The Virgin Suicides at 20: Sofia Coppola's debut continues to haunt
At the centre of The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola’s dreamy yet devastating adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s acclaimed 1993 novel, is an unsolved mystery of the most troubling kind, a puzzle that will never be completed. The questions asked by those in the film, and by us the viewers, will never be fully answered. An attempt to figure out the hows and whys will only ever be that, an attempt. It’s what’s left behind when someone kills themselves, a fog of painful unsureness, a feeling that I filed away as other when I was 16, watching it for the first of many times. As is the case for many teens, the idea had briefly entered my mind at certain low points, but it still felt distant, like looking at something through a camera that isn’t in focus.
Twenty years later, my experience of suicide, and, in turn, the film itself, has changed. Last year, a family member and a close friend both killed themselves, in the space of about six months, forcing an otherworldly concept into grim reality, a difficult confrontation most of us don’t expect to ever have. As I watched the film again, I found a new, deeper understanding of what Coppola herself described as “the extraordinary power of the unfathomable”, of how not knowing the answer to a question of such staggering gravity can haunt you, a grip that may loosen over time but will remain nonetheless.
In an industry overrun with nepotism, there was every reason to wince at the film’s arrival at Cannes in 1999 (a year before its release): the first film from Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter, co-produced by him and starring actors he had worked with. The last we had seen of Sofia was in The Godfather Part III, disastrously miscast in what turned out to be a miserable experience for all of us, especially for her. It pushed her away from acting, something she was never that interested in anyway, and years later, with great help, she moved behind the camera, where she has remained ever since.
Shuddering memories of Boxing Helena (David Lynch’s 19-year-old daughter Jennifer’s laughable debut), Paris Can Wait (Francis Ford Coppola’s wife Eleanor’s indulgent and uninteresting attempt at directing) and pretty much anything written by John Landis’s son Max have shown us the dangers of Hollywood over-assistance, a heavy-handed ushering of vanity projects that make it to the screen for all the wrong reasons, home movies that should have stayed at home. But with The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola emerged from her father’s shadow with purpose, the work of a film-maker who wasn’t just doing it because she could but rather because she should, an innate ability that would have pierced through with or without the help of an Oscar-winning parent.
Set in 70s Michigan, in a suburbia that’s both recognisably banal and at times ethereal, The Virgin Suicides opens with a suicide attempt. Cecilia Lisbon, the youngest daughter of five, has tried to kill herself, an act that leads to concern and confusion from those in the community. “You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets,” she’s ignorantly told. “Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl,” she smartly replies. It’s the beginning of the end, as told to us by an unseen narrator, the grownup version of a neighbourhood boy from the time, part of a quartet of curious locals whose obsession with the Lisbon girls has continued long after their deaths.
Coppola keeps us at a distance from the sisters (played by Kirsten Dunst, AJ Cook, Leslie Hayman, Chelse Swain and Hanna R Hall), offering us brief anecdotes and scrappy clues so that we, like the boys, are left with only random pieces of the puzzle. The parents, played by Kathleen Turner and James Woods, are strict but not unloving, religious but not extremist, clueless but not in a way that isn’t relatable and so while speculation from gossiping neighbours places responsibility for what happens solely at their feet, we know it’s not that simple; it never is. The rush of unfamiliar, unwieldy emotions that come for us all during adolescence are too easily minimised by those who have already gone through it, as if the bigger picture they now see should be visible to all, and so, for me, at the core of the film is a collection of muffled screams. The first real scream we hear is when Cecilia kills herself, soon into the film, not long after her first attempt. We’re shown how those who knew her and those who didn’t all struggle with what to do, what to say, how to react, who to blame, an impossible situation that arrives without precedent.
Coppola notably shows us no sign that the grief experienced by the surviving sisters is taken into account, is treated with the severity it deserves, and so life goes on as normal to those on the outside. But there’s a wound that lingers. When the girls are forced to stay inside as punishment, after Dunst’s Lux spends the night with a boy, Trip Fontaine (played by a 21-year-old Josh Hartnett at the height of his heartthrob years), we see the toll it starts to take. Their imprisonment is to them a clear sign that they’re neither understood nor respected. “We’re suffocating,” Lux says to her mother in a telling fragment of a scene near the end. “You’re safe here,” she replies. “I can’t breathe in here,” Lux answers.
The dreamy aesthetic and Air’s transcendent, perfectly matched score led some to dismiss the film as a mere mood piece, of style over substance, but it’s too grounded, too rich in detail to fall into that overused categorisation. We see that in a flash forward to an older Trip, whose teen bravado has faded into pathetic delusion, and we feel it in the finale as the boys discover the girls’ bodies, while dreaming of the “impossible excursions” they were planning to take. It remains Coppola’s best film, in my opinion, because of this, because the emotions that accompany the atmosphere haunt with equal force.
It’s as much about those who leave us as it is about those who are left behind, lumbered with what Coppola refers to as an “oddly shaped emptiness”, a misty, unfocused form of grief that I now know firsthand. The final, mournful piece of narration expresses sadness over the loss but also a stinging sense of regret. If the boys had just called that little bit louder, if they had just arrived that little bit sooner, maybe things might have been different. They’re agonising questions that we, as those who are still here, will always ask ourselves, knowing that the answers will for ever remain a mystery.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email: jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
the same energy and excitement as the Who,” he says over a coffee in Stoke. “I’d watched the Who open-mouthed live in Leeds when I was 15. But music had become stagnant – punk was what was missing.”
Stone relocated to Stoke after meeting and marrying a woman who lived there. He started a shop, Mike Stone’s Records, and a label called Clay Records at 26 Hope Street, funding the latter with £1,000 from a relative and naming it after the city’s potteries. Today, the site – now a disused fast-food joint awaiting demolition – looks lonely and unloved. Back then it was a dynamo of musical revolution, the wheels of which were initially set in motion by a 17-yearold girl.
Privately educated Tanya Rich, an unlikely rebel, had cut her hair and dyed it “all sorts of colours” after hearing the Saints song (I’m) Stranded. Punks in Stoke were rare enough; female ones nonexistent. “Akko, the original Discharge drummer Anthony Axon, saw me and ran down the road to tell the boys, ‘There’s a female punk in Stoke!’” she says with a laugh, still blue-haired at 59. “They ran back and said, ‘We’re a band’.”
Rich dated Rainy, then became Discharge’s manager, driving their success. “Punk had all these female artists, from Siouxsie Sioux to Beki Bondage,” she explains. “Female managers were unknown. But I had chutzpah. I got them gigs with the Clash, the Ruts and the
Damned.” Rich gave Stone a demo tape containing songs such as Acne. He remembers saying: “You sound like the Sex Pistols – what’s the point? But then they came back with something else.”
As Tezz tells it, the classic Discharge sound resulted when roadie Kelvin “Cal” Morris replaced him as vocalist, bringing growling, shouty vocals of the kind that are now standard in extreme metal. “I switched to drums and did the [furiously fast] D-beat,” Tezz says. “The band changed overnight.” Stone saw the revamped band play live – a slab of raw meat hurled his way almost hit him. “I think they were trying to impress me,” he says. “But suddenly, Discharge sounded like a bulldozer. They made the Pistols sound like Take That.” When Stone saw GBH supporting Discharge at the Victoria Hall in Hanley he thought: “I’ll sign them as well.”
GBH singer Abrahall’s theory about why punk’s second wave was much harder and faster is that “the audience had become the bands, but we didn’t have the same musical skills [as the Clash et al], so we went 100mph”. Tezz suggests that the growing metal element was because: “we all loved Motörhead, although punks wouldn’t admit it”.
The intense music also mirrored its environment. “People would either take photographs of us or want to fight us,” Rich says, while Abrahall remembers “being chased by bikers, skinheads, or straights – as we called normal people. Police vans would wait outside the Crown targeting punk rockers.”
“The gigs were like wars,” says Discharge’s Tezz. “Violence every night. People would think, ‘What’s this noise?’ and throw shit at us. When we opened for the UK Subs it turned into a massive battle.” A wry laugh. “When we started getting popular it thinned out the criminals.”
Abrahall wrote GBH’s first song, Generals, on hearing that the government were considering bringing back conscription. Discharge meanwhile sang about “being shit on far too long” (Decontrol) or the evil of warfare (Never Again). “Cal was into Crass and always had his head in pamphlets,” Tezz explains. “That’s where he got ideas from.” They showed the nuclear survival film series Protect and Survive at gigs, while scene character Biffo the Gasmask would “dress up as a housemaid in a gas mask, vacuuming the stage”.
Stone captured this creative explosion as label head and producer, despite knowing little about studios. “But I’d watched Steve Lillywhite working with [mod band] the Merton Parkas,” he explains. “In my naivety, I recorded Cal singing twice and layered one vocal over another. It sounded like a wall of sound. So I did the same with the guitars.”
For Discharge’s Realities of War EP, in 1980, Stone went to take a band shot at the back of 26 Hope Street. “But Cal didn’t want his photo taken, so turned his back”. The resulting closeup of Morris’s studded leather jacket became “the most iconic sleeve I ever released”. Stone drove a bootful of the EP to “smirking distributors, who’d go, ‘OK, I’ll take a few.’ But then after John Peel played it on Radio 1 it was like a hurricane. Punks all over the country wanted the record, and thousands of them copied that leather jacket.”
Clay’s roster weren’t the only British hardcore punk bands. Other labels sprang up, notably No Future. In 1981, Edinburgh band the Exploited – who formed two years after Discharge – appeared on Top of the Pops. After the show, guitarist Big John Duncan says, “women old enough to be our mums were coming up to us and being really nice, but the song Dead Cities captured a moment when cities were rioting”. The BBC producers also wanted Discharge, but Morris turned them down. “Real shame,” sighs Tezz, drily. “It would have been nice for my mum.”
Nevertheless, Discharge’s 1982 debut Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing went Top 40, while GBH’s City Baby Attacked By Rats reached No 17 on the charts. “In between a Jimi Hendrix collection and Paul McCartney,” chuckles Stone. “I thought, fuck me, I’ve done it.” Both bands enjoyed more success before the collapse of distributor Pinnacle in the mid-80s took the label down. “I lost £25,000,” Stone says. “It wiped me out.”
GBH continue touring and recording, reaching a new audience after Slayer covered Sick Boy. Abrahall has spotted Travis Barker and Rita Ora wearing GBH T-shirts, and is grateful to Stone for “giving me a start, and a very happy life”. Gizz Butt, former guitarist of English Dogs who began their career on Clay as hardcore punks, remembers the 1984 article hailing them as “the dawning of speedcore”. Meanwhile, three-quarters of the classicera Discharge lineup are together, and Metallica have been spotted at their gigs.
Forty years on, Tezz is keen to credit Stone for “taking a chance, when other labels said we made noise, not music”, although he struggles to comprehend the impact of a band he started after selling frozen fish to buy equipment. “I can’t listen to those bands and say, ‘That’s what we invented.’ But I know we changed the direction of music.”
The man who made it possible still manages old signings Demon and recently did courier work. Sadly, Stone sold the rights to his catalogue when he was broke years ago, but is proud of what his label started. As he drops me off at Stoke station, he nods towards the statue of renowned potter Josiah Wedgwood and jokes: “There should be one of me.”
• Discharge’s Protest and Survive – The Anthology is out on BMG. GBH are scheduled to play Rebellion punk festival in Blackpool, 6-9 August.
• This story was amended on 21 April 2020 to correct the origins of band the Exploited, who are from Edinburgh not Glasgow. An earlier version also wrongly described Sepultura as one of the “big four” thrash metal bands, widely acknowledged as Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth.
tempts to characterise Covid-19 as the “Chinese disease”, several government ministers have sought to highlight the regime’s failings in tackling the disease in December and January.
When under pressure for a lack of testing in the UK, Michael Gove appeared to lay the blame for the UK’s lack of readiness for coronavirus upon China.
“Some of the reporting from China was not clear about the scale, the nature, the infectiousness of this,” he said.
His comments followed Downing Street briefings claiming that ministers expect a “reckoning” with China over misinformation – UK scientists claimed the number of deaths in China could be 40 times greater than officially reported, while Chinese doctors who tried to blow the whistle were silenced.
Many scientists have pointed out that China voluntarily shared the genetic code of the virus very quickly, allowing countries to start making diagnostic tests and working on vaccines.
World Health Organization
The UN agency, which is responsible for sounding the global alarm during outbreaks of major diseases, has been accused by Trump of failing to test China’s claims and repeatedly praising the communist government for its response.
Downing Street joined in the criticism, saying the WHO’s response to the outbreak of the pandemic in China showed there was room for it to “improve its response” to such emergencies.
Whille Trump has withdrawn funding to the WHO, No 10 has said it will not follow his lead and would continue to fund the body, having already given it £75m to fight the virus.