The Virgin Suicides Analysis
How funny it is, to think we could ever really know another human being. Oh we muddle through all right, mostly in peace, at some level of adequacy but you never have a clue as to what exactly is going on in anybody’s head, or as to why another person does anything. Nobody understands anybody, heck, nobody understands themselves. I doubt our minds could even grasp the whole truth about anything, let alone a person. One mind can only think up its own questions and biases; it rarely surprises itself. Our mental frameworks are never quite perfect, everything’s blurrier and everyone’s uglier up close. This is correspondingly illustrated by Director Sofia Coppola’s film, The Virgin Suicides, a town where ideas are real and reality is shadow. She
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uses editing (coloring in particular) and mise en scene (particularly juxtaposition) heavily in this film to indicate personality, state of mind, and highlight the psychoses present in various characters or society as a whole. Using these techniques she is able to depict ordinary American family life as well as elaborate on several cultural and societal problems addressed in Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel.
The film is narrated in first person plural, giving the film a sense of distance from the viewer. This collective male perspective creates a certain detachment to the other characters and helps propagate the prevalent, if unconscious, awareness of male power and prerogative throughout the movie. This feeling of disjointedness is advanced by the air of mystery inherent in the film, by avoiding any degree of certainty, including the narrator, the antagonist, and the obligatory, yet unimportant question, of who the girls were and why they killed themselves. Despite the story being fixed in the 70’s, and filmed in the early 90’s, it holds certain timelessness in message and symbolic appeal. As the footage exposes the vivid contrast of color and shadows in the synthetic suburban atmosphere, so we receive The Virgin Suicides as an exploration of the pervasive shadows implicit in the ostensibly idyllic suburbs.
Coppola’s heavy use of visual symbols as a medium throughout the film advances her take on Eugenides’s themes. For instance, the emblematic scene with the girls shackled to the sickly trees and protesting their preemptive demise, is very telling. The sisters look virginal, in their modest, white angelic dresses. They have shackled themselves to an elm trunk in an attempt to save the neighborhood trees, which are labeled as contaminated and systematically removed by the Parks Department in the name of saving them. The girls are “connected” to the trees because they represent the girls’ own “sickness” in the sight of the community. The neighborhood’s attempts to remove the sickness, rather than deal with the natural process of their deaths, again reflects society’s decaying nature and their inability to let things take their natural course. This is poignantly made clear in the movie’s closing shot where we see five tree stumps, one for each Lisbon sister.
Society compulsively tries to exterminate the weak and the other, in order to maintain the standardization of suburb, psyche, and soul. This is further exemplified by the deliberate uniformity of the Lisbon’s' suburb shown in the film, with its evenly spaced houses, lawns, and elm trees, all reflecting the homogenized happiness of its inhabitants. The suburbs are a place where artificially manufactured surroundings and lives culminate in the tyranny of an enforced happiness, where appearance is everything. When this happiness is confronted, there is a consequent change in the setting. As the Lisbon family begins to crumble, their house also falls into disarray, first within, and then visibly so that the neighbors and media take notice. The power of society’s influence is confirmed by the Lisbon sisters' remarkable transformation on the night of Homecoming, when they become normal seeming and practically radiant upon leaving their house and their family problems behind. Beyond the ‘plastic’ nature of the neighborhood’s environment and their perceived happiness, is the superficial scrutiny of the Lisbon sisters. It is not important how the Lisbon sisters looked. What is important is how the teenage boys in the neighborhood thought they looked. The girl’s aren’t the focus; they’re the driving force. The subject is the group of gawky pining boys who have “loved” and lusted after the Lisbon girls, as well as society, with their fragile mental chains and constructs.
The most iconic scene portraying America’s obsession with happiness is the hypocrisy typified by Mr. Lisbon, who is shown stringing Christmas lights despite his daughter's recent suicide. Rather than show the natural spectrum of human emotion, suburban happiness is enforced as a societal ritual, a process by which the community continuously and collectively reaffirms itself. This prescribed and pressured pretense staunches the normal catharsis of grief and causes serious elusions of responsibility for the adults to raise their children with a healthy dose of reality, causing psychological delusions and disillusions in the minds of the children. Propriety trumps what is morally or humanly appropriate, and the latter is voluntarily sacrificed for the former. In this citadel of charade and self-destruction, the forgery of happiness is another compulsory farce.
Sealing the film’s metaphor for society’s neurotic happiness, color and juxtaposition are again utilized in the film at the party held after the Lisbon sisters’ deaths. Through a green camera hue we are shown party guests wearing hazard masks and eating green desserts representing society’s sickness. This scene incarnates the obsession with happiness and the inability to deal with misery and mental illness. The green color is in stark contrast to the earlier idyllic hues used, indicating that the neighborhood is declining, with its inhabitants gorging itself on sickness.
The opening sequence is the first example of Coppola’s use of dramatic shifts and juxtaposition. Shots of suburbia drift lazily across the screen in shades of green and yellow as music plays. Then suddenly, the music stops and the movie cuts to the silent bluish image of a girl floating in a tub full of her own blood. These abrupt transitions occur consistently throughout the film, as if to illustrate the abrupt plunge from dream into reality, or from life to death. Manifesting one of the major premises of the film, the death of childhood during the transition into adulthood, Coppola employs the use of shocking juxtaposition again in one of the following scenes. It shows Cecilia, after she slit her wrists, with her arms dressed as well as decorated with colorful bracelets juxtaposing the beauty and pain in The Virgin Suicides in a virtually masochistic way. Her suffering is literally handcuffed and decorated; her coloring muted, further stifling her cry for help. The girls are in a blurry sociocultural transition between girlhood and womanhood. The girls’ room, as depicted in the film, echoes childhood, complete with lots of the pinks and purples, lace and jewelry, teddy bears and white dresses, which is a tragically poetic atmosphere for their eventual suicide. Another way Coppola uses juxtaposition to achieve her cinematic goals is color. There are very noticeable color changes throughout the movie. Coppola skillfully uses color tones to create an atmosphere, or to convey a new feeling experienced by a character or the neighborhood. Contrasts between warm and cool colors are used to draw the audiences’ attention to something wrong or pivotal to the story.
The Virgin Suicides catches both the pettiness and the splendor of youth, its mundane details and its mythopoeic departures; what is missing is a sense of reality. The film juxtaposes the childlike fantasies of the girls with their collapsing home life. The girls are constantly projecting themselves elsewhere to combat the boredom and inevitability of adulthood: in dreams, costumes, photographs and landscapes. The boys envision the girls as fairytale creatures, appearing in golden meadows, or superimposed on drifting cloudscapes. Lux is even shown, in the fantasy of the boys, dancing (in muted dreamlike colors and suggestive dress) besides a unicorn, taking their impossible image of her to mythological proportions. The girls are as much an escape for the boys, as death is for the Lisbon sisters. In some measure, the children of Grosse Pointe, Michigan never existed, except in their own juvenile imaginations. They were fantastical creatures, waiting for the fantasy to end through death or adulthood.
Sight traces the surface but does not penetrate beyond. Correspondingly, the boys’ sketchy comprehension of the Lisbon sisters is limited to what they can see (predominantly through a telescope). This emphasis on the superficiality of sight epitomizes more than the philosophical assertion of the impossibility of complete insight, it is their refusal to look deeper then the husk of the girls they claim to love. Their knowledge, like their gaze, stops at the skin. Likewise, Coppola uses the sisters alluring faces and mysterious smiles as a blank slate to project all of the town’s expectations and wishes of them, matching the sisters’ emotional masks with the world they live in. This dependence on vision in the film, for both the characters and the viewing audience, exposes the predominance of images over words. For instance, the local television news station causes further confusion surrounding the Lisbon home, and shows America’s preoccupation of visuals, the mass media, and sensationalism.
Further capitalizing on the concerns of the limits of vision, knowledge, and memory, the film continually invokes the symbolic use of physical boundaries. Lux's consistent appearance in doorways, windows, and thresholds suggests her role as a middleman between her sister and the boys as well as her moral confinement, and transition to womanhood. The quintessential example is the shot of the 4 living sisters double framed by their bedroom window and the audience’s screen, denoting their captivity by their parents and society because of their entrapment on a precipitous and inescapable pedestal of innocence, beauty, and femininity.
The Virgin Suicides provides perfunctory reasons for why the Lisbon girls might have been unhappy enough to “off themselves,” so to speak.
This apparent lack of any explanation for the Lisbon sister’s deaths is the whole point: The reality of whom the Lisbon sisters were, and why they killed themselves is trivial. What’s important are the teenage boys and the town’s one-dimensional portrayal of the girls, in life as well as in death. With superficial rationalizations, dismissals, and pervasive “mis-imaginings” the people of Grosse Pointe, Michigan created a distorted picture of the girls and their tragic demise. No, the primary purpose of The Virgin Suicides was not to tell the tragic story of a draconian mother and an emasculated father driving their daughters to dramatic suicides in an attempt to protect them from what they saw as a carnal world. It was much more subtle than that. It was a comment on the impossible nature of knowing a person, the disillusionment of childhood imaginings, and the psychosocial condition of society’s obsession with finding elusive happiness. Coppola’s film, though bordering on magic realism at times, is subtle, often opting to leave things enigmatic, poignant, and esthetic. She doesn’t force critical analyses but allows her ideas to hang on her editorial creation, letting the images she believes dominates contemporary communication to ferment in her audience’s
heads.
uses editing (coloring in particular) and mise en scene (particularly juxtaposition) heavily in this film to indicate personality, state of mind, and highlight the psychoses present in various characters or society as a whole. Using these techniques she is able to depict ordinary American family life as well as elaborate on several cultural and societal problems addressed in Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel.
The film is narrated in first person plural, giving the film a sense of distance from the viewer. This collective male perspective creates a certain detachment to the other characters and helps propagate the prevalent, if unconscious, awareness of male power and prerogative throughout the movie. This feeling of disjointedness is advanced by the air of mystery inherent in the film, by avoiding any degree of certainty, including the narrator, the antagonist, and the obligatory, yet unimportant question, of who the girls were and why they killed themselves. Despite the story being fixed in the 70’s, and filmed in the early 90’s, it holds certain timelessness in message and symbolic appeal. As the footage exposes the vivid contrast of color and shadows in the synthetic suburban atmosphere, so we receive The Virgin Suicides as an exploration of the pervasive shadows implicit in the ostensibly idyllic suburbs.
Coppola’s heavy use of visual symbols as a medium throughout the film advances her take on Eugenides’s themes. For instance, the emblematic scene with the girls shackled to the sickly trees and protesting their preemptive demise, is very telling. The sisters look virginal, in their modest, white angelic dresses. They have shackled themselves to an elm trunk in an attempt to save the neighborhood trees, which are labeled as contaminated and systematically removed by the Parks Department in the name of saving them. The girls are “connected” to the trees because they represent the girls’ own “sickness” in the sight of the community. The neighborhood’s attempts to remove the sickness, rather than deal with the natural process of their deaths, again reflects society’s decaying nature and their inability to let things take their natural course. This is poignantly made clear in the movie’s closing shot where we see five tree stumps, one for each Lisbon sister.
Society compulsively tries to exterminate the weak and the other, in order to maintain the standardization of suburb, psyche, and soul. This is further exemplified by the deliberate uniformity of the Lisbon’s' suburb shown in the film, with its evenly spaced houses, lawns, and elm trees, all reflecting the homogenized happiness of its inhabitants. The suburbs are a place where artificially manufactured surroundings and lives culminate in the tyranny of an enforced happiness, where appearance is everything. When this happiness is confronted, there is a consequent change in the setting. As the Lisbon family begins to crumble, their house also falls into disarray, first within, and then visibly so that the neighbors and media take notice. The power of society’s influence is confirmed by the Lisbon sisters' remarkable transformation on the night of Homecoming, when they become normal seeming and practically radiant upon leaving their house and their family problems behind. Beyond the ‘plastic’ nature of the neighborhood’s environment and their perceived happiness, is the superficial scrutiny of the Lisbon sisters. It is not important how the Lisbon sisters looked. What is important is how the teenage boys in the neighborhood thought they looked. The girl’s aren’t the focus; they’re the driving force. The subject is the group of gawky pining boys who have “loved” and lusted after the Lisbon girls, as well as society, with their fragile mental chains and constructs.
The most iconic scene portraying America’s obsession with happiness is the hypocrisy typified by Mr. Lisbon, who is shown stringing Christmas lights despite his daughter's recent suicide. Rather than show the natural spectrum of human emotion, suburban happiness is enforced as a societal ritual, a process by which the community continuously and collectively reaffirms itself. This prescribed and pressured pretense staunches the normal catharsis of grief and causes serious elusions of responsibility for the adults to raise their children with a healthy dose of reality, causing psychological delusions and disillusions in the minds of the children. Propriety trumps what is morally or humanly appropriate, and the latter is voluntarily sacrificed for the former. In this citadel of charade and self-destruction, the forgery of happiness is another compulsory farce.
Sealing the film’s metaphor for society’s neurotic happiness, color and juxtaposition are again utilized in the film at the party held after the Lisbon sisters’ deaths. Through a green camera hue we are shown party guests wearing hazard masks and eating green desserts representing society’s sickness. This scene incarnates the obsession with happiness and the inability to deal with misery and mental illness. The green color is in stark contrast to the earlier idyllic hues used, indicating that the neighborhood is declining, with its inhabitants gorging itself on sickness.
The opening sequence is the first example of Coppola’s use of dramatic shifts and juxtaposition. Shots of suburbia drift lazily across the screen in shades of green and yellow as music plays. Then suddenly, the music stops and the movie cuts to the silent bluish image of a girl floating in a tub full of her own blood. These abrupt transitions occur consistently throughout the film, as if to illustrate the abrupt plunge from dream into reality, or from life to death. Manifesting one of the major premises of the film, the death of childhood during the transition into adulthood, Coppola employs the use of shocking juxtaposition again in one of the following scenes. It shows Cecilia, after she slit her wrists, with her arms dressed as well as decorated with colorful bracelets juxtaposing the beauty and pain in The Virgin Suicides in a virtually masochistic way. Her suffering is literally handcuffed and decorated; her coloring muted, further stifling her cry for help. The girls are in a blurry sociocultural transition between girlhood and womanhood. The girls’ room, as depicted in the film, echoes childhood, complete with lots of the pinks and purples, lace and jewelry, teddy bears and white dresses, which is a tragically poetic atmosphere for their eventual suicide. Another way Coppola uses juxtaposition to achieve her cinematic goals is color. There are very noticeable color changes throughout the movie. Coppola skillfully uses color tones to create an atmosphere, or to convey a new feeling experienced by a character or the neighborhood. Contrasts between warm and cool colors are used to draw the audiences’ attention to something wrong or pivotal to the story.
The Virgin Suicides catches both the pettiness and the splendor of youth, its mundane details and its mythopoeic departures; what is missing is a sense of reality. The film juxtaposes the childlike fantasies of the girls with their collapsing home life. The girls are constantly projecting themselves elsewhere to combat the boredom and inevitability of adulthood: in dreams, costumes, photographs and landscapes. The boys envision the girls as fairytale creatures, appearing in golden meadows, or superimposed on drifting cloudscapes. Lux is even shown, in the fantasy of the boys, dancing (in muted dreamlike colors and suggestive dress) besides a unicorn, taking their impossible image of her to mythological proportions. The girls are as much an escape for the boys, as death is for the Lisbon sisters. In some measure, the children of Grosse Pointe, Michigan never existed, except in their own juvenile imaginations. They were fantastical creatures, waiting for the fantasy to end through death or adulthood.
Sight traces the surface but does not penetrate beyond. Correspondingly, the boys’ sketchy comprehension of the Lisbon sisters is limited to what they can see (predominantly through a telescope). This emphasis on the superficiality of sight epitomizes more than the philosophical assertion of the impossibility of complete insight, it is their refusal to look deeper then the husk of the girls they claim to love. Their knowledge, like their gaze, stops at the skin. Likewise, Coppola uses the sisters alluring faces and mysterious smiles as a blank slate to project all of the town’s expectations and wishes of them, matching the sisters’ emotional masks with the world they live in. This dependence on vision in the film, for both the characters and the viewing audience, exposes the predominance of images over words. For instance, the local television news station causes further confusion surrounding the Lisbon home, and shows America’s preoccupation of visuals, the mass media, and sensationalism.
Further capitalizing on the concerns of the limits of vision, knowledge, and memory, the film continually invokes the symbolic use of physical boundaries. Lux's consistent appearance in doorways, windows, and thresholds suggests her role as a middleman between her sister and the boys as well as her moral confinement, and transition to womanhood. The quintessential example is the shot of the 4 living sisters double framed by their bedroom window and the audience’s screen, denoting their captivity by their parents and society because of their entrapment on a precipitous and inescapable pedestal of innocence, beauty, and femininity.
The Virgin Suicides provides perfunctory reasons for why the Lisbon girls might have been unhappy enough to “off themselves,” so to speak.
This apparent lack of any explanation for the Lisbon sister’s deaths is the whole point: The reality of whom the Lisbon sisters were, and why they killed themselves is trivial. What’s important are the teenage boys and the town’s one-dimensional portrayal of the girls, in life as well as in death. With superficial rationalizations, dismissals, and pervasive “mis-imaginings” the people of Grosse Pointe, Michigan created a distorted picture of the girls and their tragic demise. No, the primary purpose of The Virgin Suicides was not to tell the tragic story of a draconian mother and an emasculated father driving their daughters to dramatic suicides in an attempt to protect them from what they saw as a carnal world. It was much more subtle than that. It was a comment on the impossible nature of knowing a person, the disillusionment of childhood imaginings, and the psychosocial condition of society’s obsession with finding elusive happiness. Coppola’s film, though bordering on magic realism at times, is subtle, often opting to leave things enigmatic, poignant, and esthetic. She doesn’t force critical analyses but allows her ideas to hang on her editorial creation, letting the images she believes dominates contemporary communication to ferment in her audience’s
heads.