Sophia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides follows the lives of five young girls- the Lisbon sisters-as they deal with puberty, their parents, and suicide. The movie is told from the perspective of five neighborhood boys who go to school with the Lisbon sisters. They tell the story from their perspective, sharing with us their confusion and intrigue with the Lisbon sisters, but this method of storytelling is very limiting. We can only see the Lisbon sisters through other people’s eyes. Cecelia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese are the Lisbon sisters, each at a different stage of puberty and each walking a fine line between girlhood and womanhood. They live in a restrictive, religious household run by their mother, and all of them feel the weight of it. Cecelia is the first to kill herself, which causes their mother’s protective hand to get heavier. When Lux breaks curfew the night of the dance, that is the final straw for their mother, and the girls are put under house arrest. The Lisbon sisters feel helpless and trapped. Their mother desperately assures them “You are safe in this house,” to which Lux replies, “I can’t breathe here.” People who commit suicide have at least one reason for doing so. Here, I would like to talk about one of those reasons. I believe the Lisbon sisters all (including Cecelia) committed suicide took their lives because they had no other out, and they used suicide as a means to grasp power over their situation.
Mrs. Lisbon is the main antagonist of the Lisbon sisters. She claims that there was “plenty of love in the house,” and like any mother would, she believes that she did her best by her daughters and kept them safe. But in keeping them safe, she was hurting them. They had unhealthily strict rules and had supervised hang-out sessions, although those were not generally encouraged. They wore plain, loose, often white clothes, and lived in a plain house, where the décor mainly consisted of crucifixes and paintings of the Virgin Mary. They were forced to be nuns in a makeshift convent. Their father was also unhappy, although if asked he would have denied it. Instead of fascinating himself with endangered species and rotting trees like Cecelia, he was consumed with model airplanes, dreaming of flying away. Eventually, his mind starts to rot just like the tree in his front yard.
The Lisbon girls don’t seem shy about their blossoming sexuality. Besides Cecelia, who had just started to menstruate, the girls have passed most of the awkward stages of changing bodies, although hormones were definitely at their destructive work in 14-year-old LUx. She didn’t seem to bat an eye at her parents’ rules about boys, especially after Trip left her on the football field. The girls rebelled against their parents in smaller, less obvious ways, like playing footsie underneath the table with young male visitors and making fun of their mother’s mediocre sandwiches. The fact that the girls had no power is evident in the way they rebel- weakly and out of the sight of their mother. Lux rebelled in a stronger way, by sleeping with random men on the roof of the house, but she still did so out of the sight and knowledge of her mother. Lux did not die a virgin in the physical sense of the word. Lux committed suicide of her virginity before taking her life with the rest of her sisters.
The Lisbon sisters’ situation- feelings of powerlessness and being trapped- is very similar to Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Ophelia grew up in a court, where her decisions were made for her by men, namely her father, brother, the King, and Hamlet. When the King and her father were killed, and Hamlet “succumbed to madness,” with her brother nowhere to be found, Ophelia found herself in a strange position of being powerless without guidance. Still confined to the corseted tightness of court life, Ophelia grabbed ahold of the only power she had and took her life. The Lisbon sisters are in a similar situation. Like Ophelia, they are expected to keep their physical and hormonal transformations to themselves and are extremely discouraged from experimentation or even acknowledgment of their bodies. Lux is urged to cover her shoulders, hide her bare feet, and bleach the names of boys out of her underwear. And like Ophelia, the Lisbon sisters are trapped in a life dominated by powerful people exerting their power over the sisters. Their mother, and to some extent their father, and Trip are the most powerful people in the sisters’ story. Lux plays with Trip in the fashion that courtesans played in the Elizabethan era. Lux avoids his gaze, ignores his flatteries, and draws away from holding his hand even though she wants to be with him.
When Lux does let herself get swept away, her sin and soiled virtue is harshly punished by isolation, much like it would have been in Ophelia’s time. The Lisbon sisters were caught in a nasty web of overbearing parents, puberty, and dealing with the suicide of their youngest sister. They were not given help from their community or their parents, only from each other. They felt trapped and powerless, and truly were both those things, and decided that the only way out was death. Like Ophelia, they took control of their only possession, their lives, and exerted their power in the only way they knew how: they committed suicide.
