The place Kaye, her “proper” WASP-wife analogue, is a blonde, college-educated faculty instructor who (a minimum of on the outset) loves Michael unconditionally, embodying each familial innocence and a “New World” form of femi9 consumeristic contentment (she’s proven purchaseing Christmas presents, organizing journeys, going to the theater, getting able to settle down with Michael), To Die For goes out of its method to stress that Suzanne is just partially educated (“junior college” her father reluctantly admits), and anti-maternal, a seducer of faculty children, a would-be working lady destined to failure by her personal vanity and shallowness. Because the previous quote suggests, many opinions continually emphasized Suzanne’s lack of intelligence – or, per National Assessment, “simply the correct quantity of dumbness” – and it’s this dimwittedness, paired with an overdeveloped sense of elitist entitlement, that results in Suzanne’s ultimate demise. “Imprecisely feminist emotions stir in my breast,” David Denby wrote of this side of Suzanne’s character (somewhat ironically given his personal misogynistic description of the character), “Henry and Van Sant have hallowed [her] out, as if an ambitious driven lady wanted to be uncovered as a jerk. What would happen if “Matt Dillon had been the ambitious one?” he asks. Properly, he might need been Michael Corleone.
On the similar time, Suzanne is not any Kaye both. Whereas Kaye’s WASPy purity and innocence body her as a potential oasis of all-Americanness for Michael, Suzanne’s surface-level similarities to Kaye are framed as a sterile lure for Larry. “She’s so pure and delicate” Larry initially marvels, comparing her appears to a fragile china doll, “You simply have to have a look at her and also you wanna handle her the remainder of your life.” However Suzanne doesn’t need Larry’s care, she needs independence and success, and she’s going to kill to get it, despicable partially as a result of the film posits she was never good sufficient to make it. When Larry asks whether or not she needs children, Suzanne spits, “If you’d likeed a babysitter you need to’ve married Mary Poppins.” She’s bewitching, however uselessly, a femi9 monster who’s repeatedly associated with witches by means of cuts to Bell, Ebook and Candle on TV within the againfloor and the usage of Donovan’s ‘Season of the Witch’ on the movie’s conclusion. Like a witch who enchants males for her personal purposes, Suzanne is hyper-performative and über-pragmatic, utilizing 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 finish, weaponizing her status as an avatar for the televisual beneficence Kaye sorts typically repredespatched. She religiously preserves her pallor (or her “pure” whiteness in contrast to what she calls the “ethnic” disadvertvantages of anchors like Connie Chung), constantly tries to lose the 5 kilos the camperiod provides, and wears her pastel miniskirts and equipmentten heels like a military unitype, no matter how schlubbily her coworkers might gown for the workplace. She tells eachone round her to “optimize” themselves to “succeed,” and lastly makes use of “pather trash” teenagers to kill Larry. Lacking the excuses Michael has for his actions, she weaponizes the familiar narrative true crime tropes her Kaye-like exterior affords – innocence and victimization – fliping them on her husband and drawing the cameras she so desperately craves within the course of. “Who’re they gonna consider?” she asks primly, “I come from a good family.” One evaluation put it this manner: “What jury would convict such an attractive and popular TV weather woman? (ask O.J., he’ll inform you).”
Solely Larry’s sister, Janice (Illeana Douglas), sees by means of this delicate façade, nameing Suzanne “an ice queen” and “a 4 letter phrase: C‑O-L‑D, chilly.” The place Michael Corleone’s signature chillyness is predespatcheded as an extension of the American capitalist imperative, Suzanne’s status as an “ice queen” is predespatcheded as a monstrous extension of that all-American medium of “New World” modernity, television. On this sense, Suzanne’s relative “chillyness” is her defining characteristic and the principle that unifies the movie’s themes – as Marshall McLuhan suggests, television is a cool medium, mesmeric and passifying, and, icy although she could also be, it’s her “avidity,” her passionate need to make it (her failure to truly embody Michael’s businesslike “New World” malestality) that fails her. “She appears very fragile and delicate proper?” Larry tells Janice once they begin dating, “However after we’re– once I’m… the small print are too graphic, however she’s like a volcano.”