I recently rented Heathers, a film I had not seen in at least a decade. I liked it when it first came out, mainly because I was fresh out of high school (and the wounds from the experience were still raw), and it had a dark sense of humor that was a deliberate slap in the face to all those cloyingly cutsey John Hughes-type flicks of the 80s. But when I saw it this weekend, I was disappointed. It’s aged badly.
First of all, there’s the bad 80s clothes & hairstyles. Horribly ugly in & of themselves, but impossibly extravagant for real high school kids to pull off. (No one in MY school wore shoulder-pads, at any rate.)
Second of all, it was much easier swallowing Christian Slater’s hackneyed “Jack Nicholson” routine the first time around. When I first saw the film, he was an unknown actor, and it seemed appropriate that a high school ‘cool guy’-poser would be aping Nicholson. Then, Slater went onto a middling career of acting ‘like’ Nicholson in movie after movie. The shtick wore thin quick.
Third of all, it isn’t nearly as nasty as I remembered it. It probably seemed more scathing coming off a decade with “Cosby Show” and “Full House”, but seeing it post-“Seinfeld” and “South Park”, it’s edge seems duller. The bad kids all get what’s coming to them, Veronica makes friends with Martha Dumptruck in the end, having learned a Very Important Message. Awwwww.
That said, there are two moments that still have a shrewd bite to them:
- Heather (Shannon Doherty) mocking Martha Dumptruck’s attempted suicide
and
- This exchange:
Veronica: Why can’t you adults treat us kids like normal people?
Veronica’s mother: Well little miss ‘voice-of-a-generation’, how do you think adults treat each other? Usually when teenagers complain that they want to be treated like adults, it’s when we ARE treating you like adults!"
Anyway, what struck me worst of all, the point that ruined watching the film for me, was that looking back, I can’t ever recall a ‘power clique’ like the Heathers in this film. Yes, my high school had cliques (jocks, druggies, etc.), but there was no pecking order as depicted in this film. Druggies hung out with druggies, jocks hung out with jocks, etc., etc., and each group pretty much ignored the others. No particular group was ‘in charge’ and nobody was ‘the popular kid’ whom EVERYONE wanted to know, or be like. In fact, if any trio of girls tried lording over my high school the way that Heather, Heather & Heather did, they’d simply be viscously mocked. No matter how good looking they were. I don’t know why I overlooked this before, but it really bothered me as I watched the film last this weekend.
Much to my surprise, this film actually more closely resembled the John Hughes films it supposedly mocks than any more contemporary cynically-spirited put-down film.
It kind of reminded me of the time that I caught a few episodes of “Buck Rogers” on the Sci-Fi channel and realized to my horror that the show really was as godawful stupid as my father decried it was back in the day. Only more so, because I had actually held some regard for “Heathers.”
