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“Impossible Narrative Voices”:

2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/intelitestud.15.2.0180

1524-8429

Debra Shostak,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

Among the most distinctive features of Jeffrey Eugenides's first novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993), is its first-person-plural narrative voice. After the publication of his second novel, Middlesex (2002), Eugenides identified his fascination in both books with “impossible narrative voices.”1 The voice in The Virgin Suicides is rendered “impossible” by the counterintuitive proposition of a collectivity, a group speaking as one. The “we” voice is composed of men determined after some twenty years to reconstruct the story of the five teenage Lisbon sisters' suicides. The men work from their own incomplete memories, contradictory eyewitness testimony they collect in interviews, and many material “exhibits” and relics they have assembled. The voice's plurality invites the reader into a seemingly normative position and, together with the “documentary” premise of the narrators' historical project, seems to promise reliability, relative objectivity, and social legitimacy. Instead, however, the narrators construct a text that undermines its own authority. The “we” voice encounters the intractability of otherness, while the boys' youthful desires move them toward a position of voyeurism that obliterates the voices of the sisters whom they scrutinize, installing the girls as indistinct erotic objects rather than subjects. As a result, the apparently good-faith intentions of the narrators expose them as unreliable, not in their reportage as such, but ideologically, in their construing the objects whom they witness.2Clearly, the cinematic adaptation of a work of fiction must address its source's narrative voice, if only because the apparatus of filmic storytelling is so fundamentally different from that of verbal storytelling. Eugenides's novel presents special difficulties. The unreliable “we” voice is crucial to the complex effects of the novel, especially concerning the perceptual and ethical position in which it situates the reader relative to the narrating perspective. Robert Stam's apt comparison of prose with cinematic narration is worth quoting at length: The discursive power of unreliable narrators is almost automatically reduced by film, precisely because of film's multitrack nature…. In a film, the narrator can partially control the verbal track—through voiceover or character dialogue—but that control is subject to innumerable constraints: the presence of other characters/performers and voices, the palpable and distracting “thereness” of décor and objects and so forth. In a film, the other characters instantly take on a physical presence denied them in a novel dominated by a narcissistic narrator…. While it is not impossible to relay unreliable first-person narration in the cinema, it would require relentless subjectification on almost all the cinematic registers: foregrounded presence in the shot, uninterrupted voiceover, non-stop point-of-view editing, constantly motivated camera movements, always marked subjective framing.3 Clearly, a novel dedicated to an “impossible,” self-involved narrative voice poses a challenge: how to find a cinematic vocabulary that might situate a viewer in the position of an ideologically unreliable narrator.When Sofia Coppola wrote and directed her adaptation of The Virgin Suicides (2000), she must have considered whether such an unusual narrative device as Eugenides's “we” voice could or should be translatable to film. Without making an argument for authorial intentionality in the adaptive process, one may discern in Coppola's choices a useful case study of how cinematic form reshapes the meanings prompted by a textualized narrative voice. Certainly, the film does hew to many of the effects of Eugenides's novel. As in the novel, for example, the movie's tone is elegiac and empathetic in its presentation of the Lisbon sisters. Much of the plotting and dialogue as well as the sensual and material particulars of the film derive wholesale from the novel's nostalgic and at times surreal evocation of adolescence in the American suburbs during the 1970s. Like Eugenides, Coppola creates a narrative at once haunting—because nostalgia implies loss—and quirkily humorous. She reconfigures Eugenides's foremost narrative strategy within the formal means of film, employing some compelling cinematic equivalents for the plural narrative voice. As Stam argues, however, the cinematic medium, with its multiple registers for perspective, cannot practically construct a narcissistic, unreliable narrator to maintain control over the angle of vision offered within the frame. Most significant, the formal difference in media has specific implications for the ideological structure of each narrative, such that Coppola's film reverses the impact an attentive reader finds in Eugenides's book. In the final analysis, Eugenides's Virgin Suicides is an ironic novel of gendered ideological critique. Coppola's Virgin Suicides is a nostalgic romance.4To uncover this interpretive reversal, I shall discuss how the plural voice mediates the historiographic project of the novel The Virgin Suicides and how cinematic conventions, such as the shot, editing, acting, and the voiceover, translate the narrating perspective to Coppola's film, fracturing its consistency. Eugenides's prose reveals the unintended ironies in the narrators' interpretation of the girls, opening their understandings to reappraisal. The mimetic staples of classic Hollywood moviemaking, however, cause slippage within the controlling perspective of the narrating boys that, in the novel, supplies the primary angle of interpretation. Because the film's devices resist full appropriation of the boys' perspective, the opportunities the novel offers for an implied, recontextualizing narrative dissipate. At issue is not the fidelity of the adaptation but rather how, given Eugenides's material, the resources of the two narrative media almost unnervingly determine their interpretive differences.Most obviously, the challenge that a first-person prose narrator poses to an adaptation is exacerbated by the multiplicity of Eugenides's “impossible” voice. The “we” voice announces its plurality immediately on the novel's first page. Its composite nature tends to install the authority of numbers. The voice establishes an overriding principle of sameness and unity so that its singularity resists the distinctiveness of person, standpoint, ideological position, or interests that inhere in the fact that, logically, separate “I”s are required to constitute the “we.”5 Coppola's most obvious device for translating this voice is the voiceover, much of whose text is lifted directly from Eugenides. The voiceover frames and stitches together the film's action, offering an economy of exposition much like a conventional literary narrator. For example, it is heard within the opening minutes of the film to explain why the sound of a siren on the soundtrack is juxtaposed to the serene image of a girl's face (Hanna Hall as Cecilia), eyes wide open, floating in a bathtub within pink-tinged water. When the voice announces, “Cecilia was the first to go,” the audience infers the connection of the image to the titular “virgin suicides” (see figure 1). The voice likewise identifies both the narrators' relationship to their subject and the long backward look of their narration. After close-ups of the four boys who consistently represent the “we” voice onscreen, the voice ruminates about “those five girls who after all these years we can't get out of our minds.” The voiceover thereby adds to the film the dual temporal dimension that inheres in any past-tense prose narration but that is not an inherent feature of cinematic representation. The retrospective narrator opens a gap between “now” and “then,” even as it strives to close such a gap by attempting to master the past in present explanation. In this way, the film's voiceover enacts the nostalgia of Eugenides's collective narrator by capturing a sense of longing and loss—a tone that emerges almost inevitably when a narrator in the present regards past youth—and by suggesting that the girls' suicides permanently arrested the boys in time.6Still, the choice of a voiceover necessarily departs from the novel's aesthetic premise, since the film provides just one narrating voice. The retrospective premise of the storytelling requires the framing perspective of a narrator. Coppola might have chosen to have multiple voices speaking in unison, in choric fashion, or to have shifted the narration among several anonymous male voices, but either strategy would have been absurdly distracting and confusing to a viewer. The literalness of the singular voice naming itself “we” likely presented itself as the only workable device, in a sense closest to the source, and common in normal speech. But the reception of voice in the two media differs substantially. Because a collective narrator is uncommon, a reader may keep the plurality of the voice imaginatively in the forefront of the novel's discourse if, as in Eugenides's text, many passages are tagged with the first-person plural, “we” or “our.” When we recognize in a work of fiction that one “voice” is speaking for a “we,” it may still keep our attention focused on its plurality if the anonymity of the voice is preserved.The use of an actor, however, works against Eugenides's conceit, because the voiceover function in film concretely reduces the perspective to a single voice and, by extension, to a single eye on events. The ear's reception of the actor Giovanni Ribisi's voice on the soundtrack limits the “we” to an “I,” no matter how often he repeats the first-person plural, because our sense perception of the single voice dominates our conception of the speaker. That voice has its own character—here, Ribisi's slightly gravelly, dry, calm tone; measured pace; and narrow range in pitch. As a result, his speaking voice seems at best a representative of the group, which is plural but not univocal. Although a single voice in a prose narrative also speaks for a “we,” readers may be content to accept a shadowy singular presence to which we can attach no name or identity as “impossibly” plural. The visual nature of film, however, derails a viewer's acceptance of such ambiguity. In The Virgin Suicides, not only do we hear the singularity of the voice, but we also anticipate a concrete projection of Coppola's speaker in our line of sight because we know that he has been a participant in the action he narrates, in his own individuality.Because viewers seek coherence between image and sound, the juxtaposition of the soundtrack to an image of the boys challenges us to seek the owner of the voice in the frame, to embody it and match it with a face. Michel Chion attaches the term “acousmatic presence” to the effect upon which the viewer's desire is based. The “principle of cinema” governing an acousmatic voice, one that is at first heard when its source is unseen, “is that at any moment these faces and bodies might appear, and thereby de-acousmatize the voices”; such a voice must always, Chion argues, “even if only slightly, have one foot in the image, in the space of the film.”7 Although Coppola's film announces its retrospective premise—the grown men looking back at their youthful selves—we may still expect to pick out the young owner of the older, narrating voice. Coppola's shooting and editing generally resist this correlation, but the camera does tend to single out just three of the boys, who then emerge as likely candidates for the voice. The voiceover thus sets up a dissonance between the narrative premise of anonymity and the visual/aural impression of specificity and identity in each frame. The audience seems to hear one person's interpretation of events. The assumptions that attend a singular narrating speaker thus interfere with the impersonality and unitary social perspective implicit in the anonymous textual “we.”The contrast of plurality with singularity in representation enabled by each medium concerns not just the speakers but also their objects of scrutiny. When the narrators efface their individuality in Eugenides's novel, asserting their own fusion within a social group, they prepare for their perception of the Lisbon sisters as likewise deindividualized. Although the novel's narrators introduce the sisters in their separate characters, they are as likely to refer to them in the aggregate, as “the girls,” as they are to describe them according to their distinctiveness. The conflation of the girls' identities and presences contributes to Eugenides's critique of the boys' capacity to mythologize them as the Eternal Feminine incarnate. Indeed, the boys are deeply disconcerted when, rather than observing the sisters voyeuristically from a distance, they meet them directly at the fatal party: entering the Lisbon basement, “our eyes got used to the light and informed us of something we had never realized: the Lisbon girls were all different people. Instead of five replicas with the same blond hair and puffy cheeks we saw that they were distinct beings.”8 The boys are threatened by recognizing the girls' individuality because, up to that point, the sisters have fulfilled a ritual function for them as the sacred image of their erotic projections.Coppola's film, however, short-circuits the mythic representation of the girls as continuous with one another, because they are inevitably embodied rather than verbal constructs under the control of the collective narrator. Robert Stam points out the “doubleness of filmic representation” resulting from the combination of character and performer, such that a filmic character gains “an automatic ‘thickness’ on the screen through bodily presence, posture, dress, and facial expression.”9 Since the Lisbon sisters are performed by five young actresses, they are immediately embodied as distinctive figures. The device Coppola uses to introduce the girls emphasizes their uniqueness. As the boys watch—a narrative fact communicated by an establishing shot of four silent boys, sitting on the curb, all looking in the same direction, just past the camera—the girls emerge in sequence from the family car, and the frame freezes briefly over each girl, with her name in superimposed script. Because each name appears as a variant of adolescent bubble lettering, the frames suggest that the girls are identifying themselves in their own handwriting (see figure 2). The strategy is a clever shortcut toward exposition, and graphically in keeping with 1970s teen and pop culture, but it causes the viewer to move immediately beyond the dematerialization of the sisters that marks the novel's presentation of them.10 Indeed, the introduction of the girls establishes the representational pattern according to which they are, if anything, more fully individualized in the film than are the boys who watch them.Furthermore, while the novel for some time maintains the four older sisters on an equal plane of representation, concentrating on the boys' attempts to explain Cecilia's actions, the camera and editing immediately single out Lux (Kirsten Dunst) as the dominant sister. Coppola's very first image is of Lux, in medium shot and off center, as she stands on her suburban street, finishes a Popsicle, and walks out of the frame. Lux's opening notes are blooming sexuality—her appetite, the phallic Popsicle stick she licks, her direct look into the camera—and elusiveness, as she disappears from view (see figure 3). Dunst's starring position is emphasized shortly thereafter when a gauzy image of her in close-up, superimposed over a blue sky and clouds, winks at the viewer under the film's titles. In both cases, the frontal image of Lux places the viewer in the position of the erotic subject and in the teasing, reflexive close-up insists that we adopt a specular position on an object who seems less innocent than her years and her Popsicle-eating might suggest. Although the boys have not yet been introduced, our gaze anticipates and unites with theirs upon the desired sexual object, who is presented uncritically as the signature image of the film, offering the visual pleasure of her seductiveness and her untouchability.Since Lux continues to preoccupy the camera, her willful sensuality also colors the dominant impression left by her older sisters (Leslie Hayman as Therese, A. J. Cook as Mary, and Chelse Swain as Bonnie), who next to her seem innocent and self-contained. Eugenides's narrators, by contrast, present the Lisbon girls as undifferentiated and embodied only as female and not as individuals. Especially in the initial stages of the narration, they construct the girls uniformly as priestesses of burgeoning sexuality whose knowledge of death seems inextricable from their sensuality. Because the boys' main activity is voyeuristic looking, the girls' “fructifying flesh” (VS, 8) becomes the primary signifier in the narrative they construct. After the inexplicable suicides, they seek the “truth” about sex and death in every fetishized emanation and relic of the girls, who serve as the unreadable objects of the narrators' desire. The narrators' metaphor for their obsession is telling; they see themselves as “custodians of the girls' lives” (VS, 224), as if the girls were things to be preserved for view, like the “exhibits” the boys maintain in suitcases.11 The novel therefore triggers a response from readers who are attuned to the ideological implications of the male gaze upon the female. Eugenides opens the door to a framing irony, urging readers to read against the grain of the monovocal narrators. The reader listens for the silenced voices of the girls—as when the boys express surprise that the girls do not seem “damaged,” “demented,” or “depressed” (VS, 123), or when Therese, attempting to detach the sisters from the interpretation that Cecilia's suicide has placed upon them, confesses plaintively, “‘We just want to live. If anyone would let us’” (VS, 132). As the narrators betray the limitations of their perspective, they unwittingly allow the reader access to the girls' unrepresented point of view, enabling a critique of the boys' own narration.The film offers opportunities for the viewer to gain like distance on the boys' ideological coding of the sisters, not least when it shows them remorselessly spying through their telescope on Lux's sexual escapades on the Lisbon roof. Yet its strategies of detachment tend to equate the boys' perceptual distance from their subject with their romantic idealization of the girls. The film rarely encourages critical distance on their idealization as such, reducing the possibility for Eugenides's implied ironic frame. When, for example, Coppola represents the narrators' sexist peers in “documentary” sequences, in which the narrating boys interview other boys outside their circle who claim to have had relations with the Lisbon girls, the interviewees are shown exaggeratedly to objectify the girls, like the cocky boy who tosses off the comment that “it's best to keep chicks guessing.” The viewer may thus gain distance on the interviewees by virtue of their transparent braggadocio. But if the narrators implicitly reject what they hear, it is only to reinforce their hazily romantic conceptions of the sisters. Neither the avidly listening boys nor the consistently dry voiceover resists the representation of the girls as objects.The presentation of Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett) is also promisingly satiric. The camera objectifies his desirable young male body much as it does the girls' bodies, beginning with the first shot of him, which pans up from his feet to his face as he coolly leans against his red Firebird. The shot self-consciously echoes the eroticized shot that has often been used to frame a woman's body, emphasizing how the subjective camera stands in the place of an admiring viewer to objectify what it sees and, almost pantingly, to suggest how the image may arouse the viewer—a classic reflexive example appears when Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) introduces Marilyn Monroe. But the reflexive irony and humor of Coppola's shot simultaneously stir naive, unmediated admiration. Without diminishing its light touch, the film adopts the stance of objectification implicit in the shot as the soundtrack directs the interpretation toward Trip's sexual prowess. While he is introduced, the voiceover falls silent, replaced by a nondiegetic female voice, Ann Wilson of the band Heart, singing the 1970s rock song “Magic Man.” The montage that follows reveals his sexual “magic,” first showing him swaggering in slight slow motion down the school corridor, as girls turn to admire him, followed by a crane shot glorying in his sunlit body as he drifts on an air mattress in a brilliant blue swimming pool, and then by a visit to his house from a girl bearing a plate of brownies and a biology report with his name on it (see figure 4).Trip serves as an object for the visual pleasure of the audience, whether heterosexual female or homosexual male, disrupting the apparently heterosexual male control of the film's gaze. Yet he also displaces the desires of the narrators, for whom he operates as an idealized surrogate, a sexual knight in a shining sports car. That is, he enacts in the frame the boys' uttered but unrealized desires. Trip can thus be co-opted to the narrators' objectifying perspective rather than removing the viewer from it by our awareness of the camera's objectification of him. In this way, his representation enhances the emplotment of the film as uncritical romance. And as in any romantic genre film, the audience of The Virgin Suicides is urged to desire the fulfillment of erotic coupling between the heroic “magic man” and the most desirable—and desiring—sister, already identified as Lux. The promotion of such desire diminishes the potential to challenge the ideological presuppositions about gender and sex that construct it.Other imaginative uses of cinematic form in The Virgin Suicides also tend ultimately to deflate their own potential for ideological critique. Coppola capitalizes on the “fundamental double perspectivation” of soundtrack and image, for example, in two notable reflexive sequences presenting the girls' life at their Catholic high school after Cecilia's death.12 One example appears in a comic sequence in the school auditorium, when Trip makes his first successful contact with Lux as they supposedly watch a documentary film about hurricanes. The documentary never appears onscreen but rather is represented entirely by its soundtrack, which obliquely satirizes raging adolescent hormones. As Trip sits next to Lux in the darkened hall, the embedded diegetic film's music builds and its dramatic narrator explains the phenomenon of hurricanes, when “two masses of air come in contact with one another. One mass is hot and the other is cold.” The static camera, positioned in front of the young people as if seated in the next row, captures their shifting responses—she's first “cold,” and he's restless, but then their smiles begin as they register each other's bodily presence, keeping their eyes mostly forward. The diegetic documentary narrator describes how high- and low-pressure air masses “swirl around each other, creating the beginnings of the storm,” resulting in “a surging storm of tremendous strength that strikes with forceful determination.” As the doubly framed diegetic music moves toward a climax, the camera takes in their two hands touching on the armrest, in close-up, and when Trip confides his master plan to ask Lux out and leaves her smiling delightedly, the narrator intones his summary, “The hurricane, one of the most truly inspiring and spectacular storms nature has to offer.” Through the juxtaposition of acoustic and visual information, Coppola brings the audience in on two jokes: how teenage desire is mediated by the movies and how teenage sexuality is a tumultuous natural hazard. At the same time the acting and mise-en-scène celebrate the romance of teen sexuality, encouraging the viewer to wish for the consummation of this pairing. We are encouraged to forget that we have previously seen Trip's manipulation of other girls and to overlook the danger he may pose to Lux.The second example, which capitalizes on the potential dissonance between visual and acoustic information, occurs when Coppola assembles the frame into a school photograph to exemplify the boys' “documentary evidence.” The boys' voiceover in the sequence offers a mordant contrast to the cheerful faces of the students. As they call out, “Cheese,” in unison, the voiceover summarizes the pamphlet that the school has distributed, listing “warning signals” about teen suicide. The freeze frame sequence draws ever tighter to focus on the row of the Lisbon sisters until finally Lux alone fills the screen, as the voiceover asks, in the earnest, anonymous, irrelevant, but oddly personalized language of the pamphlet, whether the Lisbon girls' eyes were dilated or they withdrew from their peers. Coppola's film implicitly acknowledges the principle, described by Mary Ann Doane, of the “hierarchical placement of the visible above the audible” in a viewer's judgment of a frame's impression.13 Since clearly the language we hear has nothing to do with the image we are seeing, the ironic disparity between soundtrack and image undermines the pamphlet's authority, suggesting its failure, and that of the complacent adult authorities who wrote and read it, to apprehend the real experience of the girls. That authentic experience is most closely aligned with what we can see in the photographic frame, however ambiguous Lux's expression may be. But in editing the image to place Lux climactically in the sequence, Coppola reestablishes a narrative of romantic idealization. Rather than divulging how the sisters are imprisoned by the cultural expectations that might drive girls to suicide, the image of Lux's beautiful, impassive mask affirms the mythic power of the female to remain beyond knowing (see figure 5).Eugenides's tight control over the plural voice unfolds the boys' vision of the girls as a narcissistic delusion, allowing the reader to glean how their desires guide the trajectory of the story they tell and even, perhaps, influence the plot's outcome when they interfere in the girls' lives. The discourse of Eugenides's text defines the cognitive point of view of the narrative, consistently conflating, in Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's terms, the focalizer (the diegetic consciousness that “sees”) with the narrator (the voice that “speaks”).14 The ideological viewpoint articulated or implied by the narration is thus in keeping with the boys' perspective, on the dual temporal plane of the past as told in the present. A reader may stand at remove from the narrators' report, however, reinstating a subtextual perspective external to and distinct from the focalizing, narrating boys. That is, a reader may recognize the boys' unreliability so as to discern, by contrast, an “implied author” that is “depersonified, and is best considered as a set of implicit norms.”15 A reader may thus infer the novel's critique of the storytellers' unitary male gaze at the Lisbon sisters.Coppola's film, on the contrary, conveys an inconsistent viewpoint because of the multiple ways the camera's positioning may be construed. Indeed, the undecidability of the camera's viewpoint relative to a character in the diegesis, to an “objective” perspective, or to an “implied author” constitutes the main disruption of any critical distance on the story events that the adaptation constructs. François Jost offers a helpful distinction in this regard, arguing for the difference between cognitive and perceptual point of view, knowing and seeing, in relation to the camera's construction of the cinematic look. The distinction attributes an additional dimension of perception to filmic narration that helps explain the different effects of verbal and cinematic narrative forms. Like Rimmon-Kenan, Jost specifies cinematic “focalization” as cognitive point of view, produced by “what one sees, what the character is presumed to be seeing, what he or she is presumed to know, what he or she says,” and so forth. Focalization resides with human perception, especially that of a film's characters. He gives the name “ocularization” to the perceptual point of view—“the relation between what the camera shows and what the characters are presumed to be seeing,” which may or may not be aligned with a diegetic point of view or any “specific eyes.”16 Jost argues for the indeterminacy of the camera's alleged “objectivity” or “subjectivity” in the cinematic discourse, noting that “in semiotic terms nothing allows us to make an absolute distinction between a shot which simply elicits primary identification with the camera on the spectator's part, and a point-of-view shot linked to an unidentified character.”17Without a clear alignment of the camera either with a diegetic point of view or an “objective” perspective, there is little provocation for a viewer to discern something approximating the norms of an “implied author” that might enable critical distance on the viewpoints otherwise represented in the frame. An example appears in one of Coppola's visual motifs, in which a static camera holds a long shot of the front of the Lisbon house for several beats. These shots seem to put the viewer in the position of the voyeuristic boys and, thematically, convey the ultimate unknowability of the Lisbons' experience to outsiders. The effect is especially notable when the camera lingers in tableau over the still image of Mrs. Lisbon (Kathleen Turner) on her porch, guarding the older four sisters from viewing the body of Cecilia, fatally pierced in her leap onto the iron fence post. The sequence is edited so that, having just seen the neighborhood boys exit the house of tragedy, we may infer that the ca