Why Heathers is the most scathing high school… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Why Heathers is the most scathing high school movie ever made

19 Jun 2016

Words by Georgina Guthrie

A young woman with dark hair and glasses, looking thoughtful, in a classroom setting.
A young woman with dark hair and glasses, looking thoughtful, in a classroom setting.
Its focus on eat­ing dis­or­ders, rape and school shoot­ings makes this a unique­ly sub­ver­sive teen satire.

Think of your favourite high school movie. Everyone’s got one. That film you saw at an impres­sion­able age which just stuck with you – offer­ing that potent mix of dorm par­ties, teen crush­es and dra­ma set against a bliss­ful back­drop of sun­ny Amer­i­can suburbia.

If you grew up in the 90s, then Clue­less may have been that film. It had every­thing we love about the teen movie genre: snap­py dia­logue, vicious girl gangs, and a healthy dose of jus­tice served up to the high school bul­lies. It went on to influ­ence 2004’s edgi­er Mean Girls, anoth­er pithy teen movie brim­ming with the genre’s best-loved tropes. Both had bite, but both were essen­tial­ly good-heart­ed come­dies with affir­ma­tive end­ings for the pro­tag­o­nists. There is one oth­er high school girl gang movie to add to this list, one that nev­er quite achieved the main­stream suc­cess of its successors.

Released 27 years ago, Michael Lehmann’s scathing black com­e­dy, Heathers, deliv­ered a bit­ter slab of cyn­i­cism but failed to make a splash at the box office. Despite its poor per­for­mance, the film went on to amass a cult fol­low­ing thanks in no small part to the thriv­ing home video mar­ket. A lot of Heathers’ con­tro­ver­sy lies with its eager­ness to cheer­i­ly address top­ics oth­er teen movies sim­ply wouldn’t touch: eat­ing dis­or­ders, rape, school shoot­ings, sui­cide. Actu­al­ly, Heathers doesn’t just address these top­ics – it turns them into punch lines.

But what may seem like a near two-hour-long cal­lous joke is, on con­sid­er­a­tion, a car­i­ca­ture of high school indif­fer­ence and cru­el­ty. That doesn’t mean the eat­ing dis­or­der jokes any less easy to digest, though. When Heather Chan­dler (Kim Walk­er) says, Grow up, Heather. Bulim­ia is so 87,” to a less­er Heather, it sounds like a glib joke to make at the expense of a girl with a seri­ous eat­ing dis­or­der. But real­ly, the joke is being made at our expense, not hers. In a lat­er scene, Veron­i­ca (Winona Ryder) and JD (Chris­t­ian Slater) dis­cuss their rela­tion­ship while a less­er Heather is attacked. The abuse takes place in the back­ground, for us to par­tial­ly observe – or ignore.

Noth­ing is off lim­its, and the sub­ject of death is one of the film’s biggest and longest-run­ning jokes. When the lead Heather gulps drain clean­er, JD stages it as sui­cide – which then becomes the school’s lat­est fad. And when JD blows him­self up with a sui­cide vest, Veron­i­ca sim­ply uses the dead­ly blast to light her cig­a­rette. After that first mur­der, Heathers spi­rals into deprav­i­ty. The body count ris­es and the colour palette dark­ens to match the mood: frothy pinks and pri­ma­ry colours switch to dark reds, neon greens and blues that have more affin­i­ty to gial­lo hor­rors than any high school teen flick.

If you’re won­der­ing whether Heathers even has a place along­side Clue­less and Mean Girls, the answer is no way’. It isn’t an affir­ma­tive teen movie about out­casts and high school bul­lies find­ing redemp­tion, but a sub­ver­sive satire about self-obsessed indif­fer­ence to suf­fer­ing. It’s a grim, nihilis­tic mega-bitch wrapped up in a snap­py pink skirt suit. If you did have a favourite feel-good high school teen movie grow­ing up, Heathers prob­a­bly wasn’t it. But now you’re a lit­tle old­er, it just might be.

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