The Virgin Suicides Analysis
How funny it is, to think we could ever really know another human being. Oh we muddle through all right, mostly in peace, at some level of adequacy but you never have a clue as to what exactly is going on in anybody’s head, or as to why another person does anything. Nobody understands anybody, heck, nobody understands themselves. I doubt our minds could even grasp the whole truth about anything, let alone a person. One mind can only think up its own questions and biases; it rarely surprises itself. Our mental frameworks are never quite perfect, everything’s blurrier and everyone’s uglier up close. This is correspondingly illustrated by Director Sofia Coppola’s film, The Virgin Suicides, a town where ideas are real and reality is shadow. She
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This apparent lack of any explanation for the Lisbon sister’s deaths is the whole point: The reality of whom the Lisbon sisters were, and why they killed themselves is trivial. What’s important are the teenage boys and the town’s one-dimensional portrayal of the girls, in life as well as in death. With superficial rationalizations, dismissals, and pervasive “mis-imaginings” the people of Grosse Pointe, Michigan created a distorted picture of the girls and their tragic demise. No, the primary purpose of The Virgin Suicides was not to tell the tragic story of a draconian mother and an emasculated father driving their daughters to dramatic suicides in an attempt to protect them from what they saw as a carnal world. It was much more subtle than that. It was a comment on the impossible nature of knowing a person, the disillusionment of childhood imaginings, and the psychosocial condition of society’s obsession with finding elusive happiness. Coppola’s film, though bordering on magic realism at times, is subtle, often opting to leave things enigmatic, poignant, and esthetic. She doesn’t force critical analyses but allows her ideas to hang on her editorial creation, letting the images she believes dominates contemporary communication to ferment in her audience’s
This apparent lack of any explanation for the Lisbon sister’s deaths is the whole point: The reality of whom the Lisbon sisters were, and why they killed themselves is trivial. What’s important are the teenage boys and the town’s one-dimensional portrayal of the girls, in life as well as in death. With superficial rationalizations, dismissals, and pervasive “mis-imaginings” the people of Grosse Pointe, Michigan created a distorted picture of the girls and their tragic demise. No, the primary purpose of The Virgin Suicides was not to tell the tragic story of a draconian mother and an emasculated father driving their daughters to dramatic suicides in an attempt to protect them from what they saw as a carnal world. It was much more subtle than that. It was a comment on the impossible nature of knowing a person, the disillusionment of childhood imaginings, and the psychosocial condition of society’s obsession with finding elusive happiness. Coppola’s film, though bordering on magic realism at times, is subtle, often opting to leave things enigmatic, poignant, and esthetic. She doesn’t force critical analyses but allows her ideas to hang on her editorial creation, letting the images she believes dominates contemporary communication to ferment in her audience’s