“Did you have a brain tumor for breakfast?
It’s been almost 30 years since Heathers transformed teen comedy
with its morbid, biting satire of high school.
“[BLEEP] me gently with a chainsaw.”
In the John Hughes era
of perfect movie endings and fun teenage shenanigans,
Heathers heightened adolescent cruelty and darkness
and made them very funny.
“Grow up, Heather.
Bulimia’s so ’87.”
Heathers still feels edgy and daring today,
and it continues to resonate because it exposes a timeless truth --
that high school, like the society it prepares us for,
is a twisted black comedy.
“If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?”
“Probably.”
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Heathers primes us to look for meaning in high school drama and pain,
and then it reveals that there is none.
“Dear diary: my teen angst bullshit has a body count.”
The movie’s stroke of brilliance is the way it mocks the takeaway
of almost all other teen movies, and that’s the idea
that our high school peers have a secret depth we’ve overlooked.
“What we found out is that each one of us is a brain,
and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal.”
Heathers is saying no, they don’t have hidden depth --
they’re just as bad as they appear.
“Football season is over, Veronica.
Kurt and Ram had nothing
to offer this school but date rapes and AIDS jokes.”
And there is no profound takeaway to the high school experience,
other than realizing it’s all nonsense.
“Are we going to prom or to hell?”
The character who understands this from the beginning is JD.
After he kills Heather Chandler,
he convinces Veronica to help craft her fake suicide note,
knowing that people will eat this up.
“I die knowing no one knew the real me.”
Sure enough, people start acting like they had Heather all wrong.
“I thought she was your usual airhead bitch.
Guess I was wrong.
We all were.”
And they idealize the idiot football players, too,
after JD frames their murder as a gay suicide pact.
“Suicide gave Heather depth, Kurt a soul, Ram a brain.”
The joke is that the community romanticizes these people
because of their fake suicides,
but we know they actually were just mean and dumb --
they were in no way misunderstood.
JD underlines passages in Heather Duke’s copy of Moby Dick
when he’s planning her murder.
“I’ve already stared underlining meaningful passages
in her copy of Moby Dick, you know what I mean?”
And later Veronica dreams about
everyone overanalyzing the word she underlined.
“But I believe the word ‘Eskimo’ underlined all by itself is the key
to understanding Heather’s pain.”
so the use of Moby Dick epitomizes the way that society
will search to create a deeper meaning when it’s not there.
“I must say that I was impressed to see that she made proper use
of the word ‘myriad’ in her suicide note.”
But at the same time, Heathers is rejecting JD’s version of nihilism.
In a cast of characters
where everyone’s a stereotypical high school type,
JD is the “bad boy” taken to a grotesque extreme --
he’s so bad he wants to kill everyone and blow up the school.
“You’re not a rebel, you’re [BLEEP]-ing psychotic.”
JD’s full name, Jason Dean, associates him with James Dean
and the iconic Rebel Without a Cause.
He seduces Veronica with the appeal of a Bonnie and Clyde-style rebellion
“Listen, my Bonnie and Clyde days are over.”
and the adolescent fantasy of a great love pitted against society.
“Our love is God.
Let’s go get a slushie.”
But JD’s god is not love— he worships chaos
“Chaos is great.
Chaos is what killed the dinosaurs, darling.”
and he respects only the rule of strength.
“I want your strength.”
JD only “loves” Veronica to the extent
that she submits to what he wants.
“I loved you.
Sure, I was coming up here to kill you.”
Veronica’s anger at Heather Chandler draws JD to her.
He appears at her window
as almost this instant response to her throwing her diary,
after she’s written the words “I want to kill”
so it’s as if he’s summoned
because she wants to kill Heather and the others --
“You believed it because you wanted to believe it.”
But ultimately she sees through the bad boy appeal
and she rejects his choice to turn against humanity itself.
“You know what I want, babe?
Cool guys like you out of my life.”
Yes, Heathers is saying
that high school and our society are dark and meaningless.
“I’ve seen JD’s way,
I’ve seen Ms. Pauline Fleming’s way, and nothing has changed.”
But it’s not saying that life is meaningless
and not worth fighting for.
JD’s nihilism leads him to literally self-destruct.
But Veronica finds real strength within.
“You got power -- power I didn’t think you had.”
She might begin the movie as a “cool girl” in her school,
but to us, this iconic shot of her disheveled at the end
is the real image of the ultimate cool girl.
“You look like hell.”
“Yeah?
I just got back.”
At the end, Veronica reaches out to the only other person
who truly understands how stupid and pointless social dynamics actually are
--
and that’s the girl that the students cruelly call Martha Dumptruck.
“I was wondering, if you aren't doing anything that night,
maybe we can rent some new releases, pop some popcorn.”
“I'd like that.”
It’s significant that Veronica goes off with Martha
and not her childhood friend Betty --
sure, Betty’s sweet,
but Betty totally respects the rules of the social hierarchy.
“I know I’m not as exciting as your other friends.”
“Do you think, I mean do you really think,
if Betty Finn's fairy godmother made her cool,
she would still hang out with her dweebette friends?”
But Martha wouldn’t try to be another Heather.
She’s seen into the emptiness at the core of high school society;
and she’s experienced real pain, so she has depth and character.
Heathers isn’t just saying that high school is a vacuum --
it’s using the school to represent society at large.
“Now there is a school that self-destructed not because society didn’t care,
but because the school was society.”
Screenwriter Daniel Waters said the film’s message
is a variation on something Ally Sheedy’s character says
in The Breakfast Club.
“When you grow up, your heart dies.”
So, according to Waters, the Heathers version of this is
“When you’re 14, your heart dies.”
Heathers observes that the reason
our teen years are such a dark, difficult time
is because this is when we start trying in earnest
to approximate adulthood and its social structure.
There’s a recurring joke of people blaming society
for these teens’ problems.
“I blame not Heather, but rather a society that tells its youth
that the answers can be found in the MTV video games.”
And JD gets away with everything because he understands this blind spot
in how society views adolescents as if they’re strange freaks of nature.
“Society nods its head at any horror the American teenager
can think to bring upon itself!”
But the culprit here according to Heathers isn’t youth culture --
it’s youths imitating adult society.
There’s a key moment when Veronica says to her parents
“All we want is to be treated like human beings.”
and her mom’s answer tells us everything.
“Just how do you think adults act with other adults?
You think it's all just a game of doubles tennis?
When teenagers complain they want to be treated like human beings,
it’s usually because they are being treated like human beings.”
Veronica even compares her friends to coworkers.
“It's just like they're people I work with and our job is being popular and shit.”
The girls play croquet throughout the film, and this represents the civilized facade
hiding a cutthroat game of domination.
“Go ahead, knock me out.
It's the only way to win.”
It doesn’t matter which individual is in charge,
because they’re all slaves to the toxic structure.
“I’ve cut off Heather Chandler's head and Heather Duke's head
has sprouted back in its place.”
The hierarchy and desire for power corrupts people.
“Heather, why can’t you be a friend?
Why are you such a megabitch?”
“Because I can be.”
The question that Veronica is wondering all along is --
why does it have to be like this?
Why can’t her friends just be friends instead of monsters?
And the best answer is probably that a strict caste system
distracts everyone from the realization
that it’s all meaningless.
Popularity is a proxy for things that we think would make us happy.
“I’d probably miss my own birthday for a date.”
In the same way in the adult world, we fixate on status, money,
and career achievement,
and we try to climb the ladder instead of reflecting
on what it all means.
The real question of our existence is captured in the lunch poll
Heather Chandler conducts near the beginning.
“You win $5 million in the Publisher Sweepstakes
and the same day that whatshisface gives you the check,
aliens land on earth and say they’re gonna blow up the world in two days.
What are you going to do with the money?”
And this is is echoed in JD’s question to Veronica near the end.
“Now that you’re dead,
what are you going to do with your life?”
So the constructs that we fixate on are pretty worthless
if we think about the fact
that we’re going to die a relatively short time from now.
In the end, the movie gives us a little bit of hope
that there could be a new rule of law in the school,
and by extension, a better society could be possible.
Veronica seizes the red power scrunchie from Heather Duke, and she says
“Heather my love, there’s a new sheriff in town.”
But it’s worth noting
that the filmmakers originally had a much darker ending in mind,
where Veronica killed JD, blew herself up,
and the movie ended with a prom dance in heaven,
just like JD envisioned.
“The only place different social types can genuinely get along with each other
is in heaven.”
Heathers also plays on our cultural fascination
with the spectacle of teenage darkness.
The movie involves bulimia, date rape, bullying, and suicide.
It might be true that some of Heathers’ humor
would be hard to pull off today in the post-Columbine era
and in the wake of the Parkland shootings --
but it’s worth noting that the humor in Heathers
is never really at the expense of victims of bullying or cruelty.
Instead, it’s frequently using its dark topics to poke fun
at society’s flippant, ignorant attitudes towards teen problems.
“Whether to kill yourself or not is one of the most important decisions
a teenager can make.”
With Heathers, Waters was actually making fun of the way
that some 80s shows and documentaries, in his view, made suicide seem attractive.
“She was so pretty.
And so popular.
I thought she had everything.”
The high school performs concern about the wave of student suicides,
but really everyone’s enjoying the drama and excitement of it all.
We can even connect this sick fascination to the problematic impact
of a current show like Thirteen Reasons Why,
which was accused of inspiring copycat suicides.
“Can’t you see these new programs are eating suicide up with a spoon?
They’re making it sound like it’s a cool thing to do.”
One of the most profound moments of Heathers
is when we see Martha actually attempt suicide.
After all the comedy that’s come before it,
this moment is a reminder that teen pain and the risks of suicide
are incredibly real and tragic.
And amidst all of its humor and farcical pageantry,
the movie drops in some kernels of truth about teen anguish.
“Her soul was in Antarctica, freezing with the knowledge
of the way fellow teenagers can be cruel...
the way that parents can be unresponsive.”
It’s a ridiculous moment, but there’s some truth in the words.
We’ve seen nothing but teens being cruel,
and parents being unresponsive.
“Turn that back on.”
But what happens in the society of Heathers
is that real pain and problems are co-opted by the powers that be
and they get turned into spectacle to reinforce the status quo.
It’s a huge giveaway
that none of the popular kids actually killed themselves,
but everyone is obsessed with their supposed pain,
while nobody cares that Martha actually did try to kill herself.
“It’s just another case of the geek trying to imitate
the popular people of the school and failing miserably.”
It’s still about popularity— there’s no genuine concern
for people who are suffering.
“Heather Chandler’s more popular than ever now.”
The film’s memorable style comes from juxtaposing bright,
cheery All-American surfaces with a dark underbelly.
This is epitomized in the climax sequence,
which intercuts Veronica’s and JD’s brutal fight in the boiler room,
and the All-American pep rally that’s happening right above them.
The recurring references to the croquet and paté
“Great paté, but I have to motor if want to be ready for that funeral.”
emphasize the frilly, trivial surface of Veronica’s life,
compared to the anger and discontent she feels.
And you might be surprised to hear that Waters actually conceived Heathers
as a teen movie in the style of Stanley Kubrick.
The screenwriter even wanted Kubrick to direct it.
The film definitely does reflect a Kubrick-ian view of society
as rotten to the core.
The cafeteria scene was influenced by the barracks sequence
at the beginning of Full Metal Jacket.
“Sir, yes sir!”
“Bullshit, I can’t hear you.”
and Christian Slater was channeling Jack Nicholson in his performance as JD.
“You’re distracting me.
And it will then take me time to get back to where I was.”
“Nag, nag, nag, nag, nag!”
Heathers was one of the first movies to really investigate the trope
of the pretty, popular mean girl.
“Does it not bother you
that everybody in this school thinks you’re a piranha?”
“I could give a shit.
They all want me as a friend or a [BLEEP].”
We can see the film’s influence on so much that came after it
in the comic portrayal of superficial or cruel girls who run their high school,
in stories about the darkness of teen female friendships.
The most obvious descendant of Heathers would probably be Mean Girls --
which was actually directed by Waters’ brother Mark.
“Hi Courtney, love your cardigan.”
“Oh my god, I love your skirt.
Where did you get it?”
Gretchen trying to make “fetch” happen
“So fetch.”
reminds us of the characters in Heathers making “very” a stand-alone adjective.
“How very.”
The slang and dialogue in this movie is endlessly quotable.
“What is your damage, Heather?”
Waters actually invented the lingo
because he thought that copying actual teen expressions of the time
would make the movie outdated before long.
“Why are you pulling my dick?”
But as much as Heathers has influenced everything since,
the film was daringly dark in a way later movies haven’t been --
to this day, no high school comedy
has really matched Heathers in fearlessly going there,
and pulling no punches on the popular kids, high school,
and society itself.
“I just killed my best friend.”
“And your worst enemy.”
“Same difference.”
Hey guys, it's Susannah and Debra here.
Thank you so much for watching.
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