Similarities Between Lady Bird And The Virgin Suicides

In popular coming of age films about young girls, the films usually depict young girls experiencing their first significant romantic relationships with boys. For example, Lady Bird and The Virgin Suicides narrate their female protagonists going on dates, going to school dances, and experiencing romantic attraction to boys their age, which inherently causes the audience to become conscious of the films’ commentary on the male gaze— both of which are vastly different from one another. This difference is largely due to the female protagonists’ parents responding to the development of their daughters’ romantic lives differently. In The Virgin Suicides, the girls’ parents are extremely strict and conservative, causing the girls’ urge to rebel against

Throughout both relationships, Lady Bird maintains her headstrong, outspoken, and overall unique personality regardless of the boys’ response to it. She is able to live this way because her parents enforce this independent lifestyle. Lady Bird mirrors her mother’s blunt, fierce, and outspoken lifestyle, and her parents establish trust in their relationship with their daughter, as they allow her to go on dates, multiple school dances, and even spend Thanksgiving with her boyfriend and friends. By trusting Lady Bird to make her own decisions, Lady Bird then trusts herself and her instincts. At 23:10, Lady Bird and Danny are laying on the grass, stargazing. Lady Bird brings up her mom, to which Danny comments on how “hard” Marion is on her. Lady Bird quickly snaps in defense of her mother, saying that she acts that way out of love and care for her. Later on in the scene, the couple is trying to name a star they have picked together. Danny suggests the name “Claude,” to which Lady Bird laughs in response and says that that name is pretentious. Rather than agreeing with everything Danny says in order to get him to like her, Lady Bird speaks her mind even if it goes against the beliefs of her male love interest. Because her parents established an independent environment at home, Lady Bird is

Because Lady Bird had independent, self-made parents who allowed her to have romantic experiences in high school, she was able to prioritize her own needs and wants throughout the film, which guided her to obtaining closure with her friends, family and self by the end. Contraringly, the hypersexualization of the Lisbon sisters stems from the conservative environment created by their parents, leading them to put themselves in harmful situations in order to feel a sense of control in life, which ultimately leads to their collective suicide. The female coming of age narrative almost always connects to discovering what the male perspective means to each young girl, but does not always mean that the male perspective has to be at the center of it. Wanting to ensure young girls' safety from the male gaze is not enough to ensure that safety— how parents present their values are just as critical, if not more, than the actual values