Guest Programmed by Peyton Robinson

One may wonder if it’s fame itself, or the pursuit of it, that breeds the monster. Filmmaker Gus Van Sant presciently picks apart the question in his 1995 film, To Die For. Turning his penchant for the cinematic capture of subculture to what may seem antithetical – white suburbia – his lens uncovers the insecure underbelly of what is supposedly America’s most cushy locale. 

With then-budding movie stars Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix at the fore, To Die For follows Suzanne Stone (Kidman) as a housewife and local weatherwoman with an insatiable appetite for fame. Under the motto, “You’re not anybody in America unless you’re on TV,” Suzanne trails the path to big time news anchor notoriety with steely eyes and a cold, made for TV smile. Enlisting the help of heart-eyed teen Jimmy Emmett (Phoenix) and his friends (Casey Affleck and Allison Folland), Suzanne seeks to murderher husband (Matt Dillon) in a flippant sacrifice on her way up the rungs. But her plan is flawed. With foolhardy abandon, Van Sant uproots the security of white middle-classhood by unraveling it through humanity’s greatest vices: sex and ego. 

Suburbia as a site of purgatory predicates the themes of To Die For, bound by the butting heads of naivety and sociopathy. Debuting in shifting times of television –  the age of the O.J. Simpson trial and the uprising of reality TV – Van Sant’s pitch black comedy subverts the American appetite, asking: is fame a ticket to or an entrapment within the American Dream?

Peyton Robinson is a staff writer for RogerEbert.com and Cinema Femme. For the latter, she is a yearly programmer and moderator for the Cinema Femme Short Film Festival, hosted by the Music Box Theatre. She also hosts a newsletter, UNPROMPTU, which houses personal essays, art criticism, and other musings.