Stop tormenting me with your bad-boy attitude and your messy rocker hair. And your insistence upon being mostly or entirely shirtless is really making my life difficult. So if you would be so kind, please desist in the making of movies that fit the aforementioned mold.
Many thanks,
Me.
PS: I have no idea how to play croquet, nevermind strip croquet, but now I want to learn. Asshole.
Ok, so I spent half of the movie drooling and hating on Winona Ryder. But that's not the only reason I liked Heathers. Allow me to give you a little insight into my high school experience.
Our "Heathers" were actually combined into one officious bitch named Catherine. When she wasn't mocking the "unpopular" girls for their weight, looks, or lack of Gucci accessories, she was busy offending everyone by proclaiming, "Chill out. I've got peeps in the city, too," on September 11. (My dad worked in the city, and our history teacher was the first one to confirm what had happened. We were in the same class, and for the first time in my life, I broke down in school. Needless to say, the teacher told her to shut up when she complained that I called her an officious bitch.) She was followed by Ynette and -get this- Heather, and every week, they had a new "Veronica". She had to be replaced weekly, because she would always burn out. I think it was the overexposure to lip gloss and hair bleach. That, or they OD'd on bitchery and ran screaming into the night.
Our Kurt and Ram were Robby and Joe. While we didn't have cows to tip, they did take great delight in getting hammered at house parties and sleeping with whatever slutty hot chick would do it. Like Kurt and Ram, they picked on just about everyone, calling geeks "fags" and giving chubby girls nicknames akin to "Dumptruck".
We had the geeks, the rest of the jocks, the nice girls who were liked by the underlings of the school, and even the crazy, hippie-teacher. In our case, however, our hippie teacher was intelligent about getting us to open up and share our feelings. She made us write god-awful poetry and share it with the class...and then had a tendency to send you on down to the guidance office if it offered even the slightest hint of harm, be it self or otherwise.
And then we had our JD. (Apologies for my comment in class; dropping the f-bomb really wasn't necessary, but it kinda slipped on out there.) Our JD was Ryan, and he was a chickenshit little punk, with his closest-thing-to-a-trenchcoat-that-the-school-allowed, his combat boots, and his odd little habit of leering at the girl who was the subject of his interest.
As I mentioned in class, I would have gone along with the real JD's plan. Granted, there were some that I would have tried to save, as my school did have people who were worth redeeming. The "nice popular" girls, who were *actually* popular because they were nice, the better musicians, and the outcasts who were only outcasts because they didn't own a Tiffany bracelet or drive a Mustang. But JD, though clearly unhinged, also had a great deal of charisma. As he said, Veronica believed him about the bullets because she wanted to. He made her want to, but I don't think that even she realized that.
When Ryan suggested that we should try to blow up the school, however, he was completely shut down with a simple, "What, are you stupid? I am not committing a felony on your behalf, and you know that you're not smart enough to do it without me." (It was true, sadly. Boy was a nincompoop.)
So JD manages to convince Veronica to take one semi-accidental murder and make it look like a suicide. It should have ended there. After all, the head bitch was gone, and Veronica was out from under her heel, just like she had wanted. But the paté must have gotten to her brain, as she agreed to go through with another faked suicide. But then again, JD is trying to start a revolution; he wants to change the way society works. It's a flawed system, and it needs to be fixed. What better way to fix something than to start all over? To wipe the slate clean and try again? ("I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.")
Ultimately, JD's plan fails, and Veronica takes over as head bitch. And she starts being nice to Dumptruck. We discussed the thought that the system would still be the same; there would still be the best clique in the school, and it would be led by Veronica. But hang on, real life doesn't work like that. Veronica has the scrunchee. That's good and well, but what's to say that the last remaining Heathers don't just find another obscene symbol of power? Does anyone really think that in a school where jocks get away with beating the crap out of people that the best clique is going to include someone like Dumptruck? I call shenanigans. The Heathers are just going to step up and be the leaders again, and rather than Veronica being their little lackey, she's going to be the outcast, just like Betty Finn.
And even though JD was a psychopath who wanted to blow up a few hundred teenagers, we want to love him. We want him to be the hero. We need him to be the hero. He's the "black horse", the villain with the heart of gold, the rebel that falls for the girl and makes the girl fall for him despite his being an outsider. I was so desperately hoping that he would be the Will Scarlet character from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I just wanted him to be the bad guy who turns around and is the good guy in the end. But he couldn't be. The only thing that could change, aside from his locker combo, was him. Schools will reflect society and society will remain the same, with the nice guys finishing last and the cream rising to the top - along with the scum.
Throughout the movie, particularly in the suicide scenes, I thought the happenings were merely a figment of Veronica's imagination. She had hoped for Heather's death, written about it in her diary, and gone to sleep. After she falls asleep, the rebel pops into her window and uses a strangely poetic phrase to explain his entrance. They play strip croquet and end up killing Heather. The camera angles and the colors made me think that it was all a dream, and that Veronica would wake up at the end, shake her head, and end up back in the same old rut. When the jocks were killed, I expected the same thing. The only time that I was right about the whole dream-sequence was for the actual dream-sequence...which I half thought was some sort of delusion brought on by the stress of the second Heather's actual suicide that Veronica had actually failed to stop, despite the fact that we saw her stop it.
One of my classmates mentioned that it seemed like JD might be an alter-ego for Veronica; that he was a personality she created to do the horrible things she wanted to do without actually having performed the deeds herself.
Ok, I was going somewhere with that, but it's closing in on 1am, and my brain is beginning to shut down. I shall have to come back to this at a later time.
Wow you really took this movie and laid everything out. I liked everything that you talked about. What did you think about the idea of JD being her alter ego? (That was my idea)
ReplyDeleteI was expecting her to wake up and have the entire movie and the suicides be a bad dream! And then she would go to school the next morning and find out it was "let's bomb the school day"... that would've justified the storyline of this movie to me. But as it is, it's just a bunch of random stuff thrown together with some murders and irreverent church scenes.
ReplyDeleteI also had no idea that the mass suicide pact was unknown to the student body; I thought they were in on it. Whoops!
What did you think about the media or parents in this film?
Amanda - I hadn't thought about it at all until you mentioned it, and to be honest, I'm not really sure what I think of it. It's certainly plausible, but I think she waffles too much for it to be truth. Her "true" self sleeping with her alter-ego is a little too weird for me, too.
ReplyDeleteChristina - I think the parents were portrayed exactly as many teenagers see them: they're oblivious to everything, they either overreact or underreact, and are utterly useless. I thought that the portrayal of the media was oddly intelligent in contrast. It's shown as a complete circus, which is how we might look at it now. But in high school, didn't we all want to be in the midst of that?
We definitely try to latch onto JD as some sort of hero. He just generally seems crafty through most of the movie and is going against a shit social system. As the audience, we can see it's shit, and while we are powerless to alter it, JD comes along trying to. Enter heroic characteristics. Turns out, he's a bit of a loon himself, and he pisses all over the idea of him as hero, but does us all a favor of ridding ourselves of him.
ReplyDeleteI have a soft spot for JD too. We also had one in high school. (He found me recently on fb, in fact. He's still kind of nuts). And your story is, as always, fun. But what's not clear in your analysis is whether JD is actually some kind of revolutionary trying to change society, or a sociopath. In general, you can't be both.
ReplyDeleteAlso, what did you think of the reading?
I wasn't sure if JD was a revolutionary or a sociopath. There were certainly some moments when I thought that his plans were brilliant, but his ultimate plan was completely nuts. The original plan of drain cleaner shouldn't have killed Heather- it should have burned the hell out of her throat and made her violently ill, but her death wasn't guaranteed. Looking back, I'm wondering if that really was an accident, and he realized that he couldn't turn back. Again, I'm hoping that he's not just a crazy. It's very likely that his plan was to kill her from the get-go, but again, I don't want to believe it.
ReplyDeleteI HATED the reading. I had to put it down a couple of times. It was pretty obvious that the author took the movie far too seriously and just didn't *get* it. I thought that the movie had a pretty good grasp on the lack of humor in teen suicide, but also showed the kind of chaos that can ensue in a school when things go wrong. It's a strong exaggeration, but I think the author of the article took it as a serious commentary on teen suicide and didn't take the time to consider that it wasn't the crisis he assumed.