Heathers and the Gothic Aesthetic

I started this paper for a Gothic literature class, but never got to finish it. It’s obviously incomplete, but too much fun not to share.

“My teenage angst bullshit has a body count”:
How Heathers Redefines High School as a Gothic Space

Perhaps there’s something about the closing of a century that makes people unusually inclined to contemplate their inner demons. Gothic culture saw its first major popularity boom towards the end of the 1700s, but also major revivals at the close of each proceeding century (even Chanel sent grungy, spiderwebby looks down the its runway in the 1990s, suggesting that even the most stubbornly dignified of fashion houses was confronting its own existential qualms). The Gothic space of the late 20^th century didn’t necessarily reflect the horrors conjured two centuries prior, but the essential characteristic of Gothic was present: a contemplation of society’s deepest fears, creatively buffered by the supernatural and extreme. If the Gothic genre exists as a fictional arena to test our own inner demons, it hardly seem surprising that over three centuries the imagery has evolved to suit social context. Werewolves can be seen as the literary, emotional response to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution; Matthew Lewis’s The Monk addresses contemporary fears about church corruption. Among the major social upheavals that shaped society at the close of

the 20^th century is the rise of teenage of culture, itself a response to the prosperity and baby boom that followed World War II. Suddenly, the interim stage between childhood and adulthood was extended enough to warrant its own name, identity and, more definitively, its own marketing angle. Today, pop culture targeted at the teenagers, and their disposable cash flow, is ubiquitous; everything, from movies like Grease and Clueless to Katy Perry’s saccharine single “Teenage Dream,” seems detirmined to gild the teenage years. So it is hardly surprising that adolescence, and its ocean of angst, would crop up as part of the Gothic psyche. Perhaps the most incisive film to explore the darker side of adolescence is Michael Lehmann’s Heathers, a 1989 black comedy about teenager Veronica (Winona Ryder), who is convinced to stage the suicides of her popular “frenemies,” by a tall, dark and black-leather clad stranger named J.D. (Christian Slater).  The film is named for the trio of girls named Heather who, along with Veronica, rule the school through intimidation, sex appeal and emotional sadism.  Heathers is Gothic’s response to the rise of adolescent identity; it skewers John Hughes-style, rosy visions of high school and plays on society’s collective fears of and about teenagers.

It was Tim Burton, perhaps the most notable Gothic pop culture figure of the late 20^th century, who introduced Gothic motifs to the U.S. suburbs, with the macabre fairy tale Beetlejuice (1988) and kicking off a series of end-of-the-decade, Gothic teen comedies. Both Joe Schumacher’s Lost Boys (1987), which depicts vampires as a fringe gang of teenagers, and Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990), a hybrid of Bildungsroman and ghost story, are Gothic parables that turn fantasy creatures into symbols of social otherness.  This association between youth counterculture and Gothic imagery is even more pronounced in Heathers, which exaggerates already-despised high school archetypes. Thus, it compels viewers to reject conventional characters and to empathize with its unorthodox heroine and the alternative to the high school status quo that she represents; in fact, it is Veronica’s dissatisfaction with the status quo that is at the root of all the film’s violence. After a confrontation with queen bee Heather Chandler at a party, Veronica retreats to her diary, writing, “Tomorrow I’ll be kissing her aerobicized ass, but tonight, let me dream of a world without Heather, a world where I am free.” Outwardly, she is a social insider, but internally, she is an outsider who has learned to manipulate high school politics to her own benefit, since her popularity equates to social power and, therefore, social safety. Hours after writing the journal entry,

she commits her first, albeit accidental, murder, killing Heather Chandler by serving her a cup of liquid drainer; J.D. hijacks her original intention to “see Heather Chandler puke her guts out.”  But the attempt to humiliate Heather, and the resulting murder, derives from Veronica’s belief that stopping the high school’s queen bee also means endings its oppressive social mores.

Spurred by success of Heather Chandler’s murder, Veronica and J.D. plot revenge on a pair of archetypal jocks who have been spreading sexual rumors that destroy Veronica’s reputation and social standing.  Again, J.D. diverts Veronica’s humiliation plot and shoots the line backer and quarter back in the woods behind the school. The incident is presented so hyperbolically, even humorously, that one might easily forget the subject matter is disturbingly fresh. The first documented incident of student-on-student shooting violence in the United States took place in August of 1966, when a student at the University of Texas at Austin killed 16 and wounded 32 others, shooting the 29^th floor observation deck of a university building. It would be a full ten years before another student shooting incident occurred, this time at California State University, Fullerton, and another three years after that for the violence to spread from

university campuses. In January 1979, 16 year-old Brenda Ann Spencer opened fire on the elementary school across from her house, wounding several children, killing two administrators and making grim history as the first teen “school shooter.” Since 1979 and Heathers’ 1989 release, school shootings happened with increasing frequency, with incidents occurring in 1982, 1983, 1985 (2), 1986, 1988 (3) and 1989. School shootings would become even more common as the century closed (the 1990s would see a total of 29 school shootings, including the Columbine high school massacre, and the 2000s would count in at 53), but even by 1989, student-on-student gun violence had made its definite ascension into the American consciousness (Stevenson). When J.D. shoots Ram and Kurt in the woods (or even when he fires on them with blanks in the school cafeteria early in the film), Heathers expresses the impact of the rise of school shootings on the American psyche. A terror that had not existed fifty years earlier had become the darkest incarnation of high school.

As much as Heathers is a product of the escalation of teen violence, it is a product of the relatively early days of school shootings.  The hyperbole in Heathers offers an emotional disassociation that makes its subject matter palatable, but the realities of the Columbine high school massacre outdid Hollywood’s exaggeration. (Ironically, many who sought simplified explanations for the Columbine horror blamed Gothic subculture, a testament to the power of Gothic imagery as a symbol for social deviance.)  It is interesting to contrast Heathers with Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001), a film about a schizophrenic teenager whose prophetic Doomsday visions trigger a sequence of events that challenges the limits of time and space. Donnie Darko includes a student shooting and similar, characteristically Gothic, themes— social isolation, rejection of the status quo, even juvenile delinquency— but without the campy aesthetic of teen outsider movies from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s.  Instead, the post-Columbine Donnie Darko distances itself from such potentially representative imagery and plunges its protagonist deep into the depths of science fiction to achieve emotional separation from the realities of teen violence.

Perhaps more than the rise of teenage identity, it is the rise of high school, a vaguely autonomous training ground for adult social skills, that offers tailor-made-for-Gothic material. The capacity of the young for cruelty is disturbing, because it is a reminder that inexperience and innocence are not synonymous.  It is nice to suppose that children are exempted from the cruelty that adults are capable of inflicting upon one another, but the vague social autonomy of high school can rapidly devolve into a Lord of the Flies situation.  Without adults to enforce childlike innocence, adolescents are quick to mimic the social behaviors of the “real world.” Or, as J.D. sums it up in a final soliloquy as he plants a bomb in the school’s boiler room, “People are going to look at the ashes of Westerburg High and say, ‘Now there was a school that self-destructed, not because society didn’t care, but because the school was society.’”