Lick The Star

      Lick The Star is a video essay directed by Sofia Coppola in 1998.  The film is about a clique of high school girls devising a secret plan to rule the school.  As in most cliques there always tends to be a leader in which all the other members look up to and want to be like.  In this film that role is portrayed by a character name Chloe who everyone in the school wants to be like. Ultimately the film ends with the queen bee falling from her throne because of a rumor that was spread around the school.  The whole school turns on her in a blink of an eye and Chloe is left without any friends and a failed suicide attempt.  Yet as she says herself at the very end of the film "life goes on." 

      I can imagine the director's imaginary world when creating the concept for this video essay to be very inspired by films like Mean Girls and Sixteen Candles.  The world is centered around a group of popular girls in high school where the stereotypical aspects of high school popularity greatly come into play.  Mean Girls has that same idea of a clique where there is one girl that everyone follows, but it secretly afraid of (Chloe) and another girl who is actually really nice and even though she hangs out with the group she is never mean to anyone (Kate).  Very much like Mean Girls everyone ends up turning against the queen bee because of some incident that happened, showing that she never had any true friends, just minions that were afraid of her. The other film I mentioned that I presume the director took inspiration from in her imaginary world is Sixteen Candles.   The one scene in particular very much reminded me of this movie when they were in class passing notes back and forth.  There is a scene just like this one in Sixteen Candles.  

     Another thing I would guess the director would have in her database of her imaginary world is vintage 90's themed aesthetics.   The entire film was in black and white which gave it a classic type of vibe, which worked perfectly for the time period the director was going for.  All the fashion in the film seemed to be heavily inspired by 90's wardrobe, especially Chloe's style with the heavy eyeliner and signature dark lipstick she never was seen anywhere without. 

    Something else Keri Smith (the author of The Imaginary World Of) touches on in her book is this idea of the Mooreeffoc effect.  What this essentially means is taking something ordinary and changing it ever so slightly to make it unordinary.  How the director used this in her video essay is through an anagram.  The whole plan the girls devised in the film was Lick the Star which was an anagram for Kill the Rats.  The idea was sparked by a book they were reading in class called Flowers in the Attic where the characters in the book were poisoned.  The director took a phrase that was seemingly innocent but put of dark twist on it.  It was interesting because the character Chloe who thought of the plan wanted to Kill the Rats (boys) in her school but instead she was the one who ended up getting "killed".