"My teenage angst bullshit now has a body count" —Michael Lehmann
1988. An era of quirky and adorable high school feel-good movies is wrapping up. Molly Ringwald is the darling of teenage America. “Don’t You Forget About Me” is firmly etched into the mind of every good American, and everyone wants to be Ferris Bueller. The high school tropes have been rehashed in a seemingly endless cycle, and then just as formulaically broken down in a very Kumbaya-we-are-all-one-family way on the silver screen. A new film is introduced to the American public: a film complete with mean girls, a bad boy in love, showdowns in the cafeteria, annoying teachers, white-bread suburban parents who don’t get anything, and multiple murders. Heathers.
"Heathers", Michael Lehmann’s late eighties high school flick, brought to life what all high school movies were too afraid to give us. It blatantly rejected Molly Ringwald’s soft, pretty, smart-but-not-threatening, wholesome teenage girls. Instead, these teenage girls are into alcohol, blowjobs, and violence. Winona Ryder plays Veronica, a member of her high school’s ruling clique, The Heathers. Veronica has her misgivings about her besties who mercilessly tease her childhood best friend and try to force her into hooking up with random college guys, and finds the ultimate rebellion when the bad boy J.D. comes to town and starts bumping off her buddies. The combination of fun high school drama and macabre murders proved to be enough to make "Heathers" an enduring cult classic.
"Heathers" is one of those wonderfully cathartic movies that gets us cheering for the bad guys. Veronica is instrumental in allowing the audience to enjoy the brutal deaths of teenagers, as she, for the most part, rejects J.D.’s murderous nature. Through Veronica, a neutral character that seems borderline sane, the audience is able to enjoy the black comedy without feeling as though they are violating the social construct by cheering on murder. Of course, this is exactly what we’re doing. While most human beings have some instinctive urges to help our fellow man, hatred and competition are also embedded in our basic natures. Society correctly dictates that it is unacceptable to murder others based on petty personal grievances, so most of us bury our feelings of extreme hostility and feel deeply uncomfortable when we are made to address that sometimes we ourselves feel like harming or even killing others. Because of this, outlets that provide us a way to indulge our violent natures free of guilt provide a tremendously satisfying release. A prime example of one such outlet is comedy.
Dark comedies like "Heathers" present an audience with a form of wish fulfillment for things we don’t even allow ourselves to consciously wish for. Humor clouds the true purpose of the film, which is to indulge a carnal wish for retribution, and hides it from us just enough to allow us to enjoy the benefits of indulging pent-up emotions without feeling the guilt that would otherwise accompany that indulgence. I’m sure that, as a sixth grader, there were moments when I personally desired the demise of the girl in my class who told everyone that I was a lesbian (when we all barely knew but that was but knew that it was basically evil) and the group of boys that teased me for looking sick (because I recently recovered from meningitis) and made me cry so hard that I was sent home. I wish I’d known about films like "Heathers" so that I could experience some of the satisfaction that getting rid of awful people would present without any of the messy bloodstains or prisons or being severely mentally disturbed. These are perhaps the best films, the films that allow us to indulge illicit parts of our personalities with none of the less fun complications.
