I must admit, I haven’t seen this one prior to its 30th
anniversary re-release this year. Yeah, I’ve certainly heard of it before, and while
I’ve seen other films with Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, I guess it’s time
I saw where both got started. So, guess its time to travel back to the
eighties, to a time of casual homophobia and where revolvers could apparently
flouted in US high schools with the National Guard descending. It’s dark, it’s
funny, it’s Heathers.
Back in 1988, teen high school movies were all the rage,
mostly thanks to John Hughes. You had the standard, like the Breakfast Club,
then there were the classic comedies, like Ferris Bueller, then you had goofy
nonsense like Weird Science. Here, director Michael Lehmann took in the clichés
of high school cliques that continue to this day, and turned it into a very
black comedy of suicides and murder that, while dark back then, now feels so
positively lightless that it goes all the way back to being over-the-top
comedic.
Ryder here is a relatively new part of the usual clique of
preppy rich girls, going along with the rites of rumor-spreading, pointless
pontificating, and playing croquet, because that’s what they do apparently. Soon,
she finds herself hooking up with the rebellious, leather-clad, wisecracking
rebel JD, played by the eternally rasping Slater…who here is also a sociopathic
killer obsessed with faking teen suicides as some loony middle finger to
society. Turns out the teen bad boy is so bad he’s also a domestic terrorist.
Back then, the joke was that privileged rich prep students
like that had no reason to commit elaborate suicide—now, in a post-Columbine world,
this feels more like some sort of satire of the way both media and culture
reacts and feeds these sorts of things. The teachers in the school either
ignore or exploit this, the students either soon become apathetic or just
desensitized to it all…sound familiar at all? Had it been made now, the really
blunt and over the top it’s shown would be called tasteless, but being a
product of thirty years ago, you can reframe it for the current era in a way
that makes it all the more interesting to watch.
Of course, being a product of its time, comes the usual
baggage. There’s casual use of homophobic slurs and homosexuality jokes where
it’s not quite clear if they’re satirizing homophobia or jabbing at gay people.
It’s the eighties, needless to say there were many teething pains in that
regard. Of course, the worst of it in this film comes from lunatics like JD,
the meathead football jocks, or the inexplicably pot-smoking cops, so you can
take it as you like.
Still, I can’t say I didn’t find it darkly funny, and
considering it’s been remade as a TV show and more recently a musical, I feel
my point about the themes and jokes resonating now, if in a different way than
the filmmakers intended, stands. It takes kicks at the teen movies of its time
and then further twists those—sure, we might all want to see the alpha prep
girl get taken down a peg by means of grisly murder, but then as things escalate
and Slater cranks up the mania in his performance, those emotions get al the
more uncomfortable and questionable. It’s that sort of aspect of the film that
I think does hold up.
So, you can watch it as a time capsule of the late eighties,
or see it as a dark comment on contemporary issues. If you haven’t seen it, I’d
say it’s at least worth a watch for the historical value, and to see where the
current iterations come from. And, of course, for one of Slater’s first and
best highlights—one he certainly wouldn’t reach when he was sinking to starring
in Uwe Boll flicks…but I’m getting ahead of myself. Grab a croquet stick and give
it a shot.
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