May 4–11, 2000

movie shorts

The Virgin Suicides

by Cindy Fuchs

"Cecilia was the first to go." The narration in The Virgin Suicides has a familiar tone, part grim, part grandly romantic. Surely, it’s not news to read into adolescent girls’ suicides something poetic, passionate and deeply meaningful, and yet Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut reveals such interpretative practice for what it is: an effort to control events and elusive objects of affection. Based on Jeffrey Eugenides’ 1993 novel, Coppola’s script produces its own insights into the narrative process, as exacerbated by the perverse, pathetic and completely understandable anxiety of adolescence.

The narration, by an unseen Giovanni Ribisi, represents the collective voice of the young boy neighbors of the five doomed Lisbon sisters: 13-year-old Cecilia (Hanna R. Hall), 14-year-old Lux (Kirsten Dunst), 15-year-old Bonnie (Chelse Swain), 16-year-old Mary (A.J. Cook), and 17-year-old Therese (Leslie Hayman).

Looking back some 20 years with self-indulgent nostalgia, the narration is ambiguous, limited and obsessed with surfaces — lovely gauzy images of the girls walking in slow motion, their golden hair catching the dusty sunlight in their high school hallway, their faces glowing with a seeming sureness that mystifies the boys who watch and want them, save and possess them.

Set in an affluent Michigan suburb during the early 1970s, the film takes the boys’ strangely restricted point of view, sometimes imagining scenes they could never witness, other times watching the girls’ house from a distance, using binoculars and telescopes. A haunting soundtrack by the French DJ duo Air (especially the recurring, eerie theme, "Playground Love") and Edward Lachman’s cinematography approximate the boys’ combination of longing and confusion. Unable to say anything near what they’re feeling, the boys start calling the girls and playing records over the phone, evocative, sentimental songs by Gilbert O’Sullivan ("Alone Again, Naturally") and Jim Croce. In the boys’ recollection, the girls answer with Carole King and Janis Ian, and you see them as the boys picture them, lying about in one of their feminine bedrooms, their heads in one another’s laps, their fingers trailing over album covers, their dreams all about escape. This desire for escape is one of the boys’ (and the film’s) perfect fictions. You can only go along with it, given what you see.

Still, it’s a reasonable assumption, given that the four remaining girls are locked into their house by their anxious parents (James Woods and Kathleen Turner) following Cecilia’s death. She only makes it on her second attempt. The film’s opening moments recall her first, a wrist-slashing that lands her in the hospital, where she’s admonished by a white-coated pediatrician, "You’re not old enough to know how bad life gets." To which Cecilia responds, "Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl."

Such youthful wisdom, however, is lost on all the adults looking after her. Her shrink (Danny De Vito) shows her some Rorschach blotches and advises her parents that she should socialize with "boys her own age." And so, the Lisbons hopefully organize a party in their basement rec room. Mom serves punch, dad (a physics teacher at the high school) shows the guests his model airplanes. His deadly dull explanations of aerodynamics theory make the kids slink off one by one, almost afraid that if touched by this nerdy guy, they’ll turn into him.

Cecilia sees through this charade, or so the boys’ version of the story goes. They watch her beg off the rest of the evening and climb the stairs to her bedroom. Within minutes, she’s jumped out her bedroom window and impaled herself on the spiked iron fence in the front yard below. All the kids rush to see and not see (alternately craning their necks and turning away in horror), as Mr. Lisbon tenderly holds her lifeless body so that it doesn’t just hang of the fence like a rag doll. It’s an awful moment, and in another movie, it would be tragic spectacle. But in Coppola’s perversely delicate rendering, it’s less emphatic and more nuanced than it is dramatic. The next day, workmen appear to dig the fence up and tow it away, while the neighbors observe and whisper, one woman in her tennis costume and another balancing glasses of iced tea on a tray.

This trauma, not surprisingly, frightens the boys but also reignites their enthrallment with the surviving sisters. One of them steals Cecilia’s diary, and together they pore over its pages, hoping to discover in its dull descriptions of meal menus and nonevents the girls’ secret selves. Enter Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), swaggering down the locker-lined high school hallway to Heart’s "Magic Man," the prettiest high school boy who finds himself irresistibly drawn to Lux. Flattered but wary, she invites him to an evening spent watching TV at the Lisbon home; there he’s treated to a glimpse of her toes on the coffee table (before Mrs. Lisbon shoos them away) and of her family in elaborately posed non-action, the girls lounging and their parents fussing.

Trip is the only boy from these scenes whom you see as an adult (weathered by substance abuse and other fast living into Michael Paré). He is full of regrets, mostly, for the film’s purposes, concerning his treatment of Lux on prom night. As Styx’s "Come Sail Away" booms on the soundtrack, the image of Trip and Lux being crowned King and Queen drifts into dreamland, though again, the ownership of the dream is uncertain. Is Lux thrilled to be crowned Queen? Or do the boys imagine she’s thrilled?

Throughout what follows, The Virgin Suicides maintains a deliberate, vague distance. Lux’s sexual awakening proves disastrous, as such events do in the minds of boys. Her own feelings remain tantalizingly beyond reach, so that the boys must impute to her a sensitive and self-loathing misery, locked up in her mother’s house, sealed away from the corruptions of material desires and consumptions. How else can the boys — who survive just fine by consuming and desiring — explain the "oddly shaped emptiness" that swallows up Lux and her sisters? As the narrator mourns, "It didn’t matter how old they were, or that they were girls, but only that we loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling…." What the boys can never know, of course, is whether the girls heard them calling or not, or whether the girls cared. The boys can never know this, and yet they must hang onto what matters to them. This is what The Virgin Suicides, for all its many ambiguities, makes achingly clear.