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As the daughter of Italo-American auteur Francis Ford Coppola, director Sofia Coppola grew up with proximity to the kind of wealth and access to the kind of privileges that many Italo-Americans born before her could not foresee someone with an Italian-American identity having.
Sofia Coppola’s Fourth-Generation Italian-American Identity as Reflected In Marie Antoinette (2006)
In Gangster priest: the Italian American cinema of Martin Scorsese Robert Casillo describes the treacherous passage from the Old World to Ellis Island that first-generation Italian-Americans had to survive to make it to the land of the free (5-13). Once landed, these men and women were forced to take on the jobs that few natural-born citizens were willing to do for the wages that were offered to them; consequently, the first-generation and their children could live only in inadequate housing in squalid conditions (7-9). Third-generation Italian-Americans could envision themselves building beyond the means that they had grown up with: some blue-collar, comparatively unacculturated members of this generation chose to, while other blue-collar, comparatively acculturated members pursued education and climbed into the middle- and even upper-classes (56-61). As the daughter of Italo-American auteur Francis Ford Coppola, director Sofia Coppola grew up with proximity to the kind of wealth and access to the kind of privileges that many Italo-Americans born before her could not foresee someone with an Italian-American identity having.
Casillo maps the careers of Sofia’s father and his fellow third-generation Italo-American director, Martin Scorsese: where the former’s introduction into dominant Hollywood filmmaking took the form of an adaptation of an Italian story (Mario Puzo’s The Godfather), the latter did not make a Hollywood film out of an explicitly Italian story, until 1973’s Mean Streets (62-67). Casillo argues that because of Scorsese’s perception of his Italian heritage (having grown up in Little Italy as the son of second-generation Italian-American parents that worked in New York’s garment industry) as being incompatible with American hegemony, the director focused on White Anglo-Saxon Protestant American characters (59-67). Fiona Handyside identifies a similar but not identical pattern in Sofia Coppola’s oeuvre: the fourth-generation Italian-American director has auteured films that are predominantly about well-to-do, white girls and young women, that are at-present, inhabiting physical locations that they feel displaced in (such as Lost in Translation’s Tokyo, or Marie Antoinette’s France) (96-103). In 2006’s Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola struggles to understand her own subjectivity, as an Italo-American who grew up in the highest echelon in society, and as a female who has been surrounded by people who recognize her last name and consequently treat her in relation to what they would like from her father. Through a cinematic style that parodies the desirability of expensive material objects, and cinematography that disturbs the idea that Marie Antoinette is in charge of her life, and of her own body, Coppola disrupts the belief that all of life’s problems can be solved by the acquisition of “enough” capital.
In the chapter “Luminous girlhoods: postfeminist upbringing” in Sofia Coppola: a cinema of girlhood, Handyside itemizes the aspects of Sofia Coppola’s directorial style, introduces the director’s upbringing, and discusses how certain elements of her childhood whose causation was her father’s position as a successful auteur adds insurgent meanings to trademarks of her style. Handyside describes Coppola’s style with the following: “…luminous, drenched in light and featuring jewelry, glittery shoes, sequins and shimmering silks….Her [images are] cluttered with objects and designs linked to contemporary girl culture [:]…rainbows, meadows, flowers,…dainty cakes and macarons, shoes, coloured wigs, (often white, pink or floral) party dresses, (43)”. The author argues that this style is a parody of the achievement of ideal postfeminist girlhood (56-57). Since the emergence of neoliberalism and post-feminism, a time in which young females have been instructed to strive to be material consumers, and to be more successful than their male counterparts, but not to want any more equal rights to said counterparts than access to capital and to the workforce, ideal girlhood has come to be associated with quantities of girlish objects (56-64). Coppola’s hyper-stylized, hyper-feminine images do not suggest that post-feminist ideology is an adequate gender ideology, but alternatively suggest the emptiness of materialism and traditional gender roles (57-70).
Anthony Julian Tamburri examines the semiotics of Michael Corleone’s sartorial choices in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. He concludes that a pair of opposite semiotic modalities are at play in the soon-to-be patriarch’s outfits: the first, that the encoded meaning is the sign’s (the clothing article’s) hegemonic American cultural meaning and the second, that the encoded meaning is the opposite of the sign’s American cultural meaning (for ironic purposes) (95-96). Fashion and other physical markers of identity play a similar role in Marie Antoinette. Anna Backman-Rogers introduces her chapter, “Chapter 5: Marie Antoinette (2006),” by contesting the dominant reading of Marie Antoinette’s Sofia Coppola-esque style (or Sofiaesque style, as I will be heretofore referring to the filmic style described by Fiona Handyside) as artifice that is empty of depth (115-118). Backman-Rogers cites Rosalind Galt’s argumentation of the revolutionary properties of what the latter author refers to as the “pretty” (116-117). Traditional practices of filmmaking think of visual excess that contains elements that are gendered as traditionally feminine in low regard: directorial styles which rely on such feminine and excessive stylishness are dominantly read as vacant of political meaning, and as an attempt to draw attention away from the inadequacies of a film’s narrative (116-123). The style of Marie Antoinette is very Sofiaesque: extremely decorated surfaces, be those surfaces, walls, ceramics, textiles, costumes, dinner tables, gardens, floors, or architecture, are an essential aspect of Coppola’s film. In “Sofia Coppola: Reading the Director,” Belinda Smaill considers how different contemporary male cultural commentators, read Sofia’s highly decorative surfaces as a distraction from the absence of quality that they perceived was apparent in Marie Antoinette (148-152). What Fiona Handyside writes about the definition of Sofiaesque style, “She references iconic painterly, photographic and filmic images of girls, from pre-Raphaelite paintings to celebrity paparazzi shots…[In this style] her characters participate in such girlish activities as pole dancing,…dancing and tea parties, (43)” is saturated into the auteur’s 2006 film.
Fig. 1. Marie crying alone, in Versailles (Coppola, 56:03).
Fig. 2. Marie, heartbroken, after reading a letter of condemnation from her mother (Coppola, 51:49).
Fig. 3. The first French opera that Marie watches at Versailles (Coppola, 50:36).
Backman-Rogers suggests that the self-selected, avant-garde aesthetic of Marie Antoinette, the Dauphine-then-Queen of France, is an ideological move Sofia Coppola has borrowed from her father (134-136). Mimicry, the author argues, is a hyper-stylization of what a female subject thinks that femininity is (133-135). Backman-Rogers takes one of the final shots (58:16-58:45) of the film’s iconic montage of luxuriant goodies (56:13-59:11) to be the apex of Coppola’s mimetic cinematic language. In a decision that is dialogic with the sexist criticism that the real Marie received regarding the grandeur of her hairstyles in her portraiture, at a time when both men and women’s hairstyles were comparatively showy, the royal hairdresser fashions for Coppola’s Marie an extremely high, textured, and garishly decorated hairpiece (58:15-58:26). Where a dominant reading would attribute pro-capitalist and pro-consumerist meanings to Antoinette’s line, “Oh, Leonard, you’re the best! (58:26-58:29)” an anti-postfeminist reading would reveal this entire camera-pan to be a mockery of its dominant meaning.
John Paul Russo suggests that the structure of the Corleone family (as a biological family and a business operative) aligns with Ferdinand Tönnies’ concept of “Gemeinschaft” (111) – a community of kin members within which nepotism, favouritism and hierarchy are the governing principles (112). “Gemeinschaft” juxtaposes “Gesellschaft” which is a familial structure that resembles an “impersonal civil society” (112) and where contractual bonds are formed on the basis of a mutual end goal (as opposed to Gemeinschaft, wherein bonds are formed on the basis of the potential for contractual obligation) (112). Two dependant variables can be considered as to why Sofia Coppola recreates the Corleone family’s Gemeinschaft structure in her interpretation of the structure of the community of King Louis XVI’s court.
There is biographical documentation that three of Sofia Coppola’s paternal great-grandparents (her father’s paternal grandparents and his maternal grandfather) immigrated from Italy during the first generation of Italian immigration to the United States (Phillips, 7-10). As a third-generation Italian-American, Francis Ford Coppola’s father was a flute-player, and a conductor of traveling orchestras, (8-9) and his mother stayed at home, to raise him and his two siblings (8). Films with narratives that centered on child-protagonists that he could relate to, inspired Sofia’s father to pursue filmmaking (9). Francis Ford Coppola attended Hofstra University on scholarship, then attended the University of California, at Los Angeles, with the aim of acquiring a graduate-degree in filmmaking (10-11). Sofia’s father progressed through the American-academic system, then worked his way to the top of the American film industry; (8-13) naturally, Ford Coppola’s successfulness, would compound the pressure to be successful and the pressure to develop a similarly successful work ethic on top of his offspring. As Fiona Handyside has noted, (97-117) an almost unbearable pressure to make one’s parents proud, is saturated throughout Marie’s narrative in Marie Antoinette. For example, following the announcement of Louis and Marie’s nephew’s birth before the young royals of France have consummated their marriage, Coppola’s camera-man follows Marie’s actress, Kirsten Dunst, rush into an empty room in the palace (55:20-56:06). The camera is in extreme close-up to capture the tiny vagaries in Marie’s crying (55:21-56:01). Marie slides onto the floor, and cups her arms around her knees. She hides her face behind her legs – (56:03-56:04) resolving herself to the conclusion that she has failed yet again, to fulfill her duty, and her mother’s orders. A second iconic scene of Marie crying occurs after she wakes up the day after her eighteenth birthday party (1:14:07-1:14:20). Marie’s holding her legs in her hands against her chest, again (14:07-14:12). She dips down into the water, and the camera captures her expressionless stare out in front of her (14:12-14:19). The magic and freedom of last night are gone, and she must return to being the Marie Antoinette that everyone else – especially her mother, Empress Maria Theresa, and her oldest brother, Joseph II – wants her to be.
A second rationality is that the image of the Corleone Mafia family in her father’s Godfather trilogy imprinted on Sofia Coppola’s psyche. While Michael Corleone’s wife Kay is unquestionably a feminist character, Francis Ford Coppola represents the relationship between the patriarch and his children’s mother as tumultuous and ill-fated. Michael Corleone’s first wife, the quiet, docile and gorgeous Sicilian woman Apollonia, is presented by Coppola as the better of the Michael Corleone wives (2:03:01-2:03:52). Coppola establishes the question in The Godfather of whether Michael would have still morphed into the recklessly violent Mafia boss he is at the end of said film, had Apollonia not been tragically killed by the car bomb meant for the patriarch when he was a young man (2:03:51-2:06:10). Anna Backman-Rogers argues that the aristocratic women of Versailles cannot act in opposition to the traditional gender roles that are forced upon them at Versailles, and that have been forced upon them over the course of their maturation, by the adults that were in charge of raising them. Because the only alternative to fulfilling their appointed roles as the wives of the French nobility, and the mothers of future generations of royalty, was to become marked as a female “Other,” Marie and her fellow court-women could never finitely break from the ideals and expectations of contemporary patriarchy (125-138). This is another connection between Sofia Coppola’s consideration of gender in Marie Antoinette, and Francis Ford Coppola’s appraisal of the docile, traditional Mafia wife.
In Sofia Coppola: a cinema of girlhood Fiona Handyside analyses how the concepts of home and family are represented across the director’s oeuvre in the chapter “There’s No Place Like Home!’ The Exploded Home as Postfeminist Chronotype”. Handyside defines a chronotype as a place that is infused with personal memories (98-100). Because of such, returning to a chronotype can cause somebody to feel as though they are the person that they were at an earlier point in their life (99-112). The place somebody grew up in (their childhood home) and the place within which somebody felt as though they transitioned from childhood to adulthood (their coming-of-age home) are naturally chronotypes (101-117). Handyside extrapolates that places of domesticity in Coppola’s films are represented as either isolated rooms (as in the Lisbon sisters’ bedrooms in The Virgin Suicides or the rooms of Versailles in Marie Antoinette) or as prestigious public places (as in the popular nightclubs of The Bling Ring) (117-125).
Fiona Handyside presents the model of the “gilded cage” for how Coppola understands, and subsequently plays with, the ideas of “home,” and of “family” (101-103). The typical identifier of the home in literature, a family’s domestic spaces, is shaken up by the director. The traditional “home” is a space of emotional emptiness, loneliness, and abandonment; large physical buildings such as the Lisbon sisters’ Michigan house (The Virgin Suicides) and the palace at Versailles (Marie Antoinette) read like haunted, abandoned manors (101-122). Coppola locates public spaces, full of excitement and liveliness, such as Marie and Louis’ lavish parties (Marie Antoinette) and the elite nightclubs of The Bling Ring, as the true homes of her predominantly teenage-girl protagonists (103-132). Handyside argues, that because domestic spaces are enmeshed with the concepts of performance, spectacle and girls’ suppression of genuine feelings, Coppola’s protagonists seek out public spaces – away from the prying eyes of their parents – where they can come to a sense of awareness about themselves, and how they would like to live authentically, when they are given the opportunity to do so (103-133).
23:23-29:51 of the film follows a typical day of royal duties for the Dauphin and the Dauphine of France. Mary is awoken by Versailles’ courtly ladies, then they ritualistically remove her nightgown and dress her for bathing (23:23-25:56). The court watches as Marie and Louis sit down to eat a lavishly-prepared breakfast, and then the couple does, predominantly in silence, and off-screen (25:56-28:01). Marie attends mass at the palace’s Church (27:54-28:24), then dines with the closest confidants of Louis’ father, King Louis XIV (28:24-29:51). Everything Marie does is under surveillance; anytime she makes a mistake, she is reproached; and gossip accompanies a majority of the moves she makes. Marie Antoinette’s 1:11:32-1:12:58 juxtaposes the monotonous march of 23:23-29:51. Marie and her sparse group of friends that she has chosen herself from the court-women and -men of Versailles drunkenly frolic in the palace’s gardens just as the sun is coming up (1:11:32-1:12:17). The same pop song soundtracks this portion of this scene, yet its volume is lessened in the film’s audio mix, to express how this time alone with her true friends, is more intimate and tender than the party scene that precedes this one. The small group falls down beside the palace’s Grand Canal, and watch the sun rise, in peaceful and contemplative quiet (1:12:17-1:12:50). The musical soundtrack is replaced by the setting’s natural sounds – birds chirp and insects hum; for an ephemeral moment, Marie gets to be the gentle, amicable, and serene young female that she sees as her authentic self.
Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider present a set of behavioural expectations internalized by the girls and women belonging to an organized crime family in “Gender and Violence: Four Themes in the Everyday World of Mafia Wives” that is based off of the verbal accounts of American and Italian Mafia wives and daughters (32-34). Schneider and Schneider examine the biopolitics of an organized crime unit. Daughters are usually expected to marry the son of members that belong to the Mafia family unit (35-36). Family rank is an essential factor in the arranged marriages of daughters. Because the Mafia is patrilineal, the eldest son of the patriarch is expected to inherit his father’s position after the patriarch’s death (35-39) (as Michael Corleone is tasked with after Vito’s heart attack in The Godfather). Because power is maintained through succession, daughters of a Mafia Family are expected to marry within their rank. In the period of European monarchical imperialism, the bloodlines which governed and inherited the rights to govern European nation-states, organized the biopolitics of the nobility similarly. The daughter believed by the Holy Roman Emperor, Francis I, and his wife, Maria Theresa, to be the most valuable – because of her youth, purity, obedience, and beauty – was the monarchs’ eleventh daughter, Maria Antonia (2:47-8:41). Maria was wedded to the French Dauphin, Louis XVI, and formally became a member of the French royal family (including translating her Germanic name into its French equivalent), at the age of fourteen (4:18-9:07). Because of Austrian Maria’s absorption into France’s ruling family, the Holy Roman Empire gained peace with France, an alliance with the more powerful nation-state, and access to the great quantities of sellable resources that the nation-state of France possessed.
Schneider and Schneider characterize Gemeinschaft Mafia units as homoerotic; male members of an organized crime family might betray and even kill one another, but regardless, the community structure is organized around paternal and fraternal relationships between men (37-38). The authors write that Mafia females are disallowed from not just participating in, but even acknowledging, the business/the criminal aspect of a family unit (38). Because a Mafia man’s wife, children and possessions are symbols of his ranking within the family business, the role of a Mafia wife is to purchase the finest things that she can find with her husband’s business earnings for herself, for her children and for the couple as a nuclear unit (like a nice house, nice cars and nice household objects) (37-40). However, Schneider and Schneider also write that banquets are a key strategy for Mafia families (38-39). Spaces of celebration, like weddings, baptisms, and a Family’s dinners, are moments where Mafia business can be conducted most opportunely, precisely because of the comradery and casualness of said spaces (39-40). Mafia females are valuable players in pushing a Family’s agenda further: through momentary weaponizations of feminine beauty, sensuality, and sexuality, through the usage of gestures like flirting, dancing, and performing traditional female duties like serving and cleaning up meals, a Mafia unit’s special guests may be made more malleable (35-42). Backman-Rogers claims that Marie Antoinette turns to commodity fetishism to create for herself a social subjectivity that she more closely resonates with, when compared to the perfect image of Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France, that her birth family, and the court of Versailles, want her to fit into (131-136). 56:09-58:10 of Coppola’s film, is emblematic of this point. To quell the sadness she expresses in the first scene of Marie outwardly expressing her sadness that I have analysed in this paper, Marie orders all of the expensive items that she thinks she can without receiving reproachment from anyone at Versailles. Marie plays with trays of shoes (56:09-56:19); different patterns of fans (56:19-56:22); couture dresses in different colours and fabrics (56:23-56:40); an assortment of decorated confectionaries (56:40-57:24); glasses of champagne and gambling chips (56:56-57:39); and ornamented chokers and grand wigs (56:59-58:10). While Backman-Rogers also argues that since Marie is viewed by 18th-century French patriarchy to be a piece of her husband’s properties, and that therefore Marie’s consumption of things, is her consumption of herself, (126-137) within the constraints of Versailles, and more generally, within the gender politics of European imperialism, her consumption is an ephemeral moment of happiness for her.
In Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure, Anna Backman-Rogers argues that in 18th-century France, female bodies were understood by contemporary French patriarchal ideology as another piece of property belonging to the man who owned; was married to, had fathered, or was responsible for taking care of; the female body (117-119). The author argues that in 18th-century French society, male homosexual urges were satiated through the trading of one man’s “possessed” female body – either permanently or temporarily – to another man; the latter of which could exchange the traded female body for other forms of property and material objects (117-125). As biopolitics are organized in a Mafia family, the Austrian princess Maria Antonia is married off to the French Dauphin Louis XVI on the orders of her Empress mother, the matriarch Maria Theresa (because her dynastic patriarch husband was deceased), when the two are both children, for treatise between the Holy Roman Empire and France.
Anna Backman-Rogers opens “Chapter 5: Marie Antoinette (2006)” with three quotes, two of which are the following: Luce Irigay’s, “To this end, the commodity is disinvested of its body and reclothed in a form that makes it suitable or exchange among men, (115)” and Rosaliand Galt’s, “The rhetoric of cinema has consistently denigrated surface decoration, finding the attractive skin of the screen to be false, shallow, feminine, or apolitical. (115)” While I would not argue that Sofia Coppola, as a fourth-generation Italian-American who grew up with the kinds of luxuries and accesses to social and economic privilege that are only accessible to the highest socioeconomic echelon in America, faced comparable struggles in life to most of the Italo-Americans that preceded her, Marie Antoinette illustrates that the director similarly struggled on the matter of identity formation. As both Fiona Handyside and Backman-Rogers have argued, Coppola uses a hyper-stylistic, hyper-feminine cinematic style to undermine the postfeminist equivalencing of having everything a girl could want with “the secret to happiness,” that the female auteur had grown up hearing. From the kinship dynamics in Marie Antoinette, it is revealed how Sofia Coppola’s understandings of home and of family were influenced by her father, the third-generation Italian-American auteur, Francis Ford Coppola. Where Backman-Rogers is cynical on the idea that Marie is only able to experience genuine happiness and a feeling of bodily autonomy in ephemeral moments and through commodity fetishism, the smiles on actress Kirsten Dunst’s face, and her lifted mood in such temporary and materialistic moments, brings me a feeling of warmth for Marie, and for Sofia, alike.
Bibliography
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