Hacker Cinema
Heathers
1989 · Film · 103 min
Directed by Michael Lehmann
A girl who halfheartedly tries to be part of the "in crowd" of her school meets a rebel who teaches her a more devious way to play social politics: by killing the popular kids.
2 positive8 neutralfrom 10 commenters
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11 comments on Hacker News
Being from "flyover country closer to the East Coast" I've also loved that feeling of visiting the West Coast sometimes and the surprise of seeing businesses I know from TV or movies really exist. 7-11 was definitely on that list for me.
It came up for me the other day because Heathers was set in small-town Ohio and yet prominently featured a 7-11 in multiple plot points which didn't fit my mental image of (mostly Southern) Ohio. Curiosity turned up that apparently there are a few 7-11s in Ohio if you travel north enough, so it isn't entirely anachronistic.
You were right to scoff.
Heathers was a movie also about an abusive sociopathic male engineering the deaths of his classmates in an act of petty rebellion against his abusive sociopathic father who killed his mother.
Anyone that tells you that 'All {men,women} do is about {power,sex,men,women}'. is just telling on themselves and their social group specifically.
On the first and second statement, lesbians the world over would like a word.
I'm pretty skeptical of the "couldn't be made today" tropes. Some types of films have gone out of style. And there probably are cultural/ethnic stereotypes that would have been mostly considered funny by many audiences that would be more broadly seen as just offensive today.
But I'm not sure how many things are really outright taboo. For example, I've also heard people say that Heathers couldn't be made today--can't be threatening to blow up a school--but it was actually staged as an off-Broadway musical not all that long ago.
I'm always skeptical about claims that $MOVIE couldn't be made today that was made in a past decade. Lolita's title character was 3-4 years older than the character in the book in both films. Pretty Baby was very controversial when it came out. (ADDED: And I'd entertain the thought that it might be even harder to make today/be even more controversial.Might be more like HBO material.) Nymphomaniac is a European art film. Whether or not Rocky Horror and Holy Grail would be appealing to modern audiences I don't know but I see no reason they couldn't be made.
In another vein, I've also seen the claim made that Heathers couldn't be made today because of school shootings, yet it was made into a Broadway musical within the past decade.
Hint: Drinking bottled water was a subtle "they're gay" punchline in the film Heathers (1988).
https://moviechat.org/tt0097493/Heathers/58c74f926b51e905f6764540/What-is-mineral-water
Google's Ngram viewer shows a consistant uptick of print mentions since 1985:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bottled+water&year_start=1960&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cbottled%20water%3B%2Cc0
And sales volume since 1996:
https://douglashicton.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/bottlegraph.png?w=466&h=503
For myself, until the mid-1990s, it simply wasn't a thing. I would occasionally buy a bottle on road trips in the 1990s (I now carry a reusable drink bottle, those are going on ten years' use for me).
If you view conference videos online, you'll note that pitchers and glasses in earlier videos were replaced by plastic bottles later. Those are now starting to disappear in some cases, though tetra-pack water also sometimes appears. An interesting sort of incidental meta-commentary on late capitalism.
Interesting that the movie "Heathers" came out 30 years ago this year. It's about exactly this thing. If you didn't experience it 30 years ago, you may have been simply lucky.
That gave me a chuckle.
I watched that series out of sheer boredom. It was a very strange blend of Harry Potter + Heathers + so many other movie plot tools... Seriously, you can map every character to a character from Harry Potter. They conflated Wicca, Shamanism, Satanism and Voodoism.
That said, if they continue the series, I will watch it!
Heathers was only barely a counterculture movie when it was released. It's a dark comedy that follows the 80s underdog vs bullies trope. I can't imagine how anything like it would ever be released in the repressive school shootings era and that's probably not a good thing.
Interesting, just watched the movie Heathers on Netflix a few days ago. Not what you'd expect out of a late 80s teen movie, besides the shoulder pads, haha.
Reading this kind of reminded me of old Christian Slater movies like Pump up the Volume and Heathers, and other movies of the GenX era. (But, I’m sure films of the 60s fit, as well)
Hopefully this is a sign that this generation is forming its identity and ready to express it with some real cultural movements! I’ve been waiting eagerly for their cultural identity to emerge and express itself with authentic art, music, film, etc.
However, I also find the essay ironic. When the Internet first went mainstream, one phenomenon was “the lurker” - the fact that most, the mass majority, of internet users only “consumed content” (although, back then it wasn’t called content). That’s because few of us felt confident enough to claim enough expertise to share much. Therefore, most of us just “lurked”. We let the experts speak, and we indulged in surfing on their knowledge.
In this “Instagram era”, though, everyone is expected to be a “content creator”. (e.g. everyone has a github!) But, to be one, one unfortunately misses out on a long history of prior work. One gets so bogged down by creating new content and reading all of the new content created within the previous few hours, that much of the past 108 years of knowledge and wisdom isn’t fully accessible. And, although the author seems to try to escape that vortex, they also seem to have ignored that they’re mostly reinventing ideas that were created between McLuhan and 2010.
But, that is ok! I actually read the whole thing and enjoyed it (because it also kinda reminded me of reading Zines). Yeah, as others have said, it could use some editing, but at least it has paragraphs!
>Gender stereotypes keep a lot of people from seeing it. Reverse the genders in your mind.
Or watch the 80's movie Heathers