Chris looks at the music of Sofia Coppola's debut, now a part of The Criterion Collection.

Time has been kind to Sofia Coppola The Virgin Suicides, as effective a critique on the male gaze as anything else in the past twenty years. In Coppola’s gauzy vision of its central Lisbon sisters (as told by neighborhood boys) is a reflection of male idolatry that ignores the voice and emotional reality of real women. While the film is typically remembered for how it visually creates this perspective, it also uses music in interesting ways to subvert male self-serving worship.

The film is haunted by Air’s “Playground Love”, it’s most evocative and film-defining musical passage. It’s an apt song choice, one that tempts you into its pull like the tumble into a teenage crush, all jazzy hormones mired in lyrical thinness. And yet despite its temptation and seemingly feminine sway, its a starkly male brand of lust and the woman on the other end of its proclamations is never more than a vague idea. Naturally, it becomes the theme song to its young male obsession with the unknowable and unknown girls on the receiving end of empty crushes. Coppola sees and hears your  horniness and you willful ignorance, gentlemen, and the film sends out a subtle and cutting middle finger.