Sofia Coppola: Alone in the Lift
Focus FeaturesIt could be argued that Sofia Coppola’s entire filmmaking output has been, thus far, underpinned by a pursuit of narrowly-defined themes and ideas. With only seven features under her belt – counting A Very Murray Christmas among them would be highly unorthodox – it is rather difficult to infer any degree of thematic eclecticism driving her career. Hence, it is quite easy to extract the connective tissue keeping her work together, or at least so it would seem.
Some of Coppola’s works, such as The Virgin Suicides or The Beguiled, would lead one to believe she has been predominantly interested in delving into the nuance of girlhood. On the other hand, Somewhere, The Bling Ring or even Marie Antoinette suggest she is equally driven to tell stories peeking behind the curtain of celebrity. Naturally, all such remarks are valid and immediately informed by Coppola’s own life experiences. Being the daughter of one of the most prominent filmmaking voices of The New Hollywood, Francis Ford Coppola, she is uniquely equipped to make these kinds of observations. After all, she did grow up sequestered from the society at large, owing to her family’s wealth and social stature and she did have unfettered access to high-profile celebrities whom she organically viewed as house guests or even friends.
However, as much as the vagaries of womanhood and the cutting critique of celebrity are indisputable driving forces for her storytelling, Sofia Coppola’s films are all underpinned by a different thematic conversation – a far-reaching exploration of alienation. Even though The Beguiled does, in many respects, look very closely at the nature of sororal bonds between its stellar ensemble of characters, it is equally a rumination on what it must have been like for these women to find themselves in a world abandoned by men. By the same token, Marie Antoinette, a meta-biopic about the tragic life of France’s last pre-revolutionary monarch, offers a perspective on someone who found herself ‘alone at the top’: shunned by her peers and completely alien to the rest of the world. Quite frankly, a thorough survey of every single film Coppola ever wrote and directed will quickly reveal that what they have in common is that they all deal with loneliness – some very openly, others by hiding it under the veneer of style or genre.
Interestingly, although Coppola’s entire filmography fits neatly under this umbrella, three of her features stand out prominently head and shoulders above the crowd: Lost In Translation, Somewhere, and her most recent exploit, On The Rocks. It has been already remarked upon that at least two of them are directly related to each other. As such, it’s an open secret that On The Rocks functions as a spiritual successor to Coppola’s 2003 Oscar-winning golden ticket to greatness, Lost In Translation. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice the elements of symmetry between these films, from the casting of Bill Murray as a huggable rogue dad all the way to the epilogue of the film where the viewer is gleefully denied knowledge of what is engraved on the gift Rashida Jones receives from her husband. For the record, this is quite clearly a piece of tacit homage to the now iconic scene from Lost In Translation where Bill Murray famously whispered something into Scarlett Johansson’s ear and invariably sent hundreds of truth-seeking cinephiles onto a lip-reading quest, which continues unabated to this day.
However, those films – and this includes Somewhere, Coppola’s most criminally overlooked piece – are connected much deeper at a thematic level. They are all incarnations of the same storytelling melody; they are stories about people stuck in a purgatory, enveloped by loneliness, suffocating behind the mask of normalcy they don for the outside world to see and desperately pining for something to change. In addition, they are the only three films in Coppola’s entire catalogue to use the concept of an elevator scene as a narrative tool employed not only as an afterthought getting characters from A to B but predominantly working to underscore the filmmaker’s central message.
There are a total of seven scenes that take place in a lift scattered across these films: four in Lost In Translation, one in Somewhere, and two in On The Rocks. Some are fleeting moments of seemingly transitory extraction, some function as visual jokes or character cues, and a handful blossom into fully functional dramatic set pieces. Nevertheless, they all serve a purpose of underscoring Coppola’s primary thematic interest of exploring alienation. To fully appreciate the importance of these scenes, the vast majority of which most viewers will simply overlook, it is crucial to take a step back and think about what – if anything – makes them stand out. And the answer is in the fundamental characteristics of their setting: the elevator itself.
It goes without saying that life in general is governed by a set of social and behavioural protocols. Different occasions call for different toolboxes of mannerisms, body language and vocabulary. There are dos and don’ts to every situation one can find themselves in. Consequently, to thrive in the ocean of social interaction people don appropriate masks to suit the occasion. This phenomenon is reflected in Coppola’s films as well, abundantly so. Charlotte in Lost In Translation always hides her loneliness from her husband. Bob carries on with his photo shoots and talk-show appearances despite openly detesting every second of it. Johnny Marco in Somewhere persists in a seemingly comfortably numb state and lackadaisically maintains an illusion of immense success even though his soul is dying of loneliness. And equally, Laura in On The Rocks must carry on with her daily duties as a successful professional and a mother despite having lost her bearings in life.
These characters all suffer internally because the lives they have to maintain require them to pretend to know what they want out of life or that they are fine with their lives as they are. After all, other people depend on their ability to keep their act together and they seem to be driven, at least partially, by a desire to keep everyone around them happy. They carry themselves as people-pleasers. However, this pressure to maintain a certain image subsides rapidly when they have an opportunity to be alone. To achieve this, Coppola uses the setting of an elevator as a refuge from the outside world and a place where her characters can forget about the social norms they cling to adhering otherwise. This is because a lift is a magical place, come to think of it. It is a box suspended in air where a person can momentarily sequester themselves from the universe at large and spend a handful of precious seconds alone with their thoughts. Notably, this circumstance is not modified by the presence of other passengers because an unspoken protocol dictates that all social interactions cease for the duration of the trip between floor, which translates to a visual cliché of not facing other people and pausing any conversations.
This, in turn, gives the viewer a unique opportunity to peer into these characters a bit more because – for those few fleeting moments – their true feelings are on display. Bob in Lost In Translation is allowed to look jaded and tired as he towers over his Japanese hosts in what became an iconic tableau and one of the calling cards of the film. Similarly, Laura in On The Rocks is caught by Coppola – for what feels like three seconds – as she enjoys a brief moment of serenity and gathers her inner strength in the lift before joining a playgroup session with her adorable young daughter. Her husband Dean allows the viewer a glimpse into his unsettled soul towards the end of the film, shaken by uncertainty of the impending confrontation with his wife. These are all seemingly forgettable moments that might easily escape even the most astute viewer, but they are unquestionably important to understanding what Sofia Coppola is trying to achieve. These are brief snapshots of unfiltered truth emboldening the unsettling circumstances these people are in, delivered on a wholly subliminal level.
In addition to these pint-sized character moments that might also be products of pure artistic serendipity as opposed to rational narrative engineering, Sofia Coppola turns her elevator scenes into something more profound and explicitly tethered to how these stories develop. In fact, it could be successfully argued that the platonic romance between Bob and Charlotte, one of the thematic pillars of Lost In Translation, unfolds almost entirely in this setting as well. This is where Bob and Charlotte – two foreigners sticking out like sore thumbs in Tokyo – first make eye contact. And later, this is where they bond and allow some intimacy into their interaction, simply because nobody can see them. Thus, these four scenes scattered throughout the film form their own little dramatic arc running beneath the epidermis of the narrative, as well as they add important grace notes to the filmmaker’s thesis about alienation, inertia and finding meaning betwixt life’s overbearing mundanities.
However, the most intriguing use of the elevator as a thematic backdrop is found in Somewhere, Coppola’s most open deconstruction of the malaise and loneliness baked into the notions of fame and celebrity. As a matter of fact, this scene is often dismissed as nothing more than a meme, an inside joke or even complete insignificance. It sees Johnny Marco share a lift ride with a celebrity, played by Benicio Del Toro, in the Chateau Marmont hotel, an infamous refuge of celebrities whose walls have witnessed more orgies than the city walls of Gomorrah. The two stay there in awkward silence for a brief moment before Johnny initiates a conversation. Del Toro asks which room Johnny is in and then replies he met Bono in there one day. The scene ends there.
Superficially inconsequential, this little vignette embedded within the film is crucial to the story and yet is never brought up as anything more than an acknowledgment of a cameo or – at best – as a disposable comment about just how divorced from reality celebrities can be. Yet, when set against the context of Johnny Marco’s entire journey, from escaping the vicious circle of drug-filled inebriation to embracing his responsibility as a father, this seemingly irrelevant scene becomes a crucial catalyst of change. In this moment, Marco is confronted by a realisation that the world of celebrity holds no value whatsoever after all. That the emperor is naked. Up to this point, he has operated under the assumption that everyone in this racket must suffer from similar Weltschmerz as him and being stuck in the lift with one of his peers – away from the press and the madding crowd of paparazzi – he could seek an acknowledgment of that fact. What he gets instead is a dose of disappointment because Del Toro refuses to doff his own mask and embrace this moment of honesty. Or, alternatively, he is incapable of doing so because his mask is now permanent. He has fully committed to the shtick of empty smiles and chest-puffing, which is something Johnny simply cannot bring himself to do any longer. Although Coppola does not explicitly aspire to use this scene as a defining turning point for this character to embark on a quest to turn his life around, it is nevertheless there among many drops that cause the chalice of despair to overflow.
Given how homogeneous these seven scenes are at their core, it should be quite clear that Coppola’s recurring use of a lift as a thematic confessional is not exactly incidental. However, their importance is accompanied by a modicum of irony, because their fleeting nature immediately invites a question challenging their alleged indispensability. Are these scenes still crucial if the viewer is not aware of their importance, or even their existence? Do they matter if nobody notices them? The answer is: yes and no. Some, like the exchange of smiles between Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, are directly tethered to the primary narrative progression, while others could be excised and nobody would tell the difference. However, their existence binds these films together, reinforces the axes of symmetry between them, and vindicates the keen viewer actively looking for this thematic connective tissue.
It goes without saying that Sofia Coppola’s cinema is built on moments. Her stories are rarely dependent on complex plot machinations, intrigue or high stakes. She is a purveyor of understated brilliance contained in brief flashes of character depth. As a result, her work is saturated with clever nuance tethered to some truly profound notions of identity and self-affirmation. Although her portfolio of artistic output is entirely devoted to understating the melody of loneliness, these three films – Lost In Translation, Somewhere, and On The Rocks – ought to be singled out as a standalone triad bound together by language, tone, mission and visual symmetry. This ‘trilogy of elevator alienation’ stands tall as Sofia Coppola’s thematic canon: a synthesis of experiences drawn from her own life and a stunningly sharp critique of a world she has had unique access to. Most importantly, it proves unequivocally that filmmaking genius runs in the family.
