[You might want to read the more general review of Ryder’s career at the end of this entry before reading about Heathers. Also, this admittedly long entry is not meant to be predominantly negatively critical of Heathers. Also, production problems may cause the loss of some between-paragraph line breaks.]
The way a theme—or basis for a theme—for one of my blog entries comes up can sometimes be in the most accidental way; but this could end up heralding an important, complex discussion that can only be approached, at first, indirectly.
I made reference to Winona Ryder in my review of Black Swan (see February 23 blog entry), and not that I lacked for some general wish to write on her more, I didn’t expect to address her much. I had thought to review Girl, Interrupted, but from the perspective of “young females’ psychological odysseys.” That would have been a good movie choice, but I couldn’t see the movie before I resolved to get the blog entry out.
One “Winona-oriented” idea I had back in January when I first saw Black Swan was that her being cast as a broken-down old ballerina almost seemed a bit of a joke on her in terms of her career—a joke that she could well have been in on. I didn’t mean this to be crass or unsympathetic to her. Very much more recently, I happened to see a DVD of Heathers at a library where I picked up two other DVDs that I was more intent on working with. And I thought I could review Heathers and Girl, Interrupted as a pair, with a thematic bridge between them.
It turned out a number of vexations, more or less, came up, but also ideas for how to thematically organize this. The ideas are: (1) changing times regarding how you, and audiences at large, view an “old” movie; (2) Ryder’s own career as rather unusual; and (3) the issue of suicide and psychological trouble, which of course is germane to my earlier “female odysseys” blog entry.
You could add to this (4) how marketing, social mores, and personal inclinations shape how receptive you are to a movie’s story/angle and the star’s story/angle, and also how marketing for a movie changes over years. It is not insignificant that Heathers, now sold by Anchor Bay Entertainment (since the film’s producing studio, New World Pictures, went out of business just as it was released in 1989), comes with no less than two “documentaries” of comments by its participants, made about eight years apart, both of which seem in part ways to mollify those parents who may be concerned about what their children are watching with this film.
My background as to knowing about Heathers over the years
So I guess I can start here: I remember seeing Heathers when it first came out. It was hailed by Time magazine, as I recall, as rather intelligent and edgy; and as a satirical look at high school, it certainly wasn’t of the John Hughes ilk, which seemed knowing about teens’ views but also didn’t have an arch attitude toward them, or a biting agenda toward winnowing out pretensions among teens and their immediate adult “preceptors.” And for years I’ve thought of Ryder’s career as really having taken off with Heathers (a view that has seemed echoed by media commentators). Moreover, I retained a positive view of her, as if she portrayed a winning character despite all the vinegar of the movie.
Coming much more to present day, when Mean Girls (2004) was released, which is mainly noted as one of the more esteemed features that starred Lindsay Lohan, I thought it was a sort of watered down version of Heathers, at least insofar as the story revolved around a clique/trio of high-and-mighty princesses, who is joined by a more decent young woman (Lohan in the later movie, Ryder in the earlier) who at first seems to want to be like them, but in a crisis of conscience draws further away from them as she becomes more her own person, or some such thing. That boils down the plot a lot to something both movies have in common.
So that is how Heathers has stuck in my mind—and it seemed hard to believe it had been more than 20 years since it was released.
In the meantime, Winona Ryder has had a not-negligible career—and her share of personal troubles: regarding the latter, this past winter, when working on my review of Black Swan, I had in mind some sensational news story of her being arrested for shoplifting and, intrinsically involved with this, her engaging in substance abuse—which turned out to be in 2001.
All this was background to my resolving to look these two movies over, and frankly, I became less warm to dealing with Heathers—though I’d looked at the two DVD documentaries in the 2008 version as preparation. Turns out, it’s become a cult film, apparently a favorite of modern high schoolers, though originally it wasn’t a great hit with the high school age group when first released. And I felt that the whole world of high school sensibilities would be a little hard for this old man, going through career travails, to get his head around…and then it became evident I could approach this from the perspective of Ryder’s own experience with depression (which I found information on in her Wikipedia article), and the issue (more friendly to me) of depression as I’ve addressed it in more recent items such as in my Black Swan review.
If you’ll indulge one last “background” note: In preparing an edition (for impending release) of my novel The Folder Hunt, which I didn’t really do much with since about 1987, there are two things to note that are germane to assessing Heathers as times have changed since its release. First, I am struck by the somewhat “untoward” or histrionic way the issue of despair is handled in Folder Hunt. This is duly commented on in editorial notes I include with it; partly it reflects a change in my attitude and aims (and maturity) as a writer; meanwhile, the issue of a similar violence that seems to undercut the better sides of a work—when it comes to Heathers—will be revisited when I discuss the character of J.D.
Second, more broadly speaking, when I set out to write novels in the 1980s, I was inclined to write satire about peers. When I left high school in 1980, I think I was inclined to write about excesses among high school peers, but this project faded as schoolwork commanded my time in late high school and college. Meanwhile, I hadn’t had quite the brutal experiences in high school that are reflected in talk about “scars” from high school remarked on by Ryder, costar Shannen Doherty, and screenwriter Daniel Waters in the Heathers DVD commentaries. But when I left college, I was definitely resolved to write a satire of the excesses to which I was subjected or witness, or by which I was victimized, in college, which in retrospect were my first experiences of having my very rights trampled, my rights to life choices questioned in so brutal a way—the sort of thing I didn’t encounter in high school, and which I think are not typical of high school, then or now.
It’s a little beside the point whether high school as material for satire reflects on the more youthful nature of the person wanting to produce the satire, as opposed to satire treating college attitudes. I allow that those who want to satirize high school mentalities have a “mature enough” point to make; let them do it. (Incidentally, The Folder Hunt ended up not being so much about college peers per se, and while my subsequent novel A Transient aimed more consciously in this direction, it ended up not treating college peers so much as reaching a poignant resolution of sorts about high school peers. But that’s another discussion.)
The question for us regarding Heathers in part is: when there is a time for a certain kind of satire (I mean, cultural era—say, in 1989), does the satire later become dated, in attitudes or moral disposition? Why or why not? (A somewhat similar question can be asked: Is a young person’s satire still solid art when everyone concerned—artist, original audience, potential new audience—is older and, hopefully, wiser?) And do people get more hesitant to endorse an “old satire” simply out of squeamishness, a “reticence” that shouldn’t be respected by all concerned?
Heathers from the optic of addressing a culture surrounding teen suicide
Let’s start here: Heathers is a satire of a broad set of aspects of high school social life, particularly looking at how the issue of teen suicide is dealt with in high school—which its writer, Daniel Waters, saw as disagreeably honoring or “sanctifying” in a sort of over-dramatizing, hypocritical way. The movie approaches this in a satirical manner that seemed rather strong for 1989 (for instance, in a tamer moment, a character observes that after the death of one of the trio of Heathers, which was believed to be a suicide, it is remarked that she is “more popular than ever now”). Meanwhile, today teens and their worldly wisdom and associated problems (the 1999 Columbine shootings, etc.) have gotten so much more sophisticated and colorful (and in some regards darker) that Heathers now seems in its more ironic moments to echo reality more than in 1989 (such a point is made by its astute director Michael Lehmann in DVD commentary). Meanwhile, the perceived need to satirize excesses in addressing teen suicides may no longer be so current or endorsed, at least in the way Waters handled it (as suggested by Lehmann, in a generalizing way by asking how can you satirize anything anymore?, and by its producer Denise Di Novi, who also steps up to offer intelligent commentary).
In light of these considerations, the movie is in some ways more dated and in other ways less dated, but still has a devoted, cult following. After all, in addition to its sensitive theme of teen suicide, it includes a lot of cultural playfulness that is not always intrinsic to the suicide theme: even more playfully baroque language and tart humor than teens may usually have, such as to say, “Did you have a brain tumor for breakfast?” or “Bulimia is so ’87!” When one Heather tells Veronica Sawyer, Ryder’s character, “Why are you pulling my dick?,” I think this is amusing, because I’ve recently heard two New Jersey high school girls, who seemed all a whirlwind of talking in a teen argot of not only words but a certain tone and manner, call each other “dude”—a different sort of weird gender-line-crossing.
Also, a wider type of allusion shows the film trying to be more broadly humorous than just to skewer in-group cant: there are two uses of “Oh, the humanity!,” which is included here to heighten comedy within the story’s premises and is also, I think, facetious about itself by way of mocking what seems a permanently pretentious phrase (this comment was first uttered by a radio commentator witnessing the explosion of the Hindenburg blimp in the 1930s).
Ryder, in DVD commentary—which apparently was done in about 2000, and it had to have been before her arrest for shoplifting and substance abuse—is one of the film’s most passionate advocates. She says of Heathers, “If I wasn’t in it, it would still be my favorite film,” and at another point says it is “a brilliant piece of literature” that is as good as various books she’s read, such as The Catcher in the Rye.
I’ll admit, what came back to me (amid whatever other fleeting “flashback” to “old days”) when I first glimpsed bits of the film was its “word-orientedness” with all the fun parody of teen slang—and I think this appealed to me in 1989, when I was making a slow transition from all my fiction reading and writing that was thick from about 1984 through then, to a more nonfiction-oriented work life (both paid and unpaid/speculative) that would run from about 1990 on. So I see Heathers, to the extent it brings back memories as appealing to me in 1989, as somehow echoing a more looking-for-literary esthetic I had then (and unwittingly, was in the process of moving away from).
The problem I have with the film today, though—and I think I may have felt something of this at the time—is what other critics—such as Leonard Maltin—have noted: its inconsistency in terms of including too-dark and off-the-rails material amid all the more apropos-seeming parody/satire. In general, I think the screenwriter—this was his first film—though he seems to have had no shortage of ambition and clarity in what he was doing with this work (as reflected in his two DVD interviews, from ~2000 and ~2008)—rather threw everything and the kitchen sink into this movie. Not only does it make fun of—in an admiring way—teen-speak, and catalogue a lot of the personality types and cliques (princesses, fat/ugly girl, geeks, jocks)—but it has a strain of intruding violence that, in lesser degrees, can complement the more baseline wild satire, and in greater degrees, seems to run counter to the movie’s intent—to make it more implausible as it turns more horror-genre-like. In other words, where at times it has something of the consistency-with-itself on teen suicide that may characterize, say, The Virgin Suicides (1999), Sofia Coppola’s somewhat peculiar directorial debut, at other times, especially toward the end, Heathers seems to veer toward gothic (and cheap) extremes like Carrie (the 1976 movie and Stephen King’s book).
Somewhat ironically, especially earlier on, the movie has the brightly colored, MTV-style stagy approach that could make movies “in” and interesting then: relevant techniques include vivid production colors (in costumes and furnishings, and lighting front and back) and camera use (a lot of Orson Wellesian shots of people from below; or a fairly generic fisheye-lens way of capturing a small group). Meanwhile, the soundtrack music, not terribly distinguished, features a lot of reverbed synthesizer in a way that once was ’80s chic, which now screams “’80s” (in a kitschy direction) more than much else in the film. All in all, this isn’t bad (and even the music can appeal as a matter of taste, as might quintessential ’60s pop stuff to some).
That, plus the more “levelheaded” satire the film includes, could make it a nicely styled teen flick for those who like satire. Incidentally, when it comes to the density of a film like this, in terms of intellectual concepts and values, this one could be compared to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), but in the following way: Rocky in dense in terms of how it incorporates camp and two unrelated genres, horror and sci fi; but Heathers is dense regarding its satire—in terms of individual targets and in terms of broader directions it goes, sometimes not quite advisably.
It’s the trends toward violence later in the film that seem, I think, like slashing a well-crafted start of a painting with a knife, going beyond adding to the picture.
Incidentally, I’m not condemning the film, but saying it’s flawed. Its cult that loves it can have it; it is they who end up drawing the most salutary value out of it anyway—and it isn’t starting wars or causing the world economy to teeter.
The film’s conflicting tones hit home the most in the lead characters
The movie’s two contradictory-tones “personalities” interfere a bit with Veronica as a sympathetic character, and come to most troubling fruition in the one other noted character, J.D., played by Christian Slater in his film debut. Veronica is meant to be more relatable of all the main characters, and for me, Ryder lives up to this burden, which speaks to her unusual capability and flavor as an actress, as I’ll return to. In fact, a film editor speaking in a DVD documentary notes how he had to recut the film to make Veronica more appealing or accessible, such as to include more shots of her (which were sympathetic enough) in conversation sequences…which is just one instance suggesting the original script (which was quite long, according to Waters) was something of an ungovernable morass that had to be worked with effort to make the film to have enough of an economy and moral center.
Still, the movie seemed enough—especially early on—to lack an obvious moral center for some people that, for one example, as Ryder says, she was fired from a subsequent project because of her association with it. To me, what shows the movie’s flawed nature is in her involvement in the deaths of classmates: After the first death of a Heather, which is largely accidental though she had some role in it, she duly starts feeling responsibility for it. Typical of the movie, her character’s more conscience-bound inclinations are shown in fancy one-liners that may or may not be indicated as journal entries: “They’re people I work with,” she says of the Heathers to J.D., “and our job is being popular and shit.” Later, she writes in her journal, “Let me dream of a world without [one particular] Heather—a world where I’m free.” Then, after accidentally killing this Heather, she tells J.D., “I just killed my best friend.” All this from a young woman we are clearly meant to identify with, and who ends up indeed being the most sympathetic main character.
But in the second set of deaths, her role is not so ambiguous: she seems more apt, if still precipitated, to pull the second trigger (J.D. pulled a trigger earlier, which was essential to the crime) in the death of two jocks—they are set up as if they carried out a suicide pact as two homosexual lovers. (More amusingly, not only is a postcard with a picture of Joan Crawford planted among their effects by J.D., but the clincher—clicking with a policeman’s apparent Ohio forensics protocol—is a bottle of mineral water in a bag: that sealed “the fact” that they were homosexuals.) So, though she confesses her anguish in her journal, are we so much to back Veronica? Admittedly, the overall story helps us win us over to her.
Slater’s J.D. is a key to believing in this film or not. It was definitely noted in 1989 that he sounded like Jack Nicholson; this fact gets alluded to several times in the later DVD documentaries. As a longtime fan of Jack, I find Slater’s aping him to be a negative, but not simply out of respect for the original style of Jack. Not only does the question arise of why couldn’t Slater have found a villainous voice of his own to be less like imitating a famous actor? But another question arises, does this imitating style serve the film well? For instance, are we to see him as an actor trying to nail a dubious young character by, as it happens (and let’s not make too big a thing of it), sounding like Jack Nicholson? Or is he playing a high school kid who himself tries to sound like Jack Nicholson?
This isn’t a trivial question, because sometimes Slater’s acting seems hammy, and especially when he shows a more menacing side, we might remember that when Jack himself would go a little over the top with menace or anger, such as in The Shining (1980), we “went with” this because one of Jack’s fortes was anger, and this was part of his Method acting style: he made it part of the character he played, and you either liked it or didn’t, and if you didn’t, it was because you might have felt the anger was too strong, not because it was affected. When Slater goes more over the top—such as the blue-lit scene in the kitchen where Veronica sees her fearful face in a knife—we don’t necessarily “go with him” as we might have with Jack in a scene where anger seemed more suited; here we see Heathers slipping into histrionics, camp, self-parody—which in the end echoes the extremes of violence it includes in its vinegary depiction of high school.
In a general way, the character of J.D. is where the film’s two inclinations of being morally earnest and being facetious or experimental are most in conflict, or threaten the film’s credibility. J.D. is given a few lines to express not only his own character but the film’s ambitiously aimed-for themes: after having had many school peers sign a petition with its real purpose hidden, J.D. reveals to Veronica that it is a fake collective suicide note, which claims the whole student body decided to blow itself up, when J.D. is the one planning to blow the school up (not coincidentally, his father, with whom he has bizarrely role-exchanged conversations, is a demolition man, who has—accidentally?—killed J.D.’s mother when she was in a building he imploded). When J.D. is prodded by Veronica to explain himself on this, she says it is “because nobody loves me—the only place different social types can genuinely get along with each other is in heaven.” And later: “People will look at [this high school] and say it destroyed itself not because society didn’t care but because the school itself was society!” If these reflect the genuine “social” tragedy/undercurrent the film means to depict and lament, then J.D. would be presumed to be sane in reflecting it. But these statements seem to echo a deranged mind: again, can we believe in J.D. or not? How much we do so parallels how much we credit this film with artistic and moral integrity.
Anyway, that’s my take. I saw it in 2012—seeing it in a cult-audience-adjusted marketing deal—as a 50-year-old who has been through a lot in career, publishing-related efforts, and personal dealings; and I saw it in 1989 as a 27-year-old who probably admired and respected it as a new, edgy release…and I don’t know how much I objected to its tonal and dramatic inconsistencies then; probably I found them jarring to some extent. I’ve not said all I could have on this film—there’s a lot to be enthusiastic about in it, too. Anyway, let the cultists have it—it probably has more good than bad; and just about anyone new to it and navigate its complexities, I think.
***
But Ryder loved and honored the film in 2000, as attested to in her documentary comments. Not to confuse the artist with the private person, and we can only speculate on some points here, but by 2000, she may well have been dealing with more-hindering depression in her personal life; at one point in her Heathers DVD interview, she does acknowledge the teen-years death of a friend to suicide, with a raw show of touched emotion, as relevant to her view of the movie.
Well, two things: she had a perfect right to her view of the film as related to personal issues; but maybe she was a little too close to the dark clouds of depression and suicidal tendencies in 2000 to be otherwise than “piously” respectful of the film (which reflects a rationality that may seem obscure but is valid enough). And it is true the film was trying—in its bold satire—to stand for more authenticity in dealing with the issue of suicide.
So, give a complex, nervy film its due: it definitely deals with hard teen issues with more tough tone and perspective than does a film like Mean Girls. Leonard Maltin, by the way, probably writing in 1989, notes Heathers, in a mixed review, as “smug”; I think this reflects, first, that a satire inevitably has a tendentious nature anyway; and, second, a satire is no less at risk of seeming too brittly opinionated for treating such an area as teen life, where there may be events and attitudes that cause “wounds,” as Ryder and other participants of Heathers note, but where there is still an abiding “received wisdom” (or “party line”) attitude. Teens seem to share a conscience and sense of propriety among themselves, defining each generation, even if they sometimes seem elusive or bizarre to their elders. The problem is then, when you satirize something in their culture, you are both endorsing and criticizing something that is “preciously theirs”—in your upholding the normal and criticizing the abnormal; the risk is being didactic, pat, “smug,” or the like. But the fact that Heathers seems to be a cult hit among teens in recent years suggests that they accept it for what it’s trying to do, flaws and all.
Ryder from a longer-viewed perspective: development of a “power waif”
I’d said Ryder’s career launched with this film—actually, she was a goth girl in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988) earlier—and she shortly afterward appeared in his Edward Scissorhands (1990). So she had an off-color start in quirky films that seemed the tail end of a decade, the 1980s, that seemed to revisit the 1960s in some way: more youth-oriented popular arts, a lot of color and style (if not preciousness), with 1970s grit left behind. The 1990s—throughout movies, if not in all—arguably reflected something of a return, or slow march, toward more adult material. It seems Ryder’s most important work was in this later decade, while she was in her twenties: a role in the Martin Scorsese-directed The Age of Innocence (1993), for which she received an Oscar nomination, and an Oscar-nominated role in Little Women (1994), based on the Louisa May Alcott novel.
By the way, in terms of working with major directors, she bowed out of playing daughter Mary Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part III (1990), but appeared in Coppola’s visually sumptuous Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)—which latter I saw, and I know she was in it, but I can’t remember her there too well (not that this reflects on her).
After appearing in one of the Alien franchise, Alien Resurrection (1997), there was the release of the apparently long-produced Girl, Interrupted (1999), which she starred in and helped produce. She was also a costar (with Richard Gere) in Autumn in New York (2000), which I believe I saw, but even if I didn’t, I think it was roundly panned. Her films of the past 12 years have seemed more offbeat than her best work of the early 1990s. This is all based on looking at her Wikipedia article.
It’s funny: it seems she has been around “forever,” yet I’m surprised she’s only about 40; but in her early days as with Heathers, she was in her teens. Somehow, she has always seemed like a young, somewhat solitary, not strikingly beautiful but still potently appealing woman. I thought a good phrase to describe her is “power waif.”
She is another short actress, at 5 foot 3 (according to Google), though, typically, camera angles usually hide her shortness. Whether due to this, or to her history with depression (she bowed out of Godfather III because of exhaustion, according to her Wikipedia page, but maybe this wasn’t linked to what would be longstanding but low-level depression), or to something else, she is a known quantity not for being an especially sexy character, or for being adamantine in the sense that someone physically prepossessing or blue-collarish would be. She is also not an actress whose most notable roles are defined in terms of her being one of a couple. (Her pairing with Richard Gere in 2000 seems a good indication of this.)
Interestingly, in Heathers, when she is positioned (in a ruse with J.D.) to seduce the two football players into what they believe is a played threesome with her, her “seductive” manner seems rather unconvincing, like someone not quite ambidextrous trying to write with her non-favored hand. She’s not exactly asexual; she doesn’t seem bisexual or androgynous. It doesn’t seem she’s on anyone’s list of “gay icons.”
She doesn’t seem weak or playing for sympathy, either; she seems to have moxie to go with her seeming vulnerability, with her big, dark, somewhat widely-spaced eyes that seem like important reference points to “relating to her” on screen. When pointed, they hold you as if they say you better pay attention. She seems as if not meaning to stand for a huge number of peers or “America at large” but holding herself out as with an affecting and accessible story to offer, which isn’t just about herself.
