Yep. When it’s not just assumed that they’re “from Mexico.”
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Took me a drop to get it…
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Come on boys, Congress needs crackers!
Oh wait, that’s not the joke…
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I fluv Michael Harriot’s work.
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White “culture”?
When pressed, Coppola expresses little curiosity or regret about the racial specificity of her archive. Responding to the controversy over her choice to eliminate the only Black character, Mattie, in her Civil War remake The Beguiled (2017), Coppola says that “to treat slavery as a side-plot would be insulting” and that “not including Mattie in the film comes from respect.” But in trying to avoid trivializing Black girls, she elevates white ones. Coppola herself never admits that (one recent deviation aside) her girls are always white. In the interview that opens Sofia Coppola Archive , Coppola says, simply, “Across all my films, there is a common quality: there is always a world and there is always a girl trying to navigate it. That’s the story that will always intrigue me.”
Mortality may elevate the sentimental and the decorative in Coppola’s archive. Indeed, critic Alice Bolin notices that the only thing more attractive than a white girl is a dead white girl, an aesthetic that Bolin condemns but Coppola is willing to circulate. But if so, there is a price. “I want to be a spoiled rich white girl,” croons biracial transgender performer Venus Xtravaganza to Jennie Livingston’s camera in the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning . Were it not so shabby, Xtravaganza’s bedroom could be that of the Lisbon girls in The Virgin Suicides , or Priscilla Beaulieu’s in Priscilla (2023). Like Priscilla, Xtravaganza wants the bedroom, the roses, the attention, and especially the romance. Over the course of the documentary, she almost achieves her “femme realism” illusion, but then is killed for the “almost” and the “illusion.”
Not surprisingly in light of her gravitation toward dead girls, feminist viewers of Coppola’s films are divided. Rosalind Galt notices that “Coppola’s revisionism” in Marie Antoinette “strikingly refuses to blame the woman for her out-of-control consumption.” Meanwhile, Emily Yoshida worries over the image of the “sad girl” that dominates Coppola’s films, calling attention to several prominent “girl in tub” scenes across her oeuvre. Calling it “irresistible fodder to be digested and disseminated and canonized in the culture at large,” Yoshida thinks Coppola’s aesthetic glorifies passivity.
Indeed, unlike some other girls in the archives of the girl, Coppola’s young women are rarely rebels in the conventional sense of the term. Lux, Charlotte, Nicki—not one of these girls is high-minded like Sophocles’s Antigone, or courageous like our contemporary Antigone, Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games (2012). Ariella Garmaise’s insight, that a “poor-little-rich-girl magnetism” courses through Coppola’s films, speaks to the confusing mix of sympathy, blame, and disgust that Coppola’s girls generate in viewers.
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I really, really hated the Virgin Suicides, and that article helps explain why.
The only good thing I took away from that film was the Gilbert O’Sullivan song.
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Right? What you managed to take away from it is more than I did. I mostly just found it boring.
Same with Lost in Translation, which that article could have touched on too, what with its foregrounding of privileged white folks who have a sad against an appropriated backdrop of stereotypical dashes of mood-setting Japanese-ness. (Also boring, for me at least.)
Good to hear I guess that Priscilla’s portrait of another white woman is a little better. I’m still not tempted though to seek it out.
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Snooze-fest: 20 minutes in, I just gave up.
I had never stopped to really think about her work before; I just knew that none of what I saw ever moved me.
Now I think I know why.
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Write what you know?
She grew up the white privileged princess of Hollywood royalty. It’s not like she’s experienced anything worse than being sad in an expensive hotel in an exotic city.
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I think the problem isn’t that she’s writing what she knows, it’s that she’s doing it in a way that isn’t very interesting, nor is it really trying to interrogate that, merely replicating it and even celebrating it to some degree.
This matters. We’re seeing how unexamined white privilege is putting all of us under threat. People unwiling to share power with non-white people, with women, with the LGBQT+ community are willing to tear this entire country down rather than look at themselves and seek to change, even a little. These are not disconnected… Culture matters and it’s always political. People who find themselves in powerful positions, culturally, bear some responsibility for wielding that power responsibly.
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Oh I agree completely!
She’s not examining her privilege in any way. I find an interesting contrast in Brandon Cronenberg who’s films tend to question or at least acknowledge his own nepotistic privilege
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Thank you for putting into words one of the things that bugged me with that movie. It would have been just as “good”, and possibly greatly improved, if they had shot it in LA with high school drama club backdrops of “Japan” than it was shot on location in Tokyo.
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I fluv Reservation Dogs; I need to finish the second half of the last season.
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Or as we call it here: Asshole American Tourists.
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