Dissonances between delegated narrator and mega-narrator: four strategies for undermining the voice-over in 'The Virgin Suicides'

Abstract

Since its release, The Virgin Suicides has attracted scholarly interest as a landmark work in contemporary American independent cinema and as an exceptional intersection of debates on roles, representations and conflicts from feminist and post-feminist perspectives. Although the book on which it is based has been the subject of extensive analysis related to the question of unreliable narration, this aspect has not been widely explored in the case of the film, whose expressive and formal mechanisms have not been effectively identified. This article offers a reading of the film in narratological terms with the aim of dissecting its discourse, with reference to two key concepts: the mega-narrator or great imaginer, who articulates the audiovisual narrative as a whole, and the delegated narrator, to whom the mega-narrator assigns the task of telling the story verbally. In contrast to voice-overs that act in lockstep with the representation of the diegetic world, in this film there is a dissonance between the former and the latter arising from four semantic vectors used by the mega-narrator to undermine the voice-over’s authority: stereotyping, irony, alienation, and decline. These four vectors also provide clues to the mystery of the story, despite the delegated narrator’s self-declared inability to solve it.