Confession: I am easily scared. Of the dark, of heights, of confrontation; name anything and I probably have an irrational fear of it. Considering that, it was probably not the best idea to start a documentary ominously titled I Love You, Now Die. But it was a Sunday and it was hot and really, what else is there to do during a pandemic? Still, it felt strange to turn to a piece of true crime as a source of diversion, feels strange to write about it now. The truth is, the scariest thing about true crime is not the violence at its heart, but how easy it is to consume.
I Love You, Now Die seems to understand this uneasy feeling of voyeurism, incorporates it even. The title sequence features a truck slowly filling up with white vapor. The camera and thus, the viewer, is sitting in the front seat. Immediately, we are transformed from observers into active participants. We are not just watching this story; we are a part of it. It made me think of the two questions that always seem to drive true crime stories. The first is: why did this happen? And the second: what would I have done if this had happened to me? As viewers, we are always inserting some part of ourselves into the narrative. It is how we make judgements. We evaluate a stranger’s choices based on our own. Always, we are part of the story, even as we pronounce ourselves unbiased. I Love You, Now Die pokes at the inherent hubris of these judgements. Why are we arrogant enough to assume that we can truly inhabit another person’s mind?
Yet, this is all-too-common occurrence, as demonstrated by the brash news coverage of the case at the time. The documentary contrasts these snippets of loud moral superiority with its own slower, more meditative retelling. Instead of cherry picking the more salacious details, I Love You, Now Die tries to sketch out the full story. And there is a lot of ground to cover. Over the course of two years, Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy formed a relationship almost entirely over text, hundreds of texts. And in July of 2014, Conrad committed suicide with Michelle supposedly urging him on. On the surface, the documentary is simply following the course of Michelle’s trial, starting with the prosecution before moving on to the defense. But in doing so, I Love You, Now Die reveals how much has been left out, how much has been necessarily condensed in order to sustain sexist narrative. Director Erin Lee Carter chooses instead to show entire conversations between the two teenagers. Text messages pop up on the screen against backgrounds of flickering streetlights and rolling ocean waves. It feels like a reenactment, like a tragic play. We watching it happen, yet it has already happened. By refusing to paraphrase or summarize the texts, Carter immerses the audience deeply in what it actually feels like to be a teenager in a time of cellphones and constant social bombardment. Reading each ‘lol’ or ‘haha’ is simultaneously intimate and incredibly foreign. Text is not meant to be read aloud. Pulled from its natural habitat, Conrad and Michelle’s text read like a foreign language, impossible to decipher. When the text is floating free like that, disembodied, it is all too easy to fill that empty space with anything of our choosing. We can give Michelle’s words a sinister lilt. Or if we are feeling sympathetic, a desperation. But the voice we hear is really our own and not hers at all.
It is almost a relief when the documentary switches back to real people, real voices. Carter’s cameras, the only ones allowed in the courtroom, track the reactions of friends, family, Michelle. Seeing each of them move in the space, observing the way Michelle has to lean towards the microphone to swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, anchors the documentary in something solid. Still, it’s difficult to connect this young woman to the words on her cellphone. If only we could have been there. But all that’s left is a few hundred text messages and our own speculation.