Michael Lehmann's Heathers

Michael Lehmann’s black murder comedy, Heathers, was a scathing criticism of high school life and a complete rebuff of the optimistic, lighthearted teen film that John Hughes made so popular during the 1980’s. The timeless issues that Lehmann addresses have allowed this film to reach a cult status. The story centers around Veronica Sawyer, former invisible girl, who had recently become a member of Westerburg High’s ruling clique, the Heathers. When JD, the school’s dark horse, comes into the picture, Veronica finds in him someone who shares her dislike for the Heathers and how they use their power. Under his influence, Veronica starts aiding in the murders of her cruel, popular classmates and pulling them off as suicides. Unfortunately the only things this accomplishes are a rise in the popularity of teen suicides, as they become a popular fad and equally cruel replacements of the murdered characters. A cynical parody of the John Hughes’ teen film, touching on sensitive subjects such as teen suicide, unavailable adult figures, and the overarching pursuit of popularity, Heathers exposed audiences to the black underbelly of adolescence through its use of dark self governing teen characters and postmodern views on conformity.

Like any other classic teen pic, Heathers jumps into an anthropological analysis of the high school pecking order right

from the start. In our first scene of the school we are exposed to the cafeteria, where each table assigns each student to a stereotype - the jocks, the geeks, the delinquents etc. The Heathers, on the other hand, are not sitting at a table at the beginning of the scene. They are standing in the center of the cafeteria, literally presiding over the whole school. As Bailey and Hay point out in Cinema and the Premises of Youth: ‘Teen Films’ and Their Sites in the 1980s and 1990s, “the school [is a] site of intrastudent power dynamics, as opposed to the more conventional authority of the faculty.” The original Heathers clearly depict the elite rulers of the school, sharing not only the same first name, but also the same big hair and dominating shoulder pads. Veronica Waters is the unhappy fourth member of this group, sharing neither their name, nor their fashion sense, nor their hostility towards fellow students. JD encourages this unhappiness to blossom into full-blown hatred and manipulates her into accidentally poisoning Heather Chandler, the main Heather, and framing it as a suicide. With the top Heather gone, the social hierarchy at Westerburg becomes unstable, with even the nerds trying to stand up for themselves in front of the jocks.
Heathers portrays parents, school administration, and law enforcement, as desperately incompetent entities forcing the teenagers they should be mentoring to take charge of their own lives. Everyone is confused during adolescence, an identity crisis driven stage in between naïve childhood and serious adulthood, and the lack of adult agency resulted in a society of youths reliant on each other and their own self-discipline. JD’s relationship with his father takes the idea of kids parenting their parents to the next level. The two perform in a swapped role-play, where JD acts as the concerned father and the dad is the reckless son, deriving sick pleasure from collapsing buildings with bombs and watching people die. JD’s subsequent fondness for destruction is equally a byproduct of his father’s direct influence and a need for revenge for the “accidental” death of his mother during one of the aforementioned bombings. Being raised in an environment where murder was considered an appropriate course of action, and having a father-son relationship this disheveled, almost justifies JD’s extreme state of emotional turmoil and psychopathic behaviors.
Veronica’s parents, too, are completely self-absorbed and happily oblivious to their child’s problems. Veronica engages in quick, petty banter at the dinner table with them, over spy novels and cigarettes, which emphasized just how unattached they are from her life if this is the only conversation they can partake in. Later on in the film, their tones seem to stay the same whether they were talking about teen suicide or Veronica’s favorite pâté. Their nonchalant attitude towards Heather’s death is equally as alarming as JD’s father’s obsession with explosives. Even more stunning, is the flippant manner in which they address the potential suicide of their own daughter after hearing some rumors from JD.
The school administration is just as absent and stereotypically unattached as the parents. The teachers were all very ignorant in their handling of the students’ deaths, essentially only using these tragic events to capitalize on the media attention the school got. The “hippy” teacher even tried to exploit the deaths for group bonding rituals among the students. This same teacher goes on to say, “Whether to kill yourself or not is one of the most important decisions a teenager can make.” While this is clearly not a decision one should have to make ever, to a growing brain this can be very confusing when coming from someone who is supposed to be an authoritative figure. The law enforcement figures, too, are not exposed from a good light. The two policemen who found the dead football players were almost too busy smoking marijuana to notice the gunshot sounds. When they do find the dead bodies, no effort goes into trying to see if the deaths were really suicides. Of course after seeing the bottle of mineral water, the cops assumed that the suicide letters were real, because only homosexuals would be caught dead with such a drink. In the absence of competent parents, or any viable adult figures for that matter, the kids of Westerburg High turned to their peers in hopes of finding some direction. This is exactly how the social hierarchy in this school, and in other high schools portrayed in teen films, became such a governing factor in their lives.
The quest for popularity becomes one of the main reasons for suicide in Heathers.

Heather Chandler kept the rest of the school on such a short leash, that even in the afterlife she influenced everyone’s decisions. Every television program and newspaper is filled with stories about her life, making her even more popular as a depressed teen suicide, than as a Heather. When the hapless overweight outcast Martha Dumptruck attempts to join in on the trend and commit suicide, she fails, and Heather Duke, the replacement Heather, chocks it up to “Just another case of a geek trying to imitate the popular people and failing

miserably.”
Teen suicide, like every other real issue, is boiled down to a joke towards the end of Heathers. But even so, when it’s the popular kids, Ram and Kurt, who were charged with suicide, the school looked forward to it as an excuse to gossip and to skip classes. Suicide was later trivialized even more during Veronica’s dream sequence about Heather Duke’s murder. In her dream, Veronica refuses to write another fake suicide not, but JD retorts, “I’ve got a meaningfully marked up copy of Moby Dick. What else does a good suicide need?”