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Text: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

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Text: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides is a 62-year old American author who has published three novels: Middlesex (2002), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, The Marriage Plot (2011), and The Virgin Suicides (1993).
He has also published a number of short stories.
Eugenides grew up in Detroit, Michigan and studied English at Brown, before graduating with an M.A. in Creative Writing from Stanford in 1986. Today, he is a tenured professor within New York University's Creative Writing program.

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Setting: Suburban Michigan Amid the Race Riots

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Setting: Suburban Michigan Amid the Race Riots

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The Virgin Suicides is set in the suburb of Grosse Point, Michigan in the 1970s. The Lisbon sisters' town is typical of the "white flight" of affluent white families to idyllic suburbs in the midst of the Detroit race riots of the 1960s. Although their street is eerily tranquil, there are references throughout the novel to the National Guard rolling into the slums of Detroit, and grave diggers striking at the local cemetery. The Lisbon daughters are trapped not only by their zealot mother but also within a heterogenous neighborhood that refuses to acknowledge the horrors occurring around them.

As aging men, the boys of the neighborhood realize in retrospect that the girls' suicides had come to repesent everything wrong with their age:
It had to do with the way the mail wasn't delivered on time, and how potholes never got fixed, or the thievery at City Hall, or the race riots, or the 801 fires set around the city on Devil's night. The Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted on even its most innocent citizens...

This source describes precisely what was happening in Detroit during this time, particularly a riot between Black protestors and law enforcement in 1967 which resulted in the destruction of hundreds of Black-owned businesses in Detroit's poorest neighborhoods. When compared to Grosse Point, where the biggest concern is Dutch Elm Disease infesting the trees, it is clear that the setting of The Virgin Suicides is meant to highlight the bubble that the Lisbon daughters live in. From lipstick to cigarettes, in every normal aspect of adolescence, they have to sneak. Their household and community are absolutely stifling, and this environmental isolation could help explain why they felt there was no other way out but death.

The setting of The Virgin Suicides is extremely important to the telling of the girls' story. The novel is narrated by the neighborhood boys who were obsessed with the girls Lisbons while they were alive, and tortured by memories after the suicides. Every piece of their family's story has been gathered from the accounts of their nosy neighbors; this narrative format represents that a seemingly perfect neighborhood can be hiding dark secrets.

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Editor's note: This is the last of a three-part series exploring the 1967 Detroit riot. Complete coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the riot can found at freep.com/detroit67.

Traumatized, Detroit buried its dead and displayed a nervous calm as August arrived in 1967.

In the months and early years after the riot, public officials, business leaders, religious groups and community organizations worked endlessly to rebuild the city, and there was a lot of kumbaya-style talk about black and white Detroiters living and working together.

As the city was still smoldering in the riot's aftermath, President Lyndon Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission to look at the cause of rioting in Detroit and other big cities in an effort to prevent future violence. But when the report came out the following February, warning "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal," LBJ ignored its recommendations.
Read our full coverage of the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Detroit riot
Locally, a group of business leaders and community organizations, originally led by J.L. Hudson Jr., formed New Detroit Inc. The group, started at the urging of Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and Michigan Gov. George Romney, was asked to find out what went wrong and how to fix it.

The most visible post-riot contribution by Detroit's corporate leaders was the $350-million Renaissance Center, the seven interconnected skyscrapers on the east riverfront that was dedicated in 1977. Though ballyhooed, the complex never lived up to its name and, ironically, became a symbol of isolation from the rest of the ailing downtown. General Motors bought the buildings in 1996 for a deeply discounted price and moved its world headquarters there.

But what really shaped Detroit's political future was an often-violent struggle for control of the city, historians have discovered in looking back over the past half-century.

On one side were black and white radicals and liberals. On the other side were conservative whites, many of them homeowners in the vast stretches of segregated neighborhoods on the far east and west sides.

Detroit could have gone a few different ways after July 1967. The path it followed was probably the most predictable.
Read more: Read our full coverage of the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Detroit riot Detroit '67: Son of Mayor Jerome Cavanagh believes riot killed dad The rebellion that almost killed Detroit will some day make it stronger
"In the wake of the rebellion, Detroit is really up for grabs," said Heather Thompson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning University of Michigan history professor whose 2001 book on the early 1970s, "Whose Detroit?" was recently re-issued.

"There is a real question mark in the air over what is going to happen next," Thompson explained in a recent interview. "Is the city going to be a law-and-order city given that it has just erupted? Are the police going to get more power and the black community less? Is this going to be a city that can finally, finally, bring about more harmonious relationships between black and white Detroiters? Or is this, frankly, going to be a city of more black control, because whites will leave it?"

At the time, one of the most significant developments politically was the rise of militant black Detroiters and the impact they had on white Detroit, which was then 60% of the population, but shrinking.
Read more: Detroit NAACP head Rev. Anthony: Police abuse led to 1967 riot Detroit 67: Doctor 'never saw anything in the Air Force' like that week of riot
One key group was the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, whose movements at Dodge Main and other auto plants across the region argued workers should control production, and it attacked the racism of the company and the UAW. When the league demonstrated, the picket line suddenly came alive with rhythmic chants, bongo drums and militants in dashikis.

The black revolutionary union movement lasted for only a couple of years in the late 1960s, but in its militant Marxist-Leninist dogma, incendiary rhetoric and aggressive street tactics, it illustrated the radical currents coursing through Detroit in the several years following the 1967 uprising.

"We came to believe that the working class had to make the revolution, had to lead the revolution, and that we had to concentrate our energies on workers," the late Mike Hamlin, a league founder and longtime activist, told interviewers in that era.
Read more: Detroit '67: Guardsman remembers deployment to riot duty in city he loved Grief and hope: Detroit church remembers the 43 victims of 1967
The decade after 1967 was a chaotic and destabilizing period that is hard to imagine today. It led to the election in 1973 of Detroit's first black mayor, Coleman Young, and the subsequent departure from the city of most of the remaining whites, as Detroit became something that few people would have predicted even a decade earlier - a majority black city.

That post-riot drama, which occasionally turned deadly, set the table for 21st-Century Detroit, which, in the past few years, has included a trickle of whites into the city - the first time that has happened in several decades, even as blacks continue to leave for the suburbs.

While the city's industrial decline and white flight had been under way for almost 20 years by 1967 - the white population had declined by more than 362,000 people in the 1950s alone - the riot accelerated Detroit's downward spiral in significant ways.

In the years after 1967, Detroit completed its gradual transformation from a city that was white, Catholic and largely prosperous to one that was increasingly black, Protestant and poor, because of the flight of wealth that accompanied the departure of upper- and middle-class whites. The city itself experienced increasingly desperate financial problems, which culminated in the 2013 filing for bankruptcy.

White flight

In the immediate post-riot years, Detroit was a tumultuous place.

As business leaders tried to rebuild downtown, white flight spiked.

Sidney Fine writes in "Violence in the Model City" that the number of white Detroiters moving out of the city averaged 22,000 a year from 1964 through 1966, but the numbers jumped to 47,000 in 1967, 80,000 in 1968 and 46,000 in 1969. From 1967 to 1978, the Detroit Public Schools lost 74% of its white students.

Violence surged in Detroit after 1967 and paranoia took hold across the tri-county region. The city buzzed with rumors. Heroin use was growing. Gun sales tripled in the city in the first several months after July 1967 - Mayor Cavanagh called it "an arms' race." Gun clubs flourished in the suburbs; crime jumped in Detroit: Homicides - which were 281 in 1967, even with 43 riot deaths - hit 389 in 1968 and in 439 in 1969. (Since 1967, more than 24,000 people have been homicide victims in Detroit.)

The widespread fear manifested itself in the rise of security guards and ads for nighttime events that promised "lighted, secure parking" as the owners of restaurants, bars and theaters reacted to customers' growing concerns.

Fearful store owners began bricking up their windows and installing barbed wire on the roofs, bars on the windows and Plexiglas shields between customers and clerks. The new, forbidding look spreading across the city became known, cynically, as "Riot Renaissance" architecture. Even the Detroit News, under a previous ownership, installed bricks in many of the first-floor windows of its stately building at Second and West Lafayette, put metal shields behind others and strung barbed wire across the new fence in the truck lot.

Observers considered the News' security enhancements highly unusual and symbolic of a nervous metropolis. The New York Times did a story. "Paper in Detroit Turns Fortress," the headline said.

Janice (Karen) Kendall was among the Detroiters who fled right after the riot. She had grown up on the city's east side in what she called a mixed neighborhood.

In July 1967, Kendall said she was living in the YWCA downtown, working part-time jobs at a bank, the London Chop House and modeling. Downtown, she said, "was so much fun."

Kendall said she was attending a party in Birmingham, celebrating her 24th birthday with family, on that Sunday when she heard the news of the riot. She stayed with family until the violence ended and then moved out of the city, north to Warren in Macomb County.

"My family just encouraged me to get out of there," Kendall recalled in an interview last August with the Detroit Historical Museum. "And that's what I did. I packed up my stuff and I left. ... And that was the end of it, but I loved downtown."

Although she called her move to the suburbs "the biggest disappointment of my whole life," Kendall stayed away from the city for the next 20 years. Now living in Grosse Pointe, she is excited to see the revival of downtown and other parts of the city.

"America's first Third World City"

On top of the post-riot anxiety about crime, violence and integration, the passions around the possibility of busing students to achieve integration was tearing apart both the city and suburbs in the early 1970s.

The riot's carnage focused a spotlight on the city's problems beyond race and police-community relations, and put an almost immediate end to the heroic narrative of the can-do car capital. As violence flared and the hemorrhaging of people and jobs continued into the 1970s, a new national storyline about Detroit gradually developed - that of an urban dystopia - and in popular culture the once-proclaimed "Arsenal of Democracy" took on a number of derisive nicknames: "America's first Third World city," Beirut, Baghdad, Bosnia, Chernobyl and Murder City. "Will the last person in Detroit please turn off the lights?" went a national saying in that era.

The city even had two bards who both reflected and projected the chaos. Elmore Leonard's early crime novels, many set in Detroit, began attracting national attention. In "Swag," published in 1976, two neophytes unite in a plan to pull armed robberies. "They walked down St. Antoine toward the river and over a side street through Greektown to the Club Bouzouki," reads one sentence.

While Leonard appealed to readers with his literary styling, a lesser known Detroit writer, Donald Goines, wrote gritty novels about the reality of inner-city life, producing more than a dozen books with such titles as "Dopefiend," "Whoreson" and "The Story of a Black Gangster," all of which sold well across black America.

In 1974, Goines was found dead in his Highland Park flat, next to his typewriter, with gunshot wounds to his head. His end was "sudden and final," the Free Press wrote. "Goines had recaptured that moment scores of times in his books - the moment when the executioner comes to pay you back."

Black radicalism

If Mayor Cavanagh represented the white liberal dream of pre-riot Detroit - that city government could fix decades-old problems between the Detroit police and the growing black community and repair race relations from Alter Road to Telegraph - Kenneth Cockrel Sr. epitomized the post-riot era when African Americans forcefully demanded their piece of the pie and challenged the white establishment in city hall, schools, neighborhoods, courts, factories, jails and police precincts.

After serving in the Air Force, Cockrel returned to Detroit and attended Wayne State University's Law School, graduating in 1967. A combination of street guy and intellectual, Cockrel was tall, thin and stylish. He was known for his wide-ranging intelligence, lacerating wit, loping walk, perfectly symmetrical Afro and command of the language.

Once stymied in a hearing before Recorder's Court Judge Joseph Maher, Cockrel outside of court called Maher "a racist monkey, a honkie dog, a racist pirate and a bandit." Maher charged Cockrel with contempt of court, but Cockrel summoned a small army of legal help and beat it.

Cockrel, who died of a heart attack in 1989 at age 50, was also an unabashed Marxist in an age of red-baiting and the Berlin Wall. He was a leader in the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

After 1967, Detroit police engaged in several well-publicized violent encounters with black citizens that further raised the racial temperature in the city. Fresh out of law school, Cockrel won stunning courtroom victories for accused cop killers and defendants accused of lesser crimes.

One client was James Johnson, who brought an M-1 carbine to his job at Chrysler's Eldon Avenue Gear and Axle plant and shot and killed two foremen and a fellow worker. Cockrel convinced a jury that Johnson was not guilty by reason of insanity as a result of racism and conditions inside the plant. With such unlikely victories, much of white Detroit was incredulous - and angry - that black radicals were overthrowing the old order downtown.

For extra measure, Cockrel and law partner Justin Ravitz, another Marxist, challenged the way Detroit jury pools were assembled, charging authorities excluded many blacks, poor whites and long-haired hippies. A judge agreed and ordered major changes in the way juries were selected, which quickly led to a Detroit first: a majority black jury. Later, the unthinkable happened: Detroiters elected Ravitz to be a criminal court judge.

The coming of Coleman Young

Cavanagh, shattered by the riot, decided not to run for re-election in 1969. Richard Austin, an unexciting moderate CPA who was black, faced Roman Gribbs, the unexciting Wayne County Sheriff. Gribbs campaigned on a law-and-order platform and narrowly won.

In early 1971, as crime statistics, especially homicide, continued to climb (though modern experts have questioned the accuracy of stats from that era), the Detroit police unveiled its newest crime-fighting tool - the STRESS unit, an undercover decoy operation, Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets. Within months, STRESS officers had killed 10 suspects; nine were black, and critics called it an "assassination squad."

Protests began. Cockrel led the pushback, which included marches, rallies and tense public hearings that involved thousands of mainly black people.

In December 1972, three young black Detroiters, described by supporters as anti-dope vigilantes, wounded STRESS officers in a wild shootout. Three weeks later, amid an intensive and wildly divisive manhunt, STRESS cops encountered the three suspects and exchanged shots again. This time, one Detroit cop was killed and another was left paralyzed.

Police Commissioner John Nichols called the suspects "mad dog killers," and police kicked in doors across black Detroit. Innocent citizens died in the police dragnets, and tensions between the police department and black community reached the breaking point.

Two of the suspects died two months later in a shootout with police in Atlanta. The third, Haywood Brown, 18, was captured in Detroit and put on trial three times on separate charges related to shooting at police. Cockrel defended Brown, and juries acquitted him each time.

Responding after the third acquittal and reflecting the bitter feelings of many white Detroiters, Wayne County Prosecutor William Cahalan called the verdict a "miscarriage of justice" and suggested Cockrel had appealed to the "racial emotions" of the majority black jury. Furthermore, he said the jury system might need "revision."

Cockrel said: "Persons who never had a word of criticism when all-white juries were sending black people, Puerto Ricans and white working class people to Jackson are suddenly now becoming concerned and are threatening the abolition of the jury system."

When Gribbs decided he had had enough after one term, Cockrel seriously considered running for mayor, but decided against it. The 1973 mayoral campaign ended up offering a stark choice: Nichols, the then-former police commissioner who had started STRESS, and Coleman A. Young, a former radical who had joined the establishment and was a well-regarded liberal Democratic state senator. Young ran against the police and pledged to end STRESS, which he did soon after taking office in January 1974, after receiving overwhelming black support, plus votes from about 10% of Detroit whites.

The election of a black man as mayor of Detroit was the final straw for many white Detroiters, though clearly not everyone who moved to the suburbs did so because of the new mayor. In 2010, the census showed 55,604 whites remaining out of a population of 713,777, which continues to drop, though at a much slower pace than previously. In 1950, Detroit had 1.5 million white residents out of a total population of about 1.85 million.

After 1950, white flight began in earnest: The big winners were the suburbs to the north. Oakland County's population went from under 400,000 in 1950 to 1.2 million in 2010, while Macomb's population more than quadrupled to 840,978. Black Detroiters began slowly moving to the suburbs in the 1990s, and that migration, at an increasingly faster pace, continued into the following decade.

Young had no illusions about how he wound up in the Manoogian Mansion.

"I was taking over the administration of Detroit because the white people didn't want the damn thing anymore," Young wrote in his autobiography. "They were getting the hell out, more than happy to turn over their troubles to some black sucker like me."

Thompson, the U-M history professor, said: "Detroit empties out by 1976. That is deeply a response to Young. White Detroiters leave the city as losers, not victors, in a very serious contest for power."

Once in the suburbs, Detroit natives watched their former hometown continue to fall apart, largely because the tax base was depleted by the departure of so many residents, and some of them made fun of Detroit and bragged that they hadn't been downtown in decades.

One such suburbanite is Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, who grew up in Detroit and has criticized the city for the more than 40 years he has been in public life, maintaining that Coleman Young was a racist and Oakland County was a victim of Detroit's criminals and profligacy.

"The truth is, Detroit has had its day," Patterson told Ze'ev Chafets for his 1990 book, "Devil's Night and Other True Tales of Detroit."

Patterson added: "I don't give a damn about Detroit. It has no direct bearing on the quality of my life. If I never crossed Eight Mile Road again I wouldn't be bereft of anything."

Two Detroits?

Patterson's attitude is out of date today, as Detroit has been cool for several years. One result: Whites are moving back into the city in modest but noticeable numbers, along with significant financial investment. Those two trends have helped spark a renaissance - in the 7.2 miles of downtown, Midtown and other areas.

Those neighborhoods, littered with vacant storefronts and crumbling apartments a decade ago, are now bustling with new restaurants and shops patronized by thousands of new office workers brought in by Quicken Loans and other companies. Downtown and Midtown real estate, once dirt cheap, is fetching premium prices. The Ilitch family is finishing its $863-million arena on Woodward in "The District Detroit," a newly named 50-block area of restaurants, bars, shops and sports venues between downtown and Midtown.
Read more: 'Two Detroits': Even far from downtown, contrasts abound in city neighborhoods
The city, though, is 139 square miles, and the poverty in many neighborhoods is much deeper than in 1967, and people are dealing with water shutoffs, abandonment and foreclosure issues.

Critics have noted what is happening appears to be the creation of "two Detroits" - one of prosperous new white residents in the cool buildings downtown and poor, black, longtime Detroiters stuck in ramshackle neighborhoods.

The mayor of Detroit, of course, is white. Mike Duggan stunned metro Detroit's mostly white business elite at the Mackinac Policy Conference this spring when he delivered a PowerPoint speech that detailed the history of white discrimination against black Detroiters in housing and urban renewal, facts that are often misunderstood in suburban Detroit.

Duggan, who is running for re-election this year, said he will not support building projects that displace low-income residents, and he's working to keep poor residents in government-subsidized housing units that could become market-rate.

"Our principle is this: One city for all of us. That defines our planning," Duggan told a standing-room-only crowd at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island.

He told the audience that the history is important, that people need to know how government policies subsidized the move to the suburbs, keeping them white and Detroit black.

"There is going to be a lot of conversation in Detroit about equity and inclusiveness. This is something we believe deeply," he said.

He added: "If we fail again, I don't know if the city can come back."

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Detroit 67: The deep scars the city still feels today

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Editor's note: This is the last of a three-part series exploring the 1967 Detroit riot. Complete coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the riot can found at freep.com/detroit67. Traumatized, Detroit buried its dead and displayed a nervous calm as August arrived in 1967.

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Art Connection: Eleven A.M. - Edward Hopper, 1926

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Art Connection: Eleven A.M. - Edward Hopper, 1926

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This painting by Edward Hopper depicts a woman, alone in her living room. There isn't a precise backstory available, but  the most striking aspect of this piece is that it feels as though the woman doesn't even know the viewer is there. It's clear she feels she is by herself, staring out her window. The woman being naked seems to represent that one cannot hide from their truest self when alone; the mask that everyone puts on around others comes off.
Like the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides, the woman in Eleven A.M. is staring out the window. This detail brings up a dangerous facet of physical isolation from others: fantasizing. In the novel, the boys get a hold of Cecilia's diary after her suicide and realize that she had been barely holding onto reality. One boy drily remarks that Cecilia had become such a dreamer, she probably thought she'd fly after jumping out the window. When someone is so disconnected from the outside world like the woman in the painting or the Lisbon girls, it becomes less painful to exist in a fantasy than real life. But as the boys of the neighborhood witness, there soon is nothing holding the daughters to their actual lives. Eleven A.M. represents this disconnection from reality; it is daytime, the woman is naked in front of an open window, yet has shoes on as if she might be leaving at any moment.

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Music Connection: "Graceland Too" by Phoebe Bridgers

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Music Connection: "Graceland Too" by Phoebe Bridgers

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"Graceland Too" is centered around the theme of becoming isolated in mental illness, and learning to free yourself. But rather than end her life as the Lisbon sisters did, the subject of Phoebe Bridger's song actually escapes her environment.

At the beginning of the song, the speaker tells the story of a young woman who realizes she can do anything she wishes, "no longer a danger to herself or others". The narrative of this song follows the girl as she overcomes her illness, and finds comfort in being directionless after a long time of being under the surveillance of others. She delights in being "a rebel without a clue", merely picking a direction and driving towards warm weather.

This source ties in with the core struggle of the Lisbon sisters; that they felt there was no escaping their mother's watchful eye. When the boys discover Lux in the garage, they realize that "she had escaped in the car, just as we expected". The subject of "Graceland Too" has also been under supervision, presumably also for fear that she may kill herself, but she is finally able to find meaning in life once she can actually decide her own fate. Even though she is alone, she has never been happier to be alive.

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Poetry Connection: "Everything is Waiting For You" by David Whyte

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Poetry Connection: "Everything is Waiting For You" by David Whyte

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This poem presents yet another answer to the problem of isolation. The speaker urges the lonely to "put down the weight of your aloneness and listen to the conversation" of life all around them. As relating to The Virgin Suicides, this poem is interesting because it frames isolation as a mental condition, not necessarily a physical one. Much like the boys of the neighborhood, who believe "the essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness”, David Whyte proposes that "to feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings". Of course, a mental illness that drives someone to end their life might not be treated by just a change in outlook, but the perspective of this poem frames the Lisbon sisters' end in a more critical light. Even alone, there is always the "swelling presence" of everything all around you, if only you are willing to reach out.

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Nonfiction Connection: Isolation during the pandemic

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Nonfiction Connection: Isolation during the pandemic

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The theme of isolation and disconnection from the outside world obviously became painfully familiar to almost everyone over the past two years during the height of the pandemic. This article describes the effects of prolonged quarantine on the anxiety levels of a number of different teenagers, particularly those who had to take on additional responsibilities to help their parents and siblings. For kids who usually filled their days with clubs and activities, the drastic shift to online learning and no extracurriculars was almost insurmountable. One boy who was interviewed recalls how exhausting remote schooling felt, and that it became difficult to even get out of bed and attend class.

The hopelessness of a prolonged isolation such as quarantine is shared by the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides. As their house becomes decrepit and the parents stop ordering food and collecting the mail, the very presence of the daughters in the neighborhood fades away. The boys narrating can hardly remember their faces, and without any way to contact them it's almost as if they had already been dead for a long time before the suicides.

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Teens in Covid Isolation: ‘I Felt Like I Was Suffocating’ (Published 2020)

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Remote learning, lockdowns and pandemic uncertainty have increased anxiety and depression among adolescents, and heightened concerns about their mental health.

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Short Film Connection: "Twinheads" by Liza Mandelup

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Short Film Connection: "Twinheads" by Liza Mandelup

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This short film examines the close relationship between twins Wyatt and Fletcher Shears, whose ostracization from their high school's social scene allowed them the freedom to become incredible artists. The twins were 21 at the time "Twinheads" was made. Together, they make up a rising punk duo called The Garden; one on bass, the other on drums. This source illuminates another angle to teen isolation; due to their closeness and deep interest in alternative music, they were often excluded from their Orange County teenage community, and the twins were able to grow into artists completely unique from anyone else. So their isolation from others was actually freeing; they never felt beholden to the expectations of others since they were always going to be on the outside anyways. In the film, the twins share that they "like being home, staying home, for the most part" in the bedroom they still share, creating art and music in an imaginary universe called Vada Vada.
In The Virgin Suicides, the girls long for normalcy. They are ecstatic to go to their school's dance with boys like regular teenagers and resent their mother's conservative ways. Once Cecelia Lisbon dies and the girls are pulled out of school, they communicate with the boys of the neighborhood using Morse code with a paper lantern. But in the case of the Shears twins, they enjoy isolation because the absence of other people frees them from judgment. While the Lisbon daughters can't wait to get out, and even pack suitcases before the final suicides as a symbol of their "escapes", Wyatt and Fletcher resent society's urging teenagers to grow up, and stay firmly in touch with the fantasy world of their childhood as a source of creative inspiration.

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Doc X: "Twinheads" - A film by Liza Mandelup