,’” Vogue, April 21, 2020, https://www​.vogue​.com​/article​/sofia​-coppola​-interview​-the​-virgin​-suicides​-20th​ -anniversary. 3 Rickey, “Lost and Found.” For an analysis of Coppola’s visual aesthetic in The Virgin Suicides in relation to Jasmin’s work (and Bill Owens’), see Joanna Elena Batsakis, “Sofia Coppola: Cine-Poet,” The Focus Pull, November 2, 2014, http://www​.thefocuspull​.com​/features​/sofia​ -coppola​-cine​-poet/. 4 Rickey, “Lost and Found.” 5 Production designer Anne Ross explained, “We envisioned her as a person with a good eye for design, raised by people in the arts. The walls are covered with art we thought of as coming from Felix, which means he is, in a way, always present.” See Rachel Wallace, “Sofia Coppola on Finally Making a New York City Movie with On the Rocks,” Architectural Digest, November 6, 2020, https://www​.architecturaldigest​.com​/story​/sofia​-coppola​-new​-york​-city​ -movie​-on​-the​-rocks​-set. 6 See, for instance, Alexandra Schwartz, Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 7 In Interview magazine, Dorff describes a visit to Ruscha’s studio, where he saw the artist in the process of preparing the prints and suggested using one to dress the set, knowing that Coppola is a fan of his work. See “Sofia Coppola and Stephen Dorff,” Interview, November 19, 2010, https://www​.interviewmagazine​.com​/film​/sofia​-coppola​-and​-stephen​-dorff. Batsakis offers a compelling case for considering Somewhere as a series of photographic frames akin to Ruscha’s Sunset Strip series. See Batsakis, “Sofia Coppola.” 8 Quoted in “Making Somewhere,” Somewhere, DVD, director Sofia Coppola (Universal City, CA: Focus Features, 2011). 9 Robert Stam notes, for instance, that film employs five “materials of expression”: “moving photographic image, phonetic sound, music, noises and written materials.” See Robert Stam,

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“Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 59. 10 Richard Brody, “The Virgin Suicides,” The New Yorker, https://www​.newyorker​.com​/goings​ -on​-about​-town​/movies​/the​-virgin​-suicides; Richard Brody, “The Beguiled: Sofia Coppola’s Dubiously Abstract Vision of the Civil War,” The New Yorker, June 23, 2017, https://www​ .newyorker​.com​/culture​/richardbrody​/the​-beguiled​-sofia​-coppolas​-dubiously​-abstract​-vision​ -of​-the​-civil​-war; Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019). 11 On the film’s twentieth anniversary, Coppola recounted to Vogue that a graphic-designer friend Geoff McFetridge did the titles and that she fought the studio to retain them on the poster. See Bell, “Sofia Coppola on the 20th Anniversary of The Virgin Suicides.” 12 “David himself was an ardent champion of the Revolution who, as a member of the National Convention, voted for the execution of Louis XVI and made a sketch, Marie Antoinette on the Way to the Guillotine (1793).” See Dennis Bingham, “Whose Lives are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (Princeton, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 375. 13 See “Sofia Coppola on Filmmaking: A Talk and Q&A with Annette Insdorf,” YouTube, April 22, 2020, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=JKj92etN7fw​&t​=308s. For a more detailed comparison of Coppola’s moving and Kacere’s still images, see Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 114–15. 14 See Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 114–15. 15 Michelle Devereaux, The Stillness of Solitude: Romanticism and Contemporary American Independent Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 152. 16 Devereaux, Stillness of Solitude, 29. Both Wendy Haslem and Todd Kennedy cite Jean-Luc Godard’s prologue for Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963), as Coppola’s reference in the opening to Lost in Translation, noting his extended scene of a naked Brigitte Bardot reclining on a bed to display her derrière. See Wendy Haslem, “Neon Gothic: Lost in Translation,” Senses of Cinema 31 (April 2004), http://sensesofcinema​.com​/2004​/feature​-articles​/lost​_in​_translation/; Todd Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur,” Film Criticism 35, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 46. Jeff Smith has identified “a tendency towards frontality in her selection of camera angles,” noting that “Coppola employs a rectilinear approach for certain types of shots, especially roomy masters that resemble photographic portraiture.” See Jeff Smith, “Our Lives in Pink: Sofia Coppola as Transmedia Audiovisual Stylist,” in Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers and Lisa Perrott (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 80. 17 Philip Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” Aperture 231 (Summer 2018): 26. Also see Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 117–19. 18 Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, “Marie Antoinette: Fashion, Third-Wave Feminism, and Chick Culture,” Literature/Film Quarterly 38 (2010): 100–1, 107. 19 Anna Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 33; Justin Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides: Reverie, Sorrow and Young Love (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 6, 66, 69. 20 See Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 136. 21 Maryn Wilkinson, “On the Depths of Surface: Strategies of Surface Aesthetics in The Bling Ring, Spring Breakers and Drive,” Film-Philosophy 22, no. 2 (2018): 226–8. 22 Kristen Lopez, “In Conversation with Sofia Coppola,” Film School Rejects, May 19, 2017, https://filmschoolrejects​.com​/interview​-director​-sofia​-coppola​-beguiled/. 23 David Ehrlich, “‘The Beguiled’ Review: Nicole Kidman and Kirsten Dunst Subvert Male Fantasies in Sofia Coppola’s Sensational Southern Potboiler,” IndieWire, May 24, 2017,

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https://www​.indiewire​.com​/2017​/05​/the​-beguiled​-review​-sofia​-coppola​-nicole​-kidman​-kirsten​ -dunst​-colin​-farrell​-cannes​-2017​-1201831226​/2/. 24 Michael Odmark, “The Close-Up: Sofia Coppola Talks Filmmaking and The Beguiled,” Film Linc Daily, June 22, 2017, https://www​.filmlinc​.org​/daily​/the​-close​-up​-sofia​-coppola​ -talks​-filmmaking​-and​-the​-beguiled/. In the interview, Coppola discusses the influence of photography on her work, as well as the visual references to Italian cinematography and Hitchcock’s films in The Beguiled. On Hitchcock’s images, also see Anthony Kaufman, “Sofia Coppola and Anne Ross,” DGA Quarterly, September 2017, https://www​.dga​.org​/Craft​/ DGAQ​/All​-Articles​/1702​-Spring​-2017​/Collaborators​-Coppola​-Ross​.aspx. 25 Néstor Almendros, A Man with a Camera, trans. Rachel Phillips Balash (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984), 167–86. 26 Hwanhee Lee, “Terrence Malick,” Senses of Cinema 23 (December 2002), https://www​ .sensesofcinema​.com​/2002​/great​-directors​/malick/. 27 Rickey, “Lost and Found”; Todd Gilchrist, “Interview: Sofia Coppola,” IGN, October 17, 2006, https://www​.ign​.com​/articles​/2006​/10​/17​/interview​-sofia​-coppola​?page​=1. 28 See Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 143. 29 Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 311. 30 Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” 23. 31 See Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 121–8. The portrait-style images in Somewhere also reference the portraits of actors and other beautiful young people taken by Coppola’s former teacher Paul Jasmin collected in Lost Angeles (2004) and California Dreaming (2010). See Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” 26. Lost Angeles features a photo of the director taken in 2003. See Paul Jasmin, Lost Angeles, ed. Dimitri Levas (Göttingen: Steidl, 2004). On references to fashion tableaux in Marie Antoinette, also see Samiha Matin, “Private Femininity, Public Femininity: Tactical Aesthetics in the Costume Film,” in Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas, ed. Christine Gledhill (Urbana, IL and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 104. 32 See, for example, Wyatt, Virgin Suicides, 79–81. 33 See Wyatt, Virgin Suicides, 82. Also see Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 149–52. 34 For a more detailed analysis, see Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 157–60. For an alternative reading in the context of the fashion mini-film, see Caryn Simonson’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 11). 35 See https://www​.lecinemaclub​.com​/journal​/gabrielle​-chanel​-film​-list/. 36 See https://ropac​.net​/exhibitions​/263​-robert​-mapplethorpe​-curated​-by​-sofia​-coppola/. In an interview, Ropac said, “When I saw Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, certain images and framing made me think that it could be incredible to bring these two creative universes together.” See Charlotte Davey, “Robert Mapplethorpe by Sofia Coppola,” Dazed, November 25, 2011, https://www​.dazeddigital​.com​/photography​/article​/12057​/1​/robert​-mapplethorpe​ -by​-sofia​-coppola. For a more detailed analysis of Coppola’s curatorial work, see Lawrence Webb’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 18). 37 Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), Kindle loc. 196. 38 Asked whether she gave “special attention to Mapplethorpe’s treatment of women,” Coppola answered, “I didn’t really focus on that at all. But I have, of course, included some women. I really just chose the images that I liked, and that I thought could work together for a show. And, like I said already, I enjoyed most discovering the images that I didn’t know.” See Karl

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E. Johnson, “Robert Mapplethorpe: An Interview with Sofia Coppola,” Eyemazing, January 6, 2017, https://www​.eyemazing​.org/​?offset​=1484340175885. 39 Johnson, “Robert Mapplethorpe.” 40 See Coppola’s interview with Grace Coddington, “Sofia Coppola,” Face to Grace, M2M: Made to Measure TV, October 10, 2018, https://m2m​.tv​/watch​/sofia​-coppola), as well as Handyside, Sofia Coppola, Kindle loc. 2886. 41 For an analysis of the December 2004/January 2005 issue of Vogue Paris, see Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 171–3. 42 Andrea Whittle, “Kirsten Dunst, Rashida Jones, and Elle Fanning Are All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go,” W, March 2021, https://www​.wmagazine​.com​/culture​/sofia​-coppola​ -directors​-issue​-kirsten​-dunst​-rashida​-jones​-elle​-fanning. 43 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 105–9. 44 Monica Heisey, “So, You’ve Wandered into a Too-Expensive Store,” The New York Times, November 23, 2018, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2018​/11​/23​/opinion​/sunday​/holiday​-shopping​ -humor​.html. 45 Chloe Malle, “Pioneer Women Are Roaming the City,” The New York Times, September 12, 2018, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2018​/09​/12​/style​/prairie​-woman​-style​-batsheva​-doen​.html. 46 Sofia Coppola, “Soft Focus,” W, May 1, 2014, https://www​.wmagazine​.com​/gallery​/christina​ -hejtmanek​-sofia​-coppola​/all.

14 MUSIC THE FEELING OF THE MOMENT: MUSIC IN THE CINEMA OF SOFIA COPPOLA Tim J. Anderson

I think about the music and the visuals early on and that kind of informs the tones [for] all my team . . . so we can all be on the same page of what the feeling is. SOFIA COPPOLA SPEAKING TO THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE (2020)

One conventional understanding of her first three features was that each film was part of a trilogy about Sofia Coppola herself. As one Vanity Fair article notes, “If The Virgin Suicides was a beautifully executed collection of dreamy, teenage-girl imagery, Lost in Translation a more personal story about alienation and coming of age, then Marie Antoinette is her celebration of her flighty, girlie side.”1 However, extending this proposition to her next four narrative features that include stories of wartime and a middle-class gang of thieves is problematic. Nevertheless, what does unite all her films is their ability to generate palpable moments that affectively engage the audience with the assistance of music. Indeed, her films center on creating momentous intensities where music, particularly popular music, is key. This is not to say that Coppola does not tell stories or use music conventionally as a means of supporting narrative demands. In fact, Coppola’s last two narrative projects, The Beguiled (2017) and On the Rocks (2020), gesture toward more conventional forms of storytelling. Still, more often she uses music in a manner akin to musicals and melodrama. Instead of adhering to the need to drive the narrative forward, musical moments in Coppola’s films are often distended, stretched to assert

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the feeling of the moment. These assertions are moments of performance and being, demonstrations and gesture that offer audiences a visceral understanding of existing in moments of decision, movement, and encounters. Just as Anna Backman Rogers argues that Coppola employs an “outstanding ability to think through and in images,”2 I argue that Coppola’s narrative films predominantly employ music to display the momentous, to isolate the importance of individual moments, whether they be accidents, dances, soured serenades, or goodbyes. Coppola’s use of music asserts epistemic reverberations that demand the audience feel her characters’ circumstances as part of her aesthetic project. As Coppola’s cinema wanders from moment to moment, music, often in the form of pop music placements, secures and expands these moments into specific intensities flush with critical sensibilities. Even the later films that embrace more “classical” forms of narrative and rely less on momentous musical moments employ music that feels no less invested in tone. In this chapter, I will draw on Coppola’s extant narrative feature films, interviews, and discussions to demonstrate how they generate musical moments as a critical affective device. Let us begin with her 2010 feature Somewhere, a film about a male Hollywood film star whose life is effectively in limbo. One of the film’s opening scenes begins with its ostensible protagonist, Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), sitting on his bed as twin sisters dance for him on two portable poles in his Chateau Marmont hotel room. As Marco relaxes into his bed, he watches the two dancers (Kristina and Karissa Shannon) as they perform a less-thanerotic erotic routine to the Foo Fighters’ “My Hero” that plays over their portable stereo. While much of the scene is from Marco’s point of view, the shot effectively short circuits any erotic charge for the male gaze. Instead, we are provided with a static frame that feels observational rather than prying.3 The lack of quick edits and fetishizing close-ups typical of rock videos makes the performance feel both awkward and boring. With the camera remaining stationary, the dancers pop in and out of the frame in their button-up tops and bikini bottoms. The combination of the static shot with the Foo Fighters’ guitar-driven rock record generates an almost mocking, frigid scene as Marco nods off. The twins finish by simultaneously sliding down their poles upside down in parallel as the record ends, before collapsing their poles, gathering their equipment, and leaving the room, having finished their job while their client slumbers. The next morning Marco wakes up and gets on with his life as if the extraordinary scene the night before was of little significance. Less than ten minutes later in the film, the twins return to perform their act once more. While their outfits are more revealing and the record is new, the shot is the same as before: they are clad in skimpy tennis kits and armed with Amerie’s record, “1 Thing.” This time Marco is somewhat amused and invites them to bed, an offer one twin rejects and the other accepts with a bubblegum kiss. As in the previous scene, the long, seemingly excessive shot offers moments that are more athletic than erotic. Both “My Hero” and “1 Thing” are the type of records that would be played in clubs during the late 2000s. Thus, these records’ diegetic position and placement as dance accompaniment simultaneously feel appropriate, unexceptional, and critical. It is a choice example of Pam Cook’s observation of the “tension in [Coppola’s] work between the observational distance of documentary and the intimacy of home movies.”4 This kind of thing is what happens in one of Hollywood’s most famous residences for the rich, famous, and displaced, a space for those who, as

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The New York Times observed, are both “pampered and rootless.”5 Narrative judgments are suspended in exchange for something close to clinically awkward rather than leering. As Roger Ebert put it in his review of Somewhere, “we see exactly what she sees. There is little attempt here to observe a plot.”6 The two pole dance scenes from Somewhere remain two of the best examples of Coppola’s signature effect: placing the viewer in moments where her stylistic choices are applied to generate a specific mood or intensity that supersedes and stalls the momentum of the storyline. In these cases and the ones I discuss later, music is essential in illustrating these transient indulgences and a directionless existence. But these scenes are also synecdochical. Coppola’s work has long been inclined to seemingly wander from moment to moment and this is key to understanding both her pace and style as a storyteller. Elsewhere I have argued that “much of Coppola’s creative energies are deposited onto specific moments rather than weighty narratives.”7 This, I have also argued, exhibits a particular “melodramatic mode,” wherein the linear time of story is often arrested and explored to mine what these moments present. Sometimes these moments explore ennui. Sometimes they explore the ecstatic. Music is woven into these moments not necessarily as comment, but rather to “reveal characters’ states of mind, specifically what they themselves cannot communicate.”8 Coppola’s use of music underscores what has long been a key facet of her work: her emphasis on tone, both visual and aural, as the defining aspect of her films. As Coppola herself noted, “I always like to start with the atmosphere and the tone and the look kind of first, and the music, and tell the story as much as I can without dialogue. I like just trying to tell the story as much as you can with the expressions and the emotion.”9 Considering the close association that Coppola has kept with musicians, her emphasis on music is not surprising. Beginning in the early 1990s Coppola directed music videos of alternative rock acts, such as The Flaming Lips and The White Stripes. In 2013 she directed the music video, “Chloroform,” for the French group, Phoenix, that includes her husband, Thomas Mars. Mars and Phoenix have provided their services on seven Coppola projects, including as composers for Somewhere, The Beguiled, and On the Rocks. For On the Rocks, the band is credited as “music supervisor,” as important a designation for her films as cinematographer and art director. Before Mars and Phoenix, Coppola was closely associated with the music supervisor Brian Reitzell. A drummer and former member of the American alternative rock act Redd Kross, Reitzell worked as music supervisor for The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006), and The Bling Ring (2013). Describing his process of working with Coppola on Marie Antoinette, Reitzell explained, “We started as we always start. She asked me for some music to help her write the script. I struggled with it at first and then put together for her a compilation that included music by the Cure, Aphex Twin and Bow Wow Wow. It seemed kind of natural to us.” For Reitzell, the film deals not with historical accuracy, so much as an “energy and atmosphere” that both he and Coppola wanted to convey.10 Creating a CD/mixtape/playlist of suggestions was already Reitzell’s standard practice when beginning to work with a director so they can hear how he “feels the music should follow.”11 This focus on the “feel” of music is key. Reitzell has not been shy about criticizing how most music supervision is offered, stating, “I really don’t like the way most movies

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and TV shows are supervised—I hate when there’s someone singing over dialogue, songs just thrown in there.”12 Coppola’s musical connection to Mars exhibits a similar investment in taste. In a 2017 Billboard interview, Coppola explained that when working with Phoenix and her husband, she would “first send stills to establish a sense of the scene’s mood before screening the full sequence” at which time Mars would play her “a few options.”13 In 2020, Mars affirmed the nature of their working relationship: She knows exactly what she wants. When we see the rushes, I’ll play pieces that I think [sic] to Sofia, and her response is almost instant. It’s really funny—it’s love at first sight. . . . One of my favorite collaborative aspects is she’ll listen to 10 seconds of something and she’ll know right away that it won’t fit, or it’s missing a very specific synth sound that she’ll describe to you. We like the same music, so it’s helpful that I know which synths she’s talking about.14 Mars has also explained that when Coppola writes screenplays, “she writes with music. Music is always there. It’s not something we add later on.”15 Because music takes on a foundational role in the pre-production phase of Coppola’s films, Mars explains that “it can be hard to make it into something that’s not just a demo, because when you play a piece of music to someone at the very early stage, sometimes they get attached to it.”16 The refined attachment to music exhibited by Coppola’s team is important. First, it underscores that Coppola does not only think through images but through audio. As Reitzell clarifies, “There’s never anything gratuitous in Sofia’s movies.”17 Mars echoes this sentiment when he notes, “Music is almost like sugar. You don’t want to overdo it. You have to just put in the right amount.”18 The Coppola team’s refined musical palate certainly embellished her reputation enough that she was commissioned to direct a production of Verdi’s La Traviata by the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in 2016 that would find itself in limited theatrical release as a film.19 Five years later in 2021 Coppola released a video on YouTube as part of New York City Ballet’s pandemic-driven virtual gala fundraiser that consisted of five dances. Coppola’s reputation as a transmedia artist for whom music plays a primary role connects to the emphases of opera and ballet where the work of gesture guided through musical time is fundamental. As Backman Rogers and others have argued, the experience of “becoming” and “moments of threshold, of transition” are fundamental to Coppola’s work.20 Her first three features, as I have argued elsewhere, “focus on what it feels like to be on the cusp of specific moments of feminine change.”21 Whereas the idea can be written and the image stilled, the sensation must be felt through the passage of time. Indeed, music and sound emphasize synchronicity and simultaneity with time-dependency pronouncing specific capacities. Simon Frith has noted that if “ordinary daily experience takes place in a world of actual time, [the] essential quality of music is its power to create another world of virtual time.” He explains that “in narrative (or rhetorical) terms, music’s beginning, middle, and end is determined as much by gestural shape (its ‘theory’ of time passing) as by the actual order of succession.”22 This emphasis on “gestural shape” in music

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is key. The gesture, for lack of a better term, shows. Music can help heighten a pose, movement, or reaction to draw attention to the moment. As will become clearer, using music as a kind of amplifier of the gestural terrain is the key to the “melodramatic mode” that Coppola employs. She uses music to generate what Thomas Elsaesser notes is the traditional use of the term melodrama: “a dramatic narrative in which musical accompaniment marks the emotional effects . . . giving expressive colour and chromatic contrast to the story-line, by orchestrating the emotional ups and downs of the intrigue.” As a result, melodrama is not a genre or even a style, but rather a matter of “style and articulation.”23 Coppola regularly mines the melodramatic mode for this purpose. Take, for example, the relationship between the Lisbon sisters and their male teen suitors in The Virgin Suicides. When the Lisbon parents slowly isolate their daughters from the world after Cecilia, the youngest of five, commits suicide, they find their most romantic connections through records and music. The oldest sister, Lux Lisbon (Kirsten Dunst) has three significant moments centering on popular music: her high-school homecoming dance, the destruction of her music collection by her mother, and a “telephone conversation” that she and her sisters engage in with neighborhood boys that consists primarily of playing and sharing records. In each of the three moments, we not only see but are encouraged to empathize with Lux, her sisters, and their suitors. For the moment, let us focus on the homecoming dance scene. For Lux this is literally a crowning event as she is declared queen alongside her love interest, Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), who claims the title of king. Before this moment the dance has been less than successful—tame and composed of nervous, fumbling couples whose less than spirited swaying to soft rock classics such as ELO’s “Strange Magic” mark the event as unexceptional. This changes the moment Lux and Trip are declared royalty. The announcement interrupts Lux and Trip’s make-out session with gasps of excitement, applause, and Styx’s 1977 recording of “Come Sail Away.” As Dennis DeYoung sings, “Come sail away / Come sail away with me,” the gym enlivens with dancing, falling balloons, and spinning lights. Lux holds on to Trip as her father (James Woods) looks on with joyful pride. The other Lisbon sisters join the high schoolers who jump and dance while punching falling balloons as the music echoes throughout gym, growing louder and more pronounced. The sounds of balloons being punched and popped intermix with the music and squeals. A once joyless Therese Lisbon (Leslie Hayman) yells, right before she is twirled by her dance partner, “I’m having the best time!” This is a moment of release for a school, a family and community that has suffered greatly from Cecilia’s suicide; it is a moment of respite. Centered on a record that cries out fantasies of coupled escape while exclaiming that angels “sang to me this song of hope,”24 this is a pronounced, collective emotional peak. The scene ends as Air’s synthesized soundtrack grafts itself onto a fading Styx record to extend the moment for a few seconds more. This is an emotional summit worth remembering as Lux and her sisters will quickly cascade. Trip abandons a sleeping Lux on the football field after taking her virginity, she misses her curfew, and is punished by her mother, Sara Lisbon (Kathleen Turner).25 The moment is an amplified combination of soft-focus lenses and sound that perfumes the scene with the scent of memory, which is Coppola’s aim. In an interview with the American Film Institute Coppola explained, “I wanted the film to be a memory

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and not set in the seventies.”26 The question for her was, “how do you use contemporary music to feel this kind of dreamy memory feeling?”27 In his book on The Virgin Suicides, Justin Wyatt points out that, “while Eugenides’ novel includes some fleeting references to music, Coppola’s musical choices help to create an identity for the project as separate from the novel” and “music becomes a key element in the film’s style.” Furthermore, “Music is linked to specific gendered spaces as a means to define the characters and their dramatic situation.”28 The film’s fragmented delivery of 1970s soft rock classics of longing is, as is the entire film, framed as a memory. The result is these passages often engage a melodramatic mode where music and gesture overcome the limits of the spoken word. Backman Rogers’ celebration of Coppola’s films rests partially on their ability to capture the fleeting, seemingly ephemeral “moments in life that are nearly impossible to capture, centered and grounded as they are in subjectivity and embodiment.” These are moments that constitute a “feminine aesthetic.” Moments such as a homecoming or a dance “come to define the course of life.” Among the examples Backman Rogers offers, one is from Lost in Translation when a “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.” She calls this moment an “infinitesimal and profoundly altering event” for Charlotte. The sound of distorted calm and melancholy assists in distending this “slightness of brevity of actual time” that “subsists within lived experience—that is, within the body.” This is a bittersweet moment that demands sensation: “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.”29 Using music to express what it feels like to be a young woman connects Marie Antoinette to The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. Arguably Coppola’s most idiosyncratic film, it traces Maria Antonia’s transformation from the Archduchess of Austria into Marie Antoinette. Throughout her arranged marriage to future king Louis XVI, Marie (Kirsten Dunst) becomes a coddled, rich, bored young woman, who spends a significant amount of her time in a loveless and fruitless marriage acquiring expensive goods and spending time with her ladies-in-waiting. In one montage sequence that is motivated after she breaks down into tears, jealous of her sister-in-law’s newborn child, Marie purchases expensive garments and jewelry, gambles, eats beautiful desserts, and dresses up to the non-diegetic music of Bow Wow Wow’s version of “I Want Candy.” Seemingly exhausted and bored by these saccharine activities, Marie expresses a desire to leave the Palace of Versailles and go to a masquerade ball in Paris while bemoaning the fact that this would require a formal reception. One young woman in her party points out that she could easily attend the masquerade ball because she would be in disguise. Marie and her party, which includes the future king, decide to attend the ball. Unlike the staid and formal celebration of the marriage of Marie to the Dauphin that includes a minuet from the 1735 opera-ballet Les Indes Galantes by Jean Philippe Rameau, the score of the masquerade ball is dominated by the New Romantic, post-punk sounds of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bow Wow Wow. As the scene begins, we are treated to a non-diegetic string arrangement of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Hong Kong Garden.” The arrangement builds to a staccato peak that cuts into the original tempo upon the

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edit from guests descending downstairs and into an almost “pit-like” atmosphere of men and women spinning in powdered wigs and makeup. The swirling energy of “Hong Kong Garden” matches the intensity of the dance with the rhythm, attitude, and atmosphere of energized mystery. As Siouxsie Sioux sings, “Harmful elements in the air / Symbols clashing everywhere,”30 the staid frontality of the camera that documents the previous minuet of the wedding is replaced by a looser, moving camera that pries into a party of recklessly poured drinks, laughing stumbles, and stolen kisses. As “Hong Kong Garden” recedes, Bow Wow Wow’s “Aphrodisiac” diegetically fills the ballroom and looms in the background as Marie exchanges glances, gossips with her party, and then flirts with an officer of the Swedish Army. “Take an a-a-aphrodisiac / Don’t do no-no-nothing, just relax / Your ha-ha-heart goes pit-a-pat / Take an a-a-aphrodisiac”31 plays throughout as tom toms guide Marie’s first truly desire-driven moment of sexualized play. She returns to her party and travels back to Versailles in the early morning as Bow Wow Wow’s off-key rendition of “Fools Rush In” plays. Ripe with a sense of adolescent desire, the masquerade ball’s structural and functional similarity to the homecoming dance in The Virgin Suicides is clear. Both are peak moments where sexualized youthful femininity is simultaneously formally celebrated and somewhat contained. Both events involve music, chaperones, and narrative punishment.32 Most importantly, both scenes convey an unleashing of young female energy and desire: the dancing, the colors, the music, and the intermingling of similarly excited, fashionably dressed bodies work to impart an affectionate and palpable psychic charge. Coppola’s cinematic suggestion that a 1970s school dance in Michigan is not too distant from a 1770s Parisian ball may be a stretch for some. But New Order’s “Ceremony” for Marie’s birthday celebration appeared natural to Coppola for her initial understanding of the eighteenth century came from the post-punk movement: My introduction to 18th-century France was from New Romantic music, from the imagery of Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant, and Vivienne Westwood, and the whole scene that was going on post-punk, when I was an adolescent.33 The New Romantic movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s was at first a fashion movement that would find its way into music as punk’s anger subsided and many of punk’s participants embraced the gender bending attitudes of early 1970s glam rock. Combining rock music with the feel of the early Romantic movement of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fashion allowed New Romanticism’s participants access to a visceral imagination of the period. Offering an editorial comment on the spirit of Coppola’s depiction of Antoinette, the fashion historian, Caroline Weber, noted that the ever-changing image of the doomed monarch is a part of French history and that throughout the nineteenth century there were at least two substantial attempts to resuscitate Marie’s standing or specific imaginative aims. For Weber, “Coppola’s new movie, with its pop anthems and Valley Girl queen, is simply the latest manifestation of that same tradition—a new Marie Antoinette, to reflect the director’s time and place.” As Weber reminds the reader, Coppola stated that while making the film that “she felt no compunction to be ‘a fetishist’ about historical accuracy.” Coppola claimed, “I’m just, like, making it my thing.”34

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Coppola’s rejection of “dry history” and embrace of an emotional connection through the placement of relatively contemporary popular music is one of many reasons that Marie Antoinette is considered so “willfully careless of the conventional thinking.”35 Another portion of the controversy rests with the claim that Marie Antoinette is a sympathetic figure. For Manohla Dargis, that “youth and apparent ignorance locked the future queen in a welter of self-indulgence from which she had no reason to escape” was the film’s only idea. By ignoring Marie’s role in a moment of historical bloodshed, Dargis complains Marie Antoinette is “an opulent proto-Euro Disney cum rave where royals are really just 24-hour party people, full of fun and lots of cake.”36 Placing the question of historical accuracy aside, perhaps no other criticism of Coppola sticks harder than the charge that her films focus on the worlds of the tony and well-to-do. Exhibitions of privilege and its appeals permeate and, in some cases, constitute her films. Upon the release of Somewhere in 2010, Dennis Lim of The New York Times commented, “the cloistered milieu of [the film] offers yet more ammunition to her skeptics, but Ms. Coppola has a matter-of-fact response. ‘I feel like everyone should tell what they know in the world that they know.’”37 Three years later Coppola released The Bling Ring, a film that simultaneously expresses and critiques the desire for fame, fashion, and wealth. Loosely based on a 2010 Vanity Fair article titled “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” The Bling Ring depicts a group of five teens from various middle-class backgrounds who steal millions in jewelry, clothes, and cash from the celebrity homes of Orlando Bloom, Megan Fox, Paris Hilton, and others. What makes The Bling Ring so interesting is that these teens are already relatively privileged in their white middle-class homes. Nevertheless, they are overrun by a desire for fame and the expensive-yet-shallow delights that are promoted by the very celebrities they rob. Their amplified desire is displayed through moments of conspicuous consumption, clubbing, and theft. Indeed, as Backman Rogers points out, narrative time in The Bling Ring “is experienced via a succession of interchangeable and fractured ‘moments.’”38 In an attempt to convey how these moments feel, Coppola and Reitzell turned to music to make her most “musical” film to date. With seventeen selections from sixteen different artists (two from Kanye West), much of feeling of the film is driven by these selections, as one journalist explains, the visceral zing of the story, then, is carried largely on the shoulders of the film’s soundtrack. . . . The Bling Ring’s madcap high-schoolers rap along to Rick Ross’ “9 Piece” as they drive to the beach; they squeeze into short skirts and light cigarettes in their bedrooms with Reema Major’s “Gucci Bag” blasting in the background. The underage thieves dance at the sorts of clubs that play Azealia Banks’ “212” and drunk drive while mouthing the immortal words of M.I.A.: “Live fast, die young / Bad girls do it well.” Their chains hit their chests when they’re banging on the dashboard.39 The example of M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” is a particularly on-the-nose example of musical counterpoint. After the five break into Paris Hilton’s home to steal clothes and dance, the group goes to a club and toasts to “a great fucking night.” As Chloe (Claire Julien) drives home drunk with co-inebriates Rebecca (Katie Chang) and Marc (Israel Broussard), the three sing-along as “Bad Girls” booms throughout until the very second they are T-boned

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by an oncoming car, an event that immediately ends the music. Occurring in the thirtysecond minute of the film, the “accident” acts as a reminder that these moments are both seductive and frail. This feeling of collective, drunken decadence—illicit in every manner— is palpably exciting and immediately suspended at the moment of impact. The use of hip-hop in The Bling Ring presents significant issues for the characters— and Coppola. On the one hand, Coppola openly admits that she needed music that she did not have much appreciation for and put the onus on Reitzell to come through. As she explained, “the music in that movie is less personal to me. . . . The clubs and everything aren’t really my thing. Hip-hop isn’t my specialty. I like some of it, but it’s just not in my DNA.”40 Yet the importance of hip-hop to these characters is personal, as Wesley Morris observed: “This music isn’t the reason these kids rob. But it’s in their system. Their lust for luxury brands and hunger for celebrity are as much a part of where hip-hop has wound up: on Rodeo Drive.” While hip-hop’s address to young black America “began in identification,” Morris explains, “young white America’s relationship to rap began in rebellious aspiration.” He notes that “wittingly or not, Coppola’s film connects hip-hop’s migration from the realm of have-not/have-some/have-it-all to the age of disillusionment with having arrived.”41 Coppola positions hip-hop throughout the film as the music of youthful-yet-proudly-stupid aspirationals. For example, placing 2 Chainz’s “Money Machine” in the background of a club where Marc fences watches stolen from Orlando Bloom’s house makes it clear that these teens are out of their element. Hearing 2 Chainz recite, “I be fucking your girl, I was texting her only / I told her, ‘I’d like your legs better if they was open’”42 as Marc and Chloe enter the backdoor of the club to sell hot, high-end watches provides a momentary contrast that cannot be ignored. The end credit placement of Frank Ocean’s “Super Rich Kids” confirms that these are kids who have succumbed not simply to poor choices, but choices coaxed on by the very celebrities they have robbed. “Super Rich Kids” confirms these characters’ cluelessness. Frank Ocean’s slow recitation of “Super rich kids with nothing but loose ends / Super rich kids with nothing but fake friends”43 exacts a stinging yet compassionate censure for the members of this ring who, at the end of the film, have been sentenced and begin to serve time for their crimes. Coppola’s sympathies for her Bling Ring characters—Marc in particular—are, again, best sensed in their moments of dance and celebration. As the initial break-ins happen without musical accompaniment, the results of the thefts are quickly transformed into moments of spectacular display, the likes of which most young people could never resist. After Marc fences the watches, he snorts cocaine with Rebecca, and the group celebrates in a club with selfies where they show off bottles of Grey Goose vodka, sparklers, fashion, and wads of cash as the Avicii dance record, “Levels,” plays in a super-diegetic mix of gesture and dance. The slow-motion cinematography accompanying the Avicii record, which is also slowed down and stretched out to mark out and elongate this moment of ecstasy, signals this night as one to remember. To be sure, Marc immediately invests in this moment as the joy of a just-passed moment. Marc secures this souvenir via lines he voices that bridge shots of the club with one of him packing all the beautiful things he has stolen into a Louis Vuitton suitcase. Marc declares, “We went out, we got in everywhere, and everyone loved us. We had so many beautiful, gorgeous things,” closes his suitcase, and deposits it in his grandmother’s attic. After he leaves his barely acknowledged

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grandmother, we are greeted with a shot of our thieves walking down Melrose, holding half-consumed Starbucks drinks and shopping bags as they claim the sidewalk in slowmotion. While Kanye West’s “Power” plays non-diegetically, we see a “five abreast” shot. An attractive cliché that claims a legacy in masculine genres of gangster films and Westerns, the shot is a tempting celebration whose denial by any audience member feels false. “I’m living in that 21st century / Do something mean to it,”44 Kanye raps as the five members revel in a moment of confidence, strutting in slow-motion down one of Los Angeles’s more celebrated shopping strips. The allure of the moment is displayed through the rhythmic swagger and edge, carried by Kanye’s bravado and beat, the kind rarely offered to characters consisting of young gay men and women. Their gang will eventually be busted, just like those groups of men in crime films and Westerns who have their moment to be admired, accompanied by musical declarations of rapture and strength, which also end. It is a moment that is simultaneously replete with criticism, celebration, and sympathy.

Coda: Remixed Scores and Musical Clues At the time of this writing, The Beguiled and On the Rocks stand as Coppola’s latest narrative features,45 and both signify new directions for her storytelling style vis-à-vis music and narrative. In particular, the two films draw heavily from Hollywood past to present her particular feminist vision. In the case of The Beguiled, the material is sourced from the Don Siegel-directed 1971 drama of the same name. Less overtly, On the Rocks references the 1944 Otto Preminger mystery, Laura, through music with disturbing effect. What is striking is that each film lacks a significant investment in contemporary popular music. For a director who has been closely associated with soundtracks loaded with popular musical displays, these films signal a new direction. For example, when comparing the music in the two versions of The Beguiled the differences are stark. The 1971 film sports a Lalo Schifrin score that opens with a credit sequence accompanied by rat-a-tat-tats of loose snares mixed with the sounds of gun shots and the neighs of horses as sepia photos depict the violence of the American Civil War. As the sequence bleeds into the opening scene of twelve-year-old Amelia (Pamelyn Ferdin) foraging for mushrooms, the music slows, loses its percussive attack, and is dominated by strings, woodwinds, and chiming effects. This sonic sweetness is immediately spoiled once the young girl discovers the injured Union soldier, John McBurney (Clint Eastwood), who will alter the lives of young women at the school. In comparison, Coppola’s retelling of the film lacks a distinct musical identity. While Schifrin’s score cues the audience’s judgments, Coppola’s significant lack of music produces a seemingly perpetual tension. What “music” does exist in her version is credited to Phoenix who produced what one publication labeled a “non-score.”46 In an interview with Lauren Brancowitz, the band’s guitarist estimated “there are just eight musical cues throughout the hour-and-a-half-long film, and even that number sounds high.”47 The cue that cleaves the film from affectionate to threatening is a “low synthesizer drone” that accompanies headmistress Martha’s (Nicole Kidman) request for the anatomy book that will guide her

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through McBurney’s (Colin Farrell) amputation and continues as the women bury his leg. While this is a more conventional use of music, that is, to support the narrative, the ominous sensation continues the tradition of Coppola’s investment in tone. As Coppola explains, “I wanted the movie to be full of tension. I asked the guys if they would do something minimal and tonal. I liked the idea of having synthesizers to change the mood, but I wanted something that wasn’t going to get too much attention.”48 To that end, the most significant musical cue comes in the closing scene where the young women of Miss Farnsworth’s school lay McBurney’s corpse by the side of the road. The elongated passage of Claudio Monteverdi’s seventeenth-century composition, “Magnificat,” begins as the body is deposited beyond the school gate and bleeds into the credits. “Slowed down 800 percent, its horns and chorus pushed to their very limit,” the piece is unrecognizable yet effective as a long solemn note that marks a moment of mourning.49 The minimal use of music in The Beguiled is hardly the most significant difference between Coppola’s take and Don Siegel’s. Coppola’s interpretation of the events positions the narrative from the women’s point of view, whereas Siegel’s is associated with McBurney’s. The resulting sympathies differ: Siegel’s story makes the case that McBurney was wronged while Coppola’s version argues that the poisoning of McBurney by the women is justified defense. This is not surprising given Coppola’s assertion that she has “a feminine point of view and I’m happy to put that out there. We certainly have enough masculine ones.”50 This particular point of view is asserted once again in her 2020 film, On the Rocks. Whereas The Beguiled is a tone poem, On the Rocks was marketed as something of a father-daughter comedic romp starring Rashida Jones as Laura Keane and Bill Murray as her father, Felix Keane. Beginning with a beautiful wedding and honeymoon scene, we are quickly moved to a scene that takes place years after the ceremony. With two children and a husband, Dean (Marlon Wayans), who is continually away from the couple’s Manhattan apartment for work, Laura’s mood darkens quickly as the responsibilities of motherhood overwhelm her ability to perform as the professional writer she was before. When she discovers another woman’s toiletry bag in Dean’s luggage after he returns from an international trip, Laura begins to fret that he is having an affair with one of his young, beautiful employees. She phones her father in Paris for advice, who explains that Dean is probably cheating on her as this is how all men behave. Later when he returns to Manhattan, Felix persuades a wary Laura to investigate Dean’s whereabouts. Beginning with checking his phone, Laura is eventually egged on by Felix to track Dean throughout Manhattan and, eventually, follow him to Mexico. Initially convinced by Felix that Dean will be with one his female coworkers on this work trip, Laura is embarrassed to discover that Dean has left early to return to Manhattan to be with his family. Infuriated, Laura confronts Felix, telling him he broke up his marriage to her mother and she doesn’t want him to ruin hers. Laura returns to Manhattan, makes up with her husband, receives an apology from Felix, and her ability to write returns. The previous summary does little to convey Coppola’s invocation of the 1944 Otto Preminger film Laura, a film that informs not only On the Rocks’ main character but the character of Felix. When we first see Laura and Felix together, Felix sings the theme from Laura and explains that he named his daughter after the song, also titled “Laura.” The

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scene feels like a toss away moment that exists primarily to color Felix as an eccentric father. An aesthete, Felix is a stylish art dealer whose tastes run in classic Manhattan. He is something of a dandy. His connection to the Preminger film becomes clearer when we compare Felix to Laura’s primary antagonist Waldo Lydecker. An effete, know-it-all toff who is clearly marked as homosexual, Waldo’s greatest strengths are his many connections to society and his way with words. To be sure, while Waldo kills to maintain an exclusively platonic relationship with “his” Laura, Felix is less destructive in his desire to “protect” his daughter but nevertheless toxic and dysfunctional. Like Waldo, Felix is willing to use his many influential connections to assist his Laura, stalk her love interest, and provide excessively patriarchal judgments. Finally, both Felix and Waldo are determined that their Lauras find loves that they deem worthy of standards that are altogether impossible to meet. While Waldo’s downfall occurs when it is revealed that he is a murderer, Felix’s takes place in Mexico. Laura catches Felix serenading two younger women with a rendition of “Mexicali Rose,” the 1923 popular song whose narrator declares a longing for his Mexicali Rose with “big brown eyes and smile” as he is away. Felix’s amateurish singing exudes a charm that causes Laura to laughingly smile at her father’s performance. Felix deploys the end of the song as “an exit” from the company of the covered patio and, upon leaving, meets another beautiful woman whom he introduces to Laura as “Carla, the boss around here.” When she tells Felix, “I’ll think about the Hockney,” Laura asks, “Is that why we’re really here—you’re making a deal?!” Felix denies this, but Laura clearly does not believe him. After Laura catches Felix’s eye wander at dinner as another beautiful woman passes by, he begins a monologue about men, cults, bonobos, and sex. This tonal whiplash from the sweet American standard to a rather bizarre set of topics sours Laura who finally confronts him about his affairs. Laura’s turn reveals not simply her anger, but a hypocrisy she has never confronted and Felix has never acknowledged. Laura’s inquisition surfaces Felix’s less-than-hidden secret: his ego drives him to perpetually demand adoration as the center of attention. Worse, this is both the source of his charm and his most repulsive trait. Confronting her father, Laura yells, “I’m sick of how you take over everything, and it’s all about you all the time. . . . You can’t go deaf to women’s voices. You know that, right? You have daughters and granddaughters, so you better start figuring out how to hear them.” It is the secret exposed after the spell of Felix’s “Mexicali Rose” has withered under Laura’s blunt demand for respect for herself and, seemingly, all the other Lauras, past and future. In essence, Coppola demands the viewer to listen to the sounds of the unearthing of a skeleton and witness the collapse of Felix’s charm. To be sure, both On the Rocks and The Beguiled employ musical relationships beyond the relatively contemporaneous. What was once a staple of Coppola’s audible approach to narrative—the stylized employment of popular music records in her soundtracks—has clearly changed and her new direction is unpredictable. Indeed, both The Beguiled and On the Rocks suggest Coppola is investigating new relationships to narrative in general. Whereas her previous efforts displayed an interest in characters that meander, seemingly goalless, these more recent films engage the audience with characters with defined problems and pronounced ambitions that must be fulfilled. The discoveries of Coppola’s wandering protagonists have been replaced by teams with defined missions. Whether

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it means eliminating an “enemy soldier” or repairing a broken relationship, The Beguiled and On the Rocks offer a new set of narrative experiments and, perhaps, a new style for Coppola and her audiences to see and hear.

Notes 1 Evgenia Peretz, “Something About Sofia,” Vanity Fair, September 2006, 352. 2 Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 11. 3 Jeff Smith labels Coppola’s use of this technique as “frontality.” Smith draws this cinematographic practice from Justin Wyatt’s work on Coppola and “high concept” visual style. Smith summarizes this particular visual style as “a marked tendency towards hard backlighting with soft fills from the front—an approach that produced highlights on the actors’ hair and sharp definition to the outline of their bodies.” See Jeff Smith, “Our Lives in Pink: Sofia Coppola as Transmedia Audiovisual Stylist,” in Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers and Lisa Perrott (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 78. 4 Pam Cook, “Portrait of a Lady: Sofia Coppola,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 11 (November 2006): 36. 5 Dennis Lim, “It’s What She Knows: The Luxe Life,” The New York Times, December 12, 2010, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2010​/12​/12​/movies​/12sofia​.html​?pagewanted​=all. 6 Roger Ebert, “Lone Wolf of the Chateau,” RogerEbert​.com​, December 21, 2010, https://www​ .rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/somewhere​-2010. 7 Tim Anderson, “Lost in Transition: Popular Music, Adolescence, and the Melodramatic Mode of Sofia Coppola,” in Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers after MTV, ed. Arved Ashby (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 64. 8 Anderson, “Lost in Transition,” 64. 9 Todd Gilchrist, “Interview: Sofia Coppola, The Marie Antoinette Director Talks about Making a Post-modern Period Piece,” IGN, October 17, 2006, https://www​.ign​.com​/articles​/2006​/10​ /17​/interview​-sofia​-coppola​?page​=1. 10 Allegra Donn, “Sofia’s World,” The Times Magazine, October 7, 2006, 30. 11 Melinda Newman, “Independent Thinking Key to Smaller Scores,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 1, 2007. 12 Carrie Battan, “Sofia Coppola and Brian Reitzell,” Pitchfork, June 18, 2013, https://pitchfork​ .com​/features​/interview​/9153​-sofia​-coppola​-and​-brian​-reitzell/. 13 Alex Suskind, “Sofia Coppola Talks Tapping Husband Thomas Mars of Phoenix for Her ‘Creepy’ Movie Music,” Billboard, June 7, 2017, https://www​.billboard​.com​/articles​/news​/ magazine​-feature​/7824775​/sofia​-coppola​-beguiled​-score​-interview. 14 Andrew Hampp, “Songs for Screens: Phoenix’s Thomas Mars on Scoring and Overseeing Music for ‘On the Rocks’ with Sofia Coppola,” Variety, October 7, 2020, https://variety​.com​ /2020​/music​/news​/phoenix​-thomas​-mars​-on​-the​-rocks​-score​-1234796083/. 15 Matt Noble, “Thomas Mars from ‘Phoenix’ (‘On the Rocks’ composer): ‘Most Musicians Know How to Whistle,’” Gold Derby, January 26, 2021, https://www​.goldderby​.com​/feature​/thomas​ -mars​-phoenix​-on​-the​-rocks​-composer​-video​-interview​-1203995183/. 16 Hampp, “Songs for Screens.”

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17 Battan, “Sofia Coppola and Brian Reitzell.” 18 Noble, “Thomas Mars.” 19 Elisabetta Povoledo, “Valentino and Sofia Coppola Make an Opera,” The New York Times, May 19, 2016, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2016​/05​/19​/fashion​/valentino​-sofia​-coppola​ -la​-traviata​.html. With the opera being filmed by Philippe Le Sourd, the cinematographer for Coppola’s 2017 and 2020 narrative films, The Beguiled and On the Rocks, Coppola employed her signature static style that a critic for The Guardian called “hands off” and derided for eliciting “park-and-bark” performances. See James Imam, “Sofia Coppola’s La Traviata Opera Debut Looks Good but Has Little to Say,” The Guardian, May 23, 2016, https://www​.theguardian​.com​/music​/2016​/may​/23​/sofia​-coppola​-la​-traviata​-valentino​-rome​ -opera​-verdi. 20 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 26, 202. 21 Anderson, “Lost in Transition,” 69. 22 Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 149. 23 Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI Publishing, 1987), 50. 24 Styx, “Come Sail Away,” by Dennis de Young, recorded 1977, Almo Music Corporation/ Stygian Songs. 25 The parents decide to place the daughters under “maximum security isolation” and Sara proceeds to burn Lux’s record collection in their fireplace, actions that precipitate the sisters’ eventual self-inflicted demise. 26 In reality the film may have been more than a “memory.” Upon retrospection Coppola began to understand that she was thinking partially about the loss of her brother, Gian-Carlo, a death that occurred in 1986 when she was a teenager. She conceded that she felt “like every movie [I write] has something I’m trying to figure out, but I never really know until afterwards.” See Peretz, “Something About Sofia.” 27 “Sofia Coppola on the Music in her Films,” AFI, June 28, 2020, https://www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=olQckhOIFgQ. 28 Justin Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides: Reverie, Sorrow and Young Love (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 51, 58. 29 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 27–8. 30 Siouxsie and the Banshees, “Hong Kong Garden,” by Susan Janet Ballion, John Gareth McKay, Kenneth Ian Morris, Steven Severin, released August 18, 1978, BMG Monarch/ Domino Publishing Co., Ltd. 31 Bow Wow Wow, “Aphrodisiac,” by Matthew Ashman, Dave Barbarossa, Leigh Gorman, Annabella Lwin, and Malcolm McLaren, released 1983, RCA. 32 While Mrs. Lisbon enforces the extreme consequences of a curfew, Marie’s chastening comes in the form of the death of Louis XV and the arrival of her duties as monarch of France. 33 Emily Manning, “10 Insanely Perfect Sofia Coppola Soundtrack Moments,” i-D, May 13, 2016, https://i​-d​.vice​.com​/en​_uk​/article​/vbead9​/10​-insanely​-perfect​-sofia​-coppola​-soundtrack​ -moments. 34 Caroline Weber, “Marie Antoinette, Queen of Zeitgeist,” The New York Times, October 23, 2006, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2006​/10​/23​/opinion​/23iht​-edweber​.3261810​.html. 35 Peretz, “Something About Sofia.”

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36 Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, “Cannes Journal: ‘Marie Antoinette’: Best or Worst of Times?” The New York Times, May 25, 2006, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2006​/05​/25​/movies​ /25fest​.html. 37 Lim, “It’s What She Knows.” 38 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 181. 39 Battan, “Sofia Coppola and Brian Reitzell.” 40 Drew Fortune, “Sofia Coppola Reveals How She Picks the Perfect Song for a Movie Scene,” Esquire, June 23, 2017, https://www​.esquire​.com​/author​/12743​/drew​-fortune/. 41 Wesley Morris, “Get Rich or Die Trying: Sofia Coppola, Hip-hop, and Zombies,” Grantland, June 20, 2013, https://grantland​.com​/features​/brad​-pitt​-world​-war​-z​-bling​-ring/. 42 2 Chainz, “Money Machine,” by Tauheed Epps and Christopher James Gholson, released 2000, Reservoir Media Music/WC Music Corp. 43 Frank Ocean, “Super Rich Kids,” by Christopher Breaux, Roy Hammon, James Ryan Ho, Thebe Kgositsile, Mark Morales, Kirk Robinson, Nathaniel V. Robinson, Jr., and Mark Rooney, released March 11, 2013, Bhamboo Music Publishing/BMG Firefly/Dreamworld Pudding/Hot Butter Milk Music, Inc. 44 Kanye West, “Power,” by Boris Bergman, François Pierre Camille Bernheim, Jeff Bhasker, Mike Dean, Jean-Pierre Lang, Robert Fripp, Michael Rex Giles, Larry Darnell Griffin Jr., Malik Yusef El Shabbaz Jones, Greg Lake, Ian McDonald, Nathan Perez, Peter John Sinfield, and Kanye West, released July 1, 2010, Amaya Sofia Publishing/Barclay Eddie Nouvelles Edition/ Jabriel Iz Myne/Roc Nation Music/Soc EMI Melodies France/Universal Music Corporation/ Vohndee’s Soul Music Publishing. 45 One could make the case that the 2015 Netflix feature A Very Murray Christmas is a narrative feature. Yet I feel like this Coppola film is more or less a “Christmas Special” in the most basic sense of the term: an hour-long television show with a paper-thin plot whose intention is to have stars sing traditional carols and a couple of new compositions. As Bill Murray, the star of the special told Variety, “We’re going to do it like a little movie. It won’t have a format, but it’s going to have music. It will have texture. It will have threads through it that are writing. There will be prose.” Coppola added, “We’re working on a Christmas special. Not sure when it will air, but my motivation is to hear [Bill Murray] singing my song requests.” See Ramin Setoodeh, “Bill Murray to Sing Christmas Carols in Upcoming TV Special,” Variety, October 13, 2014, https://variety​.com​/2014​/tv​/news​/bill​-murray​-to​-sing​-christmas​-carols​-in​-upcoming​-tv​-special​ -exclusive​-1201329020/. 46 Katherine Cusumano, “How French Band Phoenix Transformed the Music in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled,” W, July 13, 2017, https://www​.wmagazine​.com​/story​/the​-beguiled​-sofia​ -coppola​-behind​-the​-score​-phoenix. 47 Cusumano, “How French Band Phoenix Transformed the Music.” 48 Suskind, “Sofia Coppola Talks.” 49 Cusumano, “How French Band Phoenix Transformed the Music.” 50 Guy Lodge, “Sofia Coppola: ‘I’ve Never Felt I Had to Fit into the Majority View,’” The Guardian, July 2, 2017, https://www​.theguardian​.com​/film​/2017​/jul​/02​/sofia​-coppola​-beguiled​-i​-never​ -felt​-i​-had​-to​-fit​-into​-the​-majority​-view​-interview.

15 DESIGN DESIGNING LUXURY: SOFIA COPPOLA’S PRODUCTION DESIGN Saige Walton

The . . . Outside is also inside . . . there is continuity between world, body, hand, garment. HÉLÈNE CIXOUS1

Director Sofia Coppola crafts a well-designed continuity between “world, body, hand, garment,” to use the words of philosopher Hélène Cixous.2 In this chapter, I approach luxury as a central, recurring concern in Coppola’s cinema. Luxury manifests itself in Coppola’s filmmaking not only in terms of characters and plots but also through her imaginative use of production design, foregrounding lavish architecture, luxurious objects, costumes, and settings. In interviews, Coppola outlines her approach to film as one of design rather than dialogue, favoring elements such as “rhythm, gesture, atmosphere and mood over narrative.”3 Intensely image driven, she begins discussing design elements early on in the production process, also compiling “reference photos and images to help with [the] writing” of her scripts.4 For each of her films, she begins with what she calls a “starting point” image that helps her to envision the film’s general mood. She then develops a “mood board” or “look book” that she shares with others.5 This dedicated stockpile of images is drawn from sources such as advertising, photography, fashion photography, paintings, female portraiture, and film. Similarly, Coppola’s production designers, such as Anne Ross (The Beguiled, The Bling Ring, Somewhere, Lost in Translation) and K. K.

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Barrett (Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette), keep “big mood boards of images on set” so that everyone can “get on the same page.”6 In what follows, I approach six of Coppola’s feature films in pairs to consider how the design of these films resonates with each other and also with different iterations of luxury in the cinema. My analysis is especially inspired by film scholar, Giuliana Bruno, and her attentiveness to surfaces in the cinema: the surfaces of costumes, walls, architecture, and other backgrounds. For Bruno, surfaces foster layered, “atmospheric forms of imaging,” an idea that is consistent with Coppola’s general approach and aesthetic.7 After detailing some of the ways luxury itself has been theorized, I explore Coppola’s layering of the image and the connections between luxury, memory, and violence in The Beguiled (2017) and The Virgin Suicides (1999). Building on what Charles and Mirella Jona Affron call “design intensities,” I harness what they call “punctuation” to approach the nonverbal expressivity of feeling and the depiction of luxury-as-boredom in Lost in Translation (2003) and Somewhere (2010). In the final section, I draw on the Affrons’ ideas of design “embellishment” and “artifice” to frame Coppola’s restaging of “Versailles” and the presentation of luxury as pleasure, power, and surface-based display in Marie Antoinette (2006) and The Bling Ring (2013).

Layered Images: The Beguiled and The Virgin Suicides Commonly associated with cost, ostentation, or self-indulgence, luxury is most often attached to objects or experiences that exceed life’s necessities. Discussing cinematic images of luxury, more particularly, George Toles argues against the commonplace critical association of luxury with “the siren-song of commodity worship,” as part of a long history that regards luxury as dangerous and corrupting.8 Contemplating the purloined pearls that are stolen by the actress Marlene Dietrich in Desire (1936) or the glittering, traveling earrings of Max Ophuls’ Madame De, he suggests that luxury does not have “a fixed meaning or a settled narrative function.” “What counts for me as a necessary value in watching” these images, he writes, “is our fluid imagination of them.” Rather than automatically condemning luxury for its “glistening wiles,” Toles argues for its interpretive instability—the contextual, imaginative, even “enriching use” that luxury might have for both filmmaker and viewer.9 In “Luxury, Consumer Culture and Sumptuary Dynamics,” Mike Featherstone lends further nuance to how we might experience luxury. He makes a useful distinction between direct experiences of luxury and what he calls “traces of luxury,” which he associates with “memories of luxury and images of luxury.” Traces of luxury are premised on “savouring, recollecting and reflection,” “the memory of luxury and its anticipation.”10 As traces of luxury are mediated, they can be extended to cinema where luxury (including memories of luxury) can assume special charge. Consider Coppola’s period film adaptations—The Virgin Suicides and The Beguiled—as two films that enact luxury-as-memory. In interviews, Coppola describes the enigmatic visuals of The Virgin Suicides as a “haze of memory.”11 Adapting Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel

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for the screen, she sought to imbue the film with an almost hallucinatory aesthetic. “Jeffrey [Eugenides] calls the Lisbons the fever dream of the boys. I wanted to make the movie a fever dream,” she states.12 The film opens with a shot of Lux Lisbon (Kirsten Dunst) standing in a quiet, suburban street on a hot summer’s day. Dressed in a simple pink-andred top, Lux stands with one arm loosely crossed about her front, sucking on a bright-red Popsicle. She looks around a few times before exiting the frame. At the end of the film’s opening credits, Lux appears again in phantasmic form. Superimposed over a blue sky, footage of Lux’s face fills the screen. Later, it will be revealed that this footage belongs to the boys’ nature-based fantasies about the girls. As four hand-drawn love hearts fade out, Lux seductively winks and smiles at the camera. As Anna Backman Rogers notes, Coppola’s filming of Lux plays on the Latin etymology of her name (meaning: light). As “the source of inspiration for many schoolboy fantasies,” Lux, like her four other sisters, is accompanied by flashes of lens flare or bathed in soft, golden pink hues and natural light.13 In Latin, luxury translates as luxuria (meaning: lust). In this regard, luxury can also be used to refer to an intense longing for something (or someone).14 As voiced by the film’s collective (male) narrator, the boys cannot get the Lisbon girls out of their minds. Decades after their collective suicide, the boys seek to revive the girls through their (skewed) memories, lapses into fantasy, and a fetishistic return to the objects that they left behind (Cecilia Lisbon’s diaries, Polaroid photographs, vinyl records, items of makeup, and clothing). Luxury-as-longing “cannot be experienced directly . . . only simulated via the work of the imagination,” however.15 For the now-grown boys, the Lisbons can only ever exist as a luxurious savoring of the past—something that Coppola and her production designer, Jasna Stefanovic, take full advantage of in styling the film’s setting of 1970s suburban Michigan. Soon after the winking Lux disappears from view, Coppola films the Lisbon sisters arriving home while the boys look on from across the street. Each of the sisters exits the family car and is held in a brief freeze-frame while the narrator recites their names and ages. Lit by flashes of sunshine, the blonde-haired sisters shimmer and glow. For the boys’ reimaginings of the girls, Coppola drew inspiration from the softened pastels and backlighting of women that occurred in 1970s beauty commercials (Breck, Timotei) and Playboy shoots. The “girl in nature. That was the fantasy girl of the era,” she asserts.16 Through the device of the freeze-frame, Coppola singles each of the girls out as a fantastical object. This sequence is very different from the film’s opening image of Lux, where she appears restless and bored. For the boys, the Lisbon girls are forever suspended in a golden, 1970s-styled past. In contrast to the narrator’s words, Coppola also spells out each of the sisters’ names in differently shaped, girlish fonts. The surface of the screen displays an alternate, feminine point of view. By combining 1970s retro design with effects of superimposition and luminous lighting, Coppola plays upon a disparity between the film’s narration and what might have been the girls’ actual experiences. Filmed against fields of golden wheat, the Lisbon sisters are conjured up as “magical creatures,” dressed in shades of pink and white. A similar Rococoesque style appears on the wallpaper of their bedroom with its pink fluffy clouds. In the nature-based fantasy scenes, these decorative features spill out into the fantastical world that the boys have created. Everyday actions and gestures (Cecilia [Hanna Hall] writing in

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her diary, Mary [A. J. Cook] holding a sparkler in the air, Bonnie [Chelse Swain] blowing a dandelion) are slightly slowed. Lux appears in Hawaiian dress, playing with a flower and hula dancing. Lux’s golden hair is superimposed over a unicorn (another “magical creature”), followed by a close-up of one of Cecilia’s diary pages. In these moments, Coppola layers different surfaces together to create overtly artificial effects. The girls are not flesh-and-blood bodies but chimeras. A shot of Lux leaping gives way to Mary’s face over a smiling Therese (Leslie Hayman) in a field. One sister dissolves into another, while all assume a “hollowed out, dreamlike quality.”17 A disconnect between fantasy and reality is also illustrated via split screens (fantasy girls on one side, the boys on the other). Cecilia’s voiceover narration (“My sister, the mean one pulling my hair”) is at odds with the pink, white, and gold glow of the scene. In collaboration with cinematographer, Edward Lachman, Coppola textures the screen. At times, the Lisbons appear as if they were filmed “through a layer of gauze,” externalizing the haze of the boys’ memory.18 Set in Virginia at Miss Martha Farnsworth’s Seminary for Young Ladies, The Beguiled has less obvious narrative connections to memory and longing. Through its period detailing and layered shot compositions, though, the film enacts a luxurious return to the past. The Beguiled begins with an overhead shot of oak trees followed by the sound of a young girl humming “Lorena” (a popular folk song sung during the American Civil War). The girl’s humming draws the camera downward to a tree-lined path that is draped in the Spanish moss of the South. Mists begin to roll across the path, circling through the trees. A lone girl with two long brunette braids, Amy (Oona Laurence), steps into view. The path she treads belongs to Evergreen Plantation, a still-intact plantation complex located in Louisiana. “Just filming on a real plantation,” Coppola recounts, “when you see those trees that have seen so much, the Spanish moss, you just feel there’s so much history.”19 Together with the historic Madewood Plantation House (used for all of the film’s exteriors), these real-life locations ground The Beguiled in the historic South and, indirectly, in past histories of slavery. For Coppola, there is “darkness and a beauty” to The Beguiled that she attributes to its historic locations.20 Seen through shrouded trees, the stark white building of Farnsworth’s Seminary (Madewood) stands out against the surrounding landscape. Designing Farnsworth’s interiors, Ross added a number of gothic features such as candelabras and wood paneling, also covering the exterior of the building with vines to create a “feeling of neglect.”21 Taking inspiration from landscape scenes in painting and film, Coppola and Ross were especially drawn to the imagery of “women and girls in white dresses against darkened backgrounds.”22 Through these influences, together with Coppola’s return to depopulated scenes of nature, the inhabitants of Farnsworth’s are portrayed as being “cut off from the world.”23 As Bree Hoskin comments, “environmental decay” runs rife throughout The Virgin Suicides, as a metaphorical stand-in for the girls’ deaths.24 It is evident in the film’s lines of dialogue (references to extinct species), the asphyxiation-themed ball (complete with jars of green sorbet, lurid green cocktails, and bejeweled gasmasks), its dying elm trees, and Coppola’s progressive darkening of light and color. Even in the opening scenes, where sunlight streams through the trees, Coppola includes suggestions of death, rot, and decay beneath the film’s bright surface. With a hard cut, she drains all sunshine from

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the image, ushering in a radical shift in tone and mood. In close-up, the vision of the camera holds on objects on a bathroom windowsill: glass perfume bottles, pink and blue bottles of nail varnish, a pink lipstick, makeup brushes. Two bangles and a silver crucifix are draped over the bottles. A small silver icon of the Madonna sits atop a container of pink lip gloss. Stickers of ocean shells, footprints, starfish, and other animals decorate the lower edges of the sill. Dominating the sill and the frame itself is a 1970s-style, yellow Chinoiserie fan adorned with two orange birds, indicating a desire for travel. This selection of objects (religious, decorative, retro, quotidian) and their haphazard grouping is small-scale yet rich with meaning, also gesturing toward the Lisbons’ strict, religious upbringing. By holding on these objects and endowing them with as much, if not greater, significance as the film’s male narration (“Cecilia was the first to go”), Coppola creates a female-focused still life. Only after lingering on this still life is Cecilia Lisbon revealed, lying faceup in bloodied bathwater. In preparation for their den party, the sisters tape brightly colored plastic beads and bangles over Cecilia’s bandaged wrists, trying to cover up her suicidal markings. Nothing can cover over the death that haunts Coppola’s film, however. Cecilia departs the party only to throw herself out the window, impaling herself on a spiked fence. In The Beguiled, objects and décor are likewise crucial to expressing the differences between a male and female point of view. After Amy helps to carry the wounded solider, McBurney (Colin Farrell), a shot of the school’s name appears on an iron plaque. This shot is followed by a lacy white curtain, moving in the breeze. Rather than looking out at the gardens, Coppola stays with the curtain’s oval and floral patterning. A sudden pan to the right locates the curtained window as part of a drawing room in which Miss Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) is giving the students a French lesson. Through these contrasting textures (the iron gates, the delicate white cloth), Coppola introduces the main spatial and narrative tensions of The Beguiled. The domestic, enclosed world of the women (sewing, harvesting, cooking, crafting) is set apart from the world of men and the violence of the American Civil War. A key feature of the film’s production design, the school’s iron gates serve as a literal point of contact and connection between these two worlds. As Giuliana Bruno observes, the filming of garments, environments, and objects “ferry much across bodies and spaces.”25 The blue rag tied to the gates to signal danger, for example, is sartorially repeated in the blue ribbon that adorns Miss Edwina’s “town” costuming. These bits of blue fabric indirectly invoke the darkened blue dress of Union soldiers and the film’s “blue-belly,” McBurney, threading danger and female desire together. Similarly, Coppola’s return to the imagery of cloth and female sewing objects connects the film’s two worlds. Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman) uses her sewing scissors and a pretty set of silver pinchers to extract the metal from McBurney’s wounds. Readying herself for the later amputation of McBurney’s leg, Miss Martha’s once pristine white nightgown becomes nightmarish, visibly splattered and streaked with blood. “Keep your stitches in a straight line like I showed you,” she instructs the girls as they work together to sew McBurney’s death shroud. The group then ferry his corpse outside of the school, fixing the blue rag to the gates once more. As Suzanne Ferriss comments, The Beguiled is concerned with the “dynamics of beguilement,” with “subterfuge working beneath decorative surfaces.”26 Motifs of

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whiteness and darkness, masculinity and femininity, visibility and invisibility are embedded into the film’s production design. Not seeing is precisely what The Beguiled is all about, a concern that also informs Coppola’s layered imagery. Mists, fog, and clouds recur in the film’s shots of nature, an environmental layering that adds much to the film’s pervasive sense of heat and humidity. Curtained shots and frontal shots of the school’s gate, filmed in deep focus, expressively divide and texture the screen. Veiled vision is intimately connected to the film’s female characters. Bewitched by McBurney’s charms, Amy, Miss Edwina, Miss Martha, and the others do not “see” McBurney for who he truly is. In one sequence, Miss Edwina pauses at a window to look down on McBurney in the garden below. By filming Miss Edwina’s desiring look through a sheer pale curtain, Coppola creates a “brocaded screen,” overlaying her figure.27 Decorated with bows and flowers, the curtain corresponds with the lace-edged collar and floral features of Edwina’s dress. Similar decorative motifs appear in the house’s soft furnishings and on the bowed dresses of the ladies, lending the interiors of The Beguiled an implicitly feminine visual texture. A source of cultural controversy on The Beguiled’s release, African-American characters are absent from Coppola’s feature. “The slaves left,” Amy informs McBurney when they meet. Rather than being absent from the film, though, slavery and the wealth/luxuries accumulated from it form another “not seen,” haunting the film’s dialogue and production design.28 “My father had quite a cellar in his day . . . people traveled all over to come here,” Miss Martha reflects. What is not seen but implied here is the slavery that underpins Farnsworth’s wealth, and by extension, the American South. Significantly, both of the historic locations used by Coppola for the film made their names and fortunes from slaves farming what was once a minor luxury item: sugar. In Coppola’s cinema, design follows “the emotional state of characters in a visual way.”29 For the school’s signature gates, Ross included sets of heavy metal spikes, playing on the film’s gothic allusions while also suggesting ideas of violence and entrapment. In the finale, the gates appear again as part of a frontally organized, highly staged shot (see Figure 15.1). Filmed in deep focus, Miss Martha, Miss Edwina, and the girls stand grouped together on Farnsworth’s porch. In the foreground, McBurney’s corpse lies outside the school’s gates. As the camera tracks in, McBurney’s corpse drops out of view while the metal spikes of the gate are brought into relief. Camera movement, design, and composition combine to create a barred effect over the house and its female figures. Just as the grown-up boys of The Virgin Suicides cannot escape their teenage obsession (the Lisbons), the girls and the women of The Beguiled cannot escape the violence of their location. They inhabit a white “space also haunted by a past of slavery,” where violence continues to erupt.30

Punctuating Ennui: Lost in Translation and Somewhere Production designers (the “art department”) are tasked with developing a coherent, visual design for a film. Typically, their process begins with distilling the thematic,

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Figure 15.1 Layered images and barred effects in The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017.

psychological, and emotional concerns of a script. The visual concept(s) arrived at determine a range of practical and aesthetic choices: whether to shoot on location or build studio sets, the film’s color palette, the choice of fabrics, textures, and props. As Peter Ettedgui explains it, these design elements need to resonate with each other, evoking “an atmosphere that is appropriate to the story and its characters.”31 While responsible for many of the physical aspects of a film, production designers work with the director to envision much more elusive, intangible elements such as a film’s “look and feel.” In Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narrative (1995), Charles and Mirella Joan Affron put forth the concept of what they call “design intensities.” They identify four different levels of intensity that might occur, relative to a film’s narrative. The first level is “denotation,” where design carries a “low narrative weight.”32 This is the most commonplace execution of production design, where design cues the viewer into a film’s genre, historic period, character, general ambience, and mood. At this level, we might consider The Virgin Suicides and The Beguiled, while noting that design intensities can shift across the course of a film. The next level of intensity is “punctuation,” where design assumes an “emphatic function”: it “strives to be expressive.”33 At this level, the normally transparent function of design is heightened during key moments that reveal something about characters or narrative themes. Given her preference for the atmospheric and the audiovisual in place of dialogue, this level of intensity is quite common in Coppola’s filmmaking. Consider Lost in Translation, by way of example. For the making of Lost in Translation, Coppola drew upon her own collection of photographs, including shots of the hotel where she once stayed. She was first

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attracted to making a film in Japan after undertaking various fashion jobs there (including co-running the label MilkFed). Later, she envisioned the film as being infused with “romantic melancholy.”34 For the “look and feel” of the film, she wanted it “to be based on the way a snapshot looks,” like “a memory and a love story” at the same time.35 Shot entirely in Tokyo and Kyoto, Lost in Translation centers on the charged friendship that forms between the middle-aged Hollywood actor, Bob Harris (Bill Murray), and newlywed Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson). The two Americans meet while staying at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, a five-star, luxury hotel in bustling Shinjuku. Bob is in the city to make commercials for the Japanese whisky company, Suntory. Charlotte, having just completed graduate school, is there with her husband, John, a photographer. The two share a brief encounter in the hotel lift where Charlotte smiles at Bob: “a little friendly smile, from one foreigner to another,” Coppola writes.36 In the glassy, elegant surroundings of the New York Bar, fifty-two stories high above Shinjuku, the pair come to see a likeness in each other. Both are suffering insomnia. Both feel out of synch with the city and people around them, including their own spouses. Central to Coppola’s production design is Tokyo itself, its dense urbanism, and hybridized mixture of Eastern and Western cultures. Coppola’s preference for filming in real-life locations means that the “actual location [used] serves thematic interests.”37 This is true of both the film’s exteriors and the scenes set in the Park Hyatt. Hip, fashionable, and youthful Tokyo is emblematized through the vibrancy of parties, karaoke booths, gaming parlors, glowing lantern-lit laneways, and city streets: “I wanted the neon at night,” Coppola reflects.38 The polished, Western-styled surroundings of the hotel provide an insular point of contrast to the cityscape. In the New York Bar, lit by soft, glowing lamps, suited Western and Japanese businessmen relax and drink, alongside celebrities and other high-end travelers. Familiar with the hotel and its bar, Coppola held “long conversations about luggage,” opting to give Bob a set of Tumi luggage that “was very male, not interested in flashy design,” consistent with the hotel’s design.39 “I can’t wait to see Bill [Murray] in his kimono . . . sad in the room,” Coppola tellingly commented, just prior to shooting.40 Together with the image of actress Scarlett Johansson (Charlotte), set against the projection of a walking dinosaur in Shibuya, Coppola’s vision of Murray (Bob) in Japanese dress went on to become one of the film’s main promotional posters. While Coppola associates sadness with this image, other states of feeling can be identified that are consistent with Coppola’s depictions of luxury. As Pansy Duncan details, critical discussions of boredom and ennui have consistently identified a hollowing out or emptiness on the part of the body/subject. Intrinsic to the affective shape and the texture of boredom is its “colloquially attested power to immobilize and fatigue,” resulting in an inhibition and/or monotony of action.41 Think here of the opening of Somewhere, where the filming of repetitive action often becomes monotonous. Somewhere tells the story of alienated Hollywood actor, Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), and his efforts to connect with his daughter. Coppola introduces Marco via an extended long shot. Following the sound of a car engine, we see a sleek, black Ferrari racing around an isolated track in the desert. Four times the car speeds into and out of the frame. Like the surrounding landscape, Coppola’s filming of the luxury car at full speed is “flat.” On the fifth loop, the car slows and stops, and we hear the engine

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prickling and cooling. When Marco exits the vehicle (sporting the celebrity garb of a pair of black sunglasses), he exhibits no emotional response or reaction to what has just occurred. Rather, Coppola gives the impression that, once Marco has raced the Ferrari to the point of boredom, he simply stops and abandons it. As opposed to inaction, the “restless, giddy search for distraction” is another key feature of the bored subject.42 Similarly, boredom informs key moments of Coppola’s design in Lost in Translation. In interviews, the director makes frequent reference to having preexisting images such as photographs “in mind” for particular scenes, also sharing these with her cinematographer so that they can achieve a desired composition. In the often-discussed title shot of Lost in Translation, Coppola introduces Charlotte and the hotel by reworking a painting by the American photorealist artist, John Kacere.43 According to Coppola, this was her “starting image” for the film: the image of a girl, lying on her side in a soft, hazy composition, echoing the film’s slightly blurred presentation of Tokyo. As with Kacere’s characteristic focus on the midsection of women, Coppola’s shot focuses only on the lower half of Charlotte’s body, lying on her side in bed. Whereas Kacere’s women are clad in erotic lingerie and their depiction sexually charged, Charlotte is dressed for comfort in a gray sweater and sheer pink underwear. Her (slight) actions are languid and listless. At one point, she moves her legs, as if rubbing her two feet together. Given the drawn curtains that feature in the background as well as the slight sounds of breath, the image has been interpreted as one of Charlotte asleep. There is another possibility for the image, however, especially given Charlotte’s insomnia. That is, Charlotte is bored and trying to get to sleep. Chromatically, her pink underwear punctuates the hotel’s neutral background, affirming Charlotte as being out of place not only in the hotel but also, indirectly, in her life and marriage. While the Park Hyatt is filled with expensive comforts, Coppola emphasizes the hotel’s neutrality and sameness. We see Charlotte trying to break up the time that she spends alone in her room by knitting, reading magazines, applying lipstick, listening to a self-help tape, or looking out at grand views of the city. Dressed in the same garments (gray sweater and pink underwear), she breaks up the monotony of time and the hotel’s Western-styled design by introducing Japanese “feminine” motifs into her surroundings—hanging pink paper cherry blossoms about her room. Inside and outside the hotel, Charlotte and Bob are both portrayed as being sensuously immersed in different sites while also experiencing dislocation and boredom. An audiovisual disconnect between bodies and spaces is present from the film’s earliest scenes. Following Coppola’s introduction of Charlotte, the sound of planes and airport announcements can be heard over a black screen. Instead of cutting to an airport scene, though, Coppola cuts to a shot of Bob, sleeping against a cab window, arriving in Tokyo at night. Seen through the glass windows of the cab, the neon buildings and signs of Shinjuku shift in and out of focus. Time, body, and space are out of joint. In the hotel swimming pool, with its striking geometric windows, Bob watches on while a group of women take an aqua aerobics lesson. The film cuts to Bob’s underwater perspective. As he swims past the group, the muffled sounds of the lesson continue, sonically underscoring Bob’s removal from those around him. In the sequence that directly follows, Coppola creates an evocative parallel by filming Charlotte as she wanders through a busy gaming arcade. Charlotte watches on with interest as Tokyo youths play drum machines and guitars. The film’s shifting sound intensities and blurred

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backgrounds create a hermetic, bubbled effect around each group, as if Charlotte were moving about underwater. In place of dialogue, Coppola’s “punctuative” design often externalizes feeling, helping to visualize Charlotte and Bob’s increasing connection. We see this most clearly in the hallway sequence that was filmed at Karaoke-Kan (a real-life karaoke bar, located in Shibuya). Here, Coppola’s expressive use of costuming and architectural surfaces is particularly evident. “It’s just a moment between them, nothing to put into words!,” she insists.44 That moment begins with Charlotte, filmed from the side, emphasizing the tininess of the hallway. As with the film’s opening shot, she is dressed in shades of pink and gray. This time, however, she sports a bright-pink wig that she donned during the karaoke session and she is seated, leaning against the wall. After Bob exits the karaoke booth, he takes a seat next to Charlotte, silently reaching over to take a drag on her cigarette. At that point, Coppola cuts to a frontal shot of the pair, revealing the zebrastriped, geometrically patterned walls behind them. Bob hands the cigarette back, and Charlotte leans her head against his shoulder (see Figure 15.2). He crosses his legs and folds his arms in his lap. Unlike the freneticism of their previous partying scenes, this shot is remarkably subdued. While design accents suggest theatricality and artifice (the zebra-striped walls, Charlotte’s bright-pink wig, Bob’s inside-out, yellow shirt), Coppola’s artful combination of visual design with the filming of small, intimate gestures highlights the pair’s genuine connection. “It shows their relationship and how they feel about each other,” she asserts.45 Also illustrative of “punctuative” design is Somewhere, another of the director’s forays into luxury-as-boredom. The real-life locations sourced for the film (the desert, the ice rink, and the famous Chateau Marmont hotel) were all intended to reflect Marco’s solitude. According to Coppola, these spaces illustrate Marco not “being connected to the world

Figure 15.2  Coppola’s “punctuative” design in Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003.

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around him.”46 Marco often exhibits no emotional response to actions that directly involve him: from the breaking of his wrist (an event we hear rather than see) to the twin strippers who perform for him in his hotel room. Aside from time spent with his daughter, Marco is as affectively blank as the walls and objects he is filmed against. While using the iconic locale of the Chateau Marmont (a hotel known for its historic associations with celebrities and fashion models) Coppola wanted Marco’s rooms to be “blank, simple and neutral,” to indicate being “somewhere” yet nowhere. Ross came up with the idea that Marco owned “art that he never unpacked that was just lying around.”47 If the lives of the rich and famous are usually considered enviable, both Lost in Translation and Somewhere suggest another possibility: ennui. The constant repetition of hollow encounters (even in luxurious settings) leads only to exhaustion, fatigue, and inaction. “I’m stuck,” Charlotte confesses to Bob, in another of the pair’s intimate moments, before they finally fall asleep together.

Coppola’s “Versailles”: Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring According to the Affrons, the highest levels of design intensity in film are “embellishment” and “artifice.” Here, production design can become so theatrical or artificial that it draws attention to itself, sometimes independent of a film’s human figures. Instead of punctuating particular scenes, “the décor of artifice” becomes a “primary focus of the narrative.”48 In Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring, design assumes these levels of intensity. Both films enact luxury as it is most commonly understood today: the consumption of high-end brands and other designer goods. In both films, Coppola attaches luxury to the depiction of royalist or pseudo-royalist bodies, living a privileged lifestyle. Both films also embody what I am calling Coppola’s “Versailles,” as a real, symbolic, and imagined site where luxury, pleasure, and power intertwine. Among Coppola’s “starting images” for Marie Antoinette was the front cover of Her Style, a book by French haute-couture hairstylist, Odile Gilbert.49 Coppola was particularly inspired by Gilbert’s clash of colors and historic eclecticism. In this image, a model for John Galliano appears wearing a candy-pink coiffure with a bright turquoise feather interwoven into her hair. She is dressed in gold earrings that resemble ornate drape tassels and styled with darkened lips. Caught in slight profile, the model stands looking defiantly at the camera. Remnants of this “starting image” filter through the opening of Marie Antoinette. Set to “Natural’s Not in It” by Gang of Four, we first see Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) lying on a chaise in a powder-blue room. She is clad in a white satin dress, wearing a jeweled bracelet, coiffed hair, and a pouf of large white feathers. Tiers of pink-and-white cakes (decorated with lush strawberries and red rose petals) surround her. A maid is seated at her feet, fitting Antoinette with a set of pink pointed shoes. It is no coincidence that this opening image is saturated in the pale blues, whites, and pinks of the Rococo style. The scene nods to the light-filled depictions of frivolity and aristocratic pleasure that recur in the work of Rococo artists such as Fragonard and Gainsborough. After Antoinette reaches across to take a scoop of pink frosting, she directly smirks into the camera,

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recalling the archness of Gilbert’s pink-haired model. The “whole approach was to do the 18th-century but through a New Romantic look,” Coppola explains.50 Discussing an earlier rendition of Marie Antoinette (1938), Jane Gaines observes how production costs and the “marvelous splendor” of the film’s costuming were justified “by means of history and authenticity,” “with studio production stories often [describing] years of research in Europe.”51 For Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, a deliberately “transhistorical aesthetic” was sought.52 Shooting on location at Versailles actually enabled Coppola’s flagrant mixture of past and present. Upon its release, Coppola’s film was singled out (by French critics, especially) for transforming Versailles into décor. Less commented upon is how filming at Versailles has often demanded cinematic reinvention. In his book, Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema, Antoine de Baecque details how most films that are ostensibly set “at” Versailles (especially those with court scenes) are filmed at a mixture of locations such as Vaux-le-Vicomte. Shooting at Versailles usually means “shooting the scene that will ‘sell’ Versailles.”53 For Marie Antoinette, Coppola and her crew were granted privileged access to the interior rooms of Versailles (the gilded Hall of Mirrors and the chapel), as well as the gardens and its buildings (the Queen’s castle, “Little Trianon,” the “French Pavilion,” and the “Queen’s Hamlet”). They, too, had to operate under certain conditions. They also had to reinvent rooms at nearby chateaux, restyle mansions in Paris and build sets. Using off-site locations had definite design advantages, namely, a “freer rein of the palette of the clothes and fixtures” in portraying Antoinette’s life.54 Special attention was paid to the film’s color palette. Heavier, richer, and more somber tones (what Coppola calls “jewel tones”) were chosen for the established members of the court (King Louis XV, Madame du Barry, and their entourage). Antoinette, by contrast, was associated with light blues, pinks, and greens. We “freshened the whole palette of the French vision of the world at that time to more of a pastel vision,” Barrett states.55 “It was a total silk and cake world,” Coppola affirms.56 Throughout the film, color-coordinated traversals between food, hairstyles, and fabrics create intersensory connections between luxurious objects and characters. Cakes are decorated like jewels, hairstyles resemble cakes, and Antoinette and her friends are styled in the pastel colors of Ladurée’s macarons (another key “starting image” for Coppola). Like the film’s opening, Coppola’s design often favors moments of heightened theatricality. High-rise table settings, bright fabrics, jewels, fireworks, and parties reenact the history of Versailles as one of luxurious ostentation, as glitter and show. Such design intensities are not without purpose, however. After Antoinette’s arrival at Versailles, for example, Coppola conveys the stultifying rituals of court and Antoinette’s unhappiness through detailed shot compositions that repeat the same orchestral score. Filmed in deep focus, Antoinette and Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) are seated at an enormous table with a small orchestra in the background (see Figure 15.3). The pair are arranged frontally but spaced apart. Here, setting and décor compete for our attention. The theatricality of these moments is compounded by Coppola’s use of symmetrical framing, the pink marble-and-gilt detailing of the room (an interior room at Versailles), and large curtained entrances and windows. An audience of courtiers and servants watch on. Across the dining scenes, baroque displays of food and ornate dinnerware are placed

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Figure 15.3  “Embellished” production design, theatricality, and artifice in Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006

between Antoinette and Louis XVI: towers of asparagus, bouquets of lobster tails and other seafood, bread that is styled in the shape of two crowned serpents. Crucially, in these scenes, we do not see Antoinette sampling anything other than a glass of water. After Antoinette watches her new husband eat spear after spear of asparagus (concentrating his attentions more on the elaborate plates before him than on her), she exhibits visible disgust. As Featherstone observes, direct luxury involves “immersion in sensation.”57 Luxury is intimately connected to the body and the senses: the textured feeling of silk or fine clothing, the savoring of a whisky, wine, or champagne, the clink of crystal glassware. As I have argued elsewhere, it is not until Antoinette begins to take her own pleasure in luxurious consumption that she comes into any kind of power or sense of identity at Versailles.58 This shift is signaled by the notorious “I Want Candy” sequence, set to the song by Bow Wow Wow. Here, Coppola revels in a design-led version of French history, condensing Antoinette (and the court’s) reported expenditures into a rich, pleasure-seeking montage. Antoinette’s consumption is staged as a sensuous array of gorgeous cakes and cream-filled patisseries, monogrammed plates, unending champagne, stacked-pink-and white gambling chips and playing cards, lush reams of fabric, fans, ribbons, and boxes of multicolored, Manolo Blahnik-designed shoes, pink jewels, and toy pug dogs. As Toles asserts, “wealth, like any other sort of image can ‘bear interest’” for the viewer, entrancing the gaze through luxurious largesse.59 Though Coppola hints at the transient nature of such pleasures, it is important to note that the film’s production design, in these moments, does not try to affectively distance us from Antoinette’s newfound delights. Despite their differences in period and setting (Versailles/Los Angeles), Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring can be approached as companion pieces. To better understand Coppola’s “Versailles” as it connects these films, it is helpful to turn to the art historian,

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Louis Marin. According to Marin, Versailles is best understood as a simultaneously real, imaginary, and symbolic site. It is real in that the French national monument and grounds can still be visited today. It is imaginary in that its construction was driven by the “desire to show (oneself) as absolute power.”60 Finally, it is symbolic in that the function of Versailles is to “architect” royalty, lending royal bodies a concrete geographic location and a heightened, symbolic form. Through its radial architecture and signature sun motifs, for example, Versailles architected royalty as “not only the absolute of political power but the center of the cosmos in its entirety.”61 In The Bling Ring, Los Angeles performs a comparable function, providing a real, imagined, and symbolic site for the architecting of Hollywood celebrity. The Bling Ring is based on the 2010 Vanity Fair article, “The Suspects Wore Louboutins” by Nancy Jo Sales, detailing the real-life events of the “Hollywood Hills” burglaries of 2008–9. Dubbed the “Bling Ring” by the media, a group of high-school students broke into the homes of young celebrities, making off with more than three million dollars in jewelry and designer goods. In Coppola’s retelling, the teenagers (renamed Marc, Rebecca, Nicki, Sam, and Chloe) are desperate to be “part of the lifestyle.” While they come from relatively well-off homes in the Valley, none can afford the designer wardrobes of the celebrities they admire or their constant turnover. In contrast to Marie Antoinette, then, these teenagers steal visible signs of wealth and luxury to secure their social status. Together with Sales’ article, one of Coppola’s “starting images” for The Bling Ring was a photograph of the reality-TV star/socialite Paris Hilton, posed in front of her extensive collection of designer, high-heeled shoes. Further blurring the lines between reality, the media’s reporting of the burglaries, and Coppola’s prismatic recreation of events, Hilton (herself a victim of the real-life “Bling Ring” crimes) opened her home to Coppola for the shoot. The Bling Ring begins with a restaging one of the gang’s earliest crimes: the breaking and entering of actor Orlando Bloom’s residence. In near darkness, the teenagers hop a gated fence. Dressed in hooded jackets and sweatshirts, their faces are undiscernible (an effort to hide from security cameras). After the group break into the house, the opening strains of “Crown on the Ground” by Sleigh Bells explode, sonically confirming the connection between the teenagers’ crimes and their aspirations to achieve the pseudo-royalty of celebrity. “Let’s go shopping,” Rebecca (Katie Chang) exclaims and the ransacking begins. In what follows, Coppola stages another luxurious montage, recalling and varying the expenditures of Marie Antoinette. As wardrobes, drawers, and jewelry boxes are opened, we see hands grabbing at jewels and designer handbags (Chanel, Louis Vuitton), stuffing sparkly, high-heeled shoes and garments into larger Louis Vuitton bags. Arguing for the variability of luxury in the cinema, Toles suggests that objects “can seem momentous and trivial. . . . Movies are as adept at varying the emotional size of objects as they are the size of faces and objects.”62 By panning across rows and rows of Louboutins and diamond jewels, by including overhead shots of piles of designer handbags as well as close-ups of shoeboxes, handbags, and their contours, Coppola presents these objects as being as important (if not more important) than the film’s characters. Unlike in Marie Antoinette, Coppola does not film the teens taking sensuous pleasure in the items they steal (one garment will soon be replaced with another). Luxury items are but a means to

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an end: display. Interspersed throughout the opening montage are shots of the teens’ social media posts (Rebecca, clad in a stolen hat), the aftermath of the teens’ arrest, and red-carpet footage of the celebrities who were targeted (Paris Hilton, actress Rachel Bilson). The sequence ends with the camera tracking across a mirrored surface, laden with jewels as well as criminal evidence tags. From its opening, then, The Bling Ring attends to luxurious objects, surfaces, and surface-based display. For the film’s design, Coppola sought to visually underscore discrepancies between the teenagers’ life in the Valley (“bland, beige boxes”) and “the bright world” they access through their life of crime.63 The latter is a world of parties, nightclubs, drugs, and designer wardrobes, refracted through the media reporting of celebrity and social media platforms. Los Angeles/Hollywood is presented as being akin to a contemporary “Versailles.” Lest the connections between the two films be missed, Coppola also gestures back to her own Marie Antoinette by including a cameo by actress Kirsten Dunst (Antoinette) in one of the film’s nightclub scenes. Symbolic linkages between Versailles and Hollywood resonate throughout the film: the teenagers hold “court” in the club, at parties, and online. Gilded royal carriages become expensive (stolen) luxury cars. In the Hollywood Hills, celebrity mansions resemble royal palaces. Their interior décor, furnishings, and wallpaper are even decorated in the Marie-Antoinette style. The mirrored walls and halls of Versailles (which once served to reflect the court) are updated as the mirrored surfaces of Paris Hilton’s home, replete with its own hall of mirrors in the form of Paris’ nightclub room. In Marie Antoinette, Coppola films luxury from the inside-out, focusing on Antoinette’s perspective and her life at Versailles. In The Bling Ring, she films luxury from the outside in. The landscape of Los Angeles/Hollywood has been completely internalized by the teenagers. Oftentimes, the teenagers halt their natural movements and gestures to pose or recompose themselves as façades in front of cameras, mirrors, and crowds. It is this insatiable urge to self-document and display luxury (physically and online) that leads to their arrest. Were it not for their arrest, the pseudo-royalist lifestyle of the “Bling Ring” would have continued to be one of surface-driven repetition: an endless succession of homes to be raided, luxury goods to be stolen, parties to be attended, wares and brands to be paraded, selfies to be taken. Turned inside-out, nothing is left but the urge to represent—to display oneself as a luxurious object and a pure, fabricated surface. In Sofia Coppola’s cinema, men and women live a privileged, often luxurious lifestyle. Her characters move through iconic, real-life spaces that exude a sense of exclusivity, wealth, and glamour: the Park Hyatt, the Chateau Marmont, Versailles, the Hollywood Hills, Southern plantation houses, spaces of memory and of fantasy. Through her designing of luxury and her use of expressive surfaces, however, the director also suggests that the accumulation of “bling” (be it historic or contemporary) gives way to its own decline. Memories of luxury or the rampant desire for luxury might replace reality (The Virgin Suicides, The Bling Ring). Chandeliers smash, for they come at the expense of others (The Beguiled, Marie Antoinette). Luxurious objects or surroundings cannot assuage inner feelings of ennui or listlessness (Lost in Translation, Somewhere). Once sensuous pleasures have been taken, further luxuries must be sought. In Coppola’s cinema, the living of a luxurious life cannot be emotionally, ethically, or temporally sustained.

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Notes 1 Hélène Cixous, “Sonya Rykiel in Translation,” trans. Deborah Jenson, in On Fashion, ed. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 95. 2 Cixous is speaking of a starry, reversible Sonia Rykiel designer jacket. Coppola wore a Rykieldesigned jumpsuit for making The Beguiled. 3 Jeff Smith, “Our Lives in Pink: Sofia Coppola as Transmedia Audiovisual Stylist,” in Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Imagery and New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers and Lisa Perrott (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 76. 4 Anthony Kaufman, “Sofia Coppola and Anne Ross,” Directors Guild of America Quarterly, Spring 2017, https://www​.dga​.org​/Craft​/DGAQ​/All​-Articles​/1702​-Spring​-2017​/Collaborators​ -Coppola​-Ross​.aspx. 5 For more on Coppola’s use of mood boards, see Lawrence Webb’s chapter on curation in his volume (Chapter 18). 6 Kaufman, “Sofia Coppola and Anne Ross.” 7 Giuliana Bruno, “Surface, Fabric, Weave: The Fashioned World of Wong Kar-Wai,” in Fashion in Film, ed. Adrienne Munich (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 89. 8 George Toles, “Largesse and Luxury in Film,” Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism 4 (2013): 8. 9 Toles, “Largesse and Luxury in Film,” 8–9. 10 Mike Featherstone, “Luxury, Consumer Culture and Sumptuary Dynamics,” Luxury: History, Culture and Consumption 1, no. 1 (2015): 48. 11 Bree Hoskin, “Playground Love: Landscape and Longing in The Virgin Suicides,” Literature/ Film Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2007): 216. 12 Hoskin, “Playground Love.” 13 Anna Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 28. 14 Elizabeth Wilson, “Luxury,” Luxury: History, Culture and Consumption 1, no. 1 (2015): 17. 15 Featherstone, “Luxury,” 48. 16 Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema, 33. 17 Luke Hicks, “How Sofia Coppola Uses Color in The Virgin Suicides,” Film School Rejects, May 8, 2021, https://filmschoolrejects​.com​/the​-virgin​-suicides​-color​-theory/. 18 Hoskin, “Playground Love,” 216. 19 Kaufman, “Sofia Coppola and Anne Ross.” 20 Mike Scott, “Where was The Beguiled Filmed? A Tour of Louisiana Shooting Locations,” The New Orleans Advocate, June 27, 2017, https://www​.nola​.com​/entertainment​_life​/movies​_tv​/ article​_e7156fb3​-ed35​-5a59​-89bc​-d91559eae35c​.html. 21 Kaufman, “Sofia Coppola and Anne Ross.” 22 Kaufman, “Sofia Coppola and Anne Ross.” 23 Kaufman, “Sofia Coppola and Anne Ross.” 24 Hoskin, “Playground Love,” 214–15. 25 Bruno, “Surface, Fabric, Weave,” 84. 26 Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Celebrity, Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 66. 27 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 68.

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28 “We could hang him?” one of the girls suggests when plotting against McBurney. William Brown makes a detailed, compelling argument that race is a structuring absence in the film, also evident in Coppola’s frequent use of ellipses. See William Brown, “A (Mush)room of One’s Own: Feminism, Posthumanism and Race in The Beguiled,” Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image 7, no. 1 (2020): 75. 29 Kaufman, “Sofia Coppola and Anne Ross.” 30 Brown, “A (Mush)room of One’s Own,” 86. 31 Peter Ettedgui, Production Design and Art Direction: Screencraft (Woburn: Focal Press, 1999), 9. 32 Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron, Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narrative (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 37. 33 Affron and Affron, Sets in Motion, 48. 34 Mark Olsen, “Sofia Coppola: Cool and the Gang,” Sight and Sound 14, no. 1 (2004): 5. 35 Wendy Mitchell, “Sofia Coppola Talks about Lost in Translation, Her Love Story That’s Not Nerdy,” IndieWire, February 4, 2004, https://www​.indiewire​.com​/2004​/02​/sofia​-coppola​-talks​ -about​-lost​-in​-translation​-her​-love​-story​-thats​-not​-nerdy​-79158/. 36 Lucy Bolton, Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 106. 37 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 87. 38 Mitchell, “Sofia Coppola Talks.” 39 Kaufman, “Sofia Coppola and Anne Ross.” 40 “Lost on Location,” dir. Spike Jonze, DVD extra, Lost in Translation DVD, dir. Sofia Coppola (Universal Studios, 2004). 41 Pansy Duncan, The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film: Affect Theory’s Other (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 169. 42 Duncan, The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film, 169. 43 As Backman Rogers and Ferriss have detailed, many of Coppola’s shot compositions are directly inspired by female portraiture and photography. See Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019) and Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola. 44 Joey Nolfi, “How Sofia Coppola Fused Wigs and Sake into the Perfect Lost in Translation Shot,” Entertainment Weekly, January 27, 2020, https://ew​.com​/movies​/2020​/01​/27​/sofia​ -coppola​-lost​-in​-translation​-karaoke​-scene/. 45 Nolfi, “How Sofia Coppola Fused Wigs and Sake.” 46 Kaufman, “Sofia Coppola and Anne Ross.” 47 Nolfi, “How Sofia Coppola Fused Wigs and Sake.” 48 Affron and Affron, Sets in Motion, 39. 49 Coppola also asked Gilbert to style Marie Antoinette’s hair for the film. Other “starting images” included an album cover by 1980s band Bow Wow Wow (whose music also features). See “Sofia Coppola on Filmmaking: A Talk and Q&A with Annette Insdorf,” YouTube, April 22 2020, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=JKj92etN7fw​&t​=450s. 50 “Sofia Coppola on Filmmaking.” 51 Jane Gaines, “Introduction: Fabricating the Female Body,” in Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body, ed. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 19.

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52 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 75. 53 Antoine de Baecque, Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 78. 54 Coppola was granted access only on Mondays, when the site is closed to tourists. Susan King, “Versailles, Done over in Pastel,” Los Angeles Times, September 10, 2006, https://www​ .latimes​.com​/archives​/la​-xpm​-2006​-sep​-10​-ca​-marieset10​-story​.html. 55 King, “Versailles, Done over in Pastel.” 56 Diana Diamond, “Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette: Costumes, Girl Power and Feminism,” in Fashion in Film, ed. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 73. 57 Featherstone, “Luxury,” 49. 58 Saige Walton, Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 144–57. 59 Toles, “Largesse and Luxury in Film,” 10. 60 Louis Marin, “Classical, Baroque: Versailles, or the Architecture of the Prince,” Yale French Studies 80 (1990): 168. 61 Marin, “Classical, Baroque.” 62 Toles, “Largesse and Luxury in Film,” 9. 63 Kaufman, “Sofia Coppola and Anne Ross.”

16 ACTING SOFIA COPPOLA, INDIEWOOD, AND PERFORMANCE Cynthia Baron and Yannis Tzioumakis

Actors and acting are essential to the cinema of Sofia Coppola, a fact that becomes evident when one considers the productions’ industrial context and aesthetic choices. This line of inquiry sidelines the notion that Coppola’s star-studded casts largely reflect her privilege as a second-generation filmmaker and shows instead that her collaborations with star actors directly align with indiewood cinema practices.1 It reveals that Coppola’s neo-modernist aesthetic invites audiences to study the “surface”2 of performances and that her orchestration of naturalistic and modernist strategies is often what generates the engagement and distance that makes her films’ paradoxical tone comparable to but distinct from other indiewood productions. This chapter begins with the reality that Coppola’s films have been made within the industrial/institutional context of indiewood, which has been shaped by the major entertainment conglomerates’ strong investment, generally via specialty film divisions, in the independent film sector.3 These divisions, together with other well-capitalized companies, have committed significant funds to produce and market “quality” indiewood films. Their financial investment has enabled the productions to feature major stars, just as auteurs’ ability to interest stars in their projects has made production financing possible. High-profile actors have given films by Coppola and other indiewood directors festival, box-office, and ancillary market visibility, making them valuable to critics and corporations. In addition, the charisma of Hollywood stars has fostered audiences’ emotional engagement in indiewood films; as critic Manohla Dargis notes, Bill Murray effortlessly “takes possession of Sofia Coppola’s gently comic On the Rocks—though this hijacking may be more of a sly directorial surrender [because casting] Murray is a surefire way to win over an audience.”4

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The financial investment that ensures stars’ participation also contributes to the lavish surfaces that distinguish Coppola’s work. The director’s celebrity network, “with its fusion of people working in fashion, music, photography and film,” facilitates her access to locations like the Park Hyatt Tokyo, the palace at Versailles, the Chateau Marmont hotel in West Hollywood, and an elegant SoHo apartment in New York;5 substantial financial resources allow Coppola to involve this elite network and create films with high production values in these spaces. Coppola’s ample budgets have enabled accomplished crew members and covered the costume, hair, and makeup expenses required to suitably present actors in her period pieces and those portraying the typically upscale characters in her films with contemporary settings. Indiewoodlevel funding has allowed Coppola to populate her films with sometimes scores of extras and almost without exception lead and supporting performers whose physical appearance reflects dominant ideals of attractiveness. Aligning closely with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017), an opulent indiewood drama set in 1950s London, and contrasting fundamentally with Chloé Zhao’s The Rider (2017), her second low-key, low-budget neo-realist film set on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Coppola’s depictions of affluent characters and their environments have depended on the financing and institutional support that distinguishes indiewood from other forms of American independent cinema. At the same time, Coppola’s work exemplifies the “performance experiments in the indiewood period,” which include, for example, Rebecca Miller’s 2002 three-part drama Personal Velocity.6 Creating a tone distinct from indiewood films ranging from Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) to The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014), the muted emotional quality in Coppola’s work most clearly reflects the modernist aesthetic popularized in American independent cinema by Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Like Jarmusch’s observational film, which shows the influence of post-punk aesthetics and the Squat Theater experimental performance group, Coppola productions require close attention to the “sparse physical and vocal expression charged with meaning.”7 Juan Suárez’s observations about Jarmusch’s film equally apply to Coppola’s. He argues that in Stranger Than Paradise, everything audiences know about the characters depends on “minute gestures, body language, and [actors’] reflex actions.” Similarly, the “performances emphasize disengagement and blankness rather than wellrounded ‘individuality’ [but] communicate ‘presence’ and the temporality of bodies that wait [and] ponder.” Suárez finds that “one of the outstanding achievements of the acting is the way it intimates that emotion is still there, barely visible under the evasive cool and the frowning unconcern.”8 His observation effectively describes the minimalist performances and their poignancy in Coppola films. The loose plotting of Coppola narratives, with their emphasis on “atmosphere and emotion over plot development,”9 gives the subtle details in her actors’ facial, physical, and vocal expression significance. The frequently “languid pacing” and “quasi-still images”10 make minute performance details key components of Coppola’s films. Like other narratives that have “a drifting episodic quality [and] complex characters who act inconsistently or have vague goals,”11 Coppola’s consistently cause the “momentum of action [to give] way to the moment of gesture and the body.”12 Moreover, her framing,

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editing, and lighting choices are designed around actors’ portrayals to highlight the ephemeral traces of emotion they convey. Performance details become legible when one separates the fictional character from a performance’s tangible elements, for example, the wistful look in Kirsten Dunst’s eyes as she glances over her shoulder in the final moments of The Virgin Suicides. A flicker of emotion in an actor’s eyes allows Coppola’s minimalist cinema to “articulate a deep well of feeling [in] a culture of alienation that delimits a search for meaning.”13 These moments create empathy for individuals adrift or uncomfortable in their bubbles of affluence, even as the films’ predominantly distanced tone critiques wealthy societies like Gross Pointe, Michigan, an historically segregated residential bastion for Detroit economic elites and a daunting environment for a school teacher’s daughters. This chapter’s exploration of Coppola’s indiewood filmmaking draws on our book, Acting Indie: Industry, Aesthetics and Performance (2020), which elucidates ways to approach industrial arrangements, aesthetic traditions, and performances clearly and systematically. Following that model, the chapter starts with an overview of Coppola’s career within the structures of indiewood, examining the companies she collaborated with, the process of casting major Hollywood and independent film stars, her play with genre frameworks, and the extent to which these and other elements identify her films as examples of indiewood cinema. This is followed by sections that illustrate the actingdirecting principles underlying her films, the relationship between selected performances and aesthetic traditions important to independent filmmaking, and ways that certain star performances contribute to Coppola’s indiewood cinema.14

The Indiewood Filmmaker Par Excellence The Virgin Suicides is one of the paradigmatic examples of indiewood in the late 1990s. An independent production by a first-time writer-director, the film was produced by several companies, which is a common practice in a sector where financing is difficult to obtain and filmmakers employ creative methods to fund their productions. However, rather than involving struggling outsiders, the production companies behind the film included American Zoetrope, established by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas and responsible for some of the most acclaimed and financially successful films in US cinema. Francis Coppola was one of the film’s producers, along with Fred Roos and Fred Fuchs, executives with countless credits in major Hollywood films, including most of the productions directed by Francis Coppola. This Hollywood power was counterbalanced by the presence of practitioners firmly associated with the independent film sector. Another of the film’s producers, Gary Marcus, had worked with key independent filmmakers such as John Sayles, Mike Figgis, and the Coen brothers. Cinematographer Edward Lachman had just shot The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999). Editor James Lyons had edited all Todd Haynes’ films up to that time. Costume designer Nancy Steiner had collaborated with Haynes prior to her work on The Virgin Suicides, while production designer Jasna Stefanovic’s most recent credit before working with Coppola was Men with Guns (John Sayles, 1998).

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However, when it came to casting Coppola opted for well-established (though past their peak) Hollywood actors Kathleen Turner and James Woods, major young star Kirsten Dunst, and emerging teen star Josh Hartnett. She also cast well-known character actors Danny De Vito and Scott Glenn as well as former action film star Michael Paré in small secondary parts, thus providing the film with further visibility in what was becoming a congested marketplace for independent films. As Coppola explained, although the film’s $6 million budget was modest, especially compared to films by Miramax and other studio divisions, financing was confirmed only after she had secured the participation of Turner and Woods, who were the first actors cast.15 As all these details clearly illustrate, star presence is important in indiewood cinema and has been crucial for Coppola’s oeuvre from the beginning. This convergence of Hollywood and independent cinema can be seen in other aspects of the film. The Virgin Suicides is based on Jeffrey Eugenides’ 1993 novel, which had significant critical and commercial success.16 The story places The Virgin Suicides in teen-film territory, and the girls’ relationship with their parents creates opportunities for melodrama. Yet Coppola distances herself from these generic frameworks, creating a more ambiguous text that is open to different interpretations; male audiences might see the film illustrating how difficult it is to understand girlhood, whereas women could find that it captures the despair young women experience as they discover they are little more than objects in the outside (patriarchal) world. Thus, while The Virgin Suicides’ financing depended on Hollywood connections, the film’s thematic and aesthetic dimensions reveal its “links to the 1990s independents and the specific interventions of female directors in that era.”17 The element that completed this elegant indiewood package was the film’s distributor. The Virgin Suicides was one of the first releases of Paramount Classics, a specialty film division established by Paramount and its parent company Viacom in 1997 to operate in the American independent and international art-film markets.18 Paramount Classics bought the film when it was shown at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.19 However, the specialty film company did not release it until April 2000, after it received exposure in several showcases, including the 2000 Sundance Film Festival. Paramount Classics’ strategy enabled it to capitalize on Coppola’s emergence as an interesting new female director. The approach also provided time for Viacom’s MTV to advertise the film to a youth demographic, a marketing strategy that facilitated Coppola’s path to winning the MTV Award for Best New Filmmaker in 2000 and further confirmed the film’s position between American independent and Hollywood mainstream cinema. The Virgin Suicides grossed only about $5 million in the North American theatrical market and a similar amount internationally. Nonetheless, it established Coppola as an indiewood auteur at a time when indiewood was fast becoming the dominant paradigm in American independent cinema with a group of primarily male directors emerging as its key representatives. The group included Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell, Spike Jonze, Alexander Payne, and Steven Soderbergh, with Lisa Cholodenko and Kimberly Pierce representing the female filmmakers with a presence in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Coppola’s strong links with Hollywood, which included her work on music videos, together with her assured debut as a writer-director of a positively reviewed

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film released by one of the major players in the indiewood market, propelled her directly into the pantheon of filmmakers associated with independent cinema at the cusp of an evolution that would bring it increasingly closer to Hollywood and the major film studios. This evolution, which began in the late 1990s, had been anticipated by the significant commercial and critical success of Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994). Released by Disney-owned Miramax, the film’s overwhelming positive reception “forced both the Hollywood studios and the independent/standalone players to rethink the parameters of ‘independent’ cinema and reconsider how commercially successful it could be.”20 One by one, the conglomerated Hollywood studios began to emulate the Disney-Miramax model, establishing specialty film divisions such as Fox Searchlight, Focus Features, Warner Independent Pictures, and Paramount Classics. Keen to achieve success comparable to Miramax’s, these divisions embarked on a program of increasingly ambitious film releases, the success of which would guarantee continuous support from their parent companies. The studio specialty film divisions’ involvement accelerated trends that had emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the term “indie film” became popularized. Notably, the indiewood film stars were bigger and commanded greater mainstream attention, as exemplified by Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1998) and Michael Douglas in Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000). Genre became more prominent, with character-led stories being combined with the gangster film in Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997), the war film in Three Kings (David O. Russell, 2000), and the teen comedy in Election (Alexander Payne, 1999). Marketing keyed to the presence of star actors and genre formulas assumed greater importance; the familiar elements and indiewood films’ success prompted even Hollywood to produce a few indiewood films.21 The larger budgets resulted in slicker productions and high-quality entertainment but often limited the social critique associated with independent film.22 In the indiewood context, the auteur became an even more important element in the whole package. Notably, a “privileged cadre of filmmakers”23 found a safe haven in Hollywood and their specialty film divisions because these directors could deliver films that connected with audiences, had strong box-office results, and were prestige releases that garnered awards and monopolized critics’ best film lists. As an auteur-driven, critically acclaimed, edgy but contemplative, quality Paramount Classics release, The Virgin Suicides positioned Sofia Coppola as an emerging indiewood filmmaker. If she was at the margins of the movement with her debut film in 2000, she moved to its epicenter with the release of Lost in Translation in 2003. The film did not secure the year’s highest box office, grossing $44 million in North America and $118 million worldwide, or the most awards, but it became a cultural phenomenon and high mark for indiewood cinema to that date. It not only exemplified everything indiewood cinema constituted, it also showed how elements of Hollywood cinema (star images, genres, cosmopolitan locations) could be reworked as hallmarks of independence that could be embraced by both niche and mainstream audiences. The release of Lost in Translation also coincided with indiewood further consolidating its status as the dominant paradigm in American independent film, as it moved into what can retrospectively be perceived as its golden years (2003–7), which featured the critical and commercial success of films like Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004),

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Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004), Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), Little Miss Sunshine (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2006), Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007), No Country for Old Men (Coen brothers, 2007), and There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007). Illustrating its indiewood profile, star actors are essential to Lost in Translation. Notably, when the film was released, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson attracted as much attention as writer-director Sofia Coppola.24 The film uses the rom-com genre to great effect, not to impose a horizon of expectation for audiences but to give some structure to the characters’ otherwise aimless lives and the film’s rendering of the captivating interactions between Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson). Although both characters seem to be with unsuitable partners, which in traditional rom-coms would motivate their romance,25 the film carefully avoids this direction and shrewdly underplays their romantic relationship. As a result, in the film’s celebrated last scene, the characters do not end up together but what Bob whispers in Charlotte’s ear makes her happy, ending the film on a high note. Like The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation is an open text that satisfies different audience demographics while remaining within an independent aesthetic of understatement. Reflecting the indiewood model that connected high-profile auteurs and studio specialty film divisions, for Lost in Translation Coppola worked with Focus Features, Vivendi/Universal’s specialty film division, established in 2002 following the merger of several companies.26 Focus Features became one of the most prominent companies specializing in indiewood films; in 2003 it released Lost in Translation, 21 Grams (Alejandro G. Iñárritu), The Shape of Things (Neil LaBute), and the high-profile international arthouse film The Motorcycle Diaries (Walter Salles). Geoff King identifies Focus Features as a key example of a company associated with Indiewood; Gary Needham sees Focus Features as “the definitive indie company in the 2000s in the same way that Miramax once defined the 1990s independent landscape.”27 Thus, for multiple reasons, Coppola’s Lost in Translation is the key example of indiewood cinema in 2003 and one of the most important examples of indiewood cinema in general. Coppola’s 2006 film, Marie Antoinette, extended the indiewood model to its logical limit. The film was set up at Sony, produced under the auspices of its Columbia Pictures label, and released through Sony Pictures. With an estimated budget of $40 million, high production values, locations at Versailles and Fontainebleau, recognized lead actors Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman, a cast with more than seventy players, and generic elements drawn from the biopic and costume drama, Marie Antoinette seems far removed from the independent film sector. Yet, as noted earlier, Hollywood studios have produced or distributed indiewood films to “buy into the box office success and award-garnering prestige” of ostensibly independent films. In studio-backed independent films, stars remain central, since these projects are designed to attract and then market “leading performers.”28 Concerning Marie Antoinette specifically, in the mid-2000s Sony/Columbia was the most commercially successful Hollywood major. Its Spider-Man franchise, starring Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane opposite Toby Maguire as Peter Parker/Spider-Man in the 2002 and 2004 films, together with a string of box-office hits, had given the company the

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largest market share for 2004, a feat that it would repeat in 2006, the year of Marie Antoinette’s release.29 As a result, the company was open to the kind of risky but prestige production that Marie Antoinette represented, especially as Coppola had emerged as a hugely successful and visible auteur following the critical and commercial success of Lost in Translation and Dunst was an important element in the success of the Spider-Man franchise, starring as Peter Parker/Spider-Man’s romantic interest. Sony’s involvement in Coppola’s auteur-driven reimagining of Marie Antoinette in 2006 also anticipates the limited participation of Disney, Fox, and Universal, as well as Paramount’s substantial activity in the independent sector beginning with Jason Reitman’s 2009 film, Up in the Air, starring George Clooney. In addition, Marie Antoinette is representative of indiewood trends because in 2006 the MPAA reported that the negative cost of films released by studio subsidiaries such as Miramax, Focus Features, and Fox Searchlight had reached $30.7 million per film,30 a figure not far removed from the $40 million that Marie Antoinette cost. In other words, the borders between independent cinema (as practiced in the form of indiewood by the studio specialty film divisions) and Hollywood (as practiced by the main studios) had become increasingly blurred. Given this context, Coppola secured the freedom to do an indiewood film within the structures of a studio, with the film’s independence signaled primarily through the director’s authorial interventions. Using intermittent moments of anachronism in the visuals and the soundtrack, Coppola not only rejects the biopic and period drama impulse to recreate established accounts of a historical figure, she also reframes the queen’s life to explore themes in her own film oeuvre, in this case identity and young female adulthood, to connect with contemporary audiences. As in The Virgin Suicides, Coppola creates an open text: for some audiences the queen is the indulgent figure depicted in historical accounts; for others the queen is someone who faces the same bleak options as the Lisbon sisters. In addition, echoing Lost in Translation, Coppola uses Marie Antoinette’s experiences at Versailles to consider the emptiness of affluence and celebrity. However, despite the film’s strong commercial elements, built primarily around Kirsten Dunst’s star persona, Marie Antoinette did not find success at the domestic box office, grossing only a quarter of its $60 million worldwide box-office receipts. Coppola’s 2010 film, Somewhere, returns to her examination of celebrity culture and the alienating effects of wealth and stardom. Set primarily at the legendary Chateau Marmont, Somewhere sustains the markers of high-quality indiewood filmmaking by featuring the main character’s signature Ferrari and scenes in the Presidential Suite at the luxury Hotel Principe Di Savoia in Milan, Italy, which costs $20,000 a night. Like Lost in Translation, the $7 million film was distributed by Focus Features, the specialty division most closely identified with indiewood cinema. While Somewhere thus remains within the indiewood realm, it harkens back to earlier types of indie cinema. The film’s episodic narrative has little connection with recognizable genres. The lead actors, Stephen Dorff as actor Johnny Marco and Elle Fanning as his eleven-year-old daughter, were not marquee stars but instead actors who had grown up in the film business and whose life experiences gave them an insider’s understanding of fame. While the film was not a box-office success, it served its purpose as a prestige film for the specialty film division; Coppola received the

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Golden Lion Award at the 2010 Venice Film Festival and the 2010 Special Achievement Award from the National Board of Review. Continuing Coppola’s analysis of celebrity culture, The Bling Ring (2013) marks a new trajectory by exploring ways that social media, reality television, and celebrity culture shape the values and behavior of teens who break into celebrity homes to become significant by possessing stars’ personal belongings. The $8 million production also marks Coppola’s participation in a new indiewood trend. The Bling Ring represents her departure from studio specialty film divisions and a first financial collaboration with A24, a new type of company that emerged in the late 2000s and early 2010s as a key player in various media markets, including the independent one. Between 2008 and 2010, Paramount Vantage, Warner Independent, Picturehouse, and Miramax were closed by their corporate parents. As a consequence, well-capitalized companies such as A24, FilmDistrict, Open Road, STX Entertainment, Bleecker Street, Broad Green Pictures, and Annapurna filled the gap left by the shuttered specialty film divisions. Together with non-studio specialty divisions CBS Films and Overture Films and older players MGM, Roadside Attractions, Samuel Goldwyn, and the Weinstein Company, the new companies provided a diverse slate of films, including indiewood productions by major auteurs. Their offerings soon rivalled those of the remaining studio specialty divisions, primarily Fox Searchlight and Focus Features. If one associates indiewood with studio specialty film divisions,31 then the rise of these new companies and the studios’ occasional excursions into indiewood filmmaking in the late 2000s and early 2010s suggest the transition to a “late” indiewood era.32 Thus, Coppola’s involvement with A24 is yet another indication of how thoroughly her productions reflect indiewood priorities and developments. Like Somewhere, The Bling Ring departs from indiewood norms; except for Emma Watson, stars do not play the leading roles. Yet the film mirrors the indiewood preoccupation with stars, since celebrities animate the teens’ mediated reality and the production features cameos by Paris Hilton and Kirsten Dunst. In Coppola’s next work, A Very Murray Christmas (2015), stars move to the center of the production itself. As its title suggests, the Netflix television special is led by a charming Bill Murray, deftly supported by celebrity pianist Paul Shaffer. Set in the famous Carlyle hotel in New York, early scenes in the loosely plotted story feature Amy Poehler, Michael Cera, and Chris Rock. Middle sequences include Rashida Jones, Jason Schwartzman, and Maya Rudolph, with contributions from musicians Jenny Lewis and Thomas Mars. The final “fantasy” stage numbers feature Murray, Shaffer, George Clooney, and Miley Cyrus. Echoing Lost in Translation, Murray plays a dispirited but debonair celebrity. Yet the production also marks a new direction for Coppola, because this was her first collaboration with Netflix, a telling industrial/institutional choice given the concomitant migration of many independent filmmakers to streaming television. With The Beguiled (2017), Coppola returned to more clearly defined indiewood filmmaking, with the presence of major stars Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, and Kirsten Dunst a key component of the film’s financing and publicity. In addition, The Beguiled works within generic frameworks such as the war film and the period drama; it was also a presold property, although it features Coppola’s sometimes controversial reframing of the stories presented in the 1966 novel and 1971 film. Illustrating its indiewood credentials,

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the $10 million production was distributed by studio specialty film division Focus Features. The Beguiled also satisfied its corporate financers’ desire for prestige with Coppola winning the Best Director Award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Coppola’s 2020 film, On the Rocks, reveals a continuation of her characteristically indiewood casting practices; stars Bill Murray and Rashida Jones portray the central characters, with Marlon Wayans and Jessica Yu Li Henwick in secondary roles. A sizable indiewood-level budget made these casting choices possible; it also supported the film’s luxurious rendering of New York and its upscale locations, which include the city’s legendary “21” Club, the celebrity-favored Indochine restaurant, and the Carlyle hotel, featured in A Very Murray Christmas. Coppola’s screenplay revisits themes in her earlier films, echoing Lost in Translation by exploring the dynamics between an established older man and an insecure younger woman and recalling Somewhere through its look at a dysfunctional father-daughter relationship. These thematic continuities facilitated the film’s critical reception and marketing, since an auteur’s signature is a crucial component of prestigious and marketable indiewood filmmaking. The film’s financing confirmed Coppola’s status as an auteur, with On the Rocks representing the first film produced through a partnership between Apple and A24 established in 2018.33 Branded “An Apple Original Film,” distributed theatrically by A24, and released on the Apple TV+ streaming platform, On the Rocks represents yet another reason to see Coppola as the quintessential indiewood filmmaker, whose work reflects key indiewood ingredients— auteur status, recognizable stars, innovative use of genre, high production values— and the evolving industrial arrangements that auteur indiewood directors use to create accessible quality films.

Actors and Acting: Key Elements in Coppola’s Indiewood Films Coppola’s success as an indiewood filmmaker also depends on her effective collaboration with actors ranging from young performers to major Hollywood stars. Yet acting in Coppola films has remained largely unexplored, because studies are often grounded in literary theory, rather than performing arts theory and practice, which have developed vocabulary for analyzing a text-as-written and a text-as-performed. Taxonomies for analyzing composite art forms such as film, theater, and television emphasize the distinctions that separate character, actor, and performance details (glares, downward glances, fleeting half-smiles). They enable exploration of the dynamic interrelations among character, plot, cinematic choices (framing, editing, lighting, music), and performance details (gestures, facial expressions, vocal choices, movements in space).34 Scholars have tacitly acknowledged the importance of performances in Coppola’s films. Writing about the moment in Marie Antoinette when the young queen receives “a scolding letter from her mother,” Katarzyna Paszkiewicz rightly sees a “visual alliance of decorative objects with the female body.” Although her description refers only to Marie Antoinette, it also implicitly calls attention to the details in Kirsten Dunst’s performance that elicit sympathy. Paszkiewicz writes, “The letter falls out of her [Dunst’s] hands, she

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sinks slowly to the floor, pressed against the wall and almost becoming one with it. The movement of the camera matches the pace of her [Dunst’s] movements and draws us tentatively closer to Marie Antoinette.” While Paszkiewicz describes the scene as “emblematic of how the protagonist’s pain is . . . played out through the sensuously textured details of the mise-en-scène,” she notes that it “culminates in a close-up on her [Dunst’s] tearful face.”35 Presented here, with Dunst’s name in brackets marking the distinction between the character (Marie Antoinette) and the actor (Kirsten Dunst), one can see how the actor’s observable expressions of emotion—crying, slowly collapsing, and pressing herself against the wall—engage audience emotion, even as Coppola’s orchestration of costume and décor comment on the character’s social situation. Similarly, scholarship on meanings created by Coppola’s filmic choices has isolated evidence that also clarifies why actors’ performances contribute to the director’s work. Kendra Marston finds that Coppola’s cinema is “characterised by long takes indicating the monotonous interminability of time, the use of shallow focus emphasising the protagonist’s isolation within her environment, and diffuse lighting that aesthetically idealises the heroine [and conveys] her act of corporeal fading.”36 These observations implicitly point to the constellation of lighting, framing, and editing decisions that make even the most transitory facial expression, breath, or posture hugely significant in Coppola’s cinema, which is known for its sparse dialogue and absence of histrionic emotional displays.37 Long takes allow audiences to explore the frame, their attention drawn to human movement and narratively significant human interactions; shallow focus and diffuse lighting make the actors’ postures, gestures, and facial expressions the most prominent visual elements in the frame. In another instance of scholarship tacitly touching on performance in Coppola’s films, Fiona Handyside finds the director creating an alternative to the conventional objectifying gaze: her films consciously duplicate “traditional images of women” to show how dominant society sees the characters but they use close-ups in their “sympathetic account of feminine interiority.” Coppola also complicates depictions even of “conventionally beautiful, white, fair-haired, young female stars” through “deliberately slow pacing, often reinforced by locked down camera positions and attention to repetitive rituals and everyday activities.”38 These choices mean that in place of plot-driven narratives with conventional framing and editing that directs audience attention, Coppola’s slow pacing, long takes, and static camera make her actors’ character-specific expressions, gestures, and movements the focus of audience attention. As such, the actors’ changing embodiment of their characters, perhaps more than their inert, socially coded bodies, creates audience engagement in Coppola’s cinema. Thus, her films not only display an “attentiveness to the minimalist gestures of everyday life explored by female auteurs such as Chantal Akerman and Agnès Varda,”39 they allow audiences to explore the myriad connotations that performers’ physical and vocal expressions convey. Trade publications explicitly recognize the significance of actors and acting in Coppola films. Writing for Directors Guild readers in DGA Quarterly Magazine, Carrie Rickey observes that Coppola’s work leaves audiences remembering “microclimates of feeling and longing.”40 The director’s adroit work with actors builds on her early experiences, including her last-minute casting in The Godfather Part III (Francis Ford Coppola, 1990).

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As Coppola points out, “Having been in front of a camera, knowing how vulnerable that can be, I am sensitive to that vulnerability in my actors.” The Godfather Part III marked the beginning of Coppola’s work with acting coach Greta Seacat. To “help shape the performance she wants,” she applies things learned from studying with Seacat. Coppola explains, “By going to her classes when I was younger, I learned how to talk to actors. Instead of saying, ‘Act tired in this scene,’ I’ll say, ‘You’ve been up all night and you want to go home.’”41 In other words, emphasizing a character’s given circumstances precludes generic behaviors of tiredness and empowers actors to use their preparation to embody their characters in the specific situation. The Godfather Part III was also the formal start of Coppola’s working relationship with dialogue coach/rehearsal advisor Christopher Neil, who is the nephew of Francis and Eleanor (Neil) Coppola and the director of Goat (2012). Following his training with Francis Coppola on The Godfather Part III, Jack (1996), and The Rainmaker (1997), Neil worked as dialogue coach/rehearsal advisor on Sofia Coppola’s Lick the Star, The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, Somewhere, The Bling Ring, and The Beguiled. His dialogue coach/ rehearsal advisor credits include Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999), Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas, 2005), Beginners (Mike Mills, 2010), and Priest (Scott Stewart, 2011). As a dialogue coach/rehearsal advisor (as distinct from an acting coach who works privately with individual actors), Neil is an advisor to directors, helping them rehearse and work with actors, using the type of character-centered improvisations he learned during his formative experiences with Francis Coppola.42 Describing those rehearsal strategies, Francis Coppola notes that he “always tried to get a week or two weeks of rehearsal period” to work with actors; but you’re “not reading the script or, like, rehearsing the lines. [You] read it once on the first day. Maybe you read the script twice, once straight through and then once in the afternoon [so] people can bring up their objections or their ideas.” He explains, “I always worked with the actors based on improvisations or theater games, sometimes very elaborate improvisations that had a central component . . . where they would eat food together, or they would prepare lunch.”43 This model has led Sofia Coppola to place great value in rehearsal that involves improvisation; as she points out, “I get ideas for the dialogue and the actors form relationships so they’re comfortable together. By the time we’re shooting you might believe they’re people who really know each other.”44 Sofia Coppola’s approach to working with actors on set is also grounded in actorcentered strategies, even though her preproduction work involves establishing certain cinematic or image-centered components. She “compiles a ‘lookbook,’ an album of found images that establishes the film’s texture and tone, and shares it with her cinematography, art and costume departments.” Similarly, she plans some aspects of framing in advance; for The Bling Ring she determined that the story’s first and second acts should be “in wide shots and gradually proceed to tighter shots.” Yet for Coppola, “the film’s pace is almost always guided by the movement [of the actors] in the frame” and the soundtrack.45 Coppola’s actor-centered on-set approach reflects practices her father has used. As he notes, “A screenplay has to be like a haiku . . . very concise and very clear, minimal. [Then, when] you go to make it as a film, you have the suggestions of the actors [and you’re] going to listen to the actors because they have great ideas.”46 Similarly, Sofia

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Coppola explains, “I don’t make a shot list. There’s no sense in that until you see the actors rehearse the scene.”47 Her decision to develop framing, editing, and pacing decisions based on actors’ choices as their characters echoes the approach her father came to use after years of experience. Using the metaphor of baking a cake to describe the process of letting dialogue and filmic choices emerge organically from actors’ embodiment of their characters, Francis Coppola observes, “The scene doesn’t work immediately, you have to bake it a little bit. [It] needs a little bit of time to mature. [Using plans made in isolation is] like taking the cake out without letting it be in the oven for more than a minute. [You must] be patient, and then slowly everyone starts to see that the ideas are right, or [you] make the corrections.”48 Thus, for both directors, actors’ movements, gestures, and facial and vocal expression shape their filmic choices and decisions about pacing in a scene and throughout a film. Connections between ways the two directors rehearse with actors and develop plans for shooting a scene do not indicate that Sofia Coppola’s work is somehow derivative. Instead, their shared approach reveals their participation in an important line of stage-screen practice grounded in what scholars and practitioners now recognize as “Stanislavsky’s last rehearsal technique, Active Analysis, through which actors embody a play by exploring its conflicting vectors of actions and counteraction in improvisations.” Using this approach, “actors discover the need for the dramatists’ words [by] improvising the dynamic structures of actions and counteractions that undergird dramatic scenes.” Describing the process of using Active Analysis to rehearse and develop scenes, Sharon Carnicke explains, “As actors move from reading to improvising, and from improvising back to reading, they use their minds and bodies, emotions and spirits. Only when they understand the dynamics of a scene intellectually, physically, and emotionally do they memorise the text.”49 Coppola’s use of this holistic, embodied nature to characterization makes actors’ vocal and physical expression on the “surface” of her films intensely meaningful.

Acting and Aesthetic Traditions in Coppola’s Indiewood Films Because Coppola’s films are “notoriously short on dialogue, conveying information and emotion more through images than words,” audiences must “gauge information about the characters’ interior changes [through] visual clues, from facial expressions to gesture and clothing.” In Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring especially, Coppola shows how “fashion mediates between the body and the world, between crafted, public self-presentation and intimate, personal identity.”50 Both films also illustrate the degree to which minute naturalistic details of performance engage audiences, creating a counterpoint to the emotional detachment generated by the preponderance of static shots and tampeddown performances. Coppola’s neo-modernist aesthetic becomes especially visible when one compares Kirsten Dunst’s multiregister characterization of Marie Antoinette to Norma Shearer’s coherently “realistic” portrayal in W. S. van Dyke’s 1938 version of Marie Antoinette. In

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contrast to a seamless Hollywood “realism” built on conventions borrowed from Broadway, Dunst’s portrayal is punctuated with naturalistic moments that persuasively depict the character as she evolves from a fourteen-year-old girl to a woman in her thirties. Changes in costume, hair, and makeup facilitate illustration of the character’s aging and maturation process, but Dunst deftly embodies the character’s transition from youthful innocence to middle-age acceptance. Early in the film, Dunst breaks into a boxy, straight-legged, toddler-like trot moments before reaching the room in the Vienna palace where she will receive the news of her betrothal. Once Marie Antoinette joins her mother, Empress Maria Theresa (Marianne Faithfull), and Ambassador Mercy (Steve Coogan), Dunst appears childlike, tucking in her chin so that she looks up at the other players with wide-open eyes; her breaths are shallow, and she speaks softly, using a breathy, high-pitched voice. The extended opening sequences explore Dunst’s evolving expressions, gestures, and postures; occasional smiles and dimples in her cheeks mix with moments when she avoids eye contact and presses her arms to her sides (as if to make herself smaller). However, Dunst retires this expressive repertoire of physical and vocal choices when she arrives at Versailles, and while her melodic line deliveries and fluid movements convey the character’s adept navigation of court protocols, throughout the scenes at Versailles, audiences do not have the same degree of access to the character’s inner life. Late in the film, Dunst’s body and voice do suggest the queen’s experiences of freedom and imprisonment, with her physical and vocal expressions colored by soft, light, buoyant qualities in the scenes at the queen’s retreat whereas they are marked by bound, weighted qualities especially after the queen returns to Versailles and is later taken into custody. Yet one must watch closely to appreciate the evocative details in Dunst’s portrayal of the queen at court because Coppola’s orchestration of mise-en-scène elements creates an emotional (modernist) distance between the character and the audience, which is breached in selected moments to create emotional engagement. The scene in which Dunst cries and drops to the closet floor is one; her contemplative expression when she looks out the window of the coach as it leaves the palace grounds is another. With audiences well acquainted with Dunst’s unguarded expression (eyes wide, chin up) in the opening sequence, little more than the slight lowering of Dunst’s eyelids suggests the queen’s resignation to the new set of external forces that will complete the job of extinguishing her life. The Bling Ring also depends on cool, laconic performances that create fleeting moments of emotional engagement. However, this film also mixes naturalistic and explicitly artificial performance styles, creating a more dynamic tension between emotional engagement and distance. The film, which opens with surveillance footage of the teenagers arriving at a house they will rob, starts by objectifying and presenting the characters through the lens of dominant society. The bustle of many ensuing scenes—often filled with quickly edited images of Katie Chang (as Rebecca) and the other teens rifling through jewelry, handbags, clothing, and drugs at celebrities’ homes—sustains the emotional distance established by the film’s opening shot. Portraying Nicki, one of Rebecca’s co-conspirators, Emma Watson hardens the emotional distance between audiences and the teens. In scenes at the film’s opening and closing and in ones interspersed with the teens’ arrests and court hearing, Watson’s

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absurd “performances” during press interviews foster the film’s critique of privilege in affluent society. In counterpoint, Israel Broussard’s diffident depiction of Marc engages audience empathy. Starting with his frustrated sigh and chagrined grimace in response to seeing his uncool appearance in his bedroom mirror, Broussard’s understated performance makes audiences feel for Marc. Embodying the new kid from Agoura Hills, an historically segregated, upper-class residential enclave in Los Angeles, but one with lower median incomes and average home prices than neighboring Calabasas where the Bling-Ring girls live, Broussard leads audiences to understand Marc’s profound gratitude that self-possessed Rebecca befriends him. Contrasting with Watson’s pretentious mannerisms in Nicki’s opening press interview, Broussard’s open facial expression and quiet, unadorned vocal delivery during the first excerpt of the relaxed private conversation between Marc and his lawyer, together with his brief but engaging voiceover segments, secure his role as viewers’ point of identification. In the film’s closing moments, as a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s bus transports Marc and other prisoners, Broussard’s slightly downturned mouth and downcast, unfocused, slightly tear-filled eyes convey Marc’s remorse and acceptance of his fate. His reflective demeanor soon garners additional authenticity when followed by the final scene with Watson’s animated depiction of Nicki “performing” earnestness in an entertainment news interview. The fleeting moment on the bus also connects to earlier glimpses of Marc’s unguarded feelings because despite the film’s unemotional account of the events, Broussard’s naturalistic expressions of concern during robbery scenes (pacing, glancing around, hands shoved deep in his pockets) and expressions of childlike joy during car rides and club scenes (discreet smiling, relaxed limbs, moments of bouncing up and down) have sustained audience sympathy. Coppola’s films also feature explicitly modernist modes of performance. For instance, anticipating The Bling Ring’s opening surveillance footage that shows how mainstream society will view the teens, the initial moments featuring Kirsten Dunst as Lux in The Virgin Suicides and as the title character in Marie Antoinette break the fourth wall and use a presentational performance style that captures the conventional, two-dimensional view of each character. Taking a different path that demonstrates the surprising evocative potential of modernist performance, in Somewhere Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning’s impassive portrayals have dramatic power because the actors’ sustained absence of visible emotion gives their slightest expression of thought or feeling a profound significance. Thus, the film’s connections with Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise are evident. Observations about the modernist performances in Robert Bresson’s work are also pertinent here. Explaining how the performers’ transitory flickers of emotion resonate largely, James Quandt writes, Bresson’s films are “a cinema of paradox, in which the denial of emotion creates emotionally overwhelming works, minimalism becomes plentitude.”51 Throughout most of Somewhere, Dorff and Fanning show few signs of emotion and rarely even look directly at one another; their first direct engagement occurs almost an hour into the film. The morning after Cleo has enjoyed some gelato-fueled father-daughter camaraderie, she finds that a female admirer has spent the night with her father. In a passing moment at the three’s awkward breakfast, Fanning glares at Dorff, her eyes wide and jaw set; Dorff responds with a pleading look: head tipped down, forehead wrinkled,

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eyebrows pulled up and together. Coming after multiple scenes with little action and sparse, inconsequential dialogue, this moment of private communication is striking. In the narrative, it marks a crack in the walls of isolation surrounding the characters, leading eventually to Fanning’s tears in the scene when Cleo finally reckons with her mom’s extended absence and to Dorff’s emotional late-night phone call when Johnny admits his emptiness and confesses, “I don’t know what to do.” These naturalistic moments of physical and vocal expression are the surface details that give audiences transitory access to the characters, generating fleeting emotional connection despite the distance that their otherwise minimalist portrayals create throughout the narrative. Like the work in other Coppola films, the minimalist portrayals by Dorff and Fanning contribute to the rich variety of indiewood performances.

Star Performances in Coppola’s Indiewood Films While Somewhere represents Coppola’s most experimental approach to depicting the emptiness of stardom, the isolation of celebrity is a theme underlying films as different as The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, and The Bling Ring. Coppola’s sensitivity to the ennui and alienation experienced by reflective individuals who are rich and famous has provided the opportunity for Hollywood stars to create memorable performances, exemplified most clearly by Bill Murray’s Lost in Translation portrayal. Significantly, Murray’s performance functions in such a way that his presence is not directly associated with the star persona that made him one of the biggest box-office draws in American cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, as Geoff King explains, Murray’s gentle portrayal in Lost in Translation is an important point in the actor’s transition from acting marked by “emphasis on the comic and/or performative/personification towards [another associated with] impersonation and greater narrative integration.” Notably, this transition in performance model dovetailed with “a general movement ‘up’ the cultural hierarchy, as underlined by the accompanying shift from mainstream/Hollywood to the more ‘select’ indie or Indiewood sectors.”52 For his work in Lost in Translation, Murray garnered wide critical acclaim, including a Golden Globe and BAFTA Award for Best Actor, an Oscar nomination, and an Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead. Murray’s transition to a new star image associated with legitimate performance had started earlier with his poker-faced portrayal of Herman Blume in Wes Anderson’s 1998 indiewood film Rushmore, for which he received the Independent Feature Spirit Award for Best Male Supporting Actor. Yet it was Lost in Translation that gave Murray the perfect vehicle to showcase the charm and cool elegance of his new public image. This was because critics and audiences saw the film’s sympathetic take on an aging star’s difficulty in dealing with the crass commercialism of advertising whisky in Japan as self-reflexively connecting with Murray’s aging and shifting celebrity position in American cinema. Indeed, his performance in Coppola’s film was so successful in creating a new star persona for Murray that since then, he is as well known for his droll dramatic roles in indiewood productions directed by Coppola, Jarmusch, and

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Figure 16.1  Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003.

Wes Anderson as he was for the broad comedy in his Hollywood films of the 1980s and early 1990s. Murray is one of many Hollywood stars motivated to participate in quality indiewood cinema. With studios focusing on franchise films and star-genre vehicles, there have been fewer opportunities for accomplished star actors to create performances that require them to apply their skills and extend their abilities to create striking, award-winning characterizations. Thus, a representative sampling of major stars choosing indiewood filmmaking includes Tom Cruise in Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999), Charlize Theron in Monster (Patty Jenkins, 2003), and Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyer’s Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013). Coppola’s films have consistently interested Hollywood stars, as illustrated most clearly by the star cameos in Somewhere, The Bling Ring, and A Very Murray Christmas. Contributions by major stars also distinguishes The Beguiled, which features Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, and Kirsten Dunst. Set in the “cloistered Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies, a Civil War community defined as rigidly in terms of social etiquette as Versailles,”53 the stars’ respective public images enhance audience impressions about their characters. For instance, as Suzanne Ferriss points out, “Nicole Kidman’s imperious posture and long legacy as an actress augment her status as the school’s headmistress [Martha Farnsworth], but her off-screen glamour enhances the seductive subtext in her scenes with Colonel [John] McBurney,” the injured Union soldier played by Colin Farrell.54 The Beguiled features Coppola’s “signature mix of intensity and detachment.”55 Establishing both emotional engagement and distance, the film allows for multiple readings and points of identification, with the actors’ portrayals creating multidimensional characters not easily pigeonholed into moral categories. Overall, the film is “lovingly crafted, impeccably curated, and brimming with nuanced performances.”56 Critics describe Farrell as a “gifted and fluid actor [who] is perfect for the role,” a performer

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able to move from “sly charm to emasculated anger with ease.”57 Writing about Dunst’s performance as Edwina, the teacher marooned at the seminary, critics highlight the character’s “ladylike delicacy” and Dunst’s ability to suggest “deep wells of melancholia stirred by wistful desire.”58 These impressions align with star images generated by the actors’ respective bodies of work, with Farrell’s charm demonstrated in films like In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008) and Miss Julie (Liv Ullmann, 2014) and Dunst’s ability to suggest vulnerability in films ranging from The Virgin Suicides to Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011). With Coppola using actors’ performances to establish framing, lighting, and editing choices, impressions about John and Edwina also depend on the details in the actors’ portrayals. The complex dynamic between the charismatic working-class con artist and the cloistered upper-crust dreamer becomes visible in the first conversation between John and Edwina. The four-minute scene (starting at about 27:00) takes place soon after the closing moments of John’s first encounter with Martha. Conveying John’s delight with the prospect of being cared for by a household of women, after Kidman exits the music room, Farrell lies back and emits a high-pitched giggle. Then, witnessing the hallway conversation between Edwina and Marie (Addison Riecke) that reveals his caretakers are all dressing up to impress him, John is emboldened to beguile Edwina, a decision marked by Farrell melodiously inviting Dunst into the music room. Through most of the scene, Dunst communicates Edwina’s efforts to reestablish her ladylike propriety, first turning her back on Farrell as she places the shaving items on the bedside table, then avoiding eye contact as she checks the bandages on his leg, and using a quiet, cordial, but flat, impersonal tone of voice. In counterpoint, Farrell lies

Figure 16.2  Kirsten Dunst in The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017.

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back in a relaxed fashion, looks directly at Dunst, and continually changes the pitch and rhythm in his expressive line readings. Notably, Farrell pauses artfully just before delivering the line in which John tells Edwina that desertion was smart because it allowed him to meet her. The fact that Edwina remains in the room after this declaration encourages John to step up his pursuit, which Farrell conveys by looking at Dunst more intently and infusing his voice with more intimate intonations, at one moment dropping his voice to a whisper, then sitting up and speaking quickly and passionately when he says, “So you do care what I think about you.” With Edwina still not offended and with footsteps in the hallway prompting an urgency for John to make his move soon, Farrell softens his eyes and voice, keeping Dunst engaged with one question after another. Then, easing off to genially suggest their characters are “both a little out of place” to set up John’s most direct flirtation, Farrell then casually notes, “of course, there’s your looks,” which leads to Dunst quietly choking the words out, “that doesn’t matter to me.” Embodying John’s increasingly fearless pursuit, with longing and knowing appreciation filling his voice, Farrell shares John’s perception of Edwina’s “delicate beauty”; to show the words’ effect on Edwina despite her discretion, Dunst’s chest rises and falls. Embodying John’s final, more intimate line of attack, Farrell leans forward, grasps Dunst’s hand, and lowers his voice to a whisper. Embodying Edwina’s desire to maintain decorum, Dunst leans away from Farrell; but she does not move and even adopts his whisper, her voice almost breaking, when Edwina the dreamer asks, “[if I could have] anything?” Once Edwina shares the secret that she wants to be taken far away, Dunst drops Farrell’s hand, rises, then adopts a polite but impersonal voice when she exits. Yet as the performances convey, there is now a connection between John and Edwina that will necessarily figure into upcoming events. The Beguiled also offers Kidman an opportunity to apply her craft as an actor. Critics have rightly described her characterization of Martha as “steely,” “haughty,” and filled with “steel-magnolia energy.”59 Kidman’s portrayal effectively conveys these impressions. In Martha’s first conversation with John, after he has regained consciousness, Kidman communicates Martha’s ability to retain control of the situation through her precise, clipped line delivery and controlled intonations. Later in the film, when Martha checks John’s wound and determines that he is “fit for battle,” Kidman again embodies Martha’s strategies for retaining control, speaking quickly and crisply. Yet Kidman’s performance illuminates Martha’s many other dimensions, and not simply Martha’s oft-noted desire for John. For instance, exhausted but flushed with excitement after brandishing her father’s pistol when two Confederate soldiers stop for food at the seminary, Martha invites John to join her for a brandy. During their conversation in the music room, John tries to ingratiate himself and secure Martha’s permission to stay. Responding to his flattery, Martha confides in him: to convey the unexpected relief her character feels, Kidman inhales deeply, drops into an intimate whisper to utter Martha’s confession that she gets tired, and then lets her breath out. Encouraged that Martha has dropped her reserve, John takes another step toward emotional intimacy, asking if she had someone before the war. Fleeting details in Kidman’s performance illuminate Martha’s complex response: Kidman’s eyes widen into a glare, suggesting the thought,

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Figure 16.3  Kirsten Dunst and Colin Farrell in The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017.

“how dare you ask”; then she casts her eyes down, sits back, and looks down to the side, showing that Martha has been prompted to remember her lover (who, as the novel indicates, is her brother); next she raises her head, awkwardly opens her mouth as if it is dry, and looks down to the side, conveying Martha’s remembered pain in learning he is dead; then she raises her chin and looks straight ahead to show Martha’s resolve to proudly say, “yes.” The passing moment is a turning point, reconnecting Martha to her Southern identity. Trying another tactic, John solicits Martha’s sympathy, admitting his cowardice and explaining he is a poor Irish immigrant who took another man’s spot in Union Army. Yet as Kidman’s clipped vocal expression conveys, Martha, who grew up with opulence and privilege, is not moved by the plight of the lower class. Conveying John’s realization that his charm is not working, Farrell lets out a huge breath of despair in response to the news John will be sent on his way, and he then hangs his head as Kidman stands and leaves the room. Later, details in Kidman’s and Farrell’s performances again illuminate their characters’ class-based battle of wills in the scene when Martha and John enjoy a glass of brandy as the seminary girls provide entertainment the evening of John’s send-off dinner. In this instance, slight changes in Kidman’s eyes, glance, and the way she holds her head show that Martha has grown impatient with John’s attempts to curry favor, just as the slightly louder and looser flow of Farrell’s line readings reveal that John is not only a bit drunk but also at wits’ end, having run out of viable strategies for saving his life. Here and throughout The Beguiled, Coppola’s deft collaboration with actors, enabled by her effective negotiation of contemporary industrial realities, leads to quintessential indiewood cinema.

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Conclusion The future of Coppola’s work and indiewood filmmaking as a whole is suggested by her increased association with companies that originate outside the film industry. Her 2015 collaboration with Netflix for A Very Murray Christmas and with Apple TV+ in 2020 for On the Rocks is indicative of the many independent filmmakers moving to streaming companies such as Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, and Apple TV+. This migration could increase if theatrical releases remain uncertain and as streaming companies acquire intellectual property to build their libraries and further compete with the Hollywood majors. Reflecting those trends, Coppola is doing an Apple TV+ limited series, for which she reportedly “garnered one of the most lucrative paydays of her career.”60 The quality series, an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel, The Custom of the Country, represents a “deepening”61 of Coppola’s relationship with Apple TV+ and A24 and perhaps of the relationship between independent cinema, streaming, and television more broadly. With other indiewood filmmakers involved in shows for streaming platforms (Jason Reitman and Hulu) or continually working across the two media (Steven Soderbergh), indiewood may become a streaming television category the same way “indie TV” has accrued credibility in the industry and academia. In whatever ways indiewood evolves industrially and aesthetically, Sofia Coppola will be an integral part. Her actor-centered collaborations with performers from newcomers to major stars will remain an essential component of marketable, quality indiewood filmmaking. Her varied use of naturalistic and modernist strategies will sustain the prestige and aesthetic richness of indiewood cinema. The glimpses of thought and feeling that her actors convey will remain a key point of emotional engagement in Coppola’s modernist experiments and genre explorations. Her orchestration of cinematic elements and actors’ contributions—facial expressions, gestures, postures, movements through space, vocal inflections, changes in pitch, volume, enunciation—will continue to create the emotional engagement and emotional distance that distinguishes her films and the work of many other indiewood filmmakers.

Notes 1 The term “indiewood” has been used in slightly different ways by scholars. For Geoff King, “Indiewood” (with a capital I) is an industrial/institutional phenomenon in the 1990s and 2000s that has produced a number of films with particular textual qualities that stem both from the mainstream and the independent sector; see Geoff King, Indiewood USA: Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 1–4. For Yannis Tzioumakis, “indiewood” (with lower case i) is a period in the history of contemporary American independent cinema that starts from the mid-/late 1990s in which the dominant expression of filmmaking is characterized by many of the elements identified by King; see Yannis Tzioumakis, Hollywood’s Indies: Classics Divisions, Specialty Labels and the American Film Market (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 10–12. For a more detailed discussion, see Yannis Tzioumakis, “Converging Indiewood: Spike Jonze, Propaganda Films

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and the Emergence of Specialty Film Giant USA Films,” in ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze, ed. Kim Wilkins and Wyatt Moss-Wellington (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 46–64. 2 Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 3. 3 Cynthia Baron and Yannis Tzioumakis, Acting Indie: Industry, Aesthetics, and Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 245. 4 Manohla Dargis, “‘On the Rocks’ Review: Daddy Dearest and His Late Bloomer,” New York Times, October 1, 2020, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2020​/10​/01​/movies​/on​-the​-rocks​-review​ .html. 5 Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 34. 6 Baron and Tzioumakis, Acting Indie, 281. 7 Baron and Tzioumakis, Acting Indie, 169. 8 Juan A. Suárez, Jim Jarmusch (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 32–3. 9 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 105. 10 Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 1. 11 Warren Buckland, “The Craft of Independent Filmmaking: Editing in John Sayles’ Return of the Secaucus Seven and Baby It’s You,” in A Companion to American Indie Film, ed. Geoff King (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), 408. 12 Thomas Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s: Notes on the Unmotivated Hero,” in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 292. 13 Michelle Devereaux, The Stillness of Solitude: Romanticism and Contemporary American Independent Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 20. 14 Unless stated otherwise, budget and box-office figures are from the relevant pages of Coppola’s films on the Internet Movie Database (www​.imdb​.com). 15 Keaton Bell, “Sofia Coppola on the 20th Anniversary of The Virgin Suicides: ‘It Means a Lot to Me That It Has a Life Now’,” Vogue, April 21, 2020, https://www​.vogue​.com​/article​/sofia​ -coppola​-interview​-the​-virgin​-suicides​-20th​-anniversary. 16 Justin Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides: Reverie, Sorrow & Young Love (New York: Routledge, 2019), 8. 17 Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides, 19. 18 Tzioumakis, Hollywood’s Indies, 157. 19 Chris Gennusa and Kirk Honeycutt, “October Films’ Bet on ‘Rosetta’ Pays off Early,” Hollywood Reporter, May 24, 1999, 52. 20 Baron and Tzioumakis, Acting Indie, 244. 21 King, Indiewood USA, 191. 22 Yannis Tzioumakis, “Between ‘Indiewood’ and ‘Nowherewood’: American Independent Cinema in the Twenty-First Century,” International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 10, no. 3 (September 2014): 295–6. 23 Thomas Schatz, “New Hollywood, New Millennium,” in Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies, ed. Warren Buckland (London: Routledge, 2009), 20. 24 Peter Travers, “Lost in Translation,” Rolling Stone, September 8, 2004.

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25 Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre (New York: Wallflower Press, 2007), 11–13. 26 Tzioumakis, Hollywood’s Indies, 179–83. 27 King, Indiewood USA, 234–77; Gary Needham, Brokeback Mountain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 10. 28 King, Indiewood USA, 192. 29 Dunst also starred in Sony’s 2007 Spider-Man film. The market share information is from The Numbers: https://www​.the​-numbers​.com​/market​/2004​/summary; https://www​.the​-numbers​ .com​/market​/2006​/summary. 30 MPAA, Entertainment Industry Market Statistics (Los Angeles: Motion Picture Association of America, 2007), https://wikileaks​.org​/sony​/docs​/03​_03​/Mktrsch​/Market​%20Research​/MPAA​ %20Reports​/2007​%20Market​%20Statistics​.pdf. 31 King Indiewood USA, 2. 32 Baron and Tzioumakis, Acting Indie, 7, 14. 33 Joe Otterson, “Sofia Coppola to Develop Edith Wharton’s ‘Custom of the Country’ as Apple Series,” Variety, May 12, 2020, https://variety​.com​/2020​/tv​/news​/sofia​-coppola​-edith​ -wharton​-custom​-of​-the​-country​-apple​-series​-1234604636/. 34 Cynthia Baron and Sharon Marie Carnicke, Reframing Screen Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 89–112. 35 Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 189–90. 36 Kendra Marston, Postfeminist Whiteness: Problematising Melancholic Burden in Contemporary Hollywood (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 183. 37 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 16. 38 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 13–14. 39 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 22. 40 Carrie Rickey, “Lost and Found,” DGA Quarterly Magazine, Spring 2013. 41 Sofia Coppola, quoted in Rickey, “Lost and Found.” 42 Michelle Kung, “Director Christopher Neil on his Indie Film, ‘Goats’,” The Wall Street Journal, January 19, 2012; Krista Smith, “David Duchovny and Christopher Neil on ‘Goats’: Sundance Film Festival, Episode 32,” Vanity Fair, 2012, https://www​.vanityfair​.com​/video​/watch​/david​ -duchovny--​-christopher​-neil​-on-​-goats-. 43 Francis Ford Coppola, quoted in Cameron Bailey, “Francis Ford Coppola Reflects on His Film Career,” WBUR, November 22, 2011, https://www​.wbur​.org​/npr​/140870590​/francis​-ford​ -coppola​-reflects​-on​-his​-film​-career. 44 Sofia Coppola, quoted in Rickey, “Lost and Found.” 45 Rickey, “Lost and Found.” 46 Francis Ford Coppola, quoted in Ariston Anderson, “Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration,” 99U, January 5, 2011. 47 Sofia Coppola, quoted in Rickey, “Lost and Found.” 48 Francis Ford Coppola, quoted in Anderson, “Francis Ford Coppola.” 49 Sharon Marie Carnicke, “The Knebel Technique: Active Analysis in Practice,” in Actor Training, second edition, ed. Alison Hodge (London: Routledge, 2010), 99, 106, 111. 50 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 10, 5.

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51 James Quandt, “Introduction,” in Robert Bresson, ed. James Quandt (Toronto: Toronto International Film Festival Group, 1998), 7. 52 Geoff King, Lost in Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 33. 53 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 29. 54 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 163. 55 A. O. Scott, “‘The Beguiled,’ Sofia Coppola’s Civil War Cocoon,” New York Times, June 22, 2017. 56 Angelica Jade Bastién, “How The Beguiled Subtly Tackles Race Even When You Don’t See It,” Vulture, July 10, 2017. 57 Shelia O’Malley, “The Beguiled,” Roger Ebert​.com​, June 23, 2017; Mark Kermode, “The Beguiled Review: Woozy Does It,” The Guardian, July 16, 2017. 58 O’Malley, “The Beguiled”; Kermode, “The Beguiled Review.” 59 Bastién, “How The Beguiled Subtly Tackles Race”; Kermode, “The Beguiled Review”; O’Malley, “The Beguiled.” 60 R. T. Watson, “Want to Be a Hollywood Player? Covid and Streaming Have Changed All the Rules,” The Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2021, https://www​.wsj​.com​/articles​/want​-to​-be​ -a​-hollywood​-player​-covid​-and​-streaming​-have​-changed​-all​-the​-rules​-11611247554. 61 Otterson, “Sofia Coppola to Develop.”

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PART IV

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17 AUTEURISM SOFIA COPPOLA: COMMODITY AUTEUR Pam Cook

Sofia Coppola is a high-profile figure in contemporary cinema—a celebrity auteur whose personal brand is a key marketing tool. Her director-star persona has emerged in the context of changes in the organization of global media industries over the last thirty years. Factors such as the realignment of the relationship between independent and mainstream production from the 1980s, the renewed commercial value of art cinema, and intensified emphasis on promotion and branding have created a culture in which directors are now more central to commodity production and, like stars, often perform a vital role in selling their films. In the 1960s and 1970s, auteurs were perceived as artists whose work transcended or defied the market-led priorities of the mainstream industry; work that challenges the mainstream is still produced, but the intervening years have seen the rise of the “commerce of auteurism,” as Timothy Corrigan calls it.1 Corrigan and others have dissected the formations and functions of cinematic authorship, opening up questions of intention, agency, and expressivity, but these accounts refer almost exclusively to male directors and by and large they retain the director as creative source in some form or other. The case of Sofia Coppola introduces gender into the equation, but it also extends discussion of cinematic authorship beyond the primacy of the film text and authorial intention toward branding and performance.2 In Brand Hollywood (2008), Paul Grainge outlines the changes in the functions of the studios away from production toward management of royalties and rights, and the increased importance of brand names in their bidding wars.3 Conglomeration, horizontal integration, and cross-media diversification have scattered promotional operations across a proliferating number of sites; in order to manage the fragmentation of consumer tastes, the drive to capture international mass markets is accompanied by niche marketing,

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which identifies and exploits local, specialized interests. In this volatile situation, brand identities must be flexible and mobile, capable of satisfying multiple consumer desires in different commercial interactions. Directors have always played their part in the process of commodity production, with their names used to manage audience expectations by providing coherence for a body of films. In the contemporary industry, that role has burgeoned, and the name of the director now holds together a number of conflicting elements that traverse local and global commercial enterprises. A new breed of commodity auteur, of which Sofia Coppola is a prime example, has emerged, characterized by high levels of transmedia public visibility similar to those experienced by stars.4 Coppola’s celebrity, which focuses on her private life as well as her work, extends across interrelated arenas from film, print media, fashion, and lifestyle magazines to television, live appearances, and the internet. At the time of writing this, she does not have an official website or active Facebook page, but she and her work are the subjects of numerous fan sites, Pinterest boards, Facebook pages, and Instagram feeds.5 Although coverage of her life in the tabloid press is restrained in comparison to that endured by many stars and celebrities, she has become a topic on online discussion boards, where debate can be heated, personal, and malicious.6 She works in several fields: as a film director, screenwriter, producer, costume and fashion designer, actress, model, photographer, and director of commercials for luxury brands such as Dior. She is no stranger to the business of commodity production; she has her own fashion line in Japan (MilkFed, directed predominantly at teenage girls)7 and has appeared in advertising campaigns and commercials for high-end labels Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs as well as for a range of wines named after her by her father Francis Ford Coppola, who owns a winery. As with the star persona, her biography plays a large part in her fame. Her relationship with her father, who acts as mentor, and as producer and executive producer through his independent company American Zoetrope, features strongly in the construction of her auteur identity and contributes to its generational address to younger consumers. Like her famous father, Sofia Coppola is an independent filmmaker. However, her position vis-à-vis the mainstream is not quite the same as his. Francis Ford Coppola is a monumental figure with a heroic reputation as one of the “movie brats” who transformed Hollywood in the 1970s and 1980s, and he features in most pantheons as a classic auteur and an exemplar of independent practice—even though the extent of New Hollywood’s independence from the mainstream is open to debate. By contrast, Sofia Coppola’s auteur persona is much more explicitly immersed in popular consumer culture and grounded in the structural changes that affected the industry from the 1990s. Alisa Perren has described how independent distribution companies such as Miramax successfully emulated major studio exploitation tactics to enable lower-budget art movies to perform well at the theatrical box office, resulting in the setting up by media conglomerates of specialty divisions and subsidiaries dedicated to niche art-house productions.8 These studio-based operations focused on smaller-scale quality pictures that redefined the identity of independent cinema and led to the proliferation of production set-ups that occupied the territory of “Indiewood,” located somewhere between mainstream and lowbudget production, depending on mixed funding arrangements and retaining varying degrees of creative autonomy.9 As a result, the commercial value of art cinema increased

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and art cinema became a brand. This shifting terrain provides the operating conditions for Sofia Coppola’s feature films: to date, with the exception of On the Rocks (2020), which was produced by independent entertainment company A24, all have been produced by American Zoetrope with the involvement of other independent outfits, specialty subsidiaries, and, since Lost in Translation (2003), Japanese production and distribution company Tohokushinsha. This includes Marie Antoinette (2006), even though it was produced in concert with Columbia Pictures and distributed by Sony Pictures. Indiewood has enabled Sofia Coppola to make highly personal movies distinguished by inventive style and subject matter. It has also brought her power and prestige in the industry: in 2004, following critical acclaim and a plethora of awards for Lost in Translation (2003), including the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, she made history by becoming the first American woman to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar.10 Her extraordinary achievement on the back of a relatively small-scale, offbeat art-house comedy indicates the impact that Indiewood production and distribution techniques have had on the mainstream.11 It also demonstrates her success in establishing a distinctive authorial identity after making just two feature films. Although this has been attributed to her privileged background as a member of the Coppola filmmaking dynasty, it has as much to do with her position in contemporary cinema, where “Hollywood” as a center has given way to a conglomerate culture comprising diverse interconnected operations that feed one another, enabling multiple commercial tie-ins. In this context, auteur discourse circulates across a wide range of media outlets as authorial brands interact with other marketing and cultural operations. As I have argued elsewhere, Sofia Coppola’s work and persona have emerged from this decentered context and can be seen to embody it.12 Coppola’s authorial brand is characterized by an emphasis on European art cinema as a source of inspiration. This in itself is not new: the impact of European art cinema on independent and mainstream Hollywood in the 1960s was instrumental in producing Anglo-American auteur theory and a generation of younger filmmakers who were identified as auteurs. What is different in Sofia Coppola’s case is the intersection of celebrity culture with her profile as an artist, with each dependent on the other. In the discourses that circulate her authorial brand, her personal links to Europe are marked via her ItalianAmerican family connections and her marriage to French rock musician Thomas Mars, while in interviews she highlights the influence of the Nouvelle Vague on her style.13 She is clearly aware of the significance in global media production of the European-style auteur in branding a filmmaker’s oeuvre as art, giving it a recognizable niche identity that can be used in promotion. Her insistence on creative autonomy and the personal nature of her films add to her auteur credentials, while her aesthetic, although it incorporates elements of classic cinema, draws heavily on art cinema tropes by foregrounding ambiguity, elliptical narration, and ambivalent characters and denying the viewer a secure position from which to understand the film.14 This dilatory mode is supported by Coppola’s life story, which portrays her as having drifted aimlessly before finding her creative direction, and by her laid-back directorial manner, which is perceived as low-key in comparison with that of her ebullient father.15 She encourages the idea that life events have an impact on her work, which is often interpreted as autobiographical. As an experienced actress,16 she is skilled in self-presentation and aware of its importance in creating her brand. Her persona

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combines the construction of herself as a character with the performance of identity: for example, the inconclusive, open-ended structure of her films is mirrored in her habit of leaving sentences unfinished in interviews, which has become a trademark.17 This persona is closely associated with the youthful female protagonists of her films, who find themselves at odds with the traditional social roles they are expected to occupy. It is configured as gendered and, crucially, generational. In light of her paternal lineage, it can be no accident that Sofia Coppola cites the influence of the Nouvelle Vague with its drive to break with the French cinéma de papa. She is not alone in this; she is identified with a creative elite of younger filmmakers whose work spans areas of popular culture such as fashion, music, art, and film and who, despite retaining links with old and new Hollywood, differentiate themselves from the past while nostalgically recycling it. This set has been characterized as a “play group” in ironic resonance with the movie brat generation to which Francis Ford Coppola belonged.18 It is defined by postmodern cool and the adoption of whimsical perspectives on dysfunctional characters and institutions. Jeffrey Sconce has labeled the new sensibility that emerged in North American cinema in the 1990s as “smart cinema,” describing its diverse manifestations in terms of irony, black humor, and fatalism. For Sconce, the ironic detachment characteristic of smart films is a strategic attempt to address niche audiences and demarcate the works from popular mainstream cinema. He connects the cinematic trend with the emergence of post-1960s Generation X youngsters in the United States, who mobilized irony and cynicism as a means of expressing their disaffection.19 Sofia Coppola does not appear in Sconce’s exclusively male pantheon of smart filmmakers, though many of her “play group” peers do. Nevertheless, her work shares the predilection for irony, dark undertones, preoccupation with surface style, engagement with consumer culture, and address to sophisticated audiences of the smart clique. Her films dramatize generational relationships and conflict and target affluent younger cinemagoers.20 They differ from smart films in projecting a “feminine” aesthetic that chimes with her own ultrafeminine sartorial style and identity, evident in the girlish look and persona she cultivates despite being in her early fifties and having two children. This hyperfemininity has been linked to postfeminism and to third-wave feminism’s celebration of youth, fashion, celebrity, and commodity culture—a further indication of the way Coppola projects an identity that distances itself from the past while not renouncing it.21 Others have positioned her work more in the tradition of second-wave feminism’s analytical response to consumerism and popular culture, and its critique of patriarchy.22 Coppola’s auteur persona spans a number of contradictions: the appeal to a hip younger generation is matched by nostalgia for the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut or indie classics such as her father’s Rumble Fish (1983), whose diffused cinematography she emulated for Somewhere (2010).23 Her feminine image encompasses conflicting tendencies: between passive and active; fragility and toughness; effortlessness and drive; and naturalness and artifice. Her filmmaking technique oscillates between the observational distance of cinéma vérité, the intimacy of home movies, and highly stylized collages of images and music. These tensions emanate from her position within Indiewood and her negotiation of the branding imperatives of global film culture; they traverse her work, inflecting her creative choices and execution of projects.

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Coppola’s authorial brand projects a Europeanized persona, work, and lifestyle that evoke familiar notions of cosmopolitanism and cultural sophistication. This conjures up old Europe rather than the multicultural communities of contemporary Europe. Indeed, there are similarities between the Coppola idea of Paris and that portrayed in Minnelli’s An American in Paris (1951), where the love story plays out against a quaint old-world setting in which wealthy North Americans represent a primary market for luxury goods. There is a transnational dimension to the brand’s evocation of cross-cultural exchange that complies with global marketing demands: Lost in Translation’s targeting of the Japanese, for example, or Marie Antoinette’s appeal to French and British audiences. The Europeanness of Coppola’s style is a mobile, hybrid construct that can be tailored to different contexts; nevertheless, from around 2006 when she and Thomas Mars purchased a home in Paris, Frenchness has been a privileged marker in her cosmopolitan identity. In interviews she refers to her family’s long-standing fascination with Paris, her teenage internship at Chanel, her love of high-end French fashion and lifestyle, and the influence of the Nouvelle Vague.24 Although the homages to the French were most visible around the time of Marie Antoinette, they are consistently present in Coppola’s 2008, 2011, and 2013 commercials for Miss Dior fragrances, which playfully recycle French popular culture, and in her sartorial style, often described as “effortless chic” (as we know, chic is far from effortless). In turn, her style has influenced French fashion. In 2009 she collaborated with Louis Vuitton on a range of signature handbags (see Figure 17.1), and, in 2011, on a resort collection that included dresses, pajama suits, bags, and cardigan sweaters.25 Julie de Libran, who worked at Louis Vuitton and Sonia Rykiel, designed two versions of a “Sofia” dress, inspired, she said, by the director’s “effortless chic.” Coppola returned to work with Chanel in 2019, directing a promotional film for the fashion house’s Mademoiselle Privé exhibition in Tokyo and recreating Coco Chanel’s 31 rue Cambon apartment as the stage for its “Métiers d’Art” show at the Grand Palais in Paris.26​ Sofia Coppola’s French connections are strategic factors in her performance of her authorial identity. They are intimately linked to public versions of her private life and history, which enables her to reinforce her projection of herself as a personal artist who is the sole creative source of her work. This traditional view of cinematic authorship is reiterated in production notes, media coverage, and other promotional discourses despite her collaboration with other distinguished artists and technicians. Whereas the Nouvelle Vague mobilized the politique des auteurs as part of their assault on mainstream French cinema, Coppola’s auteurism is embedded in the commercial operations of the industry; it enables her to acquire creative capital that she can use in negotiations around future projects.27 European style and aesthetics are commodities that can be used in global and niche marketing. However, commodities have cultural power and significance as well as commercial exchange value, and it is in this realization that Coppola’s resistant voice surfaces—although in the context of commodity auteurism, that too can be seen as strategic necessity. Her films question commodity fetishism while celebrating countercultural impulses in fashion. The exquisitely beautiful surfaces of their images mask dark, destructive social forces, exposing the limits of commodity and celebrity culture.28 Her projection of an ultrafeminine style and identity could be interpreted as a form of masquerade, a gender performance

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Figure 17.1  Sofia Coppola for Louis Vuitton.

that draws attention to femininity as a social construct along the lines argued by Judith Butler.29 Here, I’ve been concerned with the way Coppola’s gendered deployment of the commerce of auteurism breaks down traditional barriers between art and commerce, refusing to disguise cinema’s and the artist’s foundations in business. I suggest that this is a radical revision of traditional conceptions of cinematic authorship that position the (usually male) heroic auteur outside or in conflict with commodity production. The example of Sofia Coppola leads the way to an understanding of the auteur as gendered response to specific industrial and cultural conditions rather than as an idealized figure, enabling us to view it historically as emerging from dynamic interchange between industry and consumers.

Notes Portions of this chapter appeared previously in Pam Cook, “History in the Making: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and the New Auteurism,” in The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, ed. Tom Brown and Belen Vidal (London: Routledge, 2014), 212–26. 1 See Timothy Corrigan, “The Commerce of Auteurism: A Voice without Authority,” New German Critique 49 (Winter 1990): 43–57. 2 Catherine Grant, “www​.auteur​.com?,” Screen 41, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 101–8.

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3 Paul Grainge, Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 46. 4 I have elaborated on these transmedia strategies in the case of Nicole Kidman’s stardom. See Pam Cook, Nicole Kidman (London: BFI Publishing/Palgrave, 2012). 5 For example, see the livejournal community profile i_heart_sofia, http://i​-heart​-sofia​.livejournal​ .com​/profile; the Sofia Coppola site on Tumblr, https://sofiacoppola​.tumblr​.com​/archive; the Sofia Coppola Club on fanpop, https://www​.fanpop​.com​/clubs​/sofia​-coppola; and “I Want to be a Coppola,” http://www​.iwanttobeacoppola​.com. A Sofia Coppola search on Pinterest shows a selection of boards dedicated to her. On Instagram, pages include sofiacoppolafans, sofiaschoices, sofiacoppoladaily, sofiacoppolastyleicon, and sofiacoppolastyleroom. 6 See, for instance, David Hudson, “Venice 2010. Sofia Coppola’s ‘Somewhere’,” MUBI Notebook News, September 3, 2010, https://mubi​.com​/notebook​/posts​/venice​-2010​-sofia​ -coppolas​-somewhere. 7 MilkFed website: http://www​.milkfed​.jp/#​/index/. 8 See Alisa Perren, “Sex, Lies and Marketing: Miramax and the Development of the Quality Indie Blockbuster,” Film Quarterly 55, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 30–9. 9 Geoff King, Indiewood, USA: Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 1–46. 10 Pam Cook, “Sofia Coppola,” in Fifty Contemporary Film Directors, ed. Yvonne Tasker (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), 131. 11 Lost in Translation was made on an estimated budget of $4 million and has grossed almost thirty times that amount, as reported on Internet Movie Database, http://www​.imdb​.com​/title​/ tt0335266​/business. 12 Cook, “Sofia Coppola,” 130. 13 Sean O’Hagan, “Sofia Coppola,” Observer, October 8, 2006, http://www​.guardian​.co​.uk​/film​ /2006​/oct​/08​/features​.review1. 14 Cook, “Sofia Coppola,” 130. 15 Evgenia Peretz, “Something About Sofia,” Vanity Fair, September 2006, 237. 16 The Internet Movie Database lists 25 acting credits. See https://www​.imdb​.com​/name​/ nm0001068/. 17 Peretz refers to this mannerism in “Something About Sofia,” 184. 18 Peretz, “Something About Sofia,” 184. Coppola’s contemporaries Alexander Payne and Wes Anderson are part of this group. 19 Jeffrey Sconce, “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film’,” Screen 43, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 355–8. 20 See Cook, “History in the Making,” 222–4. 21 See Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, “Marie Antoinette: Fashion, Third-Wave Feminism, and Chick Culture,” Literature/Film Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2010): 96–118; Caitlin Yunuen Lewis, “Cool Postfeminism: The Stardom of Sofia Coppola,” in In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity, ed. Su Holmes and Diane Negra (New York and London: Continuum, 2011), 174–98; Samiha Matin, “Private Femininity, Public Femininity: Tactical Aesthetics in the Costume Film,” in Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas, ed. Christine Gledhill (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 96–110. 22 Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (Princeton: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 371, 376; Todd Kennedy, “Off With Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur,” Film Criticism 35, no. 1 (September 2010), 37–59.

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23 Isabel Stevens, “A Kind of Softer Feeling,” Sight and Sound 21, no. 1 (January 2011): 19. 24 Lynn Hirschberg, “Sofia Coppola’s Paris,” New York Times T Magazine, September 24, 2006, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2006​/09​/24​/travel​/tmagazine​/24coppola​.html. 25 Emily Holt, “Sofia’s Choice,” Vogue, November 2011, 165–6. 26 Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 168, 187. 27 For the concept of “creative capital,” see Pam Cook, Baz Luhrmann (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2010), 26. 28 For example, in Marie Antoinette the ornamental beauty of its mise-en-scène, while appearing to revel in luxury and excess, suggests that the decadence of Marie Antoinette’s self-indulgent lifestyle led straight to the scaffold. 29 For example, in Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).

18 CURATION SOFIA COPPOLA: THE AUTEUR AS CURATOR Lawrence Webb

When the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation invited Sofia Coppola to curate an exhibition for the Galerie Thaddeus Ropac in Paris, 2011, it was both the apotheosis of her longstanding interest in photography and the latest development of an eclectic international career that has spanned film, advertising, music, and fashion. In interviews, Coppola likes to discuss her affinity for the visual arts, especially photography, and she has often talked in detail about photographers who have influenced her filmmaking, from Bill Owens and William Eggleston to Helmut Newton and Tina Barney. Like her contemporaries Wes Anderson and Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola has pursued a portfolio career across different media forms and cultural sectors, and this excursion into the gallery world was in some ways business as usual for a director who has designed handbags for Marc Jacobs and edited a special issue of Vogue Paris. Yet there is something especially significant, even paradigmatic, in her curation of the Mapplethorpe exhibition, which offers a key to some of the industrial functions and cultural tensions that characterize her auteur brand. In this chapter, I extrapolate from this one literal instance of Coppola’s curatorship to propose that the idea of the “auteur as curator” has shaped engagement with her films and her public image. Whether we look at magazine profiles, promotional paratexts, or fan sites, media engagements with Coppola and her work use curation as an organizing discursive figure. From the subcultural cool of her compilation soundtracks to the deployment of fashion, props, artwork, and locations, her films are offered to the viewer as curated texts that can be disassembled into a series of intertextual references, stylistic choices, and commodity objects—a disaggregated list of images, artworks, songs, fashion choices, and consumer items that can be liked, shared, pinned, reassembled, and potentially purchased. In such materials, her work and life are habitually portrayed as a continuum

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in which the expression of style in her films maps onto her personal sensibility and the visible performance of an upscale lifestyle for public consumption. In short, her auteur brand can be understood as a self-curated text held together by one central idea: Sofia Coppola has taste.1 From an art-world perspective, Coppola’s Mapplethorpe show highlights a wider trend: the rise of the star or celebrity curator. In recent decades, new levels of visibility, prestige, and power have been assumed by curators, who are the key figures driving large-scale biennials and blockbuster exhibitions in global cities and whose brand identities have in some cases surpassed those of artists. Indeed, one effect of this “curatorial turn” has been to propel a series of highly paid, globally renowned figures into the limelight; Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Swiss artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London and author of several books on curating, is an emblematic example.2 In addition to such professional “superstars,” it has become relatively common for galleries and art museums to invite celebrity guest curators. Coppola is not the only indie director to try out the role. Wes Anderson, for example, curated an exhibition for Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum in collaboration with his wife, the writer and designer Juman Malouf, in 2018. For “Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and Other Treasures,” Anderson and Malouf selected and arranged 430 historical objects from the museum’s archives into immaculately staged rooms organized by color and material.3 Just as Coppola’s show refracted her signature themes through the selection of some of Mapplethorpe’s lesser-known photographs, so Anderson’s exhibition was understood to project the director’s distinctive cinematic formalism and quirky persona via carefully framed tableaux of offbeat curios. In each case, the director displayed one of the traditional hallmarks of the auteur, a personalized signature style, but expressed it by selecting and arranging artworks and objects beyond the film text. Institutionally, these forays into curating not only signal shifts in the culture and commerce of the art world but also is an ongoing process of convergence between cinema and the gallery.4 Yet to understand the flexibility of Coppola’s image as a curator, we need to consider a more capacious definition of the term. In the digital era, “curator” and “curation” have rapidly expanded beyond their conventional usage. In everyday speech, the meaning of the curator now extends beyond the institutional preserves of the museum and the gallery to encompass a wide array of cultural practices. Much to the dismay of art curators and museum professionals everywhere, “curation” is applied relatively indiscriminately in popular culture to acts of selecting and presenting any kind of “content,” from outfits to menus, Instagram feeds to Spotify playlists. This trend is the subject of David Balzer’s book, Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else, in which he notes that curation has come to mean “the act of selecting, organising and presenting items in the vein of an arbiter–editor,” especially as an “expression of taste, sensibility, and connoisseurship.” For Balzer, we’ve been living since around the mid-1990s in what he calls the “curationist moment,” in which “institutions and businesses rely on other, often variously credentialed experts, to cultivate and organize things in an expressioncum-assurance of value and an attempt to make affiliations with, and to court, various audiences and consumers.” As he suggests, citing Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the curator might consequently be seen as “the most emblematic worker of the cognitive

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age”—a worker whose importance rests on her ability to arrange and organize flows of content in ways that impart value.5 Thus, though a good deal of the original meaning of the term has been displaced, the expanded notion of curation usefully pinpoints how ideas of taste and connoisseurship have been remade in the digital economy. My reading of Sofia Coppola as an auteur-curator draws on both the high-culture meaning of the term and this broader application in popular culture. Coppola’s auteur persona holds two ideas in tension: on the one hand, the creative possibilities of curating as a creative process and mode of expression, and on the other, its immersion within a digital economy that promotes self-fashioning through online consumption. This bridge between apparently different (though inevitably intertwined) social and cultural worlds— the high culture of the gallery and the everyday online activity of viewers—makes curating a productive figure in the promotion and reception of Coppola and her work. Coppola’s reputation as a tastemaker is inseparable from her distinctive position simultaneously inside and outside the Hollywood mainstream. As a scion of the Coppola family, she’s a lifelong industry insider whose celebrity status has been burnished by her continuing engagement with the worlds of fashion and advertising and amplified by her photogenic presence in the media. Yet her movie projects are typically small in scale: with the exception of Marie Antoinette (2006), all her films have been produced for less than $10 million and Lost in Translation (2003) remains her only breakout hit. Perhaps no other director offers such a mismatch between box-office success and cultural influence; no comparable indie filmmaker is as comfortable appearing on the cover of Vogue as on the cover of Sight and Sound. Carefully crafted to please a niche audience of discerning consumers, her films have been dubbed “boutique cinema.”6 Her image as a curator is a product of this specific position. She has an almost unparalleled ability in the film world to reach across different cultural spheres, and her celebrity status provides her with a profile more like a film star than an indie director. Yet her indie status is highly significant, because one of the most immediate effects of her curatorial image is to produce cultural capital. The figure of the auteur-curator has various functions: it projects ideas about the distinctiveness of her creative process; it frames the marketing and reception of her work; it creates coherence across her feature films, commercials, and other artistic endeavors; and it bolsters a preexisting image as an arbiter of taste. Mediating hierarchies of cultural value, the presentation of her films and her public image as curated texts allows Coppola not only to “reconcile bohemian and bourgeois taste formations,” as Belinda Smaill puts it, but also to bridge the highbrow world of the gallery and popular online practices of curation and consumption.7

Curation and Authorship: The Commodity Auteur Despite the accolades she has received as a screenwriter, Coppola is not typically presented as a romantic artist-creator, nor as a classical artist working within the constraints of industry and genre. Unlike her father and his contemporaries George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, she is not viewed as a corporate entrepreneur or a brand engineer.8 The case

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has often been made for Sofia Coppola as an auteur in the traditional sense, given her recurring thematic preoccupations, such as femininity, adolescence, and celebrity, and her characteristic audiovisual sensibility.9 Yet in other ways her public image is consistent with industrial and technological change: she works in multiple media forms and is in many ways a director at home in the age of digital convergence and social media. As Jeff Smith puts it, she is a “transmedia stylist” whose aesthetic signature is visible across film, television, music videos, and advertising.10 Whereas Smith focuses on textual expressions of style, Pam Cook has examined Coppola’s celebrity status and dissected her complex star persona. For Cook, Coppola is “a prime example of the contemporary commodity auteur.”11 Drawing on the work of Timothy Corrigan, Cook argues that Coppola’s authorial brand exemplifies the decentered, horizontal structures of conglomerate Hollywood. As Corrigan and others have established, auteurism took on a new commercial significance after the end of the studio system, especially as a means to brand and market films. In this changed industrial environment, promoting films as the products of star auteurs has assumed a number of commercial and cultural functions: addressing a “pre-sold” audience and enabling niche marketing, shaping viewing strategies and creating textual coherence, producing ideas of cultural prestige and quality, and generating new models of commercial exploitation such as director’s cuts and special edition DVDs.12 Whereas Corrigan saw an especially resonant example of the postclassical auteur in Francis Ford Coppola, it is his daughter Sofia who best embodies the contradictions of the commodity auteur for Cook and others. And if Coppola Sr. used the performance space of the interview as a “semi-textual strategy” to navigate “the commercial dramatization of self as the motivating agent of textuality,” as Corrigan suggests, his daughter has equally deployed a series of extratextual sites to fashion her public self.13 In an effort to update auteurism for the digital era, Thomas Elsaesser has argued that contemporary directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and James Cameron are best understood as “concept authors” whose auteur image helps to organize the horizontal expansion of the franchise movie across multiple media platforms.14 But such an image maps uneasily onto the indie film world and the boutique cinema of Sofia Coppola. The auteur-curator provides an alternative model of authorship that is equally open, flexible, and technologically determined, but one that is shaped by different kinds of cultural and industrial forces than the franchise blockbuster.15 But whereas the blockbuster transforms various elements of intellectual property into spin-offs across different media platforms, the dispersible nature of the indie text is tailored to establish a cultural footprint and to extend the audience’s engagement over time. The auteur-curator plays a central role in drawing the dispersible components together: the audience’s shared understanding of Sofia Coppola’s brand and sensibility organizes the multiple access points of the text and establishes stylistic coherence. At the same time, the preexisting reputation of Coppola as an arbiter of taste provides a way to break up those component parts into a process of curated consumption. As author functions have changed over time, so have the metaphors used to understand and represent them. Shifting modes of production have generated different kinds of imagery. Working within the industrial machine of the studio system, John Ford liked to describe himself as a general commanding an army; in the literary milieu

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of postwar Paris the director became a writer with a camera-stylo. For his part, Francis Ford Coppola has sometimes likened himself to the conductor of an orchestra, an appropriately grandiose and self-mythologizing image which is in turn biographical (his father, Carmine Coppola, was a composer), stylistic (it highlights the oft-mentioned operatic qualities of his films), and culturally legitimizing. Each of these metaphors tells us something about shifting perceptions of agency, collaboration, and control in the making of a film. More recently, Donna Kornhaber has made a convincing case for Wes Anderson as a cinematic collector. As she puts it, the image of the collector offers “a powerful axis of interpretation” that reframes Anderson’s cinema as “a body of films quite literally about the psycho-emotional dynamics of collecting.”16 Although collecting and curating are related—both can involve selection and arrangement—curating in its popular definition embodies significant elements that are not invoked by the image of the collector, especially the expression of taste in selecting materials for public display. And whereas Kornhaber’s analysis is largely textual in its dual focus on Anderson’s collector characters and his cinephilic “collection” of cinematic techniques, my approach here is primarily extratextual. Curating does not provide a key to the narrative world of Sofia Coppola’s films, but it does help us to make sense of how those films circulate in popular culture and the role of the authorial persona in framing patterns of promotion and reception. Accordingly, my primary materials in this chapter are not Coppola’s feature films but rather extra-cinematic sources such as press releases, magazines, and websites. To trace Coppola’s varied curatorial activities, I will first revisit the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition at the Galerie Thaddeus Ropac in Paris, 2011. I will then move to consider the significance of the “mood board” in her production process, her guest editorship of fashion and lifestyle magazines, and her representation on fan sites. Finally, I will return to the art world and discuss how websites such as Artspace blur the lines between online publishing, digital commerce, and the gallery.

The Mapplethorpe Exhibition What is immediately striking about discourse surrounding Coppola’s Mapplethorpe exhibition is the extent to which the curator eclipses the artist. Across promotional videos, interviews, and the official press release, representatives of the gallery and the Mapplethorpe Foundation repeatedly frame Coppola’s new angle on the photographer’s work as an expression of a uniquely personal sense of style. The gallerist Thaddeus Ropac observes that Coppola’s off-center choices reframe Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre in accordance with the director’s thematic preoccupations and stylistic signatures, noting that “she will include many of [Mapplethorpe’s] still-life flower photographs, but has also selected some lesser-known portraits of children and animals.” “The selection is very personal,” he adds, “and will reveal Sofia’s personality through her aesthetic choices.” Emphasizing the “personal” qualities of the selection—which is seen as “intuitive,” “more contemplative and not so straight on,” and “less academic”—Ropac notes that the celebrity curator finds a “totally different perspective” on a well-known body of work.17 The press release

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echoes these sentiments, stating that “Coppola has created an installation very much in step with her world.”18 That “world” is presented as being at once intrinsically cinematic and distinctively feminine. Both Ropac’s interview and the press release draw numerous connections between the exhibition and Coppola’s cinema. Ropac observes, for example, that the landscape photographs selected alongside the portraits “recall scenes from a film,” adding that visitors to the gallery may see “a sort of story board develop before them” and discern a “narrative quality” to the show.19 Similarly, the press release draws comparisons with the visual style of Coppola’s films and notes that “the viewer could easily imagine the photos to be a mood board for a future film,” knowingly invoking a key element of Coppola’s creative process (which I will discuss further below).20 Through her cinematic sensibility, they suggest, Coppola has been able to re-author Mapplethorpe’s work and find previously unappreciated strands in it. Significantly, this view is specifically gendered: the photographs are presented “through the gaze of a creative woman,” and the selection of ostensibly feminine subjects—flowers, children, and animals—implicitly works against the grain of the more conventional masculinist reputation of Mapplethorpe. Selecting “gentle” and “delicate” portraits of children (Honey [1976], Andes [1979]), animals (Muffin [1981], Kitten [1983]) and what the press release calls “charismatic women” (Annabelle’s Mother [1978], Paloma Picasso [1980]), Coppola is seen to draw out qualities of “tenderness” and “emotion” in the male photographer’s work. However, the apparent femininity of the selection was also a source of anxiety for Coppola. Mapplethorpe Foundation director Dimitri Levas recalls, “It was very interesting for me to see how she interpreted Mapplethorpe and she started right away choosing things that she liked. She had made a pile of pictures and I thought that they were strong and interesting. She immediately said, ‘Is it looking too girly?’, and I said, ‘Well, it’s interesting—there’s no male nudes or anything.’”21 Underlying her apparently throwaway comment—“is it looking too girly?”—is a perceived fault line between the serious, “masculine” world of the gallery and Coppola’s “girly” sensibilities, which have sometimes been denigrated by male film critics.22 Perhaps she was also concerned that her unconventionally feminine choices pushed aside the photographer’s famous yet controversial images of young Black men. Curating is the expression of personal taste through selection, then, but also a process of inclusion and exclusion.23 As I’ll show in the remainder of this chapter, the Mapplethorpe exhibition highlights some key trends in the construction of Coppola’s auteur persona: it illustrates a persistent representation of Coppola as the holder of good taste, encouraging the idea that her cinematic style and personal style are inseparable; it promotes a model of authorship as expressed through the selection and arrangement of cultural objects; it shows the ease with which she navigates spaces of wealth and privilege, especially the high-culture sphere of the European art gallery; but it also points up gendered tensions as they relate to hierarchies of taste and class. From one perspective, Coppola’s curatorship functions to shore up the high culture side of her public image—especially her connections to fine art, photography, European modernist art cinema, and the critically acclaimed New Hollywood cinema of her father’s generation—against critiques that her work is superficial and “girly.” But taken as a broader phenomenon, Coppola’s curatorial activities and her

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persistent presentation as a tastemaker span across different cultural milieux and taste formations. As I’ll show, Coppola’s curatorial persona is a product of her unique social and industrial position, but it nevertheless provides a useful case study of the “commerce of auteurism” in the era of digital convergence and social media.

Mood Boards: Curating, Collaboration, and Creative Control The passing reference to a “mood board” in the exhibition press release is not accidental. It is notable how often Coppola presents her creative process as a kind of curatorial activity. In particular, she has discussed look books and mood boards—techniques more commonly used in fashion, graphic design, and interior design than in filmmaking—as methods for capturing her visual approach for a project and communicating it to key collaborators. In a lengthy interview for the photography magazine Aperture, Coppola reveals how her filmmaking process typically begins with a selection of photographs. Coppola explains, for example, that the character of Johnny Marco in Somewhere (2010) was inspired by two thematically related images, “a Bruce Weber photograph of Matt Dillon in bed, and also a 1958 picture by John R. Hamilton of Clint Eastwood in bed having room service in a hotel room.”24 As she suggests, the mood board functions in the first instance as a means of organizing visual references into an entry point for the filmmaking process that often precedes the script. As she underlines, the collage aesthetic of the mood board is central to her creative endeavors because of its ability to connect images and feelings. “That’s what a movie is,” she emphasizes, “grouping together these images and having an overall feeling . . . getting a feeling from the totality of all the images.”25 But her descriptions show that mood boards and look books can also operate as tools for managing collaboration and creating a coherent sense of visual style for a project. For The Virgin Suicides (1999), she photocopied a book of photographic references to go alongside the script. As she recalls, her “color-xerox books” contained influential works by Bill Owens and William Eggleston alongside cuttings from vintage Playboy magazines, which provided what she describes as “the nature girl, soft style” she envisioned for the film.26 These visual style guides provided a working model for the cinematographer and art director. “I worked with Ed Lachman, the cinematographer, showing him photographs of what I wanted the film to feel like,” recalls Coppola. “That’s how I start every movie, sitting with the cinematographer and the art department, looking at photographs, and saying, ‘This is the look or feeling,’ so everyone is informed by it. It’s always the starting point for me, the images.”27 For Coppola, this visual approach informs the entire production process; as she explains, “I tape photographs right into the script, so when we’re shooting I have direct visual references.”28 On The Beguiled (2017), Coppola worked closely with the production designer, Anne Ross, to create mood boards for different sections of the film (the first part, she notes, is “dreamy and soft and very feminine”; the second half of the film is “more Gothic and dark and the angles are more extreme”).29 As these examples suggest, visual style guides afford both personal expression and strategic collaboration.

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But behind-the-scenes information is rarely neutral, and it’s worth considering what kind of work the Aperture interview might be doing to position Coppola and her films in the cultural landscape. There are at least three effects generated by this magazine profile and its reproduction of the mood boards for The Beguiled over a glossy doublepage spread. In the first instance, the Aperture piece operates as a fairly explicit strategy of cultural legitimation. The juxtaposition in the magazine layout of film stills from The Virgin Suicides, Somewhere, and Lost in Translation with images by William Eggleston, Bill Owens, and Larry Sultan makes direct connections between Coppola’s oeuvre and a pantheon of critically esteemed visual artists—links that are only amplified when the interviewer, Phillip Gefter, observes that works by Tina Barney, Lee Friedlander, and Andy Warhol can be found hanging on the walls of her Lower Manhattan home. “These pictures,” Gefter notes, “provide clues not only about Coppola’s knowledge of photography, but also about the subtlety of her sensibility,” which he associates above all with “visual calm and compositional clarity.”30 As I’ll explore further below, such a conflation between Coppola’s cinematic style, personal taste, and domestic lifestyle is a recurring feature of her public image. Secondly, the open display of Coppola’s mood boards invites the reader to view the film as a curated text—a metatextual collection of images and influences to be investigated and discussed. The boards for The Beguiled, for example, offer a kind of cinephile’s puzzle in their unannotated reproduction of photographs and film stills (which range in familiarity from Hitchcock’s Rear Window [1954] to much more obscure references). Thus, the mood board is part of the creative process, but its curatorial collage aesthetics also inform the promotion and reception of the films. Third, the profile works along the grain of traditional modernist ideas of auteurism in its emphasis on visual style as the basis of the authorial signature, but it also complicates such narratives by presenting the mood board as a specifically collaborative technique. As is often the case, Coppola is shown as both in control (in line with the typical masculinist image of the auteur) and as especially open to collaboration, a quality that is often implicitly coded as feminine in paratextual materials. In this respect, it is worth noting the connotative flexibility of the mood board, which is associated with creative professionals but equally linked in popular culture to stereotypically feminine pursuits such as planning weddings and interior design.

Magazines and Fan Sites: Curating Consumption As the The Beguiled mood boards show, Coppola’s curatorial aesthetic is well suited to magazine publishing. Breaking films apart into influences and references is attractive to editors as a means to generate visual content, but it also slots neatly into one of the most pervasive publishing formats of the twenty-first century: the list. In this respect, Coppola’s image as a curator is at least in part an effect of her representation in the press. Perhaps the purest expression of Coppola’s public persona via a curated list can be found in her cover feature for the women’s monthly W Magazine in 2017.31 Presented as a numbered sequence, the article asks Coppola to “deconstruct some of her latest projects,” which include The Beguiled and commercials for Cartier and Calvin Klein.32

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The eclectic list brings together behind-the-scenes photographs from the set of The Beguiled with portraits of the director modeling clothes, art works by Jo Ann Callis and Sara Cwynar, and vintage film stills. We are, therefore, encouraged to view the feature film and commercials as part of the same aesthetic world; both types of creative endeavor are legitimated by references to contemporary art, photography, European cinema (Luchino Visconti), and New Hollywood classics (Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo).33 Rather than adopting explicitly auteurist discourse, the magazine instead leans on vague labels such as “feminine mystique” to create a sense of stylistic continuity between her artistic influences and her work, and there’s a blurred line between Coppola as celebrity (she is sometimes in the photos) and Coppola as artist (she sometimes takes the photos). Following a particular strand of contemporary online journalism, which is primarily designed to harvest clicks, the article is organized as a numerical list without a strong sense of continuity or development. The roots of this mode of presentation can be traced further back, however, to at least the mid-2000s, when Coppola actively participated in the figuration of her curatorial brand via the guest editorship of two print magazines: Vogue Paris (2004) and Dazed & Confused (2006). Published as part of the promotional apparatus for Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, respectively, these high-profile special issues helped to cement her image as a tastemaker in the mid-2000s.34 By moving beyond the traditional limits of film culture into fashion and lifestyle magazines, Coppola extended her public persona into new territories. Though there is no doubt some overlap, each magazine addresses a slightly different audience demographic and taste culture. While Vogue Paris specializes in aspirational images of elite fashion for the European bourgeoisie, the London-based publication Dazed & Confused bills itself as “an alternative lifestyle and culture magazine” and is targeted at a younger, hipper readership.35 In its visual presentation, Coppola’s curated section of Dazed & Confused conflates the personal world of the director, the storyworld of her films, and her selection of cultural references.36 The opening double-page spread offers a portrait of Coppola reclined on a hotel bed. Grainy and mildly blurry, the image displays some of the qualities of intimacy and self-consciousness that we would now associate with the selfie. The graphic design intentionally references the visual world of her films: the headline text is formatted in white and magenta block capitals, styled in the same italicized font as the titles and posters for Marie Antoinette, while the white hotel room pillows evoke the mise-en-scène of both Marie Antoinette and Lost in Translation. Positioned around the image of the director we find the names of artists she has invited to contribute—a varied list that spans film (Roman Coppola and Francis Ford Coppola), graphic design (Mike Mills), music (Brian Reitzell, Phoenix, Siouxsie Sioux), literature (A. M. Homes), and the visual arts (Richard Prince). These eclectic but scrupulously tasteful choices—no guilty pleasures here—position Coppola as the hipster tastemaker par excellence. Music is an especially significant component of Coppola’s appeal to the alternative taste culture that Dazed represents. If photography provides Coppola’s strongest link to the high-culture world of the gallery, it is music that connects her to what Belinda Smaill calls the “sub-cultural taste terrain” of Indiewood cinema.37 In this respect, compilation scores have been vital to the presentation of Coppola’s films as curated objects that

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create a cultural footprint beyond the boundaries of the text. We might think, for example, of the critically acclaimed soundtrack for Lost in Translation, which brought together reclusive My Bloody Valentine legend Kevin Shields with contemporary alternative and electronic artists such as Air, Squarepusher, Phoenix, and the Jesus and Mary Chain. Similarly, the expansive double CD for Marie Antoinette mixed up baroque (Vivaldi, Scarlatti), contemporary classical (Dustin O’Halloran), indie rock (The Strokes, The Radio Dept), and electronica (Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Air) with a selection of early 1980s New Wave and post-punk (New Order, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Gang of Four, Bow Wow Wow), then enjoying a critical renaissance. Though the soundtracks are typically programmed in collaboration with her music supervisor Brian Reitzell, in the popular imagination they are seen as further evidence of Coppola’s impeccable taste. The compilation soundtrack extends the aesthetic world of the film—and the imagined aesthetic world of its director—into a semi-autonomous curated playlist that can be consumed, shared, and discussed separately. In comparison to Dazed, the slightly earlier Vogue issue (2004) accommodates some of Coppola’s hipster appeal while addressing a more upscale readership.38 As in Dazed, Coppola models as well as edits, appearing on the cover with the headline: “Mise en scène: Sofia Coppola,” and she once again offers a list of some favorite visual artists, including Helmut Newton and Elizabeth Peyton. But as one would expect from Vogue, the section also contains more direct consideration of fashion. In “Les choix de Sofia,” a list of fashion choices for spring 2005, Coppola selects an Yves Saint Laurent caftan, a satin Prada handbag, a Harry Winston diamond heart pendant, and a selection of Marc Jacobs shoes. Here, Coppola’s object-world appears as a list of high-end commodities and consumer choices. Yet the graphic design does not follow the usual patterns of Vogue. Whether she is presenting film stills, photographs, or designer accessories, Coppola’s choices are displayed as a collage of overlapping Polaroid-style photos with handwritten annotations from the director herself. Arranged on the page in a thrown-together, scrapbook style, the images and text are designed to evoke a sense of homemade intimacy. At the same time, the collage aesthetic invokes the mood board and the curatorial creative process. To get a sense of how such activities might be interpreted and used by viewers, it is useful to consult the fan site, “I Want to Be a Coppola,” which later published an in-depth commentary on the Vogue issue. Dara Block’s breezy and positive review praises the section for its “quirky and girlie” qualities and notes connections to Marie Antoinette (a film which would have been underway, but not yet released, in December 2004/January 2005): “Perhaps it has something to do with the way she styles and photographs the shoes, diamonds, and macarons; Marie Antoinette features so many moments similar to this.”39 For Block, the special issue sums up something specific about the director’s ability to express her style across film, fashion, and music. “I love that her issue feels almost as personal as one of her films,” Block notes, adding that “there is something very in-depth and intimate about the way Sofia shares her interests. . . . It almost feels like I am having a personal discussion with her about all the things that have inspired her. I think this issue shows that she is not just a style icon but a tastemaker as well.” As the review suggests, it is precisely this image of Coppola as style icon and tastemaker, rather than narrowly as a filmmaker, that inspires an especially visible strand of her fandom. Following the example

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established by Vogue Paris and Dazed & Confused, fan sites have typically engaged with Coppola’s films as part of a wider network of intertexts and commodity items. In its content and structure, “I Want to Be a Coppola” shows how the image of the auteur-curator neatly maps on to modes of online engagement and consumption. Edited by Kellina de Boer alongside a “style editor” (Dara Block) and three “contributing editors,” the now-dormant but still accessible fan site consisted of a main blog, which offers text and images about all things Coppola-related, and two subsections: “Galerie de Coppola,” a collection of photos sorted by film, as well as by general topics such as “Apartment” and “Childhood,” and “Coups de Coeur de Coppola,” a rolling list of Coppola’s “favorites,” which span from her usual cultural reference points to fashion accessories, perfume, beauty products, and even household items such as toothpaste. Down the right-hand side of the page, links appear not only for each film but also for branded website merchandise and selected recommendations for Coppola-approved cultural objects (mostly photography books). Similarly, another relatively high-profile site that was active in the early to mid2010s, “fuck yeah Sofia Coppola!”, used the Tumblr microblogging platform to organize Coppola-related images of every kind, from film stills and behind-the-scenes publicity shots to personal photographs. Rather than encouraging audience engagement with the stories or characters of her films or with the filmmaking process, both of these fan sites blurred boundaries between the diegesis and the lifeworld of the director, offering a series of images and links that relate primarily to aspirational ideas about Coppola’s taste and lifestyle. Though these sites have since been displaced by social media, their mode of engagement with the director persists on platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest.

Curationism, Neoliberalism, and Digital Commerce As such fan activities suggest, much of the new curationist culture that David Balzer identifies takes place online, where users are encouraged to curate the digital self via social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, on social curation platforms such as Pinterest, and through digital streaming apps like Spotify (where “You Are What You Stream”). Consequently, if Balzer is right that the curator is the emblematic worker of our age, we should remember that outside (and sometimes inside) specific creative professions, a great deal of this labor is unpaid and undertaken by individual consumers in their habitual online activities. The idea that everyone is a curator might appear to democratize taste, yet as Hal Foster suggests, “although ‘curating’ promises a new kind of agency, it might deliver little more than a heightened level of administration, as cultural interests are packaged as ‘curated’ consumption.” Curating, Foster warns, is well suited to “a postindustrial economy in which our main task, when it is not to serve, is to consume.”40 Likewise, Miya Tokumitsu locates curationism and its promise of self-actualization through the projection of taste within the broader contours of neoliberalism. As she puts it, “In bestowing great importance to ‘just picking stuff,’ curation in its contemporary, ecumenical sense reinforces many of the personal values promoted by neoliberalism: atomized individualism, the thrall of personalization, aestheticized control, and, of course,

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consumption-as-authenticity.”41 In its online guise, curating can encompass creative selfexpression through selecting, sharing, and organizing materials, and it has an important part to play in identity formation. But as Tokumitsu suggests, it can also be understood as a specifically neoliberal mode of self-fashioning. Whereas accessible yet self-consciously aspirational fan sites such as “I Want to Be a Coppola” linked the curating activities of the director with the online self-fashioning of the audience, the art world has also reappropriated Coppola as a means to organize consumption at a different level. Coppola’s reputation as a curator has been bolstered by the private collection of fine art and photography that her personal wealth has enabled. As the director recalls, she was initially encouraged to collect photographs by her mother, Eleanor Coppola, who proposed it as an “affordable” hobby for her teenage daughter. Her private art collection, which is often mentioned in interviews, takes center stage in online magazine articles such as “Who Does Sofia Coppola Collect? See Inside the ‘Virgin Suicides’ Auteur’s Dreamy Art Collection” (2016).42 Appearing in Artspace, an online platform that blurs the lines between magazine and marketplace, this piece extends Coppola’s curatorial image by turning her private domestic space into a kind of public gallery space. The article is structured as a list of works by Coppola favorites, including Tina Barney, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Tracey Emin, and Risaku Suzuki. As the reader scrolls the page, she is invited to click on links that offer a print of the work on sale, generally for prices that run to thousands of dollars. If this array of images establishes an online gallery space, it is often mediated through Coppola’s personal space. We are frequently presented with the art works as they are hung in Coppola’s private residences. In a characteristic scene of staged intimacy, we see Sofia Coppola posing on her bed in front of Sakura by Risaku Suzuki, a photograph of cherry blossoms that inspired Lost in Translation. Elizabeth Peyton’s Nick (Poquatuck Park) is presented in Coppola’s former SoHo loft, though we are informed that it has recently moved to her “current townhouse residence in the West Village.”43 And moving from domestic to professional space, Coppola is pictured in her office in front of a print of Ed Ruscha’s Cold Beer Beautiful Girls, which appears in Johnny Marco’s Chateau Marmont hotel room in Somewhere. Even if they are fleeting, such connections to the films are important, as they provide a structuring theme for the piece, which is typical in its conflation of cinematic form, personal style, and art connoisseurship. “What does ‘The Virgin Suicides Aesthetic’ look like when it’s applied to art collecting?,” asks Loney Abrams. “It’s clear that Coppola’s taste is worth emulating,” she continues. “The aesthetic that made The Virgin Suicides the beginning of an infectious stylistic movement runs through everything Coppola touches. Her clothing, her homes, and, of course, her art.”44 Collecting and curating fine art, Abrams suggests, is the key to an all-embracing stylistic sensibility that spans cinema, fashion, and interior design. For Artspace and similar sites, Coppola’s image as an auteur-curator activates the interface between the gallery and online consumerism. With its curatorial aesthetics, its pop-auteurist rhetoric, its aspirational imagery, its collapse between public and private, and its links to high-end online commerce, the Artspace article encapsulates some of the key contradictions of the auteur-curator. As the varied materials considered in this chapter demonstrate, Sofia Coppola has selfconsciously assumed the role of curator, using it to manage her transmedia career and

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to sculpt her identity as a director, a tastemaker, and a style icon, especially through the guest editorship of fashion and lifestyle magazines and her direct engagement with the art world. At the same time, the role has equally often been constructed for her by other intermediaries, from film distributors to online art vendors, as well as by her own fans. What may have started as an expression of Coppola’s fine art training and her ability to work across media forms has become progressively entangled with the contemporary notion of curation as the performance of the digital self. It has also undoubtedly been shaped by trends in online publishing and social media that actively encourage breaking the cinematic text—or, equally, the auteur-celebrity text—into a fragmented list of items that can be liked, shared, or purchased. But as I have argued, it is precisely this malleability that makes the figure of the auteur-curator productive across different social worlds and taste formations. To navigate the space between Hollywood and global art cinema, Coppola has leveraged her image as an auteur-curator to accrue cultural capital, artistic prestige, and an aura of hipness by invoking a varied range of intertexts and influences, and she has deployed the mood board as a curatorial tool to project her artistic process as an exemplary balance between creative control and flexible collaboration. Meanwhile, journalists and fans have continued to treat her as occupying the middle ground between art-house director and Hollywood star, dissolving boundaries between cinematic style and personal style. At a moment when everything from television to shopping is organized for us by computational algorithms designed to predict individual preferences, the artist’s projection of a trusted and “authentic” personal sensibility takes on heightened significance. The auteur-curator is both an agent of fragmentation and dispersion—breaking the text into different kinds of consumable content—and an agent of coherence, a projected authorial figure who holds divergent materials together by embodying and performing taste. By expanding the traditional expression of the auteur’s signature into the broader performance of an aesthetic sensibility, curationism repackages style as taste, allowing the contemporary indie auteur to operate across varied cultural spheres and media platforms, from Hollywood to the gallery, fashion magazines to social media. Coppola’s curatorial activities are therefore not an anomaly but rather a paradigmatic performance of the contemporary commodity auteur.

Notes 1 Pam Cook has offered the related observation that “Sofia Coppola has style.” In this chapter, I reframe the discussion from the traditional auteurist idea of directorial style (which Cook astutely expands to other aspects of Coppola’s performance of style) to consider the concept of taste, which brings together ideas of cinematic and personal style with the public acts of selection, arrangement, and display associated with curation, as well as mobilizing ideas of distinction and cultural capital. See Pam Cook, “Portrait of a Lady,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 11 (November 2006): 36; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010). 2 On the curatorial turn, see Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and The Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); Hans Ulrich Obrist with Asad Raza, Ways of Curating (London: Penguin, 2015).

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3 Kate Brown, “Wes Anderson’s Offbeat Debut as a Curator Drove a Storied Museum’s Staff Crazy. The Results Are Enchanting,” Artnet, November 7, 2018, https://news​.artnet​.com​/art​ -world​/wes​-anderson​-curator​-kunsthistorisches​-museum​-1387429. 4 See Erika Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013). 5 David Balzer, Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else (London: Pluto Press, 2014), 2–3. 6 See Owen Gleiberman, “Sofia Coppola: Do Audiences Still Want to Look Through Her Gaze?” Variety, July 4, 2017, https://variety​.com​/2017​/film​/columns​/sofia​-coppola​-gaze​-the​-beguiled​ -1202486961/. 7 Belinda Smaill, “Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 152. 8 Thomas Elsaesser, “A Retrospect: The Film Director as Auteur—Artist, Brand Name, or Engineer?” (1995), https://www​.stclair​-film​.com​/uploads​/4​/9​/3​/7​/49376005​/the​_author​_a​ _retrospect​_elsaesser​.pdf. 9 On Coppola’s signature themes, see Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007); on visual style, see Jeff Smith, “Our Lives in Pink: Sofia Coppola as Transmedia Audiovisual Stylist,” in Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers and Lisa Perrott (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 75–91; Pam Cook, “Sofia Coppola,” in Fifty Contemporary Film Directors, 2nd ed., ed. Yvonne Tasker (London: Routledge, 2011), 126–34. 10 Smith, “Our Lives in Pink.” 11 Pam Cook, “History in the Making: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and the New Auteurism,” in The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, ed. Tom Brown and Belen Vidal (London: Routledge, 2014), 215. 12 Timothy Corrigan, “Auteurs and the New Hollywood,” in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 38–63. 13 Corrigan, “Auteurs,” 52. On Sofia Coppola’s celebrity image, see Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021). 14 Thomas Elsaesser, The Persistence of Hollywood (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 281–304. 15 On the “dispersible” nature of the postclassical movie, see Thomas Austin, “Gone with the Wind Plus Fangs: Genre, Taste and Distinction in the Assembly, Marketing and Reception of Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, ed. Steve Neale (London: BFI, 2002), 292–308. 16 Donna Kornhaber, Wes Anderson (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 4. 17 Charlotte Davey, “Robert Mapplethorpe by Sofia Coppola,” Dazed Digital, November 25, 2011, https://www​.dazeddigital​.com​/photography​/article​/12057​/1​/robert​-mapplethorpe​-by​ -sofia​-coppola. 18 “Robert Mapplethorpe Curated by Sofia Coppola,” https://ropac​.net​/exhibitions​/263​-robert​ -mapplethorpe​-curated​-by​-sofia​-coppola/. 19 Davey, “Robert Mapplethorpe.” 20 “Robert Mapplethorpe Curated by Sofia Coppola.” 21 “Robert Mapplethorpe by Sofia Coppola,” YouTube, December 14, 2011, https://www​ .youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=vBnbW8eTslk.

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22 Anna Backman Rogers defends Coppola against such accusations in Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York: Berghahn, 2019). 23 Though I am not directly taking up the issue of race in relation to Coppola’s exhibition here, it would be possible to draw parallels between the lack of attention paid to Black subjects in the Mapplethorpe exhibition and the criticisms levelled at The Beguiled for its exclusion of Black characters that were present in the film’s source novel. See Steve Rose, “The Beguiled: How Hollywood is Whitewashing the US Civil War,” The Guardian, July 10, 2017, https://www​ .theguardian​.com​/film​/2017​/jul​/10​/beguiled​-how​-hollywood​-whitewashing​-us​-civil​-war​-sofia​ -coppola. 24 Phillip Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” Aperture 231 (Summer 2018): 25. 25 Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” 30. 26 Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” 23. 27 Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” 23, 25. 28 Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” 30. 29 Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” 30. 30 Gefter, “Sofia Coppola on Pictures,” 21. 31 Sofia Coppola, “A Guided Tour to Sofia Coppola’s Inspirations by Sofia Coppola Herself,” wmagazine​.com​, May 30, 2017, https://www​.wmagazine​.com​/gallery​/sofia​-coppola​ -deconstructs​-her​-mood​-boards​/all. 32 Coppola, “Guided Tour.” 33 For more on the W magazine article and the crossover between commercials and features, see Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 176. 34 On Coppola’s guest editing duties, see Cook, “History in the Making,” 222–3; Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 171–4. 35 See “A State of Independence . . . ,” Dazed Digital, August 10, 2008, https://www​ .dazeddigital​.com​/info​/article​/824​/1​/dazed​-confused. 36 “Keep Your Dreams,” Dazed & Confused 2, no. 43 (November 2006): 82–101. 37 Smaill, “Sofia Coppola,” 156. 38 Vogue Paris, December 2004/January 2005. 39 Dara Block, “Vogue Paris December 2004/January 2005: Sofia Coppola,” Iwanttobeacoppola​ .com​, June 17, 2011, http://www​.iwanttobeacoppola​.com​/journal​/2011​/6​/17​/vogue​-paris​ -december​-2004january​-2005​-sofia​-coppola​.html. 40 Hal Foster, “Exhibitionists” (Review of Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ways of Curating and David Balzer, Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else), London Review of Books 37, no. 11 (June 4, 2015), https://www​.lrb​.co​.uk​/the​-paper​/v37​/n11​/hal​-foster​/ exhibitionists. 41 Miya Tokumitsu, “The Politics of the Curation Craze,” The New Republic, August 24, 2015, https://newrepublic​.com​/article​/122589​/when​-did​-we​-all​-become​-curators. 42 Loney Abrams, “Who Does Sofia Coppola Collect? See Inside the ‘Virgin Suicides’ Auteur’s Dreamy Art Collection,” Artspace, September 21, 2016, https://www​.artspace​.com​/magazine​ /news​_events​/how​_i​_collect​/sopfia​-coppola​-54204. 43 Abrams, “Who Does Sofia Coppola Collect?” 44 Abrams, “Who Does Sofia Coppola Collect?”

19 FEMINISM “YOU CANNOT GO DEAF TO WOMEN’S VOICES”: FEMINISM AND THE FILMS OF SOFIA COPPOLA Anna Backman Rogers

Sofia Coppola works at the intersection of cinema, art, and fashion, and these aesthetic preoccupations have to date, understandably, provided a central point of analytic focus for her cinematic oeuvre. A cardinal assumption prevails in many of these studies, namely that Coppola’s work is positioned explicitly on the side of postfeminism due to its seemingly ostentatious fascination with and celebration of surfaces and decorative images.1 My work on Coppola to date is written in direct contradistinction to this assessment.2 I have persistently argued that Coppola’s intricate and extensive knowledge of how images are manufactured and, co-extensively, how they work to mediate subjectivity provides prolific evidence of a radical feminist critique of the ideological effects of certain forms of gendered iconography. From this epistemological perspective Coppola’s project constitutes an attempt to free us from the burden of our own iconicity, especially in relation to the female body. I counsel that we must attend carefully to Coppola’s images. Her project is a sophisticated engagement with surface, with the materiality of the image in order to reach philosophical depth. Ultimately, I will suggest that Coppola is a uniquely cinematic “thinker” in that her cerebral process is given life via the image. The proclivity of many scholars and critics alike to refuse to take Coppola’s radical images seriously (all too often a perspective wielded notably by male critics) evinces, in my view, a misogynist way of thinking that is engrained in many of our cultural scripts and political assumptions about

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the nature of “women’s work” (superficial, narcissistic, lacking in rigor or depth). Taking my cue from Rosalind Galt’s extensive study of the “pretty” and “decorative” image, I will suggest that this alliance of the feminine with the pretty image has, historically, been put in service of an alarmingly sexist critical agenda that has undermined the artistic female point of view.3 I will argue, therefore, that we have much to gain in reading Coppola’s work from a feminist and purposefully feminine perspective. In this chapter, I will explore several manifestly complex ways in which Coppola’s work evinces a radical form of feminist politics (often allied with feminist theories of the image and the gaze from the 1970s and feminist philosophies of difference).4 She reconstructs and reframes how images construe gender, exposing, in particular, the specular reduction of the feminine as a form of violence—that is, she reveals cinema to be a “technology of gender.” Her films also vehemently critique the commodification and containment of female identity. Each of these strategies should be read as a feminist form of political action. Central to the argument I am making here is taking the feminine as a strategic expression of difference. Unlike many Anglo-American interpretations of difference, I do not take this term to be naively essentialist. Rather, I would argue that Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—despite their own radical differences—all assert a positive notion of difference by which one may speak strategically as a woman. As I have argued, woman, in this sense, “does not denote a homogenous, monolithic, static presence that can be exhaustively defined once and for all on behalf of all women everywhere.”5 Indeed, such a proposition is flagrantly preposterous and impossible. This strategic delineation of feminine difference also has absolutely nothing to do with biological or essentialist notions circulating harmfully within cultural discourse regarding women’s bodies (especially trans women’s bodies). Instead, difference is a position from which feminists may speak about a woman’s place as “a social subject within an ideological discourse that already shapes and delimits the terms and possibilities of her experience.”6 Difference denotes a feminist strategy by which one refuses to negotiate one’s identity in the world—that is, how one lives oneself culturally, politically, socially, and spiritually— via the very terms or language through which the multiplicity and diversity of women’s experiences are whittled down and degraded so as to serve as “other.” As Rosi Braidotti states, “the assertion of the positivity of sexual difference challenges the century-old identification of the thinking subject with the universal and . . . with the masculine.”7 In direct contrast to those critics who would argue that philosophies of difference contribute further toward the “othering” of women, I argue that this perspective entails a powerful and meaningful way of pushing back against phallogocentrism and misogyny. Through affirmation of difference, it is possible to refuse the position of structural otherness assigned to women within a binary and hierarchical system that renders the masculine not only as universal but also as seemingly neutral (a pernicious term that can be employed to sanction multiple forms of violence). To speak from a feminine position of difference, then, is to carve out a site of contestation that refuses all alignment with patriarchal sociopolitical and ethical models of thought (through which women’s supposed inferiority is either replicated or explained but never questioned). Coppola, as someone who thinks critically in and through images, speaks from this perspective of strategic difference as

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a feminist auteur.8 Hers is a form of “women’s cinema” as defined by Teresa de Lauretis, namely that all points of identification (the protagonist, the viewer, and the camera) are aligned with women/feminism/the feminine (as a strategic position).9

Cinema as a Technology of Gender: The Virgin Suicides The Virgin Suicides (1999) centers on the traumatic passage from girlhood into adulthood. Indeed, Coppola’s abiding cinematic preoccupation is the specificity of subjective experience within a moment of protracted life crisis. That is, she is concerned with what it means to live oneself—to inhabit one’s reality—within a community and environment that may set the terms of one’s understanding of oneself, as well as the damage that is wrought on a person in the process. Of signal interest to Coppola is the precarious and always provisional emergence of young female adulthood. The Virgin Suicides oscillates between the intimate, lived reality of this specific liminal moment when the entry point into adulthood forces upon young women a kind of internal death and introduces the mechanics by which the female body comes to bear the burden of both the male gaze and iconicity. Through this exacting calibration, this film and others in Coppola’s oeuvre think through how ideology comes to work on us as a set of images and the irreparable and incontrovertible damage this does to our embodied reality. That is, ideology already always delimits our experience in such a way that we can only ever inevitably come to recognize the terms of our own existence within it. To live within the purview of ideology— from which none of us can escape fully—is to be hailed as a subject. Yet, as Claire Johnston, Kaja Silverman, and Teresa de Lauretis have all argued, ideology positions men and women differently: we exist in language as gendered social subjects.10 As feminist film scholars, in the wake of the turn to psychoanalytic theory, have delineated, Woman (as cultural signifier of the eternal feminine in contradistinction to the embodied, real experience of women) is represented as lacking doubly. She is the screen onto which this lack—which initiates our entry into language and subjectivity and, thus, belongs properly to both male and female subjects—is projected. The representation of Woman (i.e., her on-screen incarnation) in cinema’s most mainstream and dominant modes is inescapably a creation formed out of idealization, imagination, and fetishization. Transcribed into myth, she does not define herself or set the terms of her own existence but rather has meaning superimposed on her from without.11 This is not a trivial matter for, as Johnston reminds us, “the tools and techniques of cinema themselves, as part of reality, are an expression of the prevailing ideology . . . [and so] new meaning has to be manufactured within the text of the film.”12 In what follows, I will explore how The Virgin Suicides creates new forms of (feminist) meaning within the body of the film itself. The Virgin Suicides is, at its core, a film about trauma and the lifelong coping mechanisms invoked in its wake. It dramatizes intricately how grief works to render that which has gone from us as eternally and powerfully present precisely because of its absence. Yet the film subsists as a viewing experience that is both haunting and troubling because it taps into a more primordial psychoanalytic truth: that an adult human life is lived in the shadow of

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that which is already always lost and that we seek without end that to which we can never return. Survival in the world is also, therefore, a matter of denial and disavowal. In The Virgin Suicides, narrative is cast as a particularly priapic mode of containing tragedy by which the Lisbon girls can be turned into lost objects by the boys who remember them; though the girls are irrecoverable, the fetishistic and cyclical return to the site of trauma of their suicides—where all meaning breaks down—provides a structure that allows them to continue to live (even if, as the anonymous narrator professes, it has left the boys “happier with dreams than with wives”). As such, the female figure—specifically the adolescent female body—functions as both the repository of trauma and a partial panacea for psychic wounds. As I have argued previously, the film “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.”13 The Lisbon girls figure doubly and, as such, embody ambivalence. They are at once that which ruptures this painstakingly constructed narrative (an attempt to create meaning) and the center around which patriarchal clichés circulate. (Trip Fontaine [Josh Hartnett] takes his cue from T. S. Eliot and describes Lux Lisbon [Kirsten Dunst] as “the still point of the turning world.”14) They are viewed as creatures of enlightenment yet resist any attempt to be read into, which, in terms of the girls themselves, can be seen as a refusal to be pathologized. If Lux—true to the Latin etymology of her name—is the source of light which makes meaning conceivable, her death also decimates its possibility. Essential to the boys’ construction of meaning is a cornucopia of images predicated on advertisements and soft pornography. Their impulse to narrate, though a natural and human one, is revealed also to be inherently patriarchal: an attempt to investigate and render meaningful the female body and experience through reduction and simplification. Yet the film implies—by way of tragedy—that to drain a human life of complexity in order to recast it as surface “is already a form of annihilation.”15 The dark secret of The Virgin Suicides is that the young women have been killed off well before they choose the ultimate act of self-annihilation by an ideology of the image, which, the film implies, young girls internalize. The film lulls us into a false sense of submission; it beguiles us with beautiful, light-filled fantasies in order to intimate darker truths. The film’s exquisite carapace cracks open and is shown always to have been brittle, shallow, and deceptive, a pleasing surface we thought we knew how to read that has, instead, forced upon us an encounter of an entirely different order. Fundamentally, these images which soothe, comfort and assuage are clichés. If we follow the double meaning of the term in French, clichés are representations which we can at once automatically assimilate via (visual) cultural shorthand and photographic plates that capture an unrepeatable moment in time that is already lost to the past.16 The images of the Lisbon girls are characterized both by thinness/superficiality and by light/ whiteness (see Figure 19.1). Their representation is, on the one hand, a re-presentation of images that have immediate cultural currency. (In addition to the soft pornographic images from 1970s Playboy and advertising campaigns, the girls are also likened to portraits of literary characters such as Lolita and Ophelia.) On the other hand, they are conveyed as impossibly white. This is not only an effect of cinematic lighting that transforms them into sources of resplendent illumination but also indicative of the manifold ways in which

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Figure 19.1  The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

they are cast as unimpeachable, spotless, timeless vessels. Within this narrative they are condemned to eternal femininity. Necessarily eviscerated of content, they become the screens onto which priapic fantasies of both saintliness and hypersexuality are projected and played out. Yet, as the film makes clear, this also reduces the female position into one of, at best, pure reflection or, at worst, brutal self-abnegation. Since the boys’ narrative is based on the cliché as a still image (as a photographic plate) and constructed artificiality, or recuperated from collective and cultural memory, its construction is evidently precarious. These images strain the limits of credibility. The overt fantasy sequences catalyzed by the reading of Cecilia’s diary or the slideshow of impossible adventures that the boys manifest in their mind’s eye are also poignant and devastating because the materiality of their presentation (8mm film and Kodak Carousel) evokes disintegration and what is lost to the past through qualities of friability and instability while also intimating the private rituals of family life (which in The Virgin Suicides is, in fact, the location of abuse and failure). The cliché excludes complexity and oddness—that indefinable and unique element that works to unravel containment.17 If the Lisbon girls are at once simplified and reduced to a form of surface, this representation also intimates at what is left out of the image. Emblematic of this are scenes that clearly invoke the realities of the adolescent female body and yet simultaneously work to eradicate any evidence of that messy corporeality. In one case, the fact of the Lisbon girls’ menstruation causes one of the neighborhood boys to flee from the family home where he has been invited to dinner (and has subsequently discovered a generous supply of Tampax in the bathroom). Yet indirectly, the “homecoming” sequence in which Trip and Lux are crowned king and queen takes its cue from Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976).18 If all signs of the horror invoked

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are effaced, they are sublimated into the subsequent ellipsis in time and action when Trip rapes Lux on an open football field where he then leaves her to fend for herself. It is notable, in fact, that every moment of adolescent initiation in The Virgin Suicides results in eviscerating trauma from which neither the girls nor the boys can recover. Reading into these gaps and fissures, attending to absence and what subsists below the surface of these beguiling images, opens up a feminist site of contestation. This film discloses, and disquietingly so, that invoking the eternal feminine also conjures specters and that an impulse to narrative is synonymous with implicitly violent forms of control.

The Commodification of Identity: Marie Antoinette Upon its release in 2006, after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, critical and scholarly response to Marie Antoinette was largely excoriating. In The Politics of Visual Pleasure, I argued the tone of this critical discourse was markedly gendered and confused the film’s overt fascination with commodity fetishism with open endorsement of a particularly contemporary form of “choice-based feminism.” This elision erased the film’s radical feminist politics, a politics that is played out on the very surface of the film and, by extension, through the body of its female protagonist (Kirsten Dunst). As I wrote, “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.”19 As such, scholars were not completely erroneous in identifying an aesthetics that could arguably be constructed as postfeminist, but such a reading does require that we ignore the film’s evident critique of a depoliticization of the image.20 If the film demands that we attend to “the appropriation, divestment, refashioning and disenfranchisement of a young woman’s life through her body,”21 it behooves us as viewers to take the surface of the image as a matter of import. In its profound examination of surface, the film offers a visceral critique of cultures and processes of commodification that absent a woman of her own identity, autonomy, and agency. This is the point of the film. As in the case of the Lisbon sisters, Marie’s body is the blank canvas onto which the patriarchal fantasies, fears, petty politics, hatred, and failures of a nation are projected. She is eviscerated of herself in order to bear the burden of a politics that is not of her own making, but for which she is made to stand in. As such, Marie Antoinette is both historical (in contradistinction to what many critics at the time argued, the film does depict core events accurately—to the extent that we can say any recreation of a historical moment can do so) and an effective/affective indictment of the cultural tools through which misogyny functions (objectification, fetishization, and disenfranchisement). In This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray argues that within a patriarchal economy women not only function as Other (a structural absence that shores up masculine identity) but also signify culturally in terms of their pure exchange value. She writes that women “always

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pass from one man to another, from one group of men to another. The workforce is thus always assumed to be masculine and the ‘products’ are objects to be used, objects of transaction among men alone.” It is not surprising then that the phallic law that upholds such a hermetically sealed form of exchange ensures “the exclusive valorization of men’s needs/desires, [and] of exchanges among men.”22 Moreover, the youthful, virgin body possesses the highest of exchange values for as the ultimate tabula rasa she functions simply as a receptacle or vessel for patriarchal cathexis or investment. As Irigaray states, “[t]he Virginal Woman . . . 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.”23 Women become complicit in their own disenfranchisement when, according to Irigaray, they “lend themselves to alienation in consumption, and to exchanges in which they do not participate.”24 Marie Antoinette explores in painstaking detail, in its fascination with materiality as an expression of power, the disturbing relationship between a young woman and her own “alienation in consumption.” The film renders abundantly clear in its overtly baroque style that Marie herself functions symbolically as pure exchange value.25 Divested of her identity “she comes to stand in for the power relations and discourses that create and ‘fashion’ her body as a commodity.”26 That this process is brought to bear on an extremely young, nubile, and fertile body is central to the film’s politics as herstory: it reminds us that the female body is all too often made to bear the burden of meaning geopolitically (its violation being considered tantamount to the desecration of national identity and borders) and, by extension, the body politic (not to mention the fact that the female body is often used as a weapon of war). It reminds us to be wary of any regime of the image that is invested in casting the female body as venerated or denigrated, for both are forms of violence, often played out through male sexualized brutalization of women. Irigaray, too, cautions us to heed the politics of patriarchal representation of the female body; she writes, “[h]ence 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.”27 Marie Antoinette, at its core, is a film about the violence of patriarchal law (as state, nation, and sovereign) effected on the female body. Its narrative trajectory counters a young woman’s affective agency with a world that is intent on breaking her. The film’s form elucidates the burden of the patriarchal gaze that is upon her (both institutional and state) and how it is harnessed directly as regulation of her body. Marie Antoinette is beset with images of fragmentation and dissection of the female body: objectification and fetishization are the cardinal features of a mise-en-scène of control. For this reason alone, we should be suspect of any critic who expressed disappointment in Coppola’s artistic decision to eschew portraying Marie’s bloody end. If Marie Antoinette presents its feminist politics as a question of production design, it is incumbent upon us as viewers to attend particularly to the manifold ways in which Marie’s body is “fashioned” by the French state as an act of appropriation and assimilation. Dress is both a discourse of power and a disciplinary technology here and, as Irigaray reminds us, for the “commodity” (woman) to be “disinvested of its body” it must be reclothed in

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a form that makes it suitable for exchange among men.28 Central to the film’s politics in this regard is the “handover scene” which takes place astride the border between Austria and France. As she makes her entrance into the ceremonial enclosure (a rather florid tent constructed in the midst of the forest), Marie is told that “the bride must retain nothing belonging to a foreign court” (including her pug dog, Mops). What proceeds is a ritual ceremony conveyed through a series of close-up shots designed to remind us that Marie’s hands, arms, neck, wrists, and diminutive frame are now the sole property of France. As I have argued, it is highly significant that this ceremony should take place within a quintessentially liminal space, as an area that Victor Turner would describe as “betwixt and between.”29 As such, Marie is a neophyte, a blank slate onto which a new identity will be cast. Her crossing of a threshold onto French soil symbolizes the loss of her former self and acquiescence to a life script that is beyond her own making; this rite of passage marks her body’s transition into becoming a vessel that is entrusted with ensuring a royal legacy. In and of herself Marie no longer matters, for only her transubstantiation into an unimpeachable symbol of sovereignty will ensure the integrity of this process. In fact, her behavior, her needs, and desires are considered a potential threat to the symbolic nature of her power. In order to reign, she must, fundamentally, be absented of herself (her sovereign right to determine the fate of her own body). In this regard, a mid-shot of Marie as she stands disrobed and facing out toward the country which she will serve and ultimately sacrifice her body to is highly significant (see Figure 19.2). There are four internal reframings within the shot that “accentuate and concentrate the strength of the courtly—and by extension patriarchal—gaze that is upon her.”30 This effect is amplified by the tropes of Renaissance perspective (which is an integral facet of cinema’s functioning as a technology of gender) that guide our attention toward the fragility and youthfulness of her body (i.e., its fertility). That she appears as a hollowed-out adumbration within the

Figure 19.2  Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

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Figure 19.3  Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

film’s body underscores that this process is designed to eviscerate subjectivity. Marie is captured as a void within the shot’s overall chromatic scale of shades of blue. Aurally, the scene is also absented of sound during this moment. From this caesura of nonexistence Marie emerges: fitted out in an ornate costume of blue brocade, rouge, and powder, she steps forward into the light to meet the viewer’s gaze (see Figure 19.3). This rupture of the “fourth wall” renders us complicit—for we have already been sutured into the surveillance of her body and witnessed her transformation into a decorative object to be traded among men in a game of power where the odds are stacked against her from the outset. She emerges as a royal subject ex nihilo, as the creation of an arcane and pompous ritual deliberately designed as to appear timeless. The ritual of ordination that invokes the power of a nebulous deity to conceal the profane arbitrariness—and ordinariness—of any royal legacy is undercut here. We know, plainly, Marie to be a political pawn or object who is subject to the whims of a patriarchal court; we know that she is woefully ill-equipped and underprepared for the role into which she has been forced for the purpose of political alliance; and we know that she is a child and that the mere act of crossing a threshold cannot alter that.

Female Subjectivity: On the Rocks In The Beguiled (2017), Coppola notoriously reversed the fetishizing mechanics of the male gaze on which the original narrative was predicated (evident in both Thomas P. Cullinan’s source novel and Don Siegel’s cinematic adaptation from 1971). I have argued that the film stages an “especially genteel and feminine form of ‘domestic’ violence” in order to skewer a specifically priapic form of power dynamic that functions through domination over and control of the female body as well as the pernicious myths upon

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which many romantic narratives are based.31 The film implodes these psychological precepts and mores by revealing them to be a specifically phallogocentric method to regulate and delimit female experience. However, in her most recent film—the deceptively “light” On the Rocks (2020), which deploys the structure of the romantic screwball comedy to mesmeric effect—Coppola provokes a profoundly complex reworking of gendered subjectivity based in a patriarchal epistemology of subject and object. In what follows, I take my cue from Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman (1985), in which the task of thinking woman as other (first taken up by Simone de Beauvoir) is implicated in a feminist project of difference; that is, to speak back as Other is also to challenge the phallocentric assumptions of culture (which are especially prevalent, for Irigaray, in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology).32 On the Rocks is notably Coppola’s most loquacious film to date: it is structured around a series of conversations between a father (Felix [Bill Murray]) and daughter (Laura [Rashida Jones]) ostensibly about the questionable fidelity of Laura’s husband (Dean [Marlon Wayans]). When I say that the film is deceptively light I do not mean, as some critics have, that it is synonymous with “thin” and “slight,” that the film possesses no “extra level of mystery” and only “brushes up against deeper insights.”33 Instead, I mean that it uses generic tenets to engineer a scenario in which the act of a woman listening and speaking back undermines romantic narratives that are predicated on completion of self and the pursuit of happiness. That we may not be open to the serious nature of that conversation articulated from a female point of view is another matter. Romantic narratives, based in a binary and divisive system of oppositions, are revealed to be fundamentally deforming of subjectivity: in this equation it is the woman who, taking my cue from Irigaray, becomes “the matter used for the imprint of forms.”34 Within this tight narrative conscription, Woman stands in for the object against which the masculine subject of knowledge is defined. Her subjectivity is defined through him, whereas his agency is expressed through attaining the female protagonist, often legally—marriage being the ultimate “happy ending” within such a scenario. On the Rocks, unlike most romantic comedies, starts with a marriage and reveals, as the film progresses, that relationship to be—as Jacques Lacan might argue35—built upon the site of misrecognition, projection, and fundamental narcissism (Dean wants to see himself as “impressive” through Laura’s eyes). Like Marie Antoinette, the film lampoons the reduction of a woman to an object traded among men within a phallic economy and examines the dire effects this may have on her own ability to articulate her needs, her desires, and her point of view outside of this dynamic. It is telling that Felix named his daughter after the titular female protagonist of Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) in which Gene Tierney’s character—caught between the violent and investigative actions of men—functions as the narrative’s central mystery. To Felix, women are inscrutable, conundrums for which he cannot find answers or solutions, receptacles to fulfill his wishes and desires, and psychic mirrors that must reflect his own sense of himself as powerful and successful. He is a deeply childish man who cannot name his loneliness or pain, beset as his worldview is by the sanctioned yet damaging language of masculinity. He left Laura’s mother once she was unable to devote the entirety of her time and attention to him (she no longer functioned as his mirror) and, one could argue, his profession as an upmarket art dealer has come to inform the way in which he treats women: as

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beautiful objects in which he can overinvest (venerate) or trade (depreciate) depending on his whim. In fact, we see throughout the film that his fetishization of women defines the terms by which he conducts his business as an art dealer; indeed his first sale, he boasts, was a “de Kooning Woman” (i.e., Woman as reductive essence or icon). Laura, though, seems to be the one woman whom he recognizes as a discrete subject. (He tells her that he remembers the exact moment in her childhood in which he recognized her as a person.) Laura is both of him and entirely other to him. His obsession with the integrity and status of her marriage barely conceals the fact that she is the singular presence that sustains him as a person in the world and this intensely troubles him because he needs her more than she does him. As such, then, On the Rocks seeks an answer to that original question posed by Irigaray: “[b]ut what if the ‘object’ started to speak?”36 In the film Laura speaks back— desperate as she is to find words to describe the particularities of experience. (It is no accident that she is a writer suffering from creative blockage.) At first, she counters Felix’s incessant bloviation on the difference between the sexes (a polarity he uses to justify and shore up his personal history of sexist behavior, while oblivious to the feminist meaning of difference) with sarcastic retorts and incisive, well-timed uses of silence. Finally, she delivers her truth to him after a momentary power cut during the scenes set in Mexico. The power outage is, of course, a well-trammeled cinematic cliché but could also be read as an Irigarayan gesture of circuit rupture given the excoriating emotional force of Laura’s speech during and proceeding from this moment.37 Felix relies on her to “mirror” his identity (as father, as patriarch), but in this moment, she ceases to turn her light (her attention) to him and, in a psychological sense, “sees” him as the man he is. This is also, tellingly, the moment when he resorts to cruelty toward her by using that most well-worn of patriarchal clichés about angry women who lack a sense of humor: “what happened to you?” he asks. “You used to be fun.” This is a narrative that traces one woman’s burgeoning refusal to be an object or mirror for a man—be it her father or her husband. The film dramatizes this exchange from the outset, albeit in comic mode, through voiceover: Felix tells (a younger) Laura that even once she marries, she still belongs to him. For this reason, and as I shall explain further, I believe the film’s conclusion to be ambivalent about both marriage and the nuclear family. If Felix—as arch patriarch—believes that women once wore bangles to remind them of their status as men’s property, the film leaves us with a queasy sense that Laura’s husband (about whom we learn very little, in fact) is no better. In this regard, it is important that the watch Felix gives Laura for her birthday (in Dean’s absence) is simply traded in for and replaced by the watch that her husband will gift her at the film’s end. This is a fundamentally ambiguous gesture in a narrative that has delivered its psychic climax well before its conclusion in Laura’s vehement indictment of Felix as a father and husband. Laura’s speech to her father, her precise articulation of not being heard as a woman—“you cannot go deaf to women’s voices”—constitutes a subtle point of rupture in this story, which deflates the generic note on which the film concludes. Her life may have returned to “normality” by this point, but it is unclear that this is, indeed, a “happy ending” for Laura or a state of affairs in which she will continue to be invested for the long term.

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Further, it is ironic that both men, who claim to adore her, offer her gifts that denote literally the very thing of which her life is devoid: time. Despite her material comforts—and both watches are considerably expensive38—neither of the men in her life can recognize that what Laura craves is access to space and time of her own. Dean may tell her somewhat speciously that she just needs to “make time” for herself (which could be taken to be indicative of a neoliberal recuperation of “self-care” as a feminist act), but he does nothing whatsoever to ease the considerable burden of her domestic and emotional labor (despite buying her a sophisticated food processor). As a couple, they are markedly divided within the cinematic frame; their conversations are frequently conveyed through shot and countershot, yet if they occupy the same diegetic space, there is a consistent void between them that denotes a distinct lack of intimacy. This translates into a wider pattern by which their lives are determined through private (female) and public (male) spaces. Laura is notably ill at ease at Dean’s place of work, while he barely seems to spend any time at home at all. In her rewriting of Freudian theory from a feminist perspective, Juliet Mitchell asks why “despite massive social, economic and legal changes . . . there [is] still a kind of underwater tow that makes progress regress on matters of ‘gender’ equality . . . [that] conservatism actually seems inherent in the very construction of sexual difference— as though the difference itself has in its constitution insisted on stasis.”39 She opines further that the generational transmission of the concepts of masculinity and femininity engenders an inherent conservatism with regard to gendered social roles. On the Rocks is set within a privileged urban and moneyed milieu in New York’s SoHo district where it is possible to carve out a life that is not centered on immediate subsistence. Reaping the benefits of so-called “equality” feminism, women within this rarefied social stratum are subject to the imperative to “have and do it all,” yet in Laura’s case this has clearly catalyzed an affective deadening within. Rashida Jones’ quiet and reflective performance, which verges on blankness at certain points, also carries within it a profound sense of loss, both of purpose and of selfhood.40 Laura, who is evidently successful as a writer (she has a considerable advance from her publisher on the second book she is struggling to write) and whose life bears all the hallmarks of financial comfort and privilege, is not only exhausted but also emptied out by this performance of contemporary, empowered womanhood. Laura is especially wearied by her friend Vanessa (Jenny Slate)—a woman who personifies a specifically late-capitalist version of feminist “agency” replete with a raft of designer handbags and pithy statements about empowerment and self-actualization seemingly garnered from hashtags and cultures of self-help (as personal rather than social responsibility). The bookshelves that align Laura’s writing space also structure her mental space and reveal the multiple contradictions of contemporary feminism that might inform her worldview. Laura is reading Vendela Vida’s The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, but visible on the shelf behind her is Sheryl Sandberg’s corporate “feminist” manifesto Lean In. While the former centers on a woman who becomes increasingly dispossessed of herself (a situation initially catalyzed by the loss of all the objects through which she might mark out her “official” identity), the latter corrals feminist tenets into a highly specific and privileged ideal of successful and impossible womanhood. Laura is struggling to find herself within

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both language and desire. Laura and Dean’s lack of intimacy is evident from the outset and manifest in every cinematic frame of them as a distanced couple who no longer have any curiosity about one another. Laura is clearly someone for whom creativity and personhood are distinctly imbricate. Yet a “lifestyle”—here played out as a set of existential rather than postfeminist choices—in which a woman must fulfill the imperative to perform multiple roles “successfully” results in the attrition of her own inner life. Laura is somebody who proceeds with uncertainty and hesitancy in the world—whose relationship to knowledge is, fundamentally, in crisis. Her suspicion that Dean is being unfaithful signifies both that she does not know her partner as well as she thought and that there is a kernel of truth in her paranoia (as there necessarily must be), which indicates that she is in a protracted state of crisis over her own direction in life. She suspects Dean of infidelity because she feels she is boring. Her existence is starkly offset by the characters around her who speak in terms of certainty and opinion dressed up as fact. Laura, by contrast, cannot take herself seriously because she no longer has a sense of who she is in her environment outside of the roles of mother and wife (which demand consistency, stability, and repetition from her—the absolute antithesis of creativity). Both this loss of purposeful artistic vision and the psychic trauma of her childhood—which has evidently precipitated a compounded sense of loss—leave her vulnerable to her father’s relentless chauvinist “philosophizing” and increasingly ridiculous escapades. In some sense, Laura’s burden to carry in her adult life is that she cannot seem to help being her father’s daughter and, thus, she cannot detach from him. (It is, after all, telling that we learn that her sister and mother no longer maintain contact with him.) Irigaray states that to speak back is also the means for “beginning to see.” This feminist maneuver unleashes a “disaggregation of the subject” (which she reads as male), which affects the apparent distinction between “him and the Other”; any attempt to deny this, she counsels, simply indicates an attempt “to retain . . . the power to promote his own forms.”41 Laura’s anger, her refusal to remain silent, results in her open declaration of allegiance to her matriarchal line: “you have daughters and granddaughters.” She speaks of the callousness of Felix’s dismissal of her mother and disregard for the feelings of all the women who have shared his life. Felix may try to counter this flood of reality that erupts from within Laura, but there is no doubt that he has heard her words. He does not have any trouble hearing women’s voices, after all. Laura has found it within herself finally to speak back, to question the “words as wrappings with which the ‘subject,’ modestly clothes the ‘female’.”42 Laura’s “sight”—her ability to recognize her father’s “witty repartee” as a vehemently sexist and tired routine that constitutes an assault on female agency—returns to her in the dark. In this moment, in which she does not have to “reflect” or to turn the light of her attention toward him to uphold his ego, she lays down the burden she has evidently been carrying since childhood. Once light is restored, despite Felix’s immature retort to Laura to address her words to his face (as if to suggest that this would diminish her capacity to speak), the power has shifted. For this is also the moment in which she decides to leave him. Felix may, at the film’s conclusion, try to resurrect this bond as it once existed, but he knows that his relationship to his daughter has been fundamentally altered by Laura’s insight. She has regained not only her ability to whistle (she still cannot help being Felix’s daughter) but also her ability to write. That we do not discover anything

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about the nature of the story she is crafting is crucial (neither Dean nor Felix seems to know enough about it to ask any specific questions). This is now her story to tell and it is their task to listen.

Conclusion In this brief survey, I have tried to establish central facets of Coppola’s filmmaking that mark her out clearly as an important and established voice in feminist filmmaking: namely that her films elucidate the manifold ways cinema functions as a technology of gender, and that her films offer an excoriating indictment of cultures that render the female body a commodified object. My contention throughout is that the female point of view or position is a political one, and thus that these films are most suitably read through feminist philosophies of difference. To be clear: I am neither arguing that these films are presented solely through the female gaze (although this is manifestly the subject of The Beguiled) since point-of-view shots are notably rare in Coppola’s films nor am I arguing that Coppola herself is feminist. Rather, I am arguing that the films in and of themselves manifest a form of feminist politics. As such, I am writing of a politics of the feminine and of the pretty to the extent that these terms are culturally, in contradistinction to inherently or essentially, braided—the distinction is important. The beguiling surfaces of Coppola’s films serve a radical—and not merely celebratory—purpose. They ask that we, as viewers, attend with patience and care to the imbricate nature of the feminine and the pretty or decorative and, by extension, to unpack what the purpose of this alliance might be. That this is the work that Coppola demands of us as viewers is, I must stress, far different from endorsing patriarchal regimes of the image. Her films do not solder women to iconicity but reveal the burden that they carry through complex processes of identification that precede even their entry point into language. The answers to the questions she poses cinematically, each and every time, palpate the boundaries of abject loneliness, isolation, depression, and self-harm or self-sabotage and this is cardinal to us understanding the political affect of Coppola’s work. Hers is a deeply cerebral cinema in that she thinks, first and foremost, in images—that is, Coppola possesses an exacting knowledge of how images come to work on us and to form our (gendered) subjectivities, our ways of existing in the world physically and politically. Her cinema is also deeply rooted in the mental or inner life of women and by refusing to slip in under the surface of those images, by choosing to remain merely beguiled, we miss this extraordinary quality of Coppola’s diegetic worlds. Coppola is not only concerned with the material and embodied encounters of young girls and women, she is also sincerely invested in their psychic experiences, the internal wounds that they carry, and the daily social, cultural, and spiritual attritions that prevent them from living as affective agents in the wider world. That she centers a definitively feminist struggle to carve out sites of contestation from which it is possible to write counternarratives—in essence that she documents the struggle to say “I”—is nothing less than radical in a world that all too often continues to privilege the male point of view as a position of unimpeachable articulation and power.

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Notes 1 Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017); Diana Diamond, “Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette: Costumes, Girl Power and Feminism,” in Fashion and Film, ed. Adrienne Munich (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), 203–31; and Caitlin Yunuen Lewis, “Cool Postfeminism: The Stardom of Sofia Coppola,” in In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity, ed. Diane Negra and Su Holmes (New York: Continuum Books, 2011), 174–98. 2 Anna Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and The CrisisImage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2019). 3 Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and The Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 4 It would be remiss of me to leave unacknowledged the discerning opposition some of these feminist theorists have voiced in reaction to one another’s work. While I understand, for instance, Kaja Silverman’s objection to Julia Kristeva’s positioning of the female (or specifically maternal) voice outside of the dominant linguistic order since, for Silverman, it seemingly invalidates her voice within the symbolic, I think there is a marked affinity between these philosophies of difference and the position of articulation outlined by Laura Mulvey, Claire Johnston, Silverman, and Teresa de Lauretis. It is not, to my way of thinking, a question of rejecting the symbolic order but rather refusing coherent alignment with it so that it is possible to challenge the dominance of the male subject from within representation (the view from elsewhere). This subversive form of tactics reveals, for instance, how women are made to be doubly lacking within dominant visual cultures: to bear the burden of both men and women’s lack since male displacement of lack shores up a fantasy of coherent, abiding, and active subjectivity. That women are not afraid of their own lack (as Hélène Cixous remarks) is precisely an articulation of political difference within a culture in which male pathologies are projected onto women: in other words, it constitutes a refusal to be pathologized. See Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of The Medusa,” Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875–93; Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, [1974] 1984); Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (London: Penguin, [1974] 2000); Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 394–403; and Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988). 5 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 18. 6 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 18. 7 Rosi Braidotti, “Of Bugs and Women: Irigaray and Deleuze on the Becoming-Woman,” Engaging with Irigaray, ed. Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 123. 8 It has been suggested to me that 1970s feminist theories that center on the cinematic apparatus and spectatorship are incongruent with a filmmaker such as Coppola who is so evidently fascinated with images. I believe this argument is facile and based on the assumption that Laura Mulvey, Claire Johnston, et al. were iconophobic by virtue of the fact that their deconstructionist project as brought to bear on phallogocentric visual culture demanded that women be freed from the burden of iconicity. This argument would seem

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to ignore several things: first, that iconophobia is, in and of itself, an inescapably patriarchal construct (manifest most clearly in the frequent outbreaks of “moral” panic over the meaning and appearance of women’s bodies in public spaces); and second, that Mulvey and Johnston in particular were calling for new forms of “visual pleasure” to be constructed in the wake of their deconstructionist project. There is no doubt that both theorists viewed the image as fecund ground for feminist contestation if enacted or effected at the level of the image. 9 de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender. 10 Claire Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema, 1973,” in Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 119–26; Silverman, Acoustic Mirror; de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender. 11 Johnston, “Women’s Cinema,” 120. 12 Johnston, “Women’s Cinema,” 124. 13 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 39. 14 Trip tellingly leaves out from Burnt Norton the words “neither flesh nor fleshless,” which would reveal the inherently liminal nature of this fantasy which sustains him. The poem itself stands as a tender testament to the paths we do not take and to the lives we do not live, that the past, though it may come to define us, is also “unredeemable.” Notably, this is the only scene in the film set in the “present” moment. Trip appears to be in a rehabilitation center for drug and alcohol addiction. In addition, the chromatic tones used in the scene replicate that of the past (1976). Like Lux, Trip is also irreparably scarred by adolescence and though he remains alive (unlike Lux) he cannot inhabit fully adult life. 15 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 27. 16 See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill & Wang, [1980] 2010). 17 See Barthes, Camera Lucida. 18 See Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola; and Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema. 19 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 117. 20 See especially Fiona Handyside, “Girlhood, Postfeminism and Contemporary Female Art-House Authorship: The ‘Nameless Trilogies’ of Sofia Coppola and Mia Hansen-Løve,” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 10 (Winter 2015): http://www​.alphavillejournal​ .com​/Issue10​/HTML​/ArticleHandyside​.html; Handyside, Sofia Coppola; Lewis, “Cool Postfeminism”; and Amy Woodworth, “A Feminist Theorization of Sofia Coppola’s Postfeminist Trilogy,” in Situating The Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema, ed. Marcelline Block (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 138–67. 21 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 118. 22 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 171. 23 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 186. 24 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 172. 25 See Saige Walton, Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016). 26 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 119. 27 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 183. 28 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 180. 29 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995), 95; Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 120. 30 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 121.

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31 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 64. 32 See Ofelia Schutte, “Irigaray on the Problem of Subjectivity,” Hypatia 6, no. 2 (1991): 64–76. 33 See Owen Gleiberman, “On The Rocks: Bill Murray, His Scampishness Undimmed, Reunites with Lost in Translation director Sofia Coppola,” Variety, September 22, 2020, https://variety​ .com​/2020​/film​/reviews​/on​-the​-rocks​-bill​-murray​-rashida​-jones​-sofia​-coppola​-1234777605/; David Sims, “Let Sofia Coppola’s New Film Transport You,” The Atlantic, October 21, 2020, https://www​.theatlantic​.com​/culture​/archive​/2020​/10​/sofia​-coppolas​-on​-the​-rocks​-movie​ /616802/. 34 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of The Other Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 141. 35 See Bruce Fink, Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference (Cambridge: Polity, 2015). 36 Irigaray, Speculum of The Other Woman, 135. 37 Irigaray, Speculum of The Other Woman, 69. 38 Notably, Laura’s own choice of watch is a Swatch: both practical and relatively accessible as a commodity. 39 Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, xviii. 40 Jones lost her mother shortly before filming for On the Rocks began and, in my view, her grief is a powerful aspect of her performance of Laura. 41 Irigaray, Speculum of The Other Woman, 135. 42 Irigaray, Speculum of The Other Woman, 142.

20 POSTFEMINISM POSTFEMINIST APPROACHES TO SOFIA COPPOLA Fiona Handyside

Introduction: Coppola and the Postfeminist Canon Over the last three decades, “postfeminism” has become a key term in feminists’ critical vocabulary.1 It is a contested and slippery term, but in the meanings that have proved most productive and engaging for film and media scholars, it is understood as a dominant media sensibility, shaping the attitudes, narratives, and characters of much popular film and fiction, especially that aimed at female audiences.2 It is inflected with neoliberal ideas about individual agency and media participation in a “gender regime” which mutes vocabularies for talking about structural inequalities and “undoes” feminism as an ongoing political project.3 According to this perspective, postfeminist media studies is a critical analytical paradigm that seeks to track the complex interactions between shifting gender roles, political activism, and popular media representation. Generally speaking, the vast majority of postfeminist media studies has analyzed popular film, TV series, and “chick lit,” with Nigella Lawson’s cooking shows, reality makeover shows, Bridget Jones’s Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001), Legally Blonde (Robert Luketic, 2001), Ally McBeal (David E. Kelley, 1997–2002), Desperate Housewives (Marc Cherry, 2004–12), The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006), and Sex and the City (Darren Star, 1998–2004) all considered touchstone postfeminist texts.4 Sofia Coppola’s seven feature films are not routinely considered as part of this emerging canon of mainstream postfeminist media. Coppola’s films have been produced within the American indiewood context, enabling her to have considerable control over the finished product.5 They are promoted via the film

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festival circuit, accruing cultural prestige and cinephile critical attention. As the existence of this very book testifies, Coppola’s films invite readings that prioritize her status as the author-director of her films, directly responsible for the story worlds she creates and relatively removed from the genre-driven, sequel, and franchise-dominated “Girl World” of popular Conglomerate Hollywood productions overwhelmingly identified as vehicles of a postfeminist worldview. However, several scholars have demonstrated the significant textual and thematic connections between Coppola’s film world and a postfeminist sensibility. For Caitlin Yunuen Lewis it is above all in Coppola’s own brand image that we can find the contradictory politics of postfeminism, which simultaneously celebrates female achievement and aspiration while creating narrow and fixed ideas of female success.6 Women find themselves caught in a double bind in which the gendered oppression they encounter and that all too often creates stumbling blocks to progress is attributed erroneously and perniciously to feminist neglect of/criticism of desire for a family life. At the same time, various trivial consumerist decisions such as what color lipstick to wear are repackaged as an example of progressive feminist choice. Such contradictions are summarized by Angela McRobbie as a “double entanglement” of pro- and anti-feminist ideas, and by Rosalind Gill as a culture in which feminism is “simultaneously taken for granted and repudiated.”7 Lewis explains that the clearly contrasting views of Coppola’s filmic practice—one that she is an innovative feminist film-maker articulating important issues of contemporary womanhood, the other that she is a shallow, spoiled daughter of privilege who spends excessive amounts of her father’s money on frivolous girlishness—highlight a contrast that reflects the contemporary dilemmas of femininity that are at work in all aspects of her stardom. Rather than being feminist, anti-feminist, or even quasi-feminist, Sofia Coppola is strongly located in the current climate of postfeminism.8 Lewis argues that Coppola performs a perfect postfeminist version of femininity in her director-star persona: “Coppola’s persona embodies the archetypal ideal of ‘classic white femininity’; she is dressed, positioned, and constructed to connote elegance, managed sexuality, demureness, self-control, emotional etiquette, and an ethereal denial of the abject, the bodily, and the earthly.”9 At the same time, however, she is successful in the male-dominated world of American indiewood cinema, asserting and profiting from her feminine difference. Indeed, Coppola frequently refers to the importance of her feminine style, both to the atmosphere on her films’ sets during production and to the aesthetic of her finished films. For example, in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, she comments, “I don’t ever yell on set, and people wonder why, when my Dad is so loud. But I get my demeanour from my Mom. She’s great at observing those strange, funny, telling little details.”10 Equally, she is wary of such difference being named as feminist. In an interview with The Guardian promoting The Beguiled (2017), she is ambivalent about equating this interest in the female perspective with an explicitly feminist politics, explaining that “I don’t love that labelling [feminist] myself. . . . I’m happy if other people see it that way, but I just see it as having a female perspective, which isn’t always the same thing to me.”11 While Coppola’s opinion on her films is clearly not the only valid interpretive

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paradigm, her position as the films’ director gives her view a particular authority within their overall cultural reception, helping to shape initial reviews, press discussion, and audience responses. Coppola’s hesitancy over proclaiming her films as explicitly feminist while nevertheless valuing feminine activities and female experiences speaks directly to postfeminism’s rejection of (a certain notion of) feminism and its embrace of femininity as a form of empowerment. Femininity as an entrepreneurial asset at the heart of one’s film brand sums up the paradox whereby postfeminist cultural products benefit from feminism’s establishment of women as agentic subjects while questioning feminist rejection of femininity. Coppola is a hip, media-savvy, cool individual able to parlay considerable cultural capital from her family background, celebrity connections, and fashion and advertising insider knowledge into her beautifully designed film worlds, which linger on the pleasures of femininity for girls and women, including delicate confectionary, shoes, hairstyles, dancing, Twilight, iceskating, cooking, flower arranging, ballet lessons, and dressing-up. For Belinda Smaill, Coppola’s films’ focus on image and style means they eschew the social realism favored by many female filmmakers. Instead, her female protagonists embody “coolness” (in both senses of the word), individualism, and youthful allure; for Smaill this amounts to “a postfeminist rejection of popular feminism.”12 Furthermore, I have previously argued that rather than developing a counter-cinema feminist aesthetic of “destroying pleasure,” Coppola invents a quintessentially postfeminist aesthetic which takes femininity seriously and offers sustained, intimate engagements with female characters. The recurrent themes and motifs of her films—celebrity culture; fame; power; fashion; travel—are central questions of the postfeminist age.13 Previous work on Coppola has therefore established clear connections between her films’ narratives, style and tone, her director-star persona, and a postfeminist cultural sensibility. I will not elaborate further here on the extent to which Coppola’s films conform to the postfeminist canon, as interested readers can pursue the arguments cited above. This is especially the case in relation to Marie Antoinette (2006), which has now produced a good deal of scholarship interested in its expressive use of music and costume, producing interpretations of the film that could potentially allow it to sit fruitfully alongside Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004) and Mad Men (Matthew Weiner, 2007–15) as a study of frustrated “girl power.”14 Rather, in this chapter I argue Coppola’s films express the paradoxes, contradictions, and sheer fatigue of how it feels to be living as a female-identified subject in a society shaped by postfeminist ideology and its convoluted relationship to feminism, femaleness, and femininity. Coppola mobilizes a unique auteur brand based in style and form that reveals her characters’ emotional responses to a world shaped by the logics of neoliberal capitalism and postfeminist politics. From the release of The Virgin Suicides (1999) onward, Coppola’s films have created “a beautiful and tragic world”15 in which her protagonists struggle to find meaning and purpose in their lives. Although set in different historical periods and in different countries, her films all share an interest in heightened female visibility and showcase girls and women grappling with the gap between social expectations and private feelings. This emphasis on feeling chimes with

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A. O. Scott’s assertion that Coppola understands film is “not only a visual medium but also an emotional one.”16 Diane Negra’s analysis of postfeminist culture explains how it promulgates certain fantasies. It offers the allure of a feminine subjectivity unencumbered by the weight of complicated gender politics and bolstered by the seemingly more straightforward pleasures of domesticity, conventional romance, consumerism, and sentimentality.17 In contrast, Coppola’s films consider the more difficult and ugly aspects of such fantasies, showing negligent or overprotective parents, failing marriages, date rape, imprisonment, loneliness, and depression. A key image we find repeated across her films is a close-up on a young woman’s face crumpling into tears, usually in frustration upon discovering that the promised happiness (marriage, family life, heterosexual sex, exotic travel, popularity, fame) is compromised and flawed. Coppola’s female characters can be split broadly into two camps. First, there are those, usually more minor characters, such as Kelly (Anna Faris) in Lost in Translation (2003), or the Duchesse de Polignac (Rose Byrne) in Marie Antoinette, or the showgirls in Somewhere (2010), who noisily and happily embrace celebrity culture and invest heavily in the postfeminist myths of consumerism and sex as female self-determination and empowerment. The only time we see this female character in a major role is in The Bling Ring (2013), and these characters’ generally more minor roles sideline their uncomplicated enjoyment of postfeminist excess, an enjoyment that The Bling Ring aligns with criminality. Then there are the quieter, more reflective types, usually the dominant subjectivity in the film, such as the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) in the eponymous film, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) in Lost in Translation, Cleo (Elle Fanning) in Somewhere, and Laura (Rashida Jones) in On the Rocks (2020), who we may still see participating in these activities, but who know in their hearts of hearts that attempts to alleviate dissatisfaction and ennui will lead inevitably to failure. Coppola’s films, then, critique postfeminist culture from within, recognizing the chronic dissatisfaction many girls and women feel with postfeminism’s construction of “can-do” femininity. Although these characters live lives of stylish panache and material comfort, they remain boxed in by the tortuous logics of a postfeminist culture that tells them if they conform just a little more to an idealized, unreachable feminine ideal, they will be happy. We see this in The Virgin Suicides when Lux (Kirsten Dunst) cries to her mother that she can’t breathe, trapped in the family home after having broken curfew by returning late from the school prom. We see it again in On the Rocks when Laura complains “it’s exhausting,” after her dad excuses his infidelity to her mother by saying he just needed more love.

A Cinema of Privilege and Exhaustion Material objects are key to grappling with the complex relationship between Coppola’s films and postfeminist politics. This is because Coppola’s films reveal the ambivalence of the object as highly desired and deeply disappointing, and also owing to the relationship between Coppola, the immense privilege of inherited wealth, and how this shapes her films. Coppola’s films owe their existence and their style to her familiarity with, access

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to, and ease in negotiating moneyed worlds. Her films have been produced by her father’s production company, American Zoetrope; they are set in exclusive locations to which Coppola is granted an unusual level of access, such as the Park Hyatt Tokyo, the Chateau Marmont, or Paris Hilton’s home; and they display luxury goods. It is important to acknowledge here how much the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent austerity regimes have impacted upon questions of gender, politics, and popular female-friendly cultural production. As Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker write, postfeminism “reads differently now that the economic bubble has burst.”18 Postfeminism’s promise of empowerment via consumerism now feels more like a cruel lure than a feel-good aspiration. This sentiment is summed up in the expression “cruel optimism,” coined by Lauren Berlant, which she uses to describe how people can remain attached to the fantasy of what makes “a good life” even while they realize the harm and difficulty of such attachments.19 Catherine McDermott argues that postfeminist popular cultural production is increasingly producing narratives not of empowerment but of resilience, constructing girls in particular as capable of overcoming bleak and unforgiving environments, such as in the television series Girls (Lena Dunham, 2012–17, widely discussed as a self-conscious response to Sex and the City), the thriller Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014), and the film franchise The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012; Francis Lawrence, 2013, 2014, 2015).20 For Negra and Tasker, it is a mistake to consider the recession as a one-off event; instead, it needs to be understood as part of a broader process of redrawing economic subjectivities with the normalization of ongoing wealth transfers to the top.21 In this accelerated phase of neoliberal governance and the rise of a plutocratic elite, feminism has had a renaissance. Now, far from being a derided or repudiated philosophy, feminism itself has become fashionable and cool. It is promoted by high-profile female businesswomen and film and music celebrities such as Ivanka Trump, Sheryl Sandberg, Emma Watson, and Beyoncé Knowles Carter.22 However, in what Negra and Hannah Hamad compellingly analyze as a landscape in which residual postfeminist formations compete with proliferating new popular feminisms, “the de-stigmatisation of feminism has come at the price of its articulation through figures of privilege.”23 Broadly speaking, feminism itself has become co-opted into neoliberal global capitalism, a move anticipated by Hilary Radner when she argued that postfeminism should be more correctly understood as neo-feminism. Radner coined the term “neo-feminism” to draw out the links between the ideologically loaded discourses of choice, equality and freedom in neoliberal politics, and ideals inherited from second-wave feminism.24 Movements such as #MeToo and the very recent response (March 2021) to the murder of Sarah Everard in the UK nevertheless testify to a reignited feminist anger at the social injustices and gendered oppressions that characterize patriarchal authority, at least since the election of arch misogynist Donald Trump, who was recorded boasting about sexual abuse of women. In what Helen Wood characterizes as the “current hyper-affective social media climate,” female politicians such as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in the United States and Jess Phillips in the United Kingdom are able to make angry speeches—often labeled rants—that gain traction within the affective intensities of networked media and point out the continued existence of social injustice.25 Over the last decade, then, the emotional tone of postfeminist culture has changed. Feminism itself has become both more visible, indeed luminous, “leaning in” to

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corporate culture, but social media has also enabled the freer expression of female anger and despair. Coppola’s film output neatly straddles the break of the 2008 recession and the consequent recalibration of postfeminist politics and culture, with three of her films predating it and four of them post-dating it. However, rather than being marked by this break, all her films demonstrate some skepticism about postfeminist empowerment rhetoric. Coppola’s first three films, retroactively described as her trilogy of girlhood, all explored female adolescence as a way of critiquing the expectations and promises of postfeminism. The figure of the girl provides an accessible and relatable way to consider what it means to grow up identified as female in a given society and which female lifestyles are presented as possible or aspirational. The emphasis in neoliberal ideology on the individual as flexible and adaptive finds its most perfect expression in the plasticity of the young girl, unencumbered by the old sexism which has almost magically disappeared, and free to make choices about her life course. Coppola’s films’ frequent refusal to imagine consumerism as anything other than momentary distraction from a life course that often finishes with imprisonment or death anticipates the bleaker narratives that McDermott describes. Rather than empowerment, Coppola’s take on postfeminism is one that has always insisted on its requirements of female endurance and persistence.26 Indeed, I would like to suggest here that part of the appeal of Coppola’s films for her female audiences is that they show just how tiring it is to be female in a world that either insists that you can have it all if you only try a bit harder (“lean-in” neoliberal feminism/postfeminism) or treats you as a disposable sex object until you age into invisibility (popular misogyny and popular feminism’s response). At the same time, Coppola’s films continue to construct a typically postfeminist approach toward the consumption of luxury items as an index of lifestyle and taste, with Sam Adams noting that “On the Rocks is as steeped in opulence as any movie she’s made since Marie Antoinette.”27 Given that poor women of color continue to be the ones who have the menial jobs that involve cleaning and caring for the (white) world,28 Coppola’s repeated association of privileged, wealthy, usually white female bodies with exhaustion is thorny, difficult, and illustrates vividly the limitations of her films’ capacity for intersectional feminist politics. It is notable that the only Coppola film that sees girls and women exhausted from physical toil is The Beguiled where they are forced to grow their own food once all the Black slaves have left the seminary grounds (see Figure 20.1). (Indeed, one of their motivations for keeping Corporal McBurney [Colin Farrell] at the school is his physical strength and ability to help cultivate the garden, grown monstrously out of control with the departure of slave labor.)29 Coppola’s girlhood trilogy draws rather on the classical and art historical associations of feminine repose, showcasing reclining female bodies in images that recall paintings such as Titian’s Venus di Urbino, Velasquez’s Toilet of Venus, Millais’ Ophelia, and Kacere’s Maude.30 Nathan Lee in an otherwise vicious dismissal of Coppola nevertheless cannot help but notice the stylish way she plays with images of girls and women in somnolent poses, commenting, “no-one throws girls onto pillows like Sofia Coppola.” He traces the multiple appearances of listless, fed-up girls across Coppola’s trilogy: “the Lisbon girls sprawled in a languorous tangle of limbs”; “the panty-clad appetizer to Lost in Translation, that luscious morsel of pastel booty”; “[Marie

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Figure 20.1  The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017.

Antoinette] wakes up late, cozies in carriages, rolls in meadows, passes out on the couch, tumbles into cushions, and droops on damask whenever possible.”31 Coppola asks other white women to pose for her, and she looks at them, so that her play with iconic images of women in repose remains centered on a naturalized association of feminine lethargy with whiteness and wealth. Kendra Marston argues that these repeated images of girls staring out of windows, reclining on beds, wandering alone aimlessly through imposing architectural spaces, and lazing in gardens with friends create a distinctive tone and mood for Coppola’s cinema that trumps disparities of plot or setting. Marston explains that Coppola carves out an appealing space of quiet reflection in relation to seemingly deterministic discourses of postfeminism and neoliberalism. She concludes that while this reflective space provides the possibility for fruitful feminist engagement with Coppola’s films, her protagonists, empowered by their whiteness and their wealth, remain incapable of decentering themselves to see, hear, or engage with anyone outside their rarefied worlds so that they remain sublimely self-regarding. This is an accusation Marston levels finally at the films themselves as well as their characters.32 Coppola’s cinema does not evidence complete obliviousness to the racial and gendered hierarchies of who performs what kind of labor, however. Rather it reveals the obliviousness of pampered white worlds to the kinds of labor that sustain them in their own exhaustion. A striking sequence from The Bling Ring stages the arrest of Chloe (Claire Julien). Unlike the other arrests, which have been filmed dramatically with moving cameras, fast-paced music, and police raids, this is filmed in a static tableau, with a locked-down camera, with no music on the soundtrack. The family is having breakfast in a well-appointed kitchen decorated in shades of beige, cream, and white, as if to match the family’s blonde hair and white skin. Chloe’s mother is making beet juice at the counter at the back of the shot; it is the sound of the blender we hear at the start of

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the sequence. Just behind her the Hispanic maid works at the sink washing the dishes. Chloe’s father sits at a small table reading a newspaper, two small white dogs at his feet. The wail of a siren intrudes onto the soundtrack, getting louder, and the dogs start to bark. Chloe, who of course knows she has committed a crime, is the first person to react to the sirens coming her way, finding it more difficult to swallow her cereal. She is followed almost instantaneously by the maid, who pauses in her wiping of the dishes and twice turns around anxiously, looking toward the door. The film has given us no indication of her immigration status; regardless, she clearly assumes that the siren could indicate trouble for her. Her distress is ignored by the family, as Chloe’s mother pays more attention to her yapping dog, the aptly named Crystal. A moment later her father finally looks up from his newspaper. While Chloe interprets the siren as a threat because she has a concrete reason to be of interest to the police, the maid’s response suggests a generalized wariness and suspicion of the police. Meanwhile, Chloe’s white parents remain largely oblivious, with her father responding last. The unthinking privilege that whiteness accords Americans’ ingrained responses to the police is further confirmed in On the Rocks when Felix (Bill Murray) charms his way out of a speeding ticket. His biracial daughter, married to a Black man, tells him, “it must be very nice to be you” as the police help him jump-start his car so he can be on his way. Jones discusses that moment in the film with The Hollywood Reporter, explaining, It is every level of privilege: older white man privilege, money privilege, charm privilege. All these things that are coming to this moment to conspire to really understand that character [Felix] and also her [Laura’s] relationship with that character. We talked about, like, “What does she say?[”] She has to say something. You don’t have a Black family at home and see that moment happen and think, “Oh that was fun.” You think, “If my family was in this car, that would go down in a completely different way.”33 Clearly, the tiredness that Laura feels at her dad’s flirtation with the ballet teacher at her daughter’s dance class, or Cleo’s mother refusal to comfort Johnny (Stephen Dorff) one more time when he calls her crying, is of a different order to the exhausted bodies we find in the art-house “cinema of precarity” as analyzed by Lauren Berlant, Elena Gorfinkel, and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz.34 Discussing films such as Rosetta (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes, 1999), Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008), and The Florida Project (Sean Baker, 2017) in which characters struggle with unemployment, homelessness, sex work, and addiction, the exhaustion they diagnose is borne from extreme hardship in a society that has abandoned welfare and left people to scrabble for crumbs. In this reading, neoliberal governance is shown in these films as offering only fantasies of an “ordinary” life (a home, a job, a family) to people eking out a bare existence. Coppola’s aesthetic of exhaustion lies at the other end of this sensibility. Consider for example its inflection in one of her most recent pieces of work, a high-fashion photo shoot commissioned for W magazine in March 2021. Coppola worked with three of her closest collaborators, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, and Rashida Jones. All three have taken leading roles in her films, and Dunst especially has been considered a muse.35 The photos feature Dunst, Fanning, and Jones in designer clothes (brands such as Celine by Hedi Slimane, Chanel,

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and Rodarte) and expensive jewelry (Van Cleef and Arpels, Cartier, Beladora) kneeling on beds, lounging on the floor, or lying on the grass. The interiors are dominated by heavy floral wallpapers and full-length drapes. Vases of fresh flowers, crisp white or floral linens, and thick beige carpets complete a mise-en-scène, which is simultaneously luxurious and claustrophobic. Coppola explains the images: I think we’re all starved for some beauty and fashion after being home. I wanted the whole thing to be feminine and fancy, because we’re too casual these days. The idea is that these women are lying around like they’re tired after trying on so many gowns.36 Excess and indulgence, tied back to femininity, rather than economic precarity, is the key to the attitudes and poses of these bodies. If a cinema of precarity shows us the social and emotional as well as economic impact of neoliberal governance on society’s most dispossessed, Coppola’s cinema of privilege shows us precisely the flipside of this, the social, emotional, and economic impact of the contemporary political order on those in positions of power and influence such as celebrities, reality-TV starlets, and socialites. While controversial for obvious reasons, Coppola’s decision to remove the character of the Black slave woman from her version of The Beguiled can be read along similar lines, as a focus precisely on those who benefit from, rather than suffer under, the ruling order. Coppola’s films show us then precisely how the subject position that is supposed to be at the apex of the neoliberal postfeminist system—the upper-class white girl/woman— feels stuck, trapped, and tired. Coppola’s critique of postfeminist values is visible in her use of two iconic objects of Sex and the City-style postfeminist culture: shoes and cocktails.

Shoes: Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring both feature montages in which shoes play an important part. The Bling Ring opens with four rapid shots of shoes, placing them as the most significant of the objects coveted by the LA teens whom the film shows breaking into celebrity homes and stealing their designer goods. The first shot, which lasts the longest at more than two seconds, is a left-right pan gliding over fourteen high-heeled, pointed-toe pairs of shoes that pop with color, glitter, and accessories. They clearly belong to a woman—later in the film we discover that these are shots from Paris Hilton’s special shoe wardrobe. (Coppola persuaded Hilton to let her film in her home and Hilton was a real-life target of the gang.) The shoes are displayed on racks, toes facing forwards, as if in a shop. This shot functions as an establishing shot, as the following three shots are all brief, each one lasting barely a second, consisting of close-ups of a section of the shoe shelf we saw in the first shot. The camera moves throughout the sequence, beginning with a left-right pan over the first two shots, then switching to right-left for the third shot, and back to the left-right on the fourth. This imitates the rapid swiping between images and goods of the hyperlinked digital world, which frames the activities of the eponymous gang; Maryn Wilkinson argues that The Bling Ring shows us how teen

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Figure 20.2  The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013.

girls are both produced by and reproduce the affective values of this digital world and its confusions of objects, images, and people.37 We see the names of the cast members playing them superimposed over the images of the shoes, confirming the links between the commodity object and the subjectivity it produces (see Figure 20.2). Coppola’s film title removes the direct reference to designer shoes that was in the 2010 Vanity Fair article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins” that was the inspiration for the film’s story; the credit sequence however rapidly establishes the importance of shoes to a branded, aspirational celebrity lifestyle. The rapid camera cutting and movement, scored to the ear-piercingly loud abrasive metal tones of Sleigh Bell’s “Crown on the Ground,” gives the opening images of the film a hyperkinetic energy imitating the adrenaline buzz of a shopping or crime spree. Of all the items stolen by the teens, shoes are highlighted as central to the construction of a desirable, elitist, luxurious, covetable feminine identity. Marie Antoinette’s shoe montage takes place within a two-minute forty-secondlong music video-type sequence that also includes fans, pastries, wigs, silk swatches, champagne, and extravagant, extreme hairstyles. Its soundtrack is the song “I Want Candy,” a 1982 hit for the New Wave band Bow Wow Wow whose lead singer, Annabella, was like Marie Antoinette, a teenager. The sequence occurs just after Marie Antoinette has learned that her sister-in-law has had a child while she has so far been unable to consummate her marriage. The soundtrack and images work together to allow Coppola’s cinematic Marie Antoinette to express a teen-girl desire for “candy”—sweet treats that

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compensate for her lack of agency and control over her life. The sequence opens with a left-right pan across five brightly colored, highly decorated shoes; later in the sequence we will see further beribboned shoe boxes opened, so the scene offers us altogether images of over twenty pairs of silk shoes in pinks, blues, and yellows, trimmed with fur and velvet or sparkling with diamonds. As the pan stops, pairs of hands reach in and grab the shoes and we then cut to one of the (if not the) most discussed single shots in all of Coppola’s films. It is a floor-level shot of a pair of feet and ankles clad in blue stockings and shoes, with a pink hem barely visible at the top of the frame. The feet shift slightly as if the person wearing them wants to admire the shoes from different angles, trimmed as they are with diamonds and bows. In the background of the shot, unworn, are a pair of very similar pink silk shoes and a lavender pair of Converse high tops. The scene gains its frisson from its deliberate anachronistic placing of twentieth-century casual footwear into a film set in the eighteenth century, part of the film’s broader playfulness with notions of accuracy in costume drama. As Heidi Brevik-Zender points out, the shoes that look as if they are authentic, the heels, are as much a sign of (post)modernity as the Converse.38 Designed by Manolo Blahnik at the request of the film’s costume designer, Milena Canonero, they testify to his self-branding prowess and the association of his shoes with contemporary notions of feminine decadence and luxury. In an interview with Kent Jones at the Lincoln Film Center promoting The Bling Ring, Coppola says she never expected to make a true crime story, and Jones replies, “maybe you could argue that Marie Antoinette is a kind of true crime story. People plundered and pillaged a nation.” Coppola replies, to general laughter, “Uh, yeah, I didn’t think of that. I’ve heard of comparisons because of the amount of shoes, but I didn’t think about the crime aspect.”39 The linking of shoes with criminality is nevertheless telling about the roles they play in both films. The montages use all the devices of cinema—color, movement, rhythm, speed, montage, sound—to create the shoes they showcase as desirable, beautiful objects of our gaze, both building on and feeding into their symbolic role within postfeminist culture as central to the branding of the female self as successful and desirable. Yet the shoes are only gained by the films’ protagonists through sheer entitled ignorance and greed, born from unthinking privilege. Contemporary girls and women are exhorted to participate in a gendered beauty culture in which high-heeled shoes figure not only as the epitome of luxury but as a means to shore up self-esteem: one pair of shoes will never be enough. At the same time, unfettered access to quantities of these shoes depends on developing a purposefully narrow, indeed narcissistic, worldview which mitigates against social justice.

Cocktails: Lost in Translation and On the Rocks Coppola’s use of shoes is part of their deployment within broader postfeminist cultural production, which uses them as a shorthand for female glamour, independence, and autonomy. In contrast to this use of shoes as a corollary of her characters’ alignment with postfeminist values, Coppola’s characters’ cocktail drinking is marked by a more cynical

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and detached attitude toward its dominant ideas. As Stephen Schneider and Craig N. Owens argue, contemporary cocktail culture is not just the drinking culture that has historically surrounded mixed drinks, but also . . . culture as it might be viewed through the lens of the cocktail . . . [T]he old-fashioneds and martinis that litter the world of Mad Men point to the excesses of a masculine Madison Avenue, while the cosmopolitans of Sex and the City offer us instead a symbol for the frivolity of a New York that is centered instead on Fifth Avenue.40 By contrast, Coppola uses cocktails as a trigger for thoughtful dialogue between a man and a woman that aims with some seriousness at equality and frankness. Rather than the cocktail as the opportunity for women to be “all girls together,” Lost in Translation and On the Rocks both offer us scenes where a man and a woman drink cocktails together. The settings emphasize the sophisticated urban locale. Charlotte and Bob (Bill Murray) drink at the cocktail bar in the hotel where they are both staying, the Park Hyatt Tokyo. The sequence is shot mainly from a locked-down camera position offering a classic two-shot of them side by side, accompanied by cuts away to respective overthe-shoulder and reverse shots. Bob drinks a Suntory whisky; when Charlotte says she doesn’t know what she wants, he quotes from the commercial he is starring in, lifting his glass and saying, “for relaxing times, make it Suntory times.” We have already seen that the commercial proposes a preposterous take on 1950s American Rat Pack masculinity. Charlotte laughs a little and orders a vodka tonic. As Lucy Bolton comments, their conversation is direct and honest from the beginning. Bob says he is “taking a break from his wife, forgetting his son’s birthday and getting paid two million dollars to make an advertisement when he could be doing a play.” Charlotte suggests he may be having a mid-life crisis, enquiring of him, “Did you buy a Porsche yet?”. Charlotte is under no illusions about the potential stereotype of the man to whom she is speaking. . . . [T]he attitude of this young woman is one of cynicism and amusement. This is significant, as it establishes from the outset a frank dialogue of equality between Bob and Charlotte, reflected in the two-shots of them sitting at the bar.41 In On the Rocks, Laura drinks cocktails with her dad Felix on several occasions. The first scene takes place over lunch at The Sentinel, as Felix holds forth on his theories about men’s sexual attraction to young females based in evolutionary history (“men preferred the adolescent females as they were easier to catch and mate with”) and Laura makes the odd ironic comment while turning the pages of her menu. The waitress brings them the cocktails he has ordered them to drink; Felix notices her feet turned out and asks if she is a ballet dancer to which she smiles and says she trained at the Bolshoi. Laura interrupts, reminding her dad they need to order food as she has to pick up the children soon, and then impatiently asks, “can’t you ever just act normal around any woman?” For her birthday dinner, they go to the “21” Club and sit across from each other at the table where, Felix tells Laura, Humphrey Bogart proposed to Lauren Bacall. They are both drinking martinis as he slides a present across the table; it’s his watch that she used

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to enjoy wearing as a child. As Laura ties the watch around her wrist, Felix tells her, “I remember the first moment—the moment—when I first recognized you as a person . . . You were about nine months old . . . You were sitting on the ground and I picked you up and your diaper was sopping wet with mud and water and we looked at each other and just started laughing and there you were.” Laura and Felix smile at each other in a classic shot/reverse shot sequence, which confirms this moving account of recognition. Both these films build on what Janet McCabe analyzes as Bill Murray’s star persona of “complex male ambivalence.”42 The characters Murray plays are not victims, but they are restricted and frustrated by culturally sanctioned models of masculinity. In these films, the cocktail drinking scenes, filmed to emphasize equality and conversation, have the woman teasing or chiding the man about his performance of clichéd tropes of heterosexual masculinity as sexual seduction and conquest. There’s also an undercurrent of melancholia, however, underlined by a remarkable shot in On the Rocks. Laura and her dad sit by side drinking martinis in Bemelmans bar, its beautiful murals behind them visible in the two-shot (see Figure 20.3). Laura worries her husband no longer finds her attractive and the camera moves into a close-up on her troubled face. As she glances down, the camera follows her look and moves into an extreme close-up on the glass of her martini. A tear from Laura’s face splashes into its clear liquid, and a slow-motion shot captures the ripples through the drink. Chet Baker’s jazz classic “I Get Along Without You Very Well” plays on the soundtrack, its lyrics an account of heartbreak and need for love rather than the individual autonomy promulgated by neoliberal politics. The image fades to a beautiful shot of the New York skyline at night still accompanied by the jazz.

Figure 20.3  On the Rocks, directed by Sofia Coppola © Apple TV+ 2020.

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Coppola’s cocktail drinking scenes offer a complex take on a postfeminist trope. They share its conflicted cynicism about and attraction to the traditional heterosexual romance narrative, but rather than a woman indulging with friends we see her using this to attempt to educate the man to see women as people too. The significance of dialogue in these scenes aligns them with the comedy of remarriage genre as identified by Stanley Cavell.43 Both these films show female characters struggling in their marriages; conversation is key to the mutual exploration of souls that constitutes (re)marriage. These conversations happen not between the married couple but between a woman considering divorce and a man outside of that marriage but who can comment on the institution. The cocktail allows the woman to gain critical purchase on her experiences of heterosexual seduction and romance.

Conclusion Coppola’s shoes and cocktails show us that the fantasy postfeminism offers was appealing but hollow right from the start. This realization of postfeminism’s essential crassness is the basis for the start of self-knowledge and a more radical refashioning of the self. Coppola’s films then continue to carve out a paradoxical and challenging space within postfeminist cultural production. They benefit commercially in producing a highly appealing successful image of postfeminist femininity; they also critique this process of commodification and idealization of young white women by postfeminist culture. Coppola repurposes material objects associated with postfeminist culture within her own auteurist universe. They show how she attends to showing specificities of female experience and thought on-screen and how this freedom remains dependent on privileged access to material comfort and luxury goods.

Notes 1 See, for example, Tania Modleski, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age (London: Routledge, 1991); Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, eds., Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009). 2 Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Media Sensibility,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 147–61. 3 McRobbie, Aftermath of Feminism. 4 Imelda Whelehan, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary (London: Bloomsbury, 2002); Charlotte Brunsdon, “Feminism, Postfeminism, Martha, Martha, and Nigella,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 2 (2005): 110–16; Negra and Tasker, Interrogating Postfeminism; Deborah Jermyn, Sex and the City (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2009); Hilary Radner, NeoFeminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture (London: Routledge, 2010); Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters, Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013).

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5 Her collaboration with Apple TV is through the film production company A24. She had worked previously with them on The Bling Ring and retained creative control of On the Rocks. It premiered at the New York Film Festival and had a limited theatrical release as well as streaming on Apple TV, showing her continued commitment to festivals and cinema viewing for her films, despite the restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. 6 Caitlin Yunuen Lewis, “Cool Postfeminism: The Stardom of Sofia Coppola,” in In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Male Celebrity, ed. Su Holmes and Diane Negra (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 174–98. 7 McRobbie, Aftermath of Feminism; Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture,” 161. 8 Lewis, “Cool Postfeminism,” 180. 9 Lewis, “Cool Postfeminism,” 187. 10 “LA Confidential: Sofia Coppola Interview,” The Daily Telegraph, December 6, 2010. 11 Sofia Coppola qtd. in Guy Lodge, “Sofia Coppola: ‘I’ve Never Felt I Had to Fit into the Majority View’,” The Guardian, July 2, 2017. 12 Belinda Smaill, “Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 148–62. 13 Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London: I B Tauris, 2017), 5. 14 Diana Diamond, “Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” in Fashion in Film, ed. Adrienne Munich (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 203–31; Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, “Marie Antoinette: Fashion, Third-Wave Feminism, and Chick Culture,” Literature/Film Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2010): 98–116; Christina Lane and Nicole Richter, “The Feminist Poetics of Sofia Coppola: Spectacle and Self–consciousness in Marie Antoinette (2006),” in Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema, ed. Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer (London: Routledge, 2012), 189–202. 15 Lane and Richter, “Feminist Poetics of Sofia Coppola,” 200. 16 A. O. Scott, “Evanescent Trees and Sisters in an Enchanted 1970s Suburb,” New York Times, April 20, 2000. 17 Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants: Fantasizing the Reclamation of the Self in Postfeminism (London: Routledge, 2009). 18 Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, eds., Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 19 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 20 Catherine McDermott, “Contemporary Femininities after Postfeminism: Genre, Affect, Aesthetics,” PhD diss. (Manchester Metropolitan University, 2018). 21 Negra and Tasker, Gendering the Recession. 22 A copy of Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean in: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead is on Laura’s bookshelf in On the Rocks. 23 Diane Negra and Hannah Hamad, “The New Plutocractic (Post)Feminism,” in The New Feminist Literary Studies, ed. Jennifer Cooke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 85. 24 Radner, Neo-Feminist Cinema. 25 Helen Wood, “Fuck the Patriarchy: Towards an Intersectional Politics of Irreverent Rage,” Feminist Media Studies 9, no. 4 (2019): 610. 26 It is worth noting here, however, that the marketing of Coppola’s films has changed in line with these shifts in postfeminist norms. Spinnaker, the digital marketing agency, was commissioned by Sony to create a marketing campaign for Marie Antoinette, which targeted youth-oriented

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social networking sites such as Pizco, Get Lippy, and Refresh. The aim of the campaign was to “encompass . . . the aspirational nature of today’s youth culture and the decadency of the period in which Marie Antoinette is set” and third-party sites were chosen “to speak to our specific target group of students and young fashion-conscious teenagers.” See Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 148. Marketing’s emphasis on fashion and aspiration, aligning Marie Antoinette with postfeminist values, was reinforced in the decision to sell the DVD in hot pink packaging. By contrast, The Beguiled’s campaign foregrounded themes of female anger and revenge, with the Focus Features produced teaser trailer featuring Colin Farrell shouting, “what have you done to me, you vengeful bitches?” This phrase dominated the marketing, with a Twitter feed that used the hashtag #vengefulbitches as the main marketing theme for the film. The website Nylon​.c​om hosted giveaways of film merchandise including black tank tops with the slogan “Vengeful Bitches,” modeled by minor celebrities such as Luann de Lesseps on Instagram. 27 Sam Adams, “What is the Bougiest Status Symbol in Sofia Coppola’s New Movie?” Slate, October 23, 2020. 28 Françoise Vergès, Un féminisme décolonial (Fabrique: Paris, 2019). 29 It is useful to consider here too how Colin Farrell’s Irishness informs this association of his body with hard physical labor. As William Brown points out, Farrell’s McBurney, unlike Clint Eastwood’s performance of the role in the 1971 version of the film, is an Irish mercenary who joined the Union Army for citizenship rather than ideological reasons. Brown goes onto explain that “as has been widely acknowledged, the Irish have often been elided with blackness in American history, meaning not only that the north’s victory in the Civil War is built upon an ongoing and exploitative migration of peoples across the Atlantic, but also that the assassination of McBurney is in some senses the assassination by white women of the black other.” See William Brown, “A (Mush)room of One’s Own: Feminism, Posthumanism, and Race in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled,” Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image 7, no. 1 (2020): 87. We might note too that it ties blackness back to manual labor. 30 As Suzanne Ferriss explains, “hers are not slavish reproductions of still images. They are reproductions in the broadest sense of the term, simulations that place her images in dialogue with their original source.” See Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 164. 31 Nathan Lee, “Pretty Vacant: The Radical Frivolity of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” Film Comment, September-October 2006, 24–6. 32 Kendra Marston, Postfeminist Whiteness: Problematising Melancholic Burden in Contemporary Hollywood (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 164–90. 33 Rashida Jones, quoted in Mikey O’Connell, “‘On the Rocks’: Sofia Coppola and Rashida Jones Talk about their Long History and Bill Murray’s Stunt Driving,” The Hollywood Reporter, February 1, 2021. 34 Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Elena Gorfinkel, “Weariness, Waiting: Enduration and Art Cinema’s Tired Bodies,” Discourse 34, no. 2–3 (Spring/Fall 2012): 311–47; and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, “‘Tipped over, but still growing’: Cruel Optimism and Queer Temporalities in The Florida Project,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 39, no. 1 (2020): 1–31. 35 Anna Backman Rogers, “And That I See a Darkness: The Stardom of Kirsten Dunst in Collaboration with Sofia Coppola in Three Images,” Film-Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2019): 114–36. 36 Sofia Coppola, qtd. in Andrea Whittle, “Kirsten Dunst, Rashida Jones, and Elle Fanning Are All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go,” W, March 2021. 37 Maryn Wilkinson, “Leisure/Crime, Immaterial Labor, and the Performance of the Teenage Girl in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012) and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013),” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 12, no. 12 (2017): 20–37.

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38 Heidi Brevik-Zender, “Let Them Wear Manolos: Fashion, Walter Benjamin, and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” Camera Obscura 26, no. 3 (2011): 176–90. 39 Sofia Coppola, “Summer Talks: The Bling Ring,” Film Society of New York Lincoln Center, June 2013. 40 Stephen Schneider and Craig N. Owens, The Shaken and The Stirred: The Year’s Work in Cocktail Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020), 4. 41 Lucy Bolton, Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema, and Thinking Women (London: Palgrave, 2012), 112. 42 Janet McCabe, “Lost in Transition: Problems of Modern (Heterosexual) Romance and the Catatonic Male Hero in the Post-feminist Age,” in Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Stacey Abbott and Deborah Jermyn (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 165. 43 Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

21 RACE AND CLASS MAKING WHITENESS: THE ABSENT PRESENCE OF RACE AND CLASS IN SOFIA COPPOLA’S FEATURE FILMS Jamie Ann Rogers

In Sofia Coppola’s feature directorial debut The Virgin Suicides (1999), Cecilia Lisbon (Hanna Hall), the youngest of the suicide-bound sisters, travels with her parents from their Detroit suburb to the city where she visits with Dr. Horniker (Danny DeVito). In effort to diagnose the root of her troubles, Horniker displays a series of ink blots to the girl. “A banana. A swamp. An afro,” she says, nonplussed. A brief exterior shot and sound bridge momentarily sutures the phallic, vulvic, and racialized images Cecilia interprets to the city outside—Detroit in the 1970s—linking its decline to hers. As in virtually all of Coppola’s feature films, reference to race and class conflict lies largely outside the images on-screen, often in fleeting references or through casting and soundtrack. The subtle link implied in the scene between Cecilia and the city is in fact among Coppola’s most pointed references to the connection between the white, wealthy ennui that characterizes much of her films and the raced labor economy that produces that class’ excesses. Coppola’s oeuvre otherwise remains deeply ambivalent to race and labor within its critiques of masculinist image regimes and celebrity and material culture. In her critical text Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison interrogates how literary texts use whiteness to invent and maintain normative Western identity. She names several recurring themes in US literature that she says show up through signifying tropes of Blackness: “social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; . . . innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell.”

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Morrison argues that Blackness is used in cultural productions to aid in constructions of Western normative identity and is signified not only through the physical appearance of Black characters but also through “significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, [and] heavily nuanced conflicts” that relate to race. Blackness and Black characters often serve as “surrogate and enabler,” allowing writers to examine and develop white identity through Black supporting characters and white opposition to Blackness. Ultimately, Morrison concludes, signs of Blackness function as defenses “against the psychic costs of guilt and despair” that characterize modernity and postmodernity in the Western world.1 The theoretical toolbox Morrison develops is useful in interrogating Coppola’s films not only for how they use Blackness to construct and maintain whiteness generally but also to better understand how they construct and maintain a type of white Western feminist consciousness, in particular. Borrowing from Audre Lorde’s metaphor that the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house, feminist scholar Anna Backman Rogers has argued that Coppola’s work “feminizes the master’s tools in order to reveal the weak and provisional foundations upon which his house is built.”2 In what follows, I turn to Morrison’s tools instead to reveal how the feminization of the master’s tools merely rebuilds his white house, if now with a feminine foundation.

Periods and Places The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette (2006), and The Beguiled (2017) are all markedly distinct in their historical and geopolitical settings, yet each of the films explores characteristics that are relevant to contemporary understandings of Western normative identity. Sharon Lin Tay identifies Coppola’s work as akin to the “cinema of loneliness” that Robert Kolker outlines in his study of 1970s independent American directors but with a particular focus on gendered isolation within oppressive domestic spaces.3 Reviewers often describe Coppola’s privileged yet troubled characters as living within “gilded cages,” a metaphor for the incongruity and isolation of the worlds of excess, and often of ease, that Coppola’s characters expose as both desirable and reprehensible. Her films offer no easy reconciliation. On one hand, artistic choices in Coppola’s oeuvre appropriate patriarchal filmmaking toward a feminist practice. The ahistoricism of Marie Antoinette and the absence of slavery in The Beguiled, for example, leave the films free to concentrate on the dynamics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century systems of white gendered oppression. On the other hand, read through the lens of Morrison’s text, “underscored omissions” and “startling contradictions” in both films shore up feminine whiteness within systems of white supremacy and labor exploitation. The ahistoricism and historical omissions in both films are not, of course, accidental. Coppola has commented that her aim was to focus on the individual experiences of her characters rather than the political particularity of their situations. Marie Antoinette, for example, is most concerned with the personal circumstances of the fourteen-yearold Maria Antonia (Kirsten Dunst) as she enters into both the pomp and the restrictions of the French court. At a 2020 screening of the film, Coppola noted that “[Marie] was

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in the position where you just couldn’t win. So I was really drawn to . . . telling a girl’s story of growing up in that extreme situation.”4 Rather than a historic examination of the circumstances surrounding the fall of the French monarchy, the film is about the interior life of a girl-turned-queen who goes about making a world for herself within the claustrophobic constraints of tradition and life on display. Like many of Coppola’s characters, Marie is enraptured with a world of pretty things, but this is largely as a substitute for her intense solitude and loneliness, what Kohei Usuda describes as a condition of imprisonment that produces the time for leisure.5 The film’s mise-en-scène (lush and “girly”) and soundscape (contemporary to the late twentieth century and poppy) engender identification with girlhood and the present, according to Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. Through that identification, Marie is meant to be understood as a “real girl” trapped within extraordinary circumstances.6 The effect is to situate the film as resolutely sympathetic toward Marie, first as a naive young dauphine, then as the party-going queen who has managed to find joy in life despite her near-complete confinement to Versailles and what Backman Rogers has described as the politicizing of her body. The film, Backman Rogers says, “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.”7 Excess of consumption and object fetishization function as a form of exchange within the system of patriarchy, with Marie’s fascination with objects reflecting the objectification of her body.8 Marie’s excessive consumption does not cast her as the “figurehead of hatred” that is otherwise her historical legacy but rather recuperates her by making visible the impossibility of her situation.9 Crucially, however, the maintenance of this recuperative imaging of Marie requires the ahistoricism that Coppola’s film constructs. That is, reference to the impossibility of the conditions that Marie Antoinette’s subjects endure—particularly the suffering of the enslaved and rebelling people of France’s Haitian colony, which largely produced the monarchy’s wealth and excess of objects—would detract from the film’s study of entrapment within the gendered politics of the gilded and ruling classes. By turning the lens away from the suffering of entire peoples (French laborers, the enslaved) and toward Marie’s entrapment, Marie Antoinette elides the “guilt and despair” that may accompany histories of the extreme poverty, hunger, violence, and dehumanization that mark turn-of-the-century France. The suffering of the people is instead refigured into imagined forms of freedom that “the people” enjoy and are inaccessible to Marie, and that are signaled by racialized marks of difference. The Comtesse du Barry (Asia Argento), who is the maîtresse-en-titre, or the chief royal mistress to the king, Louis XV, serves this function in the early half of the film. Like Marie, the Comtesse is brought to Versailles primarily for the use of her body. Her outsider status is exacerbated by her rejection of pretensions to sexual innocence and the flagrant enjoyment she displays in being King Louis’ lover. The real-life Comtesse was known for her beautiful blond hair and striking blue eyes. In the film, however, her dark hair and brown eyes are contrasted with Marie’s blondness and blue eyes. Her bolder, darker-colored costuming is also contrasted with the pastel color palette associated with Marie, and her exotic pets and a young Black servant indicate a proximity to racial alterity that Marie’s lightness and whiteness eschews. (She, by contrast, is imaged

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frequently with light-colored dogs and is only attended by white servants.) The metaphor of darkness aligns the Comtesse’s sexual “freedom” with the common trope of hypersexual nonwhite femininity. Marie’s disdain for the Comtesse, however, is a manifestation of envy for the freedoms the Comtesse appears to enjoy in contrast to the limits of Marie’s world. As a courtesan, however, it is the Comtesse’s job to express pleasure in sex; her enjoyment is merely imagined by the film and Marie. The film’s concern, then, is with how Marie’s particular body is politicized, not how different women’s bodies—especially laboring and racialized bodies like the Comtesse’s—are politicized more generally. A pivotal moment in the film—what Morrison might describe as a “gearshift”10—occurs when Marie realizes the repression of her sexual desires and pursues the freedom she imagines the Comtesse to have been enjoying all along. As Marie takes a lover and experiences joyous sex for the first time, an anachronistic soundtrack of Adam and the Ants’ “Kings of the Wild Frontier” bridges the scene to contemporary sexual politics within which, on one hand, sexual transgression remains racially coded and, on the other, feminism is associated with sexual freedom. Adam Ant croons: A new royal family A wild nobility We are the family . . . I feel beneath the white There is a redskin suffering From centuries of taming I feel beneath the white, there is a redskin suffering.11 The song’s lament for the “redskin’s” suffering is not a lament for the suffering of the “other” under French colonial rule but rather for Marie’s suffering under white, patriarchal colonial norms in which her body is understood only as a vessel for the king’s heir. The trope of the hypersexual other is again turned around here, used not to expose the exploitation of laboring, raced women but rather to reveal how Marie navigates her white, cloistered space. Situating Marie’s experiences by way of the imagined freedoms of the surrogate other allows the film to maintain Marie as a resolutely sympathetic pawn of patriarchal national politics rather than a player in them. When her carriage pulls away from Versailles in the final scene—as she is fleeing the space that represents the contradiction of both her caged and joyous existence—she is wistful. When Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) asks her if she is admiring her “lime avenue,” she softly answers, “I’m saying goodbye.” The scene cuts to an image of her ruined chambers, destroyed by the angry, hungry mob that we all know will later take her head. Marie’s regret here does not seem to relate to fear, however, nor to the suffering her excesses have caused. It is not an expression of guilt or despair but instead an expression of sadness at leaving the gilded cage that she had made bearable, even enjoyable, for herself. Coppola’s next historical drama, The Beguiled, is similarly preoccupied with a world of white women who are entrapped within an impossible situation. Also like Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled minimizes the presence of certain historical details in order to direct spectators toward the particularity of the women’s entrapment rather than the politics

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that creates it. The only mention of slavery in this Civil War film, for example, comes when the young Amy (Oona Laurence) says simply, “The slaves left,” to the union solider John McBurney (Colin Farrell), whom she has found injured in the woods. The film is based on a 1966 novel by Thomas Cullinan, which includes two central Black characters (an enslaved woman named Mattie and a mixed-race free woman named Edwina), and a previous film adaptation directed by Don Siegel (1971), which retained Mattie (renamed Hallie in the film) and cast Edwina as white. Coppola’s film excises Mattie/Hallie altogether and casts Edwina as Coppola’s quintessential image of innocent/impossible feminine whiteness: Kirsten Dunst. The choice to excise Black characters, Coppola has said, was deliberate. Her aim was to focus on what she termed “universal” themes of desire and gendered power dynamics, not race. She added that she was concerned that the film would perpetuate negative stereotypes of Black women if she were to include the enslaved character, noting that Cullinan’s depiction of Mattie was a caricature. “Young girls watch my films and this was not the depiction of an African-American character I would want to show them,” she said in an e-mail to BuzzFeed.12 This is a somewhat strange admission, given that the strength of Coppola’s adaptation of the novel and film is in its lack of fidelity to the source material, which in many ways constructs women as flat, vindictive, and interchangeable. And while Cullinan’s Mattie is rife with stereotypes, Hallie (Mae Mercer) in Siegel’s film is in fact the only of the characters to show insight into and resistance against McBurney’s manipulations. Coppola’s admission is helpful, however, in understanding how the film’s exploration of gendered power dynamics reworks white Western post-enlightenment understandings of the “universal.” If the “The Declaration of the Rights of Man,” written in France in the years leading up to Marie Antoinette’s beheading, demands that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” then the document, too, delineates who counts as “man” or as a fully enfranchised human. And as Mary Wollstonecraft pointed out as early as 1790 and 1792, neither Black people nor women are included in that definition.13 The power of Coppola’s film is in reformulating the structure of universality to place white women squarely within its rights—within the “freedom to do everything which injures no one else” as determined by law. As universal law also includes the right to protect one’s property, the women are within their rights to kill McBurney when he threatens it and them. While the previous versions of The Beguiled also, of course, end in McBurney’s death, Coppola’s subversion of the dominating and desiring male gaze configures the killing in ways that situate the women as rights-bearing universal subjects. That is, while the previous versions of The Beguiled present the killing as murderous and vindictive, Coppola structures it in terms of solidarity and self-preservation. Throughout Coppola’s film, the women exercise the power to gaze at their shared object of desire (McBurney), while also refusing the “ugly feeling” of envy that is so often attached to women in film and literature.14 Instead, the women stand together in solidarity—even if it is a wary solidarity on the part of Edwina, as we shall see shortly— when McBurney betrays them. The power of white women to gaze, desire, and stand in solidarity, however, has a long history that is predicated on the shoring up of whiteness in the face of encroaching alterity and racial threat, particularly in the postbellum period that is on the horizon of the film’s historical timeline. As Louise Michele Newman notes, in the postbellum period, “[l]egal recognition of black male citizenship meant that white

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women could no longer claim a shared political status (disenfranchisement) with black men.”15 Newman goes on to say that many antebellum suffragettes emphasized “white women’s racial-cultural superiority” to secure power within the white supremacist ideology that remained dominant in the rapidly changing, postwar worlds of both the south and the north. Ironically, then, Coppola’s excising of slavery and Black characters from The Beguiled is not a historical anachronism but rather reflects white feminist ideologies that emerged from the postbellum period and remain operative today. The absence of direct representations of Blackness notwithstanding, Blackness as a signifier of threat to white innocence remains. William Brown points out that within the film’s minimalist soundtrack, the repetition of the Civil War folk song “Lorena” stands out not just because of its narrative of a woman eluding love (or “control”) but also because of its film history. It was used in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), “which tells the story of a spoilt southern white girl trying to become a woman during the Civil War,” and The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), “which tells the story of a racist white man trying to rescue his niece from Native Americans.”16 The song, then, is associated with white supremacist film history, which is to say, with the dominant history of film. Brown also notes that by casting McBurney as a recent Irish immigrant to the United States (unlike the image of a white American man signified by Clint Eastwood in the Siegel version), Coppola subtly aligns his character with Blackness, for in nineteenth-century America, Irish immigrants and their descendants were largely coded as “other” within a raced labor economy; that is, they were coded as not quite “Black,” in that they were legally barred from slavery, but not quite white either in that many were indentured servants or descendants of indentured servants.17 As the only male and raced figure to enter into the white women’s world of the Farnsworth house, McBurney becomes a sign of what Morrison describes as the “sinful” but “sensual” other and an object of what Robert Young calls “colonial desire”—an exotic figure of both attraction and repulsion.18 Furthermore, McBurney is a merchant solider, not a patriot. While this allows room for the girls to “forgive” his alliance with the north, it also indicates that as a laborer, he is of a different class than all the women and girls of the house, save for Edwina, who is employed as the teacher. While all the women of the house form relationships with McBurney, it is Edwina who seems to have a genuine connection with him, perhaps because her desire for him is as instrumental as is his desire to forge relationships with all the women. While McBurney needs to stay in their good graces to ensure his survival, Edwina sees in McBurney an opportunity to realize her dream of being “taken far away from here.” Once McBurney has been eliminated as a threat to the solidarity among the white women of the house, however, Edwina quietly takes her place back within the feminine fold. While she does gaze longingly to the world beyond the gates as the film concludes, gender and race solidarity override Edwina’s personal desires, and she accepts McBurney’s death with little expressed emotion. Spectators are not encouraged to feel pain or anger on Edwina’s behalf, since she does not seem to feel these emotions herself. Instead, they are positioned to sympathetically identify with Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman), who upon masterminding McBurney’s death seems only to be following her own assurance that “[a]ll bravery is, is doing what is needed at the time.” On the other hand, the gender and race solidarity expressed in these final moments belies the uneven class positions of the women in the household, most especially Miss

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Martha and Edwina. Earlier in the film, as Miss Martha (whose honorific “Miss” points to her role as mistress of the plantation) attempts to seduce McBurney, she longingly discusses her experiences of the good old days of Southern aristocratic life. Shortly before, she had chastised Edwina for her acclimation to “town society,” an implied dig at her social position.19 Class hierarchy here functions as a tool to differentiate the women as they vie for McBurney’s attention. Later, however, class hierarchy serves to cement white female solidarity when, at the film’s conclusion, Edwina returns to her subordinated position with little to no protest, and the household is once again a feminine stronghold against the encroachment from the North on their white Southern manners. In casting Edwina as white, the film sidesteps any complications that the novel’s mixed-race Edwina might have introduced to this form of solidarity. Brown points out that despite readings of the film as a feminist subversion of patriarchal control (in both its narrative and its form), it ultimately ends with the women in the same position in which they started: isolated within the white space of the plantation house (painted a bright white for the film) and maintaining the propriety of class hierarchy (see Figure 21.1), even while the women share a longing gaze at the changing, inaccessible world that surrounds them. This suggests a tempered politics, he says. “That is, there is a desire for freedom that is never quite realized. Or, if that freedom is realized, in that McBurney is killed, the white women remain constrained within their white house, confined thus to a world of whiteness.”20 Much like the Versailles of Marie Antoinette, then, the plantation house remains a cage, even if one that the women have transformed to be, in certain terms, their own. Creating a space of one’s own, however, does not necessarily suggest the creation of a safe space.21 Clearly, the encroachment of alterity ends poorly at Versailles. In

Figure 21.1  The white women before their white house in The Beguiled, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2017.

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The Beguiled, the racial threat remains just outside the frame of the final scene as the women gaze from their stoop out to the world of a war that rages on. The Virgin Suicides, too, concludes with images of ongoing threat to white, cloistered existence. However, this earlier film offers a stronger critique, posing a relationship between patriarchal control over white women’s bodies, environmental decay, and systems of racial capitalism and labor exploitation. From the opening sequence, spectators are situated as voyeurs into the encroachment of disease and dis-ease on the eerily perfect landscaping of what is meant to be a Detroit suburb (the film was actually largely shot in Toronto, which was experiencing its own industrial decline in the 1970s). The black screen of the title credits cuts to Lux Lisbon—played again by Kirsten Dunst—standing in the middle of a treelined street, in the sexualized act of eating a popsicle. As she finishes, she briefly glances around her, squinting into the sun and then walks off camera. A car covered in insects is left briefly alone on-screen. The opening sequence subtly foreshadows the girls’ exit from life and the infestation that is soon to plague the neighborhood. A brief series of images follows: a neighbor watering a lawn, two respectfully dressed women in heels walking a white dog, and then, workers placing a notice for removal on a diseased tree. The trees are symbolic of the disease festering within the Lisbon household. The girls, subject to their mother’s suffocating propriety in the name of God and their father’s bumbling inability to communicate, are, like the trees, decaying within the stilted structures of a white suburban landscape that is crumbling under the weight of industrial decay. If the girls’ suicides are allegorically about revolt against patriarchal control, then the insects are equally allegorical: nature in revolt against man’s control. And, as if to herald the coming revolt, the sound of sirens growing ever nearer intrudes on the neighborhood’s seeming tranquility. The camera cuts to an interior shot, first of a meticulously constructed still life of femininity—a Japanese fan, opened against the natural light of a window behind an array of perfume bottles draped with necklaces and bracelets—and then to Cecilia submerged up to her chin in a bathtub full of the bloody water of her first suicide attempt. Like Marie, the Lisbon girls live their lives on display. One of the neighborhood boys narrates the film from twenty-five years in the future, making connections between the girls’ suicides and the demise of the pristine suburban neighborhood. “People saw their clairvoyance in the wiped-out elms, the harsh sunlight, and the continuing decline of our auto industry,” he says. The threat (the girls’ suicides, their escape from man’s control) remains disconcerting to the boys, even decades later. Metaphors of contagion—disease spreading from one tree to another, striking workers moving from industrial centers to the suburbs, immigrants living in the mansions—imply that the world the boys, now men, inhabit can slip out of the hands of patriarchy. Contagion is racialized, blamed for Cecilia’s suicide attempt after Dominic Palazzolo, an Italian immigrant who speaks little English and has a Latin penchant for excessive emotions, jumps from a second-floor window while professing his love for one of the neighborhood blondes. He walks away unscathed, but his otherness and its associated excesses are presented by the boys and the neighborhood gossips as causing Cecilia’s demise. Cecilia’s successful suicide also occurs after an encounter with alterity. In a painfully awkward attempt to follow Dr. Horniker’s advice to have Cecilia socialize with boys who are her peers, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon allow the girls to throw a party. The kids mingle stiffly until

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Joe shows up. Joe, a boy from the neighborhood with cognitive/intellectual disabilities, becomes the center of attention as the other boys use him to prop up their own sense of superiority. Placed directly in front of Cecilia, Joe is made to perform as if he were a much-loved pet. “Look,” one boy says. “His ears will wiggle if you scratch his chin.” Joe is then prompted to “sing your song.” A shot/reverse shot shows Cecilia as she watches Joe, her face melting from a smile to a frown to a frozen look of disbelief as the sisters and boys laugh while Joe sings “The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga,” a song popular with US soldiers during the Second World War that likens Pacific Islanders and Filipinos to monkeys. Cecilia rises and asks to be excused. The party continues, finally gaining some steam now that Joe’s presence allows everyone to feel comfortable in their white, able-minded bodies. Cecilia makes her way up the stairs, carrying the burden alone of understanding the superficial, vampiric, and fleeting nature of the joy the partygoers feel. After she leaps from the second-floor window, her heart is pierced by a spike in the fence that circles the home and pins the girls in. The strategy of narrating the film from the neighborhood boys’ perspective both literalizes and upends the classic cinematic male gaze. While the Lisbon girls are frequently shown from the boys’ perspectives, the camera also often turns back at the boys as they stare stupidly from a variety of conspicuous spectatorial vantage points—the lawn across the street, a car window, the lens of a telescope. After Cecilia’s suicide, they steal her diary. They are fascinated by her recitation of the mundane events of her days—although they only skim through page after page of her writings on the dying elm trees. As they read aloud, the scene cuts to dreamlike images of the girls in a field, the soundtrack and coloration nostalgic of 1970s film and advertising.22 These highly constructed fantasy images of femininity (“impossible” images, as Backman Rogers points out) are juxtaposed with the crass and somewhat mundane words on the page.23 A sound bridge switches from the boy’s voice reading the diary to Cecilia’s, the words and voice wresting the fantasy image from the boys’ control. Cecilia recites a brief poem that encapsulates the hermeneutic and decaying world that she is trapped within: “The trees like lungs filling with air. / My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair.” Switching back to the boy’s perspective, the narrator concludes: And so we started to learn about their lives, coming to hold collective memories of times we hadn’t experienced. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind dreamy so you ended up knowing what colors went together. We knew the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death. . . . We knew that they knew everything about us. And that we couldn’t fathom them at all. The girls remain “beautiful creatures” in the boys’ eyes, isolated and caged within a presumption of unknowability. Cecilia’s words, while revealing the simple everydayness of a young teen, are romanticized by the boys who equate femininity with death. The girls’ actual deaths result in the loss of the fantasy they represent as beautiful, all-knowing, yet unknowable creatures and indicate the fragility of the very ground on which the boys stand—the ground that is also diseased, killing the elms, and speeding extinction (an environmental fact that obsesses young Cecilia). The clairvoyance of these fantasy creatures, who could find no option but suicide to escape this order of things, marks an

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encroaching disorder of things, the beginning of suburban decline. Even death does not escape the encroachment of a new world order, as striking cemetery workers briefly block the Lisbon’s entry to Cecilia’s funeral. Backman Rogers has noted that the brilliance of the film lies in how it subverts the rituals of passage from girlhood to womanhood. She follows Richard Dyers’ discussion of the “cult of virginity,” which, he argues, equates “unsullied femininity”—femininity not “dirtied by sex”—with a woman’s pale, “unstuffed” appearance (“a body not dirtied by having matter stuffed into it”).24 Unsullied femininity is signified by a pale white, waif-like appearance, that is, the ghostly appearance of a woman’s body disappearing. White virginity is thus coterminous with unsullied femininity and equated with closeness to God/ death. The Virgin Suicides turns this preoccupation with whiteness, lightness, purity, God, and death within the Western imaginary back on itself, signaling their impossibility through subtle references to the presence of their opposite within Western systems of signification: Blackness, contamination, and hell—the very thematic of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell that Morrison describes.25 The impossibility of unsullied purity and iconic female whiteness is finally reified in The Virgin Suicides when the girls’ corporeal bodies are replaced in the neighborhood by a pervading dark green gas—phosphates produced by a spill at the plant, which the narrator relates to Cecilia’s spilling of blood from her wrists. Rather than images of female solidarity prevailing against encroaching alterity, as in The Beguiled, The Virgin Suicides ends with alterity permeating the very bodies of those who would protect white, patriarchal capitalism against it. The warning here, however, is of white patriarchal capitalism’s insidious ability to reinvent itself. Inspired by the debutants crying over coming out in “a season everyone would remember for its bad smell,” the patriarchs turn the misfortune into opportunity, theming a debutante party “asphyxiation” (see

Figure 21.2  The “Asphyxiation Ball” in The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

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Figure 21.2). Guests laugh, eat, and drink underneath their gas masks as green poison fills the air, celebrating their children’s acceptances into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, poised to become the next generation of plutocrats. Lessons about white fragility, about gendered loneliness, about environmental decimation, the film suggests, are left dangerously unlearned.

Celebrity Bling and Racial Appropriation The Virgin Suicides, as Coppola’s first film, is perhaps her most politically decisive. Her later films are far more ambiguous, even as they continue to explore gendered loneliness within cultures of excess and display. Three of these films—Lost in Translation (2003), Somewhere (2010), and The Bling Ring (2013)—take up this exploration specifically as it relates to cultures of celebrity. And while much has been said about the orientalism of Lost in Translation, The Bling Ring, as perhaps the most morally inconclusive of this trilogy, is thus the most pertinent for race- and class-based analysis.26 The Bling Ring is based on the true crime story of eight Los Angeles-based teens and young adults who broke into the homes of Hollywood royalty, including Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Orlando Bloom, and others, stealing couture shoes, bags, watches, and clothes. The film features the capers, along with the teens rubbing shoulders with their victims as they party their way through Hollywood clubs and post their exploits on social media. Unlike in The Beguiled and Marie Antoinette, The Bling Ring does not necessarily construct a sympathetic perspective toward the teenagers but rather explores both the lure and the toxicity of cultures of celebrity and spectacle. The film revels in visual glitter— iconic views of the twinkling lights of Los Angeles, flashes of famous and beautiful women on red carpets, and meticulously designed sets on which to display rows and rows of high-fashion clothes, shoes, and accessories. Much has been written on the gendered politics of the film and its relationship to celebrity culture in the digital age.27 Less has been said about the racial economy of the film in both its critique of and participation in what Joshua Morrison terms “lifestyle celebrity.”28 The film focuses on only seven of the eight true-life subjects who were part of the Bling Ring crew. Left out is Diana Tamayo, whose backstory as a working-class Mexican national without documentation complicates the narrative of wealth and boredom that is highlighted in the film. Five of the film’s seven Bling Ringers are teenagers living with their wealthy and seemingly Hollywood-connected families. The two others are twentyseven-year-old Ricky (Gavin Rossdale), who represents the real-life Jonathan Ajar, and Rob (Carlos Miranda) who represents Roy Lopez, Jr., a thirty-year-old at the time of his arrest. Rob, however, appears much younger in the film. Both are minor characters, and unlike their teenage counterparts, grew up in working-class households. By minimizing the working-class characters and omitting any mention of Tamayo and her undocumented status, the film is able to focus directly on its critique of excess, spectacle, and pursuit of celebrity while eschewing politically risky speculation on differences in the thieves’ background and interior motivations, which would also expose the group’s gender, race, and class differences.

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Without the raced body of Tamayo (and with the minimization and de-aging of the raced body of Rob/Lopez, Jr.) the film is left open to using subtle markers of racial difference to establish a pattern of behavior among the characters that sidesteps the politics of the racial economy itself, an economy that equates certain raced bodies with threat and criminality. In this way, the Bling Ringers’ behavior is meant to be understood as disturbing culturally but nonthreatening on a criminal level. The technique encourages identification with the Bling Ringers as products of their cultural milieu, even if the characters themselves remain resolutely unlikeable throughout the film. The character Chloe Tainer (Claire Julien), the fictionalized version of Courtney Ames, is particularly interesting in this regard. While she is arguably the most minor of the five central characters, her body can be read as a type of measuring device that highlights the Bling Ringers’ differing levels of proximity to, and difference from, otherness (and by proxy, criminality). Chloe’s waif-like body and long flowing blond hair are among Coppola’s signature markers of white female innocence, as we have seen already in Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled, and The Virgin Suicides. Chloe is established in an early scene as a freewheeling, extremely wealthy teen as she drives a Lexus in the shimmering California sun, windows down, and hair blowing in the breeze. She enthusiastically raps along to “9 Piece” by Rick Ross while Rebecca Ahn (Katie Chang), who represents the real-life Rachel Lee, sits in the passenger seat. Marc Hall (Israel Broussard), who represents Nick Prugo, sits in the back. The composition of the shot carefully situates each of the characters within a hierarchy of gendered and raced positions that maintains the teens as victims of their cultural milieu. Chang, whose grandfather is Korean, plays the Korean-American Rebecca/Rachel. In this scene, she is visually a supporting character, even though she is otherwise understood to be the mastermind of the thefts. By placing her in the passenger’s seat, Coppola minimizes her connection with and control over the criminality represented by the song “9 Piece” and allows her to instead represent the stereotype of the model minority Asian. Marc, whose gendered position might otherwise render him threatening, is subordinated to the back seat, watching Chloe rap and control the movement of the scene. This characterization of Marc follows throughout the film, where he is depicted as effeminate, nervous, and benign, that is, as a nonthreatening symbol of white femininity. The appropriation of rap music, as well as gestures, language, and posturing of “gangata” rap artists throughout the film, mobilizes Blackness as a signal of criminality but in ways that operate as Morrison’s “enabler” to expose the innocence of white femininity. This enabling function is most exaggerated in Chloe, who is the clearest symbol of white femininity, and who most exaggeratedly appropriates gangsta stylings. Suzanne Ferriss notes that Chloe’s appropriations mimic the posturing of many Black artists, who often are themselves posing as gangsters. (She points to Rick Ross’ history as a corrections officer before taking on his stage persona.)29 The obsession with “bling” in rap and hip-hop—that is, with jewelry, fashion, and luxury brands—acts as a backdrop for the teens’ entry into the world of celebrity and excess that they covet and enhances the “bad girl” personas they are trying on. This dangerous game of posturing is underlined when Chloe is in a drunk-driving accident while singing along to M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls.”30 Chloe, however, dismisses the experience, laughing about her blood alcohol level and

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complaining about the community service that is part of her punishment. The arrest and accident, for Chloe, simply contribute to her artificial bona fides. Nearing the film’s conclusion, however, Chloe is again established as the image of white innocence. She is the only one of the teens whose arrest for the celebrity thefts is not shown on-screen. Instead, we see her enjoying a peaceful morning with her parents in their expansive kitchen, a Hispanic-appearing maid in the background, as the sound of sirens grow nearer. Her privileged position is wrapped in the morning sunshine of her domestic space, the crisp whiteness of the room contrasted with the criminality associated with the Black popular culture that she has been appropriating. The film’s critique of cultures of excess and fame, misogyny, and decadence, then, is situated within a racialized and classed framework that erases the bodies and stories of actual raced subjects. Instead, it relates feminine white and white-proximate bodies to Black popular culture in order to highlight their differences. That is, rather than situate the Bling Ringers’ criminality as ontological, as is the condition of Blackness within the logics of white supremacy, the teens are constructed as psychologically damaged, victims of a milieu obsessed with “bling,” materialism, and excess.

A Rocky Conclusion Coppola’s most recent film, On the Rocks (2020), continues tropes she develops in films such as Lost in Translation and Somewhere, in which she explores the role of domesticity in a transitionary period of wealthy and privileged characters’ lives. Coming on the heels of backlash against The Beguiled, Coppola seems to be making good on her comment to BuzzFeed that she would love to cast a more racially diverse film “whenever I can.” About The Beguiled, she said, “It didn’t work for this story, but of course I’m very open to stories about many different experiences and points of view.”31 On the Rocks does feature a multiracial cast. It does not, however, venture far from an exploration of the experiences and points of view that are dominant in her other films. Here we find ourselves again among the wealthy, with the immaculate mise-en-scène of luncheons, elite restaurants, and resorts reflecting the refined upper crusts of New York society. The story follows the crisis of a woman in her forties whose husband’s career is taking off while her days are filled with the labor of mothering, which she performs in a way that only the wealthy can: Laura (Rashida Jones) is beautifully disheveled as she rushes around each morning, attempting to shuttle one child off to school and the other to scheduled play times, mommy-and-me classes, and bath times. Finally, during nap time, Laura sneaks in a moment to do what is again only the labor of the rich: sit down and not write a book. Class concerns, then, remain familiar in On the Rocks. And while the casting is more diverse—Jones is a light-skinned mixed-race woman (her mother is white, and her father, the musician Quincy Jones, is Black) and Marlon Wayans, who plays Dean, Laura’s husband, is Black—the racial dynamics of the film ultimately serve the also familiar purpose of shoring up whiteness. The plot is simple: Laura has come to suspect that Dean is cheating on her. She confides in her white, high-rolling, semi-retired art

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dealer father, Felix (Bill Murray), who convinces Laura to accompany him in chasing Dean around the city in effort to catch him in the act. It becomes increasingly clear that Felix is enjoying the caper, and more importantly, enjoying spending time with his daughter. While On the Rocks is in many ways about distance and disconnection in a postmodern world, at the same time it addresses themes that could have come from the era of The Beguiled: white men protecting daughters against a presumed Black threat, white men falsely accusing Black men of transgressions, white men using Black men’s bodies for their personal gain. As Felix chases Dean away from his daughter and pursues him through the city for his own amusement, he has little concern for the effect the accusation of infidelity might have on Dean’s life (or his daughter’s life, for that matter). The film concludes by enacting a white liberal fantasy of absolution when the mixed-race Laura, as representative of multicultural racial unity, unceremoniously forgives Felix/whiteness for the trespasses accumulated throughout the film/centuries (see Figure 21.3). The problem with the fantasy of forgiveness in the film is that it elides the white supremacist ideology that authorizes the white man to criminalize and pursue the Black man in the first place. One scene that offers a momentary critique of the systemic white privilege that Felix is afforded—a scene in which Felix drives Laura recklessly through the city and is pulled over then let off the hook by the police—falls flat as Felix’s easy charm and connections lead to a brotherly conversation. While the absurdity of Felix’s privilege is put on display in this scene, the critique is temperate at best in that it builds no tension between Laura and the police officer or Laura and her father. That is, in an

Figure 21.3  On the Rocks, directed by Sofia Coppola © Apple TV+ 2020.

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era when cell-phone footage of anti-Black police violence is ubiquitous, the reckless behavior that puts the raced body of Felix’s daughter into dangerous proximity with the police is unremarked upon. Laura’s only response is to wryly comment to Felix that “it must be nice” to be him. Like Coppola’s other films, then, On the Rocks encourages viewers to sympathize with the white central character. Felix’s quest for closeness with his daughter, while presented as misguided, is also nonetheless presented as sweet and understandable. He is exposed as a bygone relic of a misogynistic past, but one who is affectionate, likeable, and worthy of forgiveness. Dean, who is essentially the film’s victim, is rarely seen on-screen. And while he is ultimately repositioned to be the “good guy,” the film only works as a comedy because spectators are meant to believe at some level that Dean is committing the transgressive acts that he is being accused of committing—or at the very least, that he is capable of committing those acts. Laura ends the film by forgiving her father and reconciling with Dean. Dean, however, is never given the opportunity to choose to forgive or not forgive Felix. He is only ever given the opportunity to forgive Laura, who takes on the guilt of the white father for herself. If On the Rocks is Coppola’s attempt to reconcile the missteps of The Beguiled, it does so in a way that nevertheless repeats tropes of Blackness that we see throughout her oeuvre. Black bodies and oblique references to Blackness are used to prop up and expose whiteness: white loneliness, white guilt, and, ultimately, white capitalist patriarchy. The political genius of Coppola’s work is in its undermining of masculine control of feminine images, its deft maneuvering within liminal spaces between desire and critique, and its thoughtful expressions of the toxic effects of misogyny and myopia on white women and white men. However, within these moments of cinematic subversiveness, Coppola’s work remains driven by a desire to uncover “universal” themes about gendered patriarchy. By focusing on the universal, the films minimize the particularity of patriarchy as a race- and class-based system and ultimately produce a white feminist worldview that serves the very system it aims to subvert.

Notes 1 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 5–6, 52. 2 Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Press, 2019), 11. 3 Sharon Lin Tay, Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 131. 4 Sofia Coppola quoted in Jason Bailey, “Sofia Coppola Talks ‘Marie Antoinette’ Its Costumes and Styles at New York’s Museum of Art and Design,” The Playlist, January 20, 2020, https:// theplaylist​.net​/sofia​-coppola​-talks​-marie​-antoinette​-mad​-20200110/. 5 Kohei Usuda, “The Voice of Marianne Faithfull: On Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.” CineAction 75 (Winter 2008): 56.

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6 Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, “Marie Antoinette: Fashion, Third-Wave Feminism, and Chick Culture,” Literature/Film Quarterly, 38, no. 2 (2020): 100. 7 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 147. 8 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 148. 9 Backman Rogers, “The Historical Threshold: Crisis, Ritual and Liminality in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006),” RELIEF: Revue Électronique de Littérature Française 6, no. 1 (2012): 81; Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 157–8. 10 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, x. 11 Adam and the Ants, “Kings of the Wild Frontier,” by Marco Pirroni and Stuart Goddard, released July 25, 1980, Sony/ATV Tunes LLC/Universal Music Publishing MGB Ltd. 12 Sofia Coppola, “Sofia Coppola Responds to ‘The Beguiled’ Backlash—Exclusive,” IndieWire, July 15, 2017, https://theplaylist​.net​/sofia​-coppola​-talks​-marie​-antoinette​-mad​-20200110/; Alanna Bennett, “Sofia Coppola Says ‘The Beguiled’ Is About The Gender Dynamics of the Confederacy, Not The Racial Ones,” BuzzFeed, June 16, 2017, https://www​.buzzfeednews​ .com​/article​/alannabennett​/sofia​-coppola​-beguiled​-power​-dynamics. 13 Olympe de Gouges, too, penned a response to “The Declaration of the Rights of Man” in 1791, titled “The Declaration of the Rights of Women,” in which she argues for the inclusion of women within the category “human” by way of access to universal rights. However, while she does critique slavery in other of her writings, she does not explicitly argue for the rights of Black people here. 14 William Brown, “A (Mush)room of One’s Own: Feminism, Posthumanism, and Race in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled,” Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image 7, no. 1 (2020): 80. 15 Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origin of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 5. 16 Brown, “A (Mush)room of One’s Own,” 79. 17 Brown, “A (Mush)room of One’s Own,” 79. See Brown’s article for more on the racial, gendered, and sexual coding in The Beguiled. Of particular interest here is his discussion of the film’s setting at the Madewood Plantation House and its history as a site of countercinematic resistance in music videos such as Beyoncé’s Lemonade and J. Cole’s video for G.O.M.D. 18 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, ix; Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), xi–xii. 19 See Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 30–1, for a discussion of this scene, which, as Ferriss points out, can be read as referencing prewar social rivalries as much as a sexual rivalry between the two women. 20 Brown, “A (Mush)room of One’s Own,” 85. 21 Brown, “A (Mush)room of One’s Own,” 96. 22 See Justin Wyatt, The Virgin Suicide: Reverie, Sorrow, and Young Love (New York: Routledge, 2019), 66–84. 23 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 49. 24 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 47; Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 78. 25 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 5.

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26 See, for example, Homay King, Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 138–70, and Lucy Bolton’s chapter on the film in this volume (Chapter 2). 27 See, for example, Joshua N. Morrison, “Stealing Fame: Lifestyle Celebrity and the Dubious Cultural Politics of Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020):149–65; Delphine Letort, “The Cultural Capital of Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013): Branding Feminine Celebrity in Los Angeles,” Celebrity Studies 7, no. 3 (2016): 309–22; and Sara Pesce, “Ripping off Hollywood Celebrities: Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, Luxury Fashion and Self-branding in California,” Film, Fashion & Consumption 4, no. 1 (March 2015): 5–24. 28 Morrison describes a “lifestyle celebrity” as a figure who “is typically a wealthy, conventionally attractive woman, and whose fame is premised on the ability to demonstrate an aspirational lifestyle for consumer-participants. Lifestyle celebrities largely circumvent the need for those performing arts skills that have historically informed who becomes famous. Lifestyle celebrities instead wield their class and gender performances to generate branded selves and lifestyles.” See Morrison, “Stealing Fame,” 115. 29 Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 84. 30 Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 84. 31 Sofia Coppola quoted in Bennett, “Sofia Coppola Says.”

22 PLACE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY AND CINEMA(CAR)TOGRAPHY: CINEMATIC TOURISM AND SOFIA COPPOLA’S FILMS Laura Henderson

Tokyo, Versailles, California—when I think of Sofia Coppola’s films, my mind immediately recalls each film’s distinct location. Her work has been described as having “an unshakeable sense of place,”1 and indeed each entry in her canon presents environments imbued with a lush richness, an intimacy of texture that bespeaks each space’s atmosphere. My memories of Coppola’s films are studded with haptic details: a champagne tower in Marie Antoinette (2006), the early morning sun’s pastel hue in Lost in Translation (2003), dressing tables crowded with perfume bottles and crucifixes in The Virgin Suicides (1999). It is almost as if I have traveled to these locations myself, so crisp are my memories of the places she articulates. A brief perusal of online image-sharing platforms like Instagram, Tumblr, or Pinterest reveals that I am not alone in this sense of cinematic tourism. These boards are frequently populated with shots not dissimilar to the textures I listed earlier, images that convey the specific environmental atmosphere of her films, often accompanied by the aphorism “I want to go to there.” This itch to “travel” to Coppola’s places, I would argue, points toward the intersubjective nature of place within her work. Like Lost in Translation’s Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), we wish to travel to these cinematic locales so that we too might experience them and perhaps even be altered by them. Based on this fan practice, it would seem that Coppola’s films do not just present a location but offer a kind of cinematic tourism.

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As this handbook has detailed, Coppola’s work has strong thematic links that bind her oeuvre. Yet one of the more unusual (and underexplored) aspects of her canon is its bond to and treatment of cinematic spaces. While it is certain that many of her key themes (such as girlhood) are supported by meditation on domestic spaces,2 it’s rare to see her approach to place examined in detail. Yet Coppola’s works often have complex and compelling relationships to their locations. Her spaces hold strong symbolic functions in her narratives, actively inflecting and altering the characters that explore them. They are articulated in a sensual, tactile way that offers the audience their own form of spatial exploration. There is a holistic quality to the spaces Coppola renders in her films, which Leo Braudy would describe as openness.3 And, as noted above, her films present places that often feel as though we have traveled there with her. In her work Atlas of Emotion, Giuliana Bruno considers how travel cultures in the eighteenth century directly contributed to the emergence of cinematic “tourism.”4 Coppola’s approach to place in her films echoes this strongly—she offers the audience an experience of place that is suffused with emotion and affect. As Bruno argues, “the motion picture does precisely what its name announces: . . . it is the very synthesis of seeing and going—a place where seeing is going.”5 To watch one of Coppola’s films, I will argue, is to engage in a kind of sightseeing. This chapter considers the ways Coppola provides us with a kind of illusory travel, a cinematic spatial practice. In so doing, Coppola’s specific philosophy of place begins to emerge, a philosophy marked by intersubjectivity. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau argues, “Every story is a travel story—a spatial practice.”6 Though perhaps all films represent some form of cinematic travel, this idea particularly chimes with Coppola’s specific spatial sensibility. Her stories are travel stories, transporting character and audience alike into the cinematic landscape. She does this, I will argue, by precise tendencies in cinematography and editing, and an approach to place that foregrounds our own sensory engagement. Each of these features helps us understand that Coppola’s specific philosophy of place aligns strongly with Bruno’s conception of psychogeography. Simply by watching her films we have an intersubjective, affective experience. We come to learn each place’s textures, atmospheres, and stories, and through this tactile education, we engage intersubjectively with her filmic environments. Although this may simply be a quirk of her curated style, my analysis of her spatial practices reveals that the cinematic techniques she uses often play upon the neural underpinnings of perception. Her filmic mannerisms echo how the human brain operates, and in turn, this echo creates an affective psychogeographic impression of place.

Place and Personhood Perhaps what sets Coppola’s approach to cinematic location apart from other filmmakers is her inherent interest in the impact of place on personhood. Indeed, Roger Ebert remarked in his review of Marie Antoinette, “All of Coppola’s films, and this one most of all, use locations to define the lives of the characters.”7 Be it the celebritizing dazzle of Los Angeles or the suffocating claustrophobia of the suburbs, her canon frequently wrestles

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with how our environment can have a material impact on our lives. Instead of being simple settings, her places take an active role in the narrative, often subtly remolding characters as they inhabit the space. In this way, her spatial doctrine is reminiscent of Bachelard, who opined, “Philosophers, when confronted with inside and outside, think in terms of being and non-being.”8 Frequently, her characters are indeed defined by an intertwined location and ontology, the difference between two states made manifest in both inside/ being and outside/nonbeing. This pattern can be seen in how her characters are frequently recast by their location, such as in the opening scenes of Marie Antoinette. We see Marie (Kirsten Dunst) travel into France and at the border, her carriage is halted, and (at the request of the assembled French court) she is stripped of all her Austrian belongings and clothing.9 As Anna Backman Rogers puts it, “She enters a makeshift structure . . . on one side as a princess of Austria and exits on the other side (French soil) as the Dauphine.”10 Backman Rogers’ observation of the dissolution of Marie’s Austrian identity points toward a fundamental connection between environment and subjectivity. Marie crosses a border both geographical and ontological. Not only has her physical location shifted, but her status and role within her society (and indeed, as Backman Rogers later indicates, her individual identity)11 have changed drastically. She moves from a state of nonbeing to a state of being. This philosophy, where “outside and inside form a dialectic division,”12 of melding a physical location with an ontological status, is also echoed in The Bling Ring (2013). The teenagers’ ingress into the houses of Hollywood celebrities transforms them, most obviously rendering them criminals in the eyes of the justice system. By entering these homes, their legal status is permanently altered. Moreover, to these children, location is a synecdoche of status, their entry into the homes of the rich and famous apparently elevating them to that echelon. Thus, by entering a home, their personhood, their social status, and their lives are permanently altered. We can see this consideration of place-as-status further developing in Coppola’s canonical interest in imprisoned characters. Sharon Lin Tay notes of her first three films, “The overriding theme seems to be that of entrapment of a particularly complex variety,”13 and indeed both scholarly and critical work frequently makes mention of Coppola’s “caged” characters.14 The Lisbon sisters of The Virgin Suicides, Marie in Marie Antoinette, and perhaps, most clearly, John McBurney in The Beguiled (2017) all find themselves not only trapped inside a domestic space but also defined by that captivity. Interestingly, in the former two examples, this absorption is made visible, as the films also contain sequences or images where these characters even look like the spaces that imprison them. In The Virgin Suicides, the girls’ prom dresses eerily echo the drab pastel color of their home. Marie Antoinette, in one of the film’s more striking images, collapses against a wall in a dress which matches the wallpaper, a visual metaphor for her entrapment within stifling palace life. When Marie shifts toward a life of (admittedly artificial and curated) pastoral idyll in Le Petite Trianon, she and her child once more visually blend into the scene’s environment (see Figure 22.1). After she asks her modiste for “something simpler,” we are shown a montage of Marie at the farmstead. The sequence, marked by close-up shots of chicken feathers stuck to blades of grass and daisies in meadows, creates a deliberate visual allusion

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Figure 22.1  Marie and her daughter blend into the landscape in Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola. © I Want Candy LLC 2006.

of subsummation, as Marie’s white dress and blonde hair blur impressionistically with the shots of cotton and sheep. Marie does not just interact with the film’s space; she is inflected with it. This ethos of place-as-personhood can be further observed in works that don’t necessarily consider confinement. In Lost in Translation, tourism is presented as an existential cure, as Charlotte and Bob explore Tokyo in intersecting attempts to affirm their identity through lived sensory experience. In fact, like the characters in Marie Antoinette and The Virgin Suicides, Charlotte and Bob begin to echo the aesthetic of their environment, frequently shot in a style not dissimilar to Japanese landscape painting traditions. In one moment, Bob awakes suddenly in his bed (see Figure 22.2). Around him, the rumpled blanket and rows upon rows of pillows visually echo the crenelated peaks of a ukiyo-e mountain range (see Figure 22.3). In both ukiyo-e painting and this moment, curving horizontal lines create an implicit depth of field, rending complex landscapes in simplified form. Through this allusion, the characters are drawn into and inflected by the landscape and cultural history of Japan. Even spaces with an apparent banality inflect the lives of the characters that exist within them. Johnny (Stephen Dorff) in Somewhere (2010) and Bob and Charlotte in Lost in Translation live in the somewhat bland surroundings of a hotel room, and, as several scholars have noted, all three characters echo the impermanence of their living arrangements.15 It is as though her characters cannot help but be changed by their environment, mirroring their surroundings. From this abridged exploration of the ways in which spaces come to define or alter her characters, we can see a specific philosophy of environment in Coppola’s oeuvre. Places are not neutral; they constitute her characters’ subjectivity. Time and again, we

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Figure 22.2  Bob awakens abruptly in Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola. © Universal Studios 2003.

Figure 22.3 Utagawa Hiroshige’s Hakone; Kosui (1833–4). Reprinted with permission from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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see a character’s aesthetic style, emotion, and even ontology altered by their geography. This marks a particularly distinct approach to space, one defined by intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity relies on two subjects co-constituting each other through experience, an empathic brush where two subjects alter each other through the exchange of feeling and thoughts. Considering that subjecthood (the ontological granting of some form of intentionality) is broadly reserved for human beings, it may appear strange to claim that Coppola depicts intersubjective landscapes. Yet Coppola certainly senses subjectivity in the world around her. In one interview she describes Lost in Translation as “about misunderstandings between people and places.”16 Her work examines the ways that spaces transform us, alter us, constitute us anew. The capacity of a space to change us in some way indicates an intentionality, a to-be-experienced-ness that necessarily sets it as capable of intersubjectivity. Moreover, the intersubjective character of Coppola’s spaces is strengthened by their cinematic nature. As Vivian Sobchack famously argued, cinema is an inherently intersubjective medium itself, “an experience expressing an experience.”17 According to Sobchack, film’s “reversible vision . . . dialectically structure[s] the film experience as dialogic.”18 In watching the film, we are moved by its intentions. Yet in Coppola’s films, this reversible vision applies to both the work as a whole and the spaces she articulates. They color and shape both character and audience in an intersubjective contact with the landscape. What I am describing here is, in its essence, psychogeography. Initially considered by Guy Debord as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment . . . on the emotions and behaviours of individuals,”19 psychogeography emphasizes the connection between space and explorer. Building on Debord, Michel de Certeau contended that a location is transformed from a “space” into a “place” by individuals investing emotion and meaning into it.20 Much as in Bourdieu’s account of habitus, the affective practice also becomes a mode of production.21 By practicing emotions in a certain site, people produce an atmosphere. As de Certeau outlines, each individual “writes” their own emotions into the places in which they live.22 Both de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre consider the ways in which haptic and sensory engagement elicit emotions and memories from a spatial explorer, each considering this to be the defining feature of a psychogeography.23 By forming lines of common feeling between individuals, the emotion essentially leaves the subjective body and enters into cultural reality. Thus, a place is not only an emotional atmosphere but also an intersubjective experience. We change an environment by ascribing emotion to it, but it too changes our emotions as we experience it. In Coppola’s films, the lines between characters’ emotions and their environment are blurred, often visually becoming one and the same. Marie Antoinette does not just feel consumed and trapped by court life in Versailles; she visually melts into its walls. At this moment, her emotions are fused with the environment she exists in, and in so doing space and subject co-constitute each other intersubjectively. Coppola’s philosophy of place—wherein a space is rendered as an intersubjective psychogeography—is observable not only as a broader narrative theme but also as a key aesthetic mode that drives her cinematography and editing. Her tendency to show how place inflects our lived experience and manifests psychogeographies creates observable patterns in

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the cinematic techniques she uses to articulate her environments. Moreover, this style constitutes a form of emotional cartography that creates a crucial intimacy between spectator and cinematic space. As my analysis below reveals, these patterns render her landscapes into intersubjective experiences not only for her characters but for the audience as well. They have this power, I argue, because of their relationship to the fundamental processes of human perception. The specific techniques of cinematography she adopts trace out and animate spaces in such a way that we come to know them in a neurally intimate way: a cartography that mirrors our psychology.

Coppola and Cinema(car)tography Coppola’s idiosyncratic cartography arises from her approach to cinematography, editing, and mise-en-scène. One highly unusual aspect of Coppola’s articulation of spaces is how she frequently obscures locations by foregoing wide establishing shots, focusing instead on the minutiae of the environment. The Virgin Suicides shows this tendency clearly, particularly in the opening of the film. In its first moments, the spectator is shown a slideshow-esque montage of brief moments: of a blonde girl eating a popsicle, two women walking a dog, city workers nailing a “notice for removal” to an elm tree, boys playing basketball in their driveway, sunlight filtering through leaves. Only after this sequence are we suddenly thrown into the film’s main setting, the Lisbon household. Each sequence shows images briefly, cutting between them silently and without warning. Throughout these montages, the camera locates and draws toward small details rich in sensory texture before cutting abruptly onward. In contrast to classical Hollywood style (or even the stylistic tendencies of her art-house contemporaries such as Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson), Coppola usually waives an introductory longshot of the environment. We can see this particular stylistic distinction best by comparing Coppola’s opening to Sam Mendes’ in American Beauty (1999), a film released in the same year that also considers themes of suburban depression and girlhood.24 Both films present their locations in the first few minutes with accompanying narration from main characters. Yet where Coppola shows the suburbs through this slideshow-esque montage, American Beauty presents its setting with a highly conventional aerial shot of its location, the camera touring above a residential street in California. Mendes’ approach places the viewer above the suburban idyll, but Coppola’s thrusts the viewer onto the street level. She demands that we pay attention to the smaller, more intimate peccadillos of the everyday. In so doing, Coppola’s films seem to place the spectator within the landscape. This tendency, to focus on minutiae and situate the audience as though within the setting, is observable most clearly within The Virgin Suicides. Therein, almost every new location is interrupted by abrupt close-up shots of minutiae. For example, we are introduced to the homecoming dance the Lisbon sisters attend via a shot that cuts suddenly from their entrance to a close-up of the venue’s paper decorations. Introducing this intercut detail gives the spectator a textural understanding of the environment: the awkward prettiness of a transformed high-school gymnasium in the homecoming sequence, the leafy suburbs

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and tranquil idyll in the opening. This style of editing and cinematography fragments what Coppola deems sensually important from the broader landscape and holds it before the viewer in close-up. From this, we might infer that to Coppola, what is most important is not how a space specifically looks, or how the characters are situated within it, but how the space feels. It rejects the classical Hollywood drive toward establishing shots, and indeed the screenplay begins tellingly with “[INT. Lisbon Bathroom],” thrusting the viewer immediately into the most private space in the film’s location. She reframes each of the locations in The Virgin Suicides toward the small, the specific, and the sensually engaging. What matters far more than giving the spectator a clear schematic of the house is offering them an embodied understanding of its sensory impression. Coppola wants us to engage haptically with her locations. These abrupt intercuts in The Virgin Suicides point toward another of Coppola’s clear patterns when rendering her film’s locations: they are usually presented in a fragmentary way. To focus on introducing minor details sacrifices touring the camera through the location, which would give the audience a clear, panoramic exploration of the environment. Instead, we are given jump cuts, abrupt transitions as though switching quickly through a slideshow. Lost in Translation, which broadly favors the sweeping vistas of high-rise hotel views, also takes up this aesthetic at a crucial moment, when the measured and meditative pacing of shots transitions into a frenetic montage at a hipster party in Tokyo. This splintered aesthetic also notably reoccurs in the opening scene of The Bling Ring, where a thirty-second Steadicam shot of the group breaking into a home suddenly shifts into a quick-cut montage of the celebrity’s clothes and jewelry as it is perused and ultimately stolen. At the moment where an audience might most want a touring camera and a panoramic gaze of the Los Angeles mansion, Coppola moves swiftly into fragmentation. Although these may seem like small moments, these minor details are crucially distinct and mark Coppola’s approach to spatial exploration as both unique and uniquely humanist. Scholars such as Stephen Heath have argued that all places in film are inherently discontinuous (due to the nature of production and editing) and are transformed into a continuous whole by the processes of the unconscious.25 Crucially, Heath argued that the physical spaces within cinema are only made whole by the viewer filling in the gaps created by editing.26 These details are still brought together into a holistic place in the mind of the viewer but made richer and more intimate by these details. Yet Coppola’s approach goes even further than what we might think of as the “standard” discontinuity created by editing and the realities of film production. Her landscapes are deliberately fragmented in order to bring these minor details to our attention. For example, in one scene in The Virgin Suicides, as the narrator describes the town’s moving on from the Lisbon sisters’ suicides, we are shown images of a country club. The shots change quickly from men walking on a golf course to mixed tennis, to women drinking iced tea. Yet the slideshow doesn’t end there; we next see a child running through a sprinkler and then a palatial mansion with young debutantes walking inside. These abrupt cuts are seemingly triggered by the narration itself. The line “our parents seemed better able to do this, returning to their tennis foursomes” cues the cut to mixed tennis; “it was full-fledged summer again” moves us to the shot of the sprinkler; and “infiltrating the

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genteel mansions” brings the montage to its close at the debutante ball. It is as though we see the environment through the sense memories of the narrator, each word triggering associated concepts to stitch together a holistic impression of 1970s Detroit suburbia. In this way, Coppola’s spatial montages harmonize with our own lived experience of place and memory. By approaching places in this manner, Coppola’s films mimic our own model of perception. Her style is reminiscent of ideas from Hugo Münsterberg, who considered the similarities between a cinematic close-up and a human’s directional attention.27 He illustrated that many of the (at the time of his writing) emerging trends in fictional film felt “natural” to the audience because the cinema was made in the image of our psychology. Film, he argued, does artificially what consciousness does naturally.28 This feels particularly prescient to Coppola’s approach to place, where the (arguably) more “objective” style of filmmaking—long establishing shots, cameras that tour the space through dollies or Steadicam—are abandoned to focus on smaller details. As Münsterberg writes, “An unusual face, a queer dress, a gorgeous costume or a surprising lack of costume, a quaint piece of decoration, may attract our mind and even hold it spellbound for a while.”29 These mannerisms, the sudden excursion into minutiae, mimic our own experiences of new spaces, where our eyes might roam only to fixate on more minor characteristics. What stands out is not geography but psychogeography—the specific affective lures that alter how we feel, and in so doing how we perceive the space. Coppola’s fragmentary aesthetic in The Virgin Suicides (and across her other films) is made holistic by the neural underpinnings of visual perception, rendering these pieces into a coherent psychogeography. Moreover, her use of multiple film styles, both abstract and conventional, allows her work to play on and mirror the neurological underpinnings of consciousness. We might even consider them (to follow Barbara Maria Stafford’s ideas in Echo Objects) to be “thoughtful,” in the sense that they offer us insight into the way our brains think.30 For example, her interest in fragmentary, discontinuous editing echoes the visual discontinuity that we experience every day. Our vision is entirely fragmented and its constancy is an illusion created in the mind. The area of the eye responsible for what we culturally consider the essence of vision—colors, sharply defined edges, and general acuity—is densely packed into an area called the fovea centralis that occupies less than 1 percent of the retina.31 Of course, we don’t see the world as 1 percent color, and the rest a gray blur. To provide us with the technicolor panorama we are accustomed to, our brains jump and dart the fovea across the visual field in what is called a saccade. During these jumps, no information passes through the optic nerve, rendering us effectively blind.32 Although our lived experience tells us that we see through a continuous clear stream of vision, this is an illusion created by the brain to gloss over our own limited perceptual faculties. The information we receive from our optic nerves is incomplete and necessarily focused on details. In Downcast Eyes, Martin Jay observes that most languages use visual metaphors that imply the eyeball is almost mechanically infallible,33 as perfect as the camera’s lens. Yet the truth is that the camera’s lens is far more perfect than our eyes. What gives our eyes the illusion of perfection, of a sense of continuity in the visual field, is our brains. They stitch together the disparate fragments, sewn from details the fovea centralis picks up into the panorama we perceive every day. Coppola’s fragmentary style mimics

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this process and suffuses it with textural information. Instead of touring an environment, moving a camera whose perceptual faculties far exceeds our own, Coppola gives us fragments, which we in turn stitch together. In a style not dissimilar to psychoanalytic suture theory, the audience gives this space a coherence by perceiving it. Her approach to place is thus inherently humanistic, favoring a mimetic experience of space in lieu of mechanistic perfection. Coppola’s method of articulating environments on-screen mimics our systems of visual perception, replicating our cognitive experiences to present a humanist psychogeography. Although it is not necessarily fruitful to assume she deliberately uses a cognitivist methodology, there are strong clues that a psychogeographic philosophy underwrites her stylization. For example, Suzanne Ferriss notes that Coppola’s approach to production is strongly concerned with “atmosphere” (an inherently psychogeographic concept) and favors shooting on location for this reason.34 Coppola also hints at her humanist lens in interviews, for example, saying that she wanted Lost in Translation “to look the way Tokyo looked to me when I visited.”35 In replicating her mind’s eye, she has developed a style of filmmaking that mirrors our own experiences of places. Moreover, her representation of her own recollections is strongly related to sense memory. It is in this replication of lived experience that we see how psychogeography necessarily infuses her landscapes. Psychogeography is developed and cultured by our experience of a space, an experience that Coppola recreates at an almost neural level on-screen.

Touching Landscapes The “lived-in” feeling of some of Coppola’s locations, the sense that the audience experiences them almost realistically, is also supported by her focus on sensory information. These cuts to specific details, the crunch of leaves underfoot in The Beguiled, a half-full ashtray in Lost in Translation, don’t just add additional visual information for the viewer. Instead, she directs our attention to the affective register of the space—its sounds, smells, and textures. In The Virgin Suicides, Coppola draws our eyes to the textures of shag carpet and worn cotton, vinyl leather, and the audible crack of a teenager’s gum. These details are not simply adjunct to the space or intended to help “flesh out” the details of the location. The intercut close-ups she uses are seemingly designed to encourage us to engage with the places in a tactile way. As Bruno writes in Atlas of Emotion, “the haptic—the sense of touch—constitutes a reciprocal contact between us and the environment, both housing and extending communicative interface. But the haptic is also kinesthesis, the ability of our bodies to sense our movement in space.”36 By providing us with information about how a location feels, those textural lures that make our fingers itch in sense memory, Coppola helps attune the spectator’s body to her spaces. These details appeal to our own sense memories. This preference for a sensually focused approach to the filmic environment is exactly what transforms the locations of Coppola’s films from a “space” to a “place,” giving the audience an almost lived experience of each environment that may produce this sense of cinematic tourism. These haptic textures replicate a sense of memory, if not a sense-

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memory. For example, in The Virgin Suicides, the first image we see of the Lisbon home is a close-up of jumbled religious bibelots, perfume bottles, and lipsticks. The little oddities that define the location’s atmosphere of religiosity and femininity also appeal to a sense of memory, reminiscent of the details one would notice if they were physically in the household. We might describe them as poetic images, images whose “resonance are dispersed on the different planes of our life in the world, while the repercussions invite us to give greater depth to our own existence.”37 These sensory details find their echo in our own lived experience, incorporating the audience’s personal lifeworld into the construction of place. Coppola’s films have a feeling of cinematic tourism because her style of spatial exploration engages directly with the spectator’s sense memories: we derive a physiological understanding of these spaces from the affective lures she embeds into the landscape. Her approach recalls Bruno’s account of the haptic eye in cinema, “a tangible, tactical role in our communicative ‘sense’ of spatiality and motility, thus shaping the texture of habitable space and, ultimately, mapping our ways of being in touch with the environment.”38 This sensory approach to spatial exploration is not limited to The Virgin Suicides and can be observed across her oeuvre. In The Bling Ring, the camera lingers on closets stuffed with opulent clothes, asking the audience to focus on a riot of fur and sequins instead of the mansions that house them. Although The Beguiled foregoes some of the fragmentary editing of its predecessors, our introduction to the primary location (the Farnsworth school) remains in this slightly punctured, detailed style, where a close-up of lace curtains abruptly disrupts previously slow and measured camerawork. When Marie Antoinette first introduces Versailles, a mobile Steadicam explores the palace as though we the audience were seeing through Marie’s eyes. Yet even this clear attempt at visual surrogacy is interrupted by an intercut close-up of a crystal chandelier. This shot is emphasized by loud diegetic chimes, forcing the audience to focus their attention on this shot as it overwhelms the senses. It seems that when introducing a space, Coppola always includes a haptic, poetic image—an impression of the space that resonates within our own sense memories. Marie Antoinette, in particular, is unmistakably focused on the sensory realm. Not only does Coppola eschew broad, sweeping vistas for minutiae, but these minor details are usually highly textural and frequently supported by loud diegetic sound. The tinkling chandeliers and fizzing champagne of Marie Antoinette do not just provide the spectator with a sense of intimacy with the environment, they also actively engage our senses. The strength of the diegetic noise in these moments actively orients the spectator’s body in space, plunging us into the environment.39 As Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener note in their discussion of the role of sound, this sense above all others serves our proprioception in locating us.40 Diegetic noise renders the spectator “a bodily being enmeshed acoustically, spatially, and affectively in the filmic texture.”41 Thus Coppola’s approach lends her films both space and body, using the audience’s proprioceptive faculties and haptic optics to plunge us into the environment. Coppola again uses abruptly cut close-ups to indicate the sensory experience of the location but in this film they take on an almost abstract quality, where sudden haptic images “invite the viewer to respond to the image in an intimate, embodied way, and thus fascinate the experience of other

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sensory impressions as well.”42 This invitation to read our own sense memories into the environment is easily legible throughout the film but is perhaps best shown in one of the film’s more famous montage sequences, where Marie is shown to take up the opulence of palace life. As the opening drums of Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” blast over a tracking shot of countless satin slippers, Marie Antoinette begins its famous ode to the shallow joys of consumerism. Here, the film takes on an almost frenzied pace, as the montage flits between sudden shots of champagne being poured, painted fans, puppies, desserts, and swirling satin fabrics. These images are similar to the intercut close-ups that mark Coppola’s specific approach to spatial exploration; and indeed the majority of the shots are close-ups or extreme close-ups, staying only for a moment before the next appears. Before we can consciously recognize each object or categorize what we observe, the shot abruptly changes. Images like these, as we know from Laura U. Marks’ work on embodied spectatorship, are moments that elicit a sensual memory.43 Marks’ interest lies in images that are initially difficult to parse, frequently extreme close-ups that obscure what object they are depicting.44 Describing a very similar sequence of images in the short video art film Seeing Is Believing (Shauna Beharry, 1991), she notes, “I realize that the tape has been using my vision as though it were a sense of touch; I have been brushing the (image of the) fabric with the skin of my eyes, rather than looking at it.”45 These images, according to Marks, force the viewer to consider them through a sensory register. Coppola’s use of them in this montage further gives an affective register to the audience’s experience of Versailles. Moreover, they offer a kind of sensory exploration of the environment she renders, giving the audience a chance to understand the specific textures, tastes, smells, and sounds of the palace. As Marks notes, “The fabric of everyday experience that tends to elude verbal or visual records is encoded in these senses.”46 Coppola gives her audience sensuous experiences of place and in so doing creates a kind of “everyday” spatial exploration. This phantom sensation of having touched the places her films explore is bolstered by Coppola’s frequent choice to have characters on-screen similarly caress their surroundings. In the vast majority of the shots I mentioned above, each object is accompanied by stroking fingers or grasping hands. This tendency in Coppola’s work again plays on the basest neural underpinnings of human perception. Mirror neurons (a kind of neuron that fires when we both observe and perform an action47) are directly linked to hand movements and gestures, as they occupy the same region of the brain. This neurological system is steeped in mimesis: when we watch someone wave, the same neurons fire as we observe and then return the gesture.48 Mirror neurons have been increasingly implicated in basic human development and learning, but our core understanding of their purpose appears to be empathy.49 Mirror neurons lend weight to Sobchack’s account of watching film, where those fingers were not understood as “those” fingers—that is, at a distance from my own and objective in their “thereness.” Rather, they were first known sensually and sensibly as “these” fingers and were located ambiguously both off-screen and on— subjectively “here” as well as objectively “there,” “mine” as well as the image’s.50

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In essence, the existence of mirror neurons means that when we see fingers and hands on-screen, our minds behave (in some small way) as though they were our fingers, our hands. And so, the light brush of fingers against textures is a crucial element that explains why the places Coppola renders have a psychogeographic quality. She guides her audience to see small textural details and to inhabit the hands of those who brush against them. She invites the spectator’s body to illusorily occupy the landscape she creates. This motif of caressing hands occurs throughout Marie Antoinette, but is also visible in The Bling Ring, as in multiple scenes the teenagers coast their fingers against a celebrity’s lavish wardrobe, in the opening minutes of The Beguiled as Amy (Oona Laurence) plucks mushrooms from the forest floor, and across Lost in Translation and The Virgin Suicides as well (see Figure 22.4). Psychogeography hinges on individuals “producing” a sense of place by drawing out connections between their own sense memories, cultural impressions, emotions, and affects. According to de Certeau, it is the individual’s impressions (and their eventual, collective weight) that “write” a landscape.51 These connections, inspired by the environment, constitute an intersubjective exchange between place and person. Coppola’s films encourage the audience to engage with haptic images on a physiological level and, in so doing, we gain a personalized experience of the places where her films are set. Coppola’s films have an undeniable spatial sensibility, locating both her characters and the spectator in the cinematic world. Her characters demonstrate the power of place over personhood, their lives made reflections of their environments. Yet we too experience this power through Coppola’s films. Whether intentionally or not, she mimics human perception to provide the audience with an intimate experience of each site. Our own sense memories lend each location a kind of bodily inhabitancy. This intersubjective exchange of affects between place and person defines both her characters’ lives and the audience’s impression of each place, rendering each work a psychogeography. It is no

Figure 22.4  Stills illustrating Coppola’s tendency to include close-up images of hands grasping at haptic elements in the environment. Lost in Translation (left), directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003, and The Virgin Suicides (right), directed by Sofia Coppola © Paramount Classics 2000/The Criterion Collection 2018.

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wonder we might feel that we have travelled into her cinematic environments. Her canon illustrates both, directly and indirectly, the ways in which places alter us, affect us, and constitute us as subjects within the world.

Notes 1 Jane Mulkerrins, “He Sings to Me: Sofia Coppola Opens up About Her Very Famous Father,” The Sydney Morning Herald, October 9, 2020. 2 For a compelling account of the use of domestic spaces in Coppola’s works, see Fiona Handyside, A Cinema of Girlhood (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 96–136. 3 This “openness” is borrowed from Braudy’s ontology of film form, wherein he characterizes film worlds as either open (which manifests as an outwardly focused world which appears to continue on whether the viewer attends to it or not) or closed (where the film world appears hermetically sealed and theatrically staged for the spectator). See Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 44–51. 4 Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion (London: Verso, 2002), 172. 5 Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, 245. 6 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 115. 7 Roger Ebert, “Pretty in Pink,” RogerEbert​.com​, October 19, 2006, https://www​.rogerebert​ .com​/reviews​/marie​-antoinette​-2006. 8 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 212. 9 The role of clothing and fashion in this shift in status should not be ignored and has been compellingly expounded by Suzanne Ferriss in The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 23–4. 10 Anna Backman Rogers, “The Historical Threshold: Crisis, Ritual and Liminality in Sofia Coppola’s Marie-Antoinette (2006),” Relief 6, no. 1 (2012): 86. 11 Backman Rogers, “The Historical Threshold,” 86. 12 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 211. 13 Sharon Lin Tay, Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 132. 14 For example, see Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 116; Belinda Smaill, “Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 157; Anthony Carew, “Sofia Coppola,” Screen Education 81 (September 2016): 103–4; Pam Cook, “Sofia Coppola,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 11 (2006): 36–40; Anna Backman Rogers, “Sofia Coppola,” Senses of Cinema: An Online Film Journal Devoted to the Serious and Eclectic Discussion of Cinema 45 (2007), http://www​.sensesofcinema​.com​/2007​/great​-directors​/sofia​-coppola/. 15 For a more thorough account, see Anna Backman Rogers in Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 107–10; Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 116; Tay, Women on the Edge, 131; Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 93. 16 Anne Thompson, “Tokyo Story: Sofia Coppola’s ‘Lost in Translation,’” Filmmaker: The Magazine of Independent Film 12 (Fall 2003): 37. 17 Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 3. 18 Sobchack, Address of the Eye, 260.

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19 Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” in Critical Geography: Collected Readings, ed. Harold Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (Kelowna: Praxis, 2008), 12. 20 de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 92. 21 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 170. 22 de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 92. 23 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 1994), 30; de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 92. 24 In her book on indiewood cinema, Backman Rogers also considers the thematic and narrative similarities between these two films, which only serves to underscore the distinctive aesthetic approach Coppola uses here. See Anna Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 60. 25 Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space,” Screen 17, no. 3 (September 1976): 68–112. 26 Heath, “Narrative Space,” 74. 27 Hugo Münsterberg, Münsterberg on Film: The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, and Other Writings (New York: Routledge, 2002), 78. 28 Münsterberg, Münsterberg on Film, 76. 29 Münsterberg, Münsterberg on Film, 81. 30 Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 3–4. 31 Mohammad Wakeel Ansari and Ahmed Nadeem, Atlas of Ocular Anatomy (New York: Springer, 2016), 22. 32 Helene Devillez, Nathalie Guyader, Tim Curran, and Randall C. O’Reilly, “The Bimodality of Saccade Duration During the Exploration of Visual Scenes,” Visual Cognition 28, no. 9 (2020): 484. 33 Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 1999), 5. 34 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 58. 35 Wendy Mitchell, “Sofia Coppola Talks ‘Lost in Translation,’ Her Love Story That’s Not ‘Nerdy,’” IndieWire, February 4, 2004, https://www​.indiewire​.com​/2004​/02​/sofia​-coppola​-talks​-about​ -lost​-in​-translation​-her​-love​-story​-thats​-not​-nerdy​-79158/. 36 Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, 6. 37 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, xxii. 38 Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, 8. 39 A similar (and arguably more affecting) approach can be seen in The Beguiled and has been examined in more depth in Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 66–7. 40 Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010), 148. 41 Elsaesser and Hagener, Film Theory, 48. 42 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 2. 43 Marks, Skin of the Film, 53. 44 Marks, Skin of the Film, 163. 45 Marks, Skin of the Film, 127. 46 Marks, Skin of the Film, 130.

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47 Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craighero, “The Mirror-Neuron System,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 169–92. 48 Giacomo Rizzolatti, and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in The Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press 2008), 88–90. 49 Gal Raz and Talma Hendler, “Forking Cinematic Paths to the Self: Neurocinematically Informed Model of Empathy in Motion Pictures,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 8, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 89–114. 50 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 67. 51 de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 92.

23 CELEBRITY CELEBRITY IN SOFIA COPPOLA’S CINEMA: THE AESTHETICS OF PERFORMANCE Delphine Letort

Celebrity is a phenomenon that derives from the star system developed by the cinema industry, which has enshrouded Sofia Coppola as the daughter of a renowned filmmaker since birth. Coppola’s singular position in the industry makes her a firsthand observer of the impact of celebrity on the individuals around her, nurturing a material and immaterial culture that her films capture from the inside. Much criticism has been leveled at the supposed depthlessness of her films.1 However, Maryn Wilkinson perceives this strategy of surface aesthetics as a self-reflexive, postmodern examination of celebrity culture. Contending that “films can perhaps best be understood as interfaces,” Wilkinson argues that Coppola’s cinema invokes “an affective engagement with the film-on-screen, whereby the surface itself becomes a connective, sticky force that drives and shapes the films’ meaning.”2 In other words, the film adopts the form which is its subject, turning celebrity into an aesthetics that portrays the circulation of images as an unremitting practice which absorbs the individual. While Wilkinson limits her analysis to The Bling Ring (2013), this chapter examines other films that suggest this visual strategy applies across Coppola’s oeuvre. Retracing a true story of teenagers who became notorious for stealing from Hollywood celebrities, The Bling Ring depicts the performance of celebrity as an intoxicating habit driving the narrative forward. Marie Antoinette (2006) characterizes the French queen as a historical celebrity whose life in Versailles is seen through a contemporary lens that reveals the rococo excess of the period. Coppola makes use of idiosyncratic mise-en-scène effects to characterize the figures of The Virgin

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Suicides (1999) through the prism of a celebrity culture that reifies the female by lingering on the objects that define femininity. Celebrity appears as a state of being seen and living in her films, which Lost in Translation (2003) further explores through the figure of an American celebrity character who, hired to appear in a whisky commercial in Tokyo, finds himself estranged from a foreign environment. Somewhere (2010) also evokes celebrity as a state of privileged isolation and boredom that engulfs its protagonist. As this suggests, celebrity as a theme runs through Coppola’s filmography and defines the filmed relations to objects and to human beings, offering a metaphysical reflection on the status of celebrity itself. This chapter examines celebrity as a self-reflexive practice in Sofia Coppola’s filmmaking. Her choice of star personas (Bill Murray, Stephen Dorff, Kirsten Dunst, Scarlett Johansson, Emma Watson) allows her to question the performance of celebrity by problematizing the tension between authenticity and artificiality. Examining the use of commodities as props of celebrity permits the director to question the cultural power of celebrity and its extension to the material world, pointing to celebrity as both a cultural and commercial construct.

The Performance of Celebrity The Bling Ring delves into the artificial world of celebrity by retracing the events that brought notoriety to Rachel Lee, Nick Prugo, Alexis Neiers, Diana Tamayo, Courtney Ames, Johnny Ajar, and Roy Lopez, Jr. The youngsters were implicated in a series of robberies from Hollywood Hills mansions belonging to Paris Hilton, Audrina Patridge, Rachel Bilson, Orlando Bloom and Miranda Kerr, Brian Austin Green and Megan Fox, and Lindsay Lohan. Coppola’s camera captures the distance between the infamous wannabes and the celebrities they endeavor to emulate, using a parodic mode that exposes the superficiality of celebrity as a performance. The teens engage in activities that immerse them in a make-believe world, created from images of themselves in the same attire as their models to attract recognition from others. James Monaco explains that celebrities are “constructions,”3 an insight the film emphasizes by showing how the wannabes insert themselves in the world of celebrities by stealing their costumes and posing like them. The film calls attention to the life they stage for photographs posted on social media, indulging themselves in an illusion of wealth signified by the imitation of a lifestyle. Coppola uses a diversity of filmmaking techniques to reveal the teens’ constructed celebrity as a shallow illusion: slow-motion conveys the dream world which Rebecca (Katie Chang) has created for herself, walking to school wearing sunglasses like a film star. Coppola highlights the confusion the teens entertain between fiction and reality, as when Rebecca believes herself to be a star after spraying some of Paris Hilton’s perfume on her neck (an ironic reference given that the director has created advertisements for perfume). When Kirsten Dunst and Paris Hilton make cameo appearances in the nightclub where the teens hang out, cinematography enhances the distance between the wannabes who sit in the dark foreground and the celebrities whose presence draws attention without them asking for it

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Figure 23.1  Kirsten Dunst makes a cameo appearance in the nightclub, an effortless performance of celebrity that contrasts with the self-conscious performance of the teen wannabes. The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola © Somewhere Else LLC 2013.

(see Figure 23.1). By contrast, the characters of The Bling Ring are highly self-conscious individuals, posing like stars in their everyday outings by copying their favorite stars’ dress and behavioral style. Their performance is explicitly based on the recurring images of contemporary celebrities that crop up in the film either as short clips, press photographs, or Facebook pages, showing the designer items (jewels, shoes, bags, clothes) which Paris Hilton and other young women wear to entice the onlookers’ eyes through the media. Wilkinson comments on this film aesthetic as a reflection of the cultural practice of skimming, which the diversity of screens around us promotes: As we skim from visual to visual, from page to page, from format of mediation to format of mediation, we only briefly touch upon any particular surface before quickly moving on. The fleeting nature of our engagement with what we are seeing seems precisely the point. This is not about a layering of images to create depth; rather, it is about imploring our affective engagement with the screen to move through this landscape frenetically, continuously, horizontally. We are just skimming the surface, and it is this movement, this action, that matters here.4 The skimmed photographs capture the performative acts of femininity, which the Bling Ring girls try to replicate to make themselves visible. There is irony in having Emma Watson play the role of Alexis Neiers, for her star persona shines through her performance and heightens the exhibitionist nature of the girls’ performance of celebrity: her provocative dance in the club creates an impression of oddity, which Marc (Israel Broussard) comments on by asking, “What is she doing?” calling attention to the reflexive nature of Coppola’s filmmaking.5 However, Watson’s star qualities run against the excesses of her performing

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for visibility in the role of Neiers. The film spotlights the discrepancy between Watson’s discretion as a star who keeps her private life from the limelight and her overly sexualized performance as Neiers in The Bling Ring. Watson’s presence actually evokes the implicit distance between herself as a film star and the “celetoid”6 she is supposed to embody. Alice Marwick and danah boyd conceive celebrity “as an organic and ever-changing performative practice rather than a set of intrinsic personal characteristics or external labels.”7 This definition emphasizes the practice of celebrity as a set of actions which are performed to be seen and consumed by an audience. Coppola’s films depict not only how this practice results in a visual culture based on visible consumption but also how performance becomes a way of life blurring the lines between representation and authenticity. Marwick and boyd evoke the “construction of a consumable persona” to account for the various acts which individuals engage in to maintain the visibility which is instrumental to the continuity of celebrity. Coppola includes various sequences that subtly outline how a persona is composed for the public gaze, tying the construct of a visual identity to various objects that denote the interaction between a neoliberal economy and the display of consumable goods. Lost in Translation provides an apt example as Bob Harris (Bill Murray) embodies various character types (such as “Rat Pack” or “007”) for a whisky commercial, responding to the director’s prompts for “more mysterious,” “more tension,” and “more sexy” poses. The Japanese director refers to other actors (Dean Martin, Roger Moore) to guide Bob Harris into performing different types of masculinity; yet only his facial features should convey the expected effect. While the medium shot enhances the acting talent of Bob Harris/Bill Murray as he obediently plays out the pantomime that helps foreground the glass of iced tea that passes for alcohol on-screen, he expresses annoyance and frustration at being deprived of his voice as a “movie star” whose image is all that matters for the commercial. Anna Backman Rogers astutely perceives this moment as one of slippage when “Bob becomes unable to maintain this performative façade” and reveals “a void or blankness (a state that Bill Murray, who plays Bob, specializes in as an actor).”8 Posing in a black tuxedo with a glass near his face, Bob Harris is reduced to a pose that does not allow for his personal style of performing to emerge (see Figure 23.2). Lost in Translation, by contrast, offers more space for Bob Harris (and indirectly Bill Murray) to display his nuanced acting demeanor. The film subtly suggests that his star persona shines best beyond the studio set of the embedded sequence, where his talent is not constrained by photographic silent frames. Coppola explores the ambiguity between Bill Murray and Bob Harris, a doubled layering of celebrity in the film itself. The American actor is a recognizable celebrity, and the film highlights this fact by showing rebroadcasts of his appearance on Saturday Night Live. Bob Harris’ status as a diegetic celebrity relies on Bill Murray’s star aura since the film offers few background details on the protagonist’s acting experience. But the absence of such facts emphasizes the construction of the celebrity as a commodity signifying commercial value. Bob is expected to adopt a Roger Moore or a Sean Connery expression to sell a product, which enhances “the very mechanics of constructing a persona (a cliché)”9—or the branding of the self in the world of filmmaking.

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Figure 23.2  Bill Murray’s acting talent shines through the photographic silent frames of Bob Harris in Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola © Universal Studios 2003.

The Commodification of Celebrity The notion of celebrity is entangled with media exposure, and both feed off each other in an unending circle. Daniel Boorstin’s tautological definition of the celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness”10 aptly captures the vacuity of the concept in the age of mass and social media. The construction of celebrity relies on the multiple opportunities for image-making in a hypermediated and networked world, giving rise to public figures whose visibility is manufactured as a commodity in a society where, as Sarah Banet-Weiser explains, “visibility itself has been absorbed into the economy.”11 The individual is given a prominent place within that economy which depends on a complex mediascape to expand, turning identities into cultural constructs to be bought and consumed. Although Sarah Projansky restricts the economy of visibility to demands imposed on girls as “visual objects on display,”12 the principles on which it is founded extend the phenomenon of commodified celebrity beyond gender lines. Johnny Marco in Somewhere and Bob Harris in Lost in Translation are literally turned into commodities by the gazes of curiosity cast upon them as celebrities. Bob Harris circumvents the effects of celebrity through sarcastic comments that allow him to preserve some form of intimacy from the inquiring questions of fans at the bar of the Park Hyatt hotel, whereas Johnny Marco gives in to the easy life that he can buy himself, represented by his black Ferrari. He also takes advantage of stardom, indulging in casual sex with women who are attracted to him because of his fame. Celebrity connotes a state of being looked at that undermines the sense of action in Coppola’s films. The director relinquishes the dramatic intensity of a plot-driven narrative in Somewhere and adopts a slow narrative form that prompts her to linger on moments

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of inaction. The film makes use of still shots to convey the depressive protagonist’s lack of engagement with the real world; Johnny Marco, a celebrity actor promoting his latest film, finds himself caught in the void of daily life. He is filmed lying in the sunshine by the swimming pool, watching girls pole dancing from his bed, gazing at his daughter Cleo ice-skating from the spectators’ seats. The duration of still shots builds a cinema of stasis, suggesting the distance between Johnny and the individuals around him. Stasis, in this case, expresses his difficulty in connecting emotionally with other people, especially women whose conspicuous gaze at his body reflects the commodification of male and female bodies in a society where sex denotes the pornographic (like the pole dance). Stasis describes a sort of numbness that isolates him from the movements of emotions and affects, a state that is aptly signified by the makeup mold that covers his face in one sequence. Johnny Marco looks frozen in time and in space; the shots of a car speeding around a racetrack convey this impression of suspension and emptiness. The geometrical figure opens the film with a symbol of enclosure that reflects the lack of direction in Johnny’s life. Johnny Marco’s celebrity status has literally objectified him and he has enclosed himself in an “environment of perpetual disconnection,” as Backman Rogers suggests.13 His estrangement from the people around him, aptly signified by the use of Italian which he does not understand when attending an awards ceremony in Rome, conveys both the “aura” and the “distance,” which David Marshall describes as characteristic of celebrity.14 Johnny Marco is literally “controlled and commodified by the image-machine that is Hollywood,” Todd Kennedy argues, unable to act spontaneously. Somewhere captures the detachment that underlies his life as a celebrity whose life revolves around a series of moments where he finds himself unable to connect with others, spending “most of his time static, on his couch. When he is in motion, usually in his car, his movement always follows cyclical patterns—until, at the end of the film we are offered the promise of linear/forward movement. In other words, it is a crisis of identity depicted almost entirely along spatial lines.”15 Johnny Marco’s life is reduced to the visible performance of a public persona, a state of existence underscored by his final rejection of Los Angeles at the end of the film.16 He literally turns his back on his celebrity existence and walks away from a life in the limelight—including the prop of his fame, his Ferrari. The Lisbon girls are also portrayed like celebrities in The Virgin Suicides, endowed with an aura of mystery that inspires fantasies in their neighbors’ imagination—four boys who spy on them in a voyeuristic fashion. Coppola elaborates an aesthetic of evanescence that makes the girls appear inaccessible, enshrouding them in a distant world of their own.17 The girls are prisoners of a stereotypical image associating their white skin and blonde hair with an aura of innocence and perfection, which to a certain extent dehumanizes them by depriving them of their individuality. It is significant that Coppola endeavors to recreate their individual idiosyncrasies by superimposing their handwritten signatures beside their pictures in the opening sequence. This is, however, a timid assertion of the self as the young women are given no voice to speak out and are under the constant scrutiny of the neighborhood boys. Justin Wyatt observes that the girls of The Virgin Suicides are filmed like characters in a 1970s ad campaign, which once again enhances their objectification in the eyes of the boys narrating the story. The aesthetic approach to the girls foregrounds visual touches that “appear to be inspired, directly or indirectly, from the ads of the era:

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the golden-hued background, figures sitting adrift in a field, extreme close-ups of faces and, of course, the bold yellows characteristic of the decade.”18 Coppola’s visual style of filmmaking thus undermines the girls’ agency, which is limited to their power to exist in the gaze of others and to attract the eye of the camera—like commodities in advertising. The Lisbon sisters appear as clichés in the film, subject to an “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.”19 Backman Rogers underlines the deadly power of the male gaze, a system of oppression that reduces women to a visible, beautiful surface. Her analysis may extend beyond the girls in The Virgin Suicides to account for the often-tragic outcomes of celebrity life. David Marshall comments on the material value of the celebrity, observing that “[t]he celebrity exists above the real world, in the realm of symbols that gain and lose value like commodities on the stock market.”20 Like Bob Harris and Johnny Marco, the Lisbon girls are depersonalized and commodified as marketable clichés that deprive them of their individuality. Evolving in such a world undercuts the humanity of the celebrity, who is seen like a commodity to be bought and consumed—Lux’s name itself refers to a brand of dishwashing detergent.21 The celebrity is a product of consumer culture and his/her value extends to the objects that s/he endorses.

Commodities as Props of Celebrity Celebrity then exists as a material culture of images and objects, a hypermediated society where consuming is performed as a pleasurable action to be seen. The Bling Ring often focuses on all the paraphernalia that connotes femininity—the handbags, the Louboutin high heels, the sparkling bracelets that adorn the filmed bodies in the photographs the teens obsessively flick through. Exhibiting similar luxury objects and brands allows them to manufacture the selfies which the youngsters view as signifiers of their own celebrity status, offering a sort of mise en abyme of the whole process which construes contemporary celebrity. The film’s quick editing and blasting music convey the intoxicating nature of celebrity as a performance of excess, which leads the Bling Ring gang on their robbing sprees into famous people’s mansions to expand their collections of luxury items. The act of skimming which Wilkinson identifies results from an insatiable thirst for objects in the economy of visibility.22 Coppola’s props foreground the self-reflexive use of consumer goods in the construction of celebrity (i.e., the consumption of celebrity defined by consumption). It is a similar performance of abundance that defines royalty in Marie Antoinette, where the young Austrian girl chosen to be married to Louis XVI learns to be queen through displaying her power as a consumer. Her public role makes her a focus of attention and subjective shots convey her sense of disorientation when first arriving at Versailles. Gazes turned upon her enhance her celebrity status as a woman to be looked at, for she is expected to embody conspicuous femininity and nobility. Coppola uses closeups and quick editing to convey Marie Antoinette’s increasing consumption of fabrics, champagne, and pastries, which testifies to her accommodation to the trappings of

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Versailles and to her path from anonymity to celebrity. The Queen of France endorses her role by donning the dresses that make her fit in among the court ladies and by indulging herself in the pleasures of fashion. Marie Antoinette’s “celebrity” develops when she defines herself through consumption of goods and fashion items that distinguish her from the fashions at court. Coppola nonetheless uses fashion as a means to level criticism at a system which, while allowing Marie Antoinette to assert herself as a public figure, simultaneously stifles her feelings and sensitivity: “Marie Antoinette supports seduction as a clever mode of power for women but ultimately this subordinates the seducer more than the seduced, for as Marie’s influence grows, her image comes to replace her self with dire consequences.”23 Samiha Matin highlights the split between private feelings and public image, which becomes a source of frustration to the young Marie Antoinette who experiences more freedom by avoiding Versailles during her escapes to the Petit Trianon where she gets rid of the accoutrements of royalty. In contrast to such moments of liberation from the constraints of court etiquette, Marie Antoinette is under constant evaluation at Versailles. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young argue that cinematography is used to convey her victimization by a court audience whose background presence surrounds every appearance of the queen: “Repeatedly we see her walking down a long hallway or avenue as we hear not real conversation, but (literally) ungrounded, whispered rumors floating around her, often those of the courtiers themselves.”24 This aural environment serves as a mise en abyme of the media system which thrives on celebrity gossip. Katarzyna Paszkiewicz draws a stimulating parallel between Marie Antoinette and Paris Hilton, suggesting that both revel in an excessive lifestyle epitomized by “the selfabsorbed obscene luxury of Versailles,”25 and Hilton’s extravagant Hollywood mansion which was used as a real setting for The Bling Ring. To Jesse Fox Mayshark, “Coppola’s Versailles is a world of privilege, vanity and waste, where power is both elaborately deferred to and endlessly sought.”26 In other words, the props of celebrity exhibit a lavish exuberance which Coppola uses as symbols of excess to self-reflexively comment on the status of celebrity. The attention to objects echoes the reification of Marie Antoinette into a “piece of political chattel” and a person who remains “property” throughout the film.27 It is difficult for Coppola’s characters to transcend the material world which surrounds them, for her characters evolve in a world where money disappears into objects that provide material comfort but often fail to satisfy immaterial needs. Paszkiewicz draws attention to the use of decorative objects as a reflexive commentary on the status of the female body in Marie Antoinette, including the fan which the queen playfully uses to hide her face. The Bling Ring displays an abundance of luxury goods that fill the empty lives of the celebrity wannabes who bond over Louboutin shoes or other brand items. Backman Rogers observes that brands are named before people in The Bling Ring, which she interprets as a signifier of “neoliberal politics, which has ushered in the ‘democratization’ of the celebrity lifestyle sponsored by designer goods, [and] is so pervasive that it has come to stand in for or to substitute for relations amongst people.”28 Lost in Translation and Somewhere portray their celebrity protagonists as isolated and unable to set themselves in motion, feeling completely alienated from an environment where human relationships are constructed as another version of consumption. The

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men are without desire and seem to have lost all sense of agency, being told how to pose for the cameras pointed at them. Consumption empties life of particular meaning and purpose, reducing human relationships to material exchanges in a system which celebrity epitomizes. The Chateau Marmont hotel where the protagonist of Somewhere has settled down serves as a signifier of the commodification of a whole way of life. Mark Rozzo explains that the story of the hotel is intrinsically linked to that of Hollywood and he accumulates what he calls “factoids about the improbable casts that, over time, have occupied specific rooms.”29 Somewhere alludes to the past glory of the Chateau, where Coppola herself used to stay along with her father Francis Ford Coppola. The place sells itself on the basis of its storied history of celebrity inhabitants, reflecting a commodified way of life with the customers exploring the illusion of a comfortable home. The hotel itself is equally illusory, “designed to resemble a Loire castle and christened with a name that sounded French”30 to lure visitors with a veneer of luxury. Coppola’s films may undermine the fascination that Hollywood exerts on audiences by showing how celebrity transforms one’s phenomenological relationship to the world and to the self. Psychologists describe the contradictory feelings which celebrity nurtures, subjecting the famous to loss of privacy through various types of media exposure that are yet gratifying forms of recognition.31 Celebrity life provides a number of “guilty” pleasures, yet the thrill of being admired and recognized by the general public can also be felt as an intrusion on intimacy, which some celebrities want to shun as fame impacts every aspect of their daily life.32 Coppola’s characters toe a thin line between pleasure and annoyance, fascination and repulsion, in a world where celebrity turns every aspect of their life into a commodity to be traded.

Conclusion Coppola’s cinema promotes a reflexive look at celebrity culture. While her feature films explore an aesthetic practice that may seem to resonate with the advertising world whose aim is to arouse desire for material products that promise satisfaction, they first and foremost capture and expose the artificial world of objects which immerse individuals into the material world of the neoliberal economy. From Somewhere to Lost in Translation and The Bling Ring, celebrity appears as a shallow concept that offers little comfort in a world of images where the search for visibility replaces desire for new experiences. Her films self-reflexively question the media culture celebrities and stars evolve in, showing how the notion of fame undermines the sense of existence. Individuals have turned themselves into commodities to be consumed on-screen and off-screen, blurring the lines between the public and the private spheres. A life of fame is a simulacrum of life itself, nurturing detachment from the real. Sometimes perceived as frivolous and superficial, as “non-authentic” cultural products because of their focus on brands and commodities,33 Coppola’s films convey the impact of celebrity itself in an aesthetic form that resists the cultural fascination of celebrity by showing its shallow underpinnings.

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Notes 1 See Katarzyna Paszkiewicz’s chapter on critical reception in this volume (Chapter 24). 2 Maryn Wilkinson, “On the Depths of Surface: Strategies of Surface Aesthetics in The Bling Ring, Spring Breakers and Drive,” Film-Philosophy 22, no. 2 (June 2018): 224. 3 James Monaco, “Celebration,” in Celebrity, ed. James Monaco (New York: Delta, 1978), 8–9. 4 Wilkinson, “On the Depths of Surface,” 227. 5 Delphine Letort, “The Cultural Capital of Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013): Branding Feminine Celebrity in Los Angeles,” Celebrity Studies 7, no. 3 (2016): 315. 6 Chris Rojek coined the term to refer to someone whose celebrity status is “largely the result of the concentrated representation of an individual.” See Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion, 2001), 18. 7 Alice Marwick and danah boyd, “To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17, no. 2 (May 2011): 141. 8 Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019), 81. 9 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 81. 10 Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Random House, 1961), 57. 11 Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Keynote Address: Media, Markets, Gender: Economies of Visibility in a Neoliberal Moment,” The Communication Review 18, no. 1 (2015): 55. 12 Sarah Projansky, Spectacular Girls: Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 5. 13 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 128. 14 P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 119. 15 Todd Kennedy, “On the Road to ‘Some Place’: Coppola’s Dissident Modernism against a Postmodern Landscape,” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 52 (2015): 55. 16 Kennedy, “On the Road to ‘Some Place,’” 65. 17 Gilles Menegaldo, “Teenagers in Crisis: Fascination, Transformation and the Quest for Identity in The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999) and Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001),” Publije 1 (2018): 8. 18 Justin Wyatt, The Virgin Suicides, Reverie, Sorrow and Young Love (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 68–9. 19 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 27. 20 Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 6. 21 A. O. Scott, “Evanescent Trees and Sisters in an Enchanted 1970s Suburb,” The New York Times, April 21, 2000. 22 Banet-Weiser, “Keynote Address,” 55. 23 Samiha Matin, “Private Femininity, Public Femininity: Tactical Aesthetics in the Costume Film,” in Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas, ed. Christine Gledhill (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois, 2012), 105.

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24 Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, “Marie Antoinette: Fashion, Third-Wave Feminism, and Chick Culture,” Literature/Film Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2010): 107. 25 Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 181. 26 Jesse Fox Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2007), 177. 27 Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema, 178. 28 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 145. 29 Mark Rozzo, “Secrets of the Chateau Marmont,” Vanity Fair, February 4, 2019. 30 Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 122. 31 Donna Rockwell and David C. Giles, “Being a Celebrity: A Phenomenology of Fame,” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 40, no. 2 (2009): 179. 32 Rockwell and Giles, “Being a Celebrity,” 188–93. 33 Paszkiewicz, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, 187.

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24 CRITICAL RECEPTION “ALL THAT STYLE OVERWHELMS THE SUBSTANCE”: THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF SOFIA COPPOLA’S WORK Katarzyna Paszkiewicz

In his review of Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled (2017) for USA Today, Brian Truitt complains that the film is “much ado about nothing.” He continues, “All that style overwhelms the substance. . . . The Beguiled is slow to develop and never really cooks.”1 Also resorting to a culinary metaphor, Ann Hornaday writes in her critique of On the Rocks (2020) for The Washington Post that Coppola’s film “has all the right ingredients . . . but it’s a flavorless dish,” adding that the film’s “too-pretty upper class redoubts . . . recall the surface gloss of Woody Allen, but none of his acute observational wit.”2 These comments on Coppola’s two most recent films to date are exemplary of the most recurring narrative circulating around her work, appearing in both negative and positive press: her films are beautifully filmed, but they often fail—or refuse—to delve beneath the surface. While individually these reviews point to different (yet intersecting) discourses, such as Coppola’s interest in wealthy protagonists, the languid pace of her films, that mise-en-scène and mood take precedence over plot, collectively they share the judgment that concern for style equates to lack of substance. In this chapter, I look at how the prevalence of this critical line in the reception of Coppola’s feature films has, on the one hand, allowed her to carve out a recognizable authorial brand but, on the other, has sometimes delimited recognition of her work. Coppola’s films and career trajectory have undoubtedly undergone a process of critical and academic reevaluation in the last decade, as attested to by the recent three book-length studies

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of her work.3 Yet Truitt’s and Hornaday’s reviews illustrate that she is still discredited in popular discourse, to the point that J. Hoberman felt compelled to ask in the title of his 2019 piece for The New York Times: “Why Hasn’t Sofia Coppola Gotten the Respect an Auteur Deserves?”4 In trying to address this question, I interrogate a range of critical sources (mostly US and UK film reviews) to trace various processes of authentication and de-authentication of Coppola as an auteur. In particular, while engaging in dialogue with the existing scholarship on the filmmaker, I unpack what I see as the “surface over substance” meta-narrative, which hovers over several other overlapping discourses, including Coppola’s family connections and her privileged position in the US film industry; her filmmaking style, marked by a focus on affects, moods, and the world of decorative objects; her interest in white neoliberal femininity, which has divided critics throughout her career; and her engagement with fashion and the culturally feminized sphere of mass consumption in a broader sense, which, as I will show, leads to the persistent framing of her work in “edible” terms. Taken together, these discourses contribute to a critical alignment between the filmmaker and her oeuvre, while simultaneously they are often used to belittle her credibility as a female director. Such strategies of de-authentication are particularly evident if compared to discourses circulating around her male counterparts, Woody Allen being only one example. However, this is not to suggest that the discursive circulation of Coppola’s films is invariably determined by critical devaluation. In fact, as Suzanne Ferriss observes, a rapidly expanding scholarly interest in the filmmaker has managed “to redress the balance, eschewing biographical readings in favor of serious consideration of Coppola’s work—cinematic and commercial.”5 Arguably, this scholarly reassessment has also contributed to an increasingly positive critical appraisal of Coppola’s films in the mainstream media. Put simply, several critics have begun to realize that, to use Pam Cook’s oft-quoted formulation, “in Coppola’s film, style is substance.”6 Exemplary in this sense is The New Yorker journalist Richard Brody, who has repeatedly defended her work, arguing that “Coppola’s sense of style . . . is the most exquisite in the current cinema” and that, in her films, “sight and insight are inseparable.”7 Indeed, as Ferriss notes in her discussion of “Coppolism,” Coppola’s film style is, in fact, widely acknowledged and celebrated: “It is so identifiable that the British Film Institute (BFI) and others have produced video primers on how to make ‘a Sofia Coppola film,’ with instructions on color (muted pastels), lighting (natural), characters (sympathetic), theme (isolation, alienation), etc.”8 Even though, as noted earlier, a cursory glance at the critical responses to Coppola’s films at different stages of her career seems to point to a progression toward a more generous appreciation of her filmmaking, in fact, as the above-mentioned reviews demonstrate, certain discourses do prevail. This is partly because, as Janet Staiger puts it in her context-activated reception theory, every period witnesses several modes of reception at once, and “any individual viewer may engage even within the same theatregoing experience in these various modes of reception.”9 In contrast to Staiger, who does not separate general film-going audiences from journalists and fans, in this chapter I focus solely on professional critics and their reactions to Coppola’s seven feature films. In charting these responses, I will build on the previous scholarship on Coppola that amply demonstrates how the close examination of critical reception of her work uncovers a

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number of interpretative assumptions and narratives around her auteur-celebrity persona, which are markedly gendered and which, interestingly, share some common ground with the critical response in the discursive circulation and reception of women’s films in the Hollywood context more broadly. To use Ferriss’ sartorial metaphor from her study on how Coppola’s films intersect with fashion, art, and celebrity culture, the reviews surveyed in this chapter appeal to the polymorphous discourses that “are woven together into one dense fabric”10 and that, rather than providing fixed meanings or uncovering “truths” about the filmmaker, pinpoint the multiple factors that come together in the negotiation over making sense of her work. Coppola’s public persona and her interest in depicting the experiences of affluent, white, often young women, enclosed in rarefied, exclusive worlds (upper-middle-class suburbs in The Virgin Suicides [1999] and The Bling Ring [2013], luxurious hotels in Lost in Translation [2003] and Somewhere [2010], and the Palace of Versailles in Marie Antoinette [2006]), have contributed to the readings of her films as “obliquely autobiographical”—and the director herself has not always discouraged these interpretations.11 Throughout her two-decades-long career, few critics have resisted the temptation to bring up Coppola’s family connections and her privileged position in the US film industry. In her insightful analysis of this discourse, Belinda Smaill shows how often Coppola’s success has been attributed to her unique position as Hollywood royalty: as the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, she was accorded both wealth and exposure to the dominant film industry, a luxury that the majority of aspiring directors can only dream of. The fact that she “did not enter Hollywood from a position wholly outside the industry, as is almost always the case with female directors,” led to the perception that she lacks skills or “true” talent and, perhaps, though probably for different reasons, to her earlier exclusion from the feminist canons of women filmmakers.12 Fiona Handyside argues that the very name of the filmmaker places her films “literally as well as metaphorically under the name of the father,” while also “inviting them to be read as a part of the ‘Coppola’ brand.”13 In her illuminating reading of Coppola’s “involuntary transvestite performance” in The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), in which she is baptized as a baby boy (Michael), Handyside points to ideological contradictions implied in her position within the contemporary cinematic culture: On the one hand, she is welcomed, both on and off-screen, into a highly influential family, bound not only by ties of blood but also loyalty and business. On the other hand, she is marked from the very start as being from this family, contained by its meanings, and established firmly as a scion. The fact that she performs as a boy further complicates the meanings of her initial foray into the cinema, suggesting access to the power and agency of the image-making apparatus contains within it conflicts for women. . . . [She is] allowed access to the father’s power and influence, but at the price of losing her own agency and becoming (like) a son.14 Building on these remarks, it is my contention that, even today, Coppola’s film authorship is celebrated but at the same time subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) invalidated. She is currently one of the most visible and critically acclaimed directors and, given that she

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works in predominantly male Hollywood, it is no surprise that her gender often comes as a central focus.15 Critics foreground on a regular basis that she won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Lost in Translation and that she is one of the very few women nominated for an Oscar for Best Director in the organization’s nearly 100-year history (at the time of writing, only seven women were nominated in this category, Jane Campion twice). Coppola also became the first-ever American female director to receive the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Somewhere and she made Cannes Film Festival history by becoming the second woman in the event’s seventy-five-year history to win best director for The Beguiled. As Handyside argues, “the award recognition and critical commentary on Coppola’s films clearly locate Coppola as an auteur in the ‘romantic’ and masculine sense of the director as presiding talent (genius?) whose personal, artistic vision is communicated to us via her or (much more usually) his films.”16 Similar strategies of authentication can be identified in Hoberman’s 2019 piece: after ranking Coppola alongside Kathryn Bigelow “as the two women with the most longevity on the movie industry’s A-list,” Hoberman observes that, in fact, Coppola is “also the most celebrated American filmmaker under 50 (Paul Thomas Anderson is the only other contender).” However, while Hoberman grants Coppola a status of “a true auteur,” that is, “a filmmaker with a distinct worldview and sensibility and a personal set of quasiautobiographical interests,” he does not hesitate to call her “fortune’s child, . . . blessed and cursed for reasons beyond her control,” and from the first lines of his article he wonders if it is “an advantage or disadvantage to have a supportive, larger-than-life father who is a world-famous filmmaker.”17 This discourse resonates with how Coppola’s earlier projects have attracted accusations of nepotism. As Todd Kennedy observes, referring to Coppola’s first three feature films, The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, and Marie Antoinette: “When critics have felt she has succeeded, it has often been partially attributed to her father. . . . When they feel she has failed, critics often act as if she was unworthy of even making the film, having (they imply) been given her money from—and, amazingly, I quote here (Peter Vonder Haar)—‘Daddy.’”18 While certainly far more attenuated than in the past, this reading strategy continues to affect the discursive circulation of Coppola’s public figure, as illustrated by Hoberman’s comments.19 Early reviews of Coppola’s work tended to dismiss her achievements not only by foregrounding her father but also by reading her films as a more or less straightforward reflection of the narrow, carefree lifestyle Coppola herself is associated with—what Caitlin Yunuen Lewis aptly describes as the prevalent view that she is “a shallow, spoiled daughter of privilege who spends excessive amounts of her father’s money on frivolous girlishness.”20 As I have argued elsewhere, this narrative became particularly evident in the discursive circulation of Marie Antoinette.21 In his review for The Independent on Sunday, Jonathan Romney observed that many critics conflated Marie Antoinette and Coppola, dismissing the film as “a rich girl’s fantasy about a rich girl.”22 The Guardian article published on the occasion of the film’s release collapsed her authorial persona with her portrayal of female characters, a common reading strategy applied to other women filmmakers as well.23 Critic Sean O’Hagan wrote, “Sofia Coppola could easily be a character in one of her own films, a day-dreamy, slightly disconnected but immaculately stylish waif who seems all at sea in a world of extraordinary privilege.” The article repeatedly casts her in the role

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of Hollywood royalty, to trace not only her upbringing in a high-status environment (“she was born . . . into a Hollywood dynasty where her father, Francis Ford Coppola, reigned supreme”) but also her uniqueness in the industry as a whole (“no other young female film director possesses her kind of clout in Hollywood, and this is not just to do with her dynastic name”). Even more perplexingly, Coppola’s relationships with other famous men are also accentuated in the profile: O’Hagan relates that while Lost in Translation was said “to have echoed the fracturing of her marriage to the hipper-than-thou director Spike Jonze,” Coppola was later linked to Quentin Tarantino, who included her name in the credits to Kill Bill Vol. 2 in 2004.24 The association with Tarantino has proven particularly thorny for Coppola; when her next feature, Somewhere, won the Golden Lion, the press criticized the fact that the jury for the prize was presided over by Tarantino, whom Coppola dated briefly after divorcing Jonze.25 Feminist scholars have long denounced similar comments circulating around female filmmakers and other creative industry practitioners as reinforcing the prevailing assumption about women succeeding through their family connections or romantic relationships, which seriously undermine their hard work and professional authority. Comments on Coppola echo, for example, similar accusations that haunted Kathryn Bigelow during her career, mainly due to her personal and professional relations with James Cameron.26 However, while Bigelow managed to enter Hollywood’s “big boys’ club,” as many critics have pronounced,27 Coppola belongs to a “cool kids’ club” with a different sort of sensibility and brand image, and more clearly marked in terms of social class and taste determinants.28 Drawing on Diane Negra, Smaill has shown how Coppola manages to reconcile bourgeois and bohemian taste formations that are central to the marketability of American independent cinema. Yet, Coppola’s case is particularly revealing, as in contrast to other (male) directors, her attunement to a culture of affluence is, at times, read as “too unself-conscious and lacking in an ironizing critique, thus outweighing her ‘indie’ style credentials.”29 The industrial and cultural context of independent cinema structures the reception of many contemporary filmmakers, such as Quentin Tarantino, Spike Jonze, or Wes Anderson, still none of them suffered from the crisis of credibility that Coppola has in the early stages of her filmmaking career.30 Smaill convincingly argues: In part, it is the affluence of her narratives, their languid meditation on the lives of those who seem to take for granted their advantage, that evokes questions around the relevance of Coppola’s work. This questionability is doubled (and personalized) when coupled with Coppola’s own femininity and privilege. The ostensible problem or difficulty here is not with gender per se, but with high bourgeois femininity. Her cinema and her brand is deemed, by some, to be unworthy because it is too whimsical, too effortless, too much the product of an un-validated access to power.31 This interpretative framework, which as noted earlier became particularly prominent after Marie Antoinette’s premiere, was later reinforced with the release of both Somewhere and The Bling Ring.32 The complex grid of intertextual references between the three films and the response to these films is particularly ripe with significance with regard to Coppola’s interest in the world of fame and privilege. All of them were read as the extension of

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Coppola’s public identity, and whereas some critics saw them as a self-reflexive comment on American celebrity culture, others criticized them as excessively concerned with frivolity and superficiality. For instance, Coppola’s sympathetic portrait of her heroine in Marie Antoinette as a “poor little rich girl” was read as a reflection of her own experience as “a child of Hollywood and privilege.”33 Less favorable reviewers were clearly annoyed by Coppola’s investment in the “despicable” realm of commodity fetishism. Agnès Poirier dubbed Marie Antoinette “a scandal” and chastised the filmmaker for making what she perceived as an “empty” film devoid of any political content: “All we learn about Marie Antoinette is her love for Ladurée macaroons [sic] and Manolo Blahnik shoes.”34 Similar comments appeared after the release of The Bling Ring, Coppola’s second-lowest rated movie after Marie Antoinette on the Rotten Tomatoes website. The site’s consensus reads: “While it’s certainly timely and beautifully filmed, The Bling Ring suffers from director Sofia Coppola’s failure to delve beneath the surface of its shallow protagonists’ real-life crimes.”35 Dismissing The Bling Ring as “narratively static and morally banal,” Joe Neumaier from New York Daily News bemoans that “half the movie is spent watching shallow kids try on other people’s clothes.”36 Coppola’s version of the queen in Marie Antoinette was often referred to as an eighteenth-century Paris Hilton, the infamous socialite, and one of the victims during the actual Bling Ring robberies.37 Coppola also received criticism that her Marie Antoinette cast seemed like “spoilt 5th Avenue New Yorkers,” to which she responded by saying that she wanted “to emphasize that they are teenagers and to mark the difference between their world and the stuffy court world.”38 Significantly, her most recent feature to date, On the Rocks, has attracted reviews in a similar vein. For example, Jacobin’s journalist Eileen Jones referred to the film as “another meandering depiction of life as a bored and alienated celebrity,” and criticized it for being “extraordinarily vapid . . . oblivious to its own world of wealth, privilege, and access.”39 Hornaday also bemoaned that “On the Rocks wears its privilege like a spanking new seersucker jacket. It would be fun to watch as a slice of aspirational escapism if it seemed the least bit lived-in.”40 As these critiques make evident, Coppola’s work is still prone to be read as “confined to privileged, cossetted worlds that reflect her own upbringing”41 and thus perceived as lacking political depth. But in truth, Coppola’s films have been warmly received by many critics, despite what the above-mentioned comments might imply. Whereas some journalists seem irritated by Coppola’s overt concern with fashion and youth sensibilities, especially in her earlier films, others read her oeuvre as a subtle attack on twenty-first-century Hollywood and self-absorbed celebrity culture. “The clothes, the parties, the flatterers, the entourage, the sham marriages and passionate adulteries: it’s American celebrity culture but with better manners and (slightly) more ridiculous clothes. Affairs of state are conducted almost as it they were movie deals,” we read in A. O. Scott’s review of Marie Antoinette entitled “Holding a Mirror Up to Hollywood.”42 The New York Times critic also observes in his review of Somewhere how Coppola “illuminates the bubble of fame and privilege from the inside and maps its emotional and existential contours with unnerving precision and disarming sensitivity.”43 Nathan Heller, in turn, writes in his Slate review of Somewhere that Coppola’s attack on Hollywood places her in a site of unusual cultural tension: “Coppola’s insider criticism of Hollywood, her disdain for the industry that her

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own career relies on, leads her into a strange territory between hypocrisy and candor, privileged lament and fearless protest. This indeterminacy gives her work the back-andforth flicker—and intrigue—of a lure in water.”44 Coppola’s “back-and-forth flicker” when she seeks to illuminate the bubble of fame from the inside evokes familiar narratives in the critical reception of other women filmmakers’ work, especially when they set out to offer a critique of the dominant film culture from within the system, while remaining commercially successful. Their assumed access to Hollywood power often makes the scholarly and critical assessment of their films problematic—though, significantly, in the last two decades scholars have proposed various approaches to fruitfully address these tensions.45 It is also worth noting that, in contrast to earlier reviews of Coppola’s work that tended to conflate the filmmaker with her female protagonist to criticize her world of privilege, most recent reviews seem to be more attentive to the contradictions implied in such interpretative operations, perhaps because they are prompted by the cultural climate of the #MeToo movement, which has profoundly affected the ways in which women’s careers in Hollywood are read. Writing about On the Rocks, The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis grapples, somewhat uncomfortably, with the issue of female power, agency, and family connections in creative industries. She points to “how effortlessly Bill Murray takes possession” over Coppola’s film, though she admits that “this hijacking may be more of a sly directorial surrender.” Dargis reads his role of a father giving advice to a grown-up daughter as “a playful conceptual gambit for a director whose father, Francis Ford Coppola, casts his own long shadow.” The fact that Rashida Jones, “yet another child of a legendary father,” is cast as Murray’s daughter and as a struggling writer, adds additional complexity to the intertextual relay within which the film can be situated. As in Coppola’s earlier films, the protagonist, Laura, seems like a spectator in her own life, but in contrast to these earlier films, “there’s nothing ambiguous about how [Coppola] makes us see a woman too long lost in life’s shadow.”46 Brody, in a similar vein, draws on Coppola’s biographical details to underscore the stylistic, affective, and political intricacies of this film. In his insightful critique, he underscores that the film’s “breezy tone” suggests “no frivolity but an urgent necessity,” observing how On the Rocks self-consciously looks at abuses of power in Hollywood and even denounces its mythologies, “including the ones of the early classic movies that Felix reveres and those that brought Murray to stardom,” while at the same time relying on a similar emotional appeal. He argues: Without at all ascribing Felix’s self-justifying, troglodytic philosophy, his condescending manners, his aggressively sexist behavior, or his feckless and domineering ways to any individual in her family, her past, or her circle, Coppola nonetheless delves dramatically into the personal history of her generation. She suggests the experience of women in Hollywood (and, for that matter, outside it) who came up under the authority of an older generation of men, and of the very assumptions of modern culture, including the masculinized sense of cool that Hollywood shaped and amplified. As if doing a painful intellectual and emotional archeology of her life and sensibility, she looks sharply and critically at the conveniences of wealth and the prerogatives of privilege.47

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Taking up the well-known narrative of the conflict between style and surface, and once again fusing Coppola’s biography with the experiences depicted in the film, Brody argues that her “relationship with the subject is so intense that it nearly burns away style; there’s so little distance between herself and her subject that her exquisite flourishes of refined documentary-rooted observation . . . seem extracted with pain from the drama’s scrutiny of a certain aesthetic sensibility, and the wealth and the power on which it depends.”48 Coppola’s critical look at “the conveniences of wealth and the prerogatives of privilege” has been deemed not critical enough in other interpretative modes. In his review of On the Rocks, titled “Sofia Coppola’s Cinema-of-Privilege,” Armond White categorizes her as one of the “navel-gazing filmmakers,” calling her “a culturally vapid movie brat.” In contrast to “famous filmmaking prodigies,” including Jean Renoir, Luchino Visconti, Bernardo Bertolucci, and John Huston, who “saw past their privilege and connected to the world,” Coppola merely exhibits “spoiled-brat self-satisfaction” and “political smugness,” particularly evident in what White sees as the film’s “casual ‘post-racial’ subtext.”49 Along the same lines, Georgie Carr observes that, while “Coppola has been praised for casting Rashida Jones as her first female lead of colour,” the film relies on “exclusionary aesthetics” that are consistent with the filmmaker’s broader refusal of political engagement.50 In the context of the increasingly pronounced call for privilege-checking, Coppola’s focus on white, upper-middle-class, heterosexual female protagonists in her previous films is often taken as her complete obliviousness to intersectionality. The filmmaker has been criticized for actively sanitizing the past, which is yet another variation on the “style over substance” narrative (here substance being understood as complex social realities): in Marie Antoinette for not showing interest in social milieu that led to the French Revolution; in The Bling Ring for erasing Diana Tamayo, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who was threatened with deportation by the police to force her to cooperate; in the case of The Beguiled, which has turned out to be Coppola’s most controversial film to date, for “whitewashing” both the source novel and Don Siegel’s adaptation by excising an enslaved Black female character and casting Kirsten Dunst for “a mixed-race, white-passing teacher.”51 The only reference to the Civil War’s racial foundation is reduced to a single line of dialogue: “the slaves left.”52 This film has proven particularly tricky for Coppola, probably given the cultural climate during the Trump era. Anna Backman Rogers neatly summarizes this complex issue: 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.53

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Even the critics who tend to be the most favorable to Coppola’s work, such as Brody, considered The Beguiled Coppola’s “least stylistically refined” film.54 Brody’s comments are particularly relevant, as he has been among those who regularly champion Coppola’s films as “the most stylish of their time” as well as “the most misunderstood ones.” As he argues in his defense of Coppola’s style and substance: “There’s a widespread assumption among critics that style and substance are in conflict—that style is merely a frivolous adornment of, or a distraction from, what really matters.”55 Nevertheless, in the case of The Beguiled, it is precisely the scarcity of substance that he brings up. Coppola’s version of The Beguiled “has less substance, less story, less drama,” he writes, pointing to how the filmmaker decided not to include flashbacks, images of war, archival footage, references to financial situations, or confrontations between soldiers. He further argues that “Coppola’s Civil War is itself an abstraction—a reduction of a complex historical and political phenomenon to one particular, largely erotic and romantic crisis involving a group of white women . . . with personal as well as political history flattened into immediate experience,” and he finally wonders “why she made a film about the Civil War at all.”56 He perceives The Beguiled as flat and redundant, that is, as standing in opposition to narratively, aesthetically, or politically sophisticated films, an observation which encapsulates a number of interrelated discourses closely entangled with the gendering of genres, an issue to which I return in due course. Other commentators see more sophistication in this film. Drawing on Handyside’s observations about Coppola’s engagement with, and subtle critique of, the strict norms of femininity in The Beguiled, Soraya Roberts speculates in Hazlitt that through her consistent focus on whiteness, Coppola draws attention to hegemonic beauty standards, to which she is also subjected: “As a teen, Coppola had thick dark eyebrows, a long mahogany mane and a pronounced nose, but as she got older, her hair got progressively lighter and shorter, her eyebrows thinner, her makeup and clothes more discreet. ‘If you think about Italianness, it’s associated with excess, with sexiness,’ says Handyside. ‘She’s almost reinvented herself as a wasp.’”57 Indeed, whiteness, as part of the dominant representations of neoliberal femininity, is central to Coppola’s oeuvre; as Backman Rogers contends, it “gestures towards the limit of the image or representation.”58 This observation could be extended to Coppola’s own performance of whiteness that makes this very whiteness visible, while also pointing to the limit of representation in relation to female directors more broadly. Nevertheless, such readings also risk sliding into the usual de-authentication of Coppola’s status as an auteur through biographical details. Backman Rogers argues that, in contrast to other American auteurs, critics tend to 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. 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.59 Denouncing this discourse as tedious and sexist, Backman Rogers is critical of the ways in which Coppola has “all too readily been turned into a brand that resonates

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far beyond the boundaries of her films (unlike the majority of her male counterparts or contemporaries, such as Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach).”60 These and other male auteurs concerned with depicting exclusive upper-middle-class worlds have rarely attracted similar accusations to those faced by Coppola. While scholars writing on Coppola’s performance within the “commerce of auteurism”61 have identified the multiple facets and nuances in her authorial brand, they all seem to agree that her films are perceived in strictly gendered terms because of their association with bourgeois femininity, as well as their emphasis on mise-en-scène, affect, and commodity cultures, all historically gendered as feminine. The reason why critics sometimes feel that Coppola’s cinematic work is not sufficiently self-conscious is precisely due to her female authorship. The critical response to Coppola’s interest in fashion, celebrity culture, and the feminized sphere of mass consumption more broadly sheds light not only on the filmmaker’s uneasy position within the elite world of US film industry but also on women’s relationship to mass culture in general. The supposed lack of critical distance, inextricably tied to the perceived deficit of quality, resonates with the long-standing conceptualization of mass culture as clearly gendered.62 As Rosalind Galt and Anna Backman Rogers have argued, a woman is perceived as too close to her body and to the world of material objects to gain broader perspective and, thus, to engender proper critique.63 For instance, in her review of On the Rocks, Carr observes how Coppola’s reliance on decorative objects tends to “flatten experience” and character development: Signifiers of wealth line up, un-interrogated: Chanel, expensive jewellery, palatial country houses. Objects are used to carry the film forward: clothes hastily removed on Dean and Laura’s wedding night, a mess of children’s toys, spacious loft apartment. As the film continues, these synechdochal moments continue to dominate, reducing its characters to a series of diagrammatic relations. Carr further regrets that “something interesting could have been done with this relentless depthlessness, a critique of the commodification and aestheticization of politics and pleasure, but On the Rocks’ elaborate sign system is an empty reification of lightly sketched out lives rather than substantive or ironic analysis.”64 As Tania Modleski has shown, women’s professional and personal involvement with the feminized sphere of fashion is often denigrated and ridiculed by men, thus putting women in “a familiar double bind by which they are first assigned a restricted place in patriarchy and then condemned by occupying it.”65 This is reflected in the ideological contradictions that arise from the intersection between women’s creativity and mass culture in a wider sense: women engaging with genres associated with female/feminine concerns are ignored or treated as mere manufacturers of unremarkable, if sometimes “pretty,” goods. Several scholars have argued that the mechanisms of devaluing women’s participation in popular culture, both as producers and consumers, are frequently developed through culinary metaphors. Critics have routinely likened Marie Antoinette to “licorice,” calling it “eye candy . . . no more nourishing than a bonbon” and a “sugarcoated romp” that does not take itself “particularly seriously.”66 In the newspaper Le Figaro, historian Jean Tulard called Marie Antoinette “Versailles in Hollywood sauce,” saying that it “dazzles” with a

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“deployment of wigs, fans and pastries, a symphony of colors,” which “all [mask] some gross errors and voluntary anachronisms.”67 Writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea downplays Marie Antoinette as “a gorgeous confection, packed with gargantuan gowns and pornographic displays of pastry-stuffs,” while Sean O’Hagan observes in his positive review of the film: “It is a gorgeous-looking soufflé of a film whose perceived lack of a political subtext or even point of view has already caused an unholy row in France.”68 Such comments might seem, at first sight, fitting if we consider Marie Antoinette’s central theme. Throughout the film, Marie is visually paralleled with the sumptuous pastries abundantly displayed in a number of scenes; as the Duchesse de Polignac remarks at one point, “she looks like a little piece of cake.” This is deliberately explored by Coppola, whose protagonist seems aware of her objectification. “Marie looks like cake while she looks at the camera,” observe Christina Lane and Nicole Richter in reference to the self-conscious opening of the film.69 Yet the frequency with which film critics return to food descriptors deserves further attention, especially because they are frequently accompanied with other highly disparaging terms: “‘shallow,’ ‘superficial,’ ‘psychologically diffuse,’ ‘vague,’ ‘vacuous,’ ‘no depth’ and ‘blank.’”70 Food metaphors appear even in the context of a more positive evaluation of Coppola’s work: Caryn James writes in her review of On the Rocks that the film’s “elegant surface makes it seem like a trifle, but there are layers beneath.”71 These comments are acutely gendered in nature. Coppola’s films, described at times as “pretty,” “decorative,” or “delectable,” tend to be perceived as lacking critical distance or dismissed as too concerned with privilege and frivolity. Emphasizing how “it is male critics who nearly always perpetuate the infuriatingly gendered tone prevalent in this cultural discourse,” Backman Rogers links it explicitly to the surface/substance narrative: “her oeuvre is frequently likened to cinematic pastry, a delightful cream puff, full of delicious air but lacking in meaty (and masculine) substance.”72 Interestingly, as Deborah Jermyn shows, “cloying food metaphors” are also prevalent in the reception of Nancy Meyers’ work—another woman with an exceptionally long career in Hollywood—and that of the feminized space of romantic comedy and “chick flicks” more broadly. Such metaphors “allude to how there is no nourishment to be had here, often conjuring up an image of women audiences with no restraint or willpower gorging themselves on sugary goodies they should know are no good for them.” Meyers’ work has been routinely referred to as focused on the look—praised for her careful attention to domestic mise-en-scène by interior design professionals and fans but “regularly maligned by film critics who see her devotion to intricate color and style coordination as a kind of empty and shallow distraction.”73 As in Coppola’s discursive circulation, Meyers’ attention to lavish sets and the privileged social milieu has turned out to be both a marker of her style and “a stick to beat her with.”74 Crucially, as Jermyn posits, Meyers’ skill in the realm of mise-en-scène, “that distinctive quality which one can well imagine would be remarked on as a laudable ‘eye for detail’ in a male director (cf. Douglas Sirk’s acclaimed reputation for adopting sumptuous colour), is used in Meyers’ case to imply she can’t really ‘do’ more substantial work like original character or plot.”75 Coppola is, likewise, “unanimously acknowledged as a master of the mise-en-scène,”76 yet her films are often perceived as being all about the “surface gloss.”77

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In effect, the prevalent association between the focus on the look and emptiness has affected many women filmmakers, including those working outside of the Hollywood industrial context. Smaill quotes Judith Mayne’s remarks on Claire Denis, another instance of a filmmaker “of the image,” presumably “devoted to formal innovation and aesthetic beauty rather than a story.” But in fact, Denis, like Coppola, reconciles image and complexity, surface and depth.78 As Handyside also observes in reference to Coppola, while the notions of “style” and “look” have always informed the basis of the “masculine” auteur theory and its primary focus on mise-en-scène—for example as manifested in Éric Rohmer’s belief in the “profundity of the superficial”—they tend to be valued more ambivalently in women’s work.79 In the case of Coppola, this sort of criticism feeds not only on her films and their self-conscious, fetishistic focus on the feminized world of objects but also on Coppola’s brand image in a wider sense, deeply embedded with fashion and celebrity culture. As Handyside observes, Coppola’s “writing of the self,” both in her media image and film publicity, is shaped by notions of chic, girlish femininity (which continues to be the case at the time of writing, when the filmmaker has just turned fifty-one). She further argues: “It is through fashion that Coppola expresses most clearly and competently the paradox of her auteur persona. It is through fashion that Coppola retools the idea(l)s of image dominating script and flourishes of personal style that dominate classical film theory, giving them a feminine makeover.”80 While Coppola’s work is undeniably embedded in the complexities of both the “commerce of auteurism” and postfeminist media culture, it is striking how often critics are inclined to read her films in a conservative way, barely paying attention to the more sophisticated, more textured, nature of her oeuvre. The gendered, and sometimes overtly misogynist, tone in the popular responses to Coppola should be carefully unpacked and scrutinized. Galt and Backman Rogers have both pointed to how Coppola’s focus on the image, in particular, the decorative mise-enscène, is often taken to connote superficiality at the expense of “deeper” meanings. If, as Galt suggests, “the rhetoric of cinema has consistently denigrated surface decoration, finding the attractive skin of the screen to be false, shallow, feminine, or apolitical,”81 then such a discourse is amplified in the case of Coppola. It is also frequently extended to emptiness in terms of (feminist) politics, a quality that has been paralleled, as already noted, with Coppola’s bourgeois lifestyle. The majority of critical readings of her films have characterized them almost exclusively in terms of postfeminist concerns about “female” or “girlie” consumption and leisure, rather than with explicit feminist politics. In reference to this aspect, Handyside comments that Coppola’s view of girlhood is, nonetheless, removed from the celebratory rhetoric of “girlpower,” as her films stage contradictions of women’s position in popular culture without necessarily seeking to resolve them.82 However, it is not only the distinctive mixture of Coppola’s biographical details and her film style focused on the decorative image that is at stake here. As I have argued in my previous work on Coppola, the critical discourse around the filmmaker is intrinsically tied to the tensions that exist at the intersection between female authorship and the cultural, critical, and industrial gendering of genres.83 It is not a coincidence that Coppola is more likely to be accused of frivolity than, for instance, Bigelow. Both are equally concerned

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with the image, yet they work in different genres; in Hoberman’s words: “Where Bigelow works in genres that have up to now been dominated by men, Coppola’s are, to use her own term, ‘girlie.’”84 Thus, the analysis of critical response to Coppola’s films needs to also account for the ideological critique of the “girlie” or “female” genres, such as romantic comedy, melodrama, and the costume film. Both Marie Antoinette and The Beguiled, for example, were dismissed as pretty-looking films with no political resonance. As mentioned earlier, Brody found missing in the latter more “tangible” material: scenes of battle and more historical/political substance. Marie Antoinette, in turn, was criticized because it was not a “serious historical film.”85 If we compare this assessment with the 1929 review of The Passion of Jeanne d’Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928), in which Harry Alan Potamkin reasons that the film “is an historical film, but not a costume film,” as it possesses “no specious prettiness, but hardness,”86 the ideological operation inherent to the gendering of genres becomes evident in the discursive circulation of Coppola’s work. Potamkin establishes a clear-cut dichotomy that, according to Chris Robé, will determine all of the later US Left film criticism’s demarcations between the reactionary costume drama and more legitimate historical films: “spectacle versus theme.”87 While male-centered historical films stand out for their deliberate and “sophisticated” use of the mainstream cinematic conventions to produce radical or progressive meanings, the costume drama—associated with women, spectacle, and consumer culture—can only work as an expression of the dominant ideology that governs bourgeois film in general, as it distracts spectators from a film’s themes “by engrossing them with the empty affect of the mise-en-scène’s surface details.”88 In the light of this critical differentiation, it is interesting to note how such visually stunning period dramas as Miloš Forman’s Amadeus (1984) or Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) won universal praise, while Marie Antoinette was often dismissed as being too centered on the bourgeois spectacle of decorative objects. For instance, writing for the magazine L’Internaute, Évelyne Lever described Marie Antoinette as “far from historical reality,” contrasting it with “better historical films” including Barry Lyndon and Nicholas Hytner’s The Madness of King George (1994), which succeeded because their directors were “steeped in the culture of the time they evoked.”89 That Coppola seems to pursue surface at the price of a “deeper” authenticity is a common narrative in the critical response to her films, often deemed as “non-authentic,” or as products for global consumption, as was the case with, for instance, Lost in Translation and its creative reimagining of Tokyo.90 Coppola’s apparent disregard for historical truths or social realities render her work especially susceptible to accusations of frivolity and superficiality. Although the critical reception of Coppola’s oeuvre reveals different discourses about her directorial signature, the foregrounding of the surface seems to be a common ground. This meta-narrative generates divergent assessments of Coppola’s films, from marveling at their carefully composed imageries to considering them as somewhat inferior in comparison to more “solid” films. However, as scholarly work on Coppola has demonstrated, her engagement with surface and depth is far more complex than the critical discourse has tended to acknowledge. To quote Backman Rogers, her images “do not only beguile, they also haunt and return, trouble and subsist somewhere just beneath the skin.”91

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Notes 1 Brian Truitt, “Review: Sofia Coppola’s Mundane Beguiled Is Much Ado About Nothing,” USA Today, June 20, 2017, https://eu​.usatoday​.com​/story​/life​/movies​/2017​/06​/20​/review​-sofia​ -coppola​-the​-beguiled​-movie​/103012854/. 2 Ann Hornaday, “On the Rocks Has All the Right Ingredients: Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Sofia Coppola. But It’s a Flavorless Dish,” The Washington Post, October 6, 2020, https:// www​.washingtonpost​.com​/goingoutguide​/movies​/on​-the​-rocks​-movie​-review​/2020​/10​/06​ /65c68980​-01b3​-11eb​-b7ed​-141dd88560ea​_story​.html. 3 Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017); Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019); and Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). 4 J. Hoberman, “Why Hasn’t Sofia Coppola Gotten the Respect an Auteur Deserves?,” The New York Times, February 20, 2019, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2019​/02​/20​/movies​/sofia​ -coppola​-director​-writer​.html. 5 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 2. 6 Pam Cook, “Portrait of a Lady: Sofia Coppola,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 11 (2006): 40. 7 Richard Brody, “The Front Row: ‘Marie Antoinette’,” The New Yorker, August 6, 2016, https:// www​.newyorker​.com​/culture​/richard​-brody​/the​-front​-row​-marie​-antoinette. 8 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 10. 9 Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 21. 10 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 13. 11 Jonathan Romney, “Marie Antoinette,” Independent on Sunday, October 21, 2006, http:// www​.independent​.co​.uk​/arts​-entertainment​/films​/reviews​/marie​-antoinette​-12a6230488​.html. About the female protagonist in Lost in Translation, Coppola said: “There’s a part of me in that character.” In reference to Marie Antoinette, the filmmaker stated that she could identify with the protagonist, “coming from a strong family and fighting for her identity.” See Soraya Roberts, “The Eternal Becoming of Sofia Coppola,” Hazlitt, June 19, 2017, https://hazlitt​.net​/ longreads​/eternal​-becoming​-sofia​-coppola. 12 Belinda Smaill, “Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 153. 13 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 16. 14 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 6–7. See also Handyside’s revealing analysis of the critical discourse on Coppola’s “disastrous acting appearance” in The Godfather Part III (8). 15 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 2. 16 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 20. 17 Hoberman, “Why Hasn’t Sofia Coppola Gotten the Respect an Auteur Deserves?” 18 Todd Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur,” Film Criticism 35, no. 1 (2010), https://www​.thefreelibrary​.com​/Off​+with​+Hollywood’s +head​%3A+S​ofia+​ Coppo​la+as​+femi​nine+​auteu​r.-a0​24151​4974.​ 19 If further demonstration of this were needed, in the same article Hoberman seems to imply that Sofia Coppola “inherited” from her father his flaws. He observes how Marie Antoinette drastically “loses its edge” in a similar way to “the last 45 minutes of dad’s Apocalypse Now.” See Hoberman, “Why Hasn’t Sofia Coppola Gotten the Respect an Auteur Deserves?”

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20 Caitlin Yuneun Lewis, “Cool Postfeminism: The Celebrity Stardom of Sofia Coppola,” in In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity, ed. Su Holmes and Diane Negra (New York and London: Continuum, 2011), 180. 21 Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 177–8. 22 Romney, “Marie Antoinette.” 23 See Deborah Jermyn’s reading of Nancy Meyers, “The Contemptible Realm of the Romcom Queen: Nancy Meyers, Cultural Value and Romantic Comedy,” in Women Do Genre in Film and Television, ed. Mary Harrod and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), 57–71. 24 Sean O’Hagan, “Sofia Coppola,” The Guardian, October 8, 2006, https://www​.theguardian​ .com​/film​/2006​/oct​/08​/features​.review1. 25 Similar discourses have affected another Oscar nominee, Greta Gerwig, in relation to her partner Noah Baumbach. See Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 210. 26 Christina Lane, “The Strange Days of Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron,” in The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor, ed. Deborah Jermyn and Sean Redmond (London: Wallflower, 2003), 187. 27 See, for instance, Kate Muir, “Kathryn Bigelow’s Great Leap Forward—or Was It?,” The Times, March 12, 2010, http://www​.thetimes​.co​.uk​/tto​/arts​/film​/article2464415​.ece. 28 Leah Rozen, “Kirsten’s Marie Antoinette Fizzles at Cannes,” People, May 30, 2006, http:// people​.com​/celebrity​/kirstens​-marie​-antoinette​-fizzles​-at​-cannes/. 29 Smaill, “Sofia Coppola,” 152. 30 Backman Rogers, in turn, argues that Coppola’s work has “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).” See Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 18. 31 Smaill, “Sofia Coppola,” 159. 32 See Paszkiewicz, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, 178–81. 33 Kristin Hohenadel, “French Royalty as Seen by Hollywood Royalty,” The New York Times, September 10, 2006, http://www​.nytimes​.com​/2006​/09​/10​/movies​/moviesspecial​/10hohe​ .html. 34 Agnès Poirier, “An Empty Hall of Mirrors,” The Guardian, May 27, 2006, https://www​ .theguardian​.com​/commentisfree​/2006​/may​/27​/comment​.filmnews. 35 Available at https://www​.rottentomatoes​.com​/m​/the​_bling​_ring​_2013/. 36 Joe Neumaier, “The Bling Ring: Movie Review,” New York Daily News, June 13, 2013, http:// www​.nydailynews​.com​/entertainment​/tv​-movies​/bling​-ring​-movie​-review​-article- 1.1371518. 37 Hilton made a cameo in The Bling Ring, appearing as herself, and some scenes were shot in her own home in Los Angeles. 38 Sofia Coppola quoted in Ellen Cheshire, Bio-pics: A Life in Pictures (London and New York: Wallflower, 2015), 119. 39 Eileen Jones, “Sofia Coppola Wants You to Feel Bad for the Very Rich and the Very Sad,” Jacobin, April 12, 2020, https://www​.jacobinmag​.com​/2020​/12​/sofia​-coppola​-on​-the​-rocks​ -review. Jones’ review is blatantly biased against the filmmaker, given that she opens it by saying, “I should probably recuse myself from reviewing Sofia Coppola films.” 40 Hornaday, “On the Rocks Has All the Right Ingredients.” 41 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 2.

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42 A. O. Scott, “Holding a Mirror up to Hollywood,” The New York Times, May 25, 2006, http:// www​.nytimes​.com​/2006​/05​/25​/arts​/movies​/cannes​-journal​-marieantoinette​-best​-or​-worst​-of​ -times​-holding​.html. 43 A. O. Scott, “The Pampered Life, Viewed from the Inside,” New York Times, December 21, 2010, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2010​/12​/22​/movies​/22somewhere​.html. 44 Nathan Heller, “Sofia Coppola: You Either Love Her or Hate Her. Here’s Why,” Slate, December 28, 2010, http://www​.slate​.com​/articles​/news​_and​_politics​/assessment​/2010​/12​/ sofia​_coppola​.html. 45 See, for example, Mary Harrod and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, eds., Women Do Genre in Film and Television (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), or, in the specific context of scholarship on Coppola, Backman Rogers’ reflections on strategies of dismantling the foundations of the hegemonic culture from within. See Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 21–2. 46 Manohla Dargis, “On the Rocks Review: Daddy Dearest and His Late Bloomer,” The New York Times, October 1, 2020, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2020​/10​/01​/movies​/on​-the​-rocks​-review​ .html. 47 Richard Brody, “On the Rocks, Reviewed: Sofia Coppola’s Self-Questioning Film About a Father’s Destructive Dazzle,” The New Yorker, October 22, 2020, https://www​.newyorker​.com​ /culture​/the​-front​-row​/on​-the​-rocks​-reviewed​-sofia​-coppolas​-self​-questioning​-film​-of​-a​-fathers​ -destructive​-dazzle. 48 Brody, “On the Rocks, Reviewed.” 49 Armond White, “Sofia Coppola’s Cinema-of-Privilege,” National Review, October 23, 2020, https://www​.nationalreview​.com​/2020​/10​/movie​-review​-on​-the​-rocks​-sofia​-coppola​-cloying​ -cocktail​-class​-race/. 50 Georgie Carr, “An Unwavering Self-Regard: Sofia Coppola’s ‘On The Rocks’ (2020),” Another Gaze, November 16, 2020, https://www​.anothergaze​.com​/unwavering​-self​-regard​-sofia​ -coppolas​-rocks​-2020/. 51 Poirier, “An Empty Hall of Mirrors”; Meagan Hatcher-Mays, “How Sofia Coppola Whitewashed The Bling Ring,” Jezebel, June 20, 2013, https://jezebel​.com​/how​-sofia​-coppola​ -whitewashed​-the​-bling​-ring​-514020537; Clarkisha Kent, “Sofia Coppola’s Blatant Erasure of Black Women in The Beguiled Highlights How White Women Are Complicit in White Supremacy,” The Root, June 25, 2017, https://www​.theroot​.com​/tag​/the​-beguiled. 52 Coppola said in several interviews that she had made this decision, because she “didn’t want to treat that subject lightly.” See Rebecca Ford, “‘The Beguiled’: Sofia Coppola on Taking on a Genre Movie and Why It’s Not a Remake (Q&A),” The Hollywood Reporter, May 16, 2017, https://www​.hollywoodreporter​.com​/news​/general​-news​/beguiled​-sofia​-coppola​-taking​-a​ -genre​-movie​-why​-not​-a​-remake​-q​-a​-1004173/. 53 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 64. 54 Brody, “On the Rocks, Reviewed.” 55 Richard Brody, “The New Yorker Festival 2017 Spotlight: Substance, Style, and Sofia Coppola,” The New Yorker, September 18, 2017, https://www​.newyorker​.com​/culture​/new​ -yorker​-live​/the​-new​-yorker​-festival​-2017​-spotlight​-substance​-style​-and​-sofia​-coppola. 56 Richard Brody, “‘The Beguiled’: Sofia Coppola’s Dubiously Abstract Vision of the Civil War,” The New Yorker, June 23, 2017, https://www​.newyorker​.com​/culture​/richard​-brody​/the​ -beguiled​-sofia​-coppolas​-dubiously​-abstract​-vision​-of​-the​-civil​-war. 57 Roberts, “The Eternal Becoming of Sofia Coppola.” 58 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 64.

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59 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 15. 60 As Backman Rogers adds, David Lynch and Terrence Malick have, like Coppola, made advertisements for perfumes, but this has not been central to the critical reception of their oeuvres. She further argues that “reading Coppola’s films through the Coppola brand distorts their meaning entirely.” See Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 16. 61 Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 62 See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 44–62; Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York and London: Routledge, [1988] 2016). 63 See Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); and Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola. 64 Carr, “An Unwavering Self-Regard.” 65 Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 73. 66 Dana Stevens, “Queen Bees: Sofia Coppola and Marie Antoinette Have a Lot in Common,” Slate, October 19, 2006, http://www​.slate​.com​/id​/2151855/#; Todd McCarthy, “Marie Antoinette,” Variety, May 24, 2006, http://variety​.com​/2006​/film​/awards​/marie​-antoinette​-4​ -1200515977/; Wesley Morris, “Marie Antoinette: Movie Review,” Boston Globe, October 20, 2006. 67 Jean Tulard, “Marie-Antoinette, la reine de l’écran,” Le Figaro, September 14, 2010, http:// www​.lefigaro​.fr​/cinema​/2010​/08​/14​/03002​-20100814ARTFIG00004​-marieantoinette​-la​-reine​ -de​-l​-ecran​.php. 68 Steven Rea, “Marie Antoinette: A Sugar Rush that Goes Pop,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 10, 2006, http://www​.philly​.com​/philly​/entertainment​/movies​/MovieReviewID​_20061020​_inq​ _weekend​_SRAMAR​.html; O’Hagan, “Sofia Coppola.” 69 Christina Lane and Nicole Richter, “The Feminist Poetics of Sofia Coppola: Spectacle and Self-Consciousness in Marie Antoinette,” in Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema, ed. Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer (New York: Routledge, 2011), 193. 70 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 13. For instance, in his review of Somewhere, Peter Bradshaw praises Coppola’s cinematic technique but criticizes the movie “for being utterly lacking in emotional affect.” He says that even on second viewing “the question of why we should really care or be interested remains tantalisingly unanswered” and describes the final shot “as one of the daftest things I have seen for a long time.” See Peter Bradshaw, “Somewhere—Review,” The Guardian, December 9, 2010, https://www​.theguardian​.com​/film​ /2010​/dec​/09​/somewhere​-review. 71 Caryn James, “On the Rocks Review: A Lovely, Elegant, Funny Little Film,” BBC Culture, September 25, 2020, https://www​.bbc​.com​/culture​/article​/20200925​-on​-the​-rocks​-review​-a​ -lovely​-elegant​-funny​-little​-film. 72 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 13. 73 Jermyn, “The Contemptible Realm of the Romcom Queen,” 63. 74 Jermyn, “The Contemptible Realm of the Romcom Queen,” 62. 75 Jermyn, “The Contemptible Realm of the Romcom Queen,” 63. 76 Amy Woodworth, “A Feminist Theorization of Sofia Coppola’s Postfeminist Trilogy,” in Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema, ed. Marcelline Block (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), 155.

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77 This expression was used by Sunday Times journalist Tymon Smith (“On the Rocks has little to offer beyond the surface gloss”) as well as in the already-mentioned Hornaday’s critique. See Tymon Smith, “On the Rocks Has Little to Offer Beyond the Surface Gloss,” Sunday Times, November 8, 2020, https://www​.timeslive​.co​.za​/sunday​-times​/lifestyle​/2020​-11​-08​ -on​-the​-rocks​-has​-little​-to​-offer​-beyond​-the​-surface​-gloss/. It is quite telling that it combines “surface” with the “girlie” gloss, as in “lip gloss” or when you gloss your nails. One critic said about Marie Antoinette: “this is like a manicurist claiming to capture the inner experience of your pinkie.” See Anthony Lane, “Lost in the Revolution,” The New Yorker, October 23, 2006, http://www​.newyorker​.com​/magazine​/2006​/10​/23​/lost​-in​-the​-revolution. Another, writing about the same film, said that “it’s only for girls and gays.” See Peter Travers, “Marie Antoinette,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 2006, http://www​.rollingstone​.com​/movies​/reviews​/ marie​-antoinette​-20061020. 78 Smaill, “Sofia Coppola,” 150. 79 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 139. 80 Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 17, 138. 81 Galt, Pretty, 2. 82 Handyside, Sofia Coppola. See also Smaill, “Sofia Coppola,” and her discussion of Coppola’s work in comparison to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola. 83 Paszkiewicz, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, 184–5. 84 Hoberman, “Why Hasn’t Sofia Coppola Gotten the Respect an Auteur Deserves?” 85 Romney, “Marie Antoinette.” 86 Potamkin quoted in Chris Robé, “Taking Hollywood Back: The Historical Costume Drama, the Biopic, and Popular Front US Film Criticism,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 2 (2009): 71. 87 Robé, “Taking Hollywood Back,” 72. See, for example, Robé’s discussion of La Marseillaise (Jean Renoir, 1938) and Marie Antoinette (W. S. Van Dyke and Julien Duvivier, 1938). The latter was accused of reifying the people into an undifferentiated crowd. The former was referred to, in turn, “as a corrective to the Hollywood costume drama’s use of spectacle, which focuses on personal, ‘depoliticized’ issues” (77). 88 Robé, “Taking Hollywood Back,” 72. 89 Évelyne Lever, “Marie-Antoinette revue et corrigée par Hollywood,” L’Internaute, May 2006, http://www​.linternaute​.com​/savoir​/interview​/evelyne​-lever​/chat​-evelyne​-lever​.shtml. 90 Lost in Translation received considerable backlash from several critics who decried Coppola for relegating the Japanese culture to “Kodak moments.” These charges culminated just before the Academy Awards ceremony, when the members were encouraged to vote against the film in all categories in which it was nominated for an Oscar. See Kennedy, “Off with Hollywood’s Head.” 91 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 203.

25 ACADEMIC RESPONSE SOFIA COPPOLA IN THE CURRICULUM: FEMINIST FILM PEDAGOGIES Emma McNicol, Whitney Monaghan, Grace Russell, and Belinda Smaill

The classroom is a crucial space for extending our engagement with filmmakers and films we explore in our research. Observing students encounter films or directors we have closely grappled with can be surprising, rewarding, and disappointing in equal measure. A defining collection of essays about Sofia Coppola and her body of work would not be complete without a discussion of their affordances in the classroom. Her films, especially her early work, consistently offer a palette of style and subject matter that, at first glance, seem to hold much to appeal to the assumed demographic of university-age students in the academy of the West. This includes an emphasis on experiences of girlhood and an aesthetic focus on the spectacle of femininity and material culture. A number of films also evoke questions of privilege and whiteness. Coppola’s work is especially relevant for students of feminist film studies due not only to the detail of her films but also her status as one of the most successful female directors in contemporary American cinema. There is already significant published work exploring Coppola’s style, narrative, and feminist politics. This work thoroughly supports a “director study” of Coppola in the curriculum. As a result, we take a different approach in this chapter. We offer a case study based on our experiences of working with Coppola’s first film, The Virgin Suicides (1999), in the feminist film studies curriculum as it was deployed to introduce the problem of “the male gaze.” Given the range of writing about Coppola, there already exist sophisticated understandings of how Coppola’s aesthetic might be understood and debated. However,

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what does her work, and The Virgin Suicides in particular, offer students new to these debates and to the broader lessons of classical feminist film theory? Addressing this question is core to the discussion that follows. We anticipate that this chapter will offer a resource to educators while also furthering knowledge about how Coppola’s filmmaking might contribute to feminist pedagogy in film studies. For this reason, we are concerned both with the specific affordances of Coppola’s work, as manifested in The Virgin Suicides, but also within the broader context of the feminist film studies curriculum and its generative intersection with conceptualizations of feminist pedagogy. In this study we explore how feminist pedagogy maps onto actual experiences of wrestling with student responses and interactions in all their messiness and unpredictability.

The Context: The Virgin Suicides, Feminist Pedagogy, Feminist Film Studies Coppola’s first feature, The Virgin Suicides is based on the 1993 novel of the same name by Jeffrey Eugenides. Set in the 1970s, the film tells the story of five adolescent sisters who live in an upper-middle-class suburb of Detroit. After the youngest sister, Cecilia, makes an initial attempt at suicide, all of the girls are put under close scrutiny by their parents, eventually being confined to their home, which becomes a space of both isolation and reverie. As in the novel, the story is told in first-person plural, from the perspective of a group of adolescent boys in the neighborhood who are fascinated by the girls. However, Coppola’s reimagining via image and sound achieves what the novel cannot—an ambivalent aesthetic that invites varying interpretations about point of view, visual pleasure, and the visual politics of gender. It is significant in a teaching context that The Virgin Suicides clearly deals with and presents images of suicide and attempted suicide, albeit through the lens of an ironic and dreamlike aesthetic.1 We begin this chapter by identifying the context of our analysis as it relates to concepts in feminist pedagogy, the structuring logic of classical feminist film studies, and how The Virgin Suicides enables a program of teaching and learning within the feminist classroom and curriculum. The first three-week module of the unit was structured around different “spectatorship” methodologies, beginning with a requirement that students watch The Virgin Suicides and read John Berger’s early elaboration of the male gaze in Ways of Seeing.2 Perhaps most importantly, this module assumes an understanding of the “spectatorship debates” of classical feminist film theory of the 1970s and 1980s is foundational knowledge. It is, indeed, difficult to understand the rich proliferation of work in the feminist film and television academy without recourse to the arguments that elaborated the “situated perspectives” of viewers and the different methods of research that have examined the relationship between film and spectator. Recognizing viewing positions (and thus situated knowledge and multiplicity) as the cornerstone of feminist film studies enables a rich set of possibilities when placed in dialogue with concepts in feminist pedagogy. In her article “What Is Feminist Pedagogy?” Carolyn Shrewsbury writes, “feminist pedagogy begins with a vision of what education might be like but frequently is not.”3 This evokes the chasm between the utopian ideal of any classroom and the reality. She

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goes on to note, “At the core of feminist pedagogy is a re-imaging of the classroom as a community of learners where there is both autonomy of self and mutuality with others.”4 Since Shrewsbury’s 1987 article, the field has developed a range of rich analyses at the intersection of women’s studies and education. While concepts of feminist pedagogy can be applied in any teaching context, a large portion of the literature is focused on curriculum that deals with gender or women’s studies materials. In the context of teaching sex and gender in film specifically, Felicity Colman and Erin Stapleton assert that a key aspect of the project of feminist pedagogy is acknowledging the community of learners as a political community: A political community is predicated on common goals, but it must also be an agreement or treaty between diverse bodies, an agreement to participate in the recognition of commonality and solidarity while engendering difference. This approach to feminist pedagogy has the potential to produce the most politically engaged, nuanced student experiences.5 Colman and Stapleton advocate a recognition of shared goals between diverse subjectivities, with an emphasis on the recognition of difference. Offering an alternative perspective, Frinde Maher observes the changing role of the teacher. She notes that in the 1990s classrooms “were all about inclusion and ‘voice’ and giving students’ experiences validity and visibility.”6 Maher suggests that the contemporary feminist classroom requires a more radical undertaking: To remain, or to become, a radical feminist teacher today is to be centrally concerned with unpacking complex relations of privilege and oppression, and thus fundamentally reworking the structural as well as representational terms of inclusion that feminist teaching promises.7 Taken together, this indicates that the feminist classroom is attuned to the subject positions that compose a community of learners, including the teacher, whether pertaining to race, class, gender, or sexuality, and how these affect class dynamics and learning. Thus, the feminist classroom is a space where power and authority are highlighted, including the dynamic between student and instructor. For bell hooks, “our role as teacher is a position of power over others,”8 yet this role has the potential simultaneously to allow opportunities for illuminating the complex relationship between theory and practice, while circumventing some of the abstruseness that students often expect from academic theory. The feminist classroom enables students to see how theory impacts their own lives, behaviors, and viewing habits in a way that is highly meaningful for their feminist journeys. hooks refers to this as “a learning process that makes the world ‘more rather than less real.’”9 In film studies, this process of “making the world real” can be acutely enlivened through the synthesis of theoretical approaches and screen examples. Films also provide a crucial avenue for questioning assumptions about dominant regimes of vision and subjectivity or, in Maher’s words, “reworking the structural as well as representational terms of inclusion” and exclusion.10 For these reasons, the

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ambivalence of The Virgin Suicides affords an extremely compelling set of possibilities in the classroom. It validates multiple interpretations of “looking relations” or the notion that cinema is structured around the entrenched dynamic in Western visual culture of men looking at women.

Our Classroom “We” are a tenured academic in Film and Screen Studies (who designed and coordinated the course) and three senior teaching associates well versed in feminist film and media studies who developed resources for and undertook interactive weekly group classes. Our context is a twelve-week unit titled “Gender and Sexuality in Film and Television” offered to third-year students at a large Australian university in Melbourne with a diverse student body. We viewed and taught the film in just the second week, which meant that establishing classroom routines and dynamics, as well as fostering student–teacher and student–student trust and rapport, was still a work in progress. Planning and designing a feminist classroom, then, was for us an exercise in demonstrating that collaborative strategies and a dialogic exchange of ideas would be welcomed and expected in our classes. These classes occurred in 2020, with the added complication of entirely online delivery due to the Covid-19 response.11 A simultaneous challenge and asset in fostering a feminist classroom dynamic was the composition of our cohort. Overwhelmingly, the group was populated by young women in their early twenties. However, the tutorials contained a diverse mix of domestic and international students who participated via Zoom from their homes around the world. We also juggled a range of competencies and prior knowledge sets—variations between students fluent in film studies and those from other disciplines taking the unit as an elective; and between students who were highly experienced in thinking analytically about gender and sexuality and those for whom these concerns were relatively new. Familiarity with Coppola and her films also varied across the cohort, from students who had no prior knowledge of her work to a very small minority who classified her as their favorite filmmaker. These students shared an interest in her “aesthetic vision” and considered her work and life to provide an excellent reference point for understanding gender and power in the film industry. These differing areas of competency and prior knowledge did, in some instances, pose hurdles (we quickly realized that we could not assume knowledge of any one disciplinary term or approach), but this also afforded ways of inviting participation and sharing of expertise (slowing discussion to allow film studies students to explain depth of field or gender studies students to share their knowledge of intersectionality, for instance). In the following discussion of our experience we explore Coppola’s ambivalent aesthetic in The Virgin Suicides in relation to, first, gendered subjectivity and the film’s potential for furthering student understanding around the formulation of the gaze. Second, we turn to the question of visual pleasure in Coppola’s style and how this aids in understanding critiques of a feminist politics of the image. The third section explores broader student perspectives and relationships to feminism that were invoked through

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attention to Coppola’s work. Our analysis endeavors to “keep in play” the specificity of The Virgin Suicides, recognizing its aesthetic and narrative qualities, and building on critical discussion of these, while offering details about classroom activities and discussion, including responses from students in class and in an anonymous survey. Traversing this field, composed of film and classroom, we work to explore what happened with reference to the literature, critically evaluating how Coppola (and teaching staff) operated in our feminist classroom.

Viewing Positions, Narration, and Subjectivity: Masculine/Feminine Critical discussion of The Virgin Suicides has been keenly attuned to the narrative and stylistic qualities of the film that foster unresolved or even discordant lines of interpretation. Michelle Devereaux describes this with reference to the emotional address of the film: “The film’s highly aestheticized portrayal of emotion leads to the spectator’s confused engagement with its affective content, which creates an emotional distance that mirrors the frustrated emotional engagement depicted onscreen.”12 For Fiona Handyside, it is the expression of girlhood that offers particular complexity in Coppola’s films and “her films that show us groups of girls offer us the most complex and ambivalent exploration of girl culture.”13 Taking this ambivalence as a cue, we pursued, in particular, how the film opens out onto dual imaginative possibilities where gendered subjectivity is concerned. On one hand, The Virgin Suicides invites spectatorial pleasure by locating the Lisbon sisters as objects of the gaze; on the other, as Anna Backman Rogers observes, 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-belooked-at-ness that patriarchal narratives set out for them.14 This reading of the film is anchored in The Virgin Suicides as an appropriation of the gaze, demonstrating one of multiple lines of interpretation. We were most interested in structuring our class discussion of the gaze through the multivalent possibilities enabled by the film. Following Maher’s lead, we sought to open dialogue here as a means of scaffolding the process of “unpacking complex relations of privilege” as they are constituted in popular cinema.15 The importance of this particular ambivalence in the text, or how it opens onto multiple and persuasive subjective viewpoints, lies in the way it allows a community of learners to grapple with the prehistory of feminist cine-psychoanalysis, preceding and succeeding the publication of Laura Mulvey’s famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”16 Our curriculum took up John Berger’s Ways of Seeing as a way to initiate a two-step approach to the gaze, a concept that students had a shorthand knowledge of but lacked a robust understanding. Our aim was to foster discussion as to whether the film comprehensively

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critiques, or is complicit with, the male gaze. Our students grappled with this through classroom exercises and their assignments, acknowledging the challenging nature of the text’s ambivalences in their responses. Students completed a collaborative table activity that was designed to enable them to see how Coppola used film techniques including mise-en-scène, sound, and editing to establish “masculine” and “feminine” spaces. A crucial resource for this activity was the “diary dream sequence” in which the boys gather in one of their bedrooms and read from Cecilia’s diary, imagining the sisters frolicking in a field: a focal point for the film’s romanticism and nostalgic reverie (Table 25.1).​

Table 25.1  Table activity provided to students in Google docs format to encourage collaborative work Boys in bedroom

Girls in field

Color and texture Light Dialogue Sound Music Bodily comportment/acting Symbolism/imagery

In small breakout groups, students compiled notes on how Coppola establishes two different spaces (the “masculine” bedroom and the “feminine” meadow) through distinct color palettes, textures, lighting, dialogue, sound, music, bodily comportment, and symbolism/imagery. This attention to the film’s formal detail enabled them to develop opinions on whether this scene staged or critiqued the male gaze. For example, looking exclusively for “symbolism” and “imagery” meant that students recognized that the unicorn indexed that this was a fantasy space. When students watched the scene again to check exclusively for dialogue they realized that the boys had the privilege of narration, emboldening them toward seeing the girls’ conduct in the meadow as a male fantasy (even if the character Cecilia’s voice “takes over” from the boys’ narration later in the scene). Collating these details also enabled students to discern the scene’s more sophisticated thematic associations: femininity was associated with the “natural” and the boys’ world with civilization and agency, thus thinking about subjectivity and perspective in ways that included and extended beyond the formal conventions of the gaze. Students were encouraged to work with the idea that the scene might present a dualism of masculine and feminine settings. This approach was deliberately provocative, asking students to step into a gendered critique in which they might take up different subject positions in relation to the text. Notable responses were as follows:

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some students reported that they very much “enjoyed” this scene when first watching it (many students identified her use of the French band Air’s music in the scene as key to securing a pleasurable sensory experience for the audience); one student commented that “although the movie is presented as stereotypically female with soft lighting, dream sequences, and innocence . . . the boys are the ones who control the narrative”; a group noted the ways that identification with the Lisbon sisters (and particularly Cecilia) is partially offered but then foreclosed by the narrative device of the boys’ point of view, commenting, “The scene sort of asks you to identify with Cecilia while at the same time not allowing it. Even with the sound and the lighting it becomes difficult to focus on the words she’s saying properly, [and] her plain and occasionally darkly thoughtful words are romanticized in a saccharine way.”

As discussion progressed, students came to recognize the scene’s ambivalence, that is, that the girls in the meadow were possibly a male fantasy and the fact that they themselves had been seduced by these dreamy projections of feminine space. We encouraged them to develop their interpretation prompting them with questions including “Do you think the sisters are freely choosing this feminine way of relating to the world?” and “Do you think that the film captures girls’ perspectives and fantasies as well as boys’?” This enabled students to develop strong arguments about the film, framing their feminist readings through statements such as “The Virgin Suicides . . . showed the failings of patriarchal storytelling: by limiting how we see the girls we are never given the full picture of why they decided to kill themselves.” In this way, the activity connected into a broader reading of the film that included the viewer’s limited access to knowledge. Recognizing feminist pedagogy as being attuned to differences (of subject position, understanding, and experience) within the learning community, Nancy Chick and Holly Hassel suggest that activities such as this are extremely valuable for feminist classrooms as they establish “a place to uncover multiple perspectives on any given subject” by “encouraging all students to offer their interpretations . . . effectively supported by textual evidence and analysis.”17 Through the collaborative table activity and subsequent discussion, we encouraged our students to develop perspectives by doing and undoing binary ways of thinking around gendered subjectivity and the gaze. As a text that makes no clear or definitive statements, what The Virgin Suicides offered then was an opportunity for our students to hone their critical thinking skills in debate about the film’s ambivalence toward viewing positions, narration, and subjectivity.

Feminism and the Seduction of Images The second pivotal element in The Virgin Suicides that opened important lines of discussion in class was the problem of visual pleasure. We have already noted Coppola’s deployment of what be understood as a “feminine aesthetic.” In this section we expand on the affordances of the film’s emphasis on nostalgia, visual culture, and visual pleasure.

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The Virgin Suicides, like other films in Coppola’s body of work, emphasizes mood, image, and tone above the intricacies of narrative and does so with a carefully crafted soundtrack and mise-en-scène. Suzanne Ferriss observes the crucial attention to design in the aesthetic elements of Coppola’s films, from location choices, set design, costume, cinematography, and sound, observing how they “seamlessly fuse fashion and cinematic narrative.”18 For Ferriss, this attention affords a critique of consumer culture: Rather than disguising the constructed nature of visual performance, Coppola’s films call attention to it and submerge viewers in the experience of it, causing us to reflect on our participation in a culture that grants unparalleled power to image construction, particularly through the display of amassed consumer goods.19 Much of this style also coalesces around the nostalgia that the film summons, primarily through music, costume, and production design (including objects such as lipstick, perfume bottles, and diaries that evoke the girls’ world as well as items such as travel catalogues and records that they use to romantically connect with the boys). Significantly, nostalgia in The Virgin Suicides is finely tuned around the expression of girlhood. In her discussion of girlhood in Coppola’s films, Handyside explores the nuances of the aesthetic that accompanies this focus, observing that “Coppola deploys the apparatus of cinema to create a light-filled, ethereal image of girlhood that dazzles and sparkles.”20 In a 2018 interview, Coppola offers a certain rationale for this: I definitely was interested in femininity and a girly aesthetic because that is part of me that I’m connected to and enjoy, and also because I grew up in such a macho environment and I cling to that part of my identity. . . . I just made what I liked.21 Coppola’s interest in the broader field of visual culture is further evidenced in her statement that she first envisioned Eugenides’ novel through the lens of pornography: “I had a look in my mind of how it should feel while reading it, of that hazy, backlit style of ’70s Playboy photography.” Backman Rogers brings another critical lens to the visual pleasure entailed by this mix of nostalgia, a “girly aesthetic,” and woman as the object of vision. She offers a feminist appraisal, describing Coppola’s feminist politics as precisely “bestowed” via visual pleasure.22 Rather than embracing Mulvey’s rejection of visual pleasure, “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).”23 There exist clear lines of debate here that bring visual pleasure, and Coppola’s “beguiling” images, into dialogue with not only deployment of the gaze but also consumer culture and its critique. Before discussion in class, the lecture pertaining this topic drew attention to some of the visual references in the film, including to Nabokov’s Lolita and to 1970s shampoo commercials. It expanded on how The Virgin Suicides offers the potential of tying these dynamics to the genre conventions of the teen film. Following bell hooks’ recommendation for linking confessional narrative and academic discussion to enhance understanding of

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academic material,24 in class we invited students to reflect on the fantasies and textures of their adolescence and relate them to sequences and images in the film, including the scene discussed above. hooks emphasizes that “students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess.” In this discussion, we found confessional modes on our part as educators to be particularly effective, asking, “I found this dreamlike aesthetic in conjunction with the music to be a terribly attractive and seductive force. Why do you think she wants us to get so wrapped up in it?” This prompted classroom debates regarding whether the film was consolidating, reinforcing, or critiquing stock notions of “femininity.” Despite the potential feminist significance of Coppola’s intertextual references, students often justifiably pointed out that these images were first and foremost “beautiful,” “attractive,” and “seductive” and thus questioned whether this visual pleasure compromised, or at least attenuated, their political message. In mobilizing this critique, one student felt that “boys may actually find more truth in its depiction of youth than girls. The girls are a mystery—I am not a mystery to myself.” Through our encouragement and demonstration of personal reflection in relation to the films’ aesthetics, students were able to gauge and articulate the extent to which the seductiveness of Coppola’s imagery affected them. They were then primed to analyze how this influenced their own experience of gendered looking. Female students who were reluctant to identify with Coppola’s feminine aesthetic nevertheless identified with the phenomenon of being the object of the male gaze. In fact, female students welcomed the idea that they had internalized the phenomenon of the male gaze and altered their behavior accordingly. Relating an experience that resonated with her peers, one student noted, “There is something disturbingly relatable about being an adolescent girl and knowing, or being taught, that your agency means very little to the outside world unless attached to your looks/beauty.” This notion made for fertile connections with the film. Students discussed the possibility that the film’s spectator was privy to the neighborhood boys’ as well as the Lisbon sisters’ fantasies and considered the possibility that the girls were choosing to engage in hyperfeminine behavior. Students engaged in fraught discussion about whether, as teenagers, they themselves had authentically come to play with and inhabit a “feminine” or “masculine” world or whether they were indoctrinated into doing so by virtue of media-saturated images and presentation. However, one student recalled watching The Virgin Suicides as a teenager, noting, “I did relate to the characters in it at the time, even though I was guilty of romanticizing their appearances too, thinking oh I should cut my hair like that or try to be mysterious like that or whatever.” The film thereby prompted reflection in our classes on the complexity of gendered identity and the push and pull that many students felt to inhabit, perform for, or resist the gaze (with tacit acknowledgment of how it delimited their agency). Part of the visual pleasure posed by The Virgin Suicides is the “whiteness” of the aesthetic, both in terms of the blonde-haired, pale-skinned sisters and the monocultural neighborhood depicted in the film. Set in an affluent suburb of Detroit (although filmed in multicultural Toronto), the film is entirely absent of the broader culture of the city, which is well known as the birthplace of Motown Records. Belinda Smaill notes the affluence of Coppola’s story worlds and “their languid meditation on the lives of those who seem to

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take for granted their advantage.”25 On this point, Backman Rogers describes Coppola as “a creator, par excellence, of mood and beguilement through images that reveal, upon close reading, radical critiques of the gilded worlds in which her films are set.”26 For Backman Rogers the visual pleasure of the films are bound up with the presentation of “worlds of psychic fracture, loneliness and abjection.”27 The combination of the beauty of the image, mood, ennui, and privilege is a provocative concern in the film. The problem of whiteness and privilege, however, was touched on in class discussion but was not a distinct part of the lesson plan as we had devised it. This was, in retrospect, a missed opportunity given the potential for furthering the broader intersectional potential of the curriculum around class, race, and gender. It was, nevertheless, a reference point for some students. For instance, one student commented that although it seems “accurate in terms of exploring some of the struggles and expectations placed on girls transitioning to adulthood . . . this film deals with a straight, white, upper-middle class family so the experience is far from the experience of minority groups.” For this student, the film’s alignment between visual pleasure and several intersections of privilege detracted from its feminist message. Another, however, noted that although the film felt “distinctly American and thus unfamiliar, there were certain aspects—their costuming, their malaise, their closeness with each other” that strongly resonated and that evidenced Coppola’s feminist intentions. The students, as a community of learners, largely took the discussion of visual pleasure away from the line of critique that would entail a rethinking of consumer culture or the subversion of women as object of the gaze. The presentation of girlhood in The Virgin Suicides led to questions from female students about identifying (or not) with the subjectivity of the Lisbon sisters, rather than about the imagery associated with being a girl and its presentation in visual culture. Despite the way the tutorials and lecture foregrounded the film’s visual intertextuality and the idea of the male gaze, while contextualizing it within the broader field of visual culture, many of the students engaged with the film in this more personal way. It is possible that hooks’ strategy of confessional narrative also played a role in this. While, at times, the foregrounding of the students’ identification with characters prompted uneven critical engagement in class discussion, as we have outlined, the value of The Virgin Suicides lies in its potential to set in motion broader critical thinking about the work of images, the nature of film critique, and feminism.

Feminism, Coppola, and Student Perspectives: Habits of Mind As we have shown, our pedagogical practice explicitly sought to draw out student voices, tastes, and experiences. In this section we build on our account of teaching with The Virgin Suicides by focusing more fully on how students articulated the impact of the learning process with reference to their own consciousness. This represents, perhaps, the more deeply felt impact of learning experiences—the ways in which Coppola’s work, the theoretical approaches, and class discussion became meaningful in what hooks describes as “a learning process that makes the world ‘more rather than less real.’”28

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In this respect we are referring to the “habits of mind” cultivated in class, encouraging connective thinking (between texts, theories, experiences, subject positions), and critical thinking (including evaluating the efficacy, relevance, and utility of theoretical and methodological frameworks). For Chick and Hassel, these “habits of mind” are a core goal of teaching in the feminist classroom. To foster “habits of mind,” we used multiple approaches. Toward the end of the workshops we asked students, “How does your interpretation of the film relate to Berger’s theory of the gaze?” and “Berger writes ‘the surveyor of woman in herself is male.’ Is this supported or challenged by your interpretation?” Students used the latter prompt to explore the possibility that gendered behavior is a complex phenomenon that entails internalizing the expectations of others, particularly preconceived notions of what others might expect from us or might even find “attractive” in us. This elicited a number of responses in the classroom, with one student revealing that it prompted a deep reflection about the experience of looking at herself in the mirror every day before leaving the house. She shared that she had started wondering, “[whose] perspective am I watching myself from?” and her classmates replied “Yes!” “YESSS” “This!” as text comments in the Zoom chat. Students thus reflected on the fact that Coppola’s projection of femininity might simultaneously reflect their own experience of female adolescence while also being “cultivated.” In other words, our workshop activities and pedagogical strategies enabled students to consider the role the media might play in fostering hypergendered behavior (whether looking at, being looked at, or anticipating that we might be “looked at”). For students, the role that The Virgin Suicides played in this broader media context was as a provocation about gendered ways of looking, with one group writing, “The film tries to make us question our stance on the gaze: are we complicit?” The idea that the gaze required complicity when both looking and being looked at was one that resonated profoundly with students, prompting thorough self-reflection and recognition that Coppola’s film strategically drew them into gazing at the female protagonists and then encouraged interrogation of the emotional, cultural, and intellectual significance of that gazing. Second, from the beginning of semester onward, we were interested in students’ broader consciousness in relation to feminist politics and how this might shift during the course of study. In the first week of the semester, we used a classroom activity to ask our students what feminism meant to them. Their overwhelming response was “equality,” or more precisely, as our more vocal students defined it, social, economic, and political equality that recognizes intersections of identity and experience. Students further developed their understanding of intersectional feminist theory in our unit. At the end of the semester, we posed the same question to ascertain how their knowledge of and approach to feminism had changed through the scaffolded learning experience. As expected, students described having a better grasp of histories of feminism and feminist approaches to cinema. However, some also described an increased difficulty of pinning down feminism as they began to understand it as a broad and amorphous arena of ideas and approaches. Some students also shared what they felt they had gained: newfound recognition of patriarchal power and misogyny within the media landscape and an impulse to better locate women’s subjectivity within cinema. A number of them recalled returning

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to The Virgin Suicides several times through the semester as a key touch point on their cine-feminist journeys. Though some enjoyed the film more than others (as is always the case), our cohort considered The Virgin Suicides to have significant utility in relation to feminist film studies. Some students saw the film as a clear and explicit example of the male gaze, which enabled them to better understand its prevalence in screen culture, even in media authored by women. By contrast, others saw The Virgin Suicides as a powerful example of a female cinematic gaze, arguing emphatically that this motivated their emotional connection to the film. As one student recalled, “it was a film told using my perspective, so it meant I truly identified with it.” As we have noted, where some students saw the film’s aesthetic to be inherently feminine, others understood it as Coppola’s attempt to showcase nostalgic, male perspectives of idealized femininity. As a whole, the group largely saw the film as some kind of commentary on the gaze. They understood it to present a complex relationship between camera, character, and audience. Some students, however, read this as an ambivalence toward the male gaze, seeing it as a simultaneous challenge to and internalization of gendered looking relations. Finally, another group of students saw The Virgin Suicides as a weaponization of perspective, noting, “The film says so much by treating the mythos of the Lisbon sisters with wonder and awe and at once caring so little for them actually (their autonomy, individual experiences etc.).” In other words, these students recognized that they were encouraged to be captivated by Kirsten Dunst’s beauty and Coppola’s dreamy aesthetics but that succumbing to this also made them complicit in the specific power and gender dynamics of the gaze. When we asked our students whether The Virgin Suicides was a feminist film, we were met with responses from the emphatic “Yes!” to the equally passionate “No way!” While they saw the film’s utility within the discipline, some of our students left feeling uncertain about its popular reception. Some worried that without adequate grounding in feminist film studies, viewers would view the film uncritically as perpetuating patriarchal values. Others were simply not sure, were not inclined to take a stand either way, or were unable to pin down the feminist message but were happy to describe it as having a feminist “vibe.” All in all, our students offered multiple, varied perspectives on the film, which they articulated to us through their readings of the film’s conclusion. As one student recalled, “I believe that there are definitely strong feminist elements . . . but the film also presents a worldview in which women must die in order to achieve true freedom.” An alternate reading suggested that “Coppola shows that the current state of relations is unlivable. . . . The girls had no choice to fight against psychic violence other than just escaping through death. I think challenging dominant ideologies in such an extreme way must be feminist.” Encouragingly, our students formulated their own readings of the film and of our chosen theoretical frames. We were all cognizant that the way we worded questions could open up or close down our invitation to subjective interpretation. Taking special care to ask, “what does this mean to you?” rather than “what does this mean?” for instance, could be the difference between students being placed into a position of giving right/wrong answers and working to articulate interpretive and personal responses. If transforming “habits of mind”29 is one of the aims of feminist pedagogy, in our cohort,

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this extended from better developed cinematic literacy to a critical mindset attuned to issues of gender, informed by foundational feminist film theory on spectatorship and subjectivity.

Conclusion Across this chapter, we have sought to reflect on the utility of Coppola’s work and in particular The Virgin Suicides in relation to both feminist pedagogy and our specific discipline. What does the film offer us as scholars and teachers of feminist film studies? What does it offer our students? One of the main benefits of The Virgin Suicides as a case study is that there is no single “way in” or “way out” of the film. While we engaged it for a specific purpose in our syllabus for “Gender and Sexuality in Film and Television,” the richness of this text makes it well suited for use in university classrooms. Our experiences attest to its value in a teaching context focused on early writing on the male gaze and “spectatorship” methodologies. However, we see the film also opening productive classroom discussions on film directors and auteurs, reception, adaptation, formal analysis, intertextuality, visual pleasure, gendered subjectivity, temporalities, and the politics of sexuality, race, and adolescence. Across our teaching activities and assessments, we aimed to provide our students with opportunities to grapple with the feminist politics of The Virgin Suicides. The film’s ambivalence and multivalence make it challenging for students who want to understand film as simply (and intentionally) “feminist” or “not,” but it offers us the ability to encourage students to develop perspectives with attention to nuance and complexity. It is worth noting that in our quest to foster autonomous critical thinking we followed the lead of the “habits of mind” approach in assuming that self-directed values would lead students to adopt a feminist ethical position of some kind in their reading of the film. Interestingly and upon reflection, we do not know if our pedagogical approach made it impossible for students to reject a feminist reading altogether. Furthermore, while we had great success with collaborative strategies and emphasis on a dialogic exchange of ideas, we did face some difficulty aligning a feminist pedagogical ethos in the classroom with the practicalities of teaching the film in a large, diverse cohort of students across multiple locations. Given this context, it was necessary for us to design classroom activities to ensure alignment of weekly learning goals with semester-long learning outcomes and consistency of experience in the classroom regardless of location, cohort, or teaching staff. Moreover, in our institutional context many of our students come from educational backgrounds that favor direct instruction. It can be challenging for these students to engage with active learning approaches, especially those that seek to question power dynamics between teaching staff and students. With these factors in mind, we found that it was not always feasible to follow certain lines of discussion, which meant we had a limited scope for opportunities to explore certain aspects of the film or create sufficient openings to sit with the discomfort associated with unpacking privilege and oppression. Nevertheless, the film’s multiplicities have enabled us to grapple with some of the more utopian perspectives of feminist pedagogy associated with “re-imaging of the classroom as a community of learners.”30 These include recognizing subject positions

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impacting classroom dynamics and learning; unpacking and reworking relations of power, including those between teacher and student; shifting power from the teaching staff as the only source of knowledge; and focusing more on student perspectives and personal experiences. We find ourselves continually reflecting on aspects of a feminist pedagogical ethos that align with our experience of teaching Coppola’s work and The Virgin Suicides. In doing so, our discussions often turn to the impact of encouraging students to work through multiple lines of interpretation as they come to formulate their ideas, perspectives, and arguments. Activities such as our collaborative table activity challenge students to understand different interpretations of the same scene, moment, or shot. Informed by feminist pedagogy, we have come to see this as a gateway to empathy, to better understanding how others might see, feel, and experience. For us, this is the utility of The Virgin Suicides: a contradictory film that offers empathetic connection yet holds us at arm’s length.

Notes 1 We were mindful that some students may opt not to watch the film due to the depiction of suicide, so we set an alternative film, Will Gluck’s more conventional genre film, Easy A (2010). 2 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting, 1972). 3 Carolyn Shrewsbury, “What Is Feminist Pedagogy?” Women’s Studies Quarterly 15, no. 3/4 (1987): 6. 4 Shrewsbury, “What Is Feminist Pedagogy?” 10. 5 Felicity Colman and Erin Stapleton, “Screening Feminisms: Approaches for Teaching Sex and Gender in Film,” in Teaching Gender: Feminist Pedagogy and Responsibility in Times of Political Crisis, ed. Beatriz Revelles-Benavente and Ana M. González Ramos (London: Routledge, 2017), 110. 6 Frinde Maher, “Twisted Privileges: Terms of Inclusion in Feminist Teaching,” Radical Teacher 83 (2008): 5. 7 Maher, “Twisted Privileges,” 5. 8 bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 52. 9 hooks, Talking Back, 51. 10 Maher, “Twisted Privileges,” 5. 11 The three teaching associates were each responsible for two to three synchronous online classes of twenty-five to thirty students. We independently planned lessons from the same set of questions developed by the unit coordinator. We all took slightly different approaches to inviting students to answer the days’ questions and developed our own supplementary lines of inquiry to further elucidate points and encourage discussion. Supplemental materials (reading list, lecture outline, tutorial description) can be found here: https://suzanneferriss​.com​ /sofia​-coppola​-in​-the​-curriculum/. 12 Michelle Devereaux, The Stillness of Solitude: Romanticism and Contemporary American Independent Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 81.

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13 Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 49. 14 Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018), 15. 15 Maher, “Twisted Privileges,” 5. 16 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. 17 Nancy Chick and Holly Hassel, “‘Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Virtual’: Feminist Pedagogy in the Online Classroom,” Feminist Teacher 19, no. 3 (2009): 206. 18 Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 57. 19 Ferriss, Cinema of Sofia Coppola, 2. 20 Handyside, Sofia Coppola. 42. 21 Joey Nolfi, “Sofia Coppola: Studio Was ‘Afraid’ of Girls Watching The Virgin Suicides,” Entertainment Weekly, April 23, 2018, https://ew​.com​/movies​/2018​/04​/23​/sofia​-coppola​ -studio​-girls​-virgin​-suicides/. 22 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 7. 23 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 7. 24 hooks, Talking Back, 21. 25 Belinda Smaill, “Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no.1 (2013): 159. 26 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 7. 27 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 7. 28 hooks, Talking Back, 51. 29 Chick and Hassel, “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Virtual,” 207. 30 Shrewsbury, “What Is Feminist Pedagogy?” 10.

26 POPULAR REACTION SOFIA COPPOLA, COSMOPOLITAN ICON Sara Pesce

Introduction Sofia Coppola’s sphere of influence has spread far beyond film narrative and cinematic style. It has stretched to fashion, home design, personal style, pop music, and even tourism and opera. We might see her La Traviata, for example, as containing a few core features of her brand attractiveness.1 Shining with haute couture dresses designed by the fashion emperor Valentino and staged in majestic sets, this opera displays a convergence between her cultivated fashion connections and a bold attitude in crossing cultural boundaries, venturing into artistic areas that bear crucial autobiographical meanings— including her Italian-American origins and her family connections.2 Coppola straddles multiple social realms and cultural meanings. They range from the milieu of the New York indie-rock scene to Californian wine culture (Francis Ford Coppola dedicated two wines from his Napa Valley estate to his daughter). They include the early success of her MilkFed fashion collection in Tokyo and her interactions with Japanese artists to her liaisons with French and Italian fashion designers. They embrace polarities such as being a photographer and being photographed by famous professionals. They touch on multiple cultural capitals—New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and Tokyo. All these realms are showcased in an autobiographical narrative and highlighted in her work. The overall effect is a bending of genres, media, and cultural environments to her trademark personality as an icon of unfussy elegance, femininity, and class, a status measured by her appearances at galas and official occasions, but also by her Hollywood pedigree. If we observe her audiences’ behaviors—how they are inspired by her films or influenced by her musical choices and her fashion—we can deduce that Sofia Coppola’s fanbase is

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not constituted by a consistent community or a network of followers. Coppola manages instead to carve her space into an expanded consumer base, diversified in terms of interests and geographically disseminated, in which each person, instead of identifying with a specific trend, style, or a group of people, has a sophisticated self-conception and monitors themselves in terms of self-expression. The ongoing circulation of media content engaging with Coppola’s personality has turned her into an icon. Her appearances on television, on the covers of magazines, on stage to advertise fashion brands or promote artistic events follow the hypertextual and syncretic logic of today’s entertainment. The historical roots of her example are drawn from media developments in the 1980s, when the consumption of films and many other cultural products started to change. The theater no longer represented the main venue of film watching, as audiences moved to a more conscious form of cultural consumption. Viewing platforms have multiplied ever since, from television, home video, and pay TV to pay-per-view, IPTV, streaming via the internet, not to mention peer-to-peer exchange. In the new millennium, the breadth of entertainment products on offer has expanded enormously and films now represent only a tiny fraction of today’s vast entertainment market. Simultaneously, demand has grown extremely targeted and focused.3 The trend is a strongly oriented choice in use, an effect of the escalation of cultural industries’ marketing efforts and of the birth of new markets. Like branded clothes, audiovisual products are more exportable and reusable, made to be experienced according to personal timelines.4 The public also reflects on their experience of the goods on hand and creates derivative products. Pervasiveness, interactivity, enhanced availability of goods—these have been the hallmarks of the mediascape in which audiences have developed their affection for Coppola’s work and personality. They have been affected by the endless movements of ideas and media, besides capital, people, and goods, induced by globalization— movements that “appear to congeal into a new whole, abstracted from the tangible materials of territory, nationality, identity and power.”5 In the last ten years or so, circulation of Coppola-related content has happened on social media platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, or Flickr, in lifestyle, fashion, and gossip magazines (dozens of them, from Marie Claire to Vogue, from Vanity Fair and Life to Air Magazine), through photographic exhibitions (curated by Sofia6 or dedicated to her7), and at cultural events aimed at a cultivated but large audience. For example, interest in Marie Antoinette (2006) continues in France via a focus on Kirsten Dunst’s costumes at the exhibition Marie Antoinette, métamorphoses d’une image set in Paris in 2019. And the reviews of La Traviata in Rome or in Tokyo emphasize Coppola’s effort to make Verdi’s heroine more relatable to modern audiences.8 Consumption of products created by Coppola transcends boundaries, involving lovers of high fashion, lifestyle devotees, viewers of indie cinema, but also fans of blockbusters, professional photographers, and musicians of various tastes. It concerns communication, or what Roger Silverstone calls “the Mediapolis,” the space of appearance, in which relations between self and other are conducted in a global public sphere.9 Her influence is visible outside the United States, with a peak in Japan, France, and Italy, although meaningful in the rest of Europe and Asia.

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Coppola triggers aspirations that transcend cultural differences, treasure consumption habits that convey the notion of mobility and plurality, and encourage transnational connections based on womanly views and lifestyle. Her fans are involved in a form of cosmopolitan consumerism, where audiences, consumers, and citizens express their awareness of their role and personal responsibility, including as media users, in a global civic space. These media contents are concerned primarily with the negotiation between personal freedom and cultural superimpositions, a sphere of meaning Coppola summons up in her alter-ego characters and in her films’ atmospheres, as well as in her appearances on the stages of fashion and lifestyle. The uses that audiences make of Coppola’s products reveal how Hollywood cinema participates in a network of rebounds and reverberations between films, consumption of material goods, and user-generated content. As I will demonstrate, these uses are driven by a cosmopolitan ideal whose inclusive potential is undermined by a logic of distinction that reproduces material and symbolic inequalities.10

Social Media In a number of Facebook profiles across the world, posts about Sofia Coppola reveal a tendency for collecting items related to her as a means of conveying a state of mind or a personal stance. This sort of “collector-attitude,” fragmented, erratic, and individual, is present on other platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, or Flickr, and also on fashion blogs. This use of Coppola-related content could be characterized as a form of cultural participation and a permanent conversation.11 Audiences are drawn far from the spectacle per se—cinema, theater, museum, exhibition, concert. Their engagement, allowed by consumption practices that take place through cellphones, tablets, and e-readers, is increasingly based on the de-materialization and de-localization of cultural contents, which makes the identification between places and objects less obvious. Not only do Coppola’s admirers tend to divorce her or her films from the cinematic space, by using portraits, casual shots, pictures of her red-carpet appearances, excerpts of her films, and items related to her narratives or personal style as part of their online conversations, they also drag meanings away from the geographic coordinates of her narrative and biography. Their passion for Coppola expands to lifestyle, everyday assets, and selfperception. A number of Facebook posts concern the wine named after her, touching on desires to make the home experience special, refined, and multicultural. Coppola’s multifaceted work integrates with audiences’ behavior in an extensive range of activities turned global, including interior design, art, tourism, and music, as well as dress and accessories. Coppola’s fans are accustomed to a convergence between watching films, videos, clips or listening to music and buying items. They participate in a wider phenomenon of confluence between audiencing (media utilization) and consumption (material purchase), which blurs geographic specificity,12 where personal communication and advertising overlap, due especially to the pervasiveness of fashion consumption habits.13

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While there is some discussion of Coppola’s filmmaking, especially in France and Italy, communities that publish subjective reactions and film reviews are extremely small and not very active. Online forums do exist but are scarcely populated. There we can find that the interest of viewers intersects with Coppola’s use of rock music. On the Italian forum ondarock​.it​, in 2016 a reviewer declared, “Lost in Translation is the film that made me discover Shoegaze.”14 Posts on Facebook focus on film viewing (i.e., posts of cinema tickets or film posters in the theaters), on the pleasure of cinemagoing, or of rewatching her films on television. Similarly, YouTube, a platform conveying media content with a strong amateurish component, chiefly hosts favorite parts of her films and videoclips, or interviews. Private YouTube channels publish mashups of her work,15 where meaning and pleasure stem from reducing Coppola’s film characters to the form of gestures and colors—collected, assembled, and transformed into cult objects.16 On a microblogging website like Tumblr, fans’ engagement with Coppola’s films is also central, as in the case of sofiacoppolafan​.tumblr​.co​m. Blogging on Tumblr is limited in terms of personalization, but it integrates contents coming from other social networks constructing a sort of diary that hosts other fans’ contributions.17 Many forms of engagement with Coppola on social networks help connect individuals to others in the Mediapolis where contents are functional to the production and circulation of identity.18 Coppola’s films become opportunities for users to reflect on themselves, finding affinity with the characters in her films who, like them, are engaged in self-definition. As Suzanne Ferriss argues, “all of Coppola’s films share a thematic focus on appearance, identity, and surveillance.”19 On the social networks these themes transcend US national borders, appear marked as educated forms of self-surveillance, and become vehicles for women’s global citizenship defined by a passion for exquisite tastes and framed by artifacts of contemporary urbanity. A Bangladesh college girl posts a screenshot from Lost in Translation (2003) on Facebook, with captions from a dialogue concerning the definition of women. In France, photos of Scarlett Johansson and film posters are published, primarily by women, as symbols of a state of mind or emotion. An Italian creative and cultural company, Colori Vivaci Magazine, posts images of Lost in Translation. Its profile declares “the more you know yourself and what you want, the less you allow yourself to be overwhelmed by events.” Coppola’s film is picked for its protagonist’s self-reflexive stance. Other users appropriate Coppola’s works and image as part of their own aesthetic productions or views. On a Japanese Facebook page, for example, the covers of booklets dedicated to The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Lost in Translation appear in a series of posts in which a guitar player (Kouta Kanamori) shows his favorite album covers on his kitchen table next to cups of tea and cakes, making a visual composition of a ritual daily pleasure (see Figure 26.1). A photographer (Nobuko photography) choses an unusual portrait of the director (see Figure 26.2). Sophisticated in terms of angle and light, different from the red-carpet shots usually associated with celebrities, this kind of artistic photography envisages Sofia as allowing a closer approach and insight on the part of the viewer. A filmmaker (Manami Yashiro) publishes a post about Coppola under the auspices that an increasingly feminine vision of the world can appear on the screen. Yoshiro matches Coppola with filmmakers Mika Minagawa (whose style is nostalgic and flamboyant) and

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Figure 26.1  A Facebook post by Kouta Kanamori, March 6, 2021.

Figure 26.2  A Facebook post by Nobuko Photography, January 24, 2018

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Miwa Nishikawa (who addresses social contradictions in contemporary Japan), and also with Chinese-American independent filmmaker Chloé Zhao.20 These realms of media production and consumption testify to how frequently in the audience’s mind Coppola exits the realm of filmmaking and appears instead as a model, an icon of girly imagination and sensitive femininity confronting marginality, and possessed of an elusive, artistic imagination. She attracts the devotion of film viewers exactly like her actresses and often overlaps symbolically with them. In other words, she appears as an icon as much as a producer of images. This expansion of Coppola’s meaning outside of filmmaking is widely registered on repositories of images such as Instagram, Pinterest, Getty Images, and Flickr. Even the thematically diverse Instagram brings Coppola’s connection with style and fashion to the fore, as in the page sofiacoppolastyleicon, which focuses on the variety of her outfits and on her ability to pose or even to catwalk.21 Except for the more high-fashion/ brand-oriented Getty Images, on these platforms we find a plethora of images of her casual outfits. Street style frequently catches the imagination. A form of “style therapy,” it reveals how Coppola’s imagery can be part of a toolkit for personal well-being and an inspiration for visual display.22 Pinterest specifically hosts a variety of images across national boundaries showing Coppola sitting on her sofa, on her bed, or at her desk, or catching her while entering a boutique or crossing the street, in her uniform-like style (shirt and straight trousers) or in a collection of elegant dresses.23 Poses of the director in front of the camera, of her bags and clothes, but also the furniture gracing her interiors are visual signs of an attitude, a finely tuned self-consciousness, independent but also trendy, culturally transversal but also Euro-American.24 Her geographic mobility, her subjectivism, and refined consumerism mark her as a cosmopolitan icon.

A Cosmopolitan Icon An illustrated book published in 2012 in Japan—Sofia Coppola: Perfect Style of Sofia’s World—appears as a diagram of the aesthetics and concepts associated with her personality.25 The book testifies to the long-lasting favor the Japanese market has granted to Coppola’s fashion since the 1990s. Designed as a sort of instruction manual edited by fashion curators, the book catalogs Sofia’s clothes, accessories, hair, and makeup for admiration and imitation. Readers access beauty tips suitable for public appearances or leisure time. The miniskirt, for example, is a symbol of Sofia’s girly attitude, while her blue jeans and manly shirts signal her ability to defy standards of femininity and be true to herself. Her casual-chic vibe, together with her LA background as a capital of this style, make the link apparent between Coppola and the Japanese cult of denim, a longlasting form of globalized consumption that has now become “a new arena for national pride” due to a prolific high-end manufacturing addressing an expanding market of international connoisseurs.26 This bond between Coppola’s natural style and a Japanese fashion trend striving to occupy the global mainstream since the 1960s demonstrates the filmmaker’s enduring success as an icon of exquisite simplicity, in a nation where luxury is synonymous not only with prestigious brands but also with high quality, vintage

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styles, and retro tastes. It is not incidental that Coppola’s fashion line MilkFed continues to be remembered—with its informality and its connection to the realm of dance-pop and indie-rock (Sonic Youth), a “rough and cute” atmosphere of the 1990s.27 Coppola easily intersects with an international worship of the American casual, with its accent on bodily ease and comfort. Through their pics and preferences, Coppola’s fans often position themselves selfindulgently within an international geography of refinement based on her example, a culture where brands have an attractive potential and distinguish mediocrity from quality, as, for instance, Ladurée, which appears in the Japanese book on the pages dedicated to Marie Antoinette. Associated with Paris and French sophistication, Ladurée has become the global projection of a ladylike leisure. It is not incidental that the book chooses Coppola’s film scenes that portray characters at moments of leisure in glamorous environments, such as a still from Somewhere (2010) showing father and daughter lying in the sun at the Chateau Marmont hotel. The film still appears opposite a photo of actual guests in the same position, reinforcing the idea that film viewers, fashion consumers, or, more generally, travelers who pay for the same hotel room can aspire to be part of a world emphasized in the book’s title as Sofia’s. Therefore, Coppola encourages a framework where real and fictional entities cohabit, a melting of material and imaginary allowing us to be relieved from ordinariness and attain a fantasy. She embodies, and also represents on-screen, pop culture’s structural encounter between the cultural industry products and the everyday lives of ordinary people, where not only the star but also common people transform themselves into characters and literally enter a narrative dimension.28 International geography is crucial to identification with Coppola’s personality. Her multiple residences include those in the fashion capitals Paris and New York. Mobility and situated experience are attributes of her working procedure—that is, her preference for shooting on location—but are also a symbolic quality of her consumption, for she has liberty in selecting a home while crossing diverse cultural territories, involving travel, urban culture, exotic cuisine, fashion, and lifestyle. As seen on social media, but also in fashion, lifestyle, and gossip magazines, Coppola’s materialism includes references to tourism, food and drink, and music. Cosmopolitanism has been associated with consumption, as emerging in everyday material practices and habits of thought and feeling.29 Pierre Bordieu has described it as the cultural response of a social life that, since the 1980s and especially in the West, has been largely shaped by globalization and by a general shift from a producer to a consumer culture.30 In this context, leisure, taste, and style are pivotal to the construction of individual and collective identity, heading to mundane consumptive experiences.31 This cosmopolitanism has developed even further through social networks’ familiarization with a variety of content and delight in difference. Lost in Translation, for example, reverberates with what John Urry has described as aesthetic cosmopolitanism, a cultural disposition that has sprung from popular tourism.32 The Park Hyatt hotel, with its patterning of cultures—the French restaurant, the New York Bar, the Ikebana classes—showcases Tokyo as one of those cities that “brand themselves as cosmopolitan by offering world-class accommodations, transportation and entertainment, while at the same time accentuating unique environmental or cultural features that make visiting that particular place worthwhile.”33 A gigantic floating atoll

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dominating the city from above, it is in line with Coppola’s uncomplicated combination of luxury and cultural generalization. Cosmopolitanism downplays the awareness of cultural hegemony. This is an aspect Coppola’s spectators have detected in Lost in Translation. Tokyo is so blatantly offered as a receptacle of pop cults, a flattening combination of hypermodernity and tradition that Japanese viewer response has been surprise and criticism. On the Japanese cinema site Kinenote, reviewers comment about being puzzled by the film’s high ratings in the United States, although they also notice the straightforwardness of a foreign look on the capital, aware of the simplifications that transnational exchange brings about. This is a film, one commentator underlines, that can be “perceived as a fantasy set in the world’s largest tourist city.”34 Coppola’s Tokyo is criticized as a Wonderland brimming with stereotypical images of “Cool Japan,” the source of the Otaku and Kawaii culture since the 2000s.35 The film has been charged with orientalism: sexualization, feminization, infantilization.36 While many film viewers might have felt uneasy, Coppola’s committed fans, on the contrary, have recognized in the film a whole subcultural world which, like most Japanese subcultures, is dominantly feminine.37 This occurs to a blogger who spots in the film her juvenile idols, mentioning a few names and places,38 including Dune’s editor-in-chief Fumihiro Hayashi, who is also mentioned as crucial in making Sofia popular in Japan. This viewer response expresses a durable form of fandom dwelling in the streets of Tokyo, where, in 2014, a pop-up store appeared in Shinjuku,39 recreating the atmosphere of 1990s girls’ culture, a huge movement in which young women wore MilkFed and X-girl,40 with elements of music and street culture sprinkled in, and enjoyed Pizzicato Five and Shibuya-kei music such as Kahimi Karie.41 Coppola’s position between the youth fashion and high-fashion communities has been playing a crucial role in connecting girly subcultures to the mainstream. In Lost in Translation Coppola displays her special ability of self-positioning as an intermediary between spectators and pop icons. It is a film grounded on her personal comprehension of Tokyo, drawing from the years when her MilkFed line reached its highest sales peak in Japan and she started working as a fashion photographer for the avant-garde magazine Dune.42 A few references in the film are picked out by her fans, either cinephile suggestions (her father also did a whisky commercial in Tokyo, with Akira Kurosawa) or fashion references (items from her MilkFed collections appear, although they are not overtly displayed, and her Japanese fashion connections are part of the cast: Fumihiro Hayashi, Takashi Homma, Hiromise, Kahimi Karie). In a narrative populated by media exponents—the photographer, the actor, the promoter—and sprinkled with references to celebrity worship, her alter-ego Scarlett Johansson carries the spectator’s candid gaze on the star (Bill Murray) and on pop cults, including hi-tech Tokyo.43

The Royal Court and the Opera House The Japanese context demonstrates how Coppola’s cosmopolitan image branches into local and national cultures, intersecting with larger reformulations of national history and citizenship. This is true for France, where her alliance with the high-fashion milieu has

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expanded to Versailles’ tourism (and we should not forget that the Chateau has served high fashion as an ideal catwalk and photoshoot set).44 The queen’s private residence was restored between 2000 and 2008. Christine Albanel, president of the Chateau at the time, “carefully orchestrated a marketing promotion built upon Coppola’s notoriety,”45 with the effect of increasing visitor numbers.46 When the Petit Trianon reopened to the general public a reshaping of the queen’s fame occurred. A re-aestheticization of her image extended to her spaces of retirement. Le Petit Trianon and le Hameau de la reine became symbols of escape from palace protocol, of extravagance and self-indulgence. They were transformed into an extraordinary target of fashion tourism that turned the historical Marie Antoinette into a modern commodity.47 After the film’s release, Versailles came to encourage a consumption that flattens historical perspective, discards authenticity, and represents a menace of decontextualization. French criticism has targeted Marie Antoinette’s effect of “turning Versailles into a boutique hotel for the jet set.”48 A display of references to Marie Antoinette’s coquettish picks started to dwell in the palace’s boutiques of souvenirs, together with books and myriads of objects like fans, medallions, and perfumes.49 Colors in the pastel palette became a constant of this merchandise, especially in the confiserie. When interviewed, visitors revealed their assumption that the queen’s favorite color was pink, although not on the basis of having watched Coppola’s film in its entirety. They have admitted to being influenced by the film’s imagery, but, in most cases, they have seen only a trailer or a poster of the pastries or the shoes. What emerges is an arbitrary appropriation of film content. Marie Antoinette has created a cult, both global and geographically rooted (in pilgrimages to the Chateau), that transcends actual film viewing. The film still provokes engagement in physical research or in a trip to the site where the spectacle of the queen is made special. Putting Versailles on the same par with park themes and shopping malls, the Palace’s promotional operation activated collective fantasies and consumption habits. The Republican historical thesis engraved in French national culture started to coalesce with a cinematic imagery celebrating the aesthetics of luxury, an imagery that is intrinsically global, molded by “a multitude of concurring subliminal factors, such as marketing, advertising and heritage commodification.”50 Bloggers and social media users have long rejoiced in collecting pictures of the historical site, publishing them next to selected stills from the film, therefore “accommodating” the queen’s rooms within their virtual life spaces and personal relations.51 Whether they have visited the historical site or not, working with visuals and being personally engaged connects these users, the queen, and Coppola’s imagination, an imagination of Versailles’ ability to shape a newcomer into a public personality in every detail of attire and behavior.52 Engaging with Marie Antoinette is engaging with Coppola. Their affluence and refinement are inspiring. Sofia belongs to a cosmopolitan elite. She embodies multiple privileges: granted access to a world of cultural production, geographic mobility, and secured economic resources. Her self-development is expressed through luxury and materialism, reflecting one of many facets of femininity in a postfeminist context, one that is ideal and elitist. This has indeed elicited the counterreaction of many, based on Coppola’s wrapping herself in her insulated world of opulence and fame.53 Coppola stirs identification among women

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of different nationalities and ages who share a similar drive to distinction. Her persona and her work mirror the audience’s participation in a social environment turned global embracing luxury, publicity, fandom, and gossip. A girl’s accessibility “to worlds that kids are not usually around”: this is what Sofia reveals of herself.54 Her self-narrative revolves around a restricted entertainment entourage and fashion aristocracy. Paradoxically, fantasies of accessibility to niche social spaces are fostered by a self-declared privileged woman. Her films convey the limits put on social mobility at the same time focusing on characters belonging to a social elite. Even her street style, so often admired by her fans, broadcasts a breaking away from the conventional fashion imperatives, although the fondness for the brand maintains its hold.55 Both her personal style and film narrative parade in a context trapped in the contradictions of latecapitalist consumer culture, the contradictions between participation and equality on the one hand and, on the other, luxury corporations’ elitist-consumerist marketing, selling symbols of distinction and hierarchy but also mixing elitism with mass consumption.56 This happens in the new millennium’s enhanced visibility of ordinary people, where “anyone, apparently, . . . can be empowered by the seemingly endless possibilities in digital spaces, and yet where the divide between rich and poor continues to grow.”57 On the one hand, Coppola represents Hollywood’s social elite, based on a vertical concentration of wealth. On the other, she expresses a phenomenon vast and contradictory, where it is not illogical to be a consumer and a producer at the same time, a fan and an icon. This is, for example, what drove Valentino to invite Sofia to direct La Traviata for the Opera Theatre in Rome in 2016, after having admired her Marie Antoinette. Sofia and Valentino have repeatedly connected in the past.58 Valentino put himself in the position of Coppola’s fan while conflating two different cultural industries, opera and fashion, and different cultures: a French text inspired an Italian opera, directed by an American filmmaker with costumes by an Italian designer. Coppola, on her side, conceived her direction on the basis of the Maison’s costumes and highlighted Valentino and Violetta as the stars of the show.59 This whole operation broadened the Opera’s public. La Traviata opened to an audience of nonexperts and the Teatro dell’Opera registered the highest rates since its foundation in 1880. Coppola’s La Traviata conflates an attunement to a culture of affluence and bohemian tastes. Non-connoisseurs, attracted by fashion icons and brands more than by Verdi’s opera, appreciated the direct rhetoric of costume and scenography. Their comments online highlight Valentino’s choice of primary colors, pop colors, we might say, seducing with strong sensorial sparking.60 With Coppola, La Traviata symbolically exits the theater. A production that conflates artistic resources from Italy and the United States (the star scenographer Nathan Crowley was also involved), it has enacted a transformation of the cultural space of the Opera, a delocalization consistent with high-fashion cosmopolitanism, whose artistic directors frequently move from one brand to another and from a nation to another (Maria Grazia Chiuri, who designed the costumes with Valentino and Pierpaolo Piccioli, had previously been Dior’s first female creative director). La Traviata’s Paris is the capital of the belle epoque, of leisure and illicit pleasures. Coming from a piece of minor literature (Dumas the son’s La dame aux camélias), this opera makes marginality extremely fascinating, drawing what is insignificant and inconsiderable to the center of attention. Violetta’s romanticism

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is bound to ephemeral inclinations. She lives a materialistic existence to the fullest. Her romanticism is also a key to Valentino’s brand of femininity, a materiality reflected in La Traviata’s majestic decor and costumes.

Conclusion: Niche versus Mainstream Coppola’s reception embraces the whole arc of participatory culture, from its inception to its branching to a new television culture, including YouTube’s destabilization of television’s power structures and centralized schedule, and the increased control over viewing allowed by streaming TV. Primarily a site of amateur videos, spreading a new form of cinephilia,61 YouTube has circulated a great part of Coppola’s audiovisual products, including interviews, music clips, and fashion videos, including on specific channels such as FandomEntertainment or YouTube Fashion. On the one hand, YouTube has “developed unique, ‘authentic’ aesthetics and narrative structures”62 that Sofia fiercely opposes. The YouTube kind of authenticity, often equivalent to approximation and amateurishness, is something she occasionally “quotes” (as in The Bling Ring [2013], which indicts social media users as literal thieves).63 It could be argued that Coppola’s stance and primary creative drive—a precise duty of an heir of the Hollywood cinema tradition—is that of countering a representational standard spread by social media. Her insistent staging of conflicts between hegemony and individual agency, between mise-enscène and authenticity, or between homogenization and inventiveness relates to a media environment turned flexible. Hollywood may survive only when an aristocracy of images comes by, visionary and original. On the other hand, the YouTube ludic component, a pivotal motivation of user-generated content, is what Coppola shares with her fans in many aspects of her productions, incorporating the contemporary spectator’s audacious attitude in crossing and mixing. We may think of her video collage in tribute to Gabrielle Chanel on the occasion of the Mademoiselle Privé exhibition in Tokyo (2019) as but one example. Her pop music choice of Grimes’ Oblivion, the heterogeneity, and the cinephilia are all aspects of YouTube communication. Therefore, in a plurality of spheres of influence, Coppola draws attention to hegemony in the attention economy and in the sphere of imaginary production. Coppola’s reception occurs in an extremely varied media environment, where advertising is more targeted and TV programming is intended for small groups.64 This is a broad media environment, inhabited, for example, by a kind of instructional television like “lifestyle factuals” addressing a targeted, fragmented audience. It comprises delivery systems for television like Amazon Video, Apple TV+, and Netflix that have restored the idea of cinematic experience as authentically chosen. They “tie in with neoliberal discourses that put increased choice and control over these choices in a direct relationship with responsibilities of self-care.”65 Coppola has been increasingly involved in this reshaped distribution system that has reconfigured American independent cinema by way of its media access and modes of consumption (A Very Murray Christmas with Netflix, On the Rocks and The Custom of the Country with Apple TV+).66

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Streaming services not only enter as financial players in cinema, but they also bring issues of quality, cultural capital, and taste to the fore. Quality television, with its liberal values, has advanced a mindset delegitimizing “other” types of television considered inferior,67 a mindset that is noticeable in Coppola’s work, for example, in Lost in Translation, in the frustrating experience of Bob Harris/Bill Murray watching himself on television in his hotel room, or, in A Very Murray Christmas (2015), in Murray’s on-air crisis. On the Rocks (2020) engages streaming TV viewers’ expectations of cultural distinction through aesthetics. Coppola’s fans know they can plunge into high-standard style. Popular “subgenres” are also included but only to be outclassed, as when a televised comedy special appears briefly. Via a stand-up comedian (Chris Rock), television is designated here to convey blatantly what the film implies only obliquely: marriage kills sex. A hierarchy of distinction is presumed. Coppola’s viewers are allowed in the ranks of “the refined.” They are a new species of privileged spectators, the subscribers. They are media consumers who aestheticize their consumption. Apple TV+, like other platforms, articulates cultural legitimation in the context of media convergence. “Cinephiles once belonged to an elite club of movie theater dwellers, but the mass proliferation of technology and social media has granted anyone admission.”68 Coppola’s work is more and more intermingled with media-philia and series-philia, and viewers’ new conditions of involvement.69 Inspired by Coppola’s array of media images and experiences, her admirers around the world are promised membership in the global community via a striving for engagement and the dialectics between central and peripheral, in a convergence of viewing and purchasing. It is not incidental that Coppola’s films always fall in the category of indie ones. Their participation requires a level of knowledge, competence, and sophistication that makes them stand out. Therefore, Coppola is made the object of a cultural consumption based on the logic of distinction, one that reproduces material and symbolic inequalities. Considering the particularly Euro-American, white, male, and privileged nature of cosmopolitanism, Coppola occupies this social space as a white woman not only eliciting the attention of elite white and Asian women but also attracting a particular male audience intrigued by her art—her films, her music choices. Coppola achieves the status of cosmopolitan icon conjuring up a spectrum of meanings: the otherness of the girly realm, the trans-genre attractiveness of pop music, the mobility of transmedia contents, the geographic convergence of fashion. Outside cinemas and theatrical venues, Coppola secures global acclaim through ancillary markets that are manifestly not ancillary anymore. She is not simply a filmmaker or a style icon. She is the icon of a system of image production blurring boundaries and enjoying paradoxes.

Notes 1 Angela Carroll, “Brand Communications in Fashion Categories using Celebrity Endorsement,” Journal of Brand Management 17, no. 2 (2009): 146–58. 2 Sofia’s family connections include not only her grandfather Carmine—composer and opera lover—but also her great uncle Anton, himself a conductor of La Traviata. See Ruth Mac Kee, “Sofia Coppola’s La Traviata Opens at Rome Opera House,” The Guardian, May 20, 2016,

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https://www​.theguardian​.com​/music​/2016​/may​/20​/sofia​-coppolas​-la​-traviata​-opens​-rome​ -opera​-house. 3 Veronica Innocenti and Guglielmo Pescatore, “Dalla crossmedialità all’ecosistema narrativo. L’architettura complessa del cinema hollywoodiano contemporaneo,” in Il cinema della convergenza: Industria, racconto, pubblico, ed. Federico Zecca (Milano: Mimesis, 2012), 128. 4 Innocenti and Pescatore, “Dalla cossmedialità,” 129. 5 Roger Silverstone, Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis (Cambridge, Malden: Polity, 2007), 12–13. 6 One example is the 2011 Paris exhibition on Mapplethorpe: https://ropac​.net​/press​ -documents​/56/. 7 Coppola’s impact on photography is demonstrated by a recent photographic exhibition in Tokyo, Photography and Fashion: Exploring the Relationship Since the 1990s (Top Museum, January–July 2020), whose curator, the photographer Nakako Hayashi, makes reference to Sofia Coppola and Kim Gordon’s involvement with the fashion line X-girl. See https://brutus​.jp​ /article​/911​/35790 and https://topmuseum​.jp​/contents​/exhibition​/index​-3451​.html. 8 The Fashion Post Japan, October 2, 2017, https://fashionpost​.jp​/news​/116295; Atsuko Tatsuta, “Costumes by Valentino! What Is ‘Sofia Coppola’s La Traviata’?” Vogue Japan, September 22, 2017, https://www​.vogue​.co​.jp​/lifestyle​/culture​/2017​-09​-22; Marco Baldari, “La Traviata di Sofia Coppola e Valentino non delude le attese,” La platea. Rivista di cultura teatrale, October 30, 2017, https://www​.laplatea​.it​/index​.php​/teatro​/recensioni​/1496​-la​ -traviata​-di​-sofia​-coppola​-e​-valentino​-non​-delude​-le​-attese​.html. 9 Silverstone, Media and Morality. 10 Jennie Germann Molz, “Cosmopolitanism and Consumption,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, ed. Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 40. 11 Franceso De Biase, ed., I pubblici della cultura: Audience development, audience engagement (Franco Angeli, 2014), 366. 12 Romana Andò, Audience for Fashion: Consumare moda e media con i media (Milano: Egea, 2020),10–11. 13 D’Aloia and Pedroni analyze Chiara Ferragni’s paradigm of media syncretism in Adriano d’Aloia and Marco Pedroni, “Ferragnez: Anatomia di un sincretismo mediale,” in Supertele: Come guardare la televisione, ed. Luca Barra and Fabio Guarnaccia (Roma: Minimum Fax, 2021), 86. 14 http://forum​.ondarock​.it​/index​.php?​/topic​/21459​-sofia​-coppola/. 15 https://www​.youtube​.com​/channel​/UCxe0kUck4​-d​_142JPxTNEVQ​/videos. 16 Andò, Audience for Fashion, 11. 17 See, for example, https://sofiacoppola​.tumblr​.com/. 18 Silverstone, Media and Morality. 19 Suzanne Ferriss, The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 21. 20 Available at https://www​.facebook​.com​/manami​.yashiro​.3​/posts​/3944925535583793. 21 https://www​.instagram​.com​/sof​i aco​ppol​asty​leicon/​?utm​_source​=ig​_embed​&ig​_mid​ =271EFDC5​-2A01​-4CF4​-A89E​-E06DC34A12E5​&hl​=it. 22 https://www​.pinterest​.it​/daianavujcic​/sofia​-coppola​-style​-icon/. 23 https://www​.pinterest​.it​/pin​/162974080250668168/; https://www​.pinterest​.it​/pin​ /135178426303541449/; https://www​.pinterest​.it​/pin​/61009769939148683/.

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24 See Joanne Entwistle’s updated discourse on how a mode of being and style enables women to cope with the frenzy of modern life and her perspective on dress as situated bodily practice in The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (London: Polity, 2015). See also Pam Cook, who argues, “Coppola’s authorial brand projects a Europeanised persona, work and lifestyle that evoke familiar notions of cosmopolitanism and cultural sophistication.” See Pam Cook, “An American in Paris: Sofia Coppola and the New Auteurism,” Melbourne University workshop, September 25, 2013, https://drive​.google​.com​/ file​/d​/0Bz​2RL4​R29l​F2Yj​lWYW​82M3FORjQ​/edit. 25 Sofia Coppola: Perfect Style of Sofia’s World (Japan: Marbletron, 2012). This is a particular kind of publication called “mook” (ムック mukku), a hybrid between a book and a highprofile magazine, dedicated to a specific topic or character, illustrated, and often concerning fashion, travel, or lifestyle. Sofia Coppola: Perfect Style of Sofia’s World belongs to a series of photographic mooks (distinguished from other kinds of mooks for their smaller size) dedicated to international celebrities, where Sofia Coppola is the only filmmaker. 26 David W. Marx, Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 391. 27 Hirayoshi Hikoro, “Between Fashion and Costume: A Look at Sofia Coppola Starting from Beguiled,” Eureka (Yurīka), March 2018, 85. My translation. 28 See John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Lucio Spaziante, Icone Pop: Identità e apparenze tra semiotica e musica (Milano: Mondadori, 2016), 18. 29 John Binnie and Beverly Skeggs, “Cosmopolitan Knowledge and the Production and Consumption of Sexualized Space: Manchester’s Gay Village,” The Sociological Review 52, no. 1 (2004): 39–61. 30 Pierre Bordieu, Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 31 Zlatko Skrbiš and Ian Woodward, “Cosmopolitan Openness,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, ed. Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 65. 32 John Urry, Consuming Places (London: Routledge, 1995). It is a disposition anchored in popular consumer culture. See John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 1999). 33 Molz, “Cosmopolitanism and Consumption,” 38. 34 http://www​.kinenote​.com​/main​/public​/cinema​/detail​.aspx​?cinema​_id​=36948​#cont​_movie. 35 Ozawa Eimi, “Maturity and Women’s Loss: Sofia Coppola’s Perspective,” Eureka (Yurīka), March 2018, 48. My translation. 36 Eimi, “Maturity and Women’s Loss,” 48–9. 37 Yuniya Kawamura, Fashioning Japanese Subcultures (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 12. 38 The blogger declared in 2011: “Hiroshi Fujiwara, Nigo, Hiromix, Nobuhiko Kitamura . . . I knew them all . . . it was all in Tokyo, in places like Shibuya, Nakameguro, and Daikanyama AIR, where I used to hang out.” See https://ameblo​.jp​/dmnoissue​/entry​-11018508975​.html. 39 https://www​.fashion​-headline​.com​/article​/9671. 40 X-girl, started by Kim Gordon and Daisy von Furth of Sonic Youth, still lives in the memory of a group of enthusiasts from Tokyo, as demonstrated by sightings in the underground fashion environment (https://www​.fashion​-press​.net​/brands​/1877). It is also source of true nostalgia for English and American readers of Dazed & Confused magazine: see Claire Marie Healy, “Remembering Kim Gordon’s 90s Fashion Label,” Dazed, April 28, 2015,

432The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola

https://www​.dazeddigital​.com​/fashion​/article​/23513​/1​/remembering​-kim​-gordon​-s​-90s​ -fashion​-label. 41 The shop showed pictures of Coppola’s friend Hiromix, renowned for having started the girly photo boom of the 1990s. See https://www​.fashion​-headline​.com​/article​/16490. See also Ferdinand Brueggemann, “The Woman’s Decade,” Priska Pasquer, https://priskapasquer​.art​/ the​-womens​-decade/. 42 As Maria Francesca Genovese reports, Fumihiro Hayashi, Dune’s head editor, became one of Sofia’s dearest friends in Tokyo. He guided Sofia throughout the “coolest” spots in the city and in its artistic milieu. Maria Francesca Genovese, Sofia Coppola. Un’icona di stile (Recco: Le mani, 2007), 42. 43 Further reflection on Coppola’s melting of material and imaginary typical of the pop universe, and her staged encounters between cultural industry and ordinary people, would require a focus on her use of pop music, a social and aesthetic realm where normality can become the scenery of a staged life. This is apparent not only in her music videoclips but also in the party scenes of her films, which allow a space for celebration, self-release, and imagination, as in the electro-pop preferences of her soundtracks. 44 Robin Givhan, The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled into the Spotlight and Made History (New York: Flatrion Books, 2015); Laurence Benaïm, Fashion and Versailles (Paris: Flammarion, 2018). 45 Denise Maior-Barron, “Was This Really Marie Antoinette’s House? Who Was She Anyway?,” in Heritage: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Heritage and Sustainable Development, ed. Rogério Amoèda, Sérgio Lira, and Cristina Pinheiro, vol 2 (Barcelos: Green Lines Institute, 2014), 1401. 46 Denise Maior-Barron, “Petit Trianon, Home of Marie Antoinette,” in Narrative and the Built Heritage: Papers in Tourism Research, ed. Charlie Mansfield and Simon Seligman (Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag D. Muller, 2011), 40–62. 47 Richard Covington, “Marie Antoinette,” The Smithsonian Online Magazine, November 2006, https://www​.smithsonianmag​.com​/history​/marie​-antoinette​-134629573/. French visitors to the Petit Trianon have largely expressed their fascination with the queen’s persona online. They have made parallels between Marie Antoinette and other detested noblewomen based on an imagery of refinement. See http://www​.noblesseetroyautes​.com​/le​-petit​-trianon​-et​ -marie​-antoinette/. Film imagery populates blogs concerning the queen’s pursuits. See https://www​.tumblr​.com​/blog​/view​/vivelareine​/search​/petit​+trianon. 48 Agnès Poirier, “An Empty Hall of Mirrors,” The Guardian, May 27, 2006. 49 Laurent Mauron, “Au château de Versailles, c’est la ruée sur les cadeaux souvenirs,” Le Parisien, December 22, 2017. 50 Maior-Barron, “Was This Really Marie Antoinette’s House?,” 1402. 51 Ana Maria Munar, “Paradoxical Digital Worlds: Tourism and Social Media,” in Transformations in Identity, Community and Culture, ed. Ana Maria Munar, Szilvia Gymothy, and Liping Cai (Bingley: Emerald publishing, 2013), 35. One blogger comments on a limited collection of six scents, In the Steps of Marie Antoinette, released by the label Poesie in 2019 using GIFs from Coppola’s film. See https://www​.tumblr​.com​/blog​/view​/vivelareine​/search​/petit​+trianon. 52 This imagination is embedded in Coppola’s ability to promote herself as well as her films drawing on European culture, history, and film tradition, an ability addressed by Pam Cook. See Pam Cook, “An American in Paris.” See also Sara Pesce, “Marie Antoinette, Fashion Queens and Hollywood Stars,” in Moving to the Mainstream Women On and Off Screen in Television and Film, ed. Marianne Kac-Verne and Julie Assouly (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 174–96.

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53 Coppola’s popularity has a negative reflection that I am not analyzing in this article, based on her privilege, which is nevertheless commented upon on social media such as Reddit (see https://www​.reddit​.com​/r​/movies​/comments​/k6ocsf​/sofia​_coppola​_wants​_you​_to​_feel​_bad​ _for​_the​_very/ or https://www​.reddit​.com​/r​/TrueFilm​/comments​/7wfu28​/why​_do​_people​ _tend​_to​_dislike​_sofia​_coppola​_so/) and in the popular press (see Nathan Heller, “Sofia Coppola: You Either Love Her or Hate Her. Here’s Why,” Slate, December 28, 2010, https:// slate​.com​/news​-and​-politics​/2010​/12​/you​-either​-love​-sofia​-coppola​-or​-hate​-her​-here​-s​-why​ .html). Academic criticism includes Caitlin Yunuen Lewis, “Cool Postfeminism: The Stardom of Sofia Coppola,” in In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity, ed. Su Holmes and Diane Negra (New York and London: Continuum, 2011), 174–98. 54 “Sofia so Good,” Air: A Magazine with Altitude (Gama Aviation), September 28, 2013, 45. 55 A discourse on Sofia’s simple chic can be found on a blog called Madame Figaro.Jp available at https://madamefigaro​.jp​/blog​/figaro​-japon​/180911​-camelias​.html. See also Suzy Menkes, “Sofia Coppola, Discreet, Chic and Grown Up,” New York Times, October 14, 2008, and Kate Finnigan “Sofia Coppola’s Shares her Style Secrets,” The Telegraph, May 22, 2016, posted on Pinterest, https://www​.pinterest​.it​/pin​/372039619209474946/. 56 Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster (London: Penguin, 2007), 13–17. 57 Banet Weiser, Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 17. 58 http://www​.val​enti​noga​rava​nimuseum​.com​/features​/1648​/sofia​-coppola. 59 Interview available at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma Facebook page. See https://www​ .facebook​.com​/watch/​?v​=938222423274764. 60 See the comments on the costumes’ colors posted on the editor’s blog of Madame Figaro. Jp, September 11, 2018, https://madamefigaro​.jp​/blog​/figaro​-japon​/180911​-camelias​.html. 61 Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb, eds., Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture, vol. 1 (London: Wallflower Press, 2009); Dina Iordanova and Scott Cunningham, eds., Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves On-Line (St. Andrews: St. Andrews University Press, 2012). 62 Mareike Jenner, Netflix and the Reinvention of Television (London: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2018), 97. 63 See Sara Pesce, “Ripping off Hollywood Celebrities: Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, Luxury Fashion and Self-branding in California,” Film, Fashion and Consumption 4, no. 1 (2015): 5–24. 64 Jenner, Netflix, 103. 65 Renata Salecl, The Tyranny of Choice (London: Profile Books, 2010). 66 Yanis Tzioumakis, American Independent Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 276. 67 Jenner, Netflix, 144; Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York and London: Routledge 2012), 13. 68 Jon Lisi, “Cinephilia Culture and the Fear of Missing Out,” Pop Matters, April 10, 2014, https:// www​.popmatters​.com​/179957​-cinephilia​-culture​-and​-the​-fear​-of​-missing​-out​-2495677791​ .html. 69 Roy Menarini, “Forme della cinefilia digitale e streaming: Trasformazioni e slittamenti,” in Streaming Media. Distribuzione, circolazione, accesso, ed. Valentina Re (Milano: Cinergie, 2017), 186.

434

SOFIA COPPOLA: A TIMELINE

1971

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Born May 14

1972

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Appears in christening scene in The Godfather (dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

1983

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1994

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1996

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Acting debut in The Outsiders (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) Small part in Rumblefish (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) Plays child in street in The Cotton Club (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) Appears in Frankenweenie (B&W short, dir. Tim Burton) Minor role in Peggy Sue Got Married (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) Intern at Chanel in Paris (summer) Plays “Noodle” in Anna (dir. Yurek Bogayevicz) Intern at Chanel in Paris (summer) Shares writing credit with Francis Ford Coppola and designs costumes for Life Without Zoe (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) in New York Stories Studies art history at Mills College, Oakland, California Appears as Joan Crawford in Sonic Youth’s “Mildred Pierce” music video (dir. Dave Markey) Appears in The Godfather Part III (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) Designs costumes for The Spirit of ’76 (dir. Lucas Reiner) Takes classes at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and ArtCenter College of Design Appears as “Cindy” in the experimental film Inside Monkey Zetterland (dir. Jefery Levy) Appears in Madonna’s “Deeper And Deeper” music video (dir. Bobby Woods) Appears as “Times Square junkie” in The Black Crowes’ “Sometimes Salvation” music video (dir. Stéphane Sednaoui) Appears on the December cover of Vogue Italia (photographed by Steven Meisel) Collaborates with Spike Jonze on Walt Mink’s “Shine” music video Launches MilkFed clothing line Hosts Hi Octane television series with Zoe Cassavetes Produces Ciao L.A. (dir. Spike Jonze) and appears as “Britney” Codirects Bed, Bath and Beyond (with Andrew Durham and Ione Skye) Directs The Flaming Lips’ “This Here Giraffe” music video

436Sofia Coppola: A Timeline

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Appears as “Janet” in The Chemical Brothers’ music video “Electrobank” (dir. Spike Jonze) Directs Lick the Star Directs The Virgin Suicides Appears as “Saché” in Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace (dir. George Lucas) Directs Air’s “Playground Love” music video Appears on the cover of Dune magazine Featured in March Vogue profile “Being Sofia Coppola” (photographed by Mario Testino) Models for Marc Jacobs perfume ad (photographed by Juergen Teller) Appears as “Enzo’s Mistress” in CQ (dir. Roman Coppola) Appears in Phoenix’s “Funky Squaredance” music video (dir. Roman Coppola) Directs Lost in Translation Directs The White Stripes’ “I Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” music video (cinematography by Lance Acord) Directs Kevin Shields’ “City Girl” music video Creates Platinum television series (with John Ridley) Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Lost in Translation (accepts wearing a dress designed by Marc Jacobs) Serves as guest editor for Vogue Paris (December 2004/January 2005) Appears on cover of Vogue Paris (December 2004/January 2005; photographed by Mario Testino) Publishes photographs in Vogue, Allure Directs Marie Antoinette Serves as guest editor for Dazed & Confused Collaborates with Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton on collection of shoes and handbags Directs “Moi Je Joue,” Miss Dior Chérie perfume commercial (premieres November 8 during Gossip Girl episode) Directs Somewhere Receives Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival Directs “City of Light,” Miss Dior Chérie perfume commercial Serves on jury for first Louis Vuitton Journeys awards competition for emerging filmmakers Presents Marc Jacobs with Council of Fashion Designers of America’s Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement award Collaborates with Marc Jacobs on Louis Vuitton’s 2012 resort collection Curates Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit, Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Paris Directs commercial for H&M’s Marni collection

SOFIA COPPOLA: A TIMELINE

2013

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Directs The Bling Ring Appears as “Florist” (uncredited) in Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, interview with James Franco Directs Phoenix’s “Chloroform” music video Directs “La Vie en Rose,” Miss Dior Blooming Bouquet perfume commercial Directs commercial for Daisy by Marc Jacobs perfume Launch of a limited edition of her namesake Louis Vuitton SC bag at Parisian department store Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche (as Marc Jacobs resigns from the fashion house); designs window displays Featured as a “Timeless Muse” in Louis Vuitton exhibition, Tokyo July 2013 issue of Elle features Coppola’s photographs of Paris Hilton at Hilton’s Beverly Hills mansion Interviews Lee Radziwill for New York Times’ T magazine (and directs video) Featured on cover of August Vogue Australia (photographer, Paul Jasmin; stylist, Stacey Battat) Signs on to direct a live-action version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (withdraws from the project in June 2015) Guest editor for W (April) and Vogue Paris (December) Directs a series of four holiday commercials for Gap Directs ads for Marc Jacobs’ Daisy perfume and another for his trio (Daisy, Daisy Eau So Fresh, and Daisy Dream) Photographs Fall 2014 look book for Calder (an LA-based fashion label created by her cousin-in-law, Amanda Blake) Appears in Marc Jacobs’ final ad campaign for Louis Vuitton (Spring/Summer 2014 collection, styled by Karl Templer, photographed by Steven Meisel) Featured on cover and in fashion editorial February Vogue Italia (photographed by Steven Meisel) Directs Netflix television special A Very Murray Christmas Models for Marc Jacobs’ Fall/Winter collection Directs Valentino’s production of La Traviata for the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma Relaunch of the Sofia Coppola bag for Louis Vuitton Becomes brand ambassador (“friend” of the house) for Cartier Directs The Beguiled Receives award for Best Director at Cannes Film Festival Directs campaign for Calvin Klein women’s underwear Directs commercial for Cartier Panthère watch Appears on Face to Grace with Grace Coddington, M2M: Made to Measure TV Julie de Libran designs “Sofia” tunic and cocktail dress Directs “In Homage to Mademoiselle” for Chanel’s Mademoiselle Privé exhibition in Tokyo, October 19–December 1 Directs On the Rocks Announces will write and direct an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country (1913) as a limited series for Apple TV+ With brother Roman, directs short film for the iconic Chanel 19 bag

438Sofia Coppola: A Timeline

2021

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“Directs” spread “All Dressed Up with No Where to Go” for W’s fourth annual Directors Issue, featuring stars Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, and Rashida Jones Receives the American Society of Cinematographers’ Board of Governors Award Directs “The Chanel Iconic” short film featuring the classic 11.12 bag Directs film (sponsored by Chanel) for the New York City Ballet’s first-ever virtual spring gala (Philippe Le Sourd, cinematographer) Stages the Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room for the Met Costume Institute’s exhibit “In America: An Anthology of Fashion,” reflecting the gala’s “gilded glamour” theme

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Anderson, Tim. “Lost in Transition: Popular Music, Adolescence, and the Melodramatic Mode of Sofia Coppola.” In Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers after MTV, edited by Arved Ashby, 63–83. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Backman Rogers, Anna. American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Backman Rogers, Anna. “And That I See a Darkness: The Stardom of Kirsten Dunst in Collaboration with Sofia Coppola in Three Images.” Film-Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2019): 114–36. Backman Rogers, Anna. “Great Directors: Coppola, Sofia.” Senses of Cinema, November 2007. http://www​.sensesofcinema​.com​/2007​/great​-directors​/sofia​-coppola/. Backman Rogers, Anna. “The Historical Threshold: Crisis, Ritual and Liminality in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006).” Relief 6, no. 1 (2012): 80–97. http://www​.revue​-relief​.org​/index​.php​/ relief​/article​/view​/762​/802. Backman Rogers, Anna. Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019. Baron, Cynthia and Yannis Tzioumakis. Acting Indie: Industry, Aesthetics, and Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Bingham, Dennis. Whose Lives are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre. Princeton, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Bolton, Lucy. Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011. 95–127. Brevik-Zender, Heidi. “Let Them Wear Manolos: Fashion, Walter Benjamin, and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.” Camera Obscura 26, no. 3 (2011): 1–33. Brown, William. “A (Mush)room of One’s Own: Feminism, Posthumanism, and Race in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled.” Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image 7, no. 1 (2020): 71–95. Bruno, Giuliana. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Carew, Anthony. “Sofia Coppola.” Screen Education 81 (September 2016): 92–105. Chow, Lesley. “Fashion and Dunst: The Substance of Marie Antoinette.” Bright Lights Film Journal 56 (May 1, 2007). http://brightlightsfilm​.com​/fashion​-dunst​-substance​-marie​ -antoinette/#​.WtoSjC​_MzGI. Cook, Pam. “History in the Making: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and the New Auteurism.” In The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, edited by Tom Brown and Belen Vidal, 212–26. London: Routledge, 2014. Cook, Pam. “Portrait of a Lady: Sofia Coppola.” Sight and Sound 16, no. 11 (November 2006): 36–41. Cook, Pam. “Sofia Coppola.” In Fifty Contemporary Film Directors, edited by Yvonne Tasker, 126–34. 2nd ed. Oxford and London: Routledge, 2011. Coppola, Sofia. Marie Antoinette. New York: Rizzoli, 2006.

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Devereaux, Michelle. The Stillness of Solitude: Romanticism and Contemporary American Independent Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Diamond, Diana. “Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette: Costumes, Girl Power and Feminism.” In Fashion and Film, edited by Adrienne Munich, 203–31. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011. Ferriss, Suzanne. The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021. Ferriss, Suzanne and Mallory Young. “Marie Antoinette: Fashion, Third-Wave Feminism, and Chick Culture.” Literature/Film Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2010): 96–118. Flores, Pamela. “Fashion and Otherness: The Passionate Journey of Coppola's Marie Antoinette from a Semiotic Perspective.” Fashion Theory 17, no. 5 (2013): 605–22. Galt, Rosalind. Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Gay, Jason. “The Cinematic Life of Sofia Coppola.” WSJ Magazine, May 24, 2017. https://www​ .wsj​.com​/articles​/the​-cinematic​-life​-of​-sofia​-coppola​-1495549685. Gold, Susan Dudley. Great Filmmakers: Sofia Coppola. New York: Cavendish Square, 2015. Handyside, Fiona. “Girlhood, Postfeminism and Contemporary Female Art-House Authorship: The ‘Nameless Trilogies’ of Sofia Coppola and Mia Hansen-Løve,” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 10 (Winter 2015), http://www​.alphavillejournal​.com​/Issue10​/HTML​/ ArticleHandyside​.html. Handyside, Fiona. Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood. London: I. B. Tauris, 2017. Harrod, Mary and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, eds. Women Do Genre in Film and Television. New York and London: Routledge, 2017. Henderson, Laura. “Framing The Bling Ring: (Im)material Psychogeography and Screen Technology.” COLLOQUY Text Theory Critique 28 (2014): 22–44. Hoskin, Bree. “Playground Love: Landscape and Longing in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides.” Literature/Film Quarterly 35, no. 3 (July 2007): 214–25. Hurd, Mary. Women Directors and their Films. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007. Kennedy, Todd. “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur.” Film Criticism 35, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 37–59. Kennedy, Todd. “On the Road to ‘Some Place’: Sofia Coppola’s Dissident Modernism against a Postmodern Landscape.” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 52 (2015): 51–67. King, Geoff. Lost in Translation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. King, Homay. Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Lane, Christina, and Nicole Richter. “The Feminist Poetics of Sofia Coppola: Spectacle and SelfConsciousness in Marie Antoinette (2006).” In Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema, edited by Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer, 189–202. New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2011. Letort, Delphine. “The Cultural Capital of Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013): Branding Feminine Celebrity in Los Angeles.” Celebrity Studies 7, no. 3 (2016): 309–22. Lewis, Caitlin Yunuen. “Cool Postfeminism: The Stardom of Sofia Coppola.” In In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity, edited by Su Holmes and Diane Negra, 174–98. New York and London: Continuum, 2011. LoBrutto, Vincent and Harriet R. Morrison. The Coppolas: A Family Business. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012. Matin, Samiha. “Private Femininity, Public Femininity: Tactical Aesthetics in the Costume Film.” In Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas, edited by Christine Gledhill, 96–110. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Mayshark, Jesse Fox. Post-pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007.

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McCabe, Janet. “Lost in Transition: Problems of Modern (Heterosexual) Romance and the Catatonic Male Hero in the Post-feminist Age.” In Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Stacey Abbott and Deborah Jermyn, 160–75. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. Morrison, Joshua N. “Stealing Fame: Lifestyle Celebrity and the Dubious Cultural Politics of Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 149–65. Murphy, Amy. “Traces of the Flâneuse: From Roman Holiday to Lost in Translation.” Journal of Architectural Education 60, no. 1 (2006): 33–42. Nathan, Ian. The Coppolas: A Movie Dynasty. London: Palazzo, 2021. Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna. Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Pesce, Sara. “Ripping off Hollywood Celebrities: Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, Luxury Fashion and Self-branding in California.” Film, Fashion & Consumption 4, no. 1 (March 2015): 5–24. Smaill, Belinda. “Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director.” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 148–62. Smith, Jeff. “Our Lives in Pink: Sofia Coppola as Transmedia Audiovisual Stylist.” In Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics, edited by Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers and Lisa Perrott, 75–91. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Tay, Sharon Lin. Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Tyree, J. M. “Searching for Somewhere.” Film Quarterly 64, no. 4 (Summer 2011): 12–16. Walton, Saige. Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Wilkinson, Maryn. “Leisure/Crime, Immaterial Labor, and the Performance of the Teenage Girl in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012) and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013).” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 12/13 (Spring/Fall 2017): 20–37. Wilkinson, Maryn. “On the Depths of Surface: Strategies of Surface Aesthetics in The Bling Ring, Spring Breakers and Drive.” Film-Philosophy 22, no. 2 (2018): 222–39. Woodworth, Amy. “A Feminist Theorization of Sofia Coppola’s Postfeminist Trilogy.” In Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema, edited by Marcelline Block, 138–67. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010. Wyatt, Justin. The Virgin Suicides: Reverie, Sorrow and Young Love. New York and London: Routledge, 2019.

FILMOGRAPHY

Lick the Star (1998) Script: Stephanie Hayman and Sofia Coppola Direction: Sofia Coppola Cinematography: Lance Acord Editing: Eric Zumbrunnen Sound design: Richard Beggs Art direction: Kira Cunningham Costume design: Jacqui De La Fontaine Songs by Free Kitten, The Amps, The Go-Gos, Land of the Loops Principal cast: Christina Turley (Kate), Audrey Kelly (as Audrey Heaven) (Chloe), Julia Vanderham (Rebecca), Lindsy Drummer (Sara), Robert Schwartzman (Greg), Peter Bogdanovich (Principal), Zoe Cassavetes (PE Teacher) Produced by Andrew Durham, Christopher Neil, Sofia Coppola 14 minutes

The Virgin Suicides (1999) Script: Sofia Coppola (based on the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides) Direction: Sofia Coppola Cinematography: Edward Lachman Editing: James Lyons, Melissa Kent Sound design: Richard Beggs Production design: Jasna Stefanovic Costume design: Nancy Steiner Music: Brian Reitzell (supervisor), Air (original score) Principal cast: Kirsten Dunst (Lux Lisbon), James Woods (Mr. Lisbon), Kathleen Turner (Mrs. Lisbon), Josh Hartnett (Trip Fontaine), Hanna Hall (Cecilia Lisbon), Leslie Hayman (Therese Lisbon), Chelse Swain (Bonnie Lisbon), Danny DeVito (Dr. Horniker), Giovanni Ribisi (narrated by) Produced by Francis Ford Coppola, Julie Costanzo, Chris Hanley, Dan Halsted Production companies: American Zoetrope, Eternity Pictures, Muse Productions 97 minutes

FILMOGRAPHY

443

Lost in Translation (2003) Script: Sofia Coppola Direction: Sofia Coppola Cinematography: Lance Acord Editing: Sarah Flack Sound design: Richard Beggs Production design: Anne Ross, K. K. Barrett Costume design: Nancy Steiner Music: Brian Reitzell, original songs by Kevin Shields Principal cast: Bill Murray (Bob Harris), Scarlett Johansson (Charlotte), Giovanni Ribisi (John) Produced by Ross Katz, Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Roos, Mitch Glazer Production companies: Focus Features, Tohokushinsha, American Zoetrope/Elemental Films 102 minutes

Marie Antoinette (2006) Script: Sofia Coppola (based on the book Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser) Direction: Sofia Coppola Cinematography: Lance Acord Editing: Sarah Flack Sound design: Richard Beggs Production design: K. K. Barrett Costume design: Milena Canonero Music: Brian Reitzell Principal cast: Kirsten Dunst (Marie Antoinette), Jason Schwartzman (Louis XVI), Judy Davis (Comtesse de Noailles), Steve Coogan (Ambassador Mercy), Rip Torn (Louis XV), Jamie Dornan (Count Axel Fersen), Asia Argento (Comtesse du Barry), Molly Shannon (Aunt Victoire), Marianne Faithfull (Empress Maria Theresa) Produced by Ross Katz, Sofia Coppola Production companies: Columbia Pictures, Pricel, Tohokushinsha, American Zoetrope 123 minutes

Somewhere (2010) Script: Sofia Coppola Direction: Sofia Coppola Cinematography: Harris Savides Editing: Sarah Flack

444Filmography

Sound design: Richard Beggs Production design: Anne Ross Costume design: Stacey Battat Music score: Phoenix Principal cast: Stephen Dorff (Johnny Marco), Elle Fanning (Cleo), Chris Pontius (Sammy) Produced by G. Mac Brown, Roman Coppola, Sofia Coppola Production companies: Focus Features, Pathé Distribution, Medusa Film, Tohokushinsha, American Zoetrope 123 minutes

The Bling Ring (2013) Script: Sofia Coppola (based on the Vanity Fair article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins” by Nancy Jo Sales) Direction: Sofia Coppola Cinematography: Harris Savides, Christopher Blauvelt Editing: Sarah Flack Sound design: Richard Beggs Production design: Anne Ross Costume design: Stacey Battat Music supervisor: Brian Reitzell Principal cast: Katie Chang (Rebecca), Israel Broussard (Marc), Emma Watson (Nicki), Claire Julien (Chloe), Taissa Farmiga (Sam) Produced by Roman Coppola, Sofia Coppola, Youree Henley Production companies: NALA Films, Pathé Distribution, Tohokushinsha Film Corporation, Tobis Film, STUDIOCANAL Limited, FilmNation, American Zoetrope 90 minutes

The Beguiled (2017) Script: Sofia Coppola (based on 1966 novel by Thomas Cullinan; 1971 screenplay by Albert Maltz [as John B. Sherry] and Irene Kamp [as Grimes Grice]) Direction: Sofia Coppola Cinematography: Phillipe Le Sourd Editing: Sarah Flack Sound design: Richard Beggs Production design: Anne Ross Costume design: Stacey Battat Music: Phoenix (based on Monteverdi’s “Magnificat”) Principal cast: Colin Farrell (Corporal McBurney), Nicole Kidman (Miss Martha), Kirsten Dunst (Edwina), Elle Fanning (Alicia), Oona Laurence (Amy), Angourie Rice (Jane), Addison Riecke (Marie), Emma Howard (Emily)

FILMOGRAPHY

445

Produced by Youree Henley, Sofia Coppola Production companies: Focus Features American Zoetrope, FR Productions 93 minutes

On the Rocks (2020) Script: Sofia Coppola Direction: Sofia Coppola Cinematography: Phillipe Le Sourd Editing: Sarah Flack Sound design: Richard Beggs Production design: Anne Ross Costume design: Stacey Battat Music: Phoenix (original score) Principal cast: Rashida Jones (Laura), Bill Murray (Felix), Jessica Henwick (Fiona), Jenny Slate (Vanessa), Marlon Wayans (Dean), Barbara Bain (Gran), Alva Chinn (Diane) Produced by Youree Henley, Sofia Coppola Production companies: A24, American Zoetrope 96 minutes

CONTRIBUTORS

Tim J. Anderson is Associate Professor and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Old Dominion University. He has published numerous book chapters, refereed journal articles, and two monographs: Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording (2006) and Popular Music in a Digital Music Economy: Problems and Practices for an Emerging Service Industry (2014). His latest research project focuses on recordings, musicians, listeners, and the public sphere. Anderson’s website is timjanderson​.co​m. Anna Backman Rogers is Professor of Feminism and Visual Culture at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She is the author of American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image (2015) and Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (2019) and the cofounder and co-editor-in-chief of the experimental journal MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture. Cynthia Baron is a professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University. She is the author of Denzel Washington (2015) and Modern Acting: The Lost Chapter of American Film and Theatre (2016). She is also the coauthor of Reframing Screen Performance (2008), Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation (2014), and Acting Indie: Industry, Aesthetics, and Performance (2020). In addition, she is the coeditor of More Than a Method: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Film Performance (2004) and Intersecting Aesthetics: Literary Adaptations and Cinematic Representations of Blackness (2022). Cameron Beyl is an award-winning filmmaker and the founder of FilmFrontier, an independent micro-studio that employs a forward-thinking and handcrafted approach to the production and distribution of cross-genre cinema. His narrative features include So Long, Lonesome (2009) and Here Build Your Homes (2012), with his third feature, The Veil, set to go into production in spring of 2022. His ongoing video essay project, The Director Series, has been featured in Indiewire, Sight & Sound and Vice Creators Project, as well as in physical venues like the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. He holds a cum laude Bachelor of Arts degree in film production from Emerson College and currently resides in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter. Lucy Bolton is Reader in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women and

CONTRIBUTORS

447

Contemporary Cinema and the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch, and the coeditor of Lasting Screen Stars: Images That Fade and Personas That Endure (winner of BAFTSS Best Edited Collection 2017). She is coeditor of Visionaries, the book series on women filmmakers. Pam Cook is Professor Emerita in Film at the University of Southampton, UK. She is the editor of The Cinema Book (third edition, 2007) and Gainsborough Pictures (1997), coeditor of Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader (1993), and the author of Fashioning the Nation: Costume and Identity in British Cinema (1996), Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (2005), Baz Luhrmann in the BFI World Directors series (2010), Nicole Kidman in the BFI Film Stars series (2012), and the BFI Film Classic on I Know Where I’m Going! (second edition, 2021). Michelle Devereaux is a Leverhulme Trust postdoctoral research fellow in film and television studies at the University of Warwick. She received her doctorate in film studies from the University of Edinburgh and has taught film theory and history at the University of Warwick, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Birmingham. Her first monograph, The Stillness of Solitude: Romanticism and Contemporary American Independent Film, was published in 2019. Cynthia Felando is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After graduating from UCLA, she worked as an art-house and film festival programmer. Publications include Discovering Short Films: The History and Style of Live-Action Fiction Shorts (2015), “Spike Jonze Shorts Stories” in The Films of Spike Jonze (2019), and “Lizzie Borden: Interview with Filmmaker and Biography” in Independent Female Filmmakers: A Chronicle through Interviews, Profiles, and Manifestos (2019). She is also the editor of the peer-reviewed journal Short Film Studies. Suzanne Ferriss is Professor Emerita in English at Nova Southeastern University. She has published extensively on literature, theory, film, and cultural studies. Her publications include two volumes on the cultural study of fashion, On Fashion and Footnotes: On Shoes, and two companion volumes on “chick culture”: Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction and Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies. Most recently, she has explored the intersections of fashion, fine arts, and film in her book The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity (2021). She has just completed a short volume on Lost in Translation for the BFI Classics series. Fiona Handyside is Associate Professor in Film Studies at the University of Exeter. She has published multiple book chapters on Sofia Coppola and postfeminism and coedited International Cinema and the Girl: Local Issues, Transnational Contexts (2016). She is the author of Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (2017). Laura Henderson is a head tutor in Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne. Building on her PhD on Sofia Coppola, her research explores the intersection between affect theory, spectatorial experience, and neuropsychological approaches to screen studies. Specializing in contemporary American cinema, she has been published in

448Contributors

Colloquy and Senses of Cinema, and in the anthologies Seeing into Screens: Eye Tracking and the Moving Image (2018) and Our Fears Made Manifest: Essays on Terror, Trauma and Loss in Film, 1998-2019 (2021). Todd Kennedy is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at Nicholls State University, where he is the director of the program in film studies and teaches film and American literary modernism. Best known for his work on Sofia Coppola, Kennedy has also published academic articles on the films of Julio Medem, Robert Altman, Ang Lee, Benh Zeitlin, and Gordon Ball, and two articles on Bob Dylan’s music. His article “‘Off with Hollywood’s Head’: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur” remains on the suggested reading list for both the French and Mexican national cinematheques. His current book project examines Anthony Bourdain and posits that his work can best be understood within the context of ethnographic filmmaking. Mathias Bonde Korsgaard is Assistant Professor of Film and Media at School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published extensively on music video and audiovisual studies. His publications on music video include the book Music Video after MTV (2017), which covers some of the core issues in the study of music video—including the history, analysis, and audiovisual aesthetics of music video—while also specifically engaging with the digital afterlife of music video online. His other work has been published in journals such as Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, as well as in anthologies such as The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis, and The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening. Korsgaard is also the editor-in-chief of the Danish online film journal 16:9 (16​-9​​.dk), which publishes articles and scholarly video-essays in both Danish and English on film, television and streaming series, documentary, music video, and more. Delphine Letort is a professor in American and Film Studies at the University of Le Mans (France). She is the author of Du film noir au néo-noir: mythes et stéréotypes de l’Amérique 1941-2008 (2010) and The Spike Lee Brand: A Study of Documentary Filmmaking (2015). She has written articles about film adaptations, documentary filmmaking, and AfricanAmerican cinema and has coedited several books (with Benaouda Lebdai, Women Activists and Civil Rights Leaders in Auto/biographical Literature and Cinema, 2018; Des révoltes armées au terrorisme à l’écran, 2020). Emma McNicol is a Research Fellow at the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre. Emma has published widely on feminist theory, violence against women, feminist film and literature. She specializes in Simone de Beauvoir’s work and her PhD thesis focused on Anglophone critiques of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. An expert educator, Emma has taught extensively at secondary and tertiary levels. She has also developed and implemented gender equality and LGBTQI+ inclusive educational suites at secondary schools in both the UK and Australia.

CONTRIBUTORS

449

Whitney Monaghan is a Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University. Broadly interested in intersections of screen cultures and social justice, her research examines the representation of gender and sexuality in popular media. She is the author of Queer Girls, Temporality and Screen Media: Not Just a Phase (2016), coeditor of Screening Scarlett Johansson: Gender, Genre, Stardom (2019), and coauthor of Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures (2019). Katarzyna Paszkiewicz is Lecturer in English Studies at the University of the Balearic Islands, Spain. Her primary research is in film studies and cultural studies, with an emphasis on popular film and women’s cinema in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain. She also has an interest in questions of embodiment and cinematic affect, as well as in ecological thought. She has published several book chapters and journal articles on Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, and Isabel Coixet. She has coedited, with Mary Harrod, Women Do Genre in Film and Television (2017, winner of first prize in the BAFTSS Best Edited Collection competition) and published her monograph Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (2018, shortlisted for the ESSE Awards). Her most recent coedited collection Final Girls, Feminism and Popular Culture (2020) explores contemporary reformulations of the Final Girl in film, TV, and literature. In May 2020, she was awarded a “Knowledge Generation R&D” Grant to be Principal Investigator on the three-year research project, “Cinema and Environment: Affective Ecologies in the Anthropocene,” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Sara Pesce is Associate Professor at the University of Bologna, where she teaches film history, cinema and literature, and performance studies. Her research has been published in journals and edited collections on acting, performance, celebrity culture, and fashion; on the historical roots of Hollywood industry; and on memory and digital culture in the contemporary global context. She is the curator of a series of public interviews with major Italian actors and cofounder of the Italian Research Network on Celebrity Culture. She is the author of books on Hollywood’s Jewish founders (Dietro lo schermo, 2005), on the Second World War and Italian cinema (Memoria e immaginario, 2008), and on Laurence Olivier (Laurence Olivier nei film, 2012). She is editor and contributor of one book on film melodrama (Imitazioni della vita, 2007) and one on time, memory, and paratextual media (The Politics of Ephemeral Digital Media, Permanence and Obsolescence in Paratexts, 2016). Nicole Richter, PhD, is a professor of Media Studies at Wright State University, where she is the head of the Tom Hanks Center for Motion Pictures and teaches courses in philosophy and film, cinema and sexuality, animation, feminist film theory, and film history. She is the author of The Moving Image: A Complete Introduction to Film (2018) and has published numerous book chapters and articles in the Journal of Bisexuality, Queer Love in Film and Television and Short Film Studies, among others. She is the founder of KinoFemme and KinoQueer, respectively, women’s filmmaking and queer filmmaking collectives. She formerly served on the editorial board for Short Film Studies and as the president of FilmDayton.

450Contributors

Jamie Ann Rogers is a lecturer in the Department of English at Clemson University. Her recent publications include “‘Sometimes It Seems You’re in Another World’: Afrocentric Feminisms of the L.A. Rebellion,” in Camera Obscura, and “Diasporic Communion and Intertextual Exchange in Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust” in Black Camera. Her book project, The L.A. Rebellion: Feminist Interventions and Institutional Claims, examines the Black feminist aesthetic and filmmaking practices of the LA Rebellion student film movement. Grace Russell is a Teaching Associate in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University and an online training development consultant. She recently completed her PhD as part of the “Utilitarian Filmmaking in Australia 1945-1980,” Australian Research Council project. Her research focuses on instructional filmmaking, industrial safety, and noncinema uses of film. Caryn Simonson is Programme Director for Textile Design at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, and is an educator, practitioner, writer, and PhD supervisor. She is a peer reviewer and member of the international editorial advisory board for Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture. She guest-edited a special themed issue “Skin and Cloth,” which explored relationships between skin/cloth mimesis, material innovations, and cultural/social contexts. At international conferences, she has presented papers including “Fashionable Bikers and Biker Fashion,” exploring relationships between luxury fashion brands (Chanel, Longchamp, Belstaff, and Matchless) and motorcycling, heritage, value, and craftsmanship with an emphasis on fashion “mini-films” and storytelling. More recently, her focus has been on “Athleisure” and motorcycle imagery including papers on the Chanel x Pharrell collaboration mini-film and Vogue fashion editorials depicting motorcycles and fashion. In her academic leadership role, she has negotiated, facilitated, and delivered student industry projects with Nike (showcased at Nike HQ), I Love Linen campaign (with CELC and GGHQ showcased at V&A), H&M, and Burberry. Belinda Smaill is an Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University. Over the past two decades she has published widely on women and cinema and documentary media. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Screen, Camera Obscura, and Feminist Media Studies. She is the author of The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (2010) and Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary Moving Image (2016), and coauthor of Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (2013). Yannis Tzioumakis is Reader in Film and Media Industries at the University of Liverpool (UK). He is the author of five books, most recently Acting Indie (coauthored with Cynthia Baron, 2020), and coeditor of six volumes, most recently United Artists (2020). He also coedits two book series: the Routledge Hollywood Centenary and Cinema and Youth Cultures. For the latter, he is currently coauthoring the volume Rock around the Clock: Exploitation, Rock ’n’ Roll and the Origins of Youth Culture.

CONTRIBUTORS

451

Saige Walton is a Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of South Australia. She is the author of Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement (2016). Her articles on the embodiment of film and media aesthetics appear in journals such as Culture, Theory and Critique, NECSUS, Projections, Paragraph, Screening the Past, and The New Review of Film and Television Studies. Her current book deals with the embodiment of a contemporary cinema of poetry. Lawrence Webb is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. He is author of The Cinema of Urban Crisis: Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City (2014) and coeditor of three books: Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes of Film and Media (2016), Hollywood on Location: An Industry History (2019), and The City in American Cinema: Film and Postindustrial Culture (2019). He is the managing editor of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. Maryn Wilkinson is Assistant Professor in Film Studies for the Department for Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. She studied Film and Television Studies at the University of Kent in Canterbury and the University of Warwick in the UK, and received a fellowship from the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis for her PhD, a project that looked at feminist film theory, neoconservative politics, and the representation of teenage girls in 1980s American cinema. In addition to writing about Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, she has written about Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, the television series Mad Men, and musician Taylor Swift. Her current research interests focus on politics and aesthetics, popular culture, and critical theory, especially issues around feminist film theory and representations of youth and labor. Justin Wyatt is Associate Director of the Harrington School of Communication and Media and Associate Professor of Film/Media and Communication Studies at the University of Rhode Island. He is the author of High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood and The Virgin Suicides: Reverie, Sorrow and Young Love and the coeditor of Contemporary American Independent Film: From the Margins to the Mainstream. From 2000 to 2015, he worked professionally in the television industry leading primary research initiatives for both clients (ABC Television Network, NBCUniversal Cable Group, Viacom) and suppliers (Frank N. Magid Associates).

INDEX

2 Chainz  230 A24  6, 8, 262, 263, 274 Acord, Lance  2, 3, 10, 132 Lost in Translation  36, 192–4 Marie Antoinette  56, 194–5 acting  255–77, 374 The Beguiled  95, 265, 270–3 The Bling Ring  83–5, 202, 267–8, 365–8 Lost in Translation  41, 108, 259, 269–70, 324, 374 Marie Antoinette  5, 263–4, 266–9 On the Rocks  108, 256, 263 Somewhere  268–9 The Virgin Suicides  24, 257–9, 268, 271 Adam and the Ants  134, 228, 341 adaptation  11–12 The Beguiled  7–8, 91–2, 98–9, 312, 342, 392 The Bling Ring  6, 250 Marie Antoinette  3–5 The Virgin Suicides  3, 21–3, 25, 32 Air  9, 24–6, 31, 43, 127, 130, 226, 298, 409 Akerman, Chantal  65–6, 70, 157, 264 Allen, Woody  111–12, 385, 386 Altman, Robert  7, 155–66 American Beauty  361 American Gigolo  116, 171, 214, 297 American Zoetrope  3, 9, 23–4, 36, 52, 257, 282, 283, 325 The Amps  144, 149

Anderson, Paul Thomas  126, 256, 258, 260, 270, 361, 388 Anderson, Wes  3, 56, 132, 256, 258, 269–70, 289–90, 293, 362, 389, 394 Antonioni, Michelangelo  61, 65–6, 70, 135, 157, 210 Apple TV+  8, 12, 106, 263, 274, 428–9 auteurism  12–14, 128, 146, 157, 258–9, 261, 263, 289–91, 386–8 auteur-curator  289–303 auteur mélomane  125–9 commodity auteur  281–8, 292 feminine auteur  13, 62–3, 157, 305–6, 395 feminist auteur  128, 306 Avedon, Richard  171, 214, 215 Avicci  230 awards  10, 54, 189, 258, 388 The Beguiled  1, 7, 263 Lost in Translation  1, 4, 8, 35–7, 269, 283 Somewhere  1, 6, 61–2, 262 Baker, Chet  107, 112–13, 333 Barney, Tina  289, 296, 300 Barrett, K. K.  56, 237–8, 248 Battat, Stacey  6 Bed, Bath and Beyond  2, 140 The Bee Gees  27 Beggs, Richard  3, 4, 10, 24, 207 The Beguiled  7–8, 91–102 acting  265, 270–3 adaptation  7–8, 91–2, 98–9, 312, 342, 392

INDEX

cinematography  92, 94–5, 97, 102, 198–201 feminism  91–102, 171, 312–13 gaze  93–8, 102 genre  12, 92, 99, 262 indiewood  262–3 locations 93, 98–9, 102, 110, 130, 240, 244 (see also locations, Louisiana) mood boards  295–6 music  231–2, 234, 343 production design  97, 238, 240–2 race and class  91, 98–101, 242, 326, 329, 339, 341–5, 350 reception  392–3 Bigelow, Kathryn  388, 389, 396–7 Blauvelt, Christopher  80, 197–8 The Bling Ring  6–7, 75–88 acting  83–5, 202, 365–8 adaptation  6, 75, 83 celebrity  12, 76, 84–6, 109, 133, 269, 348, 371–4, 377–8 cinematography  77–82, 87, 160, 196–9, 211–12, 265 commodities  76–9, 86–7, 329–30, 377–9 genre  12, 78 indiewood  262 locations 6, 78, 110, 251, 357, 365 (see also locations, Los Angeles) luxury  179–80, 250–1 music  229–31, 349–50 postfeminism  76, 329–31 production design  77, 247, 250–1 race and class  82, 86, 327–8, 348–50, 392 reception  75–6, 88, 390–2 “skimming”  77–82 teenage girl figure  76–7, 82–6 Bourdin, Guy  210 Bow Wow Wow  224, 227–8, 249, 298, 330, 366 Bresson, Robert  215, 268 Brief Encounter  36, 45

453

Broussard, Israel  75, 229, 268, 349, 373 Callis, Jo Ann  297 Canonero, Milena  4, 56, 331 Cassavetes, Zoe  2 celebrity  5–7, 12, 132–3, 175, 214–17, 269, 324, 371–81 The Bling Ring  75–7, 84–6, 211–12, 230, 250–1, 262, 348–50, 371–4, 377–8 Coppola as celebrity  13, 133, 281–5, 290–3, 297, 323, 387, 390, 396, 418–33 Lost in Translation  41, 133, 175, 269, 372, 374–5, 378–9 Marie Antoinette  5, 12, 371, 377–8 Somewhere  64, 70, 133, 140, 175, 206, 261, 324, 375–6, 378–9, 390 A Very Murray Christmas  161–3, 262 Chang, Katie  75, 267, 349, 372 Chaplin, Charlie  61, 64, 70 cinematography  10, 160, 189–204, 230, 284, 356, 360–7. See also Acord, Lance; Blauvelt, Christopher; Lachman, Edward; Le Sourd, Philippe; Savides, Harris The Beguiled  92, 94–5, 97, 102, 198–201 The Bling Ring  77–82, 87, 160, 196–9, 211–12, 265 Lick the Star  142–5, 151 Lost in Translation  36, 110, 165, 192–4, 332 Marie Antoinette  129, 160, 194–5, 208, 213, 311–12, 365 On the Rocks  106–11, 115, 201–2 Somewhere  64–5, 68, 70, 196–7, 284 A Very Murray Christmas  160–1, 165 The Virgin Suicides  28–30, 109, 110, 130, 145, 146, 160, 189–92, 211, 213, 239, 361–3 class  14, 172, 251, 294, 300, 322, 324–31, 387, 390–2, 424–9. See also luxury

454INDEX

The Bling Ring  6, 251 Lost in Translation  36, 41, 43 Marie Antoinette  229, 251 On the Rocks 8, 110, 113–17, 315, 328, 350–1 Clueless  78, 84 Columbia Pictures  52, 260, 283 commercials  9–10, 116–17, 170–1 for Calvin Klein  10, 131–2, 171, 214, 296 for Cartier  171, 214, 296 for Chanel  171–82, 215–16 for Dior  5, 170, 285 fashion mini-films  169–85, 214 for Gap  9, 10, 171 for H&M Marni  9, 10, 171 for Marc Jacobs’ Daisy  170–1, 176–7, 214 use of music  171 Coppola, Eleanor (née Neil)  2, 9, 202, 206, 265, 300 Coppola, Francis Ford  2, 23, 113–14, 202, 282, 297, 379, 387 director  62, 140, 189, 192, 206, 265–6, 282, 284, 292–3, 389, 391 producer 3, 9, 24, 52, 127, 257 (see also American Zoetrope) winery  132, 418 Coppola, Gia 132, 202 Coppola, Gian-Carlo (Gio)  3, 23–4 Coppola, Roman  2, 131, 297 codirector  116, 171, 178–82, 202 director  23, 25, 129, 131, 132 producer 9, 24, 127–8, 132 (see also American Zoetrope) second unit director  8–9, 24 Coppola, Sofia acting  2, 23, 264–5, 283–4 autobiographical interpretations  4, 8, 36, 107, 283, 387–97, 418 biography  2–10, 13, 23–5, 36, 125–35, 206, 418 brand  14, 52, 63, 65, 128, 170, 171, 174, 176, 181–2, 281–6, 290, 322–3, 385–9, 393–4, 418

cosmopolitan icon  13, 14, 285, 423–9 curator  1, 9, 13, 125, 177, 216, 289–303, 419 education  2, 206 fashion icon  169, 396, 423–9 guest editor  9, 216–17, 297–9, 328–9 costume design  3, 54, 116, 237–8, 410, 427. See also Battat, Stacey; Canonero, Milena; Steiner, Nancy The Bling Ring  6 Life Without Zoe  2, 140, 206 Marie Antoinette  4, 56 Cullinan, Thomas  7, 191, 312, 342 curation  1, 9, 13, 125, 177, 215–16, 289–303, 419 The Custom of the Country  11–12, 217, 274, 428 Cwynar, Sara  296 David, Jacques-Louis  111, 208, 210 Denis, Claire  21, 396 DeVito, Danny  24, 338 Dorff, Stephen  5, 6, 61–74, 106–7, 109–10, 206, 223, 261, 268–9, 328, 358, 372 Dune magazine  2, 425 Dunst, Kirsten  9, 132, 216–17, 251, 262, 328–9, 372–3 The Beguiled  91–102, 212, 241 The Bling Ring  251, 372 Marie Antoinette  5, 52–3, 55, 195, 208, 227, 248–9, 260–1, 263–4, 266–7, 270–3, 309, 324, 339–40, 342, 344, 357, 392 The Virgin Suicides  22–34, 145, 226, 258, 268, 307, 324 Durham, Andrew  2, 5, 140 editing  176–9, 207, 264, 266, 356–68. See also Flack, Sarah The Beguiled  271–2 The Bling Ring  80, 84–5, 377–8 Lick the Star  143–4

INDEX

On the Rocks  115–16 The Virgin Suicides 22, 28, 257 Eggleston, William  217, 289, 295, 296 Emin, Tracey  300 Eugenides, Jeffrey  3, 21–3, 25, 31–3, 227, 238–9, 258, 404, 410 Fanning, Elle  9, 216–17, 328–9 The Beguiled  93 Somewhere  5, 61–74, 197, 261, 268–9, 324 Farrell, Colin  91–105, 212, 232, 241, 262, 270–3, 326, 342 fashion  116–17, 160, 169–82, 266, 282, 323, 387, 390, 394, 396, 410, 418–20. See also commercials; Jacobs, Marc; MilkFed; Valentino Calvin Klein  10, 131–2, 171, 214, 297 Cartier  10, 116–17, 171, 297 Chanel  2, 10, 13, 79, 86, 116–17, 140, 169–82, 206, 215, 250, 285, 328, 394, 428 Dior  5, 9–10, 13, 170–1, 282, 285 fashion magazines  297–9 fashion mini-films  169–82, 189 fashion photography  192, 196, 206, 210–18, 238 Gap  9, 10, 171 H&M Marni  9, 10, 171 Lick the Star  143–4 Louis Vuitton  5, 9, 13, 79, 116, 180, 230, 250, 282, 285–6 Marie Antoinette  56–8, 228, 310, 378 feminism  13–14, 148–50, 175, 304–17, 322–3, 325–6, 339, 341, 413–15. See also postfeminism The Beguiled  91–102, 171, 312–13 feminist film studies  306, 404, 407, 414 feminist pedagogies  404–5, 409, 412–15 gendered reception  385–97 Marie Antoinette  51–9, 309–12

455

On the Rocks  312–17 The Virgin Suicides  30, 101, 175, 306–9, 323–4, 414 film festivals Cannes  1, 5–8, 24, 51–2, 75, 258, 263, 309, 388 New York  8, 106 Sundance  258 Telluride  36 Venice  1, 6, 36, 61, 262, 388 Fincher, David  126, 196, 205, 325 fine arts  1, 10, 190, 202, 205–18, 289, 293–301 Five Easy Pieces  61, 67, 69–70, 112 Flack, Sarah  4, 8, 10, 11 The Flaming Lips  2, 127, 130, 224 Focus Features  7, 36, 259–63 Foo Fighters  223 Fraser, Antonia  3, 55, 58–9 Gallagher, Ellen 114, 206 Gang of Four  247 Garavani, Valentino. See Valentino genre  7, 12, 57, 198, 201, 259–60, 334 biopic  12, 54–5, 260–1 Christmas special  155–66 costume drama  195, 260, 331, 397 and gender  396–7 teen film  78–80 Godard, Jean-Luc  24, 135, 157, 210, 284 The Godfather  2, 387 The Godfather Part III  2, 4, 23, 25, 264–5 Gordon, Kim  149 The Graduate  61, 62, 67–70 Hall, Hanna 22, 239, 338 Hartnett, Josh  22, 226, 258, 307 Hayashi, Fumihiro  42, 425 Hayman, Leslie 226, 240 Hayman, Stephanie  2 Haynes, Todd  190, 257 Heart  144 Hilton, Paris  6, 212, 250, 262, 329, 372, 378, 390

456INDEX

Hi Octane  2 Homma, Takashi 190, 425 indiewood  11, 255–74, 282–4, 297, 321–2 Jacobs, Marc  5, 9, 10, 132, 169, 170, 182, 214, 282, 289, 298 Jarmusch, Jim  256, 268, 269 Jasmin, Paul  206 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles  65–6 Johansson, Scarlett  4, 35–48, 165, 193, 208–10, 244, 324, 355, 372, 421, 425 Jones, Rashida  9, 132, 205, 216–17 On the Rocks  106–18, 174, 182, 202, 232, 263, 313–17, 324, 328, 350–2, 391–2 A Very Murray Christmas  161, 163, 262 Jonze, Spike  2, 4, 36, 126, 129, 130, 258, 289 Julien, Claire  75, 133, 327, 349–50 Kacere, John  208–10, 245, 326 Kidman, Nicole  91–102, 212, 231–2, 241, 262, 270–3, 343 King, Carole  27–8 Kubrick, Stanley  194, 397 Lachman, Edward  10, 31, 189–92, 240, 257, 295 La Dolce Vita  44–5 La Traviata  9, 13, 199, 225, 418, 419, 427–8 Laura  111–12, 231–3, 313 Laurence, Oona  94, 240, 342, 367 Le Sourd, Philippe  7, 10, 198–202 Lick the Star  2, 3, 62, 129, 139–52, 157, 160, 189, 206, 214, 265 cinematography  142–5, 151 girl culture  146–52 girl’s gaze  145, 147–8, 151–2 music  144, 146, 149–51 Riot Grrrl  148–50

short film conventions  141–2 Life Without Zoe  2, 8, 23, 140, 206 locations  11, 12, 110, 156–7, 251, 387 Chateau Marmont  5, 63, 65–6, 68, 110, 196, 206, 223–4, 246–7, 251, 256, 261, 325, 379, 424 cinematic tourism  355–68 Japan  35–48, 110, 190, 193–4, 244, 358, 364, 423–5 Los Angeles  66, 70, 79–80, 206, 251 Louisiana  7, 91, 94, 98–9, 240, 242, 270, 344–5 Michigan  191, 239, 345–6 New York City  8, 107–8, 110–13, 140, 163–5, 206, 262, 263, 350 psychogeography  355–68 Versailles  4, 56, 247–51, 256, 260, 267, 340–1, 360, 365–6, 377–8, 426 Lost in Translation  1, 3–4, 35–48, 62, 107, 117, 157, 332 acting  41, 108, 259, 269–70, 324, 374 celebrity  133, 175, 269, 372, 374–5, 378–9 cinematography  36, 110, 165, 192–4, 332 genre  12, 260, 334 indiewood  37, 259–60, 283, 291 locations  4, 36, 40–5, 358–60, 362–4, 367 (see also locations, Japan) music  36, 92, 127–8, 130–2, 227, 298, 421 opening  7, 37, 107, 208–11, 245 production design  243–7 race and class  36, 40–3 reception  4, 6, 48, 388–9, 397, 421, 425 luxury  11, 114–16, 179–82, 237–51, 325–6, 331, 378, 426–7 Lyons, James  24, 257 Malick, Terrence  21, 157, 194, 212–13 Mapplethorpe, Robert  9, 13, 216, 289–90, 293–4

INDEX

Marie Antoinette  2–5, 98, 109, 111, 146–7, 157, 170–1, 285, 298 acting  5, 263–4, 266–9 adaptation  4, 5, 55, 58–9 celebrity  5, 12, 371, 377–8 cinematography  129, 160, 194–5, 208, 213, 311–12, 365 commodities  330–1, 378 feminism  51–9, 309–12 genre  2, 54–5, 57, 195, 331, 397 indiewood  260–1, 283 locations 12, 110–11, 357–8, 360, 365 (see also locations, Versailles) montage sequence  109, 330–1, 366 music  128, 131, 134, 224, 227–9, 298 opening  107, 130, 210–11 postfeminism  323–4, 329–31 production design  51, 56, 247–9, 251 race and class  339–41 reception  50–9, 229, 387–90, 392, 394–5, 419, 424, 426 Mars, Thomas  9, 13, 26, 112, 125, 127–8, 131, 133, 224–5, 262, 283, 285 Meyers, Nancy  395 M.I.A.  229–30, 349 MilkFed  2, 4, 5, 169, 206, 244, 282, 418, 424–5 Modern Times  61, 64, 70 Monet, Claude  114, 115, 205, 206, 213 Morisot, Berthe  213 Moss, Kate  10, 131–2, 171, 214 Murray, Bill Lost in Translation  3, 35–48, 133, 244, 260, 269–70, 332–3, 374, 391 On the Rocks  8, 106–88, 232, 255, 263, 332–3, 351 A Very Murray Christmas  7, 108, 133, 155–66, 262 music  2, 3, 9–11, 171, 181, 222–34, 297–8, 420–1, 428. See also Reitzell, Brian; Phoenix The Beguiled  231–2, 234, 343 The Bling Ring  229–31, 349–50

457

Lick the Star  144, 146, 149–51 Lost in Translation  36, 92, 127–8, 130–2, 227, 298, 421 Marie Antoinette  128, 131, 134, 224, 227–9, 298 On the Rocks  107, 112–13, 224, 231–4 Somewhere  223–4 A Very Murray Christmas  108, 163–5 The Virgin Suicides  9, 22, 25–8, 127, 128, 130, 144, 224, 226–8 music videos  1–2, 9, 11, 125–35, 140, 143, 149, 150, 224 Air’s “Playground Love”  130–1 The Flaming Lips’ “This Here Giraffe”  130 Kevin Shield’s “City Girl”  130–1 Phoenix’s “Chloroform”  132–3 Walt Mink’s “Shine”  129–30 The White Stripes’ “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself”  131–2 My Bloody Valentine  128, 227, 298 Netflix  155, 171, 262, 274, 428–9 Newton, Helmut  5, 215, 217, 289, 298 New Wave American/New Hollywood  62, 67, 148, 157, 284, 294, 297 French  6, 62, 67, 157, 210, 283–5 New York City Ballet  9, 225 Ocean, Frank  230 On the Rocks  8, 106–18, 274, 429 acting  108, 255, 263 cinematography  106–11, 115, 201–2 fashion  116–17 feminism  312–17 genre  12, 313, 334 locations  108, 110–17, 156–7 (see also locations, New York) music  107, 112–13, 224, 231–4 postfeminism  324, 327–8, 332–3 production design  114–15 race and class  113–17, 174, 182, 315, 328, 350–2, 390–5

458INDEX

reception  111, 113–14, 313, 385, 390–5 O’Sullivan, Gilbert  27 Owens, Bill  190, 207–8, 289, 295–6 Ozu, Yasujirō  193 A Painted Devil  7, 91 Penn, Irving  114, 214 Peyton, Elizabeth  298, 300 Pharrell  174–6, 215 Phoenix  9, 26, 112, 125, 132–3, 164, 224, 231–2, 297–8. See also Mars, Thomas Picnic at Hanging Rock  160, 212 Platinum  9 postfeminism  13–14, 76, 175, 284, 304, 309, 316, 321–34, 396. See also feminism The Bling Ring  76, 329–31 Marie Antoinette  323–4, 329–31 On the Rocks  324, 327–8, 332–3 A Prairie Home Companion  7, 155, 159, 161, 165 Prince, Richard  297, 300 production design  4, 6, 10, 11, 237–51. See also Ross, Anne; Barrett, K. K. The Beguiled  238, 240–2 The Bling Ring  247, 249–51 Lost in Translation  243–7 Marie Antoinette  51, 56–7, 247–9, 251, 310 On the Rocks  114–15 Somewhere  206, 244–7 The Virgin Suicides  21–2, 238–41, 243, 410 race  14, 36, 99–100, 174, 338–52, 392, 405, 412. See also class The Beguiled  8, 242, 326, 341–3 The Bling Ring  6, 327–8, 348–50 Lost in Translation  36 Marie Antoinette  310–11 On the Rocks  174, 328, 350–2

The Virgin Suicides  338, 345–7 Reitzell, Brian  26, 36, 56, 128, 134, 224–5, 229, 230, 297, 298 Ribisi, Giovanni  31, 37 Ritts, Herb  214, 217 Rock, Chris  107, 161, 163, 262, 429 Ross, Anne  3–4, 6, 7, 114, 206, 237, 295 Ross, Rick  229, 349 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  208, 213, 214 Rundgren, Todd  27, 164 Ruscha, Ed  206, 300 Sales, Nancy Jo  6, 75, 250 Savides, Harris  5–7, 10, 80, 170, 196–9 Schwartzman, Jason  55, 161, 163, 195, 260, 262, 341 Shaffer, Paul  7, 108, 161, 164–5, 262 Shields, Kevin  9, 36, 56, 127, 128, 130, 298 short film  139–52 Siegel, Don  7–8, 91, 92, 231–2, 312, 342, 392 Simon and Garfunkel  67, 69 Siouxsie and the Banshees  160, 227–8, 297, 298 Skye, Ione  2, 140 Sleigh Bells  134, 250, 330 Somewhere  1, 5–6, 59, 61–72, 107, 109–10, 131–2, 157, 229 acting  268–70 celebrity  64, 70, 133, 140, 175, 206, 261, 324, 375–6, 378–9, 390 cinematography  64–5, 68, 70, 196–7, 284 genre  12, 261 hobo-hero  61–4, 66, 70, 164 indiewood  261 locations  65, 66, 110, 160, 196, 223–4, 358 (see also locations, Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles) music  223–4 production design  206, 244–7

INDEX

reception  61–2, 387–91, 424 sound  70 Sonic Youth  3, 25, 129, 149, 424 Sony  50, 52–3, 260, 283 Stefanovic, Jasna  239, 257 Steichen, Edward  199, 214 Steiner, Nancy  3, 24, 208, 257 Styx  226 Sultan, Larry  296 Suzuki, Risaku  300 Tarantino, Quentin  259, 389 The Thin Man  111–12 Tohokushinsha  36, 52, 283 transmedia authorship  9, 126–9, 134, 225, 289, 292, 300–1 Turner, Kathleen  3, 22, 24, 226, 258 Twombly, Cy  115, 205, 206 Valentino 1, 13, 217, 418, 427–8. See also La Traviata A Very Murray Christmas  7, 155–66 acting  262, 270 celebrity  133, 161–3, 262 cinematography  160–1, 165 genre  161, 171 locations  110, 111 (see also locations, New York) music  108, 163–5 reception  162 streaming media  274, 428–9 The Virgin Suicides  3, 9, 21–33, 222 acting  24, 257–9, 268, 271 adaptation  3, 7, 21–3, 31–3 advertising aesthetic  25, 29–30, 109, 170–1, 211, 213–14, 217, 376–7 celebrity  269, 371–2, 376–7

459

cinematography  28–30, 109, 110, 130, 145, 146, 160, 189–92, 211, 213, 239, 361–3 feminism  30, 101, 175, 306–9, 323–4, 414 fine art  207–8, 217–18, 295–6, 300 genre  12, 99, 258 girlhood  4, 36, 53, 147, 323–4, 410, 412 indiewood  257–9, 261 locations  110, 357, 361–5 (see also locations, Michigan) male gaze  94, 95, 197, 404, 407–9, 413–14 music  9, 22, 25–8, 127, 128, 130, 144, 224, 226–8 postfeminism  324 production design  238–41, 243, 251, 355, 357, 364–5 race and class  338, 345–7, 411–12 reception  387–8, 421 teaching  13–14, 403–16 Visconti, Luchino  215, 297, 392 Warhol, Andy  152, 206, 296 Watson, Emma  83–4, 262, 267–8, 325, 372–4 Wayans, Marlon  107, 232, 263, 313, 350 Weber, Bruce  2, 192, 214, 217, 295 West, Kanye  229, 231 Wharton, Edith  11, 217, 274 The White Stripes  9, 127, 131–2, 224 Wong, Kar-wai  135, 198 Woods, James  22, 258 Yemchuk, Yelena  21 Zhao, Chloé  256, 423

460



461

462



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464