The story of Suicide Kids began May 13, 2006, even if I didn’t know it at the time. A junior at Vassar College, the semester was drawing to a close and I was looking forward to one last summer break before my senior year. Then the news came: my roommate killed herself.It was my first up close encounter with such senseless trauma. Even now, more than three years later, those first few days after are still a vivid blur of memories — impromptu memorials on campus; sympathetic smiles from people I barely knew; and the frustrating, ceaseless helplessness of what to do next.Vassar is a small school — only 2,000 students — and, when a group of us that knew her ventured to the dining hall together, I felt all those faceless stares from people that knew what happened, knew who we were, and knew not what to do. And I said to my friends, “Look at us, a bunch of suicide kids.” The phrase stuck in my mind, and as days and weeks became months and years, I knew it would be the basis for a story I needed to tell.That isn’t to say I came to writing Suicide Kids easily. I tried other scripts and other ideas, but the emotions of that day and the images of what happened kept flooding my mind. And, as a writer, the only certainty I have is, when all else fails, write it out. Draft upon draft spit out of my printer, but it was no movie. It was too raw, too hurt; there was no story, only feelings.

Of course, life is no vacuum, and I was writing the script while I was looking for work. The Great Recession hadn’t quite dawned, but those months leading up to the crash were no easier for a recent grad to find gainful employment, as I and my friends were discovering. So while I struggled with Suicide Kids, I took note of my friends’ struggles: here we were, a generation promised collegiate dreams of white collar jobs and a decade of easy early adulthood, yet still doing and complaining about the same things we had in high school.

 

A basic story emerged: how do you reach toward your dreams in the face of relentless uncertainty? I looked at Westchester and saw in the suburbs a symbol of where we are as a country, like we’re collectively longing for that fictional America that got lost somewhere between civil rights and the war on terror. The American Dream is decaying under a spectre of congestion, expenses, and hopelessness. We all wanted to believe it would get better, but so few of us dared have faith it could. And from there, the script’s structure took form.

 

The emotional core remained the effects of suicide. As it is a cultural taboo, I wanted to explore what suicide is, why people are drawn to it, and how its effects reverberate far beyond that one person. To tell a story of suicide is easy: it ends with death. But to show what happens next, the grief and anger and guilt and denial, is the heart of this unspoken act. We are raised to survive; how do we react when someone we care about flies 180 degrees against our assumed normalcy? The sad secret is suicide kills not just the victim but everyone; except only we the still-living are the ones who need to find rebirth that we can survive.

 

I don’t presume to have answers or even comfort for other survivors of suicide. I wrote Suicide Kids out of pure and simple need: to banish demons, to celebrate a friend, to go forth as we all must. The one promise I made myself was that the story would bereal, a genuine and unvarnished portrait of the world as it happens. And through those images, I wanted to offer a rejoinder to the cynics that amid horror faith flourishes. It’s hard to see, harder yet to keep, but it does exist, a testament to the fidelity of our common humanity, even if we lose sight of it from time to time.

 

I finished the final draft on May 13, 2009, one month before production commenced. And holding those 107 pages in my hands, I found some peace that by telling this story I could — as Mara comments to Malcolm late in the script (in a line taken straight from my eulogy) — find some sense from the senseless.

 

–CHRISTOPHER SMITH, writer/director