Femininity, Morality, and Catholicism in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999)
English 30 – Adam Lupo
Alex Jenkins
Lux Lisbon sucks on a lollipop in the sun, and then walks away. A softly eerie song plays in the background, almost covering the ambulance sirens. A woman waters her plants. Two girls walk their dog. A man in orange tacks a notice for removal on the trunk of an elm. A boy plays basketball in his driveway. Light shines through the trees. The music stops with the image of femininity—a flower-decorated fan, and a bottle of perfume. The sirens continue. Cecilia Lisbon is lying in the bathtub. EMTs begin to carry her away. Cecilia’s holy card of the virgin drops from her limp hand amid the blood that has dripped from her wrists. The music begins again as we see the voyeuristic neighbors watch as the ambulance drives away. Mrs. Lisbon stands by the door, paralyzed.
Who, on Christ's dear Mother gazing, pierced by anguish so amazing Born of woman, would not weep?
The male narrator explains, “Everyone traces the demise of our neighborhood to the suicides of the Lisbon girls. People saw their clairvoyance in the wiped out elms, the harsh sunlight, and the continuing decline of our auto industry.” So begins Coppola’s film, a rare combination of strong allusions to feminism, Catholicism, and coming of age in a world in which it is next to impossible to practice these together with the undying devotion required by genuine passion. In order to gain a new appreciation for the film, a viewer would do well to examine the ways in which the aforementioned themes operate throughout the film, cinematically and thematically, and thus see why the argument that true passion holds no place in contemporary American society is so well-argued in the film. Sadly, the film was marketed as ninety minutes of Kirsten Dunst rather than an exigent metaphor for American life, so some viewers may have been disappointed or surprised. However, those lucky enough to have seen the movie with no specific expectations were pleasantly led into the lives of five sisters through the twisted obsessions of the neighborhood boys, who, “after all these years, still couldn’t figure [the girls] out.”
The problematic obsession of the film and the girls with femininity can be seen from the opening sequence, when the music stops with the flowery and feminine image, and all that can be heard are the sirens coming to take Cecilia to the hospital, to save her from her feminine self.
The boy who has been invited to dinner at the Lisbon’s house opens the door to Cecilia’s room. He enters slowly as a less rhythmic but equally eerie background melody plays. He looks around, miffed. He sees Cecilia’s charcoal portraits and a crucifix on her wall. The camera pans left, and Cecilia’s altar of the Virgin surrounded by candles becomes the focus. The confused boy enters the bathroom, and opens the cabinet. He opens a lipstick carefully and brings it close to his face, as though he could breathe in the femininity it exudes. Lux’s face fills the screen against a background of harsh sunlight. She tilts her head back as the blondeness of her hair becomes apparent.
Femininity is given a religious twist by exploring the Catholic idea of the virgin, both in title and in theme. The images in the scene above, visualize Cecilia’s fixation with Mary, the ultimate image of morality and devotion, not to mention the idyllic female. They also expose the complete inability of the male to comprehend the vastness of the female aspect. This seems to be the patriarchic society’s tragic flaw, though it leads to the girls’ demise rather than its own. While Cecilia’s obsession is visualized through Mary, though, it also consists largely of an obsession with morality. This can be seen through her horror when the beautiful elms in her yard are cut down, her fixation on the elms as a subject for poetry, and her trying to explain the tragedy of the ever-longer endangered species list to her mother. Still, though, the males cannot comprehend—to quote the youngest, “how many poems can you write about dead trees?”
When the boys find Cecilia’s journal, they try to “decode it.” The visual consummation of this begins with Cecilia writing in her journal in a field. A nostalgic, airy tune plays in the background. “Lux lost it over Kevin Hanes, the garbage man…” she begins. Lux sits on the front porch in a bathing suit. A unicorn shakes its mane and runs freely through the meadow. Bonnie blows on a dandelion. Therese sits in the meadow and stares into the sun.
What seems on the surface to be the clearest cut coming of age is that of Lux Lisbon and her lipstick, in that she discovers her femininity by sexualizing it, and using it to dominate men, a practice she clearly enjoys. The point of the film remains, however, that a virgin is more than someone who has never had sex. A virgin is a persona, as stated above, that of the idyllic female, and sexual experience cannot take that persona away. Lux is beautiful and charming, and too feminine for the world to integrate.
The kids of the neighborhood are sitting in the Lisbon’s basement for a party. Cecilia approaches her mother, “Can I be excused?” “Well…” Cecilia tugs at the bracelets covering the bandages on her wrists. “Yes, yes of course we’ll just…have to have fun without you.” Cecilia stumbles up the stairs like a rag doll. Near the top, she looks back. The party continues until the father’s scream is heard. The mother looks shocked, “Cecilia!” The party runs up the stairs, and out the front door. There lies Cecilia peacefully, having impaled herself through the fencepost. The camera zooms out. The sprinkler starts and moves across the screen from left to right.
The images of the feminine in this film are unavoidable. Water is a symbol of fertility, so it seems darkly ironic that its image should be combined with that of Cecilia’s suicide. But that is the message of the movie—that maintaining the feminine, and the traditional values that go along with it, is fatal and impossible.
The film is so effective in making this argument primarily, though not surprisingly when one remembers who Sofia Coppola’s father was, because of its attention to the cinematic language. Most of this seems to allude to Jean Luc Godard’s 2 ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais D’elle, especially the heightened role of the director and narrator, and the degraded role of the actress, as mostly unknown actresses are used as a tool for the director to make the film and for the characters within the film.
Cecilia is at the psychiatrist. He asks her some stupid questions, and she looks at him, bored. He makes notes. She still looks bored. The image of a building is inter-cut, with the traffic noise blaring. All is quiet again when the psychiatrist sees the parents.
This is another Godard technique, and it symbolizes the loss of personality of the city, as well as the loss of touch with nature in contemporary society. The final Godard technique is the light shining through the leaves, which he used in his film to question the relationship between truth and beauty by asking, “Should I have talked about Juliette or the leaves?”
Overall, The Virgin Suicides is an excellent film, both cinematically and as a cultural enthymeme, because it forces us to question the role of morality, the church, and femininity in contemporary American society.
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