ABSTRACT
The primary enigma at the center of The Virgin Suicides is ‘why do the Lisbon girls commit suicide?’ At the most global level, the film is structured around a middle-aged male’s recollection of the events leading up to the suicides. Although the strong suggestion is that one of the neighborhood teenage boys, all grown up, is the narrator, Coppola leaves the exact identification of the narrator ambiguous. The film begins with the narrator positioning the distance between events (twenty-five years) and recalling the group’s continued fascination with the Lisbon suicides. Crucially, the viewer has access to these events through the narrator and his memory of events twenty-five years old. The result is an unreliable narrator. This choice of narration mirrors the ways in which adolescents construct narrative events, allowing room for revision and foregoing many of the ‘rules’ of adult storytelling.
The viewer is left with a mystery in which the clues never completely, or even partially, explain the enigma at the center. In terms of genre, there are, of course, useful parallels to other films using the structuring absence of a female figure as a central element: Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (1980), and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).
