What Differences Exist Between Virgin Suicides Book And Film?

Unlike much of the book’s other literary devices, the symbolism is handled differently in the two mediums. The book is very full of explicit symbolism: the trees, the dying elms, the relics in the boys’ keepsake boxes, the encyclopedia entries are all all explicated by the narrators in turn. The film uses visual symbolism – the framed photos of the boys’ relatives, the religious icons and items that symbolize continuity of love between the living and the dead, the bra left on the fence – and lets the audience figure out the meaning of them without having them spelled out verbally. It is more subtle and, therefore, more immersive than the book’s use of these same items as symbolism. The motif of windows and barriers to freedom is shown to illustrate imprisonment, as opposed to having a character comment on the bars of the windows. This is a classic problem of film adaptation of complex literature and I think the film does it superbly. It treats the viewer with respect, not talking down to them, and creates a more powerful and evocative atmosphere as a result. The symbols become part of the environment that the viewer can absorb, as opposed to having to be told that they are symbols and then having to decode them as he reads.

I read ‘The Virgin Suicides’ first as words on a page. Then I saw the film. The book had been ‘The Virgin Suicides’ – this house, and these people. The film was that house, all lit up, but with the music and atmosphere changed. There’s a significant difference between the novel’s narrative voice and the film’s. Both are told from the perspective of a group of boys outside the Lisbon house as they try to make sense of an event that occurred within it. However in the novel this perspective is frequently self-aware of the unreliability of memory, and indeed of the myths which are created about people and events as they are handed down through generations. In the film the same perspective is conveyed through voiceover but is more immediatory in terms of emotion. There is less distance between the reader and the characters than in the novel. And frequently this distance is set up only to be ripped apart. The novel has a dry, but deeply upset, irony that is mostly absent from the film.

In terms of structure, the book is a lot longer than the movie and as a result, there are a lot of parts to the novel that consist of reports, interviews, and even lists of things. This is all presented to the reader in order to help them piece together the lives of the five Lisbon sisters, and in doing so, Eugenides is showing his readers how a community attempts to make sense of a tragedy by piecing together evidence and creating a story. The movie, on the other hand, is a much more streamlined version of the book and as such, there are several characters and subplots that have been left out of the adaptation. These elements are not presented to the viewer in the same way as they were in the novel, instead, they have been reworked into mood and even scenes within the film. Coppola’s use of music and cinematography helps to make up for the lack of these elements and provides the viewer with a sense of the characters and their lives within the movie. In terms of themes, both the book and the movie deal with the themes of suburban suffocation, erotic curiosity, and the way in which the boys of the neighborhood are culpable in the tragedy that befalls the five sisters. However, the two versions handle these themes very differently with the book delving deeper into the causes of and culpability of the events that occur, and the movie opting for a more surface-level, elegiac portrayal of the characters and their lives.

I also really appreciated the characterization of the Lisbon sisters. In the novel, each of them is fully realized through the very specific details of their daily habits and rituals. In the film, this is somewhat the case, but the girls are also somewhat romantized and or symbolized. The performances of the sisters in the film are all very haunting and corporeal, even more so than the novel. I have the sense that each of the girls is fully embodied on screen in a way that they are not in the novel, where we can only imagine them. But the novel’s complex and highly nuanced explorations of gender, religion and the ways in which society can fail to recognize and be invisible to girls and women is far richer on the page. But, for me, anyway, the complexity of the novel is ultimately intellectual, and what the film does is translate that complexity into feeling. So, I return again and again to the novel for its complex and aching portraits of girls and women, but the film is how I experience and feel the ache of those portrayals most intensely.

One of the key elements translated to the screen from the novel was the narrative. The novel is told entirely from the perspective of a group of boys from the neighborhood now grown men, and it is told from a ‘we’ perspective. A ‘we’ perspective is inherently a collective one, obsessive and above all unreliable. The film attempted to reproduce this by means of voiceover, but as a visual medium it inevitably is more objective than a book. We see the sisters with our own eyes instead of through the distorted medium of memory and desire. The novel’s ‘we’ boys create a feeling of shared pain and unrequited love that pervades the whole novel and defines its atmosphere. The voiceover in the film is not always successful in reproducing this, and at times it feels as if it has been added as an afterthought in order to transpose the novel’s unique narrative device to the screen. On the page the boys’ fantasies are subtly projected onto the sisters in such a way that it is left to the reader to decide where reality ends and myth begins. On the screen the myth is presented to us beautifully, but we are never complicit in its creation as we are on the page. The distance that the narrative of the book creates in order to make us feel this myth is a large part of the book’s haunting effect, and although the film is also haunted in the end, it is of a different kind.