The Virgin Suicides: Is hell really a teenage girl?

 Based on Jeffrey Eugenides’ 1993 novel and adapted for the screen in Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides still stands as the epitome of Girlhood. Five teenage sisters living in a small American town, their lives tinted with love, control, silence, and pain. Coppola’s cinematographic talent shows through—as in all her films—in the aesthetics: an atmosphere so delicate, so unmistakably hers, that you almost forget the horror underneath. It’s disturbing how a story about death is presented in pastel colors and ribbons. The same visual scheme appears in much of her work, including Priscilla.

And yet, how is it that a movie so intrinsically feminine is built entirely through the male gaze?

The lives of the Lisbon sisters are narrated through the lens of their teenage neighbors, boys who feel an insatiable attraction toward the mysterious girls and romanticize the very horror unfolding in front of them. We know nothing about the sisters except what others choose to tell us. Even Cecilia’s suicide—one of the film’s first scenes—is explained by neighbors, doctors, and the boys. No one asks Cecilia why she did it. Not really. The entire movie is built through stories, fragments, assumptions. Every glimpse of their minds is through their diaries, through the words heard from them. We never truly know what was in their minds. And we never will.

In the end we had pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained. Oddly shaped emptiness mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name. What lingered after them was not life, but the most trivial list of mundane facts. A clock ticking on the wall, a room dim at noon, the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. - Narrator.

Isn’t that exactly how society sees teenage girls? Isn’t this the most accurate representation of girlhood—not because it captures what being a girl is, but because it captures how girlhood is perceived? Our existence filtered, softened, aestheticized, misunderstood. Always seen through someone else’s lens.

Is pain and beauty all people can see in teenage girls?

Is a beautiful hell all society sees when they look a 13-year-old in the eyes? Is sadness, and virginity, and softness, and rage… really all we can expect to feel? Is there really no passion? No happiness? No sensuality? No hope? Are we really just a bunch of pain and pink ribbons? Is our suffering really so different from any other’s, or is it just different? Are we really so hard to understand, or is society making no effort to understand us at all?

Girlhood can be painful. Girlhood can be soft. Girlhood can be rage and virginity and mystery. But we are not only that. We aren’t only the fire they need to try and save. We aren’t solely an enigma for boys to solve. We feel as intense as anyone else. We have the same lungs and hearts and we bleed the same. But they don’t know that. They don’t wanna know that. They want to think we’re heaven, and when they see the truth, hell is the only thing they can call us.