Heathers: What a Waste! Oh the Humanity!

This is pt. 2 of a 3-part overview. For pt. 1 ("Heathers, High School, and Saved By the Bell") please click here. For pt. 3 ("A Writer Finds Her Voice") please click here. 


Heathers has a few things in common with Robert Altman's MASH. Both films are acidic comedies that skewer the conventions of their respective genres and the social mores of their respective eras. (MASH - the hypocrisy of war and war bravado, racism, God is dead, etc. Heathers - the hypocrisy of high school, the homophobia and date rape under the surface, etc.) Both are held up as dividing lines within their genres, (i.e. films are referred to as pre- or post-MASH/Heathers) and, of course, both are prominently associated with suicide, in particular, an irreverent attitude towards it.

A more thorough compare-and-contrast of both films would be fun, but beyond my scope here. One for either a rainy day or the suggestion box over at The Dissolve. But there's an esprit de corps between the two films that I wanted to mention before getting into the mechanics of Heathers for today's go-round.

Heathers is one of the more quotable films ever made, right up there with Casablanca, The Big Lebowski or Big Trouble in Little China. We'd be here all day if I listed every line I find personally memorable, so I won't even try. But... can't resist a couple.

and in the same way I cannot pass a gazebo without saying the word in my head the way Frank Dodds does in The Dead Zone ("ga-zeeee-bo...") I flash back to Glenn Shadix

whenever I see this word in print. "Let's just hope she's rubbing noses with Jesus."

Almost all high school films or shows are very conscious of crafting stylized dialogue, whether successfully or not. Some choose to invent their own lexicon. Others attempt to appropriate real world slang, and the shelf life for such an approach is counter-productively brief.  Heathers is the best of both worlds - it's like eavesdropping on another culture's expressions, ("It'll be very," "What's your damage?" etc.) familiar but invented for the film, yet the satire of the film is served well for having them. In other words, the characters don't speak the way they do here just for its own sake; every line re-enforces the "staggering unreality" discussed last time.

The film is certainly not sparing in its broad strokes: 

1) All of the adults are completely self-medicated and/or out of touch.

"So what was the first day after Heather's funeral like?"

J.D.'s psychotic father, played by Kirk Scott, always cracks me up. He and J.D. converse with one another in role-reversal, which is both funny and brutally effective in establishing the toxic environment that spawns the J.D.s of the world. (Something we'll look at in a little more depth at the end of the week.)

Not the same actor, but he reminds me of this guy from Animal House/ One Crazy Summer. (And those Twisted Sister videos. Now that I line those roles up like this, I'm realizing he should form an 80s nostalgia band with William Zabka and William Atherton.)

I'm forgetting the stoned cops, who are perfect, and named after the lead characters in Adam-12. One for trivia night.

2) All of the traditional societal structures and rituals are so removed from their original function as to be meaningless. Something painfully obvious to every teenager who ever lived, and quickly forgotten as we inherit maintenance and upkeep of said structures and rituals as adults. Indeed, the idea of "cool adults," who claim empathy with this informs one of the film's more acidic swipes, in the form of the teacher / guidance counselor Pauline Fleming:

Played by Penelope Milford

She seizes the opportunity to "revel in this revealing moment" and transforms the school into her New Age fiefdom. Or so she thinks. It's a move anticipated and exploited by J.D., of course, in his jihad against the social order, the implication being that the Pauline Flemings of the world somehow never anticipate this, and that the only people who embrace this "New Happiness" do so out either out of following the herd or for less than altruistic reasons. (A point driven home through all of the rituals in the film: lunchtime poll topics, petitions, "I need a copy of this for my college application," etc. The mechanisms of working within the system are all hopelessly lame.) She is ridiculed both by her peers (who acquiesce to her agenda not out of compassion or enlightenment but out of convenience and a CYA mentality) and Veronica ("get a job.")

2.5) Another trope, I guess: only the uber-cynical/ socially marginalized can glimpse the truth to which all others are blind.

And, 3) all of the cool kids are actually deeply insecure, troubled or compromised. One sees a corruption of this trope all too often in social media in 2013, usually delivered with a forthrightness that would make Veronica Sawyer reach for her monocle and bottle of vodka:

I'd say it's due to the legacy of things like Heathers in my life that my immediate reaction upon seeing such things is to want to post this in response:

"Teenage suici-ii-ide, don't do it. Teenage suici-ii-ide, she blew it!"

Another reason people should study things like Heathers. In the same way that the measles and the mumps are making the rounds again thanks to people forgetting that mass vaccinations are a good idea, we're in a real danger of losing our cultural resistance to emotional infantilism altogether.

Let's have a look at the characters.

The Red Queen: Heather Chandler (Kim Walker.)

To borrow a phrase from Stephen King: "She's the Queen Bitch of Castle Hell." She channels her own self-loathing into ruthless control. She's worshipped at Westerberg, and she's only a Junior. Like Caesar, however, her time at the top will be short-lived.

 

Probably the most quotable character in the film. Not bad for someone who dies about a quarter of the way through.

As in this great cross-cut sequence at Heather Chandler's funeral. We eavesdrop on the individual "mourner's" prayers, all of which are amusingly self-serving or self-deflecting.

I'm surprised (though not really) there's never been a prequel The Rise of Heather Chandler of some kind. Like, a CW series or something. 

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so Heather Duke, (Shannon Doherty) as coached by JD, assumes the role after Heather Chandler's death.

Who isn't too mindful of the suspension he received earlier in the film, naturally.

To get there, she must step over Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk) The Cheerleader. All class advancement requires a blood sacrifice.

Trapped in her gilded cage.

Jason Dean, Trenchcoat Mafia Prototype:

It's implied he has run this murder-under-guise-of-suicide before. He last saw his mother waving goodbye from a window in a building his Dad blew up. (The aforementioned creepy aspect of he and his Dad's role reversal.) The scene where he yells after Veronica to "come back" really gets me thinking. He is trying to be a better version of his Dad and thinks he can save his mother by orchestrating these murders in a more poetic fashion, cloaked in half-baked nihilism soundbites. When it doesn't work, he has to kill Veronica, then blow up the school. That old chestnut!

J.D. is, outside of Veronica, the most important character of the film. But I'll be dealing with his (and Veronica's) story arc in a different post, so we'll just introduce them, here.

Which bring us to our heroine, Veronica Sawyer:

Our insider/outsider narrator and window on the Westerberg world.

Perfectly situated to be our guide. She "is allowed an understanding that my parents and these Remington University assholes have chosen to ignore."

She is the audience surrogate for both the "cool kid" experience (her parents are wealthy, she is attractive enough to merit inclusion in the "hot girls" clique as well as capture the eye of the school bad boy, she has a secret inner world where her brilliance soars unfettered and her kindness to those beneath her caste is given breathing space) and the anti-hero experience (murdering said cool kids and getting away with it, flaunting social convention in favor of her own moral throughline/ independence, etc.)

Mean Girls took this template, of course, and ran with it. More or less successfully, and while it's probably equally as entertaining, it's not as subversive or incisive as Heathers is. (Not that it has to be.)

Granted, some of Veronica's moral stances are a little undermined.

Her attempt to rekindle her friendship with Betty Finn is done in something of a smug spirit. But Betty is also an exaggeration of plain-Jane virginal purity/ the poor relation with the heart of gold.

And while the ending makes a lot of thematic sense (having journeyed through hell and back, Veronica seeks only a popcorn movie night with someone as far removed from all of it as possible, aka Martha "Dumptruck") there's something a little pandering about it.

Not Katy Perry-level pandering. (Along the lines of the anti-bullying stuff, above, somewhere between Heathers and "Firework" or "Roar," we lost a lot of depth perception on "empowerment.") More on this momentarily.

We can assume from the bad-ass way that Veronica disposes of Heather Duke that she is, as she proclaims, the new sheriff in town:

and her first act of office is to befriend the town outcast. But are we really to believe this one act will overturn the social order any more than Pauline Fleming's kinder, gentler administration? Veronica's is a less violent road than J.D.'s, to be sure, but one can't help but wonder if power will corrupt Veronica the same way it corrupted the other Heathers. It seems Westerberg has swapped one despotic ruler for a more benevolent dictator, but the power structure remains ultimately the same. (Veronica despises the way Heather abuses her power, but she's fine with bitchslapping her when she gets out of line.)

Perhaps that's the point. I'm not sure.

Speaking of Martha Dunnstock

She's the most obvious metaphor for adolescent cruelty, throughout, and the plot turns on several Dumptruck moments, from the lunchroom scene in the beginning, to her slowly following the popular kids' lead in trying to kill herself, then as the object/ reflection of Veronica's benevolence at the end.

It makes you wonder how the events of the story must appear from her character's point of view.

Incidentally, I hate "the fat suit." I'm usually fairly cavalier about the practicalities of make-believe and theatricality, and it's a thousand times less offensive here than it is in Friends or Shallow Hal. But there's something so weird about it. I don't know. A post for another day, perhaps.

To conclude, the script and characters are both perfect, but what really ties it all together is a sense of mise-en-scène that, as mentioned last time, has never appeared again in the director's work. (Or the cinematographer's, the art director's, or the production designer's.) But the stars must have aligned in 1988 for all of them, as this is one beautiful-looking movie. I watched this over and over again back in the day specifically to hunt for visual clues in the background. (Pausing a VHS tape wasn't always a good method of finding stuff, as often the image became blurred or obscured.)

So using the traditional ratio of worth re: pictures/ words, here are ten thousand words to showcase some of it:

I actually remember people dressing like this. It seems a galaxy long long ago and far far away, now.

Veronica's vodka-fueled funeral dream. I used to always wonder what the hell was up with this dude:

and still do.

I wish there was a way to screencap the score, which is a perfect example of 80s synth score this side of John Carpenter. And it suits the subject matter so well. Like the dialogue, it achieves in exaggeration and satire the truth of what someone once said, college isn't the real world; high school is the real world.

Next time, we'll look at Veronica and JD. After that, a wrap-up post about how this film could never be made nowadays. Our Week of Many Heathers marches on.

Heathers, High School, and Saved By the Bell

This is pt. 1 of a 3-part overview. For pt. 2 ("What a Waste! Oh the Humanity!") please click here. For pt. 3 ("A Writer Finds Her Voice") please click here.

Before we get to today's program:

(1988)

let's contextualize things with these words from Chuck Klosterman on the show Saved By the Bell:

"I would watch SBTB the same way all high school kids watch morning television, which is to say I stared at it with the same thoughtless intensity I displayed when watching the dryer. I watched it because it was on TV, which is generally the driving force behind why most people watch any program. However, I became a more serious SBTB student when I got to college. I suspect this kind of awakening was not uncommon, as universities always spawn little cultures of terrible TV appreciation."

In my own case, he's certainly correct, here. Although I started watching Beverly Hills, 90210 when it originally aired (with the same sort of thoughtless intensity he describes,) it was at college - specifically, weekly parties at the fraternity house that centered around 90210 and Melrose Place. And libations, of course - that the madness really took hold.

He continues: "We liked the 'process' of watching these shows. The idea of these programs being entertaining never seemed central to anything, which remains the most fascinating aspect of all televised art: consumers don't demand it to be good. It just needs to be watchable. * And the reason that designation can be applied to Saved by the Bell has a lot to do with the fundamental truth of its staggering unreality."

* This has changed somewhat since these words were originally written, thanks mainly to HBO shows and things like Breaking Bad and BSG. But I'd say it's still by and large true.

Its staggering unreality is the phrase to recall when we get to Heathers. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

"Every other kid at Bayside" - where the SBTB kids went to school, a place where students made money by selling a "Girls of Bayside" calendar, where oil was discovered under the football team's goalposts, and where Zack, the main character (like I need to tell you any of this) had the ability to stop time in order to narrate what was happening - "was either a nerd, a jock, a randomly hot chick, or completely nondescript. It was sort of like Rydell High in Grease."

Such a creepy picture out of context. Maybe even in context.

"On the surface, SBTB must undoubtedly seem like everything one would expect from a dreadful show directed at children, which is what it was. But that's not how it was consumed by its audience. There was a stunning recalibration of the classic "suspension of disbelief vs. aesthetic distance" relationship. (...) Understanding SBTB meant you understood what was supposed to define the ultra-simplistic, hyper-stereotypical high school experience - and understanding that formula meant you realized was (supposedly) important about growing up. (And) important things are always cliche." 

"SBTB wasn't ironic in the contemporary sense (i.e. detached and sardonic) and it wasn't ironic in the literal sense (the intentions and themes of the story never contradicted what they stated ostensibly.) You never learned anything, and you weren't supposed to."

I've got a few more Klosterman quotes to go over, but let me break in here to say that all of what he's describing does not 100% apply to Heathers per se - I'd argue there are things to learn, all the better in that they are not bullet-pointed for the viewer- but such is the context of the teenage-drama landscape in which Heathers appeared.

By 1988, the template was firmly established. And still is, more or less. When great high school movies of the 80s are mentioned, you usually hear The Breakfast Club (or Fast Times at Ridgmont High) and Heathers is the anti-Breakfast Club in many ways, as Pauline Kael pointed out in her review of it. It has more in common with Buffy the Vampire Slayer than it does with Saved By the Bell, to be sure.(Right down to its snap, crackle, and pop dialogue. The folks at Sunnydale sound an awful lot like the folks at Westerberg in the way they speak to one another.)

Quick aside: I'd never looked up any reviews of this movie until gathering steam for this blog. And as I did so, I bookmarked The New Cult Canon's and Janet Maslin's at the New York Times. Great stuff. I was obsessed with this movie in 1990 and 1991. I was very lucky for it to be a new movie, accruing cult status via video rentals and pay per view, while I was the exact age of its characters. But it was the pre-internet-age, and looking up such reviews wasn't even on my mind. I also can't claim to have understood the film in any organized fashion at the time; I was pretty much an idiot in the late 80s and early 90s. By the mid-90s, I was perhaps an imbecile, and I flatter myself to think I've achieved moron status here in our exciting new century. (Patience, McMolo, keep climbing the ladder...) But, at the time, I just knew I related to it, powerfully, and couldn't stop watching it. 

Anyway. Let's wrap up Klosterman's SBTB thoughts:

"Conscious attempts at reality don't work. The character of Angela on ABC's short-lived drama My So-Called Life was byzantine and unpredicatble and emotionally complex, and that all that well-crafted nuance made her seem like an individual. But Angela was so much an individual that she wasn't like anyone but herself; she didn't reflect any archetypes. She was real enough to be interesting, but too real to be important. Kelly Kapowski was never real, so she ended up being a little like everybody (or at least like someone everybody used to know.) It was openly ridiculous but latently plausible. And that's why it illustrated a greater paradox that matters more: Saved by the Bell wasn't real, but neither is most of reality."

That last bit there describes Heathers (and life) so perfectly. It certainly has an absurd plot that is just plausible enough (more than plausible, as we know all too well from real-world events in the 25 years since its release) and wildly exaggerated characters that remain all-too-familiar (and who interestingly resemble both the Kelly Kapowski and Angela from My So-Called Life approaches, described above: individually nuanced but swimming in broad strokes.) But it somehow captures a universally accessible essence of high school that more realistic or serious-minded attempts never do.

The only other film like it (for me) is Disturbing Behavior, which I'm sure I'll watch and screencap and geek out on at some point down the road, so I'll just namecheck it for now.

All of which is to say, though I've never met anyone who can point to Heathers and say "yep, that happened to me," I've never met anyone who doesn't instantly recognize the landscape and everyone in it. It presents a version of reality that feels far more real than the actual lived experience of high school.

I mentioned Mean Girls, before...

Undoubtedly a great film. But a whole different era. It is the Old School to Heathers's Animal House. If that makes any sense. 

Perhaps Mean Girls is to Cruel Intentions what Old School is to Animal House? Perhaps Heathers stands apart from them all. Not above or beyond, just apart. Ferris Bueller's Day Off, for example, stands equally apart; whole different criteria.

At any rate, then or now (or before it) Heathers is my nomination for perfect high school movie. Beautifully shot, written, performed, scored, conceived and executed.

This raises an interesting question: whose film is it, exactly? To whom do we give the honors?

I never feel too bad for anyone that stays consistently employed in the movie industry, as Michael Lehmann certainly has done, but it's clear from his c.v. that he wasn't pursuing any kind of personal vision with Heathers. And that's fine - perhaps it was a workmanlike guy at the helm that allowed the eccentricities of the script to bloom.

So maybe it was the writer?

But his c.v. falls apart even more immediately and comprehensively than the director's. So here we have a movie written and directed by folks who sure don't seem like the auteurs one would expect would have put it together. Who was it, then? The production designer? There's a lot of good-looking films in John Hutman's filmography, but no throughline sensibility (that I can see) that suggests Heathers is as cool as it is because of his unique vision.

Though it certainly is a beautiful looking and thoughtfully arranged film.

"Tomorrow someone else will move into her place...

The music is certainly "totally very." David Newman's c.v includes Galaxy Quest, Serenity, and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. And while that's good enough for me personally to refer to it going forward as David Newman's Heathers, it probably wouldn't hold up in court. The score more than anything, though, brings me painfully back to the era. High school wasn't exactly hell for me, but adolescent anxiety is traumatic for anybody. It lives on in the musical accompaniment for this film for me; just hearing it makes me wonder if I'll ever get laid or graduate.

So we're forced to give credit to an ensemble group behind the scenes and the actors on the screen itself. And the two leads are arguably at the height of their youthful appeal in this movie. I speak of course of Christian Slater as J.D. and Winona Ryder as Veronica.

 

Christian Slater went from this to iconic roles in Pump Up the Volume and True Romance, but his star faded somewhat after that. As with Michael Lehmann, this isn't meant in a negative spirit; only a fool would feel bad for a guy who's consistently employed for decades in Hollywood. And is pals with Anthony Hopkins to boot.

Perhaps his turn in Lars Von Trier's upcoming Nymphomaniac will reinvigorate his status. I doubt it, but we'll see.

Winona Ryder created and sustained a "Winona Ryder" archetype throughout the 90s and while her star power has waned a bit in the 21st century, she's still Hollywood glamour, to be sure. 

I thought she was pretty good in A Scanner Darkly and Black Swan.

She plays Spock's Mom in the new Star Trek. Her character didn't last long, but there's always the possibility of flashbacks/ alternate realities.

Next time around, we'll get into the movie itself, but I wanted to start things off with all of the above. Let's wrap this up with this bit from the Scott Tobias review afore-linked:

"Coming at the end of the ’80s, Heathers still stands out for questioning the prevailing stereotypes of teen movies rather than accepting them as a given. Two decades later, the Hughes model of teen comedy/dramas is still pervasive, but the goings-on at Westerburg High have only gained in potency, perhaps because so few movies have had the courage (or the approval) to follow Heathers’ lead. “It’s not very subtle,” as J.D. says, “but neither is blowing up a whole school.” "

See you next time.

Captain's Blog: Stellar Cartography

Here's some links to all Trek-related stuff here at the Omnibus. 

Dedicated to Aharon Klum. See you on Mount Seleya, old buddy.
(1975 - 2014.) 

Let's start things off with:

TREK PERIPHERALS AND FUN AND GAMES:

- Here's a mash-up of Douglas Coupland quotes with Trek imagery. 

- Same deal but with Christopher Hyatt quotes.

-

An overview of Shatner’s non-Trek roles.

- Speaking of Shatner:

The Top 50 Shatner Moments in all Trek:

50 - 41

40 - 31

30 - 21

20 - 11

The Top Ten

- “Where No Fan Has Gone Before,” the Futurama episode that assembled most of the original cast. 

-

Galaxy Quest. This movie rules.

-  Memoirs and Miscellanea. Here you will find thoughts on various cast and crew memoirs and what not. 

-  John Byrne’s Trek (IDW)

-  Gold Key Trek.

 

- The Storybook Records (Peter Pan, Power Records, etc.) (Co-blogged with Into the Dark Dimension.)

- These Were The Voyages

(an exploration of DC's first Star Trek comic from the 1980s)

-  Issues 1 through 4

-  Issues 5 and 6

-  Issues 7 and 8

-  Adaptation of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

-  New Frontiers (issues Nine through Sixteen)

- Annuals 1 and 2, and issues 17 through 25

-  Who's Who 1 and 2

-  Issues 26 through 33

-  Issues 34 through 47
(including adaptation of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)

-  Issues 48 through 56: Peter David

-  Coda
(Annual #3 and adaptation of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)

- To Boldly Go Where Everybody Knows Your Name: the Cheers / Trek Conspiracy.

- A discussion of Trek canon. (This is probably neither fun nor games.)

- Starfleet Is Hiring! Do you have what it takes?

- Who is the Best Trek Movie Villain?

- Ten Treks That Never Happened.

THE TV SHOWS

Well, it's been a good six years since I first did the "Captain's Blog" series, and I'm slowly making way through each of the Berman-era Treks. I likely will not do anything on the post-Berman Trek TV; so far none of it is worth discussing much. Which dates me, I know. I'm of the "thanks for your service now go die" age of Trek fandom. 

In order of how I did them:

Season One

Season Two

Season Three

Season Four

Season Five

Season Six

Season Seven

My Favorites

- Season One

- Season Two

- Season Three

- Season Four

- Season Five

- Season Six

- Season Seven

- Conn Officers and Other Background Players

- My 25 Favorites

- Season Four

- Season Five

- Season Six

- Season Seven

- Overview

- My Favorite Episodes

- The Truth Inside the Lie and I explored some of the more prominent fan-Made Productions (Phase II, Trek Continues, Of Gods and Men.)

- As for The Animated Series:

Faves, pt. 1 and pt. 2

- Finally:

The Original Series

An Overview. And some credit where credit is due.

Here are the links to my Desert Island TOS Top 50(ish) in order of points awarded, least to most. (For explanation of points system see here) If your favorite episode doesn't appear below, that's because it's covered here.

It's a topic I've wanted to organize my thoughts on for years, so it scratched a lifelong itch to do it. I've broken them up in how their closest points-grouping worked out, in case you're wondering what gives with the arrangements.  

The Alternative Factor (18.5)

Whom Gods Destroy

Bread and Circuses

That Which Survives

Assignment: Earth

Friday’s Child

The Way to Eden (39.5)

Catspaw

The Apple

The Omega Glory

Dagger of the Mind

For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky

All Our Yesterdays

The Tholian Web (44.75)

Metamorphosis

The Squire of Gothos

Return to Tomorrow

Errand of Mercy

The Gamesters of Triskelion

Wolf in the Fold

Day of the Dove

Balance of Terror

The Changeling

A Private Little War

The Immunity Syndrome

The Devil in the Dark

The Man Trap

Who Mourns for Adonais?

Operation – Annihilate! (63.75)

Spock’s Brain

Wink of an Eye

A Taste of Armageddon

Tomorrow Is Yesterday

By Any Other Name

Shore Leave

The Enemy Within

Piece of the Action

Spectre of theGun

The Menagerie

The Cloud Minders

The Enterprise Incident

Arena

Mirror, Mirror (73.5)

What Are Little Girls Made Of?

Space Seed

The Paradise Syndrome

Amok Time

This Side of Paradise

The City on the Edge of Forever (102.75)

The Return of the Archons

THE MOVIES

My Favorites, pts. 1 and 2. 

And bien sur les Boat Chips:

Set Phasers on Superboogie

and

Spock's on the Crapper

Captain's Blog

Directed by B McMolo. 

Produced by Dog Star Omnibus.