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Femininity and Girlhood in the Work of Sofia Coppola
Allison Kuperman
Sociology 149: Theories of Femininity
Shannon Weber
April 14, 2015
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Introduction
Known for their soft pallets, feminine stylization, uncluttered narrative, and languid
camera movements, the works of American filmmaker Sofia Coppola use a distinct directional
signature to explore experiences of girlhood and the construction of the feminine identity. Over
the past two decades, Coppola has developed an aesthetic that simultaneously invokes
foundational gaze theory, pushes back against societal devaluation of the feminine, and
comments on the patriarchal tenets of Hollywood cinema and “auteurship,” speaking to the
complexity of both “feminist” readings of media and femininity itself. Her distinct style and
general success as a screenwriter-director has resulted in film analysts labeling Coppola as “one
of the first female auteurs of the modern era,” earning the title because of her consistent visual
style and thematic concerns evident across her body of work (Prince, 2013).
Critical responses to Coppola’s films are often divided, with those writing negative
reviews often focusing on a perceived lack of depth. Her strong emphasis on visual style and
mood lends to critics characterizing her films as over-emphasizing the pictorial aspects of cinema
at the expense of deeper, more complex meaning potentially produced by the narrative. Even in
a positive reviews of her 2003 film Lost in Translation, The Boston Globe’s Ty Burr claims
Coppola’s film is “longer on atmosphere and observation than on story,” (Burr, 2003). Her 2006
film Marie Antoinette took a more direct assault from critics who likened it to
“licorice” (Stevens, 2006) and downplayed it as “a gorgeous confection” (Rea, 2006). Anthony
Lane wrote in The New York Times, “If you want your movies to feel like watered silk - lustrous,
precious, and thinner than skin - than Sofia Coppola’s latest venture is for you,” (Lane, 2006).
Unsurprisingly, most mainstream attacks on both the films and Coppola’s credibility as an artist
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and director are littered with gendered language that links the feminine aesthetic of Coppola’s
films to frivolity and irrelevance. However, more nuanced critiques of Coppola’s directional
style address her focus on middle- to upper-class white women, contributing to the racialization
of ethereality and purity, the erasure of women of color in media, and the association of
femininity with whiteness (Rivas, 2013).
Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, and The Bling Ring all explore
generational ennui and the ways young women engage with the external pressures placed on
them by society. In each film, Coppola demonstrates that beneath the shiny veneer of white lace,
pastel pallets, and dreamy atmosphere lies more complicated and darker elements of the teenage
feminine experience. Analyzing the presentations of girlhood and femininity in The Virgin
Suicides, Marie Antoinette, and The Bling Ring through the works of sociologists such as Laura
Mulvey, Sandra Lee Baryky, Carol Groneman, Carolyn Herbst Lewis, Rachel Dubrofsky, Emily
Ryalls, Joanne Hollows, and Jessica Ringrose reveals both the empowering and problematic
aspects of Coppola’s work. Though all three films push back against the societal devaluation of
the feminine and highlight the struggle young women face in trying to break away from
restrictive models of idealized femininity, they also suggest a universality of the feminine
experience that fails to acknowledge intersectionality and contributes to the erasure of women
who experience multiple axes of oppression and women who fall outside the parameters of
hegemonic femininity. The films also seem to take on a postfeminist perspective on girl culture,
uncritically celebrating only aspects of traditional, idealized femininity.
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The Virgin Suicides
Based on Jeffrey Eugenides’ 1993 novel, Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides relates the story
of five girls – Cecilia, Lux, Mary, Bonnie, and Therese Lisbon – growing up in picture perfect
suburban Michigan in the mid-1970s. The film opens on the attempted suicide of Cecelia, the
youngest of the five Lisbon sisters. The film is related in retrospect by an anonymous male
narrator who stands in for a group of male classmates who are determined to understand what
they perceive to be the mystery and intrigue of girlhood. Without a strong leading narrative, the
film somewhat presents as if the audience were paging through a faded photo album, emphasized
by the yellow hue that colors many of the shots. The mother of the Lisbon sisters is portrayed as
authoritarian and incredibly religious, keeping them under strict control, particularly as the older
sisters start to explore their own sexuality. After Lux breaks curfew after her and her sisters are
granted the rare opportunity to leave their house and attend the school’s homecoming dance, the
girls are pulled from school and locked in the house. Ultimately the story of the Lisbon sisters
comes to an end when they complete what seems to be a suicide pact (Coppola, 1999). Both the
original novel and the film tackle the themes of the American obsession with happiness, the
transience of memory, the subtle homogeneity of tragedy, and the complexity of religion
intermingling with adolescence and sexuality.
Although contemporary conceptions of femininity often link it to either passive fragility
or emphasized sexual assertiveness, Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides tentatively explores
femininity outside of this binary, providing clues to the complexity of the female characters
(though ultimately representing the Lisbon sisters as somewhat monolithic, as seen through the
eyes of the neighbor boys). Coppola attributes a considerable amount of principality to girlhood
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rather than treating it merely as a transitional stage, and the title of the film and the deaths of the
five sisters seem to speak to not only vague notions of the death of purity or innocence but also
the potential violence of female adolescence. As described by Bartky in Femininity and
Domination, girlhood and continuos efforts to demonstrate a socially acceptable form of
femininity are associated with careful navigation of countless restrictions, from expressing
sexuality in an ‘acceptable’ way to taking up an ‘acceptable’ amount of space. Bartky constructs
femininity as a form of internalized oppression, describing how societal surveillance and learned
self-discipline result in a struggle to achieve an idealized femininity while coping with the
destruction of female subjectivity and bodily autonomy (Bartky, 1990). This darker side of
girlhood is highlighted in The Virgin Suicides, portrayed perfectly as Cecilia, the youngest sister,
sits in a hospital bed after her first attempted suicide, responding to the doctor’s question of
“What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets,” with
“Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl,” (Coppola, 1999).
Despite its celebration of certain aspects of femininity and portrayal of the potential
violence of girlhood, The Virgin Suicides is at its heart an exploration of male adolescent fantasy
and desire. There is an undoubtedly voyeuristic sense to the style of narration, with the story of
the Lisbon sisters told through glimpses and memories based on what the boys across the street
could glean through obsessive observation. The narrative structure of The Virgin Suicides can be
examined using the theories described in Mulvey’s (1975) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema,” in which Mulvey utilizes psychoanalytic theory as a “political weapon” to demonstrate
how patriarchy shapes both the film watching experience and cinema itself. According to
Mulvey, the Hollywood narrative film structures its gaze as masculine, with woman always as
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the object of gaze and men (both within the film and the audience) as the bearer of gaze. Mulvey
goes on to detail how the gaze serves to produce pleasure for the male viewer - either through
scopophilia (pleasure derived from subjecting someone to one’s gaze) or identification with the
male protagonist (Mulvey, 1975).
The Virgin Suicides certainly mirrors the failures of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema” regarding intersectionality in that it portrays only white femininity as worthy of gaze;
however, even so, aspects of Mulvey’s theoretical approach to gaze in cinema can be used to
understand how the voyeurism built into both the composition of the scenes and its narrative
structure fit in with widespread media depictions of womanhood and femininity. In an interview
with Scott Tobias, Sofia Coppola explains that “a lot of the shots were from across the street
[from the boys' perspective] to create a sense of distance, because they were always trying to see
beyond the door,” (Tobias, 2000). In their efforts to learn about the Lisbon sisters, the boys in
the film even go to far as to leer through a telescope at Lux as she sleeps with men on the roof of
her house. Though the male gaze of the film is somewhat complicated by Coppola’s female
perspective, the film does generally contribute to the surveillance of women and women’s sexual
behavior by men and society. Furthermore, because the audience’s perception of the Lisbons is
somewhat colored by what the boys across the the street can piece together through observation,
the Lisbon sisters often come across as a single unit, adding to the long list of films that portray
women more as objects used to facilitate male character development than as autonomous,
complex individuals. There are several scenes where the girls seem eerily conjoined, such as
when they listen to music played for them over the telephone, or go to the homecoming dance in
the same patterned dress.
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The depiction of the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides also reflects the ambivalence
surrounding female sexuality as it relates to femininity, which is simultaneously pathologized
and fetishized. The opening sequence of The Virgin Suicides sets the tone of the remainder of the
film, with the first shot depicting Lux Lisbon standing on a quiet suburban street, finishing a red
Popsicle. From this initial introduction, Lux already walks the line between a blond, white icon
of suburban innocence and an emblem of womanly eroticism. Reminiscent of Dolores Haze as
depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita with her red lollipop and heart-shaped sunglasses, Lux’s
every glance and gesture appear to the observing neighborhood boys as ambiguous provocations.
The film then shows the boys sitting across the street from the Lisbon house, watching the
Lisbon sisters get out of their family car. As the narrator introduces the sisters, each girl is
freeze-framed as her name is superimposed over the frame in adolescent scrawl. This short
sequence promotes the idea that the Lisbon sisters are merely fantastic images of the boys’
imaginations and supports Mulvey’s assertions that women in film often take on a passive,
observed role while men serve as the active observers; however, in the context of the opening
scenes of the film, it also contributes to the juxtaposition of the sisters’ juvenile ‘purity’ with
their hyper-sexualization - like Dolores Haze, their purity increases their sexual allure.
The societal ambivalence toward female sexuality has long been analyzed by feminist
theorists, from Groneman’s writings on the history of nymphomania to Herbst Lewis’ research
into premarital pelvic exams during the Cold War period. In Groneman’s “Nymphomania: The
Historical Construction of Female Sexuality,” Groneman writes that in a patriarchal society,
female sexuality is often considered dangerous and a sign of disorder or disease. Similarly,
Herbst Lewis’ “Waking Sleeping Beauty: The Premarital Pelvic Exam and Heterosexuality
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during the Cold War” describes how passivity and prioritization of male sexual pleasure have
been considered hallmarks of healthy female sexuality. However, Bartky asserts that female
sexuality is simultaneously fetishized, with the constant sexual objectification of women
resulting in pressures to achieve power and value solely through the extent to which women are
appealing and attractive to men (Bartky, 1990). This ambivalence toward female sexuality is
reflected in the narrative structure and plot of The Virgin Suicides. While the neighborhood boys
obsess over the sisters due to their sexual allure, the Lisbon sisters are punished for exploring
their own sexualities - for example, Lux is abandoned by Trip Fontaine after sleeping with him,
and all the sisters are indefinitely locked in their house after Lux’s encounter with Trip results in
her coming home after curfew. Although The Virgin Suicides makes little effort to subvert
mainstream representations of femininity, it does bring attention to the potential violence of
girlhood and the consequences of navigating the restrictions and tensions of idealized femininity.
Marie Antoinette
Described as a “revisionist, New Wave take on the famously beheaded queen” (Johnson,
2013), Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette chronicles the life of Austrian-born Maria Antonia
Josephina Joanna as she becomes the Dauphine and later the Queen of France leading up to the
flight of the nobles from Versailles at the start of the French Revolution. After Marie Antoinette
marries Prince Louis XVI of France to achieve peace between the Austrian and French nations,
there is immense pressure on the young couple to produce an heir; however, as the story unfolds,
the audience learns that the Prince is not at all interested in sex, despite Marie Antoinette’s
efforts. As time passes, Marie Antoinette finds life at the court of Versailles increasingly stifling
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and attempts to distract herself from the ritualistic formality of the French court with parties,
shopping, and gambling. After Marie Antoinette eventually conceives and gives birth to several
children, the film depicts her as focusing less on her social life and more on her family; however,
at this point, her image in the eyes of the French has already completely deteriorated, with her
luxurious lifestyle and seeming indifference to the struggles of the masses earning her the title
‘Madame Déficit’. The film ends with Parisian revolutionaries closing in on Versailles to
apprehend the royal family (Coppola, 2006). The aesthetic of Marie Antoinette is similar to that
of The Virgin Suicides in that it is brimming with conventionally feminine stylization, from the
elaborately ornamented costumes to the towering Lauderee cakes. According to a piece by film
critic Glenn Dunks, “Coppola’s very feminine film and its pastel palette is practically obsessed
with the billowing dresses, petite shoes, cascading wigs, scrumptious sweets and opulent grounds
of Versailles that dominated Marie’s life,” (Dunks, 2013).
Based on Antonia Fraser’s sympathetic biography of the French queen, Coppola’s film
attempts to humanize the young royal through depictions that portray Marie Antoinette as young
and naive as opposed to an icon of bourgeois materialism and corrupt leadership. Through overt
anachronisms, such as the opening shot of Converse sneakers sitting amongst a pile of period
appropriate heels and a score comprised primarily of modern post-punk and shoegaze tunes,
Coppola attempts to connect the story of Marie Antoinette with modern narratives of girlhood. In
a movie review published on The Young Folks, Johnson (2013) writes, “People simply watch the
film and believe Coppola to be ineffective with her biopic, rather than realizing that she was
painting a beautifully timeless portrait of femininity and womanhood and what it means to be a
young woman dictated by laws and regulations and exterior pressures.” Similarly, Marceline
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Block, author of Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema, writes
“Marie Antoinette may appear to be the most intellectually lightweight of Coppola’s films due to
its simplified version of French politics and hot pink packaging, but it is actually the most
formally preoccupied with capturing women’s experiences and developing a feminist aesthetic as
a means for doing so,” (Block, 2010).
Though it helps that Lux Lisbon of The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette are both
played by actress Kirsten Dunst, it is easy to recognize parallels between the narratives of the
two characters, seemingly suggesting elements of a universal feminine experience. For example,
both characters attempt to rebel against the restrictions that are associated with their experiences
of girlhood, with Lux acting out against her mother's strict Catholic rules, particularly concerning
her sexuality, and Marie Antoinette consistently ruffling feathers by defying the ritualistic
formality of the French court. Like The Virgin Suicides’ 1970s America, Marie Antoinette’s
18th-century France has stiflingly rigid expectations for women. Women of the French court
were valued primarily for their ability to produce offspring, a fact that Marie Antoinette’s mother
reminds her in one of her many letters: “nothing is certain about your place there until an heir is
produced,” (Coppola, 2006). Summarizing the universal girlhood as portrayed by Coppola, film
critic Roger Ebert writes, “This is Sofia Coppola’s third 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,” (Ebert 2006). However, the notion of a universal feminine experience relies on
the existence of elements of girlhood that transcend race and class boundaries. This assumption
seems reminiscent of the universal oppression as theorized by second-wave feminists, described
in Joanne Hollows’ (2000) “Feminism, Femininity, and Popular Culture: Second-Wave Feminism
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and Femininity.” Like the theories of second-wave feminism, Coppola’s universal feminine
experience primarily applies to middle- to upper-class white women, reinforcing the boundaries
between the ‘default’ (white women) and the ‘other’ (women of color). Both The Virgin Suicides
and Marie Antoinette only seem to celebrate a waifish, delicate from of femininity - one that
seems to only be able to be embodied by white women due to the complete erasure of women of
color from both of the films.
Throughout Marie Antoinette, Coppola’s cinematography attempts to disrupt the male
gaze as described by Mulvey (1975). The film opens with Marie Antoinette lying listlessly on a
lavish chaise, surrounded by extravagant pink cakes set against a pastel blue background.
Framed by a long shot, the titular character arches over to scoop a dollop of frosting from the top
of a cake as a maid slips ornate shoes onto her feet. With this gesture, she turns her head toward
the camera and, after a brief moment, looks directly at the lens. This introduction puts into play
a visual tension between seeing and being seen. The opening shot’s emphasis on spectacle poses
a question concerning the relationship between self-representation and image production - one
that is explored in all of Coppola’s films. Throughout the rest of Marie Antoinette, Coppola uses
jump cuts to slightly disrupt images that would otherwise aestheticize Marie Antoinette’s face or
body. A notable example of this cinematography technique occurs as Marie Antoinette flings
herself across her bed and seems to daydream about her Swedish lover Count Fersen presumably continuing her earlier fantasy of Fersen on horseback surrounded by exploding
cannons, a vision of masculinity as archetypal as the boys’ fantasies of the Lisbon girls running
in a field with unicorns in The Virgin Suicides. The camera focuses on Marie Antoinette’s face
and hands, with four shots alternating camera angles linked by jump cuts that disrupt the
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viewer’s consumption of Marie Antoinette’s image, somewhat subverting the male gaze typically
present in mainstream Hollywood films.
The pressure put on Marie Antoinette to conceive a male heir to the French throne is most
clearly indicative of a long history of the pathologization of female sexuality outside of the
parameters of reproduction and the treatment of maternal behavior as a public rather than private
matter. However, Coppola’s depictions of Marie Antoinette’s unexpected maternal competency
also serve to authenticate Marie Antoinette’s femininity as natural or inherent. Like Katniss
described by Dubrosfsky and Ryalls (2014) in “The Hunger Games: Performing Non-Performing
to Authenticate Femininity and Whiteness,” Marie Antoinette is portrayed as rebelling against
many of the rituals that are associated with the performance of idealized femininity in the French
court. She seems far more interested in partying, gambling, and shopping than adopting a
position of responsibility or care for others. However, also like Katniss, Marie Antoinette is
simultaneously depicted as naturally maternal, with many later scenes in Marie Antoinette
depicting the titular character caring for her first daughter Therese, reading to her and showing
her around the gardens of Versailles. According to Dubrosfsky and Ryalls (2014), “Katniss is
naturally feminine, in part because she expresses disinterest in the rituals attached to femininity.
The naturalization of her femininity occurs through a refusal to perform gender rituals: the nonperformance is the feminine gender ritual.” Similarly, Marie Antoinette’s surprising maternal
instincts demonstrate how she naturally and unwittingly embodies conventional normative
standards of heterosexual femininity, allowing her ‘authentic femininity’ due to the nonperformance of her feminine qualities.
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The Bling Ring
Inspired by Nancy Jo Sales's 2010 Vanity Fair article "The Suspects Wore Louboutins,”
Coppola’s The Bling Ring is a 2013 satirical crime film that follows a group of fame-hungry, Los
Angeles-area teens who in 2009 used Google and gossip sites to track the whereabouts of
celebrities so they could loot their homes, acquiring over $3 million in stolen clothes, shoes,
guns, and cash. The criminal activity of the actual teenagers involved in the Bling Ring spanned
ten months, but in Coppola's propulsive, Top 40-infused, 98-minute film, the club-hopping,
celebrity-obsessed, Facebook-updating, well-to-do teenagers rapidly rise and fall on their own
shocking sense of apathy and greed, belatedly wondering what exactly went terribly wrong. The
criminal teens are eventually identified due to CCTV footage from several robberies and
evidence on social media, and the film ends with the arrest of six of the seven members of the
group. Due to The Bling Ring’s apparent stab at contemporary celebrity culture, critics have
described the characters as “cautionary tales of a culture so widely celebrated and slavishly
followed that pointing blame seems utterly elusive,” (Prince, 2013).
Aesthetically, The Bling Ring is somewhat of a departure from The Virgin Suicides and
Marie Antoinette, providing much more of a conventional narrative structure, even if Coppola
approaches the material with her signature love of visual beauty and detailed production design.
Coppola herself acknowledges the differences in visual aesthetic between The Bling Ring and her
previous films, stating, “The movies I did before Bling Ring were really slow and quiet, so I was
just in the mood to do something obnoxious and faster, and something kind of in bad
taste,” (Prince, 2013). However, much like the lavish preoccupations of Marie Antoinette and
The Virgin Suicides, The Bling Ring‘s lingering emphasis on the fringe of a purse or the hem of a
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skirt and the detailed shots of the paraphernalia of femininity packed into the closets of the
burgled celebrities are indicative of a style that flies in the face of most American (male) film
directors, who produce films with a significantly more “masculine” point of view. Another
common thread that connects The Bling Ring to Coppola’s previous movies is its subject - a
group of aimless young women (and one boy) coping with the external societal pressures of
materialism and celebrity culture, as well as the ennui of life in a transitional stage. However,
unlike in The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette, Coppola does not seem to intend for the
audience to empathize with the emotional journeys of the characters - except for possibly the
Marc (the primary protagonist), who is a young, white male.
Apart from Marc, all other characters in The Bling Ring seem like caricatures of the
effects of consumer and celebrity culture on the lifestyle of upper-class teenagers. While
Coppola makes it obvious that Marc is participating in the robberies to feel a part of a close-knit
group and to make up for his general unease and low self-esteem, the motivations and intentions
of the female characters are left completely unknown. The film serves as somewhat of a peak
into “female” world of celebrities, materialism, and consumer culture, with the audience granted
distance through the perspective of the male protagonist. As a result, the film seems to uphold
long-standing associations between femininity and frivolity (read as anti-intellectualism,
silliness, and shallowness). Though it is obvious that Coppola is a fan of ‘girl culture’
considering her previous films, when looking at just The Bling Ring in isolation, it is difficult to
discern if Coppola is making fun of celebrity voyeurism and materialism or the women who fall
prey to these cultural trends.
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In “A New Universal Mean Girl: Examining the Discursive Construction and Social
Regulation of a New Feminine Pathology,” Ringrose (2006) describes how societal reactions to
deviance are regulated through class and race-specific categories of femininity. ‘Normative’ girls
are expected to express anger and aggression through meanness, while ‘deviant’ girls are
expected to express aggression through violence. The Bling Ring demonstrates this disparity crimes involving white women, even stealing and playing with a gun, are treated lightly and used
to create a sense of dark humor. The fascination that Coppola expects the audience to have with
the group of wealthy LA teens comes from the distance between the rich, shallow, flaky
characters and conceptions or stereotypes of criminals. Coppola attempts to create humor by
showing the clash of white femininity and deviance that is stereotypically embodied by the
‘other’. Furthermore, because Coppola cut one of the non-White members of the real-life Bling
Ring from the film (Diana Tamayo, a young Latina woman), it seems that Coppola uses the
whiteness of the remaining members to ensure that the audience somewhat sympathizes with the
characters, especially as their crime spree comes to an end. As described by journalist Muna
Mire, “The film makes it clear that a young white woman’s arrest is a tragedy but also implies
(through the whitewashing of a brown character) that when Latin@s are arrested, it is neither
unusual nor deserving of sympathy. There is a presumption that whiteness prefigures innocence,
which in turn garners our sympathies,” (Mire, 2013). Playing the criminal activity of the white
female characters for laughs reinforces the notion that whiteness and white femininity are
inherently associated with innocence and purity, while non-white femininity is associated with
deviance.
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Conclusion
In The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, and The Bling Ring, Coppola’s representations
of girlhood and femininity are in many ways simultaneously empowering and problematic,
speaking to the complexity of both feminist readings of media and of femininity itself. A cursory
reading of the films may result in criticisms that Coppola sacrificed substance for style, as the
aesthetic of the films certainly takes center stage; however, a closer examination of Coppola’s
depictions of femininity through the writings of sociologists such as Mulvey, Groneman, Bartky,
Herbst Lewis, Dubrofsky, Ryalls, Hollows, and Ringrose reveals how they explore the ways
young women engage with the external pressures placed on them by society.
In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey (1975) writes, “The alternative
cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born which is radical in both a political and an
aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream film.” Although
Coppola’s films are certainly radical in an aesthetic sense, challenging the traditionally
masculine aesthetic with trademark slow pacing, privileging of impression over plot, and
focusing on the development of emotional texture and mood, Coppola asserts that her films are
not intended to be political. In an interview with Matt Muller of The Independent, when asked if
she was a feminist, Coppola replied, “Oh, I don't talk about political things. But I'm happy I get
to put out a feminine point of view,” (Muller, 2013). Through both this statement and an analysis
of The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, and The Bling Ring, it becomes clear that Coppola’s
films best fall under the somewhat ambiguous political and theoretical umbrella of postfeminism
- politically either uninterested in women’s rights and gender equality or taking these for granted,
and culturally uncritically embracing aspects of traditional forms of femininity such as passivity,
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purity, and materialism. Overall, despite pushing back against the typically masculine
perspective of mainstream Hollywood films and legitimizing the experiences of women in
transitional stages of girlhood, Coppola’s films make little effort to subvert mainstream
representations of femininity and thus end up at times reinscribing harmful systems of power. Kuperman 18
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