Sofia Coppola

The Politics of Visual Pleasure

Anna Backman Rogers

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785339660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Direction et production de films

A feminist study of the mood, texture, tone, and multifaceted meaning of director Sofia Coppola's aesthetic through her most influential and well-known films.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2019

"With this book Rogers has produced a sophisticated and impassioned analysis of Coppola's work… Rogers's main argument – that Coppola manipulates pleasurable images to unsettle rather than mollify us – is utterly convincing. If nothing else, this certainly hits home in relation to my own enchantment with Coppola's work."— Bright Lights Film Journal

All too often, the movies of Sofia Coppola have been dismissed as "all style, no substance." But such an easy caricature, as this engaging and accessible survey of Coppola's oeuvre demonstrates, fundamentally misconstrues what are rich, ambiguous, meaningful films.

Drawing on insights from feminist philosophy and psychology, the author here takes an original approach to Coppola, exploring vital themes from the subversion of patriarchy in The Virgin Suicides to the "female gothic" in The Beguiled. As Rogers shows, far from endorsing a facile and depoliticized postfeminism, Coppola's films instead deploy beguilement, mood, and pleasure in the service of a robustly feminist philosophy.

From the Introduction:
Sofia Coppola possesses a highly sophisticated and intricate knowledge of how images come to work on us; that is, she understands precisely how to construct an image – what to add in and what to remove – in order to achieve specific moods, tones and cinematic affects. She knows that similar kinds of images can have vastly different effects on the viewer depending on their context…. This monograph is an extended study of Coppola's outstanding ability to think through and in images.

PART I

Imaging Absence as Abjection and Imaging the Female Gothic as Rage

CHAPTER 1

The Virgin Suicides (1999)

Abjection preserves … the immemorial violence with which one body becomes separated from another body in order to be.

Julia Kristeva (quoted in Oliver 2002: 236)

Whiteness, really white whiteness, is unattainable. Its ideal forms are impossible … whiteness as an ideal can never be attained, not only because white skin can never be hue white, but because ideally white is absence: to be really, absolutely white is to be nothing.

Richard Dyer (1997: 78)

Since its release in 1999, The Virgin Suicides has been prized for its kitsch aesthetic qualities, its on-trend retro soundtrack and its moments of dark, sardonic humour, all of which have been cited as reasons for why the film has attained a form of cult status and has notably been a source of inspiration within the fashion industry; it has, in other words, been mostly understood and appreciated in superficial terms. This chapter aims to overturn a lack of engagement with the film’s substance by a close and careful reading of the surface of its images. For The Virgin Suicides is indeed a film that beguiles its viewer with oneiric and beautiful imagery, but it does so in order to intimate a darkness that lies secreted just beneath its surface and threatens to rupture that surface with its inarticulable truth. It is a film of horror from which horror is abjected and erased. It is therefore a deeply psychological film about the coping mechanisms that are invoked to deal with catastrophic trauma. It is a film about an attempt to narrate, to make sensical, the inexplicable. It is a film about adolescent male desire as an implicitly violent form of control over the female body. It is a film that is steeped in death, in that its principle narrative concern, beyond the titular suicides, centres on the small doses of death that are dealt to young girls on the cusp of becoming women; it is a film about the struggle or refusal to take up normative, patriarchal subjectivities. And beyond all of this, it is a masterful adaptation from its literary source (the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides), primarily because Coppola does not simply navigate the immense task of translating affectively words into images, but limns the yearning, aching chasm commensurate with adolescent desire and the sad diminishments of adulthood. In other words, the triumph of The Virgin Suicides lies in its creation of a specific mood and tone that is redolent with the weight of loss; here the palpable and irresolvable feelings of grief are given their correlative images. And thus its images strain to grasp what is always necessarily missed in language (that, as Roland Barthes has put it, we always fail to speak of the things and of the people we love).¹ This is a film about a hidden, dark desire to return to the half-light of a past that never really existed in actuality – and for that its nostalgia is insidious and troubling and desperate. For in place of the fleshy, adolescent female body and its effluence, the film offers up (and deliberately so) hollow archetypes and ghosts.

The Virgin Suicides relates, via retrospective and acousmatic voiceover, the story of the Lisbon sisters; these five girls, born and raised in a strict Catholic household in suburban Michigan in the 1970s, take their own lives as they are on the cusp of becoming young women. Their deaths trouble, haunt and distend the adult lives of the boys who grew up in their neighbourhood and came to worship the girls; seemingly traumatized by the inexplicable nature of the girls’ suicide pact, the male narrator – who stands in for all of the boys who loved them – states that male adulthood is a place where these men are ‘happier with dreams than with wives’. The Lisbon girls function as the catalyst for these dreams and, by extension, come to represent a lost and halcyon past. The film abounds with entrancing and mesmeric images, but a careful reading of these sequences reveals predication on a host of clichés and wilful acts of re-interpretation. At its most beguiling, the film betrays its own narrative, for as the boys/men desperately attempt to relive, recapture, retell and make sense of this tragedy (in order to render it meaningful), the lyrical and metaphorical images allude beyond their immediate representative function and elude the grasp of understanding. In other words, the film works on a formal level to unravel the task of making meaning that is set in place by its narrative. The image is used and revealed here precisely as a cliché, as Gilles Deleuze has characterized it. Deleuze writes that as a trope, the cliché ensures that ‘we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather what it is within our interests to perceive’ (2005b: 19). When the cliché functions optimally, it works as a form of cultural shorthand that facilitates and eases assimilation without critical thought: we already know what to think about this kind of image because we recognize it instinctively. However, when the clichéd nature of such images becomes more apparent or is heightened to such an extent that we become aware of its inner workings or construction, our automatic modes of comprehension begin to break down or malfunction and what the cliché conceals from us – the underside or what Deleuze has termed ‘the unbearable’ (2005: 20) of the image – begins to slip through. The Virgin Suicides is comprised of threshold images or images that strain at the limits of understanding; their status as clichés serves to indicate states of breakdown and exhaustion, the place where understanding ceases and feeling overwhelms.

So what do these images work both to conceal and reveal? It is my belief that Coppola adapts and recuperates her source material from a feminist perspective; if Eugenides’ (admittedly beautiful) novel is fundamentally a male narrative that knowingly draws on well-worn clichés itself (the distorting effects of adolescent male desire and a subsequent onset of specifically masculine crisis), The Virgin Suicides transcribes suicide as an act that goes beyond a subversive refusal of normative, patriarchal subjectivity. If the images the boys/men draw upon to relate the girls’ story have their basis in a plethora of clichés drawn from – as we shall see – advertising and soft pornography, the film, by extension, suggests that any form of subjectivity that reduces, simplifies and renders as surface a person precisely is already a form of annihilation. The Virgin Suicides is a film that revels in beautiful surfaces, but works to subvert those surfaces and reveals them as brittle, hollow and false because it is about a regime and ideology of images – to which the film implies young women are coerced to submit – that forces upon the female body a form of internal death. This is the unbearable or unrepresentable ‘truth’ that the boys attempt to cover over or hide via their narrative. The girls’ deaths, as such, threaten to destabilize or decentre their own masculine subjectivities; indeed, in her doctoral thesis, Michelle Devereaux argues that ‘the film is an almost parodic rendering of the Romantic ideal of the absorption of femininity into the masculine sublime ego’, in which the girls’ suicide pact ‘serves as a rejection of this absorption’ (2017: 131). Beauty, then, is invoked as a kind of psychic abjection: an attempt to cast out the reality of the Lisbon girls as human beings who continue to resist a specific priapic form of narrativization. The film’s cracks, fissures and lacunae that intersperse and break apart a regime of images that serve to hold in place the boys’ attempt to narrate their way out of the tragedy speak to the film’s obsession with failure.² For, as Deleuze writes, it is in ‘the disturbances of memory and failures of recognition’ (2005b: 52) that we come closest to the meaning of what troubles us. The reality of the Lisbon sisters’ story – as a feminist hauntology – lies inbetween and on the underside of what we see.³ The film’s central critique is of the implicit violence and control wrought on the adolescent female body, and that critique, as we shall see, subsists as a kind of abject horror that the film’s tentative narrative tries, but always fails, to hold at bay. Moreover, the very structure of the film draws upon the abiding tenets of classical narrative cinema as retheorized by feminist scholars (suture, lack, fetishism and sadism) in order to reveal the mechanics of narrativization as a form of control. As Kaja Silverman has noted, one way to contain the female body is by ‘writing a narrative by means of which she (it) is defined’ (234); this chapter will argue, via recourse to feminist recuperations of classical narratives that seek to ‘other’ the female body and Kristeva’s theory of abjection, that The Virgin Suicides opens up but one site of contestation to classical cinema’s perennial scopic regime.

‘Obviously, Doctor, You Have Never Been a Thirteen-Year-Old Girl’: The Female Body as Abject Object

Abjection as a psychological process and the abject as a psychic category are psychoanalytic terms that have been most extensively elaborated upon by philosopher and analyst Julia Kristeva in her study Powers of Horror (2002, originally published in 1982). Kristeva has delineated the abject in relation to how it is invoked to contain and section off the (maternal) female body and those bodies that are deemed to be ‘foreign’ in some sense. As such, the abject acts as a force of estrangement or an attempt to ‘other’ that which we place outside of certain hegemonic categories of identity and being. Although Kristeva has characterized aspects of the abject through focusing on material substances that may seem to revile, revolt and repel (excrement, vomit, blood, the cadaver), this summation serves merely to make manifest what the abject object and the process of abjection represent and enact, since ‘filth is not a quality in itself, but it applies to what relates to a boundary and, more particularly, represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, its other side, a margin’ (Oliver 2002: 259). Indeed, Kristeva stresses that what is at stake in denigrating certain objects or people is not, in actual fact, a lack of cleanliness or integrity, but rather ‘what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (Oliver 2002: 232). For the abject is that which works to obfuscate boundaries and borders. The abject is inherently liminal because it is neither a discrete object nor a nonobject and, by its very threshold status, calls into question the borders between self and other, life and death, and being and nonbeing. As Kristeva puts it, the abject is: ‘Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A “something” that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture’ (Oliver 200: 230). By extension, abjection – as an active mode of (dis)engagement – enables the shoring up of identity via separating out an entity from that which threatens or pollutes its existence as a supposedly sovereign being. As such, the liminal space within which abjection and the abject exist and function brings the subject and that which is its ‘other’ into contact and, in the process of doing so, reveals the compartmentalization and separation on which all identity is predicated. That which threatens our borders and undermines boundaries is therefore by its very nature essential to our identity, however much we may seek to deny or eradicate its existence: I exist by virtue of what I am not. Kristeva writes that the abject object ‘lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated, it beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced’ (Oliver 2002: 229) and that it ‘draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’ (Oliver 2002: 230). The abject object, then, exercises a curious form of attraction and seduction on us precisely because it reveals something fundamental and essential to our own existence and identity. Kristeva argues further that ‘it is true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverises the subject. One can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when the subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than the abject’ (2002: 232). The abject, as the psychoanalyst might argue, is fundamental to our very being precisely because it reveals that which remains latent at the heart of all being, all meaning, desire and language: the want initiated by our entrance into language and the symbolic realm that is always already founded on lack.

Taking her cue from Kristeva, film scholar Barbara Creed (1993) has delineated the abject in terms of the dynamics initiated and invoked by the horror genre – especially in relation to what she describes as ‘the monstrous feminine’ body. She also suggests that the abject plays a vital role in ascribing and setting up identity because: ‘Although the subject must exclude the abject, the abject must, nevertheless, be tolerated for that which threatens to destroy life also helps to define life. Further, the activity of exclusion is necessary to guarantee that the subject take up his/her proper place in relation to the symbolic’ (1993: 9). At the beginning of this chapter, I set out my argument that The Virgin Suicides is, in fact, a horror film from which all signs of horror are eradicated; this is especially pertinent in terms of the female body and its portrayal in the film as that which functions as the site of inspiration to reverie and the receptacle for phantasy and projection, but also as that which symbolizes an otherness that must be ‘cleaned’ of its abject core in order to be acceptable or useful for narrative purpose. Here, the female body serves both to shore up and secure (male) identity, but also threatens radically to decentre and destabilize meaning and coterminous identities. The adolescent female body, as a spectral entity that hangs between life and death and thus invokes the abject, returns in the forms of haunting, dream and fantasy/phantasy, but also of trauma. When I say that these moments function as a kind of feminist hauntology, I mean to suggest that these representations work to break apart and decimate the psychic processes that create boundaries and identities in the first place by revealing their very basis within those processes. Yet in order to recognize this dual status or purpose of the female body’s representation within the film, one must be able to read how these corresponding images have been cleaned or effaced of the abject (in particular, of any reference to menstruation). In other words, in what follows I will suggest that the film itself reveals the psychic mechanics of abjection in order to critique narratives predicated on male desire and identity. In short, the film evinces how the female body comes to be viewed as other.

The Virgin Suicides opens on two iconic, if somewhat hackneyed, iterations of the feminine or female young body; namely, the literary characters ‘Lolita’ and ‘Ophelia’ as envisaged by Stanley Kubrick (1962) and John Everett Millais (1852), respectively. It is the image of Lux Lisbon as Lolita (she is sucking on a lollipop) that opens the film and introduces a sinister tumescence that lies beneath this initially bucolic-seeming image. The glow of the evening sunset limns Lux’s hair and creates a halo effect around her young, dimpled face. From the outset, as the Latin etymology of her name would suggest, she is associated with light and, suitably, Lux acts as the main source for the boys’ fantasies and reveries. This flat, head-on, establishing shot sets Lux apart from the drab, uniform and suburban environment via an eschewal to shift or rack focus: she is a thing of wonder in this pedestrian diegetic world. Indeed, the following sequence of tableau shots establishes the film’s setting as a generic, all-American neighbourhood in which one house is much like any other – conformity and uniformity are the foundations upon which this community is built. Yet, just as the opening image of Lux signals outside of itself and recalls Lolita as at once both seductive and infantile, these scenes of domestic idyll also intimate at more insidious representations of the ‘white picket fence’, such as those in – by way of example – the films of David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) and Todd Haynes (Safe, Far from Heaven). Indeed, the humming sound of crepuscular insects heard in the film’s opening moments does not indicate, as it ordinarily might, the season in which things grow and ripen, but rather the moment in which things turn to rot; for by the film’s conclusion, this small town will be swamped in an algae and insect infestation that manifests itself in a sickly, green tinge that permeates the atmosphere. Returning to the film’s introduction of Lux Lisbon for a moment: she is, undoubtedly, beautiful (in the sense of fulfilling a specific form of iconic American beauty associated with homecoming queens and cheerleaders), but she is also on the threshold of womanhood – a transition that brings ruin and obliteration upon her and, by extension, her sisters.⁴ If the index of her onscreen presence here is Lolita, the viewer cannot also help but remember that Dolores Haze is a young girl from whom we are kept and thus denied the privilege of really knowing, caught as she is in a narrative of male desire that serves to disguise an irrevocably damaging form of abuse. This sense of subtle and hidden harm effected on the female body is compounded further by the introduction of Cecilia Lisbon in the ensuing sequence.

The narrator’s voiceover, which informs us that ‘Cecilia was the first to go’, is ushered in via a close-up shot of a cornucopia of accoutrements, such as lipsticks and perfume bottles, and an overhead shot of Cecilia lying in a bathtub of bloodied water and wearing a white ceremonial gown; clearly, we infer, she has slit her wrists. Yet even in the moment of her (as it turns out near) death, she remains pristine and serene. In her extensive study of aesthetic representation of female death, Elisabeth Bronfen notes that the prevalent presentation of the female corpse throughout the history of art is highly ornate and beguiling, and beautification is invoked in order to rid the female body of threat: ‘Femininity and death cause a disorder to stability, mark moments of ambivalence, disruption or duplicity and their eradication produces a recuperation of order, a return to stability. The threat that death and femininity pose is recuperated by representation, staging absence as a form of re-presence, or return, even if or rather precisely because this means appeasing the threat of real mortality, of sexual insufficiency, of lack of plenitude and wholeness’ (Bronfen 1992: xii). Implicit within Bronfen’s analysis here is that the female body already denotes a form of lack registered as death that must be aestheticized in order to render its threat obsolete or to cover it over. Yet this is an impossible task since, as Bronfen puts it, ‘the “re” of return, repetition or recuperation suggests that the end point is not the same as the point of departure, although it harbours the illusion that something lost has been perfectly regained. Instead, the regained order encompasses a shift; that is to say that it is never again/no longer entirely devoid of traces of difference. The recuperation is imperfect, the regained stability not safe, the urge for order inhabited by a fascination with disruption and split’ (Bronfen 1992: xii). In other words, the female body is fetishized precisely because it has come to denote lack, yet the fetish both reveals and conceals this threat to stability precisely because of the necessity of its employment in the first place. Aestheticization, in this mann...