Pretty in Pain: Revisiting the Virgin Suicides

by Kristin Haegelin

Content Warning: Eating disorders, self harm, and suicide.

In 1993, Jeffrey Eugenides published his first novel “The Virgin Suicides.”

In 1999, Sofia Coppola debuted her film adaptation of the novel to largely positive reviews.

Now, in 2022, we’re still talking about it.

Released more than 20 years ago, the movie has since outlived its can drop away from a body of work as easily as meat falls from the bone. When the lat(now grown men), who lived in the same neighborhood of the five Lisbon sisters and adolescence, but has found an impressive cult following amongst teen girls throughout the 2000s and 2010s. Many swarm to the film as an accurate portrayal of the claustrophobic nature of girlhood, identifying with the angst and repression that make up the core of the doomed Lisbon girls’ existence. Along with the film’s enduring acclaim, “The Virgin Suicides” has sparked criticism as well. Some find that the plot prioritizes white femininity ( it does) and others who felt that it only serves to glamourize suicide and mental illness (I’ll leave that for viewers to decide).

Still, its important to interrogate what makes “The Virgin Suicides” so timeless amongst this adolescent demographic. Is it, in fact, timeless? Amongst the contemporary online environment of instant reshares and TikTok edits, nuances of film and its literary meaning can drop away from a body of work as easily as meat falls from the bone. When the latest iteration of a text arrives onto our feed, we are left only with easily digestible aesthetics, while the marrow of the text is discarded completely. This is the case with Eugenides and Coppola’s original investigation and condemnation of the male gaze. Through high speed internet trends and a rapid rebirth in cultural capital on social media, the original meaning of “The Virgin Suicides” has become estranged from its aesthetics, leaving teen girls with an iconography that centers female pain as tragically beautiful and worthy of imitation.

As we enter the cinematic universe of 1970s suburban Detroit, Coppola makes her exploration known from the start: she is presenting a story through a subjective lens, one that most likely differs from the viewers. The film occurs through the eyes of a group of unnamed male narrators, boys (now grown men), who lived in the same neighborhood of the five Lisbon sisters and witnessed their fatal decline. Despite the difficult task at hand, Coppola’s work captures pent-up teen boyhood in all of its unchecked cruelty and testosterone-fueled extremes. Shooting the blonde sisters through car windows, behind elm trees, and in the close-up view of a telescope, she makes it clear that the girls are always being watched. Even in moments where the girls are presumed to be alone, such as when Lux wakes up on the football field alone after having sex for the first time, the camera is placed above as if there was a stranger looking on from the bleachers. Finally, the intermittent narration of the boys constantly reminds the viewer that this is not the story of the Lisbon girls. It never has been. Instead, this is the story of privileged, middle class white men and their fantasies which never reached fruition.

“The Virgin Suicides” novel further parodies the limited view of the boys by showing their careful collection of the Lis bon girls’ stolen items, which ultimately gives them little in sight into what their infamous neighbors were really like. The invasive hoard itself contains 97 “exhibits,” which are “ar ranged in five separate suit cases, each bearing a photo graph of the deceased [girls] like a Coptic headstone” (241). From faded family photos of the girls, to Mary’s cosmetics, a stolen brassiere, and Lux’s gynecological exam, the boys have figuratively and literally objectified the girls through their treasured museum. Unsurprisingly, their comical (and often uncomfortable) ways of getting closer to the Lisbon sisters leave them worse off than they began. As the narator truthfully remarks, “Our vigilance had been only the fingerprinting of phantoms” (182). Without ever taking the time to talk to the girls, Eugenides points us to the obvious conclusion that the group of teens boys had no chance of understanding them. The girls stayed as phantoms for ever, illusory and one dimensional.

design by Katelynn Perez

While the male gaze is both visible and ridiculed through out the novel and film, the most recent wave of internet fame surrounding “The Virgin Suicides” does not seem to acknowledge the irony of the girls’ idealized images. A simple Pinterest search of ‘Kirsten Dunst’ or ‘Sofia Coppola’ produces hundreds of behind-the-scenes stills, pictures of lipstick-stained cigarettes, and Brandy Melville outfits. TikTok holds much of the same, sometimes producing fan edits of the film set to Lana del Rey songs. If these permutations still were not enough, there is also the 2021 ‘Virgin Suicides’ collection from Marc Jacobs’ Heaven, which features Lux Lisbon’s image printed on mesh tops and slip skirts, all priced in the hundreds.

design by Katelynn Perez

Beyond commodifying the Lisbon sisters’ pain (however fictional it may be), these viral mood boards seem to perfectly capture the misogynistic martyrdom featured in the book without a pinch of its self awareness or literary nuance. Lacking the context that these webs of imagery emerged from, the film’s exaggerated, male-centered depictions of girlhood become ideals to strive for. In this way, the voyeuristic male gaze that saturates each frame of the movie becomes our gaze through the discreet lens of the internet. Whiteness, thin ness, and unbearable misery are what girls have learned to both covet and relate to, rein forcing an exclusive Eurocen tric beauty standard that is already firmly entrenched in American society.

All of this to say, “The Virgin Suicides” is still only a tiny piece of a giant, cultural puzzle to solve. In the greater web of internet culture, similar film and media aesthetics have had immense, unintended social effects in online communities. For example, in the journal article “Ana and Mia: Ophelia on the Web,” author Remedios Perni points out that image boards on Pinterest and Tumblr, overpopulated with figures such as the Lisbon sisters, Winona Ryder’s character in “Girl, Interrupted,” and Natalie Portman’s tortured artist figure in “Black Swan,” have functioned as inspiration for girls on pro-eating disorder blogs and chat forums. “The contemplation of icons of Western beauty,” Permi argues, invites girls to further engage with self-destructive/self-harming behavior by providing them with Hollywood-approved benchmarks for success.

While many might have first found solace in relating to these female characters on line, the ethos of these internet spaces serves only to spawn “an ideology of emotional problems which helps reproduce the conditions that produce them.” If we are to overcome this cycle of martyrdom, we need to start taking the politics behind aesthetics seriously and ask ourselves critical questions: Why are so many of our icons depressed? How does society benefit from capturing and romanticizing female pain? And when the next pop cultural sad girl comes along, will we be able to stop ourselves from sanctifying her?