3/14/2014 – New York, New York. Musical “Heathers” performing at New World Stages in New York. Photo by Chad Batka. Source: TIME
Shut up, Heather!
Sorry, Heather!
If dark comedy is more your flavor of horror/thriller than ghost stories, Heathers (1988) is on both Netflix and Hulu right now. I decided to revisit the movie after listening to the musical, which I found by chance on YouTube. Major spoilers for both the movie and musical.
I tried to watch Heathers in college after Mean Girls came out, but I didn’t really enjoy it at the time. The movie is very Gen X and very cynical; I’m an old Millennial who was in junior high during Columbine. It’s a bit like the airport scene in Love Actually (which I loathe, but that’s another story): a relic of a time when security was a lot more lax. Which seems charming but is actually just really commentary on the unending cycle of gun violence in the U.S. 1988!JD can shoot blanks at jocks during lunch and get suspended; 2014!J.D. would have been arrested, if not shot by the police (but since he’s white, he wouldn’t have died in police custody). While the original is funnier to me now as a 30-something than it was when I was 20, the musical really knocks it out of the park.
In Heathers, the three most popular girls at Westerburg High are Heather Duke, Heather McNamara, and Heather Chandler; the story is told from the point of view of Veronica Sawyer, their friend whom they appear to have “rescued” from friendship with nerds and weirdos. Veronica is intrigued by newcomer J.D., a loner in a trenchcoat, whom she runs into again at a convenience store on the way to a frat party. At the party, Veronica rebuffs a creepy college guy’s advances and pukes on Heather Chandler’s shoes, causing Heather to promise to destroy Veronica. J.D. shows up at Veronica’s house; they have sex after “strip croquet”; and then go to Heather Chandler’s to make amends. J.D. swaps Veronica’s “hang-over cure” of orange juice and milk (meant to make Heather throw up) with drain cleaner, killing Heather; he then demands that Veronica fake a suicide note to fool the police.
Heathers The Musical is 1989 for the ‘10s, and I don’t mean that in a cynical way. Rather, instead of replicating the musical exactly, the updates made make the story flow better and provide a little more structure. Veronica Sawyer and her best friend Martha Dunstock (“Martha Dumptruck”) are “losers” just trying to survive their senior year of high school. In Veronica’s “I Wish” song “Beautiful,” she describes how her classmates all got along as kids, but have become cruel to each other as teens; she wants everyone to get along, but since that’s not going to happen, she wants protection. Since she can’t seem to make that happen, she takes a chance to throw in her lot with the Heathers after forging them a hall pass; whereas in the film, she was already hanging out with them. Veronica gets a makeover and bullies back off her, but after she finds herself on the outs with Heather Chandler, she picks J.D., whom she watches fighting Ram and Kurt, hoping she and J.D. can protect each other. He has other ideas about how to deal with the bullies, though.
Another major change is a series of updates to make a story about the 1980s believable in 2017. For example, instead of firing blanks at jocks Kurt and Ram during lunch, J.D. gets into a fist-fight with them. The Heathers get an updated wardrobe that looks sexier, if only because the country-club look of the 1980s looks very stuffy and proper now (think Princess Diana – it was hot at the time but looks very frumpy in retrospect). Martha, who is bullied for being fat, and Betsy, one of Veronica’s old friends, are conflated into one character (Martha), which makes that part of the narrative a little tighter. The party scene and sex scene are also really different in a way that I like–Veronica has a great time at a high-school party until Martha starts getting bullied and she pukes on Heather Chandler; after Heather tells her “[she’ll] be deleted” Monday morning, Veronica decides to spend her “last hours” with J.D. and asks him to have sex with her (also the line “I’m hot and pissed and on the Pill!” is A+). The update to Ram and Kurt’s murder, staged as a double suicide because they were gay, is also much snappier: no staging a scene with sparkling water and queer-coded items, just the note. Straight people gleefully quoting “I love my dead gay son!” can just STOP FOREVER, but the song “”My Dead Gay Son” is surprisingly funny–and the twist ending was a delight.
The music is seamless with the dialogue, and the songs are catchy as hell. (My partner is getting used to being greeted with “You need a Jell-O shot! It’s time for BIG FUN!” on Fridays. For the records, I had my first and last Jell-O shot at the age of 30. For charity.) Lindsay Ellis’s theory on how the emotions conveyed in musicals can sometimes fill in gaps more quickly than in non-musical plays and films also applies here. One particularly good example is in “Our Love is God” and its reprise as well as “Meant to be Yours,” which is chilling. “Our Love Is God” starts out as a quirky love song in which J.D. promises Veronica they’ll make Kurt and Ram pay for humiliating her:
We can start and finish wars
We’re what killed the dinosaurs
We’re the asteroid that’s overdue
The dinosaurs choked on that dust
They died because God said they must
The new world needed room
For me and you
Which is repeated in the reprise as “They’ll die because we say they must;” dissonant minor chords play in the background as J.D. repeats the line “Our love is God” at the end of the song.
Check it out on YouTube and buy the soundtrack here.
Contains gaslighting, murder, suicidal ideation/attempts, abusive relationships (romantic, parental), bullying, that time when you think a guy is really charming but he turns out to be manipulative, sexual harassment, a whole song about blue balls.
