Girlhood Personified

I often like to remind people that “it’s fun to be a girl” - and usually with an eye-roll and as much condescension as I can muster. And nothing has solidified that better than watching Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999) for the very first time.

It may surprise you to learn that I’d never seen this movie before a couple of weeks ago - which is especially ironic since I’ve long been a fan of Coppola’s directorial style. But when YouTube started suggesting video essay after video essay about this movie, my interest was thoroughly piqued. I’d long known of this movie, but didn't know anything about it… 

No, truly.

I didn’t know it was based on a novel. 

I didn’t know it starred a young Kirsten Dunst. 

I didn’t even know this was Sofia Coppola’s directing debut.

So I watched one short essay to really get a sense of what this movie was about. I wasn’t even bothered by the minor spoilers that came with it, primarily because I prefer to know where a story is going if I’m feeling uncertain about the content. And with a title like “The Virgin Suicides”, I just needed to preemptively verify that this one would not upset my peace of mind. 

At least not too terribly.

Besides, a good story is always a good story, with or without knowing the ending. 

And let me tell you, this movie did not disappoint in the slightest.

***

Atmospheric and iconic, it now makes perfect sense why so many young ladies have gravitated towards this movie and its dazzling aesthetic. Sophia Coppola truly captures what it means to feel like a girl at this stage of life, regardless of the now-distant 1970’s timeline. 

It really is summed in Cecilia Lisbon’s quip at the start of the movie: 

“Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.”

The pressure young girls feel to be “perfect” can be… daunting at best - hellish at worst. 

And perfect for whom? 

Well - everyone. But especially the boys. 

To me, this is why the “male perspective” of the story (apparently also featured in the novel) feels so pointed. The story is not being told from the perspective of any of the five sisters, but rather from the now-adult neighborhood boys who are still trying to figure out why these girls ended their lives.

What’s even more intriguing to me is the fact that there’s never a clear answer by the movie’s end, though hints and suspicions abound from every which direction.

I honestly think that’s why I can’t stop thinking about this movie, long after the credits have rolled. There are many different ways you can interpret this story, and I don’t think any one of them is completely right or wrong.

I don’t plan to dive into all of them, but I would like to touch on a few interpretations I took away upon first viewing. And one admittedly “weird” pull I don’t think anyone else has voiced just yet… 

Potential to Fester

There is a very strong undercurrent of “contagion” throughout the movie, with the primary focus being on the possible psychological contagion of suicide itself. 

It’s never outright confirmed, but it seems heavily implied that Cecilia’s suicide was inspired by one of their neighbor-boys… the one who “jumped” from the roof of his house while declaring his love for another local girl. 

More ostentatiously, however, is the fact that the surviving four sisters entered a suicide pact only a year after their youngest sister passed away. 

Following along this thread of “contagion,” we also see the ultimate destruction of the neighborhood trees lining the streets of their Detroit suburb. And all of it started with Cecilia’s diseased tree in their own front yard. It is this tree, marked by Cecilia’s handprint, that her sisters desperately try to save when the trimming crew comes. With arms locked in unshakable resolve, they refuse to let the crew cut it down. They succeed, of course, and, surprisingly enough, with the actual support of their peculiar parents - but at the cost of the disease spreading throughout the rest of their neighborhood.

The question remains however, what is the actual source of the girls’ contagion. What drives them to their tragic fate in the first place? Personally, I think it could actually be grief. 

As someone who’s become fairly acquainted with death, I feel pretty confident in admitting that personal loss can be a powerful source of self-destruction, especially when it is not fully processed. “Treated” if you will.

Something was clearly eating at Cecilia even before the beginning of the movie. So much that she didn’t think she had any other way out of a bad situation. What that situation was will be forever unknowable. But it’s also brutally clear that her sisters, and, I would argue, her parents, never fully processed her death.

Right after Cecilia’s first suicide attempt, her parents’ solution was to follow the Dr. Horniker’s orders, and encourage more socialization - especially with boys her own age. Though I question the suggestion that her suicide attempt was motivated solely by her burgioning sexuality (it kind of plays into the “male-gaze” theme that is present throughout, albeit more benignly), I would agree that Cecilia needed a community outside of her home. 

She needed friends with shared values but outside perspectives to provide the emotional support I doubt she was receiving at home. Not even from her own parents.

Now to her parents’ credit, they did follow the doctor’s orders and throw a party for their daughters - though obviously reluctantly and, I would argue, completely half-assingly. 

They also showed deep sorrow and grief and attempted to shield their remaining children from seeing Cecilia’s body on that night of her death. 

And then they just… kind of left it there. 

I don’t think they ever really spoke of Cecilia again, and the girls returned to school as if nothing happened. It was like they were even afraid to mention her name. But pain like this doesn’t just go away just because you ignore it. Grief holds the potential to fester over time if left unchecked, serving as the source for numerous forms of destruction. Including self-destruction. 

The Weird Pull

But as with many things in life, self-destruction can begin at home… especially when you have parents like Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon. 

Forewarning, I make no attempts to hide my disdain for either of the parents. The fact is, they’re both horrible, and for very different reasons. And the best way I can think to illustrate what I mean is by referring to an old fairytale. 

You’ve probably heard of it - Disney’s about to remake their own take from 2012…

Yes, an inverted “Rapunzel” is a very strange pull to take away from this movie, but bear with me - I promise it’ll make sense.

So, the long and short of that old fairytale is that a girl is locked away in a tower because of her beauty - which only grows as she grows into a young woman. The witch who locked her away is the only one to have access to her until a handsome prince overhears Rapunzel singing, and then spies on them just long enough to learn their secret password. 

He goes up, she falls in love, and they start a secret relationship because she’s literally never seen a man before (the bar is so low for her, it is literally on the floor). In older retellings they do what teenagers are gonna do - which, coincidentally, is what rabbits are very famous for - and she ends up pregnant. 

With twins. 

Double whammy.

(That’s the “adult-cut” of the new Disney movie) 

So the witch casts out her surrogate-daughter. In either re-tellings it boils down to the fact that Rapunzel crossed a threshold she wasn’t supposed to; she became a woman, and effectively “betrayed” her mother-figure.

So, ya’ll probably know the rest of the story: the witch tricks the prince, tries to kill him by yeeting him out of the tower; he ends up blind from the throne-bushes down below, so he wanders heartbroken until he hears Rapunzel’s singing. They reunite, the power of her tears heals his eyes (no flowers were harmed in the making of this fairytale) and they lived happily ever after. 

Now personally, I always interpreted “Rapunzel” as a cautionary tale for parents. Especially for mothers, as the witch character is the closest thing to a mother Rapunzel has ever known. Even in the Disney-fied retelling the writers put that relationship front and center, though with a new and more focused spin. 

A lot of people like to dog-pile on the idea these fairytales were designed to promote sexist values, and I think that is true to a certain extent. But in the case of older versions of this story, I suspect it holds very subtle nods for the parents. 

Ultimately, what is Rapunzel being “punished” for when the witch discovers her secret: 

Being a teenager? 

Having a boyfriend? 

Wanting a connection to someone else other than her mother? 

Fact remains, it was the witch who locked Rapunzel in the tower in the first place, because she was afraid of other people seeing her beauty. The witch was the one who set the bar for relationships so low - literally on the floor - that of course her surrogate-daughter was going to have sex… she had no concept of those consequences! 

Ultimately, I think the point of “Rapunzel” is that you can’t stop the inevitable; you can’t stop children from growing up. Not even little girls.

By now you may be wondering, “well what does a fictional princess have to do with The Virgin Suicides?” 

Well, for one thing, Rapunzel survived - and ironically enough because her mother kicked her out of the house for breaking the rules. 

Mrs. Lisbon, meanwhile, held on tighter than ever, following the homecoming dance - and all because just one of her daughters broke curfew. 

From that moment on, the girls are pulled out of school and are essentially imprisoned in their own home with their mother serving as their warden. Mrs. Lisbon even makes Lux, who broke curfew, burn some of her own records because she still can’t accept the fact that Lux is the source of her own angst, not the rock-and-roll she liked to listen to.

Lux chose to break curfew. Lux wanted to go to the dance with her date. And Lux was the one who became sexually active that night - because she thought she found her “prince.”

In fact, Lux still engages in hypersexual behavior even after she and her sisters are locked up. 

Night after night she makes love to one boy after another on the roof of her house, and is left disappointed when they immediately leave her afterwards. The neighborhood boys watch, of course. Through the telescope one of them keeps across the street like the blooming-perverts that they are. 

I don’t think we’re supposed to know if her parents know what she’s up to, but I suspect they haven’t got a clue. That feat requires some self-awareness, and obviously Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon have none. 

Their poor parental oversight is made even more evident by the fact that their house goes completely tits-up by the second-half of the movie. Garbage and clothes everywhere, the girls holed up in a single bedroom like floor-gremlins. Apparently the book describes atrocious smells that start coming from the house, as if decay is slowly settling in.

And the parents don’t do a dang thing about it!

Mr. Lisbon acts as the breadwinner in their dynamic, sure, but at one point he’s let go from the school where he taught. And Mrs. Lisbon - well - for someone who’s clearly defined by her “traditional values,” she’s obviously a poor homemaker.

More than anything, it’s the passivity of both parents that just really sets my ass on fire. Mrs. Lisbon, driven by those old-fashioned values, clearly has domain and final-say over the care of the girls, but we never actually witness any attempts of her actually caring for them - though she exercises as much control as humanly possible over their lives. 

As for Mr. Lisbon, I'll be blunt with you: the man’s a nebbishy wiener. 

He is very quick to excuse himself from any situation regarding homelife. Especially regarding his own children, just because they happen to be all girls. He so quickly defers his daughter’s lives to his wife’s authority, that I can’t help but wonder: would this same situation have played out the same if any of the kids had been sons instead? 

And while it may be a stretch, I still feel confident in asserting this theory: the girls probably knew just how little they could depend on him - their own father - to help them. 

Kids in real-life aren’t stupid; they always know who’s really there for them. 

And when you’re a girl blossoming into a woman, that sense of awareness only sharpens when you start to feel eyes leering at you. All of the time.

Limiting Nature

I don’t think I have anything new to add on this topic, but come on - I can’t talk about The Virgin Suicides without addressing the elephant in the room.

The Male-Gaze is palpable from start to finish. From the way the boys sexualize Lux, the most rebellious of the Lisbon sisters, to the way the four surviving sisters are staged to look like one single unit, their individual personalities shining through in only a few poignant scenes. 

Even the way the male narrator describes their homecoming dresses as “four matching shapeless sacks” feels saturated in male-teenage-hormones. In actuality, their matching dresses were fine. Admittedly, white with little pink roses is super boring for high school girls, but they looked perfectly fashionable for a 70’s high-school formal. 

Personally, I feel the placement of that line is more telling than the line itself: it comes on the heels of the narrator describing how Mrs. Lisbon added extra yardage to the neck- and hem-lines.

To me this only supports the argument of just how obtuse the boys are to the girl’s actual story - and just how little the girls mean to any of them. 

When the Libsons are locked away, the boys subscribe to the same catalogs to get an “insight” into what the girls are doing. The boys fantasize themselves on exotic adventures with the sisters - even reviving Cecilia so she could be married off to a prince.

Meanwhile when the girls finally make contact with them, the boys wrack their collective brains for a hilariously long time before realizing the simplest solution to make contact themselves: just pick up the phone and call.

The girls and the boys then start an admittedly cute little correspondence by way of playing records to each other over the phone. The boys selecting love-songs while the girls choose songs about loneliness.

Even at the height of the movie’s climax - the night the girls carry out their pact - the boys, summoned to the Lisbon house, have one last play at their fantasies, when they briefly imagine a sunny joyride with the sisters. This fantasy stuck out to me in particular, because it showed them getting to be the heroes they always imagined themselves to be: brave princes to the rescue.

They end up bolting out the back door upon discovering the bodies of Bonnie and Mary Lisbon.

The thing that bothers me the most in retrospect  is the fact that this group of boys are supposed to be grown men now. As they look back on their past, not once do they comment on the actual tragedy of the situation: the Lisbon sisters will never get to grow up. 

In the boys’ minds they will be forever young, beautiful, and mysterious, trapping them in a perpetual state of girlhood; of childhood.

These men, who presumably have children of their own now, are still unable to sit with that reality. Frankly, it makes me question if they are even willing to, lest they destroy that idealized image of the girls.

I absolutely suspect this is a feature not a bug. Possibly a subtle commentary on the limiting nature of the male-gaze. Though whether it’s in the original source material, or added by Coppola’s directorial style, I honestly don’t know. I’m really tempted to track down a copy of the novel to find out.

In either case, the male-gaze essentially serves as the narrator to the story of the Libson sisters - which is why I think the story feels so elusive. The boys just don’t get it. 

The “mystery,” the reason why five girls committed suicide isn’t the point, though it does play a role. When someone dies it doesn’t matter how or why - what really matters in the end is that their life, their potential, is gone.

And no one was a hero about it in this story. Especially not the boys. No one lifted a finger to actually stop the tragedy, though many consumed as much of it as they could.

Conclusion

Holy moley! I didn’t think I had this much to say about my first viewing! 

I can only imagine what else I’ll find upon rewatch - later on, of course. 

As much as I really enjoyed this movie, it’s also kind of a downer. I think I need to give myself a little break before I let it back into my headspace again.

Ultimately, The Virigin Suicides absolutley struck a chord with me. It reminded me of what it feels like to be a young girl growing up with pressure and uncertainty of completely unrealistic standards. And feeling like no one really wants to know what’s going on with you.

In a weird way it also reminded me of how I want to experience womanhood, now that I am grown. The pressure’s still there - an exalted expectation that you have to be everything to everyone, all of the time, and do it perfectly. But here’s the key difference: now I can tell the sexist malcontents to go pound sand.

How I interact with this movie was always going to be a little different because I came to it as a fully-grown adult. But whether or not you find it as a 14-year-old getting ready to launch, or as crotchety-30-something with a loud-hillbilly-mouth, this movie deserves to be viewed, taught, analyzed, and remembered for generations to come. 

The Lisbon sisters may not be real people, but there is truth in their story, and how girlhood in adolescence can feel so overwhelming. Particularly when kids are held to unrealistic expectations. There is always a real person behind that ideal even perfect strangers project onto others. And expectation can so easily turn to tragedy when that basic humanity is simply ignored.

It’s fun to be a girl, isn’t it?