How important is family to you? To what lengths would you go to be with your family? Lux Lisbon and Esther Smith, two characters with strikingly different family dynamics and final scenes, hold unlikely similarities in their relationships with their siblings, love interests, and ultimate character development. Esther Smith of Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) lives a comfortable life in her upper middle class home in St. Louis. She finds her true love, gets engaged, and is able to stay with him and her loving family in the end. On the contrary, Lux Lisbon’s story in The Virgin Suicides (1999) is a tragic one. Her and her sisters are sheltered from the outside world, persuading Lux to sneak out and meet with boys. As the story progresses, her parents …show more content…
Louis, Rose, Esther’s sister, says to her, “When you get to be my age, you’ll find out there are more important things in life than boys.” Immediately following this, Esther sings a stalkerish ballad expressing her love for a boy she has never met. Lux is portrayed in a similar way. One diary entry reveals that she had a crush on the garbage man and would wake up at 5:00am on trash day, waiting for him to come. It’s worth noting that the subjects of both Lux and Esther’s boy obsessions are in exceedingly close proximity to their houses. It’s almost as if they fall for the first boy that comes within five feet of their house. I believe this is due to their close connections with family and home. Esther is deeply attached to her home, while Lux is unwillingly confined to it. This shared trait of “boy-craziness” is very important to their character development and realizations in their final scenes. Throughout both movies, Lux and Esther spend a good amount of their time with or discussing boys. However, in their final scenes, they both end up choosing their family. The Virgin Suicides shows this in a tragic, but symbolic, way. On their last day alive, the four remaining Lisbon sisters invite some boys over to help them sneak …show more content…
By giving up the chance to run away, Lux contradicts her typical rebellious, boy-obsessed nature. Alive and well, with the promise of freedom in front of her, Lux realized she could not live without her sisters and made a permanent decision to be with her family forever. In Meet Me in St. Louis, Esther is put in a similar, but much less extreme, situation. Esther’s true love, John Truett, asks to marry her three days before she is set to move to New York with her family. This photo is a look at the moment after his proposal. Esther’s big smile and intense eye contact show that she is overjoyed and wants nothing more than to be with him. But as the conversation continues, Esther realizes that to be with him, she must stay in St. Louis while her family moves away to New York. Esther loves St. Louis, and she loves John Truett, but she rejects his plans, reasoning that they could try and make it work with her in New York. Like Lux, Esther realized she could not live without her family. She was willing to sacrifice her one true love just to be with them. This is incredibly vital to her growth as a character. For most of the film, her main objective was to gain the attention and love of “the boy next