I Hate Heathers

For the longest time, it was the jocks vs. the nerds and the outcasts. 

The jocks were worshipped and, depending on the economic prospects of the school, they either continued to be worshipped or they peaked in high school and wound up living a less than ideal life in order to make some point about small town American blah blah blah. Or at least that’s how it seems thanks in large part to the media we consume. Truthfully, these kinds of social paradigms exist because capitalism values certain personalities, and even if it didn’t, human beings are flawed and we conjure all types of bullshit reasons to reject one another. But I’m speaking in broad terms.

And then something happened. Suddenly, video games were a billion dollar industry, and the jocks wanted to play them too. Suddenly, comic book IP films started dominating movie culture. The art that the nerds love dominated, and still dominates, all pillars of the entertainment industry. Suddenly, it seemed, the nerds won. 

And then they proved themselves to be as cruel and misogynist as the jocks. In fact, they’re arguably worse. Maybe it’s because they didn’t have the internet yet, but at the very very least, the star quarterback never published the nerd’s social security number on the internet, as well as the nerd’s address, the addresses of their family, the nerd’s banking info, and any other kinds of personal info you can think of, plus a few threats of death and/or sexual violence.

It’s all I think about when I watch Heathers.

I completely understand how and why Heathers has earned its cult following. I was never bullied in high school, nor did I ever feel like I was on the receiving end of any toxic social structures. There was absolutely a hierarchy at my school, but nothing nearly as destructive or harmful as what you see in Heathers. But I understand that makes me lucky, and I’m even luckier that I can say that there wasn’t any catharsis to be found in Heathers for me.

And let’s get some quick qualifiers out of the way. I first watched this movie during my senior year of college. Even if I did feel the sting of a shitty high school experience, Heathers was never going to mean as much to me as it does for anyone who watched this movie for the first time at a more impressionable age. On top of that, I’m aware that this was a movie made before the rise, or at least the public awareness, of spree shootings in American public spaces and learning institutions. I won’t deny that seeing this movie post Sandy Hook certainly added a wrinkle to my experience, but I was present enough to be able to make that distinction, and I can still make it now every time I give Heathers another shot to see if I finally click with it. But I never do. 

Whenever I watch Heathers, the only thing I can see is cruelty at its core.

Heathers does eventually condemn J.D.’s behavior, but only after spending a lengthy amount of the runtime reveling in the violence he instigates and the lives he takes. Veronica sees the harm in what she and her boyfriend are doing, but she doesn’t come to that realization as quickly as one would expect someone with her temperament would. Together, there’s a fantasy being played out. A revenge narrative. We can murder the popular kids and get away with it because, at the end of the day, they deserve and it’s right. 

To me, this makes the later revelations feel insincere, even though I know in my heart of hearts that it isn’t trying to be. It’s clearly trying to say something about how high school structures trap us into treating each other with a certain menace. But there’s something about the lack of remorse that neither of them feels for what they did to the first Heather, and a lot of their behavior afterward, that makes me not want to give it the emotional benefit of the doubt. (For the record, I get that it’s supposed to be “satirical,” but that’s a word a lot of aggressively untalented people throw around when their comedy doesn’t work.) The problem, according to the movie, isn’t killing a bully. It’s killing two or more and allowing that violence to spread to the innocent. Killing is fine so long as you learn something from it.

The bullied gain power, but they don’t want to end the cycle. They want to start it again on their own terms.

There’s a lack of self-examination in Heathers. The same energy I see when a bunch of mad gamers review bomb a game for patching out a little bit of cleavage or an upskirt shot. Or send a death threat to a game developer for a delay. Or any number of acts of real world acts of violence or oppression.  Maybe I saw it too late to appreciate it, or maybe I’ve simply outgrown it. But I can’t see anything else, and I don’t feel any particular need to try to.

Much of Mean Girls has aged poorly. In particular, the jokes around race and sexual identity come off as cringy baggage from the 2000s made by a white creative team who thought their jokes were subversive. However, at least it understands that bullying is wrong, and that, ideally, we should learn to grow beyond the need for high school power structures. I wish Heathers felt the same.