Virgin Suicide Movie Vs Book

The illusion that words create compared to a moving picture can be completely perceived differently, depending on who the audience is. Specifically, when one tries to recreate a book into a movie, it is really hard to stick to all of the details because most movies have a time limit. If a director were to make a movie the exact way a book was written, then the movie would be four to five hours long. Not a lot of people would complain about it, but there is a cost limit to the movie as well. So, concerning The Virgin Suicides book and movie, you can see that there will be a lot of alterations to the books details. Although the movie and book of The Virgin Suicides may appear very similar, there are many differences such as the characters of
The number one description from the book that is not displayed the same way in the movie is the decaying of the Lisbon house. When reading the book, Eugenides words create the sense of a burial ground, rather than a house being unkempt. The book describes how the leaves aren’t being raked, the trash is piling up around the house, and how the smell coming from the house is what really shows how the house is literally deteriorating in front of the neighborhoods watchful eyes. Even the boys begin to smell the stench, that to them, is so thick and palpable in the air. The shabbiness of the house begins to attract attention, yet the only time the movie even depicts that the neighbors are actually watching the Lisbon house, is when they take the fence out of the front yard. The reason the house decaying is such a big detail in the book that is missing in the movie, is because of how throughout the book, the house is the constant reminder of how the Lisbon family is slowly decaying. “We noticed how tattered the curtains had become, then we realized we weren’t looking at curtains at all but at a film of dirt, with spy holes wiped clean” (Eugenides 160). The Lisbon house’s external decay is what mirrors the chaos going on inside of the house, so when the movie leaves that out, it’s like the one major detail being left out to bring the entire story together. There are also the foreshadowing moments of the bugs during the seasons, because when it came for Cecilia’s successful suicide attempt, the bugs were there, and when it comes for all of the sisters to all die together, the bugs are back. In addition, the foreshadowing moment of when the girls go back to school, the clocks points down on the girls, like it is trying to show the readers that they are next to go. It just goes to show that leaving out any type of details can ruin a plot of a story because