Gus Van Sant’s 1995 “To Die For”

When Nicole Kidman came across the script for To Die For, she practically begged Gus Van Sant (b.1952) for the role. Kidman is at her most brilliant when playing the perfect housewife gone awry, and this film is no exception. Kidman stars as the perky and persistent Suzanne Stone, a small-town local weather reporter obsessed with becoming a famous news anchor. She visits a local high school to recruit students for a documentary that she is producing, and sets her eyes on an impressionable, awkward delinquent (Joaquin Phoenix). Their relationship turns into a scandalous affair, seducing him into doing her bidding. When her husband pressures her to give up her dream to help with the family restaurant, she enlists her new underage boy toy to extinguish him. Framed as a suburban crime thriller, this dark comedy is a prescient critique of our media-obsessed society where your image is worth dying for.

Inspired by real events (the film is an adaptation of a novel based on the life of convicted murderer Pamela Smart), the film employs humor and camp to create a mockumentary style that critically reflects on fame before the Internet. Her obsession continues to resonate 30 years later in an era of social media influencers. Kidman’s characterization of Suzanne simultaneously seduces you and pushes you away. If you are unable to see the big picture until you step back, Suzanne's desire to be seen ultimately reduces her to an image and nothing else. A screen within a screen, the image collapses on itself, begging the question: if everyone is being watched all the time, who is left to watch?

Van Sant’s career is incredibly versatile, including experimental (a frame-by-frame remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho, 1998), arthouse (My Own Private Idaho, 1991), and Academy Award-nominated films (Good Will Hunting, 1997). A key figure of the “new queer cinema” movement of independent filmmakers in the 1990s, even Van Sant’s most mainstream films explore the boundaries of desire and excess.