This Week in Reading #3

Something long, something short

Sofia Coppola’s Path to Filming Gilded Adolescence - The New Yorker

Few things bring me as much joy as a long, well-written profile on personal icons, in this case, my Favourite White Woman. If 2023 was the ‘Year of the Girl,’ Coppola was its original protagonist. Before Miu Miu cat eye sunglasses and dresses, there were Chanel cardigans. Before Taylor Swift and Barbie, there was Kirsten Dunst and Marie Antoinette. Heck, if I’m to believe this profile, Coppola anticipated Pinterest aesthetics when she spent an adolescence decorating her walls by curating images from Vogue that have since reincarnated themselves into the dreamlike quality of her movies.

But the girlhood is seen as pre-political, and therefore, pre-, even anti-feminist. Lost in Translation is just a story of a trust fund “girl finding herself” in a some foreign country, Marie Antoinette is an unserious attempt at depoliticising the French Revolution and Priscilla merely gives its protagonist a very ‘teenage womanhood’. This is unlike the directness of the feminism in say, Jane Campion’s work or pre-Barbie Gerwig. This is also partly because Coppola is a ‘nepo baby’ (cue the deeply personal scrutiny she received for her frankly drab performance as Mary Corleone) She’s privileged enough to not be taken seriously. We can reduce her to the frills, pastel pinks and cupcakes of her movies.

But in seeing Coppola as the auteur of girlhood, we may forget why this is so. The profile reveals a bit of the more feminine side of her upbringing, in stark contrast to her acutely macho father.

One member of the family who struggled to find her way in the business was Eleanor. In “Notes,” the first of two memoirs she has written, she described meeting Francis on the set of his début feature, the horror film “Dementia 13,” in 1962. He was the director, she was the assistant art director, and she thought that they might work on films together for years to come. Instead, within a few months she found out she was pregnant with Gio. She and Francis were married the following weekend, and Francis, as Eleanor put it to me, “made it very clear that my role was to be the wife and the mother.” She writes in “Notes” of a feeling of living in waiting—“waiting for Francis to get a chance to direct . . . waiting to go on location, waiting to go home.”… Sofia described a time when her mother visited the set of “Priscilla” and observed a scene in which Elvis is preparing to go on tour, while Priscilla will stay with their daughter, Lisa Marie. Eleanor told her, “I’ve been there.” Eleanor recalled to me, “When Elvis said to Priscilla, ‘You have everything you need to be happy,’ that’s exactly what I was feeling at the time. I went to the psychiatrist and said, ‘Why am I unhappy?’ Not one single person said to me, ‘You are a creative person.’ ”

…When I told Coppola about the feelings of stuckness that Eleanor had shared with me, and that seemed to percolate through Coppola’s films, she said, “I think so many people can relate to that, especially women.” Then she added, of her mom, “I’m sure seeing my first impression of womanhood as a woman who felt trapped, and her sadness, is related to the women in my films, more than to a side of myself.”

There you have it. Coppola, despite having her creative apprenticeship from her father is still, carries lessons from her mother in her work, at least unconsciously. And we see mothers like this all the time, everywhere — mothers who quit studying to marry, quit their job to care for children, mothers who have some inexplicable sadness written in them, apparent in their very motion. This is why I immediately scoff at anyone who tries to reduce Coppola into some other rich brat making movies because she carries a famous surname. Look closely and beneath the frills, pink pastels and cupcakes, you’ll find shocking viscerality.

The profile also contains possibly the funniest post-publication correction that I’ve read: Jacob Elordi’s height was misstated.

Toward a Free Economy - Aditya Balasubramanian

In an election year when we go around shaking our heads and muttering under our breath about a lack of an alternative, this books serves a good reminder of the possibilities and promises of opposition politics even when an electoral monolith exists. This was a quicker read than I expected, rich with notes. What particularly struck me is in its profiles of various leaders of the erstwhile Swatantra Party, there is a great deal of documenting of their intellectual influences. It is evident that everyone from London-educated barristers like Minoo Masani to ‘moffusil intellectuals’ NG Ranga constantly read up and engaged with emerging ideas and movements across the world. The politicians then looked outside for creating something new in here. Compare that with where we are here today — suspiciously self-occupied, insidiously inward-looking.