Veronica Sawyer hates her friends, her bitchy, rich and popular friends: Heather Duke, Heather McNamara, and Heather Chandler. The Heathers, with Veronica's help, make life at Westerburgh high a pain for anyone unfortunate enough to go there. After Veronica meets J.D., though, things begin to change.

"Heathers" is a dark, dark comedy. Dark. Very dark. But funny and worth your time. Seminal, even. If you've ever heard the line "I love my dead gay son!" or "Fuck me gently with a chain-saw," or the phrase "Diet-Cokeheads" or if you've ever heard the word "very" used as an adjective rather than an adverb, "Heathers" is the font from which those things spring.

If you've ever planned on watching "Heathers" but for some reason haven't gotten around to it, rent it right now and stop reading until after you do, because I'm going to spoil it to talk about some aspects of the plot and, frankly, they're better if they take you by surprise. If you don't plan on watching, then read on. An analysis follows the jump.

//

Seriously, don't read the following if you're going to watch the movie. I'm very interested in your reactions.

//

Another line you may've heard from "Heathers": "It lacks subtlety, sure, but so does blowing up a whole school." See, after Veronica falls in with J.D. (after J.D. 'accidentally' kills the lead-Heather and 'tricks' Veronica into killing two football-playing assholes and making all three deaths look like suicides which leads to 'suicide'-committer's subsequent glorification, a reaction to the teen-suicide concern of the Eighties--is "Eighties" supposed to get a capital letter there? Seems like it should--and that's basically the plot of the movie with a dose of dark hilarity tossed in on top) J.D.'s end game slowly unfolds as a plot to blow up the school during a big rally and make it look like a mass-suicide. (J.D.'s pompous speech about how and why he's doing it, during the boiler-room stand-off scene, is priceless.) 

At this point, the movie should sound thoroughly ridiculous, because, well, it is. And that's it's point. It's a send up of the entire teen-film genre, particularly a response to the John Hughes toothlessness of the teen-film in the 80's. The writer and director and actors of "Heathers" all understood that the deep scars left by high school can't be solved by lighting up during Saturday detention and having deep conversations about how everybody's fucked up. Nope, when dealing with beasts like the Heathers, more drastic measures have to be taken.

Anyway, what strikes me as interesting is how, to my perspective, the school-bombing plot immediately struck me as horrendous. Horrible, vile, terrible, no-good and very bad. And that's partially because of the serious, Nicholson-like, unhinged quality that the young Christian Slater brings to the role of J.D., but more importantly because I think there's a big gap between when kids had fantasies in the 1980s of blowing up their schools and today. Or, at least, between them and me... maybe it's swung back the other way again. But for me, and I'm going to wager, for us, there's one big reason that plotting to blow up your school strikes such a resonant, unseemly chord. And that's going to be Columbine.

(Some of you may not recall that Columbine would've been much worse if the killers' propane-tank bombs would have detonated. This detail has always stuck with me, at least.)

Which brings up the whole issue of context in the enjoyment of art. I can still, intellectually, understand and enjoy "Heathers" and understand and appreciate that destroying your school--and those assholes inside of it--is a common outsider fantasy, but every time I think about J.D. in his big black coat stalking the empty halls and coldly planting bombs it gives me shivers. Bad shivers.

But other than that, "Heathers" is a tremendous film and I think I'm going to buy it and put it in my collection. I just may never watch the last ten minutes again.

Watching it you can also start to get a sense of where "Donnie Darko" got it's strange visual grammar, particularly in the early sequences of that film (which always seemed, to me, somewhat out of place with the rest of it). They always seemed "teen movie but a little off" to me, and I think "Heathers," as the progenitor of the genre, is owed a lot by "...Darko."

Anyway, if you've seen it, what do you think? If you saw it before Columbine, what did you think then? How about now? Am I the only one affected in this way? Am I just, as adults have always claimed, a little sensitive?