31 Movies of May, Day 23: Heathers
May 23rd viewing: Heathers, chosen by Chicago Cinema Workers Fund donor Rachel Hansen. Rachel also donated extra money for me to take a shot of Malört, which tasted like what I assume a tall glass of boat hull cleaner tastes like.
Year of Release: 1989
Directed by: Michael Lehmann
Written by: Daniel Waters
Starring: Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, Shannen Doherty, Kim Walker, Lisanne Falk, Penelope Milford, Glenn Shadix
Accompanying Beverage of Choice: Amber Ale (American Amber/Red Ale, 5.8% ABV), Bell’s Brewery, Kalamazoo, Michigan
(Support Independent Breweries - buy local when getting buzzed during quarantine)
It’s kind of wild watching Heathers in the era of regular school shootings. The phrase “This movie could never get made today” gets tossed around a lot for many different films, but Heathers ABSOLUTELY could not be made today with its wildly blasé attitude toward guns and violence in schools. Yet, thirty years later, the film still kind of works anyway?
A lot of that is attributable to the dreamlike atmosphere of the film. Director Michael Lehman isn’t trying at all to create a realistic depiction of high school. This is perhaps best demonstrated in the gleefully absurd depictions of the adults at the school who are nominally in charge but readily admit that they are beholden to the whims of students, going so far as to determine the amount of time the school will be closed down for the death of a student based on arbitrary signifiers of popularity. But the most important detail might be the interactions of the titular Heathers - despite all being named Heather, they all refer to each other as simply “Heather” with no further identifiers, yet are always able to instantly understand who is communicating with and/or about whom. It’s an actual magic trick that helps communicate the dark fantasyland of the film.
And boy, is that fantasyland DARK. Within the first twenty minutes, Christian Slater has already shot two other students in the middle of a full school cafeteria, and the debate immediately afterward is whether a suspension might be a sufficient punishment for this. Granted, the gun was loaded with blanks, but that act in a school today would end with a SWAT team swarming the building. Then, of course, you have three murders committed over the course of the movie, and an attempt to blow up the school and all the students in it.
A lot of that violence works as depicted because it feels cartoonish. When Slater’s character tries to blow up the school, the bomb is armed with a giant digital clock that would be right at home in an Animaniacs episode. The first murder, of Queen Bee Heather Chandler, works partially because it’s so ridiculous and weird for a teen death. How many teens do you hear dying from boat cleaner ingestion? And who would just down an entire pint glass full of noxious blue liquid, continuing to chug even as the first gulp starts ripping apart their esophagus?
But there’s something about that first gun incident in the cafeteria that still just gnaws at me now, and not in a good way. Unlike the rest of the movie, it feels nauseatingly under-calibrated. While some of the reaction, including Winona Ryder’s lovestruck rose-collared glasses view of it, is meant to be dumb, I still get the impression that the film thinks it can depicted this as a forgivable transgression, and only later is the gunman truly shown to be irredeemable. The worst part of it, though, may be that, unlike the rest of the film, that scene doesn’t feel like it’s taking place in a fantasyland. It feels much too close to something that could happen, and does happen, in actual reality. Maybe that wasn’t the case when Healthers came out in 1989, but it’s hard to get away from that now.
