Characters / The Virgin Suicides

Cecilia Lisbon

Cecilia Lisbon

• 555: The number on the card held by Cecilia during her attempted Bath Suicide is "555-MARY."
• Abusive Parents: Downplayed, Mrs. Lisbon is strict and Mr. Lisbon is inept, but the narrative does not spend much time holding them culpable and there are many moments where they do display love toward their daughters and have a difficult time recovering from their deaths sometimes to the extent of deep denial over what happened.
• All Love Is Unrequited: An early speculation about Cecilia's attitude toward Dominic though it later gets rather debunked by her diary entry.
• Bath Suicide: Subverted. Cecilia attempts this, but survives.
• Blood-Splattered Wedding Dress: Cecilia dies in her wedding dress, but the spike she jumps on apparently slices her through so cleanly that no blood is visible, and none is shown in the film.
• Bungled Suicide:
  • Aforementioned Cecilia.
  • Also - Dominic Palazzolo, who jumps off the roof yet fails to die. Unlike Cecilia, he doesn't seem too fazed by his continued existence.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Cecilia is a spacey introvert who empathizes more with animals and nature than people.
• Driven to Suicide: The motives of the girls are never truly disclosed. Only with Cecilia do we get anything close to insight.
  Doctor: What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets.
  Cecilia: Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl.
• Embarrassment Plot: There are vague but definitely existent hints that Cecilia's suicide was motivated at least in part by going through puberty and feeling ashamed of becoming a sexual being. It's not clear if anyone was shaming her directly, but given her strongly religious household it was likely she was, at the very least, shamed by her environment.
• Girl Next Door: The Lisbon girls, though they are of a particularly hard-to-approach variety.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: All five of the Lisbon girls.
• Hereditary Suicide: A couple of months after Cecilia's suicide, all four of the other Lisbon girls, her sisters, die by suicide (in the film, Mary dies in the mass suicide, whereas in the book, she actually survives that attempt only to overdose on pills and die later.)
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Cecilia. She does it herself.
• Meaningful Name: Cecilia is the first one to go, Keeping in mind that Cecilia means "the blind one" one reading could be, "the blind one" is the first one to go.
• Shoddy Shindig: The Lisbon family throws a chaperoned party for Cecilia in the hopes of cheering her up after her suicide attempt. They don't really have much experience with throwing parties, and thus it's a dreary affair and Cecilia ends up leaving and hurling herself out of her bedroom window.
• Starts with a Suicide: Opens with Cecilia's first suicide attempt. Her second, successful one is what really sets the story in motion.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: The Lisbons have a lot of these traits, as they're the most pleasant people by far in their Dying Town and choose the ultimate escape from it.
• Virgin in a White Dress: Cecilia constantly wears a wedding gown despite all attempts to make her take it off, eventually dying in it.
• Virgin Power: The possible reason why the girls are so fascinating.
• Weirder Than Usual: The youngest of the Lisbon girls. Cecilia, age thirteen, is known as the weird one of the family. She habitually wears an ill-fitting vintage 1920s wedding gown, stained and cut short. She bites her nails, invokes the Virgin Mary, and spends hours listening to wailing Celtic music that she has ordered by mail.

Lux Lisbon

Lux Libson

• Abusive Parents:
  • Downplayed, Mrs. Lisbon is strict and Mr. Lisbon is inept, but the narrative does not spend much time holding them culpable and there are many moments where they do display love toward their daughters and have a difficult time recovering from their deaths sometimes to the extent of deep denial over what happened.
  • Mrs. Lisbon does turn genuinely abusive after Lux and Trip have sex in the football field, hitting Lux, pulling the girls out of school, and forcing them to burn their non-Christian music. She proceeds to go completely ballistic after Lux's Pregnancy Scare, turning her house into a virtual prison.

• Adaptation Distillation: Despite setting Lux as the main character, Sofia Coppola's 1999 version is very loyal to the novel.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Lux falls love with Trip Fontaine, Trip cares little for school, and instead takes regular trips to his car to smoke marijuana and run a minor drug business on the side.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: When the girls run out to protect their tree from being cut down, the boys note that this was one of the few times they seen Mr. Lisbon hold Mrs. Lisbon in affection. Likewise, Mrs. Lisbon tells the yard workers that her girls have a right to stand there.
• Broken Bird: Lux.
• Childhood Memory Demolition Team: The trees in the neighborhood are being cut down because of a spreading disease. The Lisbon girls try to prevent the tree in their front yard from being cut down because of how much it meant to Cecilia. Possibly subverted that Mr. Lisbon never recalls Cecilia exactly being interested in the tree and some speculate that the girls had a publicity motive for protecting it.
• Deadly Gas: Lux died of carbon monoxide poisoning after sealing herself inside the garage with the car running.
• Downer Ending: The girls do commit suicide, and their parents don't seem to understand they were partly responsible. All the surviving boys can do is examine the tragedy with hindsight.
• Girl Next Door: The Lisbon girls, though they are of a particularly hard-to-approach variety.
• Good Bad Girl: Lux loves cigarettes and sex, but is one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. Another one of her passions? Knitting.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: All five of the Lisbon girls.
• The Hero Dies: By the end of the film, all of the Lisbon sisters have killed themselves.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: Lux Lisbon has a succession of encounters on the roof of her house.
• Meaningful Name: Lux is the last one to go, Lux means "light"... one reading could mean "light", the last one.
• Odd Name Out: Lux. Of course she gets greater focus than her sisters, and becomes a main character in the Film of the Book.
• Prefers Going Barefoot: Lux is almost perpetually barefoot. She later abuses this fact to play Footsie Under the Table, and to try to tantalize Trip, whose eyes remain glued to her foot.
• Pregnancy Scare: Lux has one following her string of rooftop one-night stands. She isn't pregnant, but the actual outcome isn't any better, as the scare exposes her dalliances to her mother and causes her to clamp down even harder.
• Right Through His Pants : And, apparently, Lux's tights, on the football field.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: Lux Lisbon.
• Slut-Shaming: She is the most sexually advanced girl in her high school, and is the object of desire for the local boys, Her interests include boys and she seems to relish the power that her sexuality grants her.
• Spear Counterpart: Lux and Chase, the youngest and most energetic ones who get more Character Focus than the others.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: The Lisbons have a lot of these traits, as they're the most pleasant people by far in their Dying Town and choose the ultimate escape from it.

Bonnie Lisbon

Bonnie Lisbon

• Abusive Parents: Downplayed, Mrs. Lisbon is strict and Mr. Lisbon is inept, but the narrative does not spend much time holding them culpable and there are many moments where they do display love toward their daughters and have a difficult time recovering from their deaths sometimes to the extent of deep denial over what happened.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: When the girls run out to protect their tree from being cut down, the boys note that this was one of the few times they seen Mr. Lisbon hold Mrs. Lisbon in affection. Likewise, Mrs. Lisbon tells the yard workers that her girls have a right to stand there.
• Childhood Memory Demolition Team: The trees in the neighborhood are being cut down because of a spreading disease. The Lisbon girls try to prevent the tree in their front yard from being cut down because of how much it meant to Cecilia. Possibly subverted that Mr. Lisbon never recalls Cecilia exactly being interested in the tree and some speculate that the girls had a publicity motive for protecting it.
• Downer Ending: The girls do commit suicide, and their parents don't seem to understand they were partly responsible. All the surviving boys can do is examine the tragedy with hindsight.
• Girl Next Door: The Lisbon girls, though they are of a particularly hard-to-approach variety.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: All five of the Lisbon girls.
• Hanging Around: She hangs herself and dies on the night of June fifteen.
• The Hero Dies: By the end of the film, all of the Lisbon sisters have killed themselves.
• Middle Child Syndrome: She is quiet, docile, skittish, and exceptionally pious.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: A throwaway line in both book and movie reveals her given name as Bonaventure. Otherwise it isn't addressed and everyone calls her Bonnie.
• Spear Counterpart: Bonnie and Parkie, the straight-laced ones who try being "bad" at prom and don't like it. The only pair to get a kiss.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: The Lisbons have a lot of these traits, as they're the most pleasant people by far in their Dying Town and choose the ultimate escape from it.
• Virgin Power: The possible reason why the girls are so fascinating.

Mary Lisbon

Mary Lisbon

• Abusive Parents: Downplayed, Mrs. Lisbon is strict and Mr. Lisbon is inept, but the narrative does not spend much time holding them culpable and there are many moments where they do display love toward their daughters and have a difficult time recovering from their deaths sometimes to the extent of deep denial over what happened.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: When the girls run out to protect their tree from being cut down, the boys note that this was one of the few times they seen Mr. Lisbon hold Mrs. Lisbon in affection. Likewise, Mrs. Lisbon tells the yard workers that her girls have a right to stand there.
• Bungled Suicide: Mary's first suicide also fails. She lives for a while before she successfully dies by sleeping pills.
• Cheated Death, Died Anyway: Book-only. In the book, Mary's initial attempt fails and she lingers for a month after the rest of her sisters before finally overdosing on sleeping pills. The movie makes no mention of this plot point and goes straight to the Lisbon parents leaving the neighborhood, leaving us to assume that Mary died with the others.
• Childhood Memory Demolition Team: The trees in the neighborhood are being cut down because of a spreading disease. The Lisbon girls try to prevent the tree in their front yard from being cut down because of how much it meant to Cecilia. Possibly subverted that Mr. Lisbon never recalls Cecilia exactly being interested in the tree and some speculate that the girls had a publicity motive for protecting it.
• The Cutie: She is prim, proper, poised, and spends hours in front of the mirror.
• Downer Ending: The girls do commit suicide, and their parents don't seem to understand they were partly responsible. All the surviving boys can do is examine the tragedy with hindsight.
• The Generic Guy: Mary is easily the least developed Lisbon and is defined mostly by her relation to the others. In the film, her Spear Counterpart is David.
• Girl Next Door: The Lisbon girls, though they are of a particularly hard-to-approach variety.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: All five of the Lisbon girls.
• The Hero Dies: By the end of the film, all of the Lisbon sisters have killed themselves.
• Spear Counterpart: Mary and David, the ones who are just sort of there.
• Suicide by Pills: Mary overdoses on sleeping pills later on in the story after her first attempt to kill herself failed.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: The Lisbons have a lot of these traits, as they're the most pleasant people by far in their Dying Town and choose the ultimate escape from it.
• Virgin Power: The possible reason why the girls are so fascinating.

Therese Lisbon

Therese Lisbon

• Abusive Parents: Downplayed, Mrs. Lisbon is strict and Mr. Lisbon is inept, but the narrative does not spend much time holding them culpable and there are many moments where they do display love toward their daughters and have a difficult time recovering from their deaths sometimes to the extent of deep denial over what happened.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: When the girls run out to protect their tree from being cut down, the boys note that this was one of the few times they seen Mr. Lisbon hold Mrs. Lisbon in affection. Likewise, Mrs. Lisbon tells the yard workers that her girls have a right to stand there.
• Childhood Memory Demolition Team: The trees in the neighborhood are being cut down because of a spreading disease. The Lisbon girls try to prevent the tree in their front yard from being cut down because of how much it meant to Cecilia. Possibly subverted that Mr. Lisbon never recalls Cecilia exactly being interested in the tree and some speculate that the girls had a publicity motive for protecting it.
• Downer Ending: The girls do commit suicide, and their parents don't seem to understand they were partly responsible. All the surviving boys can do is examine the tragedy with hindsight.
• Girl Next Door: The Lisbon girls, though they are of a particularly hard-to-approach variety.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: All five of the Lisbon girls.
• The Hero Dies: By the end of the film, all of the Lisbon sisters have killed themselves.
• Spear Counterpart: Therese and Tim, The Smart Guy and Girl.
• Suicide by Pills: She overdosed on sleeping pills.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: The Lisbons have a lot of these traits, as they're the most pleasant people by far in their Dying Town and choose the ultimate escape from it.
• Virgin Power: The possible reason why the girls are so fascinating.
• Women Are Wiser: The oldest of the Lisbon girls. Therese Lisbon, age seventeen, is intellectual, studious, and fascinated by science. She reads textbooks, grows seahorses, attends science conventions, uses a ham radio, and aspires to attend an Ivy League college.