Heathers (1988)
Writer: Kristy Jett
When I was first asked to write about one of my favorite films of all time, Heathers, I already had in mind what I wanted to write about. The idea had come to me a few weeks prior as I was watching said film. I made a strange correlation I had never made before. I noticed that J.D. (Christian Slater) wore a black duster trenchcoat. Of course I had noticed this before, but this time I immediately associated his attire with that of the “Trenchcoat Mafia,” the nickname of the clique that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (Columbine Massacre perpetrators) called home. I started out on this odyssey to talk about the social relevance and connection between those psychopaths and Jason Dean. Everyone wanted to blame horror movies, video games and Marilyn Manson…but no one mentioned this movie? I was not in a position to blame the film, of course not. But I did want to point out some similarities. However soon after starting that article something devastating happened in the same community that survived Columbine. Some mental-defected lunatic shot and killed innocent movie-goers in a theater in Aurora, Colorado. Needless to say within a day or so of that happening I found it in poor taste to speak of all of that. I decided to take this in a much more light-spirited way and just wax poetic about my love for the film, Heathers. Let’s do that, shall we?
In recent years I find myself angry and full of vitriol at films that set a new voice and vocabulary for themselves. It happens in low budget horror and insightful indie dramas and namely in Diablo Cody movies. Though not so much in “Young Adult.” That one was actually pretty good and standard-dialogued. But I digress. The point is that I find myself in the league of cinema fans who get testy when it comes to films that create their own language. “People don’t talk like that!,” I’d angrily stomp at the screen. I guess maybe it’s something I get snooty about because I’m so in love with the past and the films I grew up on. At least now I’m coming to terms with it. If I think back on it, most of the movies I grew up on didn't have realistic dialogue. Maybe it was the time and the place or the situation. One thing though is for sure. The idea of a film creating a language all its own is perfectly passable for a dark comedy. Dark comedies by definition involve elements of comedy and tragedy usually involving gloomy or dark satire. There is none more black than Heathers.
At the start you don’t see Heathers as a dark comedy. You see it as a mean comedy. A group of cunty twat high school girls pre-dating Mean Girls by 16 years, with only one voice of reason in the form of Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) . Within 3 minutes it’s clear that Heather Chandler, the leader of the “Heathers,” is a cold-hearted bitch. She is focused on the here and now, and her reality is giving herself a laugh by visiting pain on those around her. Even those she considers her friends. Everyone bows to Heather and if they don’t they’re cut out. It’s like the mafia, but instead of being shot to death it’s a much slower, public humiliation that awaits you. You know Veronica is only here out of necessity. High school is survival of the fittest, or at Westerburg High School, the cruelest. The introduction we get to all of the characters takes place in the cafeteria- the melting pot of any school. All cliques are forced upon each other. The Heathers, a clique in their own right mingle with the richies, the jocks are represented by Kurt and Ram, the geeks, the cause-heads, the stoners and the rejects- portrayed by Martha Dumptruck. Then on the literal outskirts of the cafeteria we see Jason Dean, played by the man himself, Christian Slater.
Immediately we sense a connection between him and Veronica. Their eyes tangle from across the room and it’s clear Veronica is already in hook, line and sinker. Heather McNamara says, “His name is Jason Dean, and he’s in my American History.” I remember distinctly as a kid hearing that line and not understanding it was a class, and thinking she meant he was so important that he was a part of her history. Veronica walks over to him and their fate is sealed. Within a few hours of Veronica blowing her big shot at being date raped at a fraternity kegger, and being eviscerated and promised public degradation on Monday morning by Heather Chandler, she finds herself in bed with J.D. Earlier in the night they had run across each other at the Snappy Snack Shack and had a conversation about her friends. “I don’t really like my friends,” she says and he quickly adds, “Yeah, I don’t really like your friends either.” Once they sleep together, the tide turns. The film takes on its decidedly dark edge. One could argue the darkness starts in the cafeteria when J.D. shoots Kurt and Ram after they try unsuccessfully to bully him with blanks, but things are still lighthearted up until the morning after the frat party.
It’s not hard to see why Veronica would fall so swiftly for J.D. He is gorgeous, smooth talking and dangerous- the kind of guy your mother would warn you about. But another theme so precise in this film is the lack of involvement of parents in their kids lives. Veronica’s parents take enough time to make small talk about prom and make snide country club jokes, but outside of that you don’t get any indication that they’re involved with her every day life. There’s a lack of parental figures in general in the film. In the morning when Veronica and J.D. visit Heather Chandler in her home, no parents are to be found. They confer back and forth in her kitchen about a way to get back at her- Veronica wants to make her puke and J.D. wants to push it further and offers up a cup full of liquid drano. In a mix-up Veronica ends up serving up the literally pipe-cleaning cocktail and in an instant, Heather Chandler is no longer alive. In shock, Veronica still manages to let an immediate thought be, “They’re going to have to send my SAT scores to San Quentin instead of Stanford.” J.D. convinces Veronica to pen a fake suicide note, in turn making Chandler the poster child for tortured and misunderstood teenagers. Her death brings about an open door and causes all those involved to re-examine their lives.
The one larger conversation piece this film alarms is, “Who is a worse person?” Is it Heather Chandler, a venomously cruel girl who it’s obvious will always get her way and harm anyone in her path, or J.D., clearly a psychopath, but who tries and weed out the bad in the world in order to create a more copacetic end?
Not long after society comes to view Chandler as the victim in this cruel world, Veronica and J.D. stumble upon a new fake suicide conquest. Though Veronica goes in unwittingly, they let the same fate befall Kurt and Ram, the seminal jock assholes of the school; this time making it seem as though they died in an apparent love-fueled double suicide. This time the subject on the table is the taboo of homosexuality which sprouts one of the oft-quoted lines in the film, “I love my dead gay son!” Maybe I’m the only one quotes it so much. All I know is that when I had the pleasure of meeting Patrick Labyorteaux who played Ram this past Spring that’s the first thing I thought when I saw him. I asked him about his experience with Heathers, and he said that film is one of his most proud moments in his career. He told me that the script had been offered to his brother Matthew and his brother had passed. Patrick read it and began campaigning to be a part of it. He told me that the controversy around it wasn’t as intense until after the film was released. I can say that the man behind one of the biggest, doofiest douchebags in cinematic history is actually a genuinely sweet guy who loves meeting his fans.
But let’s get back to business! The theme song from band Big Fun, “Teenage suicide, don’t do it!’, echoes comedy but more sincerely echoes the troubling times Westerburg is mired in. Heather Chandler, Kurt and Ram are dead. Veronica knows that this can’t go on and that J.D. is a dangerous man. She seeks to sever ties with him, but he infiltrates her in other ways. He starts to work on the outsider of the Heathers, Heather Duke (Shannon Doherty). In this time, the other Heather, McNamara shows signs of being suicidal. Martha Dumptruck- the token fat girl, straps a suicide note to the front of her Big Fun shirt and walks into traffic but thankfully fails. Veronica suspects J.D. is up to something far more sinister than what she could have imagined and in order to throw him off of her trail she fakes her own suicide. Thinking she is dead, J.D. reveals his ultimate plan- to blow up the school. He has had the students (with the help of Heather Duke) unknowingly sign a petition that serves as a mass suicide note. Veronica may have been an unwilling participant when it came to the first three deaths but she takes an active pursuit in stopping J.D. He plans to blow the school up with a bomb set under the bleachers of the gym while in the midst of a pep rally. Veronica corners him and tries to force him to tell her how to diffuse the bomb. J.D. tries to talk her out of it. “You think just cause you started this you can finish it?” he offers up, even though it’s obvious he was the catalyst for all of this “great change.” Then he continues on offering up an astute observation, “But seriously, people are going to look at the ashes of Westerburg and say there's a school that self-destructed not because society didn't care, but because that school was society.” Is J.D. right? Is this the inevitable conclusion for all of society? This one exercise in forced attrition in a sense, is this the only hope society has? Is this the start of a society facing facts, or the ramblings of a mad man? And if J.D. isn’t some babbling lunatic, who will carry on once this lesson is learned?
Veronica doesn’t fall for the sweet talk any longer, J.D. straps the explosives to himself and Veronica watches on as he detonates. The school has no idea how close they came to being blown to oblivion. In the end Veronica seeks to reach out to Martha Dumptruck who is injured from her attempted suicide and suggests they “rent some movies and pop some popcorn.” It’s a strange calm that comes over the final moments of this film. There are no more Heathers in Veronica’s world. She has broken all of her connections to that other life.
You can’t call Veronica the typical heroine, but she is one in her own right. Heathers is indeed the darkest comedy of them all. But of all of the things you’d expect to leave it with, a newfound respect for the girl who was just grasping at straws to survive in the beginning is certainly the least of it. Comedies by nature are supposed to leave us with an overwhelmingly positive and happy outlook on the future; dark comedies can leave you with that as well, though typically pointing out the inconsistencies in humanity along the way. It’s sad to refer back to it, but in the times we live in now you can see a lot of Heathers’ themes in our every day lives. It was a film so ahead of its time for better and for worse. It called it like it was. Maybe you’re like me and this was one of the films that bridged the gap between you and the journey that was adolescence. I’m certainly thankful for growing up with this film- not exactly understanding what it was about all the way until years on. Because in actuality, that’s the biggest part of growing up. Things happen that may not make sense til years on. Connecting the dots in a backward motion….and that my friends, is my rambling ode to Heathers….absorb it as you will.
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| Design by Frank Browning |
-Kristy Jett
