The Virgin Suicides

the melancholy and dreaminess of this film is so haunting it sits in me like a kidney stone. the mystique and collective confusion that surrounds the lisbon girls pervades every nook and cranny of this film; everyone is afraid of wrapping their heads around people so complex, they either flee (trip), are overcome with obsession (the four guys, though they actively try to piece the parts together and inwardly acknowledge there is no real conclusion they can come to), or refuse to understand all together and make surmises (the news outlets, the neighbours etc...). and as an almost anti-climatic, inconsequential close, they retreat into something "deeper than death" forever to be nothing more than a fleeting thought for the neighbourhood and a borderline masturbatory passion project for the four main guys. that is what this film teaches us about how it is to be a teenage girl; both neglected and inspected under a microscope, they are not people but specimen. they are not left to mourn but instead their existence is construed to be "mysterious", and they do not experience death in peace but are now "selfish" for taking their lives. narrated through the perspective of these boys we can see how dehumanised they have become “It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”