To Die For · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

She films her own seduction.

The most consequential thing Suzanne Stone does in this picture, she does in front of a camera she set up herself. Not to keep a record of it afterward. The tape isn't proof that the seduction happened; the tape is where it happens. Once you notice that, the whole film reorganizes around it.

Deleuze has a useful name for images that work this way. In his cinema books he separates ordinary description — an image pointing at something that exists apart from it, a table you could walk around and confirm — from what he calls crystalline description: a description that builds its object and then replaces it. Nothing survives outside the image. Suzanne's home tapes and her cable-access weather segments aren't documents of a life she leads elsewhere. They are the life. Van Sant stages this so plainly it's almost rude: she is framed inside monitors, windows, mirrors, the rectangle of a television set. Go looking for her outside a frame and there's no one there.

You can watch this film as a satire of ambition, and it plays beautifully that way. Small-town weather girl, cold determination, three kids talked into a murder. But that reading leaves the movie's actual construction unexplained. Why is almost every scene bracketed by someone talking straight into a lens? Why does the film hand you the outcome long before it explains the mechanism? Satire doesn't require that architecture. Something else does.

What it requires is testimony. The story arrives through interviews, home video, tabloid segments, courtroom material, and Curtiss Clayton cuts it so that an account is regularly embarrassed by the dramatized scene that follows it. Deleuze calls this falsifying narration: a narration that stops certifying which version is true and keeps incompatible ones in play as a creative principle rather than a puzzle. Citizen Kane built the machine — a dead-center subject reconstructed from witnesses who contradict each other, prefaced by a news package that spoils the ending. Van Sant and Buck Henry rewire it in one crucial way. Kane's witnesses fail to reach him; there is a man in there they keep missing. Suzanne's witnesses aren't missing anything. Testimony is the material she's made of. And notice that the speaking is never neutral reporting. Everyone here, the bereaved included, eventually finds a camera and performs into it. Deleuze's term for that is the speech act, or legending: talk that makes rather than reports, people caught in the act of composing themselves for an audience.

Underneath all of this sits a contract Bazin articulated better than anyone. The photographic image, he argued, carries something of its object across into itself; the camera earns its credibility because nothing human intervenes between the thing and the record. Documentary lives on that credit. Deleuze's powers of the false is the discovery that a filmmaker can spend it. His figure for this is the forger, and the forger is not a liar — a liar accepts that there's a truth and dodges it, while the forger manufactures one and gets others to live inside it. Suzanne is a forger of exactly this kind. She authors the story in which she is the tragic young widow, and she casts it, and it works. Double Indemnity supplies the engine Henry rebuilds: woman recruits pliable accomplice, kills husband, and the whole thing comes to us as retrospective confession, so the suspense moves off what happened and onto how the teller justifies it. Walter Neff's confession is shaped like guilt. Suzanne's is shaped like a press kit. And Ace in the Hole had already established the grammar — journalist as author instead of observer, a circus assembling itself around a corpse — which this film hands over to the murderer, who is a better producer than any reporter in it.

The formats do their own arguing. Eric Alan Edwards shoots the dramatic scenes hard, bright, symmetrical, saturated, in the visual language of advertising and local television. Her world is lit like a commercial because a commercial is what she wants her life to be. Against that, the testimonial material goes flat and frontal, and the video inserts are smeared and low-resolution. Network got there first, treating the diegetic monitor as a second camera with its own lighting logic; this film extends it until format itself becomes information. Deleuze's word for an image that no longer explains itself by what it shows, and has to be deciphered, is the lectosign. Here you read every shot twice: what is happening, and what kind of camera is claiming it.

That split is also Kidman's problem to solve, and it's the reason this performance changed her career. A Face in the Crowd invented the on-monitor/off-monitor actor, warm and legible on the broadcast, something else entirely between takes. Kidman's solution is to refuse the seam. Nothing comes off when the red light dies. The private Suzanne is the same performance running with no audience, which is what makes the crystal-image here so cold: person and image swap places at a speed that makes the question of an original meaningless.

The teenagers are where the comedy stops being funny. Trailers, bedrooms, parking lots, against her pastel suits and coordinated accessories — the class argument staged entirely in décor. What eats them is closer to Deleuze's impulse-image than to satire: an appetite with no bottom, erupting under the vinyl siding of Little Hope, dragging whoever it touches down a slope that doesn't reverse.

Then the snow. She dances in it, and for one sequence the film simply gives her the beauty she has been trying to manufacture all movie. Deleuze describes moments where the character stops generating movement and the world moves through them instead — the dance absorbing the dancer. It's the one gorgeous image in the film Suzanne didn't produce, and it arrives free. That doesn't cancel the satire. It makes it hurt.

Van Sant's invention, coming off the drifting long takes of My Own Private Idaho, was to build a satire out of the same substance as its subject: a movie about a woman who exists only as footage, assembled from footage. Henry's method holds the line — let her convict herself in fluent, self-regarding speech, and never editorialize, exactly as he did in The Graduate. This was 1995, the last moment the premise still counted as an exaggeration. The confessional camera, the true-crime feeding frenzy, the ordinary person who considers an unrecorded life a rough draft: the film found the form before the culture supplied the content.

So watch it again for who is holding the camera in each shot. The murder gets solved early. The harder question stays open, and it isn't about Suzanne, who at least says out loud what everyone else in the movie is quietly doing.