Review of Heathers (1989) by Chet K — 30 Dec 2012

Dark, funny, witty and smart, Heathers may come across as absurd, but I believe you can very directly read this as a Nietzschian critique on society and morality through a 'will to power.' The school (which may as well represent society as a whole) is structured into a master/slave hierarchy or dichotomy. The Heathers represent the elite class. Heather 1, for instance, wears a red ribbon as a crown which gets passed around after her death. They control the masses of different classes from the loner fat kids to the geeks to the jocks through the inherent social morality propagated, in a Nietzschian sense, from the masses themselves. Then there's Veronica (Ryder) who seems to have found herself amongst the elites, but disillusioned by the inherent injustices prevalent in the system. She's attracted to the "cool" James Dean like outsider JD (Slater), who is not to be confused as an anarchist, but rather the Ubermensch - or the Superman, who has his own superior sense of morality. Importantly, this morality, unlike the other's, is not a socially imposed 'slave morality,' and this is what allows him (along side the audience) to look down on the entire school system misanthropically (apart from Veronica who he recognises as a potential equal) as though it is populated by apes (or inferiors). Thus the film allows no compassion for each murder, and rather the victims are seen as inferior and undeserving of life. In fact it is only in their deaths that they can finally be seen as human - thanks to JD and Veronica's rewriting of their lives and personality in forged suicide notes.

In this high school - a moral vacuum of nilism where God is most definitely dead, JD (and his new found accomplist) begins to enforce his superior morality through a rampage of murder and suicide. Importantly, as at the end of the film when he declares "lets face it, the only place different social types can genuinely get along together is in heaven," it is not through hate, but rather out of compassion for the oppressed that motivates JD to take society to a genuine utopia. Whilst he may fail in the end, it is a recently self discovered outsider - Veronica (with her hair a frizz, her clothes half burnt and torn, and covered in ash) that takes the Heathers crown.

Heathers is a cult classic that pleasantly took the teen genre into new directions. Despite it's dark cynicism theres still a lot of charm to Winona Ryder and Christian Slater's romance as they go on their suicidal rampage, a charm that the teen genre very rarely taps into - at least in the more recent attempts.