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inquires whether he had something to do with it — her happiness, that is
— and she says “everything,” attributing it to his “diabolic spell.” Bud,
whose mind never strays far from her father’s mines, attributes it to
something else, “Our relationship is a simple matter of chemistry. Like
attracts like. It happens with minerals, it happens with people.”
Bud then offers Ellen a drag from his cigarette, but when she
politely declines, he tosses it to the ground, reflecting “No good if you
really don’t know what the other’s thinking.” The audience,
remembering Bud’s final words to Dorrie before he pushed her off the
roof, has a pretty good idea what he’s thinking. Ellen jokingly alludes to
Bud’s “dark past” and he reluctantly admits to a “shameful, sinister
secret,” “I’ve never really been in love before.” In the reverse shot, a tall
cactus plant stands silent as a totem. Kiss, kiss. Fade to black.
In the concluding, climactic sequence of A Kiss Before Dying,
Ellen drives Bud out to her father’s smelter in a white convertible whose
red-trim interior is the same color as the lipstick in the film’s title card.
In this scene. Bud is sporting his usual post-Dorrie look, a light-colored
shirt and jacket, though in a sartorial twist that speaks volumes (since it’s
the first time in the film that Ellen reprises an outfit), she’s dressed in the
same “pink cotton dress” she donned when she decided to act on her
suspicions that her sister’s death was not a suicide.
Admiring a fleet of trucks. Bud caresses a lamp guard, absolutely
entranced by what he sees, “Two million dollars on wheels!” Later, he
gazes longingly into an enormous pit which he describes as the “center of
creation,” and it’s as if he’s been reborn. This is the moment he’s dreamt
about all his life — about to marry into the Kingship fortune, about to
meet his fate like, as Levin writes, “a lover going to a long-awaited tryst”
(127). However, when Bud reflexively corrects Ellen about how long her
father’s company has been mining the pit and she responds, “Darling,
you sound like you knew the Kingship mine long before the Kingship
girl,” his masquerade begins to crumble. Luring him on (Bud claims that
he met Dorrie), Ellen mentions her sister