Earlier this year, the Paramount Network in the U.S. premiered their much-talked-about re-imagining of the classic dark teen comedy, Heathers. For this TV adaptation, the original premise of the story — the diabolical machinations of a trio of popular high school girls and the trials of their best frenemy, who tries to end their reign of terror — was to be modernised, with one hefty twist: instead of the Heathers being your typical white, rich, thin mean girls, this version saw the three embodiments of adolescent evil as an African American teenage girl, a non-binary person, and a plus-size young woman. In an attempt to satirise political correctness (rather than status and privilege), the show changed the core message of the story to try and pander to the Instagram generation. It was torn apart by critics, and barely lasted one episode.
Other than the questionable storyline, one of the main reasons the Heathers reboot failed was because, in addition to being a superior product, the original Heathers is still so painfully relevant — even perhaps more so than when the film premiered in 1988. This was a decade before Columbine, when images of a teenager in a trench coat waving a gun around a cafeteria was something that could be satirised. These days, Heathers rings sickeningly true, in a world where the complicated ugliness of real life spills into high school hallways as a matter of routine.
“Heathers does still seem to be relevant in today’s world to some degree, and it’s partly because there’s been all of this progress made in the past 30 years, towards inclusion,” says Michael Lehmann, the director of Heathers, as I sit across from him in a spacious green room at London’s BFI Southbank, where a new print of the classic film is being shown for its 30th anniversary. He has curly salt-and-pepper hair and stylish glasses, and an air of studious calm about him: he could be a teacher in an ’80s comedy himself. “Now, suddenly the world’s gone into reverse. Somebody shifted the gears, and it’s started to go backwards. And just because of that simple fact, the themes in this movie start to become relevant again.”
Up until now, Heathers was one of the few contemporary classics from the teen heyday of the 1980s and ’90s to never receive a sequel or remake, clearly for good reason. And while Lehmann hasn’t seen the Heathers TV show (one wonders if it’s out of diplomacy, disinterest, or a mix of both), he’s been asked about continuing the story for decades. “For years, people used to ask me, ‘Would you do a sequel?’, and I would say, ‘No, I don’t understand why would you do a sequel; it is what it is — it’s self-contained,’” says Lehmann. “But Winona (Ryder, who plays the film’s protagonist, Veronica), who’s very smart, said she wanted there to be sequel where the Heathers are grown up and work in Washington, DC. I remember she and I talked about this probably sometime in the late ’90s and I thought, ‘Well, I guess that’s kind of interesting,’ but I didn’t really get it. Now, I’d say, ‘Sure. That’s exactly how you’d do it, because you have all these Heather-type characters running the show there.’” He has a point. In the era of the extreme dumbing down of American culture, where politicians at the highest level are acting like petulant teenagers hellbent on popularity, the cutthroat world of Heathers ceases to be fantasy and slides terrifyingly into the realm of reality.
“Now, suddenly the world's gone into reverse. Somebody shifted the gears, and it's started to go backwards. And just because of that simple fact, the themes in this movie start to become relevant again.”
Michael Lehmann
But, for better or for worse, this is why the movie is still such a fascinating watch. Not only for Winona Ryder’s spot-on portrayal of moral duality as Veronica, torn between her psycho boyfriend JD (Christian Slater, doing a Jack Nicholson impersonation for the ages) and the wicked whims of the three Heathers, but for balancing all of the film’s dark themes: teen suicide (although, as fans are quick to point out, no one actually commits suicide in the story itself), alienation, power struggles, and the baffling nature of those bestowed status for no reason other than their birth. If that doesn’t draw a clear through-line between 1988 and 2018, what does?
When I ask Michael if Heathers could ever be made today, his answer is resolute. “The simple answer is no, you couldn’t make it today, because look what happened with the TV show,” he states. “Whether that was done well or not, I have no idea, but obviously they ran into trouble because it was pulled from its American release after the Parkland shooting. With all this crazy high school violence, no, you wouldn’t want to go there right now.” But Heathers isn’t just about violence, it’s about undermining power, revolutionising the underclass, by any means necessary. I wonder if the world needs a dose of that rhetoric now more than ever. “If you look at the current political and social landscape in the States, it’s baffling to try and figure out what kind of approach you could take that would be appropriately satirical, because it’s already too ridiculous,” offers Lehmann. “It’s crippling in a way, because how can you make fun of something that’s already so completely, self-consciously ludicrous, on the surface? Trump is literally a game show host!” I think of Veronica’s searing line to Heather McNamara, as she thwarts her suicide attempt in the girl’s bathroom of Westerberg High: “If you were happy every day of your life, you wouldn’t be a human being. You’d be a game show host”. Fake, plastic, and unfeeling.
And, just like the reality we’re living through right now, the characters of Heathers — their desires and motives — are more complicated than they seem. Take Veronica, who turns to the darkest side of herself to stop the Heathers, almost losing herself in the process: “She’s interesting because she has the moral compass, but she’s playing both sides of the fence,” explains Lehmann. “She is a Heather, basically. (Heathers screenwriter) Dan Waters always said that she was the Albert Speer character,” he says, referencing the Nazi architect who apologised for his party’s horrific crimes at the Nuremberg trials. Does that mean Heather Chandler, the leader and most toxic of the Heathers, represents the ultimate evil? What about JD, who is an actual murderer? “The Heathers and JD are different representations of evil, or bad faith,” says Lehmann. “It’s interesting, you can’t really break down Heathers and say, ‘This is the bad guy of the movie.’ JD is seductive, and JD speaks a lot of truth, and JD spurs Veronica to action in a way that she thinks is positive, until it’s not. So, you know, I guess he’s the antagonist in the classic, dramatic sense. But you definitely get the sense that the Heathers are sort of the bad guys of the movie. It’s a tricky one. This isn’t a simple case of, ‘Here are the people that we root for, and here are the people we root against.’ That’s part of what happens in a dark comedy.”
"When we cast Winona, that was my first glimmer that it could really work"
Michael Lehmann
For diehard fans of the movie, however, would he ever revisit these characters, in any capacity? “I would be happy to make a movie that was as funny as Heathers or had the same kind of humour, but I wouldn’t go back to the same characters,” states Lehmann. Fair enough — and in a way, the making of Heathers does seem like lightning in a bottle: a series of events and circumstances that could never be recreated. “There was really something so special about that script, and in the particular nature of that satire and the tone of the film. It would be very hard to equal it. I mean, I tried for years and years to develop other movies that were similarly dark, and even having had whatever kind of success Heathers had, it still didn’t make it easier to get these other movies made. So, the only albatross for me has been: why couldn’t I get another movie as dark as that made?”
Beyond its darkness, Heathers was also a benchmark in late 20th century cinema for its acerbic, quick-witted script, one that remains extremely quotable to this day. It was one of the first scripts of its kind, containing an incredible line of dialogue a minute, one that could be studied over and over again and recited ad nauseum. “Nobody speaks like that in real life, and nobody spoke like that then. Dan is brilliant: he made up a lot of that language, and we would laugh and try and spin it and come up with new things. One of the ones that was very much of the time was, ‘That’s so turbo,’” Lehmann says, with a laugh. “It never made it into the movie but it was in one of the earlier scripts.”
In a way, it’s not surprising that the movie remains so beloved, 30 years after its release. Heathers was Lehmann’s directorial debut, and a part of me expects him to be wistful about the past — but he’s decidedly not. That being said, he’s grateful about the attention the movie has received throughout the years: “We thought we were so lucky to be able to make that movie; we knew that, because it was definitely a whole series of events that lined up the right way,” he says. “None of us thought, ‘Oh, we’ll be talking about this in 30 years.’ We had no idea what would become of it, but we knew how funny the script was. We knew how different it was. I think when we were prepping the movie and putting it together, the question was: will we be ever able to live up to how funny this script is? I remember having that fear myself, as a first-time director. When we cast Winona, though, that was my first glimmer that it could really work.”
Winona, of course, went on to be an ultimate icon of ’90s youth culture, revolutionising the very society that Heathers so expertly parodied. She, like Veronica, became the anti-Heather, a beacon of authenticity in a world where, up until then, vapidity and greed reigned supreme. In fact, it’s in discussing this, the true message of Heathers, that Lehmann becomes his most philosophical. “It’s built into adolescence: you’re a child, and then you’re taught that the world is a just and ordered place, and that you have a position in it, and you keep thinking, ‘Well, it’s so unfair, children are not treated well, but it’s gonna change when I’m a grown-up, when I can tell people what to do’. And when you get in to high school you realise, ‘Oh yeah, right, it just gets worse. And all the grown-ups were protecting me from the world, and now I have to deal with it, and it’s not what I wanted it to be.’” Perhaps, for 2018 there is no truer feeling.
Heathers is in cinemas across the UK from today for its 30th anniversary re-release.
Images courtesy of New World Pictures.