“That’s the way I work: I try to imagine what I would like to see,” said Sofia Coppola in an interview with The New York Times in 2003. That cinema provides the possibility to depict the world differently is obvious, so it seems a shame that Coppola’s investment seems to be in the reproduction of certain lifestyles: the wealthy, bland worlds of the very rich, that for all their splendour are dulled by a dearth of imagination. More than anything, Coppola’s world-making is constructed around material culture. She explores her characters’ subjectivities by framing them between the decorative aspects of largely comfortable, wealthy lives, a vision of the material world rooted in an expressive humanism; as the film world is built up, the self remains at the centre. But there are pitfalls to this approach if interiority threatens to flatten experience, thinning life down to a rote set of material interactions. On The Rocks follows Laura (Rashida Jones) on a series of adventures with her father, Felix (Bill Murray), as they trail Laura’s husband, Dean (Marlon Wayans), to discover whether he’s having an affair. Slickly and smoothly, Coppola whisks her characters around some of the city’s most refined locations, from cocktails at 21 Club to Bemelmans Bar, sometimes in an open-top vintage car. Together, father and daughter explore the city. Enlivening daily family life on the Upper East Side with adventure and whimsy, Laura searches for meaning: a quest for stability and reassurance amid the stresses of modern living. But what seems to be intended both as a loving homage to New York City and a film about female self-discovery succeeds only in anointing the trappings of intense wealth with cinematic finesse. As it aestheticises and romanticises a life lived in elite society, On The Rocks reifies the haute-bourgeois world it depicts and is confined by a splendid but limited interiority.
On the Rocks’ protagonists live rarified lives. Felix is a wealthy international art dealer from a long line of aristocratic New England WASPs with a chauffeur driven car. Laura is an author, the mixed-race daughter of parents who separated after her father’s affair. She lives in a large apartment with two children and her husband who, having recently launched a successful start-up, is increasingly away for business. Following one of these trips, Laura finds another woman’s toiletry bag in his luggage and becomes suspicious. She asks her father for a “man’s point of view” on events and he jumps at the chance to engineer a no-expense-spared detective mission cum bonding exercise to uncover the truth, using her crisis as an opportunity to initiate his daughter into his jet-setting lifestyle. (The film seems blind to the generational privilege that unites them). Signifiers of wealth line up, un-interrogated: Chanel, expensive jewellery, palatial country houses. Objects are used to carry the film forward: clothes hastily removed on Dean and Laura’s wedding night, a mess of children’s toys, spacious loft apartment. As the film continues, these synechdochal moments continue to dominate, reducing its characters to a series of diagrammatic relations. Cliched shots, fill-ins for extended dialogue or cinematographic inventiveness, tie the film’s vignettes together and compensate for a lack of real character development. As we move into the film’s present, Coppola has the camera track Laura around her spacious loft apartment, which is full of elliptical hints: a labelling machine signals she is organised; an empty MacBook Air screen: worried; a floor to ceiling bookshelf: erudite. Laura is composite, a constellation of objects that never quite add up into a person. Most of the time these signs take us nowhere: although Laura is rarely seen without her Strand bookshop bag and her bookcase is full, we rarely see her read or write. As Sam Adams writes in Slate, Coppola has slotted Laura into a multi-million pound lifestyle without commentary. Amusingly, a ‘Bernie 2016’ sticker is prominent on the door, but Dean and Laura have no politics beyond the immediate and personal, worrying about buying a bigger house, new schools for the kids, promotions. Something interesting could have been done with this relentless depthlessness, a critique of the commodification and aestheticisation of politics and pleasure, but On The Rock’s elaborate sign system is an empty reification of lightly sketched out lives rather than substantive or ironic analysis.
The background isn’t the only place where objects do the heavy lifting: Coppola also uses them to illustrate personal and, by extension, political disappointment. This is seen most prominently through a sequence of gifts. When Felix remarks that one of Laura’s bangles – a gift from her husband – is a sign of male ownership, Laura responds with a wry stare and dry remark, and yet when Felix later gives her his watch as a valorisation of their growing father-daughter bond she seems pretty happy. By contrast, when Dean gives Laura an expensive food processor for her birthday she is depressed, and we understand that the gift is neither appropriately feminist nor suitably romantic. But at the end of the film, Dean gives Laura a Cartier watch and she is shot in a close-up as she puts it on with affection. Does this moment challenge or embrace the earlier association with male ownership? These discontinuities feel politically confused rather than productive. They seem more in line with Felix’s retrograde and essentialist gender politics (“males are forced to fight to dominate and impregnate all females”) than Laura’s occasional retorts and eye rolls. Coppola’s script raises the spectre of feminist politics only to dodge any real engagement with it, expecting her audience to read Laura as a modern feminist seemingly without any evidence to back it up. This is tedious. Feelings are realised through material culture as Coppola catches her characters in a feedback loop that equates emotional worth with economic value, schooling her viewer in a commodity code: a thoughtless gift suggests a bad, potentially-cheating husband; in Marie Antoinette (2006) the French Revolution is little more than an excess of cake. The problem with this method is that it cannot account for or express the strength of feeling, anguish and joy that should underscore a film about modern life and love. The Soviet literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky argued that when objects became embedded in our perception, they began to fade away, unnoticed. A failure to examine the world around us often leads to de-politicisation. As Shklovsky argues, not without his own unexamined misogyny, “automatisation eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war”.1 For Shklovsky, the job of the artist is to bring things back, to de-automatise and re-politicise the cultural, thus re-invigorating life. But what happens if the artist refuses this political engagement? Might certain lives, objects and feelings, slip away?
Just as objects are automatised in On The Rocks, so are people. If Laura and Felix go to a restaurant a waiter appears, holding a martini or dessert. Reverse shots track the father-daughter conversation, but when the dialogue is due to end and Felix’s punchline approaches, Coppola cuts to reveal the waiter standing by the table, a ready-made reaction that informs us that Felix is either ribald or affectionate. Hospitality staff are stock tropes from a comparative class bracket, necessary to smilingly justify Laura and Felix’s lifestyle. Doorman, ballet teacher, chauffeur, waiter – in Coppola’s script they all find Felix funny and charming. Though this shrunken New York is dependent on class hierarchies, Coppola’s telling of Laura’s story renders everyone but the super-elite as prompts, dupes and carries; a buoyant and encouraging Greek chorus. When they’re not needed, they disappear. As father and daughter’s relationship to the world is concretised scene after scene, the parameters of their limited experiences begin to constrict our own. New York is apparently a city of charming elites, friendly cops and service workers who love their jobs. Good character ripples out to justify class hierarchy, and Felix and Laura are relentlessly shot centre-frame, placed squarely in the middle of the world that exists for them, a paramount individualism. Coppola’s homage to a city becomes a celebration of their New York, a paean to their privilege.
When Coppola made The Beguiled, in 2017, she was keen to depart from a “macho filmmaker” perspective, to “flip it over from their point of view and show women”. But the space she makes in her narratives for the perspectives of working class women or women of colour are limited. In his review for the Telegraph, Kaleem Aftab notes The Beguiled’s erasure of black history, while Inkoo Kang has written about the dialogic and aesthetic racism in Coppola’s Lost In Translation. Now Coppola has been praised for casting Rashida Jones as her first female lead of colour, but the problems of exclusionary aesthetics extend far beyond representation. On The Rocks makes you question how far Coppola has reckoned with the limitations of her comfortable white sight. Extra-diegetic Mariachi trumpets announce Felix and Laura’s arrival at a Mexican Hotel, and soon after Felix sings the 1920s Western song ‘Mexicale Rose’ to pleased applause in the beach-side bar. But one short scene in particular seems to me to both reveal Coppola’s model of aesthetics, art and cinema and explain her disinterest or rejection of outright political engagement. Laura and Felix are at an art dealers’ party. Prompted by Felix, they sneak out from the opulent lounge to examine a Monet hanging in an adjacent room. They pause before the painting and their conversation grows slower, quieter: “That’s something, isn’t it?”. “Beautiful,” Laura responds. In a low voice, hushed with emotion, Felix recounts first seeing the painting with Laura’s mother. He walks away and Laura stays staring at the painting. The low buzz of the art party fades away and is replaced by high quasi-celestial electronic music. When Laura also walks away the camera stays staring fixedly at the painting, making us engage with the Monet just as they did. If Felix and Laura find the painting beautiful so should we, suggesting a universalising continuum of taste connecting character to audience. Here, beauty and aesthetic judgement is presented as subjectively felt but at the same time self-evident – and, therefore, as the lingering camera suggests, ultimately universal. In Pretty: Film and The Decorative Image, Rosalind Galt describes “the Kantian idea of the beautiful [that] might underlie many accounts of cinematic value from the early twentieth century through to the present day”.2 Significantly, as Galt argues, Kantian aesthetics associate “beauty with good”; indeed, “to be beautiful is to be good”.3
That Coppola’s films celebrate beauty is not the problem. The problem is that Coppola’s display of knowledge-through-experience is always of a certain type; a personal intuition universally proclaimed, by beautiful, wealthy, and mostly white men and women. A philosophy of beauty is combined with one of solipsism, and this encases her world in a glossy amber that for all its shining spectacle is hard and shut in. Often people celebrate this. Feminist scholar Anna Backman Rogers argues that “Coppola’s films are deconstructing the ways in which women are turned into image … which is precisely why her fascination with surface and superficiality is not superficial in any sense of the word”. For Backman Rogers, Marie Antoinette is about “a woman being turned into an object that is traded among [a] hierarchical, patriarchal society”, and a critique that functions through hyper-objectification can be powerful. But is a criticism of society that works through mere intensification good enough, or are you still leaning in as you’re acting out? Are expensive dresses radical just because they’re yours? Turning the inside outwards to make a world in your own image is superficial in that it will only affect life’s surfaces, leaving deeper structures intact. Coppola’s aesthetics represent stasis, rather than change, even when (and perhaps because) they are always presented through the lens of personal development and discovery. Everything slides into individualism, self-improvement, a life dedicated to feeling better. On The Rocks traces a life only to say: she is living! Or, rather, I am living! Coppola never pushes past the individual to the group, the city, society. Although we know there is life out there in the world, we never see it.
1Viktor Shklovsky. (2015) Art, as Device. Poetics Today 36:3 pg.162. 2 Rosalind Galt. (2011).Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image. New York: Columbia University Press.pg. 38 3 Galt pp.52-54.
Georgie Carr is one of Another Gaze‘s staff writers
