The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

In the novel The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides and the film by the same title directed by Sofia Coppola, you are presented with the story of the Lisbon girls, Lux, Mary, Theresa, Bonnie, and Cecilia, who are being watched by five teenage boys who live across the street from them in their neighborhood. Cecilia is the first to kill herself, spawning an interest in the boys that give them the power to control them and their appearance in the story.

The boys, who are also the narrators, are in complete control of what the reader/viewer learns and thinks about the Lisbon girls, their motives, feelings, and especially their sexual habits. While the story takes place in the early 1970's, the narrators are retelling it from the present day, still in awe and confusion about the events that took place.

The reality of the story is that although you are presented with a picture of a group of five sisters who seem as if they are oppressively controlled by their parents, they are actually controlled by the male gaze that is surrounding them. In a time where the Feminist movement had just occurred they are still succumbing to what all of the males surrounding them think, say, and do, which I believe is the reason they killed themselves, although never actually stated with in the novel or film.

The narrators of the novel are the five boys who live across the street, and the same is true in the film. The boys are obsessed with the Lisbon girls, not directly in a sexual way, but in a controlling way. The film portrays the boys in a way that makes it appear as if they feel that they do not know anything about the girls, and that they have no control over the mystery that the girls present them with, they still peer in to their lives hoping to gain the information necessary to gain that control over them.

This is a false appearance of the boy narrators, because in actuality they have complete control over the Lisbon girls and all that the reader/viewer is aware to. The five boys are scopophiliacs, they have no direct connection to the girls other then collecting their trivial items and becoming voyeurs in to their lives by watching them through binoculars. The boys seem to get off on the idea of watching the girls to find clues to the puzzle of why the girls are the way they are. The boys felt as if it were their job in life to save the five Lisbon girls, that only they could stop the tragic events that were to follow for them.

The five adolescent boys across the street are obsessed with the Lisbon girls. Their purpose at that point in their lives is only to watch them, study their every move, and unlock the secret of their depression, "It is not important how the Lisbon sisters looked. What is important is how the teenage boys in the neighborhood thought they looked" (Ebert). The only sense of identity that the reader/viewer receives from the girls is what we are given by the narrators, the boys. We are subjected to a bias viewpoint from which we are supposed to base our own judgment of the girls on.

The boys are not obsessed with the girls for aesthetic reasons, but they are more intrigued with the idea of finding out who they are so that they can better control them. From their window across the street they have no influence on the world of the Lisbon girls, but if they could make their way in, they could "save" the girls.

This is a typical male view of seemingly unhappy women. When the Girls begin to act suspiciously, depressed, withdrawn, the boys feel as if only they could rescue them. They collect possessions of the girls, even Cecilia's diary, in a hope to obtain the keys to unlock the mystery. We only see a picture of the girls that they boys have painted for us, one of helpless women trapped within their own miserable sexuality. When Lux begins to sleep with numerous men on the roof of her house, they indirectly accuse her of being a "slut," even though they continue to be voyeurs through binoculars from the windows across the street.

They are indirectly saying that it is not alright for a woman to be comfortable with her sexuality, but it is alright for a male to watch her sexual acts from a distance with perverted thoughts and intentions.

When brought to the screen, the girls seem completely helpless in their world. The image that the reader takes away from the novel is that the girls are in control of their surroundings, their parents, and their peers. But when brought to the screen the girls look innocent, frail, and helpless. Roger Ebert claims: "Mourn for the passing of everyone you knew and everyone you were in the last summer before sex. Mourn for the idealism of inexperience" (Ebert 2). I disagree with this viewpoint, and I feel that it is an opinion such as this that makes the female character appear so insecure.

The death of the girls was not due to the fact that a male came along and "took" their innocence, but rather it was their awakening to the reality that they were and always would be controlled by men just as the boys across the street controlled them through their gaze.

When comparing the book to the film there is almost no difference and director Sofia Coppola did this purposefully when adapting the novel to the screen. The Virgin Suicides was the first movie that Coppola directed, and I feel that she did so in a very respectful way to Eugenides' novel. She took most of the dialogue directly from the book, making sure not to alter any of the poetic conversation between the characters, and this worked extremely well for the film. The only aspect of the process of adaptation that I disagreed with was the use of "girly" actions such as winks, smiles, and other flirtatious actions.

The film does seem to cater to the female viewer, "The picture has a feminine sensibility in terms of its dreamy languor, and pearlescent glow that hovers around it like a nimbus" (Salon.com). This girly feel to the film was an attempt to make the girls appear more innocent and naive than they actually are presented in the novel. There seemed to be an abundance of them within the film and this made the girls seem as if they were playing the part of the helpless woman in a world full of male gazing eyes. It made the girls look as if they were intentionally objectifying themselves in order to play in to the game of the men around them.

The feminine "feel" to the film seemed to be Coppola's attempt to pull some of the focus away from the five boys who were in control of the story. By using classic feminine actions and characteristics Coppola was trying to regain some of the power for the Lisbon girls, making them seem as if they had more control over their surroundings than they actually did as well as trying to make them appear innocent to the male eye that surrounded them.

In a review by Salon.com the critic states: "But Coppola's picture is completely nonjudgmental about the narrators' love for the Lisbon girls." I strongly disagree with this statement because I feel that when viewing the film there was more of a sense of male dominance over the girls. When the novel was brought to the screen you were then faced with a picture that reinforced the views of the male narrators. When reading the novel I got less of a feel that the boys were actually controlling the story than when I saw the film. In the film you have a voice over throughout by the boys, giving insight and comments to situations that they were not even present for. I felt as if the five boys had somewhat taken over the film with their presence, making it even more difficult for the girls to come to life as their own independent characters in the film.

The first to commit suicide was the youngest daughter Cecilia, who was thirteen years old. Cecilia's character acts as a window to why the girls felt as if they had to kill themselves. After Cecilia's first attempt at killing herself, she was sent to a psychotherapist who deduced that the Lisbon's need to allow Cecilia to be places "…where she can interact with males her own age" (Eugenides 21). This statement reinforced the idea that the boys need to save the Lisbon girls, and because it occurred in the very beginning of the story, helped to strengthen the position of power that the boys held over the girls.

From every review that I have read about this story there seems to be a general consensus that the point and focus of the story is not within the actual events, but rather in the emotions that the story provokes, "…to believe what we see, we don't have to, as long as we can believe what we feel" (Griffith 402). This type of displacement only begets the treatment of the female in today's society that we are currently encountering. To disregard the entire oppression and objectification of the Lisbon sisters and claim that the story is not actually focused on the characters is absurd.

In conclusion, the adaptation from novel to screen was a successful one on the part of Coppola and does show her genuine attempt at trying to give the girls more power within the story, even though their weakness to the male dominance around them was inevitable. I feel that the film version of The Virgin Suicides did accomplish displaying how the males around the Lisbon girls were really the ones in control of their lives, and that their gaze in to their world was in actuality the reason for their suicides. They knew that they were trapped in the world of the male and that even after a feminist movement, that there was still dominance over them that they had little hope of ever escaping.