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The Depiction Of Suburban America In Contemporary Film Set in a Detroit suburb, the story of The Virgin Suicides resonate throughout typical suburban America. Despite the changes that occurred in the ' 60 s and the growth of the womens' movement, suburbs remain a place of the old patriarchic order. Men go to work, take care of the yard, lift heavy things and act as head of family, while women confine themselves to the home, cooking, cleaning and raising children. In the movie, things go alright only when the suburban inhabitants respect and honor these patriarchal ideals. The decay of the Lisbon's house is a reminder to those who would push the boundaries of the gender roles and try to change the usual state of things. All the bad things happen to the Lisbon girls when they are in the house, they experience the only happy moments of their lives being are out of it.
The example is the Homecoming experience for the girls. In this movie, the Lisbon house parallels to all the suburban America so conservative, so traditional, so religious and narrow-minded. It looks like the message of the movie is to get out of the house (in reality out of suburbs) to get some fresh air, new ideas, new lifestyle. Otherwise, you the suburban air will suffocate everything prominent, outgoing and outstanding. Another thing that is very typical for the American suburban life is watching TV every evening. The Virgin Suicides shows how quality time for the Lisbon's means making it through the Disney special together.
Television seems to be the American solution to intimacy, and family substitute shared experience for interaction. It is interesting how the suburban people choose to protect themselves and their children from a possible danger. Everyone in shocked by the Lisbon tragedy and the neighbors are afraid it can happen to them. The solution they found to shield themselves is quite interesting: the fathers decide to ruin the fence that killed Cecilia instead of analyzing why she decided to kill herself. Instead, everyone thinks it was just her mental illness that led her to do it.
It is another typical feature of the suburban mentality: to fight the consequences, not the causes. In the same way, the suburban media proves itself unable to fully illustrate the tragedy. The newspapers do not try to investigate the causes of suicide, instead, they only describe suicide characteristics as if they were a tornado or other inevitable disasters. In the same manner, the school Day of Grieving speaks in very general terms of the tragedy that has happened and does not even pronounce the word suicide. Bowed by the weight of tragedy, Old Mrs.
Karafilis does not understand why Americans pretend to be happy all the time. To her, the suburbs are a place where artificially manufactured surroundings and lives culminate in the tyranny of an enforced happiness. Rather than indicating one's personal feeling, suburban happiness is instead a matter of social ritual, a process by which the community continuously and collectively reaffirms itself. For Old Mrs. Karafilis, this hypocrisy is typified by the figure of Mr. Lisbon stringing Christmas lights despite his daughter's recent suicide.
The novel's sociological exploration of suburban ritual supports Old Mrs. Karafilis' theory. The high school holds a day of grieving in response to Cecilia's death, which the school considers to be a great success despite the fact that the suicide was never mentioned and that the Lisbon sisters wait out the day in the bathroom. The neighborhood fathers remove the particular fence on which Cecilia jumped, giving no thought to the other fences in the neighborhood. The Parks Department systematically removes all the neighborhood trees in the name of saving them. These examples describe a widespread suburban emphasis on form, ritual, and propriety over and above content.
What is proper is infinitely better than what is morally or humanly appropriate, and the latter are readily sacrificed for the former. In this infrastructure of charade and self- destruction, the forgery of happiness is another necessary farce. The deep irony of American happiness is suggested by the characters of Lux Lisbon and Trip Fontaine. After living his youth at the pinnacle of the American dream, Trip spends his middle age in detox recovering. Likewise, Lux's decadent sexuality culminates in her premature death. Trip and Lux's search for love and happiness takes a sharp toll on their bodies; similarly, the suburban attempts at American happiness prove false, fickle, and fatal.
The sudden switch from innocent object to tool of death is deeply troubling to Cecilia's her suburban neighborhood, which conceives of itself as an oasis of security and normalcy. However, if mundane domesticity is life-threatening, then the suburbs are fatal. To conceive of itself as safe, the suburban neighborhood must reject the implications of Cecilia's suicide for ordinary people by claiming that it was an extraordinary events isolated stroke of terrible luck rather than an instance of an endemic problem. When the neighborhood men declare the Lisbon fence a hazard at the beginning of Chapter Three and organize to remove it, without worrying about any of the other fences, they exhibit this logic. The neighborhood boys, however, reject such sensationalism. In calling the Lisbon girls their "twins, " the boys are perceptive enough to acknowledge the trivial nature of the differences which separate them from the Lisbon sisters and, by extension, from suicide.
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Research essay sample on Day Of Grieving Lisbon Sisters Suburban
