Sofia Coppola: White Woman Tears

In recent years, Sofia Coppola’s films have become aestheticized symbols of an intrinsically female selfhood. A quick search of “Sofia Coppola” on TikTok, Pinterest, or Tumblr will bring up hundreds, if not thousands, of posts from young women proclaiming their “she’s just like me” affinity with her often emotionally-troubled female protagonists. Her undeniably beautiful mise-en-scène and martyr-like characters seem to have grown inseparable from an ethereally pink image of universally relatable female suffering. However, despite this online wave preaching the director’s innately feminine appeal, I’ve never connected with or felt “represented” by her films. Instead, I’ve found Coppola’s worlds of pale pink tears to be just that — pale. Like many famous white directors, Coppola’s oeuvre features a dearth of POC protagonists or even characters. But my issue with her films lies beyond their immediate lack of representation. More than a sheer absence, Coppola renders POC subjecthood an unintelligible impossibility, presenting the POC individual only as an opaque foil through which whiteness may be further clarified. By prioritizing whiteness, POC selfhood is not only neglected but negated entirely. Beside the complex inner lives of her white protagonists, the recognition of an equal non-white interiority becomes an emotional inconceivability. The richly adorned landscapes of suffering and elevations of martyrdom are accessible to white women alone. To Coppola, Black girls don’t cry. 

While the director’s apparent discomfort with the POC subject can be traced throughout several of her films, The Beguiled and Lost in Translation are especially revealing of this pattern. Inspired by a 1966 novel and a preceding 1971 film adaptation, Coppola’s 2017 interpretation of The Beguiled follows the women and girls of an isolated Southern girls’ school during the American Civil War. Her film largely observes the same story beats as its predecessors: when the women resolve to take in an injured Union soldier, conflict unravels as they increasingly strive to capture his attention. Where the film is unique, according to Coppola, is in its female perspective, through which she desired to present “something women could connect to.” However, the 2017 film features another notable departure from the previous versions, recognizable from a quick glance at the cast’s photos. Coppola’s The Beguiled is without the story’s sole black character, the enslaved Mattie (renamed Hallie in the 1971 film). Needless to say, Coppola’s decision to cut out Blackness from her Civil War-era film sparked controversy. Nonetheless, the director remained steadfast in her decision-making, defending her judgment in a statement to IndieWire:

I thought there were universal themes, about desire and male and female power dynamics that could relate to all women. [...] I did not want to perpetuate an objectionable stereotype where facts and history supported my choice of setting the story of these white women in complete isolation, after the slaves had escaped. Moreover, I felt that to treat slavery as a side-plot would be insulting. There are many examples of how slaves have been appropriated and ‘given a voice’ by white artists. Rather than an act of denial, my decision of not including Mattie in the film comes from respect. [...] But it has been disheartening to hear my artistic choices, grounded in historical facts, being characterized as insensitive when my intention was the opposite. I sincerely hope this discussion brings attention to the industry for the need for more films from the voices of filmmakers of color and to include more points of views and histories.

Predicated on a commitment to “historical facts” and “universal themes” of womanhood, this defense reveals a discomfort with Black subjectivity. These ghosts of “historical facts” are merely a sly endeavor at exclusion, conjured to justify the erasure of the POC individual. I’ve often lamented the lack of POC characters in my favorite period pieces, only to be met with comments claiming that the inclusion of Black individuals in an otherwise fictional story would simply be an immersion-breaking “historical inaccuracy.” This ethos reveals an unwavering dedication to an insular centering of whiteness, failing to see that Black people have always existed and are not some new invention that emerged only after the post-Civil Rights era. While Coppola does not necessarily follow this exact line of rhetoric, the result of her statement is the same, similarly weaponizing “historical facts” to legitimize a past bereft of Black people. By maintaining the “accuracy” of the all-white Civil War space, Coppola perpetuates the same erasure of Blackness as heralded in neo-Confederate dialogues, divorcing the Civil War from its integral slavery context. The film’s whitewashing at the cost of Black identity reenacts the same essence inherent in the continued obsession with Scarlett O’Hara and Civil War balls, imagining a romantic antebellum South where slavery is an unimportant faded backdrop against the vibrant hoopskirts of plantation belles. It’s not surprising that in interviews about the film, Coppola admitted an adoration for the Civil War South: 

I love that era. Something about the Civil War, women and the South has this very exotic...The South is still very exotic to me, not being part of that world. The manners and the costumes all appealed to me. 

This “exotic” yet mannerly South is the shadow of the “Lost Cause,” ignoring the enslaved people who upheld this white antebellum society. There is no “respect” in this ignorance, as there is no “respect” in Coppola’s denial of the Black individual. 

The director’s perspective fails to be essentially “female,” denying the sentiments and very existence of women of color in an attempt to center whiteness. Through her statement, Coppola reveals a discomfort surrounding Mattie, refusing to confront the character’s complicated make-up. Rather than rewriting the character to explore her interiority equal to that afforded to her white counterparts, Coppola decides upon erasure, deeming this task impossible and insurmountable. She resolves that it would have been irresponsible for her to write-in Mattie's voice but fails to take this thought to the next logical conclusion — perhaps this story was not hers to tell at all. Her final call hoping for “more films from the voices of filmmakers of color” rings hollow. 

One of Coppola’s few films that features POC characters, Lost in Translation reveals a similarly problematic relationship with race and non-white subjectivity. While staying at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, young Yale grad Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and aged Hollywood actor Bob Harris (Bill Murray) discover connection, finding solace in each other’s shared loneliness. Alienated from their spouses, the protagonists find that Tokyo amplifies their sense of displacement, unable to fully communicate with their romantic partners or the Japanese-speaking society around them. 

As Charlotte and Bob’s relationship crystallizes amidst the hectic streets of Tokyo, Japanese people grow to represent a mere backdrop, a wallpaper with which to embellish the story of the white protagonists. Primarily, the film overlooks Japanese interiority, rendering it an impossible illegibility contrasting the white protagonists’ innately more complex psychology. In their isolation, Charlotte and Bob’s potential connection with the Japanese individuals around them is completely ignored and denied possibility. Of course, our white protagonists do not speak the country’s language, but it seems like the characters (especially Murray’s) do not even deign to try. Even so, language difference can’t be the point of “lost translation,” as Japanese characters continually try to speak to Charlotte and Bob in English. However, Murray’s character is especially unappreciative of these attempts at connection, smugly making fun of the Japanese person’s futile interaction with English. Many of the spoken exchanges between the white protagonists and the Japanese cast take the notion of “lost in translation” to a literal and discriminatory misrepresentation of Asian people’s interaction with the English language. Multiple scenes between Murray and the Japanese cast center the Asian character’s mispronunciation of an English word, often dwelling on their accented confusion between the Anglophone “R” and “L” sounds. In one such scene, which goes on for over three minutes, a prostitute continues to repeat the phrase “lip my stockings,” the joke being her mispronunciation of the word “rip.” 

When Japanese presence does come to the forefront of the film, albeit seldomly, it is to underline Asian separation from the white Westerner. This creation of difference operates at Japanese expense, elevating the white individual while poking a finger at Asian society. As Kiku Day pointed out in her 2003 review of the film for The Guardian, several scenes emphasize this created dissimilarity by jokingly belittling the Japanese person’s smallness next to the six-foot-tall Murray, who struggles to fit into the tiny shower and elevator at his Western-style luxury hotel. According to Day, “the viewer is sledgehammered into laughing at these small, yellow people and their funny ways, desperately aping the western lifestyle without knowledge of its real meaning. It is telling that the longest vocal contribution any Japanese character makes is at a karaoke party, singing a few lines of the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen.” Lost in Translation does not allow Asian selfhood to exist separate from white identity. Rather, Japanese subjectivity may only emerge as a vague possibility on the edges of a blurred frame, outlining the center of Coppola’s particularly white tunnel vision. Like The Beguiled, the viewer is permitted recognition in whiteness alone, as the film flattens out Asian interiority to emphasize the contrasting depth of white emotionality. Again, only white girls cry, and the tears of Lost in Translation are especially white and colorless. We may see solely white emotion — our non-white interior remains a distant and opaque void of non-expression.

To me, Coppola’s “femalehood” is by no means all-encompassing. The director’s work seems to embody a white feminist ethos, silencing POC women to claim the white female experience as universal. Whenever I momentarily see a door to relatability in Coppola’s work, it is unfailingly slammed shut before my face — I’m perpetually denied entry into these floating towers made of white girl tears. Sadness here can only exist in a vacuum, predicated on the absence of POC emotionality.