GIRL MUSIC 010: Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides — The Elm Trees and Girls Left to Die in Our World
“We just want to live. If anyone would let us.”
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Words: Juno Rylee Schultz (she/her)
Edits: Morgan Shaver (they/them), Nathan Miller (he/him), and Bex Stump (she/her)
“I loved that book, and I heard they were going to make a movie of it, and I hoped that they didn’t mess it up — as that happens sometimes with books that you love. I just had an idea of how I thought they should make it into a movie, so I thought I would try to learn how to write a screenplay. I started working on one just as a kind of practice. I thought I would just do a few chapters.”
— Sofia Coppola, Entertainment Weekly, 2020
“I know there’s a script somewhere. I can’t remember who it was, but I remember it was really dark and it was a guy’s version, and I was like, This is not how it should be. I felt very strongly about that. It was the boys looking at the girls, but somehow the girls are the ones presenting the story.”
— Sofia Coppola, Vanity Fair, 2025
Sofia Coppola’s postmortem with the words of Jeffrey Eugenides’ book The Virgin Suicides brings to life what might have otherwise been a ghost story told through the male perspective… a perspective yearning for these memories for all the wrong reasons.
Ultimately, this shifts the text into a tragedy mouthed by the lips of all girls, instead of one confined to the head voice of the narrator’s male-chorus framing device.
Coppola contending with the text and reinterpreting the male author’s words casts the story in shades of both female Gothic tragedy and cautionary tale. This is male voyeurism and toxic masculine fantasy transformed into feminist excavation. This is feminist hauntology. This is The Virgin Suicides, recuperated and reinterpreted through the feminist lens of Sofia Coppola.
Both the author and filmmaker know the girls are dead the entire time; however, Eugenides frames this narrative as a tragic and preventable ghost story. In contrast, Coppola reimagines the girls as enigmatic, almost supernatural figures — emphasizing their agency and the tragic circumstances they’re forced to navigate.
The film displays a clear level of care and attempt to understand each of the girls, in contrast with the author’s more lackadaisical approach in creating and killing the five sisters. Put differently, I believe the author’s view of the girls provided additional space and material for Coppola to unravel the disinterested male gaze surrounding the Lisbon sisters’ deaths.
The Virgin Suicides is a complex and living piece of art because of the two different ways the story has been told, the order in which the two versions of the story were created, and who was — or wasn’t — involved.
The book is a story told through the collective perspective of neighborhood boys recounting their memories and fantasies (ew) of the Lisbon sisters. The girls are technically dead the entire time, with their story unfolding not only from the boys’ perspective but also through a diffuse male chorus that yearns for them in death as it once did in life.
The film’s story is similarly told through the perspectives of the boys in their remembrance of the Lisbon sisters, with the girls dead the entire time. However, the way Coppola’s camera frames everything, the cinematography, aesthetic choices, and other details — shaped by her vision centered around the girls themselves — inject a deeper female point of view resistant to the trappings of the novel’s male gaze.
Eugenides portrays the boys as innocent observers, which raises the question of whether he might have unironically joined the boys in their voyeurism and theft of the girls’ tampons and diaries, before mourning them without ever truly considering them as people.
Sofia Coppola delves deeper in her film and her attempts to equally understand the characters, without shrugging off the actions or behaviors of anyone — male or female. As a result, she’s able to give the girls more life, concern, and time to exist in their stories than the author did before their deaths.
In the book, the lives of the girls play out without them ever truly existing inside of it, while the boys stare and yearn for understanding, but fail to put forward any effort to acknowledge them as girls, not puzzle pieces. Even when Lux is able to smile again after her sister’s death, the boys are upset that another boy — a different boy, a boy they didn’t find intelligent or worthy — was the one who had made her smile.
But in the film, the camera centers the girls on the stage that is their lives instead of laying them out on a table to be dissected — even if the boys are still there gawking at them with a telescope in the present, and through the wrong lens for the wrong reasons from the future.
The film is told by a girl next to a camera held by a woman watching other girls act out a sad story, as opposed to a tale of “girls will be girls” told from the perspective of uncaring boys primarily concerned with conquest and obsessing over what could have been.
There’s a scene where Lux sneaks outside to kiss Trip — after he comes over for a date of TV time with the family in the living room — and in the movie, it’s innocent and feels like a moment where Lux and Trip are connecting equally, while also kissing and attracted to each other.
In the book, however, the scene is presented through the glimpse of the male gaze via Trip Fontaine. Lux is described like a beast, a monster — like some sort of werewolf succubus creature that’s feeding on Trip.
The stark contrast between how this same scene plays out from the male author and male chorus of characters, to Coppola’s careful and empathetic excavation, make both feel like two completely different scenes altogether.
In Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure, Anna Backman Rogers explains how abjection and the assumptions of the audience are used by Coppola to communicate beyond the text itself.
“Abjection as a psychological process and the abject as a psychic category are psychoanalytic terms most extensively elaborated by philosopher and analyst Julia Kristeva in her study Powers of Horror (1982/2022).
As Kelly Oliver explains, Kristeva delineates the abject in relation to how it is invoked to contain and section off the (maternal) female body and those bodies deemed “foreign” in some sense.
The abject thus acts as a force of estrangement, an attempt to “other” that which we place outside of hegemonic categories of identity and being. While Kristeva highlights substances that repel and revolt (excrement, vomit, blood, the cadaver), Oliver stresses that these examples make visible the broader process of abjection.”
As Kristeva herself writes: filth is not a quality in itself, but it applies to what relates to a boundary and, more particularly, represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, its other side, a margin.
— Powers of Horror, 1982/2022, cited in Oliver 2022
In other words, the abject are the parts of the film’s visual language which work together to take our thoughts and thinking on what’s happening in multiple places. As Rogers explains, “The abject is inherently liminal because it is neither a discrete object nor a non-object and, by its very threshold status, calls into question the borders between self and other, life and death, and being and non-being.”
As Kristeva puts it:
“… not me, not that, but not nothing, either. A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.”
— Powers of Horror, 1982/2022, cited in Oliver 2002
“By extension, abjection — as an active mode of (dis)engagement — enables the shoring up of identity via separating out an entity from that which threatens or pollutes its existence as a supposedly sovereign being. As such, the liminal space within which abjection and the abject exist and function brings the subject and that which is its “other” into contact and, in the process of doing so, reveals the compartmentalization and separation on which all identity is predicated.
That which threatens our borders and undermines boundaries is therefore, by its very nature, essential to our identity, however much we may seek to deny or eradicate its existence. I exist by virtue of what I am not.
Kristeva writes that the abject object “lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated, it beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced” and that it “draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.”
Kristeva argues further that:
“it is true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverises the subject. One can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when the subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than the abject.”
— Powers of Horror, 1982/2022; cited in Oliver 2002
The abject, as the psychoanalyst might argue, is fundamental to our very being precisely because it reveals that which remains latent at the heart of all being, meaning, desire, and language: the want initiated by our entrance into language and the symbolic realm, which is always already founded on lack.
Taking her cue from Kristeva, film scholar Barbara Creed (1993) has delineated the subject in terms of the dynamics initiated and invoked by the horror genre — especially in relation to what she describes as the “monstrous feminine” body. Creed also suggests that the abject plays a vital role in ascribing and setting up identity because:
“Although the subject must exclude the abject, the abject must, nevertheless, be tolerated for that which threatens to destroy life also helps to define life. Further, the activity of exclusion is necessary to guarantee that the subject take up his/her proper place in relation to the symbolic.”
— Barbara Creed, 1993
This is all to say: The Virgin Suicides is not only a horror film, but a horror film through the perspective of the predators, and all signs of it even being a horror film have been removed by the narrators.
This is perhaps made most clear with how the female body is held up and portrayed in the film. The bodies of the Lisbon sisters are always “the site of inspiration to reverie and the receptacle for phantasy and projection.”
Through visual language and symbolism, Sofia Coppola also communicates an “otherness” with the female body “that must be cleaned of its abject core in order to be useful for narrative purpose.”
Furthermore Rogers explains, “the female body serves both to shore up and secure (male) identity, but also threatens radically to de-center and destabilize meaning and coterminous identities. The adolescent female body, as a spectral entity that hangs between life and death and thus invokes the abject, returns in the forms of haunting, dream and fantasy/phantasy, but also of trauma.”
It’s only when we begin to contend with the intentional visual language employed by Sofia Coppola when we are able to see the film for what it is: feminist hauntology. By recognizing how all of the images onscreen are shown and what they all mean, we are able to break apart and reconstruct the message of the pictures in front of us.
“The Virgin Suicides opens on two iconic, if somewhat hackneyed, iterations of the feminine or female young body; namely, the literary characters “Lolita” and “Ophelia” as envisaged by Stanley Kubrick (1962) and John Everett Millais (1852), respectively. It is the image of Lux Lisbon as Lolita (she is sucking on a lollipop) that opens the film and introduces a sinister tumescence that lies beneath this initially bucolic-seeming image. The glow of the evening sunset limns Lux’s hair and creates a halo effect around her young, dimpled face. From the outset, as the Latin etymology of her name would suggest, she is associated with light and, suitably, Lux acts as the main source for the boys’ fantasies and reveries.
This flat, head-on, establishing shot sets Lux apart from the drab, uniform, suburban environment via an eschewal to shift or rack focus: she is a thing of wonder in this pedestrian diegetic world. Indeed, the following sequences of tableau shots establish the film’s setting as a generic, all-American neighborhood in which one house is much like any other — conformity and uniformity are the foundations upon which this community is built.
Yet, just as the opening image of Lux signals outside of itself and recalls Lolita as both seductive and infantile, these scenes of domestic idyll also intimate more insidious representations of the “white picket fence,” such as those in the films of David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) and Todd Haynes (Safe, Far from Heaven).”
Perhaps the easiest and earliest example of how much extra Coppola is communicating through the film are the insects humming at the beginning of the film. The assumption of the viewer would be that it’s the start of a season, and life and plants are about to grow, but these bugs are part of the town’s coming death—in the form of an insect infestation that takes the trees and the very atmosphere of the town.
We are a given another perfect example of this—and the other side of Lux’s introduction from the sky—when the narrator states “Cecilia was the first to go” in a melancholy tone, while the camera focuses on what appears to be her dead body in a bathtub. All the camera really seems to focus on though are the lipsticks and perfumes around the peaceful body.
There is no blood, even though, in this moment, the audience is told this girl slit her wrists in a bathtub.
Elisabeth Bronfen has studied the aesthetic of the female corpse throughout the history of art and believes the beautification of the corpse and situation comes from a desire to rid the female body of possessing any sort of threat.
“Femininity and death cause a disorder to stability, mark moments of ambivalence, disruption or duplicity and their eradication produces a recuperation of order, a return to stability. The threat that death and femininity pose is recuperated by representation, staging absence as a form of re-presence, or return, even if or rather precisely because this means appeasing the threat of real mortality, of sexual insufficiency, of lack of plenitude, and wholeness.”
— Elisabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents
There are also extended sequences that show the girls being filmed against nature, while being characterized as pure, which is meant to be reminiscent of 1970s beauty commercials and the religious iconography of saints.
“It had such a specific visual sense of time and place. I thought suburbia was so exotic, because I didn’t grow up there. There was always a sort of romantic quality about American suburbia that was so clear in my head once I figured out the puzzle of adapting it. I had a look in my mind of how it should feel while reading it, of that hazy, backlit style of ’70s Playboy photography.”
— Sofia Coppola, Vogue, 2020
That was the “fantasy girl” of that time period, so it makes sense the boys would see the girls like this, functioning as a perfect abjection.
This is highlighted further with all of the sister’s names being that of religious saints — except Lux, whose name means “light” and who functions as the catalyst of the story and the boys’ desires. Lux is also the last light to leave inside of the sisters’ suicide pact.
Cinematography’s boldest decisions are often made in culmination points like these. In these moments, the place, point, and purpose of women in society are simultaneously viewed according to the opinion of the male gaze audience, and affirmed silently by the interjected female perspective of Sofia Coppola.
The camera and audience are left in the hallway when the father of the Lisbon girls invites Trip Fontaine into a classroom to let him know the answer to whether or not he and his friends could take the girls to the dance.
It’s just the audience, chatter of the hallway, lockers, and the closed classroom door in front of us — and yet also one of the loudest statements that could be made by a female director in her first movie in 1999.
This is a story about girls, but it’s a boys’ story.
Sofia Coppola made more than art when she reclaimed this ghost story for us — she created feminist poetry that reinterpreted male fantasy as female tragedy.
The dreamlike quality of the book, functioning as a piece of the framing device of the story — memory of the boys looking back — is used as a sort of hazy border that adds a haunting tint and edge to the film, warning us and every girl watching.
The dreamlike quality of the book, carried over as part of the story’s framing device — the boys’ retrospective memories — becomes a sort of lingering haze that lends the film its haunting atmosphere, and its warning to the audience and every girl watching.
Because of how the visual language and cinematography function, every viewer of THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is a girl by COPPOLA’S DESIGN.
The Virgin Suicides is the opposite of a love story — it’s a cautionary tale about control, death, and how routine these rituals have now become in a world that would rather not understand girls than try to. Or give girls the space to figure ourselves out as we become women. A world where it’s easier and more entertaining for girls to die, and for our lives and narratives to belong to anyone that decides to pay attention after we’re gone.
“IF THE BOATS DIDN’T BRING THE FUNGUS FROM EUROPE NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED.”
At the end, we see that the boys — now men — have never been able to move on from the Lisbon sisters, with the suicides of the girls functioning as physical manifestations of what could have been. Amid the inarticulable loss, the boys are unable to stop commenting on how much the deaths of the girls changed their lives, without ever seeing the irony in how the girls themselves were never able to truly live — and now exist forever as surface image in their minds and the town.
“I don’t know if I would have a film career if it wasn’t for that book. Turning it into a film really opened me up, gave me the bug. I think I was just wandering in my 20s, trying to figure out what I wanted to do, trying different things and having that angst of not feeling comfortable in your own skin yet. It was scary directing a film, but I was so connected with the material I felt like I had no choice. The Virgin Suicides made me a film-maker.”
— Sofia Coppola, The Guardian, 2018
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