"The Virgin Suicides" and Foucault

Society has rules for appropriate behavior that its citizens must follow or consequences will emerge. From the time children are born they are being molded into becoming a specimen of their environment, and the parents take on the first role of government. The parents are the authority and they impose their values and beliefs on the offspring. In the movie “The Virgin Suicides,” the household rules align with the strict guidelines of the religious institution. The five daughters, in the film, have “anxiety over behaving well” (Foucault, “Class of 1968”) from fear of punishment. As Foucault says, “we become our own prison guards” (“Class of 1968”), which is what the girls have to do in order to keep some form of freedom in their own home. However, after the youngest daughter, age 13, commits suicide and Lux (another daughter) misses curfew, the parents take it upon themselves to completely isolate the girls. The teenage girls are taken out of school, disallowed from outside contact, and on indefinite house-arrest. The parents believe in Foucault’s idea that “power and knowledge directly imply one another” (Foucault 550), which means since they are the parents and are religiously pious, they have the right to ultimate control over their children. They believe that if the children can not willing subscribe to their moral values, it will be imposed on them through strict restrictions and punishment.
The total isolation from society could be compared to the quarantine example that Foucault explained in his piece “Discipline and Punish.” However, in the film instead of the girls suffering from the plague, they have the disease of wanting independence and freedom. The type of discipline the parents took into action could be classified as “the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution,… turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time” (Foucault 557). The isolation was meant to bring the girls on the right track towards religion and purity, while simultaneously constructing their identity in the image of the parents. This enclosure could also be paralleled with Bentham’s Panopticon, with the parents being the central tower and the girls being under constant surveillance. The girls, however, acting as the inmates are not secluded from each other, but only the outside world. As Foucault states about the Panopticon system as not being effective “for the immediate salvation of a threatened society” (Foucault 556), neither does the isolation work for the teenage girls. Lux still finds ways to act promiscuous with boys (she just does it on the roof), and the girls ultimately gain their freedom from the firm grasp of their parents. All four remaining sisters commit suicide in order to shape their own destiny and escape the unmerciful power of their creators.
These movie sends a message that every individual should have the right to have personal freedom and the people in power should be more understanding. The individual being its own prison guard benefits a capitalist society, like Foucault says, and this movie shows that if there is no understanding and no give and take relationship, than the society with its citizens will ultimately lead to destruction.


Works Cited
Foucault, Michael. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2nd ed. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. p. 549-566, Ch.1 "The Class of 1968"