ABSTRACT
The book’s concluding chapter places the themes, stylistic devices, and authorial traits in the context of Sofia Coppola’s later work: Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006), Somewhere (2010), The Bling Ring (2013) and The Beguiled (2017). Considering The Virgin Suicides against these later works, it is clear that the thematic concerns of dislocation, loss and the fragility of youth are revisited and deepened for Coppola. To trace the connections, themes and storytelling devices through the films is a project substantially aided by invoking one key tenet of Coppola’s filmmaking, the focus on identity formation. Certainly, the establishment of the adolescent—and then adult—identity is key to The Virgin Suicides . To understand Coppola as an auteur is to address identity formation, the process through which identity can be formed and transformed in adolescence and beyond. In this chapter, I trace how identity formation is so central to The Virgin Suicides and the subsequent Coppola films. While identity formation is central to theories of human development, Coppola’s take reflects a specifically modern concern, the inability to create a coherent or stable identity in our postmodern world.
