Sofia Coppola’s Melancholic Aesthetic: Vanishing Femininity in an Object-oriented World

Chapter Six offers a close reading of Sofia Coppola’s first three feature films, arguing that these texts provide critiques of neoliberal postfeminist culture through the heroines’ experience of a melancholic existential inertia. It is an integral feature of these films, however, that protagonists racialised as white and socio-economically empowered are incapable of decentring their experience to see, hear or otherwise relate to subjects racialised as non-white—especially in so far as these subjects are positioned below them in status and class hierarchies. Coppola has managed to capitalise on a cultural mood of postfeminist melancholia in order to sell stories of white female burden not only through her cinematic endeavours but her fashionable collaborations also. Yet, her cinema also capitalises on the association of melancholia with specialness in offering romanticised portraits of protagonists confined not only by their society, but by their own propensity for introspective processes which prove both pleasurable and pointlessly apathetic.

The World Is Her Oyster: Negotiating Contemporary White Womanhood in Hollywood’s Tourist Spaces

This chapter analyses Hollywood tourist romances Eat Pray Love and Under the Tuscan Sun as examples of texts in which the burdened white woman transcends her melancholic state as a result of travelling beyond US borders. The female protagonists in both films are creative writers who feel stifled by their urban environments and discover that the value systems they encounter outside the US allow them to feel creatively reinvigorated as well as liberated from societal dictates that declare true happiness to reside in marriage, upward mobility, and bodily discipline. In these films, the tourist zone must appear to exist independently of the globalising forces of neoliberal capitalism, with the heroines’ belief that they are divinely guided on a spiritual journey of self-discovery constituting a shift away from the secular ideologies of neoliberalism and postfeminism, while also operating as a form of white exceptionalism within the foreign space.

Introduction

The introductory section opens with a discussion of Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, examining this text’s significance as part of a broader cultural moment in which the depressive episodes of white women are used to provide commentary on the moral decay of the Western world. It situates the book’s analysis within the fields of postfeminist media studies and critical race and whiteness studies. The Hollywood manifestation of postfeminist melancholia is attributed to several factors, including a resurgence of interest in feminist politics, conflicts in US race relations, and the shifting image of the US internationally. It then argues for the examination of this cinematic figure’s relationship to a politics of white hegemony, briefly exploring Hollywood’s history of utilising stories involving ethnic appropriation as a means of assuaging national anxieties associated with earlier socio-political movements, such as the civil rights movement and sexual revolution.

Conclusion: Melancholic White Femininity, Cultural Resonance and the Shifting Politics of Representation

The conclusion discusses the recent changes that have occurred in Hollywood as a result of backlash over a lack of industry diversity, both onscreen and behind the camera. It points to the recent successes of films with predominantly African American casts at the Academy Awards, and hypothesises as to how the reception of such films by both industry professionals and audiences may have changed in the Trump era. In addition, the concluding chapter explores how the book’s arguments may resonate beyond the US context.

Paranoid Attachments to Suburban Dreams: Reading Pathological Femininity in Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train

Chapter Four analyses the suburban melancholia evident in the psychological thrillers Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, arguing that the films are examples of an emerging subgenre in which audiences are tasked with assessing whether the heroine’s melancholia harbours an inner violent pathology. Neoliberal postfeminist ideology, here depicted as inciting middle-class female malaise, lends itself to a new kind of (lucrative) cinematic puzzle in which readers or viewers guess the effects on women of a failed social promise. In these two films, the suburban environment, the gothic genre, and the conventions of other quintessentially postfeminist texts provide clues as to the melancholic heroine’s true state of mind.

‘Hoist the Colours!’ Framing Feminism through Charismatic White Leadership in the Fantasy Blockbuster

This chapter explores the manifestation of melancholic white femininity in fantasy films featuring proto-feminist heroines. The protagonists of The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass experience feelings of burden in relation to the expectations placed upon aristocratic, white women. They dream of alternate magical lands that will allow them their freedom and are rewarded through a series of events that allow them to enter these magical spaces, subsequently transgressing idealised standards of white, upper-class femininity. The protagonists form bonds with victims of oppression in these fantastical spaces, and ultimately come to realise that their freedom from gender norms will occur upon realising their long-dormant leadership potential and liberating the inhabitants of the magical zone. Feminism here is recognised as a type of social charisma with white hegemonic power structures not deposed but rather reframed through the coming-of-age journey and benevolent intentions of a melancholic, white heroine.

Aristocratic Whiteness, Body Trauma and the Market Logic of Melancholia in Black Swan

The fifth chapter explores Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan as an example of a film in which Hollywood’s historical treatment of classical ballet is referenced to provide a self-reflexive and critical commentary on the role of the melancholic white woman in artistic representation. The film provides a horrific take on the ethereal and melancholic Russian ballet Swan Lake, deploying a variety of genre tropes associated with melodrama, horror and film noir in order to convey the protagonist’s increasing levels of paranoia as she loses control of her disciplined ballerina body. In doing so, Black Swan critiques the culture of competitive individualism and bodily discipline associated with neoliberal postfeminism and works to collapse the distinction between mental illness and the romanticised cultural discourse of melancholia. The film’s politics, however, are frustrated by the insistence on framing gendered pathologies in terms of white burden and by its strategic self-reflexivity in relation to Hollywood image construction.

Neoliberalism, Female Agency and Conspicuous Consumption as Tragic Flaw in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine

Chapter Three analyses the 2013 film Blue Jasmine as an example of a text in which the protagonist’s melancholia appears misplaced and is thus unable to be alleviated by a journey away from home. Jasmine operates as a social outcast who exemplifies value systems that are temporarily deemed morally reprehensible, based as they are upon the over-valuation of economic income and enthusiastic participation in consumer-capitalism. Blue Jasmine’s narrative and its protagonist must be understood as signifying at a temporary period of ideological weakening for neoliberalism and its associated political rhetoric. It is this moment of instability that allows for the privileged race and class status of the postfeminist representational subject within this film to be configured as an ethical problem to be debated, even if on superficial or temporary terms, rather than a conditional aspect of the aspirational ideal.