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I don’t know how it is in other countries, but here in America we spend a lot of time acting surprised by things, despite the causes being blatantly obvious. We act surprised that there’s there a opioid epidemic, despite the fact that our healthcare system is run by corporations. We act surprised about rampant undocumented immigration, despite our government’s history of destabilizing foreign governments and our economy’s lust for cheap labor. We act surprised when teenagers kill themselves or shoot up schools, despite taking no steps to stop it or building them up for a future that’s worth living. Acting surprised is easy, pretending to care takes little to no effort at all, that’s why it’s peddled around so much. Attaching a human face to rampant inhumanity.
Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) knows a bit about inhumanity as well. In a bid for popularity she became friends with the Heathers, the local mean girl high school clique, run by the meanest mean girl of them all, Heather Chandler. Heather is the iron-fisted dictator of this school, the girl everyone either wants to befriend or fuck, and she knows it. Verbal abuse, emotional abuse, domineering behavior, if you’re in Heather’s immediate vicinity than you are in her control. A single word from her and your high school life, your college life, your very future can become an absolute living hell. Life with Heather is so bad that Veronica sometimes wishes, pleads to the heavens above, that she would just drop dead. Keel over, and let Veronica get on with her life in peace.
So what if, new student Jason Dean (Christian Slater) posits, we just kill her?
Heathers is another one of those movies that I’ve had kicking around the old Marathon watch queue for ages, but it took me until now to finally watch it. There was always another movie that came along I suppose, and since I didn’t know anything about the movie beyond a netflix blurb, it made for an easy substitute. It’s the sort of thinking that led to me watching shitfests like Forbidden Zone, so it’s probably something that you’ll want to avoid.
Having finally watched Heathers, I’ve got to say that it definitely deserved a place on the list sooner. From the outset it appears like we’re heading into familiar territory when it comes to 80’s movies, high school, irreverent comedy, we’ve seen it all before. However, while the movie does start off in this wacky Revenge of the Nerds/Fast Times at Ridgemont High kind of landscape, around the halfway mark the tone takes an interesting turn towards the serious and morbid. Everyone remembers the ‘dead gay son’ line, but it’s not too long after that that the film takes a step back and says that maybe people’s actions have consequences. Maybe the guy with the trenchcoat and the gun fetish isn’t a cool rebel, he’s a potential murderer who should probably be in therapy. That maybe teenagers display toxic behaviour because that is the natural result of being consistently ignored and marginalized by the society in which they live. I wouldn’t say it’s done flawlessly, the movie seems to forget what it’s trying to go for sometimes, but it’s a level of depth that I honestly wasn’t expecting going in. As I wrote before, I was expecting an Airplane! or Blues Brothers, not a movie that actually made me think about stuff.
Acting-wise, this movie came out a year after Beetlejuice and yet Winona Ryder basically feels like her Stranger Things self to me for some reason. As for Christian Slater, the criticism you always hear about him is that he’s trying to copy Jack Nicholson, and in Heathers...he sounds like a guy trying to do a Jack Nicholson impression. Not to disparage the guy, but he’s got one speed in this movie and he sticks to it the whole way through. Both fine actors, but for whatever reason I’m not feeling their chemistry together onscreen. They talk to each other, they make out, but it feels more like they’re doing it at each other rather than with each other. Not quite Natural Born Killers, but then maybe that was intentional, I dunno. The rest of the cast, including a young Shannen Doherty as Heather 3/Duke, is fine.
Speaking of Natural Born Killers, there’s actually a couple similarities between that film and this one. Both films are about a young couple who, feeling outcast from society, resort to acts of murder. Both films also deal with society’s detachment from the reality of violence, whether it’s turning the couple into pop culture icons in the case of NBK or meaningless ‘love-in’ sessions watched by narcoleptic parents. In NBK is treated as a means to an end, instant gratification, while in Heathers it is meant as a social statement. Heather’s death is meant to address two issues in the film, to protect Veronica’s future and to free the school from a tyrant. This plan backfires; Heather gains a level of nuance in death that she never seemed to have in life, and because the underlying problems were never addressed surrounding what Heather represented, the students are simply reorganized into a new hierarchy. Even worse, suddenly suicide becomes chic, something for the privileged to indulge in rather than the serious issue that it is. Ultimately it is up to Veronica to reject both Heather’s and Jason’s route, the sadistic rat race and antisocial attacks, and define her character on her own terms. Without the consent of the governed, what power does the system have?
Anyway, Heathers is a pretty good movie, with a humor that lies more in the morbidity of the situation rather than any of the jokes. Or maybe it was a lot less or a problem back in ‘89. It gets a recommendation, and a reminder that unless it’s part of a grander Blade or Neo setup, a black trench coat does not a great Halloween costume make, so I don’t want to see any Jason Deans running around come the 31st. Unless you’re going to do your own version of Christian Slater’s Jack Nicholson impression of course, then you can do whatever.
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