Oh! You Pretty Things: The Egotistical and Feminine Sublimes in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides

This chapter examines the effects of the ‘egostical sublime’—a subjective version of sublimity that builds on Kantian notions of the sublime and is reserved as the province of masculine imagination—on female subjectivity and emotion in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. In the world of the film the expression of emotion is constantly thwarted by gender and class hypocrisy; characters fail to communicate despite undercurrents of deep feeling. The film engages with the egotistical sublime in its idealised aesthetic portrayal of a group of teenage girls, who serve as objects of sublimity for the local teenage boys. However, it also portrays a reverence for a ‘feminine’ or ‘everyday’ sublime by valorising a feminine aesthetic Rosalind Galt terms the ‘pretty’. Ultimately it creates an ambivalent presentation of this femininity through dreamlike yet kitsch imagery of the girls, which speaks not only to the celebration of femininity but also to its commodification and degradation.