“Impossible Narrative Voices”: Sofia Coppola’s Adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides

Among the most distinctive features of Jeffrey Eugenides’s first novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993), is its first-person-plural narrative voice. After the publication of his second novel, Middlesex (2002), Eugenides identified his fascination in both books with “impossible narrative voices.”¹ The voice in The Virgin Suicides is rendered “impossible” by the counterintuitive proposition of a collectivity, a group speaking as one. The “we” voice is composed of men determined after some twenty years to reconstruct the story of the five teenage Lisbon sisters’ suicides. The men work from their own incomplete memories, contradictory eyewitness testimony they collect in interviews, and many material “exhibits” and relics they have assembled. The voice’s plurality invites the reader into a seemingly normative position and, together with the “documentary” premise of the narrators’ historical project, seems to promise reliability, relative objectivity, and social legitimacy. Instead, however, the narrators construct a text that undermines its own authority. The “we” voice encounters the intractability of otherness, while the boys’ youthful desires move them toward a position of voyeurism that obliterates the voices of the sisters whom they scrutinize, installing the girls as indistinct erotic objects rather than subjects. As a result, the apparently good-faith intentions of the narrators expose them as unreliable, not in their reportage as such, but ideologically, in their construing the objects whom they witness.²

Clearly, the cinematic adaptation of a work of fiction must address its source’s narrative voice, if only because the apparatus of filmic storytelling is so fundamentally different from that of verbal storytelling. Eugenides’s novel presents special difficulties. The unreliable “we” voice is crucial to the complex effects of the novel, especially concerning the perceptual and ethical position in which it situates the reader relative to the narrating perspective. Robert Stam’s apt comparison of prose with cinematic narration is worth quoting at length:

The discursive power of unreliable narrators is almost automatically reduced by film, precisely because of film’s multitrack nature. . . . In a film, the narrator can partially control the verbal track—through voiceover or character dialogue—but that control is subject to innumerable constraints: the presence of other characters/performers and voices, the palpable and distracting “thereness” of décor and objects and so forth. In a film, the other characters instantly take on a physical presence denied them in a novel dominated by a narcissistic narrator. . . . While it is not impossible to relay unreliable first-person narration in the cinema, it would require relentless subjectification on almost all the cinematic registers: foregrounded presence in the shot, uninterrupted voiceover, non-stop point-of-view editing, constantly motivated camera movements, always marked subjective framing.³

Clearly, a novel dedicated to an “impossible,” self-involved narrative voice poses a challenge: how to find a cinematic vocabulary that might situate a viewer in the position of an ideologically unreliable narrator.

When Sofia Coppola wrote and directed her adaptation of The Virgin Suicides (2000), she must have considered whether such an unusual narrative device as Eugenides’s “we” voice could or should be translatable to film. Without making an argument for authorial intentionality in the adaptive process, one may discern in Coppola’s choices a useful case study of how cinematic form reshapes the meanings prompted by a textualized narrative voice. Certainly, the film does hew to many of the effects of Eugenides’s novel. As in the novel, for example, the movie’s tone is elegiac and empathetic in its presentation of the Lisbon sisters. Much of the plotting and dialogue as well as the sensual and material particulars of the film derive wholesale from the novel’s nostalgic and at times surreal evocation of adolescence in the American suburbs during the 1970s. Like Eugenides, Coppola creates a narrative at once haunting—because nostalgia implies loss—and quirkily humorous. She reconfigures Eugenides’s foremost narrative strategy within the formal means of film, employing some compelling cinematic equivalents for the plural narrative voice. As Stam argues, however, the cinematic medium, with its multiple registers for perspective, cannot practically construct a...