Heathering

During the 80s, we had several movies about teenage rebellion, showcasing the angst of coming of age. Some of these films used dark humor quite well, and those are the ones that resonated with me.

You might remember Better Off Dead with John Cusack. The film touches on some very serious themes like depression and even suicide, but it uses clumsy and absurd humor to mask the seriousness of the subject matter.

The Breakfast Club faced the serious issues of the day with appropriate solemnity, and while it did offer some dark humor, the movie was mainly a very well done drama.

By 1989, people like me were ready for a movie that combined the dark humor elements in an unflinching critique of life through the eyes of a high school kid. And while previous films had largely had one kid that didn’t really fit in with a group of cooler kids, Heathers focused on the kids who lived outside of the mainstream.

These were surely the kids I identified with, never quite fitting in with any one particular group.

The TL;DR of the film goes like this: a girl named Veronica (played by Wynona Rider) is a member of the most exclusive and important clique in the school. Three other girls make up the group with Veronica, and all three are named Heather.

Even though she’s in this group by choice, Veronica begins to feel uncomfortable with the savage cruelty by which her crew operates. They sit in judgment of people who are viewed as lesser than. She calls this crew “the Heathers.”

At this point, a new character named JD (played by Christian Slater) emerges. He’s the new kid at school, full of cynicism and mystery. He connects with Veronica, and they start plotting pranks to embarrass the Heathers. Things escalate quickly, and an accidental murder ensues.

Eventually, JD shows himself to be a complete sociopath, interested in blowing up the entire school. This is dark stuff that would be much tougher to make today, and there’s plenty more to be said about how useful black humor can be during dark times, but the thing I want to focus on is a great line Christian Slater delivers:

Are you a heather? What a question!

In an instant, JD asks Veronica if she is also named Heather, but I think he’s asking more than that. He’s asking if she identifies as a Heather too.

Daniel Waters brilliantly wrote three Heathers in as the core of the group, with the movie told from Veronica’s point of view. This means that we, the viewer, get to see that she gets to decide whether to stay in the group, calling out to everyone watching the movie in the theater (or at home) to consider whether or not they’re a Heather.

In my household and network of friends, the word Heather has taken on a deeper meaning. We think of it as a verb: to heather means to gossip about someone else, or to otherwise use gatekeeping to keep other people from joining your cool little club.

Heathering is dangerous behavior. Any culture you want to preserve needs to address this toxicity immediately.

Implicit in the language here is the idea that ultra-conformity leads to dangerous groupthink. Making fun of people because they are lesser-than isn’t something I’m interested in, but inverting the equation and using humor as a righteous sword? That’s another matter entirely.

Monty Python often punched above their weight. So did Weird Al, and so did most of the humor I gravitated toward during the late 80s. Incidentally, so did the punk rock that called out to me.

In looking back on Heathers, JD’s character is noteworthy. He doesn’t only take things too far, but he completely misses the point of rebellion. For Veronica, it’s not about getting revenge against everyone in the school who has wronged her in some way, but more so about improving the conditions in which she lives.

Rebellion and revolution are one thing, but revenge is something quite different. It pays to remember this central lesson.

Did you grow up with the movie Heathers? If you grew up during a different era, where did you draw fuel for your own teenage rebellion? Are there some other good cautionary tales about confusing retribution for revolution?