The Feminine Musique: “Lux”

Pom Pom Squad’s 21st century musical spin on the conscience of “The Virgin Suicides” main character gives Lux Lisbon the voice she never got the chance to use.

Written by Arundhati Ghosh

Lux Lisbon is abandoned on a cold, dark football field in the middle of homecoming night over, and over, and over again.

The first time is the easiest for readers and viewers to stomach, because it’s the one time that it’s real, that it’s tangible to Lux herself. The girl everyone wants but nobody can have gives herself to Trip Fontaine, the boy everyone watches from afar who remains unapproachable. It happens on the grass at night right after Lux is crowned Homecoming Queen, and for the moment, everything is okay. They’re a match made in heaven. It all fades into the background for a night: the suicide of Lux’s younger sister Cecilia and how overbearing the Lisbon girls’ mother has become in the aftermath. Lux is allowed to relish inside her own head for just one night, and it’s everything to her.

The second, and third, and so on and so forth times Lux is left on that football field are when the story is recalled verbally by the boys that live in the houses across the street from the Lisbons. They, by their own admittances, dedicate parts of their lives to ‘decoding’ the Lisbon sisters’ very existences reminisce. They go from boys to young men to individuals with careers and families of their own, and yet they still maintain a single thread of connection between them: the Lisbon sisters and how enigmatic their lives and deaths were. Every year after the girls’ deaths, the boys get together to discuss how Lux must have felt that night, both before and after Trip, why he left her, and why she ended her life soon after.

They turn her anguish into a spectator sport, her prison of a home into a caged exhibit at a zoo, and then go on to wax poetic for decades about how they could never see why she had to end her life, or why any of her sisters felt the urge to do so. “The Virgin Suicides” follows the Lisbons’ lives as seen through these boys from across the street as they try to decipher what the girls think and feel, and why they say the things they say and do the things they do. Not once are the girls’ own feelings or thoughts revealed to the audience. It is, by design, the epitome of the male gaze.

Lux’s entire story is narrated by these boys. She never speaks for herself; not in the book, and certainly not in the movie.

After more than two decades after the film’s debut, the indie rock/grunge band Pom Pom Squad aims to speak for a character that never spoke for herself. They give Lux Lisbon’s character the identity she never got to show off, with the band’s instrumentalists giving a loud, rowdy, and gripping performance behind Mia Berrin’s vengeful vocals and punchy lyrics. In a short collection of pithy lines, the artists showcase an entirely different and ultimately more personal side to Lux than seen throughout both the entirety of the book and the movie. After multiple versions of their stories, one of the Lisbon sisters finally gets the chance to tell it herself. The song “Lux” may be short, but it certainly isn’t sweet. Over the course of roughly two minutes, the lyrics traverse the end of Lux’s story; going to homecoming with her sisters and their dates to sitting in a running car in a closed garage in her prison of a home.

“I've got a sinking suspicion, it might be something in your tone,” Berrin drawls. Her words are scathing as the song opens with a barrage of heavy percussion and bass underscoring her voice, ensuring that the rage she embodies is almost tangible. She continues her thought — Lux’s thoughts towards Trip on that fateful night — by finishing off the verse with a condemnation: “That you would leave me here to find my own way home.”

Alone on the football field, Lux realizes two things: First, that in willingly giving her virginity to Trip, he’d taken more of herself than she’d initially offered. Second: it’s way, way past her curfew. We watch through the prying eyes of the next-door neighbor boys — our narrators, who spy on the Lisbon sisters with a telescope — as that morning marks the beginning of the end for the four remaining Lisbon sisters. We see as their mother pulls them in on an increasingly tighter leash, separating them from all that they love, all due to a singular rule breach. The anger Lux must feel at her newfound circumstances is channeled through Pom Pom Squad’s harsh guitar riffs and gravelly vocals.

The lyrics of "Lux" are primarily aimed at Trip, the titular character's only real love. From Lux's perspective, Berrin declares: “My collar in your fist / Pulling me into your kiss / And suddenly, I knew my body was not my own.” Throughout the book and film, Lux is outright described as a budding femme fatale, coquettish and coy, despite being a young girl of 14 during the events of the story. She is something to be pined over and lusted after rather than someone to know and genuinely love: an object rather than a person. The idealized Lux presented to the audience through the male narrators’ eyes is a sweet, romantic girl who’s entirely in control of her own fate.

The real Lux, as interpreted by Pom Pom Squad, is just as unsure, skeptical, and inexperienced, as any 14-year-old is bound to be when it comes to relationships. She becomes hyperaware of how vulnerable she is as a person when Trip manhandles her. Although she is there, she is not entirely present.

Through the eyes of Pom Pom Squad, Lux sounds incredulous with herself. “In a cloud of peach alcohol,” Berrin sighs, “I let myself get drunk on the idea that you loved me.” Her tone is one of disbelief at best, as if it’s Lux’s own fault for assuming someone could truly feel for her what she feels for them. She is used to being ogled at (by boys at school, the boys across the street) and being controlled (by her mother) in the name of “love.” In Coppola’s film, the Lisbon sisters are effectively used as set dressing, merely props in the eyes of everyone around them.

Throughout the Lisbon girls’ story, the narrator and his friends fixate on the ‘why.’ Why did five beautiful girls choose to end their lives? They treat the question like a puzzle in need of solving, never stopping to think of how they had treated the girls as objects rather than human beings while they had still been alive. The narrator’s opening monologue states that “as teenagers, [us boys] tried to put the pieces together … to understand those five girls … ” and his ending monologue is poignant — and alarming — enough to mention its conclusion in its entirety:

“So much has been said about the girls over the years. But we have never found an answer. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls. But only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”

It takes a special kind of audacity to make five sisters’ suicides about yourself and your friends.

Berrin is clear on the personal meaning behind “Lux.” In an interview with Atwood magazine, she stated that “It’s about the fear of intimacy [she] felt as a teen that stemmed from negative early experiences of male attention.” The Pom Pom Squad frontwoman was quick to note the scene with the football field as pivotal both to the movie and her song, discussing how Trip “had gone through the effort of making [Lux] love him and then, when he got what he wanted, he left.” In the song, Berrin asks, “How do you expect me to figure myself out / When I cannot tell the difference between bad and good attention?” Lux does not experience healthy intimacy, and her feelings towards Trip and her relationships with boys in general shine through in the lyrics and instrumentals of “Lux,” emphasizing just how much the male gaze can take from women and girls.

Apart from the “woe is me” attitude the male narrator has towards the Lisbon sisters’ deaths, he remains completely oblivious to the fact that all the so-called puzzle pieces he so desperately seeks are and have been right in front of him the entire time. Throughout “The Virgin Suicides,” the living Lisbon sisters are never shown truly grieving Cecilia’s death outright despite their implied devastation. After all, them showing real, raw emotions does not factor into the idealized versions of who the girls were to the male gaze. On top of suppressing their emotions, the sisters are not allowed individuality. It’s rare to see any one of them on screen without the others, and they are all forced by their mother to wear dresses cut from similar cloths to homecoming, giving the impression of a singular Lisbon unit. As they are rarely ever mentioned individually apart from the stories the narrator relays about Lux, anyone analyzing “The Virgin Suicides” is consequently forced to group them together as well. It is difficult to write about Therese, Mary, Bonnie, and Cecilia when they are hardly ever acknowledged. It is difficult to write about Lux without being acutely aware of the fact that her true emotions are rarely explicitly expressed in the story.

One of the only instances is when, in the movie, minutes before the girls die onscreen, Lux tells her mother that she’s suffocating. Her mother casually disregards her, responding with a curt “You’re safe here,” as Lux is locked inside the home.

Pom Pom Squad intones it again on Lux’s behalf: “ ... in here, I'm suffocating / But out there, I feel so small / What a wonder to be anything at all.” Lux feels like a prisoner in her home and, to a point, within herself as she realizes just how insignificant she thinks she is. All of the girls come to believe that they only have each other. Anyways, and if that is the case, then they may as well be with Cecilia and be a full family again. The narrator and his friends continue to question the Lisbon sisters’ motives without seeing what is right in front of them (or, rather, what is visible through the telescope one of them has constantly trained on the Lisbon house): five sisters, one dead, and the rest of them trapped within the confines of their home, which is shrouded in an air of societal suspicion from everyone around them. Therese, Mary, Bonnie, and Lux are not even given the illusion of choice, and without free will, they no longer have a will to live.

In the movie, the girls tell the boys that are always watching them to come over one night at midnight, and the boys, convinced that they’re about to save the sisters and take them far, far away to live happily ever after — as if they are the princes to the girls’ Rapunzels — are beside themselves with excitement. The boys arrive at the Lisbon household and are greeted by Lux, who goes along with their savior fantasies by calling shotgun in their car and telling them to wait for her. The boys take it upon themselves to look around, another all-too-natural invasion of privacy. As they walk down to the basement, talking amongst themselves, one of them talks about how “[the Lisbon] girls are making [him] crazy” and he would do anything to “feel one of ‘em up just once.”

These are the last words said onscreen in the Lisbon household. He runs into Bonnie’s dangling feet moments after, and all of the boys subsequently run away, finding Mary’s body on their way out. Therese is already dead upstairs. Lux is last.

As the percussion and guitar crescendo in the final verse of “Lux,” Berrin’s words become even more urgent. In the music video, the singer stares directly into the camera while challenging the audience: “Everybody telling me that ‘life goes on’ / Meet me tonight in the garage.” She is defiant, daring anyone listening to prove to her that life is still worth living. Plenty of people hear Lux, but nobody apart from her sisters ever listen. The song’s last line is a final “Meet me tonight in the garage,” but the boys never do. It’s in the garage that she makes the first choice she’s made in a while, and last she will ever make.

The Lisbon sisters die, the Earth continues to turn, and in the version of “The Virgin Suicides” that will forever be stuck in 1999, the narrator still meets up to talk about the girls and the mystery they’ve left behind. In 2021, with “Lux” by Pom Pom Squad, the song’s titular character is given the chance to speak her truth. Lux Lisbon is abandoned on a cold, dark football field in the middle of homecoming night once again, but this time, we finally have an idea of how she feels.

DIVERSITYAfterglow ATXNovember 29, 2021arundhati ghosh, pom pom squad, lux, lux lisbon, the virgin suicides, film, coppola