The Virgin Suicides

The following is a script for a YouTube video I uploaded recently. The script is different from what was recorded, as per usual. But, the idea was born here.

Women In Disguise

Major Spoilers: The Virgin Suicides, Anora

Minor Spoilers: Lost Highway

Intro

Sophia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides details the tragic end to the five daughters of the Lisbon family: Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese.

While not something you watch to lift your spirits, the film’s use of distorted perspective and unreliable narration is unparalleled. On a recent re-watch, I was so fascinated by the boldness of the narrative decision given it was Coppola’s first feature, I wanted to get my thoughts out on the matter. While there is enough in the script, I could talk about it for over a hour, I specifically want to focus on the use of distorted perspective and then hone in on how that perspective is used to portray the Lisbon girls.

Warped Perspective

What we, the audience, see is a story in the past told by narrators in the present, not unlike a documentary. The documentary idea is pushed further by random cuts to Q&A style segments, breaking the fourth wall.

And, like some documentaries, the story is told from the perspective of whomever is narrating at the time; but, unlike a documentary, the footage we see may or may not match reality – it could be from the Objective Camera’s point of view or from the perspective of the character telling the story being shown in that moment.

Most notable is the view from the perspective of the high school boys. Clearly, no one in the Lisbon household felt loved; but Trip and the other boys remember their time with the Lisbon girls in an explosive and life-changing-ly romantic way.

We even get warnings from the story that perspective is going to be a problem: When confronted about her suicide attempt, Cecilia’s doctor tells her she’s too young to have problems, and she responds “You’ve never been a 13 year old girl.” This is mirrored at the end of the film, when a boy at a party dramatically falls back into a pool and says, “I’m a teenager, and I have problems.” This tells us both that the teenage cry for help isn’t (and perhaps, shouldn’t be) taken seriously while it also need not be ignored.

To make the perspective the film gives us even more confusing, there’s even light evidence that the first death (Cecilia’s) was an accident. Cecilia sees a neighborhood boy jump from the top of his home and remain unharmed in an artistic act of defiance. Later, she also jumps from the roof of her own home, but dies due to landing on a metal fence. If you take the position that she didn’t intend to land on the fence in a fatal way (which would require at least some amount of luck), then there’s further evidence in the dialogue that the fall from the roof wouldn’t have been fatal – just like it didn’t kill the boy before. Lux tells her father that keeping the window open is fine because the fence has been removed. This could be both a nod to how men can survive certain social perspectives women can’t while also noting that nothing – even from the beginning – was that serious to start with. The act of defiance was deadly in once case while harmless in the other and nothing more than luck played a role.

Interestingly and certainly intentionally, the girls referenced by the very title of the story never get a perspective of their own except when the audience needs a reminder that the characters telling the story don’t think about them as autonomous beings. For example, Bonnie (is it Bonnie?) notes that, for Homecoming, “They’ll just raffle us off.” Later, Lux wakes up alone in a football field after Trip’s night of the most magical “love” he ever experienced.

The film places “us” (the audience) in the mind of “them” (those who live among the Lisbon girls) and “they” don’t know what really happened in the story being told from the Objective Camera’s point of view because no one thinks to ask the people the story is about. It reminds me of the 2024 Sean Baker film, Anora. While a competent comedy, the movie only really hits one emotional crescendo which comes at the very end when Igor asks Anora what her name “means.” This is the first and only time in the story anyone asks Anora anything about herself or who she is. Because, from the perspective of the characters in the film, Anora is either just a sex object, a servant, or a legacy-ruining gold digger – anything but a person.

As the narrator tells us in The Virgin Suicides, the Lisbon girls aren’t really girls at all – we’re told they are “women in disguise.” A statement that leaves their humanity questionable. And, even after the death of their sister, Cecilia, the Lisbon girls are never treated like human beings, but rather endangered animals that, from their parents’ perspective need to be conserved, and from the boys’ perspective, need to be poached.

The Lisbon Conservatory

The film follows a subplot where the Elm trees in the community are dying. Despite the subtextual comments about early American settlers killing off the Natives (“If the boats had never brought the fungus from Europe, none of this would have happened”), the Elm trees are, like the Lisbon girls themselves, objects to be protected and conserved – brittle and rare. (“This tree is dead”).

Cecilia marks her tree – We learn a red tag means an Elm is marked for death, and, before the remainder of the sisters remove themselves from the story, we see four additional elms, apart from Cecilia’s, adorned with red tags, all in a row.

The dying Elms are being used to represent the Lisbon girls’ impending doom; but, more than that, how the girls “view” the Elms is how the rest of the cast views the girls themselves: their parents attempt to surround and protect them, ultimately failing; the rest of the world only cares about them once they’ve already died. A commodity taken for granted.

On a similar but unrelated note: Their father demonstrates he takes his daughters for granted early on in the film, but stops after the death of Cecilia. We see him trying to connect with the boys his daughters bring to the house with boy-friendly hobbies, as if he regrets never having a son. Further on the note of not having sons, the girls’ mother demonstrates knowledge of behaviors young women should avoid to ward off the wandering eyes of young men, as seen by the mother quickly telling Lux to take her foot off the table. These moments aren’t significant except in that they remind us the Lisbon parents have knowledge of the world they’re trying to protect their daughters from and they make one wonder what their life was like before it was dedicated to protecting their daughters from society.

Back on topic – The girls themselves demonstrate some knowledge of the perspective the world has for them, starting with Cecilia.

At the party thrown for Cecilia, a boy with Down’s Syndrome (Joe) is invited to attend. Once there, he immediately becomes the object of everyone’s interest. Cecilia sees him and how he’s treated and she sees the rest of her life flash before her eyes – to the rest of the world, Joe is just an animal in a zoo carted out for the entertainment of the higher-status beings. Just like her. The house isn’t her home, it’s the conservatory her parents built to protect her and her sisters. The boys attend to review the town’s most exotic exhibits: The Lisbon girls. Cecilia has no escape.

There is a through line of “hunting” the Lisbon girls and collecting tokens of the expedition. At the beginning of the film, Paul Badio talks about finding one of them “through the sewers” surrounded by blood. The boys communicate with them, not with speech, but with flashes of light, music, and intricate planning. Additionally, we hear a plumber the family used recently stole Cecilia’s diary, and it somehow got in the hands of the high school boys. At the end of the film, we see someone (or someones) has been stealing the girls’ possessions by the hundreds, taking them either off the girls’ person or from their house. This is treated completely sanely, like a token from the Lisbon girls’ home is something you could hang above your mantelpiece, instead of like a cleptomaniacal compulsion that hints at criminal or deviant behavior later in life, something the film also touches on with Trip’s final interview.

All of this leads us to believe that Cecilia was right. There is no escape. The world is your zoo and the house is your exhibit.

Whether the rest of the girls understood what Cecilia had realized before or after her diary was stolen, the result was the same. Lux, presumably after making sure her other sisters were dead, tempted the boys with one last vision of an idealized future – something that, if the boys had ever been concerned with what the Lisbon girls wanted, they would have known could never have happened. They wanted Cecilia back. They wanted to save the Elms. Lux wanted Trip; but all Trip wanted was Peach Schnapps and the type of love you pay for by the hour.

The entire story of the Lisbon girls was never about the Lisbon girls until no one could have them anymore. Thus, the title.

Conclusion

So much happens in this film despite there not being that much going on. Every scene can be interpreted from three or four different angles, leading to an explosion of narrative possibilities. Interestingly enough, the David Lynch film Lost Highway deals with similar subject matter (“I like to remember things the way I like to remember them; not exactly how they happened”). Despite the setting and subtext being completely of a different genre, both movies broach the matter of what is shown to the audience contradicting the story as it happened from the Objective Camera’s point of view. As Lost Highway came out 2 years prior and there are quite a few “Lynchian” feeling moments in The Virgin Suicides, I caught myself wondering if Sophia Coppola drew influence from that movie. Either way, The Virgin Suicides stands independently and artistically unique. Despite its Lynchian feel, I’ve never seen anything else quite like its use of warped perspective.

And, from my perspective, that alone makes it worth the run time.