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"Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances."
- Robert Hass
Sofia Coppola's 2000 film The Virgin Suicides, based on the 1993 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, is a meditation on longing and suburbia, filtered through the collective consciousness of a group of males looking back from adulthood at the experience of their adolescence when they were infatuated with five girls in their neighborhood - the Lisbon sisters. The film begins with the attempted suicide of the youngest girl, thirteen-year-old Cecilia, and ends with the suicides of all of them. However, The Virgin Suicides concerns itself not with the reasons behind the five deaths, but rather, the film concerns itself with the subjective phenomenon of longing - adolescent sexual longing, nostalgic longing for the experiences of youth, and the dilemma of both physical and temporal distance evoked by the word "longing." The suburban landscape, presented at first as a type of residential playground where children play basketball, jump through sprinklers, and eat popsicles, is particularly significant. Its mundane familiarity and uniformity act as a universal space of nostalgia for the experience of childhood at the same time as it provides an innocuous veneer for the horror and mystery that reside behind the leafy foliage and the walls of the pleasant houses, thereby enabling The Virgin Suicides to be seen as a "suburban Gothic." That is, the thematic concern of The Virgin Suicides - the destruction of childhood - is as much about anxiety as it is about longing, thus sharing similarities with a Gothic literary and filmic tradition in which fear and desire are often inextricably linked. Moreover, like contemporary Gothic literary and filmic culture that regularly uses suburbia to turn everyday, relatable events into terror, the use of setting in Coppola's film is an integral component in that it gives a haunting immediacy to its concern with both remembering childhood and mourning its loss.
Coppola's film is set in suburban Michigan during the 1 970s, an era characterized by an awareness of and anxiety over environmental degradation. According to VaI Stevens, the seventies saw the growth of the Ecology movement throughout the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe:
With the setting up of the Conservation Society, Friends of the Earth (FOE), Greenpeace,...