The Virgin Suicides and Observing the Male Gaze

There are some unsolvable problems

The Cathal
Sep 9, 2018 · 10 min read

(I have not read the book The Virgin Suicides, or any other books by Jeffrey Eugenides. I’ll be spoiling the whole movie here, so maybe go watch that first. Or read the book.)

There is a riddle considered to be the hardest logic puzzle in the world. Not a matter of lateral thinking or inventive trickery, but cold and brutally unforgiving logic. Known as the “Blue Eyes” puzzle, it concerns an island on which 200 mute people are trapped by a captor. 100 of them have blue eyes and 100 of them have brown eyes. They can see each other, but cannot know the colour of their own eyes. The captor stands before them and says “I see someone has blue eyes. They are allowed to leave tonight.” The captor stands before them and says this every day. Who leaves, and when do they leave?

The Virgin Suicides is simply one of the greatest titles of all time. Not just the perfect evocation of the ideal of a commodified feminine innocence and the distillation of romantic perdu but also narratively it’s a lighting-in-a-bottle kind of compelling. It’s the moment where the evil baddie has a knife to the damsel’s throat and Indiana Jones or James Bond or Batman or Harry Potter or whoever says some iteration of “Let the girl go!” It’s that specific moment of tension stretched out across the entire film. Because of this title it is fixed in our brain that no matter what happens, no matter how it feels, no matter how upbeat the music, no matter how wide the smiles or how petty the arguments, this is going to get worse.

The title is also a deliberate misnomer; it delineates the ideal of the Lisbon sisters and who they actually are. The five blonde sisters in 1970s Michigan, each aged a year apart from thirteen to seventeen are Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary and Therese. Beginning with a suicide attempt by Cecilia, the doctor tells her “You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” Cecilia in her bandaged wrists precociously responds “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.”

You are one of the people with blue eyes but you do not know this, all you know is there are 99 people with blue eyes, 100 people with brown eyes, and you.

It isn’t long before Cecilia makes another more final attempt. The Lisbon parents, already quite strict Catholics, now start trying to suicide-proof their remaining daughters’ lives, removing the perilous spiked fence, closing ominous open windows. The Lisbon sisters are often cloistered away from the dangerous world, safe in the shade of the doomed elm trees that line the street outside.

But the fourteen-year old Lux Lisbon cannot be contained by these rules. In the months following her Cecilia’s suicide she begins numerous shallow sexual affairs with many boys from the school, each more meaningless than the last. Lux simply smiles her innocent smile and laughs on cue for the ones she likes. Until eventually she meets her match, Trip Fontaine, a local heartthrob who’s found the one girl who’ll ignore him. They begin a courtship and he arranges a whole coterie of suitors to take the girls to the homecoming dance. All seems right with the world, there’s dancing and singing and things couldn’t be happier, and Lux and Trip spend the night on top of one another by starlight. But in the morning Lux wakes up alone, and makes her way home alone, and the cloister tightens around the sisters once again and they are taken out of school entirely.

If you saw 199 people with brown eyes you would know it was you that must have blue eyes and you would be free to leave on the first night.

From here the logic of the film begins to break down and we enter a kind of suburban mythology more than a clear narrative. The girls move further into abstraction and become interchangeable creatures that clearly must leave the house at some point, but never do so when observed. Lux (still fourteen, but played by an eighteen-year-old actress) begins taking a string of sexual partners, both boys and men, from around the neighbourhood, and having sex with them on the roof by night. Where these men actually come from and how does nobody ever speak of these rooftop hookups is not explained.

They begin a correspondence of codes and hidden messages with some of the younger local boys, Morse signals in lamplight, records played over the phone, letters found in unexpected places, until eventually the boys are invited round to take the girls on an adventure. But after Lux invites them in they find only a mass suicide in progress, all four sisters exeunt by their own separate means. The boys flee, only a painful mystery remains, which the rest of the affluent suburb does its best to ignore. Why did these perfect girls all decide to kill themselves?

Assuming you had brown eyes, if you saw one person with blue eyes and 198 others with brown eyes, they would use the established logic and leave on the first night. They do not leave the first night. Someone else must also have blue eyes. It must be you. You both leave on the second night.

The Virgin Suicides, as a film at least, is a layering of perspectives: the female experience, as viewed by the male gaze, as viewed by Sofia Coppola’s female gaze. Throughout the film there are moments where virtuous young men allow themselves to sleazily dream of violating these young women whose innocence they idolise. Whether its a young boy saying he witnessed Cecily’s first suicide attempt while trying to spy on the girls taking a shower (all the boys he’s telling about this agree that it would be awesome to do that), or our learning about Lux’s sexual awakenings through a montage of bragging assholes suggesting you smell their fingers. The gang of boys communally spy on Lux’s rooftop sex through a telescope, even keeping records on her encounters. In the film’s climax the youngest and cutest of the virtuous boys excitedly declares that he can’t wait to feel one of them up, just before they start finding the bodies.

The film is about the idea of these girls through eyes of the teenage boys in the neighbourhood, but the teenage boys never fully become characters themselves, as they too are simply a hive of the self-idealising male gaze. Although there is a Steven King-esque core group of boys investing the strange goings-on in the ‘hood, very few of them get any identifying moments. Another group of boys follow Trip taking the sisters to prom, and you’d be forgiven for not even noticing that these were different characters. The narrator identifies himself only as “We,” describing “They”.

“We” are obsessed with Them and the impenetrable mystery of their deaths. The story is told from years after the fact, the small group of boys now men who pause over every venerated artefact of the girls they can get their hands on, any insight available to somehow crack the conundrum of what do pretty white teenage girls think about. We hear the advice of the male physician who suggests that Cecilia needs to get to know more boys her own age. After her death we see boys her own age poring over her purloined diary, taking ludicrous logical leaps trying to decipher the hidden meaning of her handwriting, and fantasising themselves into endless romantic adventures with whatever a young girl has always meant.

Assuming you had brown eyes, if you saw two people with blues and 197 others with brown eyes, you would wait two nights for them to use the established logic, and then the two of them would leave. They do not leave on the second night. Someone else must also have blue eyes. It must be you. You all leave on the third night.

The Virgin Suicides is not about suicide, whether as an individual ideation or a psycho-social contagion. Trip blames himself, the parents blame themselves, the “We” blames all of Michigan. It begins and end with the narrator spelling out (far too) clearly the metaphorical representations of the story in how these endangered girls are the souls of Michigan’s disappearing society, economy and environment.

But the boys don’t truly learn. In the end they have no grasp at all on who the Lisbon girls really were and remain only and openly obsessed with them as concepts. The real message of the film is about how women are never truly seen, how feminine innocence is an illusion created by men whose self-serving worldview depends on it, and by bitter matriarchs who worship their own emotional prison.

Their suicide is counterparted with an early scene where a local boy obsessed with a different local girl leaps rapturously from a first-story window in divine protest at being kept from her by fate, and he walks it off utterly unscathed. This is not really indicative of how things go in real life, young boys do kill themselves in frightening numbers as well, but suicide isn’t suicide in this movie, suicide is semiotics. The boy jumps and walks away because he is seen, he is understood. Nobody second-guessed why he jumped. People understand a boy obsessed with a girl.

But the Lisbon sisters are not girls, they are ideas, they are mythology. We see the girls around us as we grow up and We experience our sexuality through Them, and we learn of their sexuality only through the lens of how it flatters or blocks our own. While Lux is the one of the four that stands out in the story as a mouthpiece doling out riddles until they leave a final tragic puzzle, the Lisbons nevertheless fuse into an amorphous construct. A perfect frustrated They confounding the perfect frustrated We. A failure of communication, perfectly communicated. Even in death They are not real and We don’t want them to be.

Assuming you had brown eyes, if you saw three people with blue eyes and 196 others with brown eyes, you would wait three nights for them to use the established logic, then all three would leave. They do not leave on the third night. Someone else must also have blue eyes. It must be you. You all leave on the fourth night.

I’ve felt obsession with women many times in my life. Maybe not love, but certainly obsession. I used to find myself feeling somewhat autistic in trying to react to people socially, but in my adulthood I find I’m as socialised as I’d ever expect anyone to be. Only two arenas I never fully adjusted to are work and sex, both of which I get scared of as soon as it feels less than completely good and both of which give me a punishing fear of failure and embarrassment. So I find myself replaying in my head where things go wrong, what do I do next, am I crazy, what do I want, what am I supposed to say, what’s wrong with me, am I happy. And I try to find the roots and routes of obsession, where does it come from, where does it go, can it be controlled, or reclaimed. Do I feel anything at all or is this all some simulacrum of how I think a person would be if I were a person.

And I grow vague.

And I think back to individual women I know and try to work out which one of them I’m supposed to run to, or am I supposed to run to any of them, or should I arbitrarily find another one and then run to her, and does it even make a difference at all, shall I write out an letter describing how I feel and send it to each one individually as if it’s only been sent to them because if it truly is how I feel then should it not be just as true regardless of who I say it to if I really can’t even think of a good reason why it should be one woman instead of any other.

And I think back further to whatever woman was I obsessed with last year or the year before that or the year before that, and I’m older now so I’m counting in decades too. And shall I just inject myself like mercury into the lives of women I haven’t talked to in years, and how much time is too much, and how stretched must a bond be before it’s considered broken. And what have I even to say about how things were, or how they’ve been since, do I even actually care who they are, and how many do I have to file through until I feel safe in the loving arms of a concept. And would I feel sure of love if I was some kind of a person. And am I happy.

And across time I forms into We and all possible women form into They. And I look back and see a long sequence of convincing myself that these vague things are real. And I look forward and see a long sequence of convincing myself that these vague things are real.

And I am a here and a now. And I know that I am not alone, and I know I have people to reach out, and that I do reach out to, and that reach out to me.

But there is a vagueness within me. And do I want anything, and is there anything I want to say, and am I happy. And I do and there is and I am.

But who I am to be if I’m not to be obsessed?

When do We find the answer?

You see 99 people with blues eyes and 100 with brown eyes. 99 nights pass. 99 remain. On the 100th day 100 people with blues eyes leave the island.

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