The Virgin Suicides and the Boredom of White Girlhood
Originally dismissed as a superficial attempt at communicating the experience of a teenage girl, The Virgin Suicides, take seriously the soft, pink, and girly aspects of growing up a woman. The director, Sofia Coppola, is known for her films that take on this experience, and she is also equally known for her erasure of any sort of girlhood that is not white. A woman’s teenage years are a period of time frequently touched upon, but rarely explored with true depth, or without judgment. This becomes increasingly true for young women of color who look to the screen and are shown that the correct way to be a young woman is to be white. The purpose of the film was to include all forms of femininity as something that should be taken seriously, but it fails in its representation of who makes up an American teenage girl. The Virgin Suicides perpetuates the white hegemony of American cinema and fails to take into consideration the broader racial and political context of the suburban decay that it tries to illustrate. In its approach to religious oppression and mental illness, and how this affects young women the film brings to light the pain and misguided nature of these ingrained ideologies in America. However, it merely plays into what these ideologies teach minority groups about the value of whiteness in society and become part of what teaches these ideologies.
To fully understand the problems with The Virgin Suicides I, being the radicalized-by-TikTok-during-the-pandemic girl that I am, have to bring Marxism to the table. Prominent in The Virgin Suicides are the ideological state apparatuses used by the dominant class to keep the subordinate class out of power. These structures are found in religion, family, school, media, and most everything that does not fall under repressive state apparatuses, which are structures like the law, police, and government that are controlled by the state directly to oppress the subordinate class. Since the culture and the ideas of the subordinate group will continuously shift, the dominant group creates systems that teach the group without power to believe that they want the current system of oppression and should maintain it. If one is part of the subordinate class, which is almost exclusively composed of minority groups in America, there are little to no representations of themselves. This does not merely exclude them but shows that the overwhelming whiteness of culture is what they should look like. The controlling belief becomes that there is no place or success for people of color in American society.
This is where hegemony comes in. Through these practices, the dominant class wins the consent of the subordinate classes so the system will remain in place. After being consistently shown and told that there is only room for whiteness in America this belief becomes internalized and allows the dominant group to maintain control. This cannot be blamed on the subordinate class because a person cannot be blamed for their own oppression and the success of systems that have been perpetuated and created to preoccupy them with day to day struggles. Ideological hegemony posits that the reason the dominant class must continuously win this consent is that there will always be push back and resistance from the subordinate class. However, the purpose of these apparatuses is to prevent this resistance. The structures have been in place so long it becomes almost impossible for the subordinate class to simply “wake up” when all systems are against them and teach them to be not just to be content in their oppression, but that there’s nothing wrong with it.
The Virgin Suicides is interesting because not only does it give many examples of ideological state apparatuses through religious and sexual oppression, the school, and the suburban landscape, but the film acts as part of the apparatus itself. The film takes great pains to represent and understand the recurring “imprisonment of being a girl”, but rarely takes a step back to consider it’s own effect of imprisonment on young girls watching the film who do not see themselves reflected on the screen. Narratively, the audience follows the decline of a white suburban neighborhood as the Lisbon sisters, a group of five beautiful girls, become increasingly trapped by their lives, and eventually all commit suicide. It’s told through the eyes of a group of local boys obsessed with the girls and what happened to them and takes on the inherent fetishization every young woman coming of age experiences. The girl’s parents are extremely strict, and ultimately confine the girls to the house sealing their fate of boredom and imprisonment that makes them feel there is no way out.
The film is set in the 1970s in a suburb of Detroit, historically white and segregated. Although the film shows its slow downfall due to the end of the auto industry boom and allegorically represents the “rotting” of the community through the trees dying of a European fungus, it does not explore the broader cultural context. The reason that so many of these suburbs came to be was because of the white flight from cities when black people moved to northern cities in the 1960s. Yes, the lack of diversity and historical background is intentional. Coppola often takes large events and examines them through smaller, more personal contexts. However, as part of the cultural impact of film and media, what it fails to represent must be recognized because Coppola often simply dismisses the experiences of anyone besides herself. The dreamy, stagnant feelings of being disconnected from reality that the girls experience come at the cost of the minority groups their lifestyle exploits. This is not to blame the girls themselves or discount their feelings, but it’s impossible to ignore the connotations of white female “self-destruction” within this perfect environment created to nurture them and the racist values that uphold their lifestyle. The girls are trapped and bored by their lives, and are so discontent with their stability and safety that the taking of their lives is produced by their idyllic white lifestyle, Their lives were boring and suffocating as a product of their privilege, and it was the systems created to uplift them that they chafe against. To young women who aren’t white watching this film their experience of suburban life, or being excluded from it, does not line up with this portrayal. They often do not have the luxury of becoming bored and stagnant in their lives and, while the film rejects the concept of the “American dream” because of the failure of this community, it does nothing to explore the realities of different types of people.
Sofia Coppola is associated with young, rich white girls, but she has also taken time to try and shed light onto some of the more demonized parts of femininity. This rings true for almost every single one of her films from Maire Antoinette to The Beguiled, perhaps her most insensitive attempt at inclusion by dealing with the Civil War without touching upon the overt racism of the role of the black woman in the cast. Additionally, Coppola has long been critiqued by male counterparts for her depictions of “girly” cinema, and her success has been attributed to her father’s. Although nepotism in Hollywood is systemic, and Coppola should be critiqued for her little to no attempts at inclusion, many criticisms of her work come from a sexist place that she is not deserving of. Men describe her dreamy and soft style as all look and no substance, but the subject matter she takes on is trying to shine a light on the feelings critiques such as this arise in young women. That their interests, pleasures, and dreams are vapid and take a backseat to their relationships with men. In The Virgin Suicides, the Lisbon sisters are expected to be the perfect virginal ideals that their Catholic mother and largely Christian society uphold while also having to deal with the sexualization that is immediately placed on young women after puberty. Although not racial, this is another example of ideological state apparatuses. Women are taught from birth that their worth is dependent on the way they are viewed by men. This is where Coppola shines in her take on this experience through the treatment of Lux, the most sexually liberated of the girls, after she is simultaneously punished for losing her virginity, and revered and fetishized by the boys who watch her sexual encounters. Through the telling of the story through the eyes of the boys Coppola shows us that too often young women are only a sweet idea or a beautiful mystery for men to contemplate without ever concerning themselves with what they are feeling. Even after their deaths, the Lisbon sisters are still remembered this way. As a mystery, the boys have yet to solve.
This film caught my attention and quickly became one of my favorites when I saw it for the first time in high school. As a young, middle-class white girl living in the suburbs experiencing for the first time what it meant to feel trapped by my American idyll and what it meant to be looked at by men, I was almost forced to identify with the film. It was unapologetically feminine in a way I felt to be taken seriously I could not be. It made me feel as though I was allowed to be discontent with a life that had been marketed to me as everything I should want and that I was ungrateful for wanting something else. Throughout my life, I have been privileged and lucky enough to have thousands of films that make me feel represented at my fingertips. Perhaps The Virgin Suicides was the first to take my feelings seriously, but I was not short on content to make me feel less alone. This cannot be said for the young women in minority groups who are my peers. I am not saying that the burden of representation should fall squarely on Sofia Coppola’s shoulders and that she should be writing for women of color when she does not share their experiences. However, her privilege and clear ability to empathize with the different situations that are faced by women shows that she could be capable of including women of color in her brand of delicate femininity that is often, and harmfully, reserved for white women. The Virgin Suicides was meant for women like me, and to this day I love this movie, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t critique it. As I get older I become more aware of its flaws and what it might be like to watch this film and feel completely disconnected from it. Not every film is made for everyone, but using that as an excuse to be exclusionary can only limit opportunities for filmmakers to become more self-aware and create better media.
