Consider the parallels between Suzanne Maretto and Michael Corleone as Gus Van Sant’s sultry satire turns 30.
Since its debut at Cannes in May 1995, To Die For, Gus Van Sant’s sharp, chilly breakout into the Hollywood mainstream, has been almost exclusively discussed as a product of the tabloid-and-24-hour-news-cycle media ecosystem of its moment. For good reason: this pastel and formica TV news satire is an adaptation of Judith Maynard’s novelisation of the 1991 case of Pamela Smart, a school administrator who seduced and manipulated a group of 15-year-old boys into killing her husband; while developing the script writer Buck Henry was directly inspired by the ongoing Tonya Harding scandal; during filming Van Sant recalls that crewmembers once broke off in the middle of shooting a jailhouse confession scene to watch the live broadcast of OJ Simpson’s low-speed police chase. (Incidentally, Simpson would be found ‘not guilty’ of murder the same week that To Die For released.)
These frenetic influences are clearly the primary drivers of To Die For, which follows the beautiful, bigoted, viciously self-absorbed Suzanne Maretto née Stone (Nicole Kidman), in her single-minded mission to hit primetime. As we learn through a nonlinear bricolage of tell-all interviews, home footage, and narrative scenes, when Suzanne’s unambitious, family-oriented husband Larry (Matt Dillon) asks her to give up her dream, she efficiently arranges his murder using Nightline and The Sally Jessy Raphael Show as her guides. This is Suzanne’s downfall; while she understands the ruthlessly straightforward, easily digestible logics of TV, the contingencies and emotional nuances of real life prove too complicated for her.
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But TV isn’t the film’s only inspiration. “There seem to be two, maybe two-and-a-half movies at work here,” David Rimanelli mused of this fractal and refractive satire in his Artforum review, “the übermovie that proffers a satire of television and lust for fame” and several “interstitial, ‘under’ movie(s).” Though Rimanelli doesn’t mention it, one of those “under movies” is – perhaps unexpectedly – Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. In To Die For’s opening passages, we’re introduced to the doomed couple’s parents as they’re interviewed together on a talk show. Suzanne’s wealthy WASP father (Kurtwood Smith) recounts how he was dubious of Suzanne and Larry’s match from the beginning: “For all you know,” he recalls warning his daughter, “his family could be mixed up with the mafia or something!”
Offscreen, the crowd titters at the stereotype, but Larry’s father, Joe (Dan Hedaya), remains stoic. “I understand, I understand,” he mumbles amicably – before we cut sharply to an abandoned boathouse on a frozen lake where a high, feminine scream pierces the day’s tranquility. While this flashcut could feasibly be a departure into fantasy given the film’s dreamlike visual language and nonlinear storytelling strategies (watching it for the first time I certainly assumed as much), we eventually learn that this cut foreshadows Suzanne’s eventual demise at the hands of the cosa nostra. “I thought he’d marry a nice Italian girl,” Joe continues with a smile and a pat of his wife’s hand, “but like that guy in The Godfather said, ‘This is America!’ The melting pot.”
But of course, this is not the line in The Godfather. The scene Joe is misquoting, the first film’s famous opening monologue (“I believe in America…”), depicts a father, Amerigo Bonasera, rejecting assimilation in the wake of an act of senseless violence against his child, a plea for old school vengeance after the courts fail him in an elitist, biased system rigged against working class people – like the Marettos in To Die For. Far from a simple tongue-in-cheek pop culture reference, this initial allusion to The Godfather proves to be a central structuring element for the film. After her arrest for Larry’s murder, Suzanne goes on live TV and calls her dead husband a coke addict. When she’s asked to make a statement on the steps of the courthouse, she grins and says, “I’m just glad to live in a country where life, liberty…” she pauses, searching “…and all the rest of it still means something.”
It’s this offense to his son’s honor and this perverse invocation of American justice (recall Bonasera: “I stood in the courtroom like a fool…I said to my wife, ‘for justice, we must go to Don Corleone’”) that drives Joe to organize the hit on his own daughter-in-law, even inviting the cops to his Italian restaurant for dinner while it happens in a wink to Michael’s killing of a police captain in The Godfather. Suzanne meanwhile, times her husband’s slaying for when she’s delivering a weather report, in the same way Michael attends the baptism of his first godson as his enemies are slaughtered, both actions cross-cut with the violence they ordered. For all of the focus on Suzanne’s relationships with the teens she tricks into killing Larry, and then the time spent on Suzanne’s struggle to worm her way into the TV-industry pecking order as a local weather girl, eventually the story becomes as simple as an act of violent disrespect (a matricide) and an even simpler act of violent revenge (a gangland assassination). Just under the surface of the plot, a mafia story lies in wait, finally bursting forth in a flash of brutality that reinstitutes the (pater)familial rules that Suzanne, a character Janet Maslin called a “media-mad monster” has flaunted throughout.
Beyond an overarching narrative frame, the influence of The Godfather on the story also illuminates the thematic tensions Suzanne embodies throughout To Die For: In her egomaniacal quest for success in her career, which quickly comes into violent conflict with her traditionally feminine role as Larry’s wife, Suzanne becomes an uncanny blend of Michael Corleone and his own beautiful WASP bride, Kaye Adams-Corleone (who, like Suzanne using her “professional” maiden name to avoid “ethnic” assumptions, insists on keeping her own name at least provisionally). In his book ‘Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream’, Paul Cantor suggests that The Godfather identifies two archetypically conflicting “polarities” to that American ideal: Business versus family, and the “Old World” (embodied by tribalism, patronage and violence) versus the “New World” (framed as capitalistic, pragmatic, and rationally modern). Cantor suggests that the tensions between these polarities are the ultimate tragedy of The Godfather, ironically observing that “Many of the core virtues that make a good American paradoxically turn out to make a good criminal as well – the drive to make something of oneself, the compulsion to succeed, the willingness to stand up for oneself, a commitment to hard work and self-discipline, a sense of self-reliance and refusal to become dependent on anyone, the courage to respond to challenges.”
But what To Die For emphasizes is that these “virtues” are also highly gendered: A good American man should shun dependency and strive, while a good American woman, conversely, should settle down and submit to the head of her family, her father or husband (“I’ll still never find a man like you, daddy” Suzanne whispers in her father’s ear as she leaves for her honeymoon). Michael Corleone injects the capitalistic pragmatism and rationality of “New World” modernity with the violence and tribalism of the “Old World” in his calculated, savvy approach to the family business, but at the cost of his family, a tragic choice he ultimately makes without question. With this decision, he takes on a traditionally masculine, at least somewhat paternalistically “noble” – if obviously malevolent – role in the process. But, Suzanne’s choice offers no such archetypal avenue; her decision to attack her would-be career with the same drive Michael treats being Godfather while cloaked in weaponized femininity becomes something overtly monstrous, made explicitly damning by the fact that, as David Denby observed in The New York Times (with no small helping of glib chauvinism) “we immediately see that this pastel-pink creature isn’t going to make it as a star – she’s too avid, too ignorant, a Cosmo cover pea brain.”
Where Kaye, her “proper” WASP-wife analogue, is a blonde, college-educated school teacher who (at least at the outset) loves Michael unconditionally, embodying both familial innocence and a “New World” kind of feminine consumeristic contentment (she’s shown buying Christmas presents, organizing trips, going to the theater, getting ready to settle down with Michael), To Die For goes out of its way to stress that Suzanne is only partially educated (“junior college” her father reluctantly admits), and anti-maternal, a seducer of school children, a would-be working woman destined to failure by her own vanity and shallowness. As the previous quote suggests, many reviews continually emphasized Suzanne’s lack of intelligence – or, per National Review, “just the right amount of dumbness” – and it’s this dimwittedness, paired with an overdeveloped sense of elitist entitlement, that leads to Suzanne’s ultimate demise. “Vaguely feminist emotions stir in my breast,” David Denby wrote of this aspect of Suzanne’s character (somewhat ironically given his own misogynistic description of the character), “Henry and Van Sant have hallowed [her] out, as if an ambitious driven woman needed to be exposed as a jerk. What would happen if “Matt Dillon were the ambitious one?” he asks. Well, he might have been Michael Corleone.
At the same time, Suzanne is no Kaye either. While Kaye’s WASPy purity and innocence frame her as a potential oasis of all-Americanness for Michael, Suzanne’s surface-level similarities to Kaye are framed as a sterile trap for Larry. “She’s so pure and delicate” Larry initially marvels, comparing her looks to a fragile china doll, “You just have to look at her and you wanna take care of her the rest of your life.” But Suzanne doesn’t want Larry’s care, she wants independence and success, and she will kill to get it, despicable in part because the movie posits she was never smart enough to make it. When Larry asks whether she wants kids, Suzanne spits, “If you wanted a babysitter you should’ve married Mary Poppins.” She’s bewitching, but deadly, a feminine monster who’s repeatedly associated with witches through cuts to Bell, Book and Candle on TV in the background and the use of Donovan’s ‘Season of the Witch’ at the film’s conclusion. Like a witch who enchants men for her own purposes, Suzanne is hyper-performative and über-pragmatic, using the racist, classist, elitist logics of television as her yardstick for life.
Suzanne views her doll-like “ice queen” beauty as a means to an end, weaponizing her status as an avatar for the televisual beneficence Kaye types typically represent. She religiously preserves her pallor (or her “pure” whiteness in contrast to what she calls the “ethnic” disadvantages of anchors like Connie Chung), constantly tries to lose the five pounds the camera adds, and wears her pastel miniskirts and kitten heels like an army uniform, no matter how schlubbily her coworkers may dress for the office. She tells everyone around her to “optimize” themselves to “succeed,” and finally uses “trailer trash” teens to kill Larry. Lacking the excuses Michael has for his actions, she weaponizes the familiar narrative true crime tropes her Kaye-like exterior offers – innocence and victimization – turning them on her husband and drawing the cameras she so desperately craves in the process. “Who are they gonna believe?” she asks primly, “I come from a good family.” One review put it this way: “What jury would convict such an attractive and popular TV weather girl? (ask O.J., he’ll tell you).”
Only Larry’s sister, Janice (Illeana Douglas), sees through this delicate façade, calling Suzanne “an ice queen” and “a four letter word: C‑O-L‑D, cold.” Where Michael Corleone’s signature coldness is presented as an extension of the American capitalist imperative, Suzanne’s status as an “ice queen” is presented as a monstrous extension of that all-American medium of “New World” modernity, television. In this sense, Suzanne’s relative “coldness” is her defining characteristic and the principle that unifies the film’s themes – as Marshall McLuhan suggests, television is a cool medium, mesmeric and passifying, and, icy though she may be, it’s her “avidity,” her passionate desire to make it (her failure to truly embody Michael’s businesslike “New World” mentality) that fails her. “She looks very fragile and delicate right?” Larry tells Janice when they start dating, “But when we’re– when I’m… the details are too graphic, but she’s like a volcano.”
Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that the final mafia hit comes in the form of an unlikely cameo by David Cronenberg, playing an assassin, posing as a TV exec. Cronenberg may not be Italian, but he is the auteur behind that classic treatise on the McLuhanite dangers and ambiguous erotics of television, Videodrome – a film Van Sant seems to draw on in a scene of Suzanne’s young lover (Joaquin Phoenix) masturbating to her fantasy image talking dirty to him over the tube. “In our fast moving computer age,” Suzanne recites later during an interview, copping her lines from George Segal in an earlier cameo: “it’s the medium of television that brings together our global community, and it is the television journalist who serves as messenger, bringing the world into our homes and our homes into the world. It has always been my dream to become such a messenger.” Cronenberg’s otherwise inexplicable presence in the film can be viewed, then, as a forceful admonishment of Suzanne’s ambitions here: “The medium is the message!”
As John Ganz points out in his recent book ‘When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s’, a particular strain of American conservative intellectual believed that “the mobster, especially as portrayed in The Godfather, was a governing American myth on the level of the cowboy” in the ‘90s, and the rash of mafia (and explicitly Godfather-adjacent) films early into the decade – Goodfellas, The Freshman, The Godfather Part III, and Miller’s Crossing in 1990 alone – seems to back this contention up. He cites the 1992 trial of another tabloid favorite, mobster John Gotti, and the subsequent folk hero status it earned him, to suggest that the mobster was “a symbol of order, the old order that many longed for still” in a time of rapid globalization.
In this context, here Suzanne presents the sterile-yet-feminized dangers of unconstrained televisual global hegemony, while Cronenberg and his mafia hit represent the reinstitution of “Old World” tribalist patriarchal order against it. Still, in many ways, the film also presages our modern fascination with “unlikeable female characters.” Suzanne, who critics called a “barbed-wire Barbie,” and “crazy as a loon, but also a fox,” will do anything to make it, including decide to kill her husband with absolutely zero remorse. “Larry’s a nice guy,” she admits by way of explanation, “but he doesn’t know a thing about television.” One can almost hear The Godfather’s voice: “It’s just business.”
