One of my girlfriends at university in the early nineties had a VHS of this film lying around her flat and I thought at the time that it was a masterpiece. Watching it tonight, for the first time in a decade, it seems a little clunky, desperately contrived, utterly tasteless and, well, incredibly 1980s.
The 1980s had a really unpleasant sterile Nietzchian undercurrent bubbling through them, and this film is a product of that. The Christian Slater character, with his Jack Nicholson voice and Peter Falk posture, spouts inconclusive Reader's Digest/Mein Kampf aphorisms as if they seal the argument and then kills people. The satire rests upon the adults all being idiots and the children all being competitive vampiric brutes, except for the former best friend and the ostracised victim of body fascism, who wait around to prove that Winona Ryder's character has a soul by being implausibly forgiving to her.
The script's clumsiness even leads it into the same homophobia which it wants to satirise. It really is a poor effort.
So why did it look so cool when it was new? Well, Christian Slater certainly had an impact, although I seem to remember my girlfriend commenting that anyone who said "Greetings and salutations" was advertising himself as a dick-head. The colour coding, and stylization, instead of looking random, speed freaky and anally retentive, looked "Very" when MTV still seemed like a good idea, and...oh yes: this is the main reason...
There had been high school shootings before then; of course there had; Boomtown Rats wrote a song about one that was a huge hit in the 80s. However, they'd managed to sweep the idea under the carpet to an extent that became impossible pretty soon after this film was made. So, when Heathers was released, the idea of pulling out a huge gun and pointing it in the face of people who annoyed you still seemed pretty cool: "Radical", but cool.
That's what this film is really: the adolescent dream we all have of employing violence to wipe away our teen angst. Thank God, most of us grow up, accept that problem solving is a complex but rewarding part of life and look back on Heathers as a nasty, self-congratulating piece of nihilistic smugness. Most of us.
The 1980s had a really unpleasant sterile Nietzchian undercurrent bubbling through them, and this film is a product of that. The Christian Slater character, with his Jack Nicholson voice and Peter Falk posture, spouts inconclusive Reader's Digest/Mein Kampf aphorisms as if they seal the argument and then kills people. The satire rests upon the adults all being idiots and the children all being competitive vampiric brutes, except for the former best friend and the ostracised victim of body fascism, who wait around to prove that Winona Ryder's character has a soul by being implausibly forgiving to her.
The script's clumsiness even leads it into the same homophobia which it wants to satirise. It really is a poor effort.
So why did it look so cool when it was new? Well, Christian Slater certainly had an impact, although I seem to remember my girlfriend commenting that anyone who said "Greetings and salutations" was advertising himself as a dick-head. The colour coding, and stylization, instead of looking random, speed freaky and anally retentive, looked "Very" when MTV still seemed like a good idea, and...oh yes: this is the main reason...
There had been high school shootings before then; of course there had; Boomtown Rats wrote a song about one that was a huge hit in the 80s. However, they'd managed to sweep the idea under the carpet to an extent that became impossible pretty soon after this film was made. So, when Heathers was released, the idea of pulling out a huge gun and pointing it in the face of people who annoyed you still seemed pretty cool: "Radical", but cool.
That's what this film is really: the adolescent dream we all have of employing violence to wipe away our teen angst. Thank God, most of us grow up, accept that problem solving is a complex but rewarding part of life and look back on Heathers as a nasty, self-congratulating piece of nihilistic smugness. Most of us.