Heathers
(1988)
(SPOILERS) Michael Lehmann’s opening trio of movies – Heathers, Meet the Applegates, and, yes, Hudson
Hawk – marked him out as a bright talent in the realm of absurdist humour,
one to rival Joe Dante and Tim Burton. And then what became of him? A retreat
from the mauling Bruno’s vanity vehicle received to likeable but indifferent fare,
and now a jobbing career on TV. It seems so unfair. As for his collaborator in Heathers’ pitch black comedy, Daniel
Waters, the man who wrote the screenplay with Kubrick in mind as director, no
less, he’s the classic example of starting on a giddy high and freefalling ever
since, although he made notable contributions to Hawk (the Hawkster), Batman
Returns and Demolition Man, and also
directed Noonie in the underseen but quite decent Sex and Death 101. Together, they made the last word in high school
movies, that word being a slice of astonishingly creative vernacular that
stands out today as every bit as crude, cruel and hilarious as it was then.
Pretty much everyone involved in the movie cites it as a
reaction to John Hughes’ enormously successful stranglehold on teendom during
the ‘80s, before confessing they actually really like Hughes’ pictures. But you
can see how Heathers is rightly
fuelled by the spleen of wanting to right the misleading wrongs of Hughes’
essentially life-affirming, uplifting take on the trials and tribulations of
high school. Waters professes to have loved the place, mind (curious, as he
doesn’t look like the kind of guy who
would have).
Although IMDB would have Heathers
as a 1988 release, that’s on account of a solitary festival screening. It
arrived in the UK late ’89, and I first caught it almost a year later in my
first year at university (on a big screen, no less, likely a rarity for a
picture whose following has derived predominately from video). Probably the
ideal moment to see it, since although its stars – unlike many of Hughes’ – are
age appropriate, the writing and visuals are so stylised that it’s almost too good to be lumped in with mere teen
angst bullshit fodder. Waters rightly recognises the UK as one of the few
places where the picture instantly went down a storm (elsewhere it got titled Lethal Attraction – Germany – and Fatal Games – France – indicating the
ailing New World Pictures, rather than the protesting Waters, knew nothing about
marketing movies).
Perhaps predictably, when critics were nigh-on universally
lauding it to the heavens, Pauline Kael struck a grouchy note (“It’s not fun, and it lacks a punchline”).
She found fault with Lehmann’s approach (that he doesn’t find the right mood
for the gags) and Waters’ “layers of
didacticism”, although admitting he had a “malicious talent for pinning down psychological cant”. She, like
many – including Waters – complained
about the ending dissolving the satire (although really, something more obvious
revisiting the picture, it’s satirical elements are frontloaded into the first
two-thirds).
I’ve never had a problem with the ending (I’ll come back to
that). Kael wanted sting, but – just as she complains about Winona Ryder being
too real – I suspect, if she’d had it her way, she’d have bemoaned the picture
as one-note. As Veronica Sawyer, Ryder invests you in the proceedings as much
as you laugh at them. Far from the pieces of the picture not fitting together,
it’s the ability to stretch itself, while stylistically coherent under
Lehmann’s heightened gaze (“razzing the
material”) and Waters’ devilish delivery, that makes it work so well. Or,
as JD (Christian Slater) might say, “You
say tomato…”
Bart Mills, in the Film
Yearbook Volume 8, delivered a rapturous essay, awarding it the status of
one of their Films of the Year (as he suggests, the kids who loved Hughes’
films have grown up and are now drawn to films that are about teens but made
for adults), noting its darker approach as a parallel to the earlier River’s Edge (early Keanu, and batshit
crazy Crispin Glover). Where that film takes in indifference to the deaths of peers
in a morbid, soulless context (softened somewhat, ultimately, by the photogenic
romance between Reeves and Ione Skye), Heathers
lacerates the cult surrounding teenage suicide at the time, sticking barbs into
the eulogies and hypocritical posthumous veneration of the formerly loathed.
Pauline Fleming: We have to talk. Whether to kill yourself or
not is one of the most important decisions a teenager can make.
Pricking the bubble of a taboo subject with unbridled mirth,
a subject that had been fed upon, vulture like, by a media desirous of
revelling in the carnage while paying lip service to its seriousness in a
desire for ratings, is such a rich seam that Waters didn’t even begin run out
of material. No one reacts in a genuinely aggrieved way to the loses – apart
from Brad’s little sister, in a funeral insert that drew a groan from Waters on
the commentary but which is the kind of bubble burster that wisely prevents Heathers from becoming as mercilessly
distracted from reality as the characters it’s depicting.
Mom: So what was the first day after Heather’s
suicide like?
Veronica: I don’t know, it was okay, I guess.
On the one hand, there’s Veronica’s refreshingly blasé
approach (asked what she will be doing with her afternoon, she replies “Mourning, maybe watch some TV”). On the
other, the manner in which Waters hones in everyone’s entirely self-centred
reaction to tragedy, be it in a hilariously detached (“Are we going to be tested on this?”), entirely delusional (“She said I was boring. Now I realise, I
wasn’t boring, it’s just that she was dissatisfied with her life”) or utterly
cynical fashion. The school teachers are priceless in this respect, as we cut
from JD arguing that including “myriad”
in their forged Heather Chandler suicide note, a word she flunked in her
language test a week earlier, is fitting as a badge for her failures at school,
to one of her teachers commenting “I must
say I was impressed to see she made proper use of the word ‘myriad’…”.
Pauline Fleming: We must revel in this revealing moment!
So versed are JD and Veronica in the book of suicide clichés
that they instantly agree with ending the note on “I died knowing no one knew the real me”. And the irony of an actual
suicide attempt (poor Martha Dumptruck) is greeted with derision (“Just another example of the geek trying to
imitate the popular people in the school and failing miserably”), rather
underling Waters’ point about the fakery of emotional engagement. The actual
imitator, popular person Heather McNamara (Lisa Falk), has the really weak
reasons (“I’m failing math. My home life
is a mess”), unlike Martha, who has been systematically abused her entire
educational life. Perhaps the New World head was responding subconsciously in demanding
a different the ending, because in the narrative itself, the faked suicides do
indeed promulgate suicidal tendencies.
Veronica Sawyer: Dear diary, my teen angst bullshit now has a
body count.
Heathers, along
with Beetlejuice, is the signature Ryder role. She turned 16
during shooting, and while for the next decade plus she’d be consistently
playing and looking younger than she was (such that by the time of Girl, Interrupted she’s nearing 30 and
still passing herself off as an addled teen, in a movie that falls into the
trap of treating the same distressed subject matter as Heathers with cloying reverence), here she brings to the role a
very keyed-in sense of maturity. The dialogue helps, of course, but Ryder is
personified by this movie in a manner she hasn’t even come close to since.
Michael McDowell of
Beetlejuice gave her the screenplay (no wonder she’d love sequels to both
movies; they’re the best roles she’d ever get) and she went after the part with
abandon (Waters had Jennifer Connelly in mind). All agree that Veronica was far
nastier on the page, and that Ryder made her nicer (Waters, as self-effacingly
critical as he is of his work, clearly didn’t begrudge this as he went on to
cast her in Sex and Death 101). Even
in the first cut, apparently, you didn’t like Veronica, and Lehmann and editor
Norman Hollyn had to work to tip the balance.
It’s easy to see why, even now. I do think Mills is a little charitable towards his perception of Veronica’s
innocence in his review, which may be a consequence of Noonie’s inability to
eschew compassion; JD’s “You wanted to
believe it”, but her true feelings were too gross and icky, is closer to
the mark. She gets over Heather Chandler’s death far too easily for someone
entirely horrified by her boyfriend’s scheme, happy to kick back and scoff at TV
interviews with classmates expressing grief. I mean, really, after her
involvement in offing a Heather, she then goes and kills Kurt with an “Ich luge” bullet. Her actions up to this
point make much more sense if she’s a straight-up psycho like JD, but also far
less interesting; that she isn’t makes the ending consequently more
interesting.
Veronica: Great pâté, but I'm gonna have to motor
if I wanna be ready for that funeral.
Veronica’s confidential diary confessions immediately put us
on her side, inclusive and privy to her deliriously reasoned eloquence, and her
responses to her peers are ones we can readily identify with (her kindness
towards those she has left behind as she scaled Westerburg High’s social ladder
is a little less believable, however, or she would never have taken the steps she
did). And Ryder simply aces Waters’ dialogue, even if she also gets all his
clunkers.
For every admission that she wants to kill Heather and that
this is “more than just a spoke in my
menstrual cycle” there’s an overwritten ouch-er like “If you were happy every day of your life you wouldn’t be a human being.
You’d be a game-show host” or “Are we
going to prom or to hell?” or “No one
can stop JD. Not the FBI or the CIA or the PTA” or “I’m going to have to send my SAT scores to San Quentin instead of
Stanford?”. Actually, I quite like all of them, but they’re a little too deliberated. Oh, and I love
Veronica’s monocle, even if it makes her the “Albert Speer of the Heathers”. Or even especially because.
JD: Seven schools in seven states, and the only
thing different is my locker number.
Veronica’s grounding enables those around her to operate even
more in the realm of caricature, type or archetype. Waters’ impulse with Jason
Dean was that “the coolest male teenager
would have to be a psychopath”, so who better than Christian Slater as a
young Jack Nicholson (who had delivered quite a few mad Jacks by this time)?
Like Ryder, Slater would spend most of his career failing to capitalise on a
couple of defining fledgling turns (his last great movie role being True Romance). Apparently Brad Pitt did
a reading for JD, but was deemed “too
sweet” (also, a bit old).
JD: People will look at the ashes of Westerburg
and say, “Now, there’s a school that self-destructed, not because society didn’t
care, but because school was society”.
Now, that’s deep.
JD’s psychopathy is fascinating in as much as he takes moral
stands that suggest a bringer of justice and righter of wrongs, but they’re
really just a means to an outlet for his own appetite for carnage. The episode
with the hull cleaner (“I say we go with
big blue here”) is effectively a test to see if Veronica will get on board
with his Bonnie & Clyde fantasies; it’s only when she has no choice but to
recognise her complicity and that he’s “a
fucking psycho”, spurning his advances, that he turns nasty, and is as
willing to manipulate and change allegiances (teaming with Heather Duke) to get
what he wants. His funniest moment might be the admission that yes, “Maybe I am killing everyone in the school”
but that’s “because nobody loves me!”
as ridiculously facile/petulant as anyone’s reason for doing anything
destructive, to self or otherwise.
Veronica Sawyer: What is your damage, Heather?
Kael opined that Heathers
lost something once Kim Walker’s spiteful Heather Chandler was out of the
picture (Walker sadly died of a brain tumour in 2001, making one of her
funniest lines, “Did you have a brain
tumour for breakfast?”, bizarrely ironic), but I’d argue Shannen Doherty’s
Heather Duke is more than up to the challenge. Kael isn’t wrong about Walker’s
“glittering teen-age bravado”, though
(“They all want me as a friend or a fuck.
I’m worshipped at Westerburg, and I’m only a junior”) or downing the “death potion” – big blue to me and you.
Her throat-clutching gasp of “Corn nuts!”
is another of Waters’ most wonderfully gleeful little eccentricities, mocking
meaningful suicide notes and last words while giving the genuine ones not an
ounce of resonance (apart from on the oddball register).
Veronica Sawyer: Why are you such a mega bitch?
Heather Duke: Because I can be. Veronica, why are you
pulling my dick?
Doherty’s professional reputation precedes her, although I
only really knew her from Our House
with Wilfred Brimley when this came out (so she was sweetness and light) Lehmann
attested on the commentary “Shannon was
great to work with”, to Waters audible disbelief. It’s also said that she
was aghast after the first screening (“No
one told me it was a comedy”), which I find a little hard to believe, but
on the other hand no one in Starship
Troopers actually realised they were making a satire, so it isn’t beyond
the bounds of credulity.
Doherty wouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vein yet was
quite happy to reel off other blue language. Heather Graham, cast as Heather
McNamara, didn’t even get that far, with her devout parents preventing her from
taking the part once they got a look at the script (as far as off-screen bonds
go, Lisanne Falk, who also appeared with Walker in Say Anything… became firm friends with Ryder).
Ram Sweeney: Jesus Christ in heaven… Why’d you have to
kill such hot snatch?
I have to admit, as plum as the main parts are, it’s the
less central characters that always have me in the biggest fits. Jocks Kurt
Kelly (Lance Fenton) and Ram Sweeney (Patrick Labyorteaux) have the most side-splitting
plotline in the picture, and pretty much every line reading Labyorteaux gives
is a gold (when Kurt suggests a Veronica Sawyer-Heather Chandler sandwich would
be “so righteous”, Ram concurs: “Oh, hell yes. I wanna set a Heather on my
Johnson and just start spinnin’ her around like a goddam pinwheel”).
Ram’s
moronic consistency is endlessly entertaining, such that he and Kurt are even
outmatched by their natural prey (“Say, ‘I
like to suck big dicks’” he demands of a geek he has in a shoulder lock: “Oh, you like to suck big dicks” comes
the response. Another great nerd moment finds Veronica asking Rodney what’s
under the gym; he somehow contrives to make his “The boiler room” response pathetically suggestive).
JD: Football season is over, Veronica. Kurt and
Ram hand nothing to offer the school but date rape and AIDS jokes.
We could add cow tipping to JD’s list, but that’s more
extra-curricular. I’d hazard the only thing that has really changed in terms of
school bullying since Heathers is
that it’s now a multi-media thing. Waters’ turning their greatest prejudices on
Ram and Kurt (as we saw above) is deliciously twisted, such that they hide “a forbidden love, forced to live the life of
sexist beer guzzling jock assholes”, the proof being JD’s “homosexual artefacts”, consisting of a
copy of Stud Puppy, a candy dish, a Joan Crawford postcard and, best of all
thirty years later, mineral water (“Oh
man! They were fags?” offers Officer Milner in grim realisation on seeing
said item). And then there’s the reaction of Kurt’s dad.
The parents in
Heathers are consistently hilarious prospects, as colourful as the kids, so
setting them in marked contrast to those in your average John Hughes movie
(Waters suggested Hughes’ error was in placing all kids’ woes at their parents’
door; there may be something to this, but the two are also necessarily entwined). The funeral of Kurt and Ram finds
the former’s father standing over this son’s casket (hilariously, they’re in
football gear, complete with ball) delivering a eulogy “My son’s a homosexual, and I love him. I love my dead gay son”,
which JD wryly notes wouldn’t be the response if he had “a limp wrist with a pulse”.
Veronica’s Dad: Goddam, will somebody tell me why I smoke
these damn things?
Veronica: Cos you’re an idiot.
Veronica’s Dad: Oh yeah, that’s it.
Veronica’s Mum: You too.
We also meet Veronica’s oblivious parents (Jennifer Rhodes
and William Cort), mum forever offering pâté
and dad unsure why he does anything he does (but certain that “I don’t patronise bunny rabbits”), and
JD’s equally deranged like pater like son, of Big Budd Construction, angry at
how he can’t demolish a hotel because “Glen
Miller and his band once took a shit there” and jubilant at a detonation in
which “I put a Norwegian in the basement”.
For his part, JD’s problems of detachment may stem from the fact that the “Last time I saw mom she was waving from a
library window in Texas”.
Heathers has too
much good dialogue to do it even a shred of justice here. Even Waters’ audible
grievance that he had to make do with Moby
Dick as a go-to-teen-angst tome to quote, rather than evidently more plausible
Catcher in the Rye, elicits some
suitably daffy dialogue (“Eskimo”). JD’s
“Greetings and salutations” would
surface again in the Waters re-written Demolition
Man, notably spoken by there by this movie’s vicar Glenn Shadix (also of Beetlejuice and Lehmann’s Meet the Applegates). A few further
choice ones follow:
Veronica Sawyer: You’re beautiful. (It’s all in the delivery.)
Heather Chandler:
Come on, it’ll be very.
Heather Chandler:
Well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw. Do
I look like Mother Teresa?
Brad: Save the speeches for Malcolm X. I just want
to get laid.
Veronica Sawyer: Betty Finn was a true friend and I sold her
out for a bunch of Swatch dogs and Diet Coke heads.
Heather Chandler:
I got paid in puke.
Veronica Sawyer: Lick it up, baby. Lick. It. Up.
Student: Did you hear? Schools cancelled today cause
Kurt and Ram killed themselves in a repressed homosexual suicide pact.
Heather Chandler:
God, Veronica. My afterlife is so boring.
If I have to sing Kumbaya one more time…
Veronica Sawyer: Hey mom, why so tense?
JD: Let’s face it, the only place different
social types can genuinely get along with each other is in heaven.
Ah, yes. The ending. Waters was and is very critical of the
studio-mandated climax, commenting that the picture is “building to an ending it doesn’t get” (the picture is much more of
a “straight” thriller in its final act – meaning some of the contrivance, such as
JD arriving in Veronica’s room at the moment she is playing dead and then having
him helpfully spill the beans about his grand plan, plays more glaringly than
it would otherwise – but I don’t
necessarily agree that merits an apocalyptic finale). In the original
screenplay, Veronica blows herself and the school up, having killed JD, and
there’s a subsequent prom in heaven. Here, Veronica takes charge, announcing “Heather, my love, there’s a new sheriff in
town” before making a movie date with wheelchair-bound Martha.
Mills attests “This
conventional reconversion to virtue finish is a typical 1980s loss of nerve”
and certainly, that’s true of New World, vetoing Waters’ take on the absurd
grounds it would encourage teenage suicide. But for me, it would only
dissatisfy if the result were a bad
ending. The exploding JD, Jesus Christ posing, faulty timer interrupting his cool
moment, and lighting Veronica’s cigarette as he blows (echoing his earlier
smoking off her glowing palm), set to David Newman’s sublime score, is a great,
supremely satisfying scene (Newman hasn’t composed a better score, all
gorgeous, woozy, dreamy synths complementing Lehmann’s stylish, poppy, slo-mo
direction; DP Francis Kenny has since lensed Nicolas Roeg’s Cold Heaven and all five seasons of Justified).
And Que Sera Sera
bookends the picture beautifully; indeed, there are a number of neat, clever
gestures here. The picture’s first encounter between Veronica and JD finds her
asking the lunchtime poll question, notably revolving around death and the end
of the world (“You inherit five million
dollars the same day aliens land on earth and say they’re going to blow it up
in two days. What do you do?”) Here, in their last moment together, JD
rejoinders by asking “Now that you’re
dead, what are you going to do with your life? Blow up all the schools?”
Yes, the high school explosion notion is big and makes a
mark (school was society), but it
bears noting that it’s a derivative ending, of If… amongst others, and I’m not sure the heaven coda would have
really landed as intended (notably, the Eskimo dream sequence, funny as it is,
is less impactful for the surrounding material being heightened anyway). And
anyway, one might posit that Veronica’s nicer (less Republican?) rule only
superficially changes anything. Like all leaders, she has calculation and
murder in her veins. We’re not really buying her quiet life with Betty and
Martha.
You can call it uneven (Kael), or you can look at it in
terms of trapping one into sympathising with someone who has done terrible
things and yet gets off scott-free. High school goes on, and most minds remain
oblivious. Yes, the ending’s weak if you want a movie where “justice” is blatantly
served, but it never felt to me that Waters’ ending (obviously, I don’t have
the option of putting it to the test) would have made any marked difference,
except maybe through the thought that I’d seen such spirited nihilism elsewhere
– that kind of ending – so it maybe
wasn’t that rebellious after all.
Certainly, Waters didn’t think Veronica went on to become a
good girl. Ryder has always pressed for a sequel, but the furthest Waters went to
placate her was suggesting an off-the-cuff premise in which she works for a
senator (Meryl Streep) and ends up assassinating the President (which sounds
great, actually), some also suggesting a Force-ghost-style JD haunting her
movements (shades of Mr. Robot there).
Whether it ever happens – and it gets less or more likely with each passing
day, given the unlikely vehicles that are currently getting exhumed, and there’s
also the forthcoming TV anthology series – it would be great to get this team back
together for something else, not in the obligatory Fierce Creatures sense but with something Waters has been genuinely
inspired to write.
So yeah, you can see the ending as a flaw, but almost every
cult movie has a flaw. In no way does it prevent Heathers from continuing to stand out; it doesn’t get old. Hughes’ teen
movies are now charming for their vintage, but Heathers’ bile is as fresh and merciless as ever it was. Colour me
impressed.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.