Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Virgin Suicides
2000 · Sofia Coppola · The Virgin Suicides on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Count how many shots have glass or a curtain in them. (camera)
Lachman shoots the Lisbon sisters through windows, from across the street, behind panes and gauze. The boys use binoculars. You never once get an unobstructed look at any of the five.
Payoff: The barrier is permanent. What reaches you is always somebody's view from a distance, never the girls on their own terms. In the reading: crystalline description. An image that builds its object and then stands in for it is what the reading calls a crystalline description.
Watch the sisters drift across a lawn in slow motion. (light)
Backlit, hair haloed, lens flare, a honeyed wash over everything. The light is doing the narrators' work for them. Later, as the house is sealed off, the same light dims and curdles.
Payoff: The beauty is a symptom rather than a fact. You are watching how longing makes a picture, not how a girl looked.
Listen to the men narrating and the synths holding under them. (sound)
Air's analog chords never quite resolve. The voice-over is hushed and middle-aged. Between them runs a curated stretch of seventies pop, including the records the boys and girls play to each other down a phone line.
Payoff: The whole soundtrack is framed as remembrance. Everything you hear is arriving from decades later, the songs included.
Watch how often Lux is shown and how rarely she explains. (performance)
Dunst holds sensuality, vulnerability, and opacity at the same time. She is the most visible of the sisters and the least accounted for. The other four are shot as a collective rather than as individuals.
Payoff: The film keeps her at the center without letting you inside. She is looked at constantly and asked almost nothing. In the reading: icon of quality (qualisign). An image holding up one pure quality for contemplation instead of putting it to work is what the reading calls a qualisign.
Watch the Lisbon house change as the windows get covered. (staging)
Wood paneling, floral wallpaper, faded seventies rooms. As the mother closes the family off, the house dims and deteriorates around them. The staging keeps putting the girls on thresholds, at doorways and windows.
Payoff: The building tracks the story. A protection hardens into a lock, and you can read the change in the paint and the light.
Once you have seen it
Listen for the word we in the narration. (structure)
Everything reaches you from a group of grown men recounting a year they only half witnessed. They have a diary, photographs, relics, and no key. The film puts the watchers on trial with what they watched.
Payoff: The narration is the subject. These men are telling you a story they built to fill the hole where five people used to be. In the reading: fabulation / legending. Men caught in the act of turning girls into a myth is what the reading calls fabulation, or legending.
Watch for the mock documentary inserts and home-movie textures. (cutting)
Coppola punctuates the suburban naturalism with staged interviews, illustrative cutaways, and grainy home footage keyed to the voice-over. Time slides loosely across the year. The film is assembled like a case file.
Payoff: The form matches the narrators' problem. They hold fragments in no particular order, so the film arrives as fragments.
Track every explanation the film offers and how fast it drops it. (structure)
Doctors, neighbors, and priests each take a turn. None of it holds. The outcome was announced in the first minutes, so suspense was never the engine. What is left is the circling.
Payoff: The refusal is deliberate. You end up holding relics and questions, which is exactly where the narrators have been for decades.
Watch Woods and Turner play the parents against type. (performance)
Woods, usually volatile, plays a meek math teacher. Turner, usually commanding, plays fear hardening into rule. Neither performance excuses the harm and neither turns the parents into monsters.
Payoff: The casting keeps the house human. What entombs these sisters is ordinary anxiety with no idea what else to do.
Carry this in: Watch the glass. Every pane and curtain tells you that you are being handed a picture, not a person.