Heathers

"Whether to kill yourself or not is one of the most important decisions a teenager can make."
This was by far my favorite line of the entire film. When I heard it, the absurdity of it just struck me. I soon realized that this line, above all others, proved that Pauline Fleming was not even an attempt at a real person. Who says that?

Heathers is not a commentary on life as a teenager. If it was, the characters would be exaggerated approximations of real life. Instead the cast of characters consists of extremes, but extremes that could only come from a different world than the one we inhabit: John Hughes' world of film.

I think this is why for all the grasping we did in class the other day, we could not settle on a rough estimate of what Heathers is supposed to say. Is Veronica a hero? Can we really forgive her for falling under J.D.'s maniacal wing? What do we make of J.D.'s suicide? These questions garnered a wide range of responses in class -- I think because we were digging for gold in a landfill. A better question might be, how does Michael Lehmann take the John Hughes film format and turn it on its head? And further, what does this do to us as viewers? How does Heathers play with our expectations?

In a Hughes film like Ferris Bueller's Day off, the characters have very specific roles. You know Bueller is cool, Cameron is eccentric and Sloane Peterson is too pretty to be that easy going, and to easy going to be that pretty. As the plot develops, it doesn't take long to figure out that Ferris will get just about everything he wants, including the girl, while his goofy friend provides laughter, support, and graciously takes the blame. This is a format we're used to seeing, so the characters do not need long introductory backstories for us to know what to expect. In Heathers, we expect the same based on similarly minimal introductions, but what we get is totally different.

Looking past the shear darkness of the opening segment -- where the Heathers aim their crochet balls at Veronica's sprouting head -- I was lead to believe that Veronica would play the underdog role we're all so familiar with from John Hughes films (see Pretty in Pink) and rise above the click that at first keeps her down. The turning point for me was when Veronica first tell her diary that she "wants to kill and you have to believe me." She concludes, "Tomorrow I'll be kissing her aerobicized ass, but tonight let me dream of a world without Heather, a world where I am free." So she's got a dark side. Even at this point, I thought she was just expressing herself. But, as it turned out, with just a little help from a "Dark Horse," she could be a killer.

As Nick Burn points out in "Scent of dominance," Heathers "offers no 'map' for predicting or understanding emotions raised within the plot." This is partly why we don't expect Veronica to have murderous thoughts, but what Burns doesn't say is that our expectations have been shaped by John Hughes. Lehmann has deliberately messed with Hughes' road map, and that, for me, is what makes the experience of watching Heathers so shocking.