The
Virgin Suicides
Blow Waves & Micro Waves
published in Real Time No.39, Sydney,
2000
Maui-surfer
bead necklace, peeking through a shirt undone to the chest.
Two-toned aviator sunglasses, optionally worn or fondled.
Narrow flared trousers slung low at the hip line. And a
sexy stud haircut: an amalgam of Farrah Fawcett's heat-wanded
wings, the Botticelli 'page-boy' look and the unfurled hirsuteness
of Jesus Christ. Such is the retro visage of one Trip Fontaine
(Josh Hartnett) as he sashays down the corridor of an upper
middle class Catholic high school circa 1975 in Sofia Coppola's
The Virgin Suicides.
Despite
the pleasure in reading this scene (accompanied as it is
by Heart's Magic Man) the vacuousness of The Virgin Suicides
perplexes me. From what I could get, a quartet of blondes
move around for 90 minutes, often set in repose as if they
are about to engage in a soft-core bacchanalia. Eventually,
they off themselves. Something about life being tough when
you're a teen girl. A bunch of male nerds perv on them in
a variety of ways (all ludicrously ineffective) but can't
even manage to wank. And some dork drones on and on with
a voice-over narration that is as insightful as The Wonder
Years. Something about "we-this" and "we-that" and other
crap about love, society, yadda-yadda. I guess the book
was a 'must-read'. Through this blancmange of 70s panel
van art (about as hip now as using a Chemical break-beat
sample) an arch 'girliness' wafts through the music by Air
- a French band, as they label themselves. And did I mention
that it's set in the 70s? The film reminds you of this about
every 30 seconds.
It's
2000 and still people think the 70s is 'cool'. Like they're
able to laugh at those 'dags' back then. Like people dressed
in Country Road, Mooks and new Levis are not 'dags'. Like
kids going into ad agencies with 'rad' ideas like 'sending
up the 70s' are real with-it. This ongoing flirtation with
'bad' style is typically retro - and typically insecure.
Most tellingly, it is achingly sanctioned and validated
as a stylistic stance, which makes it so weak and reduces
it to the highly conservative paradigms which define kitsch
and camp. Like the straight declaration of love for Abba
as a statement. Like the gay aesthetic embrace of Kylie
as a politic. Real radical. The Virgin Suicides looks and
moves like a video clip copied from an ad copied from a
movie copied from a send-up on a TV show copied from a video
clip copied from an avant-garde fashion spread copied from
a nightclub flyer copied from a film. In the end, you get
a micro-wave safe movie which numbs you to all processing
in the act of consumption.
How
exactly does this micro-waving - this 'retrogradation' -
work in a film in an audio-visual sense? How does one fold,
caress, arrange and drape a cinesonic fabric from another
era as part of the material texturing and rendering which
can enliven and embody a film's aesthetic, purpose and pleasure?
The Virgin Suicides offers a chance for considering this
- even though the film is woefully off the mark in terms
of successfully exploiting, fusing or even handling the
audio-visual issues discussed below.
The
Virgin Suicides has a requisite peppering of 70s songs,
and the music supervision is canny and accurate: Todd Rungren,
Gilbert O'Sullivan, 10CC, Heart. A consistency guides the
selection into a cache of soft sensual rock. Not entirely
vapid, but oozing with a pregnant sexuality which thematically
mirrors the languid moves of the blonde quartet and their
palpable pubescence. Just as many soft rock songs from the
mid-70s alluded to heady states of passion without unleashing
any noticeable libidinal energy (The Starlight Band's Afternoon
Delight being the penultimate example) the Virgin blondes
hover as objects beyond reach - but moist and ripe for engagement.
In a sense, they visualize the four-part vocal harmonies
which densify pop music's choral floridity. Such harmonic
vocalizations within Pop's meta-trajectory - from barber
shop quartets to wartime swing to urban doo wop to secularized
gospel to Brit pop to ornate R'n'B to the currently undying
boy/girl-group resurgence - use multiples of voice to act
as a swirling garment which simultaneously dresses and undresses
a melody. Such eroticism is rendered pornographic when one
lyrically addresses intimacy, privacy and consummation.
Although a better selection of tracks would more effectively
amplify this, the gratuitously enigmatic placement of the
blondes throughout the film serve to sound this musicological
trope.
Where
the audiovisual construct of seductive shots of the blondes
lolling around combined with 70's soft rock on the soundtrack
generates a coital limpidity central to the film's "what-me-sexy?"
tease, the music of Air melds these two elements into an
interiorized soundtrack. The score provided by Air (and
released as a CD separate to the official 'soundtrack recording'
compile of 70s songs) imagines the film musically almost
by pretending to be a band from 1975 who has been asked
to score a movie. The Air 'sound' is thus highly referential
and hyper-representational, perfectly befitting French culture's
curating of stylists who excel in replication (which may
be why post-70s Japanese pop culture has been so transfixed
by all things French). The choice to use Air is a savvy
one - though Air's playful authorial coding tends to be
lost within the film's own vagueness, due to the film's
alignment with the 'sound of Air' being posed against the
film's ambivalence toward the history of that sound.
So
what exactly is this 'sound of Air'? Their music for The
Virgin Suicides can be identified and classified by tracing
a multiple of sonic arcs which stream forth from the band's
studio-produced epicentre. One stream leads to a 'symphonic
loch', wherein a melting pot of mid-70s Euro rock references,
echoes, phonemes and motifs can be discerned. I spy concentric
ripples emanating from Magma, PFM, Le Orme, Ash Ra Tempel,
La Dusseldorf, Klaus Shulze, Kingdom Come, Goblin, King
Crimson, et al. Another stream leads to the lite-rock arrangements
gleaned from Ennio Morricone, Riz Ortolani, Bruno Nicolai,
Michel Polnareff, Michel LeGrand, Gert Wilden, Manfred Hubler,
Siegfried Schwab, et al. Their frothy film scores from the
late 60s to late 70s struck modern and modish poses via
their use of rock/pop instrumentation and spacey studio
effects to suggest a libertine power unleashed by their
pseudo-hip music. I can imagine that in Air's record collection
you would find Jerry Van Royen's score for Jess Franco's
Succubus (1968); Francois de Roubaix's score for Harry Kumel's
Daughters of Darkness (1971); Pink Floyd's score for Barbet
Schroeder's The Valley (1972); Gato Barbieri's score for
Bernado Bertolluci's Last Tango In Paris (1973); Jose Bartel's
score for Charles Matton's Spermula (1976), Michel Polnareff's
score for Lamont Johnson's Lipstick (1976); and Goblin's
score for George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978). (At the
very least, it has to be noted that the two-chord pattern
of The Virgin Suicides' main theme is lifted straight from
Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, 1973.)
Collectively,
these composers, ensembles, arrangers and orchestrators
often employed Baroque-style modals and chord sequences
which root the melodic terrain of European pop music as
solidly as blues idioms provide the musical cartography
for American pop music. There's a very simple way of putting
this: Euro music always sounds like it somehow comes from
a church. Its melodic progression, drama and resolution
wells up deep from the musical architectonics which mark
the shifts through Early, Medieval and Baroque music. Knowingly
or unknowingly, every trained keyboard player who ended
up as a composer or band member in the 70s imported such
mock piety through the use of organs, synthesizers and mellotrons.
The bizarre thing is that the soft-core sex boom which fuelled
European film production between 1969 to 1977 often combined
scenarios of mysterious topless nubiles wandering somnambulistically
through mansions, castles, convents and tombs with symphonic
rock throbbing and pipe organs droning on the soundtrack.
As scantily as the costumes adorned women's bodies, so did
themes of redemption, salvation, retribution and seduction
drape these films, limply aligning them to purported libertine
ideals intended to decimate the mouldy values of the Church
and the State's represssion of sexual freedom. (In other
words: virgin lesbian nuns humping to prog rock.) Such were
the characteristically heady delusions of the upper middle
class which both produced and consumed these movies.
Taking
all of this into account, The Virgin Suicides can be viewed
as a contemporary arthouse version of this endearingly pathetic
period of progressive cinema. It even - unknowingly, I would
argue - recalls far greater titles (and films) like The
Virgin Report, Virgin Among The Living Dead, The Blood Splattered
Bride, Confession of A Sixth Form Girl, Behind Convent Walls,
etc. via its sensationalist juxtaposition of 'virgin', 'suicide'
and David Hamilton photographic effects (though all we get
is a cupboard full of Tampax). Yet in place of the kind
of haunting erotic inexplicability one finds in much 70s
Euro sexploitation, The Virgin Suicides serves up a blanched,
complacent Italo-Catholic ambience intermingled with a lackadaisical
sexuality. The referents and codes lazily announce themselves
in the film's audiovisual terrain, but the narrational machine
of the film does not run on their fuel.
Despite
the careful sono-musical landscaping of Air - and despite
a controlled and consistent tone which guides the film's
plasticity and performances - a flatness pervades the very
surface of the film. Whilst this view sounds contradictory,
it should be noted how the recouping and appropriation of
a generic or iconic audiovisual textuality does not conform
to the extant and reduced notions of postmodern quotation.
You might be po-mo by restaging a film still for a photo
shoot in a fashion mag staged inside a new retro-outfitted
night-club and get all the details right, but such production
is like chemically distilling the flavour of lemon detergent:
your molecular formula of reconstruction remains in the
immaterial realm of calculable formula. You're doing an
image of an image; it was already rendered immaterial before
your arrival. Sound - specifically, the tonality of sound
of the recording of a musical style - is a dense fabric
of textures, hyper-material and abstract. It happens when
you arrive at it. Less a terrain of signs, images and objects
and more a dimension of shades, tones and surfaces. The
surface of music is never flat, as its sound images its
depth and engineers an environment for experience. Image
production does not operate in this way at all. So when
you bring the two together - yes, in the film soundtrack
- you design a multi-planar and multi-linear space for audio-visual
narration. Music - supervised, commissioned, scored, composed
- may be treated as mere wallpaper as in The Virgin Suicides,
but music is the whole room, the view outside the window
and the space inside your head.
How
does one fold, caress, arrange and drape a cinesonic fabric
from another era as part of the material texturing and rendering
which can enliven and embody a film's aesthetic, purpose
and pleasure? The research continues.
