Heathers
I thought I was cynical, and you might think you are too, yet "Heathers" has us all beat. Even <PERSON> winces at it.
Yet the movie, despite its controversies, is unmistakably a warped vision, a campy dark view of Gen-X high-schoolers circa 1988. That warped vision is in love with, among other things: <PERSON>, "The Shining," "Clockwork Orange," <PERSON>, <PERSON>, and after-school specials.
About that last category, I was subject to them. They showed them in middle-school health class. Look up the titles: they are inherently campy, even though they were dead serious. One of them is "Have You Ever Been Ashamed of Your Parents?"
"Heathers" seems aware of that one, since its answer to it is "certainly" because nearly every adult figure is an idiot in this movie. That's explicit: <PERSON>'s schtick with her dad is to call him an "idiot." Which he accepts, as idiot dads do in this kind of fare.
There are a hundred other weirdo cultural items that "Heathers" is aware of, and it goes about mocking them mercilessly, including after-school specials about teen suicide. That got this movie in trouble. The trouble should've been how school systems were treating real kids, as they still do. But no, it was about the tone of a movie that's based on the shared warped vision of a lot of American kids everywhere. Beware of blaming the symptom, the art, instead of the cause, which is the reality it's derived from.
For my part, "Heathers" has several 2-5 minute segments of brilliance, never connecting them all that well for me, and then copping out around the end. When this movie gets a moral heart, for no good reason even though it probably needs one badly, I feel it swings and misses.
That because I identify enough with the <PERSON> character, for awhile, as I imagine a lot of people watching this movie do. He combines the cool loser with the cute outsider, a bystander looking at the whole problem and thinking about it. 292
That he goes about it as a kind of pre-Heath Ledger <PERSON> is disturbing, obviously. Still, he has a point. That's the <PERSON> side of him: the rebel who doesn't know his cause yet has one, if he only had consulted <PERSON>.
In the end, to me, "The Breakfast Club" is arguably edgier. I mean in the end of both movies in comparison, and not in their proceedings. Imagine this movie in its middle, first time you watch it, and then being told that this movie arguably *affirms* school systems. Not that it necessarily does, just that that's an interpretative option in the end.
Maybe the point is that Gen-X is not all that brave, just too bitchy and whiny and self-loathing. I think we would all own that criticism of ourselves. We are still dealing with older people, the generation or two older than us, lording it over us -- in business, in politics, in finance. I can refer you to the current Presidential race as example #1 of 100,000 examples. Best we could ever do was be cynically ironic, as this movie often is, only to just go along with what is, the status quo.
Maybe that's what "Heathers" is describing about us?
P.S. Past generations had their "murder and suicide" dark comedies. Just listen to MASH's theme song! If you want disturbing, go check out post-WW2 comedies of the 1940s. This movie is the line of <PERSON>'s "Monsieur Verdoux" and "Kind Hearts and Coronets." 80