Gendered Fantasies in Clueless and The Virgin Suicides
This is an unpublished essay I wrote for a class in the fall of 2023.
Film scholar Lesly Speed credits Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995) for the increase in films about teen girls following its popularity (Speed 48). The film “enacts a comedic reversal of the male-centered coming-of-age film” by instead centering the highly feminine Cher, played by Alicia Silverstone (Speed 38).
The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999) exists within this legacy of woman-directed films about teen girls, but is not similarly told in the female perspective. Rather, its female characters — the five Lisbon sisters, notably Cecilia and Lux (Kirsten Dunst) — are largely presented through the eyes of the neighborhood boys who obsessively watch them.
Both films engage in fantasy, but where Clueless presents an aspirational image for girls, The Virgin Suicides shows a seductive image for its male onlookers. This can be seen in the use of mise-en-scène, editing and camera movement, and voiceover in Clueless’ introduction and The Virgin Suicides’ diary-reading sequence.
Clueless begins with a sequence that Cher comically likens to a skin-product commercial, highlighting its superficiality. It depicts her affluent lifestyle: driving a nice jeep, shopping at expensive stores, lounging by the pool, and more — all while looking like she just stepped off a runway.
Speed writes that the film offers a “heightened,” “performative,” and “exaggerated” representation of teen life (Speed 29, 44). While this fantastical view is ridiculous, and Cher is a protagonist we are perhaps meant to laugh at, it is also enticing.
The introduction’s mise-en-scène of bold colors, actors draped like painting subjects, and fashion that inspired audience imitation creates a world that Heckerling describes as “a fantasy that you would want to live in” (Speed 44).
The editing and camera focus on these elements with energetic, abrupt cuts and movements, taking the viewer on a ride and showing off artificial waterfalls and toned legs.
A pop-punk song in the background states that “we’re the kids in America,” situating the viewer with these socialites. Cher’s casual voiceover then kicks in to cement the viewer’s shift from “an outsider to being invited into Cher’s life” (Speed 40).
Her voiceover throughout the film creates a familiarity between Cher and the audience akin to friendship. It solidifies her role at the center of the film and encourages us to laugh with her, rather than at her, and participate in the girlish fantasy of her life.
The Virgin Suicides stands in stark contrast, even in its shared moments of constructed reality. One such moment occurs when the neighborhood boys steal Cecilia’s diary after her suicide for insight into her life and death, and the Lisbon sisters at large. Unsatisfied with the mundane entries, the boys perk up when Cecilia writes about a crush Lux had.
We begin to hear the entry in Cecilia’s voice as the boys imagine her writing this in a golden field, dressed in white. As Cecilia reads her words, a close-up of Lux’s face is super-imposed.
Images begin hazily dissolving in and out, over and beside each other, of the sisters dancing, frolicking in the field, and blowing a dandelion. Interspersed in these is a unicorn, highlighting how fantastical it all is.
These images only exist in the minds of the boys to satisfy their desire to have the sisters. The girls exist more as unicorns than as people, becoming — as feminist scholar Anna Backman Rogers describes — “unwitting objects of male fantasy” (Rogers 9).
The technical aspects of this sequence reinforce the film’s position as a story told through the lens of leering males. The mise-en-scène consists of the girls in innocent white or revealing bikinis, happy in a beautiful landscape that potentially only exists in the minds of these boys. Director Sofia Coppola named Playboy shoots from the 1970s as an inspiration, citing the “back-lit hair, with the girl in nature” as the “fantasy girl of that era” (Rogers 8).
The hazy, layering, gradual editing and stationary camera make the sequence dreamlike. Rogers writes, “rather than helping to make sense of the Lisbon girls’ mystery, these images literally fragment and dissolve” (Rogers 9). The editing shows that the boys have no interest in truly understanding the girls, only in viewing them as fleeting, romantic images.
This sequence does provide a rare moment in The Virgin Suicides where a Lisbon sister has a voiceover in the form of Cecilia reading her diary. However, as her narration ends, the boys’ voiceover continues over the fantasy as they explain the profound lessons they have inflicted upon Cecilia’s private, mundane memories.
The synth-pop that had been accompanying Cecilia’s voice turns orchestral with brass and string instruments imposing, just as the boys impose. Where Cher’s Clueless story is her own, the Lisbon sisters’ is told by the boys who feel entitled to their lives.
Although both movies have fantastical elements, those in Clueless are real within Cher’s life — if only a dream for the average girl — while in The Virgin Suicides, they are only in the boys’ imaginations.
They are constructed with different methods, like vibrant or soft colors and abrupt or hazy cuts. Voiceover is regularly used in both films, but to center different roles. These distinctions highlight how the films, despite their shared teen-girl branding, are told from drastically different, gendered perspectives.
The femininity in Clueless is fun and seen as a power to wield socially, while the prescription of it is a death sentence in The Virgin Suicides.
Even with this narrative incongruity, both films argue for the viewing of women as entire beings and not simply superficial rich girls or the seductive girls-next-door.
Clueless accomplishes this by making Cher the audience’s role model and friend, while The Virgin Suicides does it by making us as ignorant to the intricacies of the Lisbon sisters as the boys we share spectatorship with.
Works Cited
Rogers, Anna Backman. “Chapter One — Adolescence: Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999).” American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image, Edinburgh University Press, 2015, pp. 24–61.
Speed, Lesley. “‘A Way Normal Life’” and “All the Young Dudes and Girls.” Clueless: American Youth in the 1990s, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, New York, NY, 2018, pp. 29–69.