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It is a hazy, golden-hour dream that feels more like a funeral. Most people remember The Virgin Suicides for its aesthetics—the sun-drenched lens flares, the soft-focus shots of Kirsten Dunst in a field, and that ethereal Air soundtrack. But if you watch it again today, really watch it, you realize it’s one of the most devastatingly misunderstood movies about the American suburbs ever made. It’s not a romance. It’s not even really about the girls.
Sofia Coppola’s 1999 debut changed everything for indie cinema. Based on the 1993 Jeffrey Eugenides novel, the film tells the story of the five Lisbon sisters—Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese—living in a suffocatingly strict household in 1970s Michigan. They are beautiful. They are doomed. And they are watched.
That’s the thing.
The story is told through the perspective of the neighborhood boys who grew up obsessed with them. These boys, now grown men, are still trying to piece together the "evidence" of the girls' lives. They have diary scraps. They have old photos. They have memories that have probably been warped by time and nostalgia. Honestly, the movie is a crime procedural where the investigators are just horny, grieving teenagers who never actually understood the victims.
The Virgin Suicides and the Trap of the Male Gaze
We talk a lot about the "male gaze" in film, but The Virgin Suicides weaponizes it. Coppola was so smart here. By framing the entire narrative through the eyes of the boys across the street, she shows us exactly why the Lisbon sisters were so lonely. Everyone was looking at them, but nobody was seeing them.
The boys treat the girls like a puzzle to be solved. They analyze Lux’s (Kirsten Dunst) promiscuity as if it’s a riddle instead of a cry for help. They look at Cecilia’s (Hanna Hall) initial attempt on her life as a bizarre fluke. When the boys finally get "close" to the sisters during that famous scene where they talk on the phone and play records for each other—listening to Todd Rundgren and Carole King—it feels like a breakthrough. But it's an illusion. Even in their most intimate moments, there is a fence or a telephone line between them.
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The girls are trapped in a house that is literally rotting. Their mother, played with a chilling, repressed rigidity by Kathleen Turner, thinks she is protecting them from a "corrupt" world. Their father, James Woods, is a man who loves his daughters but is fundamentally ill-equipped to understand the interior lives of young women. He’s a math teacher who can’t make the life-and-death variables of his own home add up.
Why the 1970s Setting Actually Matters
It wasn't just a stylistic choice to set the film in the 70s. The era is vital. This was the tail end of the American Dream's golden era. The suburbs of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, were supposed to be the safest places on Earth. And yet, there’s a literal plague of Dutch Elm disease killing all the trees.
The trees are being cut down and hauled away, leaving the neighborhood exposed and barren. It’s a heavy-handed metaphor, sure, but it works. Just as the neighborhood's physical beauty is being stripped away by a silent parasite, the Lisbon household is being hollowed out by depression and religious extremism.
The costumes by Nancy Steiner are iconic for a reason. Those prom dresses? They weren't supposed to be "cool." They were meant to look like "four identical tents," as the book describes them. Mrs. Lisbon forced the girls to wear modest, high-collared lace that looked like something out of the 19th century. Yet, because the girls were so naturally radiant, the boys saw those dresses as high fashion. They saw what they wanted to see.
The Air Soundtrack: The Sound of Loneliness
You cannot talk about The Virgin Suicides without talking about the French duo Air. Their score, Playground Love, is arguably one of the best film soundtracks of the last thirty years. It’s moody. It’s synth-heavy. It sounds like summer heat radiating off a sidewalk.
Most directors would have used 70s rock hits to ground the film in its era. Coppola did use some—Styx’s "Come Sail Away" is used perfectly during the prom scene—but the original score is what provides the emotional weight. It captures the lethargy of being a teenager. That feeling of lying on your bedroom floor for six hours because there is absolutely nothing to do and your heart feels too big for your chest.
Music is the only way the sisters and the boys truly communicate. When they play records for each other over the phone, they aren't talking. They are letting the lyrics do the work. It’s a beautiful sequence, but it’s also incredibly sad. It highlights the total lack of real vocabulary these kids had for their own mental health.
Kirsten Dunst as Lux Lisbon
This was the role that proved Kirsten Dunst was a powerhouse. Lux is the "rebel" of the family, but Dunst plays her with this flickering light that goes out slowly throughout the film.
The scene on the football field? After she’s abandoned by Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett)? It’s devastating. Trip, played with perfect feathered-hair arrogance by Hartnett, is the catalyst for the final downward spiral. He wanted Lux because she was the "ultimate prize." Once he got what he wanted, the mystery was gone, and he literally walked away from her while she was sleeping on the 50-yard line.
That rejection wasn't just about a boy. For Lux, Trip was a potential exit strategy. When he failed her, she realized there was no way out of the house. No way out of the suburb. No way out of being a "Lisbon sister."
What Most People Get Wrong About the Ending
People often debate why they did it. The movie doesn't give you a clean answer because the "investigators"—the boys—don't have one.
The film suggests that the girls didn't necessarily want to die; they just couldn't find a way to live in the world as it was presented to them. They were suffocated by their parents' fear and the neighborhood's voyeurism. The boys think they are the heroes of the story, trying to "rescue" the girls in the final act. But even their rescue plan is a bit of a joke. They show up with a getaway car, but they have no plan. They are playing at being heroes in a story they haven't read the ending of yet.
The final party scene is the peak of this disconnect. While the neighbors are throwing a "debutante" party to celebrate "life" and the future, the remaining Lisbon sisters are finishing what Cecilia started. It's a brutal juxtaposition. The suburbanites are literally wearing gas masks because of a chemical spill or a pest treatment—I forget which—while the real toxicity is happening right inside the house next door.
The Legacy of the "Coppola Aesthetic"
Sofia Coppola was only 29 when this came out. She was criticized at the time for being a "nepo baby" before that term existed, with people saying her father, Francis Ford Coppola, probably did the heavy lifting. That was a lie.
You can see her specific fingerprints everywhere:
- The focus on female isolation.
- The use of light as a narrative tool.
- The sympathy for the "bored" girl.
- The refusal to over-explain.
She took a book written by a man, about boys watching girls, and somehow made it a definitive statement on the female experience. She centered the sisters' silence. In a world that constantly demands women explain themselves, Coppola let the Lisbon sisters remain a mystery.
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Practical Takeaways for Fans and Film Students
If you’re revisiting The Virgin Suicides or watching it for the first time, look past the Pinterest-ready imagery.
- Watch the background: Notice how the house gets darker and more cluttered as the film progresses. The flowers die. The trash piles up. The physical environment mirrors the sisters' internal state.
- Listen to the narration: Giovanni Ribisi provides the voiceover for the grown-up boys. Notice how often he says "we didn't know" or "we couldn't understand." It’s an admission of failure.
- Compare it to Lost in Translation: Both films deal with women trapped in "gilded cages," whether it’s a high-end Tokyo hotel or a Michigan suburb.
- Read the book: Jeffrey Eugenides' prose is more clinical and detached, which makes the movie’s warmth even more interesting. The film is much more empathetic toward the girls than the book is.
The film is a reminder that nostalgia is dangerous. The boys remember the girls as these golden goddesses, but the reality was much grimmer. They were just kids who needed help, living in a society that preferred to watch them through binoculars rather than knock on the door and ask if they were okay.
Twenty-five years later, the film hasn't aged a day because the feeling of being young, misunderstood, and trapped is universal. We are still the boys across the street, looking through the glass, wondering what’s going on inside.
How to experience the film today:
- Find the Criterion Collection version: The 4K restoration is breathtaking and preserves the specific grain of the original film stock.
- Listen to the Air score on vinyl: It was designed for that warm, analog sound.
- Research the 1970s Detroit recession: Understanding the economic decline of the area adds another layer to the "rot" depicted in the film.
- Look for the "Lisbon" influence in modern cinema: You can see traces of this movie in everything from Euphoria to the works of Greta Gerwig.
The movie isn't just a mood. It’s a warning about what happens when we objectify people's pain instead of helping them carry it.