The Virgin Suicides Explained- Existential Dread, Hopelessness, And Why The Boys Get A Bad Rap

“Cecilia was the first to go.” Those ominous opening words have always stuck with me. Like a nasty earworm, I can’t get out of my head, that one simple sentence imparts an unnerving vibe. The implication being there will be many more to go after that. Sofia Coppola’s debut feature, The Virgin Suicides, from the novel of the same name by Jeffrey Eugenides, shows how deceptive existential dread can be. It creeps and sulks, dances, and twinkles. But, mostly, it just laughs at how pitiful and inept humans are at avoiding it. While not a traditional horror movie, Eugenides’s story has the power to terrify me nearly twenty-five years later.

I knew someone who attempted suicide in high school. It happened at school, and I was one of several people who found him. It still terrifies me to think about it. Sometimes I still think about him. I didn’t know him, but I wondered if there was anything I could have done. I couldn’t imagine what that horrible sense of doom felt like. It’s not that my life was perfect. I got bullied and broken up with like any other kid. I just always had hope that if I could make it through high school, things would get better. The Lisbon girls had no such hope. The utter misery and certainty that nothing would ever get better clung to them like smoke lingering in a confined space. It is unavoidable and hideous. A noncorporeal dual-headed monster called dread and despair.

Being a teenager is exhausting. It is wild, tumultuous, dramatic, and riddled with the kinds of highs and lows that only the most extreme roller coasters feature. Yet, for most, our teen years are a curiosity best remembered in small detail and endured. The Virgin Suicides is as much about the death of the girls as it is about the destruction of the specific fragile Michigan ecosystem and the end of childhood for the four boys, now men, who can’t stop obsessing about the girls.

All of the girls weren’t virgins, but they might as well have been. None of them experienced life and love as they should have. Cecilia(Hanna Hall) is the first to die. The sweet, sardonic young woman was just thirteen. That’s hardly enough time to judge the world, yet in the briefest time onscreen, we see that she did. People are cruel, and her world was seemingly ending. Jokes made at the expense of a boy with Down’s Syndrome were just the last straw. Her death is the most grisly. After attempting to bleed to death in the tub, she jumps onto a metal railing and impales herself during the one and only coed party the girls ever had. The deflated balloons are a nasty reminder that appears again at the end of the film when another sister hangs herself in the basement.

The Lisbons keep their daughters from harm religiously. But, more than even their strict adherence to Christianity, the girls’ safety is their religion. The five sisters are porcelain dolls kept in cases, locked away from the world, suffocating to death. Ironically, the place the girls’ parents thought was most safe is the very thing that destroys them. The faulty logic that if they could isolate the girls in their house, they would be safe is their undoing.

Lux(Kirsten Dunst), Therese(Leslie Hayman), Mary(A.J. Cook), and Bonnie(Chelse Swain) live in a cage. Their parents, James Woods, and Kathleen Turner, respectively, are strict before Cecilia’s death. After finally being allowed to go to a school dance with dates, Lux breaks curfew, and the girls are placed in lockdown. They aren’t permitted to go anywhere and are pulled from school. Their beloved albums are burned in a chilling scene that shows just how dangerous fear can be.

As Lux sobs over her records and chokes on smoke created by burning vinyl, Mrs. Lisbon, stone-faced, tells her it is for her own good. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Over time the sisters reach out to the boys who watch them. They share music and plans, and eventually, the girls’ deaths. Lux invites them over to take a drive but fails to mention that they are there to find their bodies. The Virgin Suicides is about pain needing a witness.

Like a plague that tears through a community, suicide for the Lisbon sisters was virulent. After Cecilia died, the others were on borrowed time. Maybe in another house, they could have been saved. Instead, the boys’ fascination with them is marred by tragedy and guilt. They can’t let go because they loved them, worried about them, and lusted after them. They are beautiful, unknowable secrets of sunny burgeoning sexuality and repression. The Lisbon sisters are a stunning mystery, and the boys are victims of their deaths.-forever in fear that history will repeat itself because they didn’t act.

As easy as it would be to allow the girls to live through the boys’ recollection of them, they are not just gorgeous enigmas of feminity. Despite the boy’s, and later the men’s, inability to know them, the Lisbon girls are dreamers, rebels, frightened animals, and schemers. Their authentic selves are what haunt the boys. Like a Cheshire Cat who drapes herself in the rotting trees that line the neighborhood street, Cecelia and the others are never truly gone in The Virgin Suicides

The boys’ encounters with the girls are fleeting and fevered. Lux jumps on Trip Fontaine in his car after a date in her living room with the entire family and smothers him with kisses as hedonistic and desperate as any encounter. The other boys fantasize about relationships with the sisters. Every phone call, every journal entry, and every song is a carefully coded message rife with meaning. It is intense, and to trivialize their experience is unfair.

In another home with other parents, would these girls still be alive? Are they products of their upbringing? Was it genetic or like some terrible contagion that spread from girl to girl while their willfully ignorant parents looked on with increasing levels of tedium and denial? Did Trip and the myriad of other boys who treated the girls with callous disregard contribute to their depression? Although he remembers Lux fondly, Trip is a coward and a user. The other boys in The Virgin Suicides are varying degrees of complicit.

Maybe it was fate that everything the girls touched in The Virgin Suicides would be destroyed. Those who got the closest to them were the most affected. With his gorgeous face and lustrous hair, Trip was reduced to an alcoholic lying to himself at a rehab center. The younger four boys never forgot them. Frozen in time, they are the epitome of arrested development. Like Icharus to the sun, their wings melted, and they fell back to Earth to begin their adult lives broken and bewildered.

Perhaps the boys can’t stop fetishizing the girls because they are the specters of adolescence. Their albums and magazines, dreams and smiles, the discarded detritus of teenage life. The girls are a fantasy of dappled sunlight and pastel fabrications, while after their death, the boys navigate a sickly green nightmare of odious fumes and broken promises. The girls are paradise, found and lost, and the boys know it.

The four teenage boys who obsess about them get a lot of grief, but everyone fails to remember they were children too. The film is kinder to them, showing their fascination rather than playing up their lust. Their curiosity is partly sexual because the boys are coming of age along with the women. There isn’t any agression though. They make inappropriate remarks typical of the era and age group of the boys, but likely they wouldn’t know what to do with the girls if given the chance. Most of them look as if they have barely gone through puberty if they have at all.

Trip does not fair as well in the Virgin Suicides. He leaves Lux alone and vulnerable after taking her virginity. She was just a thing to conquer. A trophy to boast about, but not a girl to be loved. Is he to blame for the girl’s deaths? He contributed, but the blame lies entirely with the Lisbons, who clutch so tightly to their daughters they don’t see how they are squeezing the life right out of them. The girls needed medical help. Instead, mental illness was allowed to run rampant through the house unchecked. In the novel, this point is clearer with text detailing how chaotic and neglected the home becomes. It reeks of rot, and decay shows in every corner. Like the Elm trees dying in droves after contagion ripped through the city, depression was replicating in each of the girls’ minds.

The girls are the trees. If left untreated, they will infect and kill everything around them, eventually leaving the neighborhood bare and empty. The streets and houses become too sunny and exposed to the elements and the truth. In an effort to protect the girls, the Lisbons imprisoned them in suffering. Misery loves company, and the girls only had one another. Since they were taught they were nothing but sexual objects and their limited experience emphasized that belief, the sisters thought they had nothing to live for. Coppola’s film does a remarkable job allowing us a look inside their mental state while the novel is from a male gaze perspective. In the end, the girls were mistreated objects. They were symbols of purity to their parents, and sexual conquests to the boys who coveted them.

The Virgin Suicides feels both timeless and so specifically of a particular time it is almost painful. A crystalline memory made of delicate glass that could as easily mirror our experiences as shatter in an instant. It is of and for a certain moment in life when anything and nothing is possible. The buzz of excitement when we hold hands with someone for the first time. The feel of soft, warm lips on ours before a tongue darts into our mouth and begins tentatively swirling around. How hands underneath clothes feel forbidden and so intoxicating. The grief and embarrassment of rejection. It’s heady stuff that still makes my blood pump decades later.

The Virgin Suicides is the loss of possibility. It’s hopelessness and questions that continue to plague us decades later. Like the four boys, the Lisbon sisters never leave our thoughts entirely. They haunt in technicolor glimmers of what could have been. They are water color memories with no substance beyond ephemeral images of the past.