To Die For is, I suppose, just that.
As reviewed by James Brundage
I don't know why I didn't see it before. I saw Natural Born Killers, which I will go out on a limb and compare it to (minus excessive senseless violence and profanity and Oliver Stone's foray into the surreal). I simply am left, in the first five minutes after watching it, like I was caught inside a whirlwind of activity, of insanity. Like I just watched a twisted version of the OJ Trial in an hour and a half.
And indeed, that is the best analogy, for To Die For, Gus Van Sant's screwball black comedy about a woman obsessed with being on television... to the point to have her husband killed to do so (they even have the Star Spangled Banner playing as she walks towards the cameras on the night of her husband's death). It's just a perfect illustration, a perfect satire of the black comedy which is violence in America. For an hour and a half it entraps you in the world you're already in, but in such a way as to make you realize just how twisted a place it is. Gus Van Sant preaches to the converted and to the disbelieves and has em all coming out of the theater blinking twice, doing a double take and wondering ... did this really happen? The answer... it did.
No: Tom Cruise isnt' dead by the hands of Nicole Kidman (who plays the very disturbed main character), but dying left and right are the NBKC, The Natural Born Killers copycats, thrill-killers who seek to be immortalized for their crimes. Psychopaths inhabiting our world, obsessed with the media. The violence in film issue, the death of Brandon Lee on the set of The Crow, Kurt Cobain copycat suicides. All of it shows this film for what it is... Not a fiction but a mirror. This is not the world according to Gus Van Sant (which I will stop and watch anyday), but, like Drugstore Cowboy, one of the director's first and most realistic works, a showing of the world as HOW IT IS. Watching this movie, I recognize this, and the line pops into my head from a book in an equal vein of reality, American Psycho : ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood.
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