The Hip Pocket #26: HEATHERS

When you talk about films you couldn't make today, this is at the top of the list

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

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Heathers
Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, Shannen Doherty, Lisanne Falk, Kim Walker, Penelope Milford, Glenn Shadix, Lance Fenton, Patrick Labyorteaux, Jeremy Applegate, Jon Shear, Carrie Lynn, Phill Lewis, Renée Estevez, John Zarchen, Sherrie Wills, Curtiss Marlowe, Andrew Benne, Kevin Hardesty, John Richman, Bess Meyer, Jennifer Rhodes, William Cort, Larry Cox, Kent Stoddard, John Ingle, Stuart Mabray, Betty Ramey, Aaron Mendelsohn, Kirk Scott, Mark Bringelson, Chuck Lafont, Christie Mellor, Mark Carlton, James “Poorman” Trenton, Adrian Drake
cinematography by Francis Kenny
music by David Newman
screenplay by Daniel Waters
produced by Denise Di Novi
directed by Michael Lehmann
Rated R
1 hr 43 mins

A teenage girl and her new boyfriend take dark revenge against the bullies who rule their high school.

“I love my dead gay son!”

I remember laughing so hard at that anguished cry during my first viewing of the jet-black comedy Heathers that someone in front of me turned around to look at me like I had called their mother an asshole.

Then, a moment later, a little girl turned around to glare at Veronica (Winona Ryder) and J.D. (Christian Slater), tears on her face, making both of them feel like assholes for laughing as well. And at that moment, I knew that Michael Lehmann and Daniel Waters were absolutely on the right side of the very difficult jokes they make in the film. It’s a film that is gleeful about pushing the envelope to the point where it shreds, and it makes plenty of missteps, but it is also plotted tightly, unfolding with a sort of dreamy inevitability. It is bratty and rude and ham-handed at times, and it is, without a doubt, one of the most scathingly honest reflections of teenage angst ever captured on film.

Right now, I’m watching my first teenager snap slowly into focus, and it’s a nightmare. It feels like someone’s pranking me. This person I’ve known for over a decade, who I’ve watched develop little by little, suddenly took a left turn and now I’m not exactly sure how to talk to him or what’s going on inside of him. When I say “it’s a nightmare,” I am exaggerating, of course, and I am aware that it is a cycle that my own parents went through. They laugh when I talk about what I’m experiencing with Toshi. It’s one of those moments that makes you recontextualize everything. You realize what your parents were thinking and feeling while you were going through things as a teenager, and it’s sort of mind-blowing.

What I remember about being Toshi’s age was that everything I was feeling was SO IMPORTANT and everyone was SO STUPID and I was SO MISUNDERSTOOD, and it all felt like the end of the world at every single moment. Part of that was driven by the pop culture I ingested, and I think one of the reasons my parents were able to forgive me for my insanity in a way that their own parents were not prepared to forgive them is because they were the first generation of post-war American teenagers. They invented teenage angst. My generation just took their generation’s invention and fine-tuned it, weaponizing it into movies and music that told us that we weren’t crazy, our parents were. And then our generation passed it down to the next, and they’re doing it their own way, making us crazy all over again. Heathers came at a moment when the second-generation teenage programming was just coming to an end. John Hughes had moved on to grown-ups, Patrick Dempsey had stopped chasing older women, and there was already a new Karate Kid.

It does not surprise me that Heathers remains far from a universally beloved classic. Determined to obliterate whatever the outer limits of acceptable darkness were, the film is what happens when the worst instincts of every high school movie get cranked up to high and then allowed to metastasize into something meaner and uglier than even the meanest and ugliest. There were plenty of films that tried to emulate the language of the John Hughes films, but Heathers feels like the first film that truly dared to hold up a funhouse mirror to them and say, “This version of the teenage experience you’re buying into is toxic and phony and it will lead to nothing good.” It was honest because it was surreal, and it was abrasive because it was unafraid. Heathers had nothing to lose, and because of that, it felt like anything could happen from moment to moment. Daniel Waters wrote a script that is determined to shock you, no matter what, and perhaps the best thing about his collaboration with Michael Lehmann is the way their sensibilities seem to push against each other, rather than meshing perfectly. There’s something arch and ridiculous about some of Lehmann’s staging and his choices in production design that is not necessarily a part of what Waters wrote. It’s a big choice, and it’s because of that choice that so much of the movie’s most scathing moments manage to be palatable in any way.