YMMV / The Virgin Suicides

• Awesome Music: Air and Heart supply much of the soundtrack, and the final Homecoming dance is set to "Come Sail Away."
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The graveyard strike scene in the film adaptation quite bizarrely appears without context for the audience.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Trip's ability to attract fangirls isn't limited to fiction. There are fics where he and Lux get back together, despite how clearly toxic their relationship is shown to be.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Despite her brief (but important) role, everybody loves Cecilia, for being cute, troubled, and spacey.
• Fanfic Fuel: What would have happened if one or more of the girls survived her suicide attempt? This is particularly true of Cecelia, given how her suicide triggers the rest of the plot.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Mr. Lisbon being the Henpecked Husband to a fundamentalist wife is a lot more ironic now that James Woods has become a far-right political pundit.
  • Woods' character being a Doting Parent to five lovely teenage daughters as well, after allegations of him making unwanted advances toward underage actresses came to light in late 2017.
• Jerkass Woobie: Mrs. Lisbon may have been a domineering bitch of a mother towards her remaining 4 daughters, to the point of never letting them leave their house again, however it's absolutely heartbreaking that she lost all of her children to suicide.
• Nightmare Fuel: The scene where the boys enter the Lisbon house to save the girls, only to realize that they are too late, and find their dead bodies throughout the dark house; with Bonnie's corpse hanging from the basement ceiling, and Mary lying dead on the floor next to the oven. Later, we even see Lux's lifeless arm hanging out the car window in the garage- still holding the cigarette she was smoking, as well as Therese, who overdosed on sleeping pills.
• Ship Mates: The film version more or less invites this by cutting the main male cast down to four, one for each sister, with three of them seeming to be interested in one above the others - Tim with Therese, Chase with Mary, and Parkie with Bonnie.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The scene in the movie, where on the way to Cecilia's funeral, the graveyard workers are holding a strike protest at the entrance. Mr. Lisbon just solemnly gets out of the car, talks to them, and they move aside, stunned about the circumstances of his daughter's death. We never hear Mr. Lisbon's words but the impact is there.
  • Mr. Lisbon going into Cecilia's room, possibly imagines her ghost, and discovers that the window where she plunged to her death is open. Closing the window, he clearly bends his head down in distress. Then he finds Bonnie, reassuring him that the yard workers moved the gate where Cecilia impaled herself.
  • Lux's final scene. The boys are too excited at the prospect of rescuing the girls that they don't really seem to notice that Lux is incredibly glum, as if she knows already what happened to her sisters and knows she's next.
    • This line from the book's narration:
    She had escaped in the car just as we expected. But she had unbuckled us, it turned out, only to stall us, so that she and her sisters could die in peace.
  • The scene where the boys make contact with the girls and they play music on their recorders over the phone line. While the book conceals how the Lisbon girls exactly feel about it, the movie drops some hint. The boys are glad, while the girls are glad, yet very solemn, as if they know this is their final moment together.
  • Despite his attraction to Lux, Trip abandons her on the football field after they consummate their relationship and leaves her to get home by herself, recalling later that "I just got sick of her right then." The book goes into more detail about this encounter: Lux cried during the act and said, "I always screw things up. I always do."
  • After their daughters die, the elder Lisbons throw all their photos of them into the garbage. Makes one wonder if they ever really cared at all, though grief looks different for different people.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Portraying 14-year-old Lux as a Ms. Fanservice who Really Gets Around may come across as awkward to modern readers. Though it's pretty clear she acts this way as a reaction to her ultraconservative mother, she'd still likely be at least two years older if she were created today.
  • The minor character Joe Larson, a boy with Down Syndrome, is repeatedly described as a "retard" and a "mongoloid" by the narrator. Even allowing for the fact that the narrator is a tactless teenage boy, this would not fly today.
• The Woobie:
  • The Lisbon girls.
  • Poor Mr. Lisbon does whatever he can for his girls.