Heathers: A Fitting Destruction of the Eighties

The first time I attempted to watch Heathers it was in a dormitory common room with eight other people and a girl named Heather trying to force us to enjoy it. We never finished it. Suffice to say, from the moment the shoulderpads entered the scene, it did not go over well -- the group was looking for any reason to condone the film just because it had been so forced upon us.

So, I didn’t quite have the highest expectations returning to this film for class, even from a more critical perspective. But, man, am I glad I got the chance to try it again. This film is so very.

I can’t quite figure out why Heathers seems to scratch an itch that other teen movies like Mean Girls only seem to make me aware of, but it probably has something to do with what Willa Paskin notes in the Vulture.com article: “Heathers doesn’t do heartwarming messages.” More specifically, Paskin notes that when TV shows like Glee are held next to Heathers they feel “like a tour through a Hallmark card factory,” and “even the willfully edgy Mean Girls and Gossip Girl are earnestly committed to portraying socially positive values . . . in an uncomplicated way that Heathers would scoff at.” It’s not that Heathers is more impressive because it’s darker, or because it’s less caring, or because it’s so nihilistic; it’s more impressive because the movie doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is: a parody (and thus a member) of high school dramas that channel morals into the audience either through support or through scorn. Heathers doesn’t “pretend” because it doesn’t wish to mollify the venom in these schools; in fact, it cranks them to a ridiculous point, sharpening the film in the role of parody.

Perhaps Heathers is more satisfying than some of its successors because it has escaped the scrutiny of a contemporary America. Just as Paskin concedes, there is absolutely no way this film would be made today, and even if it were, surely it would not capture such mass appeal. This movie really could only have happened pre-Columbine, pre-9/11, pre-cyberbullies. It is in a safe zone, free from being seen as deplorable. I suppose this line of thought, that Heathers is in a realm of immunity and that even though we’re shocked we still give it great praise, would imply that Heathers acts as a sort of relief to the stifling constraint and a deficient sense of irony in today’s world, which is probably a dangerous thought -- one that I don’t necessarily subscribe to as those three circumstances are truly considerable matters.

In that case, the more interesting question is: why are films like Heathers not remembered as learning experiences to the same degree as other contemporaneous, warmer-and-fuzzier, films like The Breakfast Club? As Paskin asserts, “While you can see some of Heathers influence in modern teen movies, John Hughe’s movies . . . and Beverly Hills 90210 . . . have had a more lasting influence on the ethics, if not the style or basic premise (high school is nasty), of teen-centric entertainments.” Why do we strip the ethics of movies that Hughes creates, but we sometimes forget that nihilistic films like Heathers are cautionary and admonishing, thus promoting similar values? Perhaps we just like our morals spoon-fed to us, or maybe it’s less work, rather than having to sift through the stacks of irony.

How perfect then is the framing of this online article? The article separates the background of the film, it’s targeted demographic, and the analysis of how well the film has aged, into categories that are, what, more manageable? It’s like the concise but separate structure of a scientific study, rather than a uniform article, is more digestible for attention spans that grow evermore evanescent. Yeah, I’m reading into this article too far, as it’s probably not meant to be anything more than quick, accessible, and fun, but it’s so neatly packaged that I can’t help but wonder that, on some level, our impatience and diminishing attention for reading an article might relate to our lesser awareness (or maybe less prioritization) of irony. But here’s hoping that the studious presentation of the brief article is merely irony meant to parallel the rampant polling present in Heathers.

Returning briefly to the popularity given to Hughes’ movies, I do think that Heathers teases, and perhaps even slanders, some elements of the Hughes film. Heathers is a parody in many respects, but one of its chief targets is the peachy, Hughes’ “takeaway.” The icing on this cake, of course, is JD’s final moments. In his badass trench coat, he raises his hands to the sky, in a manner that seems to recall Bender’s cheer in the final frame of the Breakfast Club, and then he explodes.

Yeah, exactly.

Other than that, I’d say Heathers provides a commentary on or takes a jab at any number of themes and narratives that we’ve witnessed this semester, making it a fitting final movie. On one hand, it seems to zap the idealized Small-town America in a fashion similar to Blue Velvet: by taking Bluecollar, Ohio with its stereotypical fanaticism regarding high school football, and it brazenly pokes fun with moments like one father’s, “I love my dead gay son.” Again, you’re not going to see a film like this made any time soon.

On the other hand, the film coincides perfectly with some of our discussions regarding the commodification of images, like we saw in Wall Street. The Heathers are a Corporation. Polling is their business, their shoulderpads and scrunchies are their image. These brands are so prevalent that their families and surroundings must adhere to similar identities. Heather #1 has a grandmother with an entirely red kitchen complete with red accessories, so that the viewer knows the setting belongs to constantly-clad-in-red Heather #1. Similarly, Veronica lives in a house painted in blues and whites. When she sits out on the patio catching up with her parents, her parents’ clothes and her own clothes correspond with the white-and-blue shades behind their shoulders. It is only appropriate that the drainer, that JD and Veronica poison Heather #1 with, is the color blue -- it secures the image of Veronica, and her ownership of the color blue, when she removes her competition.

This was a fantastic movie. One, though older, that has taken the mantle from Mean Girls  as my favorite high-school centric film. I find it fortunate that this movie can still thrive in relative safety, even if it must be taken with a huge grain of salt.

Wall Street: "Deceit Gets Results"

It seems appropriate that we watched Oliver Stone’s Wall Street in addition to Platoon this semester. Stone seems to provide a refreshing dose of realism in what can sometimes feel like a litany of postmodern films with hugely aesthetic focuses and with often tongue-in-cheek irony. Not to say that Wall Street isn’t postmodern or without its own fair share of irony; only, it demonstrates a postmodern world and is not itself a postmodern product (at least not as much as Platoon is on the technical side of the film). That said, in a lot of ways, Wall Street and Platoon parallel one another from anything as simple as the reuse of certain actors and the recycling of character archetypes, to things as thematic as both of Charlie Sheen’s characters struggling between, as Jack Boozer puts it in “Wall Street: the Commodification of Perception,” “two opposing father figures and two distinct sets of values” (93). Platoon rejects the revisionism of Vietnam and Wall Street exposes the dangers and realities of lucrative Wall Street wealth -- neither making a claim for which values are the correct one. For instance, even though Gekko is clearly the antagonist, he is not entirely condemned as evil -- or rather, even after such a condemnation he is still highly admirable like some glorified conservative hero.

Gekko remains this hero, or antihero I suppose, because the values of America, particularly the youth’s, have changed from the values of Carl Fox’s day. Some of Boozer’s most interesting comments were the ones that detailed the diminished patience in the American 80s with its redesigned values. “Carl’s world is the mythological realm of family values America would like to hold on to” but in reality there is much more individualistic motive. “So seductive is Gekko’s approach that we almost forget that father Carl's alternative advice, however ethical, doesn’t answer to Bud’s experience.” Similarly, there is an “overwhelming desire to enter even the bottom rung of the commercial power system.”

While the film may reveal the pitfalls of idealizing such values, it does not seek to dispose of them -- perhaps it even seeks to encourage them, especially the correct use of such values. Obviously, the correct use is that “greed is only good when one can get away with it by passing negative repercussions on to someone else.” Throughout Wall Street there is a “strong association between financial success and virtue.” Even after losing the battle, getting fooled by Bud Fox, Gekko never appears to lose his credibility or the image of his superiority. As Boozer has pointed out, an eighties American society has fostered viewers to appreciate and oblige Gekko’s speeches: “We are smart enough not to buy into the oldest myth running -- love” ; “If you need a friend, get a dog”; “It’s all about the bucks, kid. The rest is conversation.” Gekko never loses our reverence. Even after the film and the viewers have concluded upon his moral depravity, he is still a glorified conservative antihero -- one in which might lead us to ponder: what if we did have that money?”

Speaking of Gekko’s untarnished image, the brunt of Boozer’s observations and Wall Street’s main depictions are those that deal with image. Essentially, in order for one to maintain the right image, the profitable one, one must lose their originality and their identity. “Bud lose[s] any vestige of coherent private self separate from his economic standing.” Furthermore, “The particular discourses and signs of the media come to dominate both the actual event reported and the functional use value of the commodity advertised. The individual finds it nearly impossible to distinguish direct personal experience from mediated images of similar experience.” In this regard, Wall Street portrays some of the core components of postmodernism, namely Jean Baudrillard’s third stage simulacra: a copy that pretends to portray reality but is, in actuality, a copy without any original. Speculative projections of a company’s future worth are represented by numbers and information that people consider representations of a company’s actual worth. As Boozer channels Baudrillard: “free-floating signs… have increasingly replaced the initial social relations they purport to represent.”

In this sense, the ending of Wall Street either bothers me or it intrigues me. If Bud Fox is a representation  with a long gone original identity, and his resumption or rediscovery of his identity in the last act is due to the need for a conventional ending, then this seems to be an inconsistency in the film’s portrayal of postmodernism, and I am bothered. But, if Bud Fox’s relinquishment of the images of himself and of the insubstantial signifiers he consists of, and he is subsequently reassuming his old identity shaped by his father’s ethical values, then I am intrigued because now this film that has only depicted postmodern values has chosen to reject those values -- as if the film wishes to cast away postmodernism and it yearns for a real and tangible truth.