Like butter wouldn’t become tender … Winona Ryder, Kim Walker, Lisanne Falk and Shannen Doherty in Heathers. Photograph: 20th Century Fox/Rex Features
As allowing that to reinforce the worst stereotypes about entertainment executives, word filtered through this week that the next hit TV show to emerge from the creative minds of the American networks may well be … Heathers. This may not mean a great deal to many of the Guardian’s younger readers, but that for the rest of us a small moment of break is likely to follow. The original was one of the cornerstones of 1980s cult cinema, a brilliantly scabrous account of multiple teen homicide at a mid-western high school dominated by a trio of poisoned princesses – now in appearance to be reinvented through a view to the ungenerous screen as a shotgun marriage of Dexter and Gossip Girl.
This is the point at which etiquette demands a rant about for what cause everyone amenable should be force-fed drain cleaner – unless the truth is, I’m not sure I can oblige. The betting is, of course, that if it makes it to screen the new Heathers will be awful, but given its black-hearted cynicism there’s something oddly fitting about Heathers conscious cannibalised by done as a last resort TV producers 20 years after its release. And I’brawl grateful to them for reminding me how much I like this singular movie from a particular moment in time.
Thanks largely to material it helped inspire (everything from the excellent Mean Girls to the self-satisfied American Beauty), we all grew used to the spectacle of teens hiss smart-mouthed dialogue at unit another like the pouty spawn of Clifford Odets. Back in 1988, however, Heathers’ acidity was quite the wow; its best lines (“I love my dead flashy son!”) still raise a smile now. It was doubly cogent for arriving at the end of a period in which a a great deal of cuddlier notion of the American teenager had reigned supreme – not least through the films of John Hughes, to what the angst was always finally dispelled by a sunshiney worldview. Heathers was different.
Much of its dark charm came from writer Daniel Waters’s script. But the movie moreover benefitted from its perfect timing (by the end of the 80s, God knows we were ready for some bile) – and a triumphant quirk of casting. Now the following isn’t a person of consequence I’ve often had cause to write, no more than here Christian Slater was a marvel. The same glazed soulessness that makes him such hard work to engage with was a good instead of his turn as blankly smirky killer JD, sold on the idea of himself as a Nietzschean James Dean, but in the plastic 80s doomed to have being nothing more than a glib wannabe.
Slater was just one recipient of the bad vibes that dogged the film’s principals, an aura of misfortune that you might hold would have oddity the execs off. For Heathers’ male lead, it was downhill from here: a troubled life off-camera accompanying a steep professional decline. For co-star Winona Ryder there was a comparable tumble, from perhaps even greater heights of celebrity to still deeper ignominy (Ryder, incidentally, appears alone in check talking up a Heathers sequel). For Waters and director Michael Lehman, the film would be no great springboard to mainstream success. And it’s hard to watch events unfolding at the film’s Westerburg High School free from glimpsing a sad hint at of Columbine.
But for most of its 102 minutes, Heathers is a riotous world unto itself. It would have to share the status as the prime teen-flick of its era with the haunting River’s Edge (a movie that managed to prefigure both Twin Peaks and Nirvana) – but without ceasing its recognize terms it was a atomic classic, deserving of its place alongside The Breakfast Club et al in be it what it may canon may live of 80s American high school movies. And if some LA types now want to dig its bones up for a vile TV discover, so be it. There – did that sound bitchy?
