Reflection and Repression: THE VIRGIN SUICIDES
This summer, I’m doing a deep dive into Sofia Coppola’s filmography, mostly because….I’ve always meant to! We start, as always, at the beginning….
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“You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.”
It’s awful being a kid.
It’s an easy thing to forget once you become an adult, when your soul becomes leaden with life’s curses, and you begin to feel the undertow of the boundless sea of nostalgia pull you in. As bleak as it starts to feel once you pass the legal voting age, though, adulthood at least comes with its own certain freedoms. The freedom, for instance, to crack open a beer (or two). The freedom to drive out to the middle of nowhere if the mood strikes. The freedom to hang out with pretty much whoever you want. Sure, those things can all have consequences attached to them, but there’s typically nobody in your way of doing much of anything.
As a kid? Your freedoms depend mostly on the mercies of the guardians surrounding you. You’re too young for beer; you’d be lucky if you’re allowed to even drink a sugary soda every once in awhile. Your ability to travel hangs on the ability and desire of a parent to give you a ride, there and back. And god help you if one of your friends (or…gulp…boyfriend) fails to merit your mom or dad’s approval. And this is all assuming your parents are anything resembling normal. Your already impossibly small world can become almost unbearably tiny if you’re dealt an especially bad parental hand.
How you deal with the restriction of freedom inherent to your adolescence and teenage years can make or break you. One option is to just sort of accept the ennui and decide to start doing things to amuse yourself, like writing crappy stories in a composition notebook, which can lead you down the path of eventually writing articles about Scorsese’s THE IRISHMAN and Lembeck’s THE SANTA CLAUSE 3: THE ESCAPE CLAUSE within weeks of each other during a pandemic (just as an example).
Or…you can rebel. And there are lots of ways to reclaim your freedom. You can lie to your parent’s faces just because. You can thumb your nose at their religion or beliefs. You can secretly call or text that boy they disapprove of.
Or, in the most extreme of cases…you can opt out of it all entirely.
THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (1999)
Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett, Kathleen Turner, James Woods
Directed by: Sofia Coppola
Written by: Sofia Coppola
Released: May 19, 1999 at the Cannes Film Festival, general release April 21, 2000
Length: 97 minutes
Based on the 1993 Jeffrey Eugenides novel, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES takes us back to 1975 Michigan to tell the story of the Lisbon family through the perspective of a group of neighborhood boys, reflecting back on their youth as grown men in the present. Seemingly living comfortably in a Grosse Pointe suburb, the Lisbons consist of the mother Sara (Turner), the father Ronald (Woods) and five daughters: Lux (Dunst), Mary (A.J. Cook), Cecilia (Hanna R. Hall), Therese (Leslie Hayman), and Bonnie (Chelse Swain). One summer day, Cecilia attempts suicide by slitting her wrists in a bathtub. From there, the movie tracks the Lisbons’ reactions and behavior to this unexpected turn, as well as the boys in the neighborhood that become oddly fascinated with these mysterious girls.
Initially, nobody really knows what to make of Cecilia’s attempt on her own life. Even the well-meaning child psychologist, Dr. Horniker (a role that gives us a wonderful and unexpected Danny De Vito cameo) chalks it up to a cry for help, and suggests increasing her socialization. In response, Mrs. Lisbon instead tightens the reins she has on her daughters, increasing their curfew. After a very forced, very sterile, and very supervised “party” with a couple of neighborhood boys, Cecilia excuses herself and leaps off the balcony onto the metal fencing below.
We follow as Lux begins a secret love affair with one of the hottest boys in school, Trip Fontaine (Hartnett). Their romance burns brightly before being inevitably extinguished in a cruelly arbitrary manner, and curfew becomes tighter and tighter for the Lisbon children. The daughters are pulled out of school and are essentially on house arrest. In response, Lux sneaks onto the roof at night to have random hookups with strange boys. From there, the movie chugs along towards the ending indicated by its title.
THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is about…well, it’s about a lot of things. It’s partly a story of feminine interiority. It’s also partly a story about the struggle for identity and autonomy in an inherently restrictive environment. Most interestingly, though, it’s also a story mostly told through the eyes of a group of boys. As mentioned, the film is narrated by one of the neighborhood kids (voiced by Giovanni Ribisi), now a grown man, reflecting back on this time of his life where he and his friends were obsessed with the Lisbon sisters, due mostly to the fact that they were so completely…unknowable. They’re not really allowed to go out much, they don’t really socialize….they’re essentially blank slates for others to project their dreams onto. Although we never see the boys as men in the present (although we do see a grown-up Trip, more on that in a minute), their perspective ultimately serves as audience surrogate, our window into the story’s central family.
This would seem, at first glance, to be counter-intuitive. A story about women told from the perspective of men? Phooey! However, I think this extra layer of narrative removal achieves the effect of keeping the girls further away from us. For instance, the only way the boys ever really get any insight into any of the sisters is through Cecilia’s journal after she passes. Even then, they’re only left to imagine what their documented experiences might have looked like, or how those experiences may have played out. Other than that, they really only have their assumptions and gut feelings. And so do we. When it comes to the Lisbon sisters, we know about as much about them as the boys do, which adds to the film’s mysterious and dreamlike haze.
THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is also a story that Coppola almost didn’t get to tell at all. Before pivoting to filmmaking, it felt like she was best known for most of the 1990’s as the scapegoat for why THE GODFATHER PART III fell short of its astronomical expectations. By the time she was given a copy of Eugenides’ book in 1998 (by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore), she was technically too late to turn it into a film, as a studio had already greenlit a production. However, she just wasn’t able to shake how the book had made her feel, specifically citing it as the reason she decided to finally enter the family business:
I really didn't know I wanted to be a director until I read The Virgin Suicides and saw so clearly how it had to be done.
So, she wrote her own script anyway, mostly as a private project for herself. As fortune would have it, the original production subsequently fell through, and she was able to pitch her script to the production company that owned the rights to the book. She made a strong enough impression that she was hired on to be both the writer and the director.
The cast was assembled fairly quickly. Turner, who had previously worked with Coppola on 1986’s PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, was allegedly the first to sign on. Woods was next, having been impressed both with the script and with the young director. After a extensive search for the right fit for Lux Lisbon, Coppola eventually went with her gut and selected 16-year old Dunst, who was transitioning from a child star to someone on the cusp of adulthood. Hartnett won the role of Trip Fontaine by seemingly embodying that mix of swagger and unbridled youth that Coppola saw in the character.
In the same quote above, Coppola went on to explain exactly what she saw so clearly about the story:
I immediately saw the central story as being about what distance and time and memory do to you, and about the extraordinary power of the unfathomable.
With that in mind (especially that part about the “extraordinary power of the unfathomable”), it immediately becomes clear when watching THE VIRGIN SUICIDES what film influenced Coppola most directly in the crafting of her debut feature: Peter Weir’s 1975 mystery magnum opus PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK.
If you’ve never seen it, HANGING ROCK is ostensibly about a group of Australian girls at the turn of the century that mysteriously disappear during a picnic at…uh…Hanging Rock, an intriguing (and apparently very real) rock formation. But it’s a movie that’s also about…well, it’s also about a lot of other things. It’s about trying to seek understanding of events that will never be clear. It’s about trying to understand the motivations of people that are ultimately unknowable. It’s about the way nature can compel us to do all sorts of things that defy logic and reason. It’s about…look, you should just watch it, it’s great.
As you might be able to surmise, there are lots of similarities between HANGING ROCK and VIRGIN SUICIDES, to the point where it would make for a fascinating double feature. Besides the obvious parallel of a story (adapted from a novel) regarding a group of girls and their seemingly inexplicable removal from this life, it also features a boy trying (and failing) to understand the girls he admires from afar. Hell, even the costumes in Weir’s film seem to have parallels in Coppola’s; the Lisbon daughters’ unfortunate set of prom dresses bears a very close resemblance to the Appleyard school uniforms.
Another key similarity between the two films is this sense of extreme feeling being intentionally buried beneath the surface, just waiting for enough heat to cause an explosion. Yes, they deal with different types of feelings (in HANGING ROCK, it’s existential and indefinable dread; in VIRGIN SUICIDES, it’s the relief of human passion), but in both cases, the narrative is driven by this urgent sense that something bad is going to happen sans the resolution of this imperceptible note.
To be clear, they are ultimately very different movies, both in tone and in texture; THE VIRGIN SUICIDES feels like a foggy dream you keep trying to hold onto, while PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK feels more like a vivd nightmare you can never shake again. But seeing this kind of connective tissue is exciting nonetheless! And it’s thrilling to be able to see a very young Sofia Coppola consume an international masterwork and learn all the right lessons from it.
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One of the most striking things about THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is how understated everything driving the narrative is. It’s a story that’s driven by behavior and feeling, which can sometimes get interpreted as '“boring” (an opinion that also gets levied against Coppola’s follow-up feature, LOST IN TRANSLATION). And it’s true, VIRGIN SUICIDES perhaps doesn’t precisely have that A-B-C structure that we normally look to in stories. Yes, there’s a lot of scenes that consist of things happening, but if a viewer isn’t able to connect with the film on an emotional level, it might not be clear what exactly Coppola is trying to say.
But the beating heart of a dramatic story is so definitely there, and being able to lock in on the emotions most of these characters want to express here is what makes for a thrilling watch. Zeroing in specifically on that feeling of longing and repressed desire is the key to unlocking what THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is all about. When you do, you can see two simultaneous and intertwined ideas within the film emerge: the suffocating effect of “normal suburbia” on youth, and the foggy effects of nostalgic memory.
We experience the first idea through what we get to see of the Lisbon sisters and the way at least two of them react to their parents’ fierce clinging to what they can control, out of a complete and paralyzing fear of the uncertain. Cecilia chooses to opt out entirely, successfully committing suicide early on. Lux tries to find feeling and take control in other ways, both through her passionate fling with Trip, then later through random trysts on the roof. In both cases, it’s a call and response to the panicked restriction of control, motivated by the Lisbon parents’ misguided attempts to keep things “normal” and mitigate risks against that normalcy. Ultimately, this push and pull between the parents and the sisters ends up being a race to the bottom.
We experience the second through the narrative framing of the movie. It’s important to reiterate that the narration is reflective, someone in the present trying to recall events of the past, making the entire movie a flashback of sorts. When taking the events of THE VIRGIN SUICIDES in totality, it becomes clear that this is also the story of a grown man trying to sort through maybe the craziest thing he’s ever experienced, desperately searching for an answer to the inexplicable events of his past, trying to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical.
In both threads, the idea of repressed passions keep coming up to the surface. Let’s go back to the boys reading Cecilia’s diary entries. It’s fascinating just how vivid their imaginations become when envisioning those diary pages playing out, and the visual language of the movie changes in kind. The moments that take place in their mind’s eyes are all shot like scenes from a particularly relaxed music video; dreamy shots of unicorns, silhouettes of the sisters superimposed against a normal blue sky (I’d also argue this is the visual influence of HANGING ROCK seeping through again). It’s all a stark contrast to the more washed-out world of 70’s suburbia the movie normally resides in.
Coppola directs all of this with a surprising amount of control and confidence. She does a wonderful job with a difficult assignment: making the invisible visible. To be blunt, subtle filmmaking is really fucking hard. To some degree, more “kinetic” directors have an easier job. Not that action movies are easy (compare the level of craft in an average Mission: Impossible to the endless parade of bullshit Netflix has been crapping out, lest one think action filmmaking is a lesser art form), but the story is usually there in front of you. Motivations are explicitly stated. The twists and turns in a given scene can be seen through a pair of fists. In something like VIRGIN SUICIDES, all those emotions need to be invisible, yet still deeply felt.
All this to say that this makes Coppola’s debut feature an astounding achievement. I’d stop short of saying it’s a perfect film. I have quibbles: I don’t think the boys themselves are all that memorable, unfortunately. Also, the toxic gas leak at the debutante ball near the end of the film is on-the-nose in a way almost nothing else in VIRGIN SUICIDES is. Even still, there are all these little touches throughout the film that inform the story without drawing a lot of attention to themselves. Like the tree in the front lawn that’s dead from the roots, an early symbolic sign that something is deeply wrong in the foundation of the Lisbon home. Or the sad insistence within the community that Cecilia’s suicide was actually just an unfortunate accident; they always knew those metal fences were dangerous!
A less dire example that also comes to mind is the reveal that Lux has written Trip’s name on her underwear are shot and crafted to align with this “under the surface” nature; we see the relevant part of her underwear via a superimposed iris over her prom dress. Like every emotion felt by every kid in this movie, it’s only there if you know where to look.
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Even know you’re clued into them ahead of time just by reading the title, the suicides that bookend the film still come as somewhat shocking surprises on a first watch. On a second go, however, when you can really take in the behaviors on display, and the undercurrent of unexpressed (and unfulfilled) desire that infuses every primary character….it becomes clear that for these sisters, there’s truly no other way but out.
Given all of this, the unexpressed pain our main characters feel, and their ultimate fates, it’d be easy to paint the Lisbon parents as abusive monsters. But that’s the beautiful things about THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, at least as a screenplay: it’s really, really careful not to dramatize them that way. As presented here, they’re not actively abusive, not really. Not in the way we normally see abuse depicted in film. Instead, they’re presented as terrified. The Lisbons are 70’s-era religious, scared and confused. They’re overprotective to the point of genuinely repressing their children’s feelings, which creates an ouroboros of action-reaction (the Lisbon sisters desire even further rebellion and social interaction as it becomes further and further restricted, and that desire leads to further restriction….and on and it goes).
Kathleen Turner plays all of this with stark realism. In lesser hands, Mrs. Lisbon could have been a caricature of a religious head of household (and to be clear, she is The Head of This Household), an unfeeling zealot that craves complete dominance over her progeny. But, in Turner’s hands, she manages to be weirdly sympathetic, even as you desperately want to shake her and make her realize the damage she’s doing.
The biggest surprise, though: despite currently spending his twilight years being a complete ghoul, James Woods is….quite good! It helps that the character is wildly well-written, another understated Lisbon parent who has no idea how to even function, let alone do right by his daughters. Again, he isn’t a mean, abusive villain. He’s a total dork, a high-school science teacher, all white shirt and earth tones. What help can he really lend to his five daughters dealing with the pain of being a teenager? What counter-balance can he possibly provide to his scared-out-her-mind wife? So he doesn’t. It’s a realistic (and under-discussed) scenario, that of the man who applies for the job of father, only to turn out to only be just okay at it once he gets it.
Of the five actresses that play the Lisbon daughters, easily the one with the most to do is Kirsten Dunst. Although she’d already starred in major hits like JUMANJI and SMALL SOLDIERS, with future hits like BRING IT ON and SPIDER-MAN right around the corner, this still manages to feel like a career-making performance. Effortlessly sexy (but, crucially, only mysteriously so), she serves as good of a gauge as to the headspace of the Lisbon daughters as a collective as anyone else. When Trip makes the boneheaded decision to abandon her after having sex on the football field the night of homecoming, your heart sinks. It’s not just because we know what this is going to portend, but because Dunst embodies Lux’s heartbreak and shame so perfectly.
Hartnett is also dynamite as Trip, the perfect embodiment of the 70’s high school heartthrob. He and Dunst are just perfect together, and their chemistry is insane. There’s a very simple scene in a movie theatre where the two touch hands for the first time; you almost can’t breathe during it, a consequence of a film repressing its passions until two characters can’t help it anymore. When they finally begin to make out in his car, as the needle drops on Heart’s “Crazy on You”*…you can’t help but get swept up.
*(Shout out to the soundtrack, by the way. Coppola was careful not to overload it with a bunch of music from the period in order to preserve a little timelessness, but the few tracks that she does opt to use hit like gangbusters; sorry, James Gunn, but Sofia got to 10cc a decade and a half before you. But the actual film score by Air? Beautiful. “Playground Love”, the defacto theme of the film? Just great. It’s sometimes silly to break down loving a movie to something this reductive, but….a movie with a cool soundtrack makes me feel cool for watching it. In this sense, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is an A+.)
However, I’ve always been most intrigued by the somewhat-incongruous flash-forward to an adult Trip (Michael Pare), who appears to be in detox treatment and deeply, deeply regretful for taking off on Lux all those years ago. In no other scenario in the film’s 97 minutes do we ever leave the confines of mid-70’s Michigan. So to all of a sudden be in 1999 for a minute or two in the middle of the film feels like Sofia intentionally drawing our eye.
It’s a diversion that the book takes as well, and I think it’s a way for both mediums to illustrate how the inexplicable casual cruelness that only teenage boys can truly exhibit tends to come back to haunt them as adults. It’s heavily implied in the film that his addictions as an adult stem from the guilt of leaving Lux at the football field. Now she’s dead, taken by her own hand, and all he’s left with are the feelings he felt and the inexplicable dick move that he probably couldn’t even justify in the moment, much less twenty-five years later.
As to why we get specific insight into Trip and not our narrator or any of his friends? I chalk that up to Trip no longer being an outsider. He got to tango with at least one Lisbon. He knew Lux, at least a little. So we get to know Trip. At least a little.
More to the point, adult Trip shows us directly the devastating power of memory. Trip is left with only his recollections as a young buck, when the world was rife with opportunity, when you could put basically anything into your body with minimal consequence. Now, as he sits with regret, he has only memories.
In the end, that’s all the Lisbon sisters are to our boys: the physical representation of a time gone by, never to return. A time where the world seemed like a dream, where even the unique horrors of childhood felt a little magical, detached from reality. That’s the nature and power of nostalgia (and THE VIRGIN SUICIDES): it can make you even miss the ghosts.