To Die For: You’re Not Anybody in America Unless You’re on TV

Following the logic that made her “firmly believe” that Mikhail Gorbachev would still have been in power if he’d “had that big purple thing taken off his forehead,” Suzanne would doubtless have counseled Clark to get that makeover earlier. And sublimely idiotic though her reference to the Soviet architect of glasnost may be, who among us, having seen how breathlessly newspapers and networks covered the prosecutor’s new hairdo, can say her logic is entirely wrong? That’s To Die For all over—every funny, vacuous Suzanne line in Buck Henry’s barbed, catty screenplay, every crinkle of Kidman’s adorably pert nose, tells us as much about the exceptionalist values of white, middle-class America at the end of the last century as it does about Suzanne herself. The way she lowers her voice conspiratorially when describing Connie Chung as “ethnic.” The way she attributes Barbara Walters’s “deep sympathy for people’s inner feelings” to her being “of the Jewish persuasion.” The way she tempers her praise of Jane Pauley with a singsong reference to “the weight problem.” Suzanne is blithely confident in her ignorance, ruthlessly self-promoting, mean-spirited, dim-witted, superficial, racist, and cruel, but hey, it’s 1995. Who isn’t?

So when To Die For was delivered to nearly a thousand venues nationwide, just a few days after Simpson’s divisive, endlessly debated exoneration, critics were quick to note a kind of cognitive resonance between life and film. “The humor in director Gus Van Sant’s To Die For is wicked. The acting is superb. And the timing is downright unnerving,” wrote Margaret McGurk of the Cincinnati Enquirer. “There are times when we get exactly the satire we deserve, and this is one of them,” wrote Janet Maslin in the New York Times.

Simpson, on that occasion, walked free. Suzanne meets a grislier fate, ending To Die For as a frozen stiff, in a lake to which she has been lured by her vanity as surely as mythical Narcissus was by his own reflection. But the film’s distant real-world inspiration, Pamela Smart, was at that moment in Bedford Hills maximum-security women’s prison, where she remains as of this writing, serving a life sentence for conspiring with her teenage lover in the murder of her husband, Gregg. Smart’s 1991 trial—widely referred to as the first to be televised live “gavel-to-gavel”—formed the loose basis for the 1992 Joyce Maynard novel (also titled To Die For) that Henry, the screenwriter of The Graduate (1967) and Catch-22 (1970), pretty faithfully adapted. It is a fictionalization; it would be hard to enumerate all the ways that To Die For deviates from the more ambiguous details of the actual case. But the film does derive some of its power from the way it finds that line between fiction and nonfiction, shimmies right up to it, and, sometimes, darts quickly across it. The saddest example: James, murmuring “God forgive me” as he shoots a kneeling Larry, just after Russell demands Larry’s wedding ring and Larry pleads, “My wife will kill me.” These lines are lifted from the actual accounts of Smart’s murder given by defendants William Flynn and Patrick Randall, both then seventeen, on the witness stand in 1991.

Given the moments putatively lifted from a real human’s real murder, it takes considerable skill to even out potentially tasteless deviations in mood, and to steady the seesaw between poignancy and camp. But Van Sant, after enormous back-to-back indie acclaim with Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991), was coming off his first major critical flop, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993), an uneven imagining of Tom Robbins’s cult novel. To Die For plays like a refutation of Cowgirls’ bagginess: lean, efficient, and self-disciplined as its heroine, it skates clean-lined arabesques and axels through treacherous tonal landscapes. Employing the idiom of the nascent reality-TV boom, the fragmented first-person accounts of Maynard’s novel become faux-documentary, piece-to-camera interviews, interpolated into the third-person action. So there is always somewhere else to go, some other perspective to cut to, when the going gets heavy. Chronology is deceptive, reordered in a way we understand only as the movie nears its end: the Suzanne who has been delivering a self-serving account of her “recent tragedy” has actually been dead all along. It’s a reveal that pulls a clever little exculpatory U-turn on the moral stance of the viewer. We can excuse ourselves our fascination with so amoral a murderess because her comeuppance has already comeupped.

But even within this precise, tricksy structure, Van Sant occasionally takes flight into fancy, accented by the otherworldly, fairy-tale passages in Danny Elfman’s mercurial score. James masturbates to Suzanne’s weather report, and her perky meteorological monologue coarsens into a pornographic purr. Larry finally stands up to his wife, who, unaccustomed to anything but his lunkish adoration, dissociates, her view of him narrowing to tunnel vision (making her the oncoming train). And later, in a lovely flourish, the murderous weather girl pivots slowly in her living room like a plastic ballerina in a music box, and morning becomes evening in the space of one lazy, catlike stretch. It’s a gesture that isn’t just pretty filmmaking. It also perfectly illuminates Suzanne’s philosophy: there’s no point in doing anything worthwhile if nobody’s watching. Here—one of the few times Suzanne is alone, without an incidental audience or a camera to play to—nobody is watching, so nothing worthwhile occurs. Suzanne simply edits the day like it’s a VHS tape and she can record-pause all the uninteresting bits.

Van Sant plays with reality, or at least with metafiction, through casting too. Maynard appears in a small role as Suzanne’s lawyer. Henry plays the school principal, who pronounces “Maretto” with a deliciously prim hard t. Director David Cronenberg, known for body horror, cameos wittily as a mafia hit man posing as a studio exec. Matt Dillon reunites with Van Sant after Drugstore Cowboy, which had yielded the best proof to date of the actor’s leading-man chops. And speaking of actors making a bid for the big leagues: though Kidman only got this blistering breakout role once original choice Meg Ryan shied away, her casting, too, was touched by metatextual kismet. The passage in Maynard’s novel where Suzanne wonders who should play her in the movie of her life ends with two suggestions: either Julia Roberts or “that actress that just got married to Tom Cruise in real life—I can’t think of her name.”

Many of To Die For’s principal actors were, at the time of its making, at a pivotal point in their own relationship with celebrity. Notably Phoenix, here billed for the first time as Joaquin rather than Leaf, who somehow gets tragic mileage out of the inherently comic stupidity of a teenage Jimmy who falls murderously hard for the first person to ever call him James. But no one had more to gain than Kidman, whose marriage to Cruise had made her more of a name as a wife than an actress, a status her other 1995 movie, Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (which, coincidentally, also satirizes the zombifying effects of television culture), would hardly change. Sure, the bat-sequel handily won the year’s box office, but Kidman’s role was just another underwritten love interest, an accoutrement ranking significantly below the film’s notorious bat nipples in terms of memorability.

So Kidman tore into To Die For, leaning away from the rest of the cast’s naturalism (see Illeana Douglas’s wonderful turn as Larry’s sarcastic, grief-stricken sister) and transforming Suzanne into a towering terror of pink-lipped, cold-eyed calculation and artifice, the model for actresses playing venally ambitious, sociopathic, and/or narcissistic antiheroines ever since. Yet watch To Die For again and the surprise is that Kidman is also kind of heartbreaking. There are cracks in the glaze—a flub, a flash of panic, a glimmer of glue on false eyelashes—through which we see the vulnerability beneath the lacquered-on layers of ambition and delusion and we understand a simple, scintillating fact: Suzannes are made, not born. In fact, we make them.

Suspended between Smart’s televised trial in 1991 and the reality-TV boom of the late nineties, released the same week that TV culture reached an undreamed-of apotheosis with the O. J. verdict, To Die For might have seemed destined to remain a relic of its unique moment in history. That it’s not is due to Van Sant’s timelessly sharp-eyed filmmaking, Henry’s hilariously cutting script, and Kidman’s tragicomic, terribly recognizable Suzanne, an archetype who lives on in every YouTuber, influencer, and TikToker who craves attention without being worth paying attention to. The OG might be frozen in the midnineties lake ice near Little Hope, New Hampshire, but never fear. There’s a new Suzanne Stone minted every minute, in the little TVs we all carry around in our pockets these days.