Columns on Kidman: Revisiting To Die For 30 Years Later

|Ben Jarman & Carey Nadeau|

To Die For plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 10th through Sunday, January 12th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.

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The teens in this film are not realistic. That’s the only negative thing I thought about Gus Van Sant’s To Die For, but I didn’t mention it in my 1995 review in my high school newspaper, North Star. I was lucky to have had a chance to write about the film because it wasn’t really marketed to teens. But that was what North Star was all about; letting teens write about what was important to them. Outside the fact that To Die For is inspired by a true story, many of the topics covered in North Star also come to life in the film.

The official newspaper of Oshkosh North High School was produced monthly in newsprint for years. The paper had an army of student writers and photographers in 1995, commanded by a student editor-in-chief, Carey Nadeau, along with a supervising English teacher, Ron Harrell. A wide variety of topics were covered, from sports to punk rock. More specifically, North Star often detailed events and happenings in and out of school including curfew laws, gang activity, sexual abuse, the death of students, and pornography airing during school video announcements. When looking back at my review of To Die For, I find the media depicted in the film isn’t all that different when compared to news coverage in this high school newspaper.

My review of To Die For was a big deal because I was obsessed with Gus Van Sant. I looped Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho on VHS trying to find a way to enter the worlds of those drifters and the fringes of society they inhabited. The characters in those movies follow a code of cool in which they are confident about their empty goals. Matt Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy was an addict but made a life for himself in the process. River Phoenix was a prostitute in My Own Private Idaho but rolled with it to be with his friends. Their characters spoke to me at the tail end of high school when trying to work out my own identity and life goals. With this in mind, I was impatiently waiting for To Die For to release. 

From the opening of To Die For, Van Sant leans heavily into the media’s depiction of sex, violence, and murder. Camera flashes light up the screen, characters move in slow motion for dramatic effect, and news reports speak to the tumultuous story about to unfold. Watching the dots on televisions shine as the stars of the drama present themselves reveals manipulation from the get-go. Everyone in the public wants to know about any scandal and the more pronounced or catchy the story is in print or digitally, the more eyes a media outlet gains. In particular, the panning close-ups across newspaper columns suck viewers into the film just like reading the headlines of North Star. 

Sex and violence, the same subjects that surrounded To Die For, were all around me in high school. As reported in North Star, two teens at my school lost their lives in the summer of 1995 and another was charged with participating in a gang beating. The topic of child abuse was given a two-page spread in one issue. There was also a school assembly on self-defense. It was partially unbelievable; small-town Oshkosh, WI, known best for the Experimental Aircraft Association (E.A.A.) annual convention and Oshkosh B’Gosh overalls with barely 60,000 in population, was isolated from any metropolitan area (with Milwaukee over an hour away.) 

Looking at To Die For in 1995, the teens in the film seemed incongruent with my own high school teen experience. Nicole Kidman plays a prized wife, Suzanne, with dreams of becoming a media superstar. Her plans require the use of marginalized teens which is the closest we get to drifters without looking too much at context. As the instrument of Suzanne, a young Joaquin Phoenix plays Jimmy Emmet, a mumbling teen in jeans. He is attracted to Suzanne and in turn, follows her orders. Then, I did not see Jimmy and his friends as realistic teens but more like stereotypical forgotten ones with not enough screen time to flesh out characterization. For example, Jimmy’s friend Russel making inappropriate comments directly towards Suzanne or any adult in the middle of class was something I never saw at school. On the other hand, examining old issues of North Star in preparation for this article, I realize things may not have been as different as they seemed to me. I see where Van Sant pulled his melodramatic headlines to create the essence of aimless teenagers. 

Today, it is too easy to say the teens in To Die For are the Van Sant drifters on the fringe, but in retrospect, Kidman really portrays the cool drifter in the film. She has lofty goals, but her means of reaching those goals are outlandish, to say the least. You can see Suzanne becoming frustrated when her plans fail or someone like her husband condescends her. She has her followers, but she is the only one who will see everything to the end, good or bad.

The editor-in-chief of North Star went to see the film after skeptically reading my review. I thought she would see how smoothly Van Sant rolled the news media into the film just like she shaped the North Star into an outlet for teen guidance. She told me she didn’t see what the big deal was and accused me of having a crush on Nicole Kidman. I told myself that wasn’t the case; I had a crush on Gus Van Sant’s visions and that was all. Now that I think of it, my editor may have been right. I was wrong about those teens in the film because I didn’t want to see anything out of my high school circle. More so, I believe I did obsess over Kidman’s character as she was the character doing her own thing, crazy or not.  Unlike Matt Dillon’s character in Drugstore Cowboy and River Phoenix’s character in My Own Private Idaho, Suzanne’s lofty plan in To Die For leads to murder. Regardless, her life plans are still outside the norm which is why I gravitated to Van Sant’s characters. Unfortunately for Kidman’s Suzanne to reach her goals, being the fringe female protagonist means she must go farther than what is appropriate in her male-dominated world. 

1. North Star, 15 Sept. 1995.  ↩︎
2. Patterson, Dave. “Punks Not Dead: Punk Music Exudes Individuality.” North Star, 17 Nov. 1995, p. 6.  ↩︎
3. Jarman, Ben. “To Die For Thrills Reviewer.” North Star, 17 Nov. 1995, p. 8.  ↩︎
4. Nadeau, Carey. “North Students Charged for TV9 Porn.” North Star, 21 Oct. 1994, pp. 1–2.  ↩︎
5. Lor, May Va. “Sexual Abuse Victims Gradually Speak Out.” North Star, 12 Jan. 1995, p. 4.  ↩︎
6. Lor, May Va. “Senior Charged in Gang Beating.” North Star, 7 Mar. 1996, p. 1 ↩︎
7. Nadeau, Carey. “Curfew Does Little for Juvenile Crime Problem.” North Star, 3 Mar. 1995, p. 8.  ↩︎

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Edited by Finn Odum

To Die For