Sofia Coppola has long been celebrated as an icon of girlhood cinema, a genre of films that centers on the coming-of-age experiences of young girls. While Coppola does offer nuanced portrayals of girlhood, she does so almost exclusively with white women — thin, upper-middle-class white women at that. Additionally, Coppola has repeatedly left out characters of color from her films, including Mattie, a key character in the novel “The Beguiled,” which Coppola did not include in her film adaptation of the same name.
Coppola claimed that she did not include this character as she did not want the character to appear exploitative, but this claim rings a bit hollow when you consider that Coppola has rarely included a major character of color across her entire filmography. Coppola has never explicitly stated that she deems white girlhood to be superior to girlhood for women of color, but her continued pattern of only offering nuance to her white female leads, while not actively interrogating their privilege, speaks where her words have not.
Race is inherently linked to class, as the dominant structures of white hegemony have established systems of power that privilege white men, and specifically, straight white men above all else. In both the whiteness of her protagonists and their upper-class status, Coppola refuses to interrogate this nuance and instead situates her aesthetic within the dominant white framework. Coppola’s aesthetic presence has manifested into a material one, as many girls aspire to imitate Coppola’s aesthetic in their own lives. This meshing of Coppola’s aesthetic with lived realities continues to produce an air of white and class superiority in the material space.
A key way this appears is in rooms, and chiefly, through the idea of “girl messiness.” Coppola’s debut feature film, “The Virgin Suicides,” exemplifies this best. The Lisbon sisters, the main characters of the film, all have rooms arrayed with “girl messiness.” Their walls are covered in collages, a mismatch of photos, drawings and letters. The surfaces of their desks are often barely visible beneath the scattered array of beauty products, perfume and trinkets. There are frequently clothes scattered around their rooms, hanging from banisters and strewn across the ground. Each room is specifically formulated to a color palette, often light or pastel in color — everything distributed around the room working towards the overall aesthetic cohesiveness of the space.
The lighting and softness of the spaces is created for a white gaze, as the rooms are filled with the girls themselves, all of them white, all of them blonde, all of them upper middle class. There is also a kind of unspoken privilege evident within this, as each of the Lisbon girls is able to not only possess this many material things, but meticulously choose them to match their rooms. This combination of the filmmakers’ privilege and race, projected onto the Lisbon girl’s privilege and race, simmers under the surface of the seemingly luminous aesthetic, tainting it with dominant hegemonic powers and prejudices.
Recently, a viral trend was sparked when TikTok creator @latenightwar posted a video talking about how, “When a girl’s room is messy, it’s Sofia Coppola, it’s ‘hell is a teenage girl’ … it’s indie, it’s hot.” This audio then became the background for videos of other girls’ “messy” rooms, aligning themselves directly with Coppola and her aesthetic. These videos, predominantly posted by white creators, focus on the same things Coppola does — collective color palettes, mess that looks disorganized rather than disgusting, clothes draped around a space, piles of things like books, makeup and perfume. Vintage furniture, lamps and trinkets are featured prominently as well, linking mostly clearly to the ornately detailed and antique spaces in “Marie Antoinette.” These rooms aren’t just messy, though. Rather, they are full of things that require careful selection — vintage clothes, perfumes and specifically placed wall art. All of it is curated.
The messiness that appears in these videos, and in Coppola’s films, is not an accident. Each item in the space is specifically placed to appear a certain way before the camera — to evoke a feeling of cohesiveness and aesthetic purpose even within the mess. The rooms are meant to seem messy, but they are not gross. They are cluttered, but not disastrous. Even as many of Coppola’s protagonists struggle with the constraints of girlhood and growing up, they are still buoyed by their whiteness and material possessions. The reproduction of these spaces then continues the pattern of material wealth and paleness, whiteness, and softness as an aesthetic. Many of the creators who posted to the sound are themselves white, and the sound grounds itself not only in Coppola and her white identity, but also in many of the materials pictured in the videos. This frequently includes books by authors who interrogate race and social class co-opted into this aesthetic and an overall emphasis on a softness and gentleness that is not afforded to women of color.
Mixed in with the perfume and lush framing, there is a distinct air of privilege without acknowledgment. This is classist feminism in action — an emphasis on the celebration of women, but only the privileged, primarily white few. This is not the world we want to live in, or the aesthetic we want to cultivate. Instead, we should be striving to create spaces of inclusivity, to be engaging at our cores with intersectional feminism. We must be actively interrogating our privilege, the ways identities work in tandem with systems to create power imbalances. This is something that must be interrogated at a broader societal level, but that we can do starting in our very own spaces. Consider the privilege you have in your spaces. Consider what you have hanging on your walls, what you’re emphasizing within your room. Engage with more diverse literature and films — do not sit aloof on your polished bedroom throne. Engage with the world around you and push against this overtly privileged and isolated perspective of girlhood.
Lauren is a senior studying English literature, communications and film. You can connect with her at [email protected].