Suffocated by Luxury: The Anger of Sofia Coppola

Warning: major spoilers for The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Lick the Star (1998) below. I encourage you to watch both if you haven’t already before reading this essay.

There are plenty of notoriously angry filmmakers: William Friedkin with his dogged outcasts on their hatefully nihilistic quests; Abel Ferrara with his tortured protagonists destroying themselves with violence, drugs, sex, and Catholic guilt; Oliver Stone with his Vietnam War trauma and dark alienation from the American project; Ken Loach with his strident socialist politics and unsparing depiction of working class suffering and militancy. All the above directors are justly celebrated for their verve, style, and command of the cinematic medium; they are also all men (although Ferrara’s Ms. .45 and Bad Lieutenant both starred and — in the case of the latter — were partially scripted by Zoë Lund, a true one-off character for the ages). There’s an expectation that female directors (save a few exceptions, like the brazenly violent, high-testosterone flicks of Kathryn Bigelow) not express rage and hew to a narrow range of girlboss/gal pal empowerment narratives. 

Even within this direly limited paradigm, Sofia Coppola is seen as the girliest of the girl directors. She’s regularly accused of producing fussy, shallow, poor-little-rich-white-girl (or poor-little-rich-white-Bill Murray) narratives where ethereally undefined characters play second fiddle to the obsessive, borderline-autistic cataloging of their trinkets, accoutrements, and bedroom decor. Questions of class, race, and struggle are parked at the doors alongside the gathered Mercedes and Porsches. The setting is literally Versailles or Graceland.

Yet I’ve always found Sofia Coppola to be a distinctly, viscerally angry filmmaker. The rage is tamped down, smothered, muffled behind glass, but it is there. If you aren’t attuned to it — or don’t know the history behind it — you’d never pick up on it. If you can, though, it’s nearly all you can see in her films. Contemporary reviews of and audience reactions towards Priscilla (2023) often seemed confused by Coppola’s rather negative view of Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi), depicted here as a faithless, navel-gazing redneck who more or less grooms the hapless Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) to be his wife before treating her like shit for ten years. Why did we think this would be a mere pretty enumeration of the tacky sixties-era bric-a-brac of Graceland and Priscilla’s various hairstyles, and not a searing reconsideration of Elvis’s place in the American pantheon, told from the perspective of she whom he hurt most? Because, obviously, we missed Coppola’s molten core of rage. Still waters run deep, and beneath the exquisitely captured knick-knacks and comfortable interiors there’s a seething, white-hot current of despair and hurt floating above the deep black pit of death.

To understand Sofia Coppola’s rage, we must consider the checkered career of her father, the eminent Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola père had directed several of the consensus-best films of all time: his seventies run of the first two Godfathers (1972 & 1974), The Conversation (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979) is one of the most gobsmacking in cinematic history. He fought the studios for creative control and was largely granted it, simply because he was producing such consistently massive hits; he co-founded the American Zoetrope production company with George Lucas to ensure someone in American film remained dedicated to originality and experimentation. While The Conversation underperformed at the box office and Apocalypse Now’s lengthy, tortured production is legendary, Coppola appeared poised to continue his profitable marriage of art and commerce as the eighties dawned.

But then the situation changed. The leniency studios granted directors in the seventies dissipated after a series of big-budget flops and accusations of “self-indulgence” from executives and critics alike. The new socio-cultural mood of the Reagan administration signaled a turn away from the gritty, morally-ambiguous films of the previous decade and towards crowd-pleasing blockbusters where the hero always wins the day. Coppola — always adversarial towards studio control — found himself a man in a foreign country. He still wanted to make the films he wanted to make and the studios weren’t playing ball. His musical One from the Heart (1982) — a visually sumptuous musical with songs by Tom Waits — bombed royally both at the box office and with critics. The next year saw a double-header of S.E. Hinton adaptations in The Outsiders and Rumble Fish; while The Outsiders did respectable business (and featured a bevy of future stars, including Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, and Tom Cruise), Rumble Fish — a genuinely gorgeous, German Expressionism-comes-to-Oklahoma tone poem — likewise tanked (no pun intended). The Cotton Club (1984) — set in thirties Harlem — was dismissed as mere period drivel; Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) — an idiosyncratic biopic of an eccentric automotive executive starring Jeff Bridges — at least got good critical notices but still failed to make back its budget. Coppola’s lone hit in this period was Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), a time travel dramedy starring Kathleen Turner where he essentially served as a director-for-hire after Jonathan Demme turned the project down.

Sofia Coppola grew up in this world; her father was Hollywood royalty, but the studio system treated him like shit. It doesn’t matter how high you rise in the system, or how many hits you produce, or how original your vision is: some cokehead executive will smack you down and then force you to beg for the forgiveness you ought to ask from them. I don’t really know how Sofia Coppola feels about the slights her father’s faced during his long career; I don’t know if it’s caused her some kind of deep psychic wound or not. But just look and how she’s been received: like her father, she started out receiving positive critical notices and decent box office returns: The Virgin Suicides (1999) was an independent circuit hit, while Lost in Translation (2003) received near-unanimous critical acclaim, grossed $118 million despite only costing $4 million to make, and won her a bevy of Oscar nominations (including a win for Best Original Screenplay). Then it all came undone: Marie Antoinette (2006) polarized critics and brought in a middling box office haul, and since then she’s been in the critical and commercial doghouse. Indeed, last year’s Priscilla is the first time I can remember both critics and audiences giving Coppola her due and not just rolling their eyes and staying away.

It doesn’t help that Coppola faces double standards because of her gender. Wes Anderson makes similarly fussy, elegantly-produced pictures with majority rich-and-white casts, and while he gets the occasional critical snipes or audience grumbles, he’s never faced the kind of persistently virulent attacks as Coppola has. Coppola’s cousins Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman have both been mocked for various reasons (poor choice of roles in the former, pretension in the latter), but neither have been consistently slurred as a “nepo baby.” Her work is simultaneously attacked as too feminist for focusing on the ways men control, contain, and neglect women but not feminist enough because its polished surfaces and visual cataloging of the artifacts of girl- and womanhood can be viewed as stereotypically feminine in all the wrong ways. The right reacts the way the right always reacts to these things, and in a rare show of solidarity the left joins in; Eileen Jones, the chief film critic at minor socialist rag Jacobin has a violently unhealthy vendetta against Coppola (fellow left-wing female critic Ciara Moloney, meanwhile, wrote a lovely defense of the director from the same ideological perspective).

My understanding of Coppola’s anger crystalized when I rewatched The Virgin Suicides yesterday. It was even better than I remembered it; the parts I found draggy or aimless suddenly became all too real. I realized something that’d eluded me the first time around: the toxic mix of anger unto bloodshed and death that permeates the picture. This may sound shocking given the film’s title and subject matter, but I’d focused so much on the film’s equally strong dollops of Catholic guilt and religious control that the throbbing, polluted heart of the film mostly eluded me. The Virgin Suicides is set in a Michigan in the process of dying; perhaps not coincidentally, it’s set in 1975 — around the peak of Francis’s career. This is a state on the precipice of deindustrialization, feeling the anaconda-like squeeze of Ford-era stagflation and related economic malaise and the general cynicism and nihilism of post-Watergate America. The rot is so pervasive that it’s even reached the affluent boulevards of Detroit’s Grosse Pointe suburbs: the gracious old elms linings the quiet streets are dying from Dutch elm disease, an invasive fungus; the labor crisis is so dire that even the cemetery workers are on strike; a summertime toxic waste spill wreaths the suburb’s empty-headed deb balls in a foul stench (who ever said Sofia Coppola isn’t a political filmmaker?). 

Everything in mid-seventies Michigan is dying, and only the Lisbon sisters — a quintet of teenage girls caged and controlled by their strict Catholic parents — seem affected by what’s going on. Their homemaker mother (Kathleen Turner) is overbearing and devout, while their math teacher father (James Woods) is dorky and ineffectual (his chosen hobby is making model planes). They cannot cope with the apparently sudden suicide of their youngest, thirteen-year-old Cecilia (Hanna R. Hall), nor can they fathom that their adolescent daughters might be at all interested in boys their own age. They are afraid of sexuality, specifically as expressed by their children; not for nothing does Mr. Lisbon force fourteen-year-old Lux (Kirsten Dunst, in a star-making role) — by far the most rebellious and sexually adventurous of the girls — to burn her Kiss and Aerosmith records, two of the era’s most notoriously oversexed bands. The boys at their Catholic school are little better; they are mostly sweaty, grasping peeping toms who enjoy observing the girls from a distance, mooning over them but never really seeing them as people with thoughts, feelings, desire, or indeed anything resembling an inner life. The only boy with a shot at romancing them is Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), a Jim Morrisonesque football player who takes Lux to homecoming; he fucks her on the football field afterwards and then flees after she falls asleep there, necessitating an early-morning cab ride home. 

Fontaine’s caddishness results in the final death-spiral of the Lisbon sisters, as their parents order the harshest crackdown yet and more or less seal them in their rooms, where their only contact with their former peers comes through window-lamp morse code and Lux’s occasionally rooftop trysts with various boys. After one of said trysts, Lux smokes a cigarette and gazes disgustedly over the treetops and mansions of Grosse Pointe; there is so much hurt and rage and anger and guilt within her; the world is too much with her, late and soon, and she cannot express it in any way besides quick, passionless love-making followed by a smoke and an inward mental pilgrimage to that throbbing, stewing core within her mind. Their neighbors gossip behind ajar doors, passing blithe judgements on the oddness of the Lisbons; the local news becomes luridly fascinated with them, mindless pursuing the age-old dictum of “if it bleeds, it leads.” In no one’s minds are the Lisbon girls people; they are merely blonde leaves on the wind, ephemeral things onto which they can project anything they desire. They rally around the elm tree in their yard because they sense within it something of themselves; something long taken for granted and soon to die. The remaining girls eventually kill themselves in a vast, hidden suicide pact, depriving the world of ever fulfilling its fascination, letting their bottled-up anger explode in the most violent and flamboyant way possible. 

But perhaps the most crystalized, least censored expression of Coppola’s rage comes from her first directorial effort, a fourteen-minute IFC short (included on The Virgin Suicides Criterion Blu-ray, and available in lower resolution here) titled Lick the Star (1998). Shot it luminous black-and-white (one wishes she’d try her hand at B&W again), all of the Sofia Coppola trademarks are already here: the voiceovers, the layered montages, the pop music soundtrack, the shots of minor objects that say so much and so little (a beat-up Flowers in the Attic paperback, teen heartthrob magazine cutouts on locker doors, etc.) The plot is simple, and honestly somewhat rushed; you get the sense that Coppola wanted to say so much in so little time and what results in a pure rush of sharp, surging adolescent alienation and anger. Seventh-grader Kate — after a brief absence after breaking her foot — finds that clique leader Chloe has formulated a plan to secretly poison their male classmates with arsenic (“lick the star” being a garbling of “kill the rats”). The plan goes awry and Kate is caught helping Chloe and suspended; in her absence, Chloe’s reputation is destroyed when false accusations of racism lead to a suicide attempt and the subsequent revelation of her “lick the star” plot, turning her into a social pariah. The film ends with Kate — now on the cusp of abandoning Chloe before her reputation is ruined in turn — observing the latter dolefully writing poetry in her journal before walking away.

What’s remarkable here is the sheer, pure anger of the thing. The extreme youth of the protagonists means we get the deep heartlessness and emotional trauma of junior high in all its ugly glory. The soundtrack features Coppola’s beloved alternative rock, true, but it is lousy with the jagged, spiky electric guitars of Kim Deal, the Go-Go’s, and Kim Gordon, the vocals piercing and confrontational, expressing some kind of twisted, roiling, feminine rage at anything and everything. The girls hate the boys and vice versa, all the way to the brink of murder. The characters are mouthy and sneering; in the most jarring element to 2024 sensibilities, they regularly use “gay” in a pejorative sense to mean “lame” or “stupid.” 

This is Sofia Coppola unbound: she is angry. She is angry that her father has been dicked over by the film industry repeatedly for decades despite everything he did for them. She is angry that critics blamed her admittedly poor turn as Mary Corleone (Michael’s daughter) in The Godfather Part III for that film’s weaknesses, even though Francis’s heart wasn’t really in the project and Winona Ryder would’ve played Mary if she didn’t have a massive mental breakdown mere weeks before filming began. She is angry that the only reason she’s getting ahead as a female director is because of her surname, and that she’ll still be mocked for riding his coattails in a way a male director never would. She is angry for all the girls cooped up inside because their parents and their boyfriends hate them. She is angry that the world tastes like poison and everything is blood money from Judas on down. She is angry that there is nowhere to hide from this poison, not Grosse Pointe nor Tokyo nor Versailles nor Graceland. She is angry and we cannot see her anger, just like Chloe and Lux and Priscilla and all the rest. She is as trapped as her protagonists are: suffocated by luxury.