The Enduring Legacy of ‘To Die For’

When I first saw Gus Van Sant’s To Die For on a rented VHS as a high school kid in the 90’s, it seemed a little far out at the time. I watched plenty of TV as a kid growing up, but my family was resolutely anti-cable, so the satire on reality TV and the nascent national obsession with trials and true crime mostly went over my head. Now that Criterion has re-released it all these years later, when tabloid TV has mutated from mass entertainment to a form of self-expression, the film’s critique of getting famous by any means necessary hits the mark more than ever.

Buck Henry, who honed his satirical chops over years of writing for SNL as well as The Graduate and Catch-22, wrote the screenplay, adapting a novel of the same name by Joyce Maynard about a popular real-life true crime controversy featuring an older woman, a smitten teenager, and an unlucky husband. The woman in question is still in maximum security prison and reportedly enjoys being the basis of a Hollywood movie.

We hear the story of one Suzanne Stone, played with tone-perfect chirpy WASP psychosis by Nicole Kidman. A riot of pastels and assumed self-importance, Stone inveigles herself into something approximating a TV star by strutting around the godforsaken town of Little Hope New Hampshire telling everyone within earshot how famous she’ll be one day. She seems to win over most of the locals who otherwise don’t seem to have much else to look forward to.

Stone narrates most of the story facing directly into the camera in unsettlingly close closeup. Her voice brims with the brittle, faux- sincere prattle of the daytime TV host she wants to become. Kidman does these excruciatingly tight grimaces when mentioning how some famous TV journalist got fat or has extra empathy due to being “of the Jewish persuasion” or too “ethnic,” which reveal Stone’s casual clueless cruelty, so stiletto-sharp it could cut glass.

Kidman has a special knack for playing middle-class women on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She played Virginia Woolf in The Hours,  the sexually stymied wife in Eyes Wide Shut, the delusionally grieving mother in Birth, and this role, for which she apparently lobbied van Sant hard (in a very Stone-like fashion) to get, informing him that “I’m destined to play this part.” In the Criterion commentary one of the filmmakers marvels at how brilliantly Kidman consistently nailed Stone’s long paragraphs of dialogue, how meticulously she worked at getting everything right, and that they found themselves referring to Stone on set instead of Kidman: “the character just took over.”

Matt Dillon is the doomed meathead husband who thinks that perky Suzanne is he happy hausfrau of his dreams, and the underrated Illeana Douglas plays his sarcastic sister who got wise to Stone’s true nature early on. The film features three actors who would later go on to Oscar glory: after breaking out in this unexpected hit, Kidman won for playing Virginia Woolf, and Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix play two teenage dirtbags swept up in Stone’s sinister wake. Phoenix’s character is comedically hapless in his puppy-like adoration for the seductive Stone.

Yet even though he’s a pathetic lunkhead who is over the moon to be shagging the new weather girl on his local TV station–”I never used to pay attention to the weather before” he murmurs—Phoenix is the emotional center of the film. Then relatively unknown, the dark-eyed, brooding Phoenix brings an awed pathos to the way his character reminisces about the one exciting thing that ever happened to him, even if it completely ruined him. Watching Stone dance in the rain to “Sweet Home Alabama” in a short skirt is about as good as it’s ever gotten for him, even if she’s teasing him along to his eventual self-destruction.

Another key scene has Stone do her spontaneous schizophrenic switching from glib to glaring when she’s explaining why she knows she’ll get away with it all. She explains with sing-song certainty that being a nice looking white middle-class lady, and a grieving widow no less, there’s no way anyone is going to take some loser’s word over hers. All that time she spent watching TV and absorbing the dynamics of drama played out in real time has clearly taught her who and what American audiences like to believe, regardless of facts. And the really messed up part is that she’s not wrong. If everyone on TV is a star in the national movie, whether it be fiction or non-, you can bet who the insecure audience will want to identify with.

Cleverly, Kidman doesn’t play her character in the usual way that movies portray these kinds of egomaniacs, who usually end up bearing some kind of psychic wound or nagging emotional need. In fact, there’s very suggestion of Stone having any real inner life at all other than basking in other people’s appreciation of her sex appeal. To Die For provides no backstory, either. Stone seems like a case study of someone desperately attempting to resemble a human being by mimicking the images of ones she saw on TV. She cobbles together her personality, such as it is, through the various images that she’s trying to reproduce.

This insight gives To Die For its acid view on the very relevant, and apparently unkillable, craving for one’s fifteen minutes of fame. It’s not that Stone is merely a study of ruthless ambition; we’ve seen that a million times before. It’s that she doesn’t know and seemingly couldn’t imagine anything else than being on TV. As the excellent accompanying critical essay by critic Jessica Kiang puts it, “it’s never wholly clear if she wants to be on TV because she wants to be famous or if she wants to be famous so she can be on TV.” Exactly. And who could possibly deny that creepy muddle of motives is very much in play today?

Kiang is also very right to make the chilling observation that Stone is more the symptom than the larger disease: “Suzannes are made, not born. In fact, we make them.” She’s what happens when people base their sense of self through watching or being watched, of rooting for or being rooted for, something that sounds absurd until you see your phone tally of how many hours you may have spent gazing at social media. Or when you consider the people basking in the public eye who would otherwise never have amounted to much without it. “There’s a new Suzanne Stone minted every minute in the little TVs we all carry around in our pockets these days.”