The Virgin Suicides: The Eternal Love of Men, Home, and the Suburbs

  In 1993, Jeffrey Eugenides wrote a novel about teenage girls in suburbia in the 70’s told through the perspective of the men that loved them looking back and recalling their time with them, trying to figure out just what drove them to their suicide. Seven years later, Sofia Coppola made her debut feature-length film based on this novel, and with such The Virgin Suicides had made its mark in the industry with its meloncoly dreaminess and soft visuals contrasting its dark story. Starring in these suicides are the Libson Sisters, all filled with the beauty and wonderlust of their youth. Despite the Libson Sisters being the focus of The Virgin Suicides, we as an audience do not get to know much about them. Instead, we learn about them through the men in their lives. Through framing the story to be told from the perspective of men, The Virgin Suicides places an emphasis on the male gaze and eternal love in the femininity of the suburbs, all in an attempt to reveal truths about teenage girls.

When the novel The Virgin Suicides first came out, teenage girls from around the word flocked to read it. One of these girls was Emma Cline, a writer for the New Yorker. In her article “The Virgin Suicides” Still Holds the Mysteries of Adolescence she recalls her first time reading the book saying “it felt like a flare from my own secret world, all the inchoate longings and obsessions of being a teen-ager somehow rendered into book form.” What The Virgin Suicides has that many other books and movies about teenage girls do not is simple: The Virgin Suicides doesn’t fully understand the female characters and does not try to. A major purpose of The Virgin Suicides as a book was not to find out what being a teenage girl means, but rather the horrors that can happen if teenage girls are not allowed to be. 

The novel of The Virgin Suicides includes better descriptions of the girls. In this novel, we get to know Cecilia as dreamy, Therese as communicative, Bonnie as frightened, Mary as emotional, and Lux as rebellious. This is in opposition to the film, where we only get key characteristics of Lux and Cecilia. Sofia Coppola’s choice of exclusion is not out of uninterest in the other girls, but rather her choice to focus on Lux and Cecilia emphasizes the contrast between the two. Lux is a dreamy, innocent 13-year old girl. She dreams of saving animals and carries around cards of the Virgin Mary. In other words, Cecilia is the perfect daughter. Lux is the opposite of this. She’s brash and boy-crazy and breaks curfew. Lux is not the perfect daughter. This idea of the perfect family is pertinent throughout the film because of its setting of the feminine suburbs. 

Susan Sagart writes in her article Masculine Cities and Feminine Suburbs: Polarized Ideas, Contradictory Realities that “Women and the suburbs share domesticity, repose, closeness to nature, lack of seriousness, mindlessness and safety [, leading to become] conservative about political and moral issues and norms.” Due to these commonly shared associations, the Suburbs are deemed to be more feminine in the Freudian sense: “passive, intellectually void, [and] instinctually distractive.” This is seen in The Virgin Suicides through the overbarringness of Mr. and Mrs. Libson. Mr. and Mrs. Libson are straight-edged, conservative parents. Mrs. Lisbon was the one with all the power. She is the one to talk to the minister when Cecilia dies. She is the one that burns Lux’s records. She is the one to make her daughter’s dresses more conservative. Mrs. Lisbon is seen as the villain in The Virgin Suicides through the narrators (the boys infatuated by the Libson sisters) eyes because she is the epitomie of the suburbs and femininity in the Freudian sense. Because of this alignment with classic ideals of femininity and masculinity and the rebellion of the narrators throughout the story.

The narrators, or the boys of the street, express this dissatisfaction with the suburbs and the life that comes with it throughout the film and novel. They constantly fantasize about running away from the suburbs with the Libson sisters, moving to the city, and living out their life freely and powerfully. While we don’t know about many of the boys' futures, we know Trips. When Lux meets Trip, he takes over the narration. He says that he doesn’t think he’s loved anyone like he’s loved Lux, talking about her as if she was the greatest love of his life. Then, at the end of his recalling of his relationship with Lux, a woman calls his name and it’s revealed that he’s in a detox facility, presumably because of his years of heavy usage. Although Trip talks about Lux in a very loving manner, he abandons her after they have had sex. It is assumed that he got sick of her after or didn’t know what to do, but the messaging of the film implies that it's because Lux fulfilled her purpose for Trip. Trip was viewing Lux through a very common lens, establishing her as a sex symbol in his mind. 

Film Theorist Laura Mulveny defines the Male Gaze as “a gaze that is presumed male and an audience in which women are presumed incidental”. In other words the Male gaze is the way in which women are portrayed that objectifies them for the pleasure of heterosexual men due to the presumed male audience. The Male Gaze is pertinent in The Virgin Suicides because of it’s narrators. The narrators of The Virgin Suicides are the boys that were infatuated by the Libson sisters, now as older men recalling their time with them. This frames The Virgin Suicides, a story about teenage girls, in an intresting light. 

What teenage boys know about teenage girls is minimal, shown in the film through the boys not understanding the girls at all. The scene that makes this the most obvious is the telephone conversation the boys have with the sisters. This conversation happens because the girls are desperate to reach out to the boys, doing so through leaving notes around the neighborhood. This leads the boys to call the girls and play the song “Hello It’s Me” by Todd Rundgren. The girls then respond with “Alone Again (Naturally)” by Gilbert O’Sullivan and to this, the boys reply with “Run To Me” by The Bees Gees. The final song played is by the girls, being “So Far Away” by Carole King. The differences betweens the songs played appears to be minimal, but the meaning could not be further apart. One thing Coppola likes to incorporate into her movies is playing songs that display what the characters truly mean. “Alone Again (Naturally)” is about a man preparing to end his own life. Through playing this song, the girls warn the boys about what’s going to happen. The boys ignore this with their song choices, one to simply saying hello and the other saying to run off with them. The girls follow their own trend of warning the boys with “So Far Away”, a song not only about the physical distance between two lovers, but also about the emotional distance between them. This is essentially the girl's rejection of the boy's fantasy to run away. In this telephone conversation the girls tell the boys what they’re going to do, but because the boys have a fantasy about running away with the girls and travelling the world, they are unable to hear them. This idea is furthered in this scene when the girls appear to be depressed and empty, whereas the boys are happy because they’re on the phone with the girls. The boys are just happy to be getting inside to the girls lifes, ignoring their calls and warnings because the boys love the girls and forever will. 

This recurring idea of the eternal love these boys have for the Libson sisters is striking because it’s not a common theme that pairs with the male gaze. When Jefferey M. Anderson interviewed Sofia Coppola she said “it's the boys' story. The girls sort of represent the end of their innocence. [...] I know stories about guys and the girl they loved in second grade and they've never found anyone that compares. But if there's something I don't understand, I go over it a million times. And that way I can relate to it.” This idea of loving one girl for eternity is central to The Virgin Suicides because that’s what the story is. Through all their infatuations, these boys will forever love the Libson Sisters. This is seen, again, most clearly through Trip. Although Trip was just using Lux for her sexuality, when he recalls his time with her as the greatest most passionate time in his life. Recalling Lux in this way alludes to the fact that he has and always will love her. It is assumed that this is correct for the other boys on the block as well. 

Coppola ends her quote on eternal love with “Boys who don't understand girls grow up to be men who don't understand women.” The men in The Virgin Suicide don’t understand the Libson sisters. For being in love with them for eternity, calling out the girls names, they sure don’t understand them. This deep misunderstanding of the girls is undoubtedly due to the image the boys had of the girls in their heads. Cecilia, the dreamy one, Therese, the communicative one, Bonnie, the frightened one, Mary, the emotional one, and Lux, the rebellious one. Through fitting the Libson sisters into these clearly defined categories, the boys assign them characteristics that they simply cannot be defined to. Defining the Libson Sisters through these categories and then breaking these defining characteristics helps us understand what The Virgin Suicides has to say about teenage girls. Teenage girls cannot be put into these neat little boxes. Teenage girls are not simply one thing or another. Teenage girls are simply teenage girls, nothing else. The pressures that teenage girls go through are severe and numerous, many of such are pertinent because of the boxes society wants to fit them into. Women cannot be many things because men are everything, and The Virgin Suicides makes this as obvious to the audience as it is the girls are going to kill themselves. 

    Through dreamy visuals, a magical soundtrack, and a dark story, The Virgin Suicides is a film made for moody teenage girls. This film is different from most made for teenage girls though because this film doesn’t try to tell teenage girls what to be, but rather show the teenage girls watching it that they’re not alone in their pressures and they’re not alone in the world misunderstanding them. Being a girl and being teenaged is a fantasy that women young and old aspire to, but anyone who fantasizes about being teenaged has never been a 13-year old girl.

XX,

Cinephiliac