Everyone has a high school movie (or possibly movies) that got them through the awkwardness of their teenage years.
Maybe yours was The Breakfast Club (or basically ANY John Hughes film). Maybe it was Mean Girls. Or Ten things I hate about you. Or The Craft, Superbad, Booksmart, even... gulp... High School Musical.
Mine was Heathers.
Maybe there's something about the films we watch when we're between 13 and 15 years old but a lot of my all-time favourite films were released within a couple of years of each other during my adolescence. Maybe I just had a lot of time on my hands and access to a Video Village membership during this period? Maybe I was at a formative time in my life?
Released in 1988 and starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, Heathers is a stylish and satirical look at the social hierarchies found in high schools and, by extension, society at large. It is darkly comic with an off-kilter sensibility - dead characters turn up in dreams, the quartet of main female characters wears colour-coded clothing, the whole thing feels extremely unreal and strange and vaguely cartoonish in places.
Part of its appeal for me, at time of first watching, has to be the casting. It's hard to explain just how much I wanted to be Winona Ryder. She was teen screen royalty in the 1980s, and as Veronica Sawyer, the much put-upon bottom rung in the Popular But Mean Girls clique of her school, she's all "journalling out loud" and being an undercover nerd while wearing the kinds of outfits you'd expect to see on middle-aged administrative assistants - truly, the 80s was a decade in which entire ensembles were in service of shoulder pads rather than the other way round. Winona was peak ingénue and her shoulder pads were aspirational.
Also she got to make out with Christian Slater, the bad boy of the piece, and an actor who has perhaps never quite got out from under his early "Jack Nicholson Lite" branding. Gravel-throated and expressive of eyebrow, Slater is the sly hot mess your mother warned you about. Even as the story reaches its outlandish, cartoonishly violent ending I couldn't help wishing he'd been just slightly less murderous. Maybe he and Veronica could have skipped off together, hand in bloody hand? Way to miss the entire point of the film, teen me. Nicely done.
And the dialogue. Hoo boy. Some of the lines spouted by these characters are brutal beauties - graphic imagery mashed up with 80s teen-speak. My fave is too rude to write here but it involves a chainsaw and... look, it's just very memorable. But others include:
"Grow up, Heather - bulimia's so '87."
"Did you have a brain tumour for breakfast?"*
"God, Veronica. My afterlife is so boring. I have to sing Kumbaya one more time..."
"What's your damage?"
"Oh, my God. I'll have to send my S.A.T. scores to San Quentin instead of Stanford."
Honestly? Iconic**.
But look, it's not without its issues. It's common these days to excuse a piece of art its failings by pointing out that it's a product of the era in which it was produced, but I don't think there's a way you could make a film featuring so much teen gun violence in a post-Columbine world and be as glib about it as Heathers is. It just wouldn't play. Indeed, the TV reboot that came out in 2018 was beset by scheduling difficulties in the wake of multiple high school shootings in the US. It eventually aired but with significant cuts and was not renewed for a second season because as dark as this kind of dark comedy is, reality is even darker. A musical stage version, currently running at the James Hay Theatre, has proved successful however, perhaps because musicals are, by their nature, more removed from reality.
Gun violence isn't the only issue that teens continue to face that crops up in Heathers - suicide, sexual assault, homophobia, eating disorders - the film treats them all, more or less, with the same insouciant shoulder shrug. They're presented as things that just happen to teenagers and there's no real emotional depth given to any of it. It's all just plot points and grist for the dank, black comedy mill and how things are viewed through the slightly unreal, satirical lens this film uses.
As a teenager, I didn't particularly want to be preached to. I wanted cool lines and cool clothes and sick dark humour. But the film does, despite its dark undertones and self-obsessed characters, have a moral viewpoint roughly encapsulating "being yourself is better than being popular" and "bullies suck" or possibly "social hierarchies that rely on a downtrodden underclass and an elite who wield power irresponsibly can get in the bin. Kindness is the way forward". Which, as far as morals go, is still a fairly relevant one.
Heather, my love. There's a new sheriff in town.
*I have learned, in the course of researching this post, that the actor who delivered this line, Kim Walker, died at the age of 32 of a brain tumour. Proof positive, if any were needed, that ours is truly the darkest timeline.
**Another fact that I've learned in researching this post is that the writer of Heathers, Daniel Waters, also collaborated with the director of the film, Michael Lehmann on another project. That movie? A massive flop starring Bruce Willis called Hudson Hawk. People will tell you this film is terrible but I have nothing but love for it so apparently my tastes are very attuned to the Daniels/Lehmann vibe.
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