The Cinema of Sofia Coppola

Fashion, Culture, Celebrity

Suzanne Ferriss

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350176645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Direction et production de films

The Cinema of Sofia Coppola provides the first comprehensive analysis of Coppola's oeuvre that situates her work broadly in relation to contemporary artistic, social and cultural currents. Suzanne Ferriss considers the central role of fashion - in its various manifestations - to Coppola's films, exploring fashion's primacy in every cinematic dimension: in film narrative; production, costume and sound design; cinematography; marketing, distribution and auteur branding. She also explores the theme of celebrity, including Coppola's own director-star persona, and argues that Coppola's auteur status rests on an original and distinct visual style, derived from the filmmaker's complex engagement with photography and painting. Ferriss analyzes each of Coppola's six films, categorizing them in two groups: films where fashion commands attention ( Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled and The Bling Ring ) and those where clothing and material goods do not stand out ostentatiously, but are essential in establishing characters' identities and relationships ( The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and Somewhere ). Throughout, Ferriss draws on approaches from scholarship on fashion, film, visual culture, art history, celebrity and material culture to capture the complexities of Coppola's engagement with fashion, culture and celebrity. The Cinema of Sofia Coppola is beautifully illustrated with color images from her films, as well as artworks and advertising artefacts.

1

Self-Fashioning

“My movies are not about being, but becoming.”
SOFIA COPPOLA¹

Central to Coppola’s film narratives are issues of self-definition and a reciprocal, yet independent, concern: how we are defined by others. All her films focus on problems of identity, emphasizing a late-modern² definition of selfhood as essentially unstable and ceaselessly open to change. This preoccupation takes narrative shape in plots centered on characters at key moments of self-definition or redefinition. The narratives consider liminal moments, such as adolescence, mid-life crisis, marriage, divorce, and travel. Coppola deems this her niche: “character-driven films mapping the moves of people lost in transition.”³

Scholars writing about the first three films in Coppola’s oeuvre have classed them as a trilogy focused on the transition of young women from girlhood to adulthood, taking her claim that they are about “a lonely girl in a big hotel or palace or whatever, kind of wandering around, trying to grow up” as their guide.⁴ But, as I noted in the Introduction, this overstates the case, particularly when considering the existing six-film corpus. The Virgin Suicides focuses on the teenaged Lisbon sisters, but charts their passage from the perspective of the teenage boys who are obsessed with understanding the girls retrospectively from their position as adults. Lost in Translation features a woman, Charlotte, unsure of her professional and marital future, but the film focuses equally on Bob, a man in precisely the same precarious state. Marie Antoinette is the sole film in this initial group that centers almost exclusively on a young woman navigating multiple life transitions, from childhood in Austria to adulthood in France, from adolescence to marriage and maternity, from early life to the cusp of her death. Taken as a whole, Coppola’s films feature men as well as women negotiating questions of identity and purpose. Somewhere presents a man whose life is figuratively stalled, his repetitive existence leading nowhere. While female characters outnumber men in The Bling Ring and The Beguiled, the male characters are essential figures: Marc in The Bling Ring seeks belonging and experiments with gender definition; and Corporal McBurney, passing through enemy territory in The Beguiled, spins multiple narratives of his past to find favor, safety, and sexual satisfaction.

Taken together, the films foreground the dynamics of identity: they dramatize that the self is not fashioned (or refashioned) in isolation, but defined in relation to others—for or against, in concert or competition with others. As sociologists from Erving Goffman to Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman have demonstrated, individuals establish a sense of self through interaction with others. In fact, the very notion of a self implies its distinction and difference from other selves.⁵ From her first short film, Lick the Star, Coppola has stressed group dynamics. The cliqueish nature of high school in that film carries over into The Virgin Suicides, The Bling Ring, and The Beguiled. What are Versailles and Hollywood if not grown-up and more stifling versions?⁶ In such tight, exclusionary social worlds, identity is established through emulation and reinforced by conformity, whereas individualism is asserted by rebellion and defiance. Coppola’s films dramatize the dynamics at play: individuals define themselves in relation to others while others define them through social interaction and observation. Individuals present a self to others, who scrutinize their self-performance for clues to their identity. Who was Marie Antoinette? Who is Johnny Marco? Which version of Corporal McBurney is the true one? Were there signs of the Lisbon sisters’ imminent demise?

This preoccupation with identity links Coppola to a long tradition of narrative cinema. As Pam Cook argues, her films “wrestle with the extent to which identity is of our own making or imposed by others. This existential problem has preoccupied filmmakers from Hitchcock to Scorsese.”⁷ However, as this chapter demonstrates, Coppola’s approach is distinctive in two respects: first, her plots are famously spare, marked by an uncommon paucity of dialogue that shifts the burden of storytelling to the visual register; and second, the visual dimension foregrounds fashion. For her films’ characters—male as well as female—clothing is central to shaping identity and, more crucially, for communicating with other characters through self-display. Her films are preoccupied with our tendency to judge others by their appearance and our fixation on publicly created images of individuals, from historical figures such as Marie Antoinette to contemporary celebrities such as the fictional actors in Lost in Translation and Somewhere. Coppola’s films highlight how displays of fashionable clothing—and other socially visible consumer goods—can broadcast identity but are equally subject to manipulation and misreading. A constructed public identity can conceal as much as reveal. Fashion is the hinge between the crafted public self and intimate personal identity. Questions about the possibilities of self-knowledge or genuine insight into the lives of others pervade her films, from The Virgin Suicides to The Beguiled, and are pursued cinematically through the visual language of clothing.

Looking

“I’m not really dialogue-driven.”

Sofia Coppola⁸

Coppola’s films are notoriously short on dialogue. The screenplay for Lost in Translation was 70 pages and the script for Somewhere only 43, when the average for a Hollywood film is 120.⁹ She even toyed with the idea of making Marie Antoinette a silent film.¹⁰ Dialogue for key scenes has also been “delivered against serious auditory challenges,”¹¹ as Hannah McGill and Isabel Stevens note: the final words Bob (Bill Murray) speaks to Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) at the end of Lost in Translation are inaudible. Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) shouts his parting words to his daughter Chloe (Elle Fanning) over the relentless whirr of helicopter blades. McGill and Stevens detect in Coppola’s films an aversion to “overt emotion and excessive verbosity.”¹² Amy Woodworth notes that the vapid speech of others—the chattering of the female star in Lost in Translation and the court gossips in Marie Antoinette—is often contrasted with the protagonists’ silences, which are a mark of intelligence. Above all, Woodworth argues, spare dialogue suggests the “inadequacy of words to convey feeling.”¹³

The burden for conveying emotion shifts instead to image. To gauge information about the characters’ interior changes, we rely on visual clues, from facial expressions to gesture and clothing.¹⁴ Rather than offering details of what Charlotte is thinking while isolated in her hotel room or walking the streets of Tokyo, Coppola’s script for Lost in Translation includes little more than vague descriptions of action: “she wanders around” or “she sits in her underwear and looks out the window.”¹⁵ To critics of her films, this barely constitutes action and grants them a troubling “hermetic quality.”¹⁶ Defenders counter that, as in life, significant moments occur in mundane, everyday circumstances, particularly in moments of transition—driving, waiting, sharing a drink, floating in a pool. “This is the magical territory that defines Coppola’s work,” according to Anna Backman Rogers, for these ephemeral moments externalize the “turbulence of inner life.”¹⁷ Since identity—an interior, subjective experience—is the films’ central narrative concern, external action is by definition superfluous or at least secondary. The “vagueness” repeatedly noted in her films mirrors the transitional, uncertain condition of their subjects.¹⁸ In short, “her very sense of action is inseparable from subjectivity.”¹⁹

In the absence of overt action and explanatory dialogue, access to the characters’ subjective states is conveyed visually. As film critic Richard Brody argued of her first feature film, “Coppola [is] a master at rendering inner depths startlingly, straightforwardly visual.”²⁰ In his review of her most recent film, The Beguiled, he noted that “perceptions, appearances and impressions are crucial facts.”²¹ Scholars concur that the visual surface “is deeply meaningful in Coppola’s diegetic worlds.”²² This emphasis on image or aesthetics over dramatic action and dialogue is the hallmark of a “classic Sofia Coppola work,”²³ or, more simply, “Coppolism.”²⁴

Fashion and Identity

“Style synthesizes different pieces of affective knowledge into an expressive statement of the self, linking processes of identity construction and aesthetic creation.”

Samiha Matin²⁵

“Life itself is a dramatically enacted thing.”

Erving Goffman²⁶

In filmic worlds of such aesthetic exactitude, clothing bears extraordinary significance, especially given the foregrounding of identity as a thematic preoccupation. Philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists have advanced models of selfhood with parallels to cinema that fuse narrative and performance. In the 1950s Goffmann offered a dramaturgical model to describe social life, arguing that identity was a performance conveyed through voice, posture, facial expressions, and material objects, including clothing. Others have noted that the self is essentially a character, performing for others but also acting as the protagonist in an “ongoing ‘story’ about the self” that it narrates to itself as well as to others.²⁷ We perform a self to ourselves, to an imagined audience, as well as to a real audience of other selves. As Bauman explains:

It is in interaction with others … those “out there”, as well as those already incorporated as “significant others” and set inside the self in a perpetual court session … that the awareness of “having a self” or indeed of “being a self” dawns upon us and the life-long labour of building and rebuilding identities is conducted.²⁸

The narratives of self unfold in language (through both internal and external dialogue) but are also, in Bauman’s words, “printed on the body, in a sartorial lingo or the patois of demeanour and countenance.”²⁹ In our interactions with others we employ clothing, “sartorial lingo,” with varying degrees of intention, as part of a performance of identity. “The self, of course, is embodied,” as Giddens argues, and “more or less constantly ‘on display’ to others.”³⁰ Thus appearance “becomes a central element of the reflexive project of the self.”³¹

As the connection between our bodies and the world, our inner lives and outward appearance, clothing is central to identity. Clothing is “most closely attached to the corporal self”: “it frames much of what we see when we see another” and thus serves as a “visual metaphor for identity.”³² Or, in Joanne Entwistle’s words, “It is the insignia by which we are read and come to read others.”³³ For instance, as Judith Butler and other theorists have argued, gender—masculinity and femininity—is performed. When a woman wears a dress and make-up to appear more feminine, she too is acting, adopting culturally specific signs of femininity that are not in themselves indicative of her sex, her sexuality, or her identity as a woman. For this reason, psychoanalyst Joan Rivière described femininity as a “masquerade” in her 1929 article, “Womanliness as Masquerade.”³⁴ In Butler’s words, “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.”³⁵ High heels and skirts may nowadays signal femininity, but these items are simply props in a performance: there is no direct relation, for instance, between femininity and high heels. Louis XIV and other French aristocrats in the sixteenth century wore hig...