On the Lisbon Sisters and the Misnomer of The Virgin Suicides
BEFORE I READ THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, I read about how Josh Hartnett asked Kirsten Dunst to her prom—at the bidding of Sofia Coppola, who was directing them both in the film adaptation of the book. I came across the story flipping through back issues of Seventeen magazine while I was taking PE as a summer school course. I was at once resentful and enamored. It was a Hollywood anecdote sticky with charm, from the fact that teen actress Dunst had a confidante in the young director Coppola, to Hartnett the heartthrob with a heart of gold being a good sport and asking his younger costar to the dance.
Dunst ultimately chose to skip the prom entirely, baffling and devastating my fifteen-year-old self. I could not get a date of any kind, much less one with a highly desirable movie star four years my senior. I saw myself as the inheritor of bad genes that rendered me thicker than my peers and destined for a cruelly obscure suburban existence. And this feeling only sank deeper when faced with Dunst’s decision to opt out of a coveted role in the important social ritual of prom. I blamed what I decided was her effortless thinness and only mildly deserved fame. I silently hurled unfair and inaccurate assumptions at her charmed life, foisting my inadequacy at her in accusations she would never hear.
At the end of the summer, my sister Nova and I went to see The Virgin Suicides in a small movie theater in downtown San Diego when it finally found its way into cities beyond New York and Los Angeles. It was still a gamble on Nova’s part to take me to an R-rated movie because she had to buy my ticket and then hope against hope that I would not be asked for an ID at the ticket counter. But Nova was inclined then and is inclined even now to believe in the magical properties of sisterhood, that there was something about blood and secrets and being girls that elevated us. My sister and I were born on the same date three years apart under the sign of Gemini, the twins. Our shared birthday and the particular star sign have given a cosmic edge to our sisterhood that I am sure all sisters share, but I have the benefit of real mythology to back it up.
Greek mythology is scattered with clusters of sisters who offer moral instruction, and I have infused our own origin story with similar cosmic heft for my entire life. My sister, too, was preoccupied with the stars; one year she cut out a gold foil star and glued it to a blue cardboard block the size of a playing card and wrote a message on the back of it, dedicating a star to me. And so it was no surprise that Nova, whose name means “star,” took in the melancholy ’99 tribute to teenage tedium alongside me, whose name means “child,” with above-average levels of youthful despair and recognition. Though Josh Hartnett was the designated dreamboat of the film as Trip Fontaine, it was the five girls playing the Lisbon sisters with whom I was distraught to part ways when the credits rolled.
Hanna R. Hall appears on-screen as the living Cecilia only for a few minutes, but she makes an enchanting specter in appearances later on. Of all the Lisbon sisters, she had the most courage in her conviction that death was the appropriate response to life as it had been handed to her. Hall had played the child version of Jenny in Forrest Gump five years earlier, so when she jumped to her death in The Virgin Suicides, I could not help but recall the failure of her prayer from the earlier film, “Dear God, make me a bird so I can fly far, far, far away.” It failed this time, too.
My anger at Dunst for turning down Hartnett melted as she retreated into the character of Lux, the fourteen-year-old Lisbon sister whose disaffectedness seems to spread the suicide contagion most aggressively in the household. Chelse Swain plays Bonnie, the sister I later learned was characterized by a sharp nose, a long neck, and substantial height in Jeffrey Eugenides’s book. Swain possessed none of these markers, but she was the lesser-known sister of Dominique Swain, an actress made famous briefly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and so it seemed especially fitting that she was the lost middle sister. A. J. Cook plays Mary, who was the most vain of the Lisbon sisters, and when animated by Cook’s lovely smile and gentle features, it is easy to see why. Therese, the most awkward and intellectual sister, is played by Leslie Hayman, who never appeared in another film but who looked like a popular girl from my high school and so will always be famous to me. I bought the novel the following day and envisioned the Lisbon sisters as the girls who brought them to life on-screen, and I have never been able to separate the two.