THE REMAINING LISBON SISTERS are sprawled in their bedroom when the priest knocks on their door.
“Hello girls, I thought we could talk. Do you feel like talking?”
Their returning stares are vacant and unknowable, and the priest wears only the pretense of concern. Both parties maintain their false decorum, neither fully able to acknowledge their shared grief: the suicide of Cecilia, the youngest Lisbon sister, only 13 years old.
Sofia Coppola’s 1999 film The Virgin Suicides (based on Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel of the same name) is peppered with such moments of dissonance as a neighborhood tries to grapple with the untimely deaths of all five Lisbon girls. Premiering 25 years ago, Coppola’s debut film is a snapshot of American decadence in decline, a moment not unlike our own: a society in cultural, environmental, and economic upheaval.
But rather than expose the sorrow of the other Lisbon girls and their strict Catholic parents, the director withholds the girls from us, situating the lens from the perspective of the neighborhood onlookers, particularly a group of teen boys. Adults in their tidy Detroit suburb project their own anxieties upon the Lisbons, laying the burden of Cecilia’s death at the feet of her and her family so as not to implicate themselves, to not infer her death as endemic.
“Those girls have a bright future ahead of them. The other one was just going to end up a kook,” quips one mother to her kids.
Thus the boys are well taught to paint the girls as blank canvases, drawing inspiration through stolen diaries and schoolyard boasts about who got lucky with whom. The girls are set dressing, with Coppola hinting at their psyche only in hazy ambiance.
In this way, The Virgin Suicides portrays the callous ways we distance ourselves from the grieving. We unshoulder the burden of community care for the easier load of judgment, denying the reality that the pain of our neighbors is ours to bear as well. Such isolation ultimately can damn the bereft and unbereft alike.
Between 2007 and 2021, suicide rates among Americans ages 10 to 24 rose by 62 percent. This rise has paralleled the blossoming sense of ennui in the decades since the film’s release, as religious leaders and politicians and even neighbors have failed to fully reckon with our growing existential ills.
Toward the film’s end, one of the boys notes in recollection how the adults shrug off the horrors of the suicides, “returning to their tennis foursomes and cocktail cruises, as though they’d seen this all before.” Such indifference is an inherited ailment, one we pass down like a cursed heirloom. And in time, if left undisturbed, it bears a grief of its own.
Curtis Yee is a reporter and critic living in Washington, D.C. He covers faith, society, and everything in between. Follow him on Twitter @curtisfyee.
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