#262 - The Virgin Suicides

Poster Source

The Virgin Suicides
Directed by Sofia Coppola
May 19, 1999
262 on the List



Tonight, I'll be starting The Virgin Suicides, a film I don't really understand. But I don't know much about it, really. What I do know is that it has received a lot of underground praise, has a reasonable cult fanbase, and is on this here list. It's even directed by Francis Coppola's daughter. That's The Godfather, folks.

I'm excited to delve into this one, so here we go.

Approx. 96 minutes later:
Well. That was awful glum.

Upon finishing this film, I'm sure most people long for a deeper meaning. They ask; why is this happening? Was there a way to stop it? Who the junk names their daughter Lux? Fair questions.

But I think this went deeper than that, in that it didn't. There aren't any answers. Those things happen, and by the end, the narrator and his friends are clearly frustrated by the turn of events. And that's the point. They're driven mad by the idea of all this, so you are, too. You don't get answers because no one has them.

In my Composition class recently, I learned about this poem, called This is Just to Say, by William Carlos Williams.

"I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold"

Now, 90% of you, like me, don't "get" poems. So the first thing you're scrambling for is a deep meaning, right? This must be about how sin in general is extremely tempting, and more often than not, we partake in it, even if our roommate was planning on eating it - something far-fetched like that.

But no!

It's worse: this poem is just about someone who thinks chilled plums are the yums.

No one wants to feel stupid or played - although personally, I feel that poems were created for that express purpose - so, naturally, we try to understand everything. "Oh, I see what you did there." But, do we?

The point is The Virgin Suicides resembles that poem in many ways. It dares us, with its sheer simplicity, to figure it out. Come up with an answer. Make our high school Literature teacher proud. And in doing that, we miss out on one of the true beauties of life: sometimes, cold fruit tastes good. And that's all.