Programme Notes: The Virgin Suicides

Hero Image

Rich Text

The Virgin Suicides

Warning: these programme notes may contain spoilers and may be best read after the film

Teenage Dreams, Interrupted…

Released in 2000 and adapted by Sofia Coppola from the 1993 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides has become a cult classic and a favourite, particularly, amongst young women. The film follows the shortened lives of the five adolescent Lisbon sisters, Cecelia, Lux, Bonnie, Therese, and Mary, through the lens of a group of increasingly obsessed neighbourhood boys, one of which narrates the tragedy retrospectively as an adult.

Coupled with the dreamy cinematography of Edward Lachman, Sofia Coppola takes us back to the mid-70s suburban landscape of Michigan. In the opening sequence, the camera pauses over the leisurely suburban life of dog-walking and garden maintenance. The second youngest sister, Lux (Kirsten Dunst), finishes off a red ice-lolly against the setting sun, the allusion to the infamous poster for Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) indicating something darker than the sunny setting. The idyllic suburban imagery is interrupted further by two workmen placing a notice for removal on an elm tree. As the rotting trees lining the streets of a middle-class suburban town succumb to disease, the Lisbon sisters creep closer towards their untimely demise.

The Virgin Suicides is a film full of interruptions. Desperate for normality, the girls convince their strict religious mother (played excellently by a tight-lipped Kathleen Turner) to allow them to be escorted to the homecoming dance with eligible young men, including Lux’s date, the hotshot jock Trip Fontaine. Caught up in the awkward ceremony of the school dance, the teenagers fumble for each other’s hands under handmade glittery stars and streamers and sneakily swig peach schnapps from behind the stage where Lux and Trip are crowned homecoming king and queen. However, the teenage dream, as is always the case, doesn’t last long. Trip abandons Lux on the football field after losing her virginity and, as a result of missing curfew, their mother confines them to the house, condemning the sisters to fatal isolation.

Colour is used as a source of interruption. The soft pink and purple pastels of girlhood, most noticeable in the design of the sisters’ bedrooms and their possessions, is interrupted by the toxic greens that run through the veins of the film. The living room walls in the Lisbon home are coloured a sickly shade of green, just as the pamphlets distributed by the school to raise awareness of teen suicide rates are. As one teacher tells us: ‘We thought green was cheerful, but not too cheerful. Certainly, better than red.’

After the deaths of all five of the Lisbon sisters, the narrator indicates the callousness of the neighbourhood adults who return to their ‘tennis foursomes and cocktail cruises’. The urban landscape decays further as a spill at the plant causes a swampy smell to fill the air, ‘infiltrating the genteel mansions’. A fume-filled green filter muddies a scene of middle-class suburbanites chattering and sipping cocktails at a debutante party which the host has themed ‘asphyxiation’, in a troublesome allusion to Lux’s death.

The Virgin Suicides presents the Lisbon girls as they exist retrospectively, almost as urban legend — their deaths being associated with the demise of the neighbourhood. The mystification of the sisters is furthered by their private lives being made public. Much of the story and how we perceive the girls is collaged together from the gossip of nosy neighbours, newsreels that run on their boxy television sets and through the telescopic lens of the neighbourhood boys who fashion themselves as detectives in the great mystery of understanding the teenage girl.

The boys rarely physically interact with the sisters, instead, connecting vicariously with them by collecting ‘souvenirs’ that belong to them, reading the same travel magazines that they subscribe to and communicating with them through the lyrics of songs played down the telephone. While pouring over the stolen diary of the youngest sister Cecelia after her death, the male narrator tells us: ‘We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy and how you ended up knowing what colours went together.’

It is precisely this quality, the articulation of what it feels like to be a teenage girl that makes The Virgin Suicides resonate with its audience twenty-three years later. From the clutter of trinkets in the girls’ pastel painted bedrooms and bathroom to a cupboard stuffed full of tampons, Coppola takes femininity seriously and offers a portrait of girlhood with depth and a great level of empathy.

The director has spoken in interviews about how she wanted to make a film that was respectful of girlhood and the experience of being a teenager. The Virgin Suicides sets up the hellish nature of girlhood early on with Cecelia’s statement to a puzzled doctor who was questioning the motives behind her first suicide attempt: “Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.’ This sentiment is shared with other iconic explorations of American girlhood that followed, such as Mean Girls (2004) and Jennifer’s Body (2009) which opens with the line, ‘hell is a teenage girl.’

As Graham Fuller argued on the film’s release, The Virgin Suicides is, ‘a fairytale that fails.’ Locked up in the home with a tyrannous mother and dissociated father, the girls are like the princesses awaiting rescue. The boys, who fantasise about riding off with the girls in a stolen car, taking them ‘anywhere [they] want’, fail as the knights in shining armour.

The failed fairytale is a recurring theme in Coppola’s later films. The chandelier comes crashing down in Marie Antoinette (2006), the fairytale of a youthful marriage and being whisked away to Tokyo fails to live up to expectations in Lost in Translation (2003), and the dream of assimilating into a life of fame and celebrity fails in The Bling Ring (2013). Coppola cross-examines and interrupts the stories that women have been fed for centuries, her body of work exploring and dismantling myths and expectations of girlhood and womanhood throughout time. The Virgin Suicides was just the beginning.

Rosie Beattie Freelance film writer and programmer

Footer