When I first watched “The Virgin Suicides” in my junior year of high school, I thought about it every day for weeks. I had never been impacted by a movie on such a level before. The film showed me what being a girl was like in a different, more serious light, and it just so happens to be coming to the IU Cinema on May 9.
Women are constantly described as objects. From a young age, women learn that they will be surveyed, glanced upon and objectified by the man's world we live in. “The Virgin Suicides” talks about being a girl and brings attention to these issues through the Lisbon girls’ story, which is told by men.
The Lisbon girls, Cecilia, 13, Lux, 14, Bonnie, 15, Mary, 16, and Therese, 17, are untouchable — not because they want to be, but due to how their parents raised them. The parents of the girls are strict, not allowing boys in the house, hangouts, sleepovers or anything a teenager might think of as fun.
The whole story is told through the eyes of the boys living across the street from these girls. They watch them go about their day, fascinated by their beauty and obsessed with the fact that no one can get to them.
It follows the idea that men want something innocent, something uninfluenced, something beautiful. They crave the girls no one can have, and that no one knows anything about, besides the fact that they are beautiful.
The Lisbon girls are objects to these boys, and to other boys that cross their paths during the movie.
The story starts with the youngest Lisbon girl, Cecilia, saying “Obviously, doctor, you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
As a girl, it makes me think of all the times men have tried to suggest, imply or live in my shoes without knowing the true everyday struggles of the patriarchal system.
In the movie, the girls have a strong desire to live and experience things. With their strict parents, they never got a chance to have the teenage fun most kids experience. They want to live so badly but since they can’t, they choose to die. While others watch them for their beauty and elusive femininity, they watch others live the life they desire, until they can’t do it anymore.
The Lisbon girls are represented with intense femininity. Flowy pink curtains, white, innocent clothes, and the little makeup they wear gives the girls a soft pink girlish aura. This resonates with the idea that the boys in the movie want that innocent, soft love they think the girls have. They don’t ask how they are, what their hobbies are, or anything about them, but rather care about how to step into the lives of the most beautiful, untouchable girls in school.
Close to the end of the movie and book, the girls communicate with the boys across the street about how they want to escape the boring town they live in. The boys come over for what they think is a rescue mission, but really ends in the suicides of all four of the Lisbon girls. The boys fantasize about who they would sit next to, if they would kiss, and their lives together. Then, they realized the true meaning of what had happened.
“We had never known her. They had brought us here to find that out,” the boys think to themselves when they find Bonnie dead in the book.
The Virgin Suicides combines everything stereotypical in a girl’s life: the young innocent girls who wear pink and white, the mysterious femininity guys don’t and possibly can’t understand, and the concept of the male gaze.
The girls were never known by the boys they interacted with. They were objects for the male gaze, and they showed this to the boys with their final goodbyes.
This story could have been told differently. It could have been through the Lisbon girls’ eyes, talking about their short lives and why they did what they did. Instead, the story is told through the men they interacted with, and why those men were so obsessed with them. Letting the boys tell the stories of the Lisbon girls combines the meanings of the movie and book, telling the audience that even after the deaths of the girls, the boys are the ones who get to tell the stories of what it's like to be a woman.
Kate Hutner (she/her) is a sophomore studying journalism and fashion design.
