Heathers (Heathers (DVD))

Member Name: Lichfield1979

Product:	Heathers (DVD)
Date:	10/09/08 (235 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: One of the great influential high school movies

Disadvantages: n/a

Heathers (1989)

Winona Rider plays Veronica Sawyer, a sassy, popular high school girl, who hates her best friend, and becomes attracted to a dangerous, sardonic outsider, Jason Dean, played by Christian Slater, as a Jack Nicholson impersonation.

Heathers was not the only school drama that mattered in 1989. Say Anything and Dead Poets' Society left their mark. The Wonder Years had debuted on television twelve months earlier, and Beverly Hills 90210 followed a year later. The movie tanked at the US box office. Many reviews were lukewarm. Nevertheless, The Washington Post was prescient enough to state of Heathers: "it is a revolution in young-adult entertainment." The reviewer was right. Director Michael Lehman and writer Daniel Waters' mordant black comedy soon had a cult following that counted many youthful writers among its alumni. Looking back now, Heathers overthrew the 1980s high school hegemony of John Hughes, and even outstripped the influence of Cameron Crowe on the genre by the end of the century.

At its heart Heathers has a simple idea. To take the misanthropic romantic leads from Bonnie and Clyde, or Badlands, and let them inhabit a high school setting, portrayed here as a kind of dark fairytale. The script has an original tone of camp nihilism and macabre satire that not only skewers the landscape of cliques, but seeks the transformative power to reject their very existence. Also in the firing line are the genre's frequently inadequate approximations of the supposed boundary between the spheres of adulthood and adolescence. JD may be named for J.D. Salinger as much as he is for James Dean. Although the tone is somewhat different to that other unusual school, Rushmore, which was undoubtedly inspired by the same reclusive writer in the work of Wes Anderson a decade later, they do share the same deadpan world-weariness.

Similarly, unlike many fictional teenagers who are too well cosseted by their creators, Heathers is perfectly happy to point out its characters self-absorption. This may have caused some early critics to see the film itself as contrived and glib. Others felt the film tried too hard to court the crowd it was supposedly mocking and so lacked the courage of its convictions. Meanwhile, Pauline Kael was sceptical that the film had a punch line to its set-up. Indeed, the studio watered down the end of the last act, feeling the script was too dark for the teen market, although their judgement may have been right in this respect, and it's difficult to criticise the final cut for pulling any punches. The film very much struck the right chord with the audience it eventually found, and has plenty of character. The art direction is colourful and full of sight gags, and the minimal soundtrack has a spooky feel to it. If the ending does have a slight weakness it's that the director doesn't match the daring tonal shifts David Lynch achieved in Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet, but then, absolutely nothing else can either, so lets not worry about that much.

Despite the follow-up misfire of the Bruce Willis vehicle Hudson Hawk, this script, full of surreal dialogue, got first time scribe Daniel Waters the gig writing Tim Burton's Batman sequel. He followed that with the lacklustre Demolition Man, and more or less dropped off the map for fifteen years. Water's had originally hoped that Stanley Kubrick would be interested in Heathers, but when that failed to materialise, Michael Lehman took the helm. The direction and editing feels a little like watching a television program at times, although TV has got good in the intervening twenty years, and Heathers probably inspired a lot of that, at the youthful end of the spectrum. Veronica Mars most clearly owes a debt in style and tone, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer shares something of a kinship in terms of its snappy dialogue. I've mentioned Twin Peaks already, but you can't mention Twin Peaks enough. Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks.

At the cinema, the high-school noir movie Brick would be another story that Heathers paved the way for, and Donnie Darko seems to inhabit a not dissimilar world to Veronica Sawyer. Reese Witherspoon's Freeway was not set in a school, but it certainly expands on the idea of a violent teenage fairytale. Another of her movies, Election, takes the dark wit of Heathers and transfers it to a more naturalistic school setting, exploring the political similarities of childhood and adulthood even further. Like David Lynch, Jeffrey Eugenides must have already been independently ploughing similar ideas and inspirations to Heathers with his novel The Virgin Suicides, at roughly the same time, but Heathers unquestionably informs Sofia Coppola's movie adaptation of his work. Mean Girls is undoubtedly a gentler variant for a younger audience. Cruel Intentions has a similar sense of humour.

Grittier films like Kids, Welcome to the Dollhouse and Thirteen are a million miles away from the universe of Ferris Bueller, Risky Business, Sixteen Candles, Pretty In Pink, Fame, The Breakfast Club and Grease, which Heathers pretty much ushered out. It stands with Fast Times At Ridgemont High as the most lastingly influential high school movie of the decade, although Back To The Future was the most successful. And even in Fast Times director Amy Heckerling's wonderful later comedy Clueless, you can see the influence of Heathers on the manners and dialogue of the teens.

In the 1990s and later, the landscape was changed again by the peerless Dazed and Confused, which updates American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show, and by the two giant but short-lived TV series, My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks, which criminally failed to stay on the air whilst shows like the execrable Dawson's Creek and the OC were allowed to prosper. Reassuringly, it's hard to see Kevin Williamson having a more lasting impact on teen comedy-drama than Judd Apatow and Richard Linklater, no matter how much we all liked Scream when it first came out. These battles are won by virtue of the lasting influence the work has on the next generation artists. Writers like Williamson were making their teens too self-conscious, to excruciating degrees, and their universes were becoming preachy and paradigmatic. Even as they strove to emulate the wittiness of Heathers, they were undercutting its cynical outlook with their own lack of self-awareness. What Paul Feig and Winnie Holzman were able to do was to build on the Wonder Years model, by restoring an innocent warm heartedness, as well as uncertainty, to their ensemble characters, stripping back the knowing, post-modern aspects that would come to plague the genre in lesser hands than Joss Whedon. My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks feel about as disarmingly real as school life can be portrayed whilst still remaining barely comfortable to watch. And so it is Angela Chase and Lindsay Weir both seem to have a lot more in common with Winona Rider than they do with Molly Ringwald.

The key bridge may be Richard Linklater's film, which feels very much like the sort of world the characters Veronica and JD would actually live in if they weren't caught up in a surrealist plot. Pink, Slater, Mitch, Wooderson and the rest of Dazed and Confused's 1970s Texan teens get up to a much more realistic brand of trouble than the fairy tale allegories of Heathers, but it's good honest trouble nonetheless, for lifelike kids, and not the likeable caricatures you'd find in a John Hughes movie. For although the teens in Heathers do crazy things, the way they talk and think actually has a verisimilitude to it, which is why the film hits a nerve that most films before it miss. Heathers was a film that drastically redefined how you could portray teens in the 1990s, and both Dazed and Confused and My So-Called Life then seem to me to have profoundly influenced Freaks and Geeks at the close of the decade (as well as perhaps feeding back into Cameron Crowe's work on Almost Famous) and therefore the current Hollywood career of Apatow and his collaborators, who seem to be taking a stranglehold on the young-adult market. It's worth pointing out Apatow and Heathers director Lehman were both alumni of The Larry Sanders Show. Lehman had later made the more genial romantic comedy The Truth About Cats And Dogs, but was largely consigned to a career in television after the Hudson Hawk debacle.

The 1990s teen film that doesn't really fit easy categorisation, like Back to the Future defied genres in the 1980s, is the basketball documentary Hoop Dreams. If I was to take an early guess at an influential film from this decade, I might suggest Evan Rachel Wood's performance in Thirteen, a disconcertingly honest film, that shows the darker side of Dazed and Confused's humour, and with younger kids. And of course, in television, the season four story line of The Wire, set in the Baltimore public school system, is probably the greatest work done this decade in any artistic genre on any subject. The Wire is less entertainment - though it is certainly entertainingly challenging - than it is a relentlessly penetrative assault of decades of public social policy, through the lens of brilliant dialogue and characterisation. In the same way that Heathers foreshadows Columbine, these works tackle the difficult subject of childhood criminality head on, but they eschew the need for surrealism and elect dirty realism as their mode instead.

Though difficult to say at the time, Heathers may have been the premature career high point of both its stars. Christian Slater started out on Broadway, before In The Name Of The Rose gave him his star-making role alongside Sean Connery whilst still a teenager. Winona Rider came to prominence in the Tim Burton movie Beetlejuice. Both had a reasonably good but short run near the top.

After Heathers, Rider played opposite Johnny Depp in Tim Burton's gothic fairytale Edward Scissorhands, and was then cast alongside Daniel Day-Lewis in Martin Scorsese's period adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, The Age of Innocence. She was also cast as Mary Corleone for the final Godfather movie, but caught flu after filming Mermaids and dropped out, leaving Sofia Coppola to take the role. She did however work with Francis Ford Coppola on his adaptation of Dracula, and had a part in the Jim Jamusch movie Night On Earth. She was Oscar nominated for her lead role in Little Women. Looking back at her resume after, say, Reality Bites in 1994, it's easy to forget just how famous Winona Rider was for a while, and as an actress, not the celebrity ex-girlfriend of Depp and Matt Damon who got caught shoplifting. The Crucible, Celebrity, and Girl Interrupted weren't bad movies late in the decade, but they're largely forgotten, and the fourth film in the Alien franchise was a disaster. The best film Rider's been involved with this century is the Richard Linklater animation A Scanner Darkly. Perhaps her upcoming appearance as Spock's mother in the Star Trek reboot will revitalise her fortunes.

After the teen fare of Pump Up The Volume and Young Guns II, Slater won the role of Will Scarlet in the hugely successful Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, played the journalist in Interview With The Vampire, made the underrated romance Untamed Heart and the underrated drama Murder In The First, and starred in another cult classic, True Romance. His career too has been in freefall since around 1995.

Brad Pitt and Jennifer Connolly were in the running for the lead roles of JD and Veronica, and Heather Graham was actually cast as one of the Heathers, but was dissuaded from taking the role by her parents. Indeed, Rider's agent supposedly warned her the film would ruin her career. Shannen Doherty makes a pre 90210 appearance as one of the Heathers.



Okay, now I am going to review literally the whole film, in mind numbing detail, as I watch it and react to it, so you can stop reading now if you don't want any spoilers. If you think this review is way too long already, consider it finished. My book reviews get criticised for not discussing plot details, so if you like plot details, here you go:





New World Pictures puts up a red and black stripy globe logo.

WINONA RIDER

CHRISTIAN SLATER

HEATHERS

The titles are white capital letters with red shadows on a dark screen.

The music is a fairy-tale rendition of Que Sera, Sera, and I believe it's sung by Syd Straw and arranged by Van Dyke Parks. "When I was a little girl I asked my mother what will I be..." You know how it goes.

Three teenage girls are walking through a dreamlike garden, holding croquet mallets in the bright daylight. If you ask me they look detached and even a little cruel.

Okay. Winona's narrating a voice over. We're in school now. It sounds like a diary entry, but it rhymes. Winona's interrupted and summoned to see those same three girls in the cafeteria. They want her to write a fake love letter to some poor girl they want to humiliate. Oh no Winona. Please don't write it. But you are. Winona's name is Veronica Sawyer. The other three are all called Heather.

Christian's in the cafeteria, making eyes at her. She meets his gaze and walks into a chair. The leader of the Heathers is busy being obnoxiously important. Veronica's not sure about this. She says everybody thinks she's a piranha. "Well f*** me gently with a chainsaw, do I look like Mother Theresa?" Ha-ha! They're making plans to go to a college party. High school must be beneath them, which is a shame, them being high school kids and all. Must be tough, hating yourself. For some reason they're asking all the students a question for a poll. We see a montage of that.

Cruelty alert. Winona, sorry, Veronica looks ashamed as the rather chubby chick they sent the love letter to gets humiliated by a table full of football players, who don't know what she's talking about, but squawk with laughter. Christian is still coolly watching everything that's going on. The leader of the Heathers tells Veronica she's losing her sense of humour. She should be happy she's part of the coolest clique in school. Now we're in the girls' bathroom. "Grow up Heather, bulimia's so '87." Ouch.

The Heathers have clocked Veronica's into a boy. Jason Dean. He's in her American history class. She approaches him and he says, "Greetings and Salutations are you a Heather?" and she says no she's a Veronica and she's got to ask him a stupid question and he says there are no stupid questions and she asks what would he do with five million dollars if aliens were going to blow up the earth and he tells her it's the stupidest question he's ever heard.

The football players are jealous of this interaction and decide to intimidate JD after Veronica has gone. So he pulls a gun on them and starts shooting. Scary dude...

Now the Heathers are playing croquet and discussing if he'll be suspended or expelled or sent to prison. The gun fired blanks. One Heather says to another Heather "Did you have a brain tumour for breakfast?" Ha-ha. Croquet seems to be a metaphor for how insanely stupid social games are so of course they all take it very earnestly.

We meet Veronica's parents and they seem pretty cool about her going to this party. Next Veronica sees JD at this food court on the way to the party and they hang out and he shows her his motorbike. He says he moved around a lot as a kid and his dad owns a construction company. He asks her a question and she answers "No my life's not perfect I don't really like my friends" and he tells her he doesn't like her friends either and she says "it's just like they're people I work with and out job is being popular" and he says maybe its time she took a vacation. This is an interesting exchange if you ask me because it spares no sacred cows about school days and friendship. Childhood is already like a job and you have colleagues. Huh? Are kids allowed to say that in high school movies? Cool.

This college party looks a dump. Turns out guys who are jerks in high school are jerks in college too. Who would have thought? "Dear diary, I want to kill, and you have to believe it's for more than just selfish reasons More than just a spoke in my menstrual cycle." Ha! "I understand that I must stop Heather." That emerges kind of abruptly, but I can buy it, I guess. Veronica is playing with matches. We keep inter cutting with the party. The guys are still bozos and dweebs but Winona, sorry, Veronica, looks fetching. "Betty Finn was a true friend and I sold her out for a bunch of swatch dogs and diet coke heads. Killing Heather would be like offing the Wicked Witch of the West. Wait east. West! God I sound like a f****** psycho!" Well dear, you're wearing a monocle and your wastepaper basket is on fire, so yeah, maybe!

Before Veronica Sawyer joined the Heathers, she had a best friend called Betty Finn. Now the more attentive among you will have already noticed the dualism with these names. Betty and Veronica. Sawyer and Finn. Anybody still want to bet against JD being a literary reference and not just a shout out to Rebel Without A Cause?

Cut to the party and Veronica wants to leave and Heather won't let her and Veronica throws up and Heather thinks that's hilarious. The two of them have a shouting match in an alleyway that's flickering moodily in the light of a trashcan that must have caught fire when Veronica was playing with matches at the window earlier. Heather says she made Veronica. She threatens to destroy her. "Transfer to Washington. Transfer to Jefferson. No-one at Westerberg's going to let you play their reindeer games." Heather has a reddish yellow perm that looks quite demonic in the firelight. Veronica's black coiffure and makeup look great for somebody who just puked everywhere. I bet JD would let her play reindeer games with him.

Veronica finishes her diary entry and flings it across the room just as JD is clambering through her window. She seems more scared someone might see her wearing a monocle than she is a psycho is following her round and just clambered through her window. She looks startled and somewhat thrilled. He asks her to come and play croquet in the garden with him and that's totally a euphemism.

"I say we just grow up be adults and die" says Veronica afterwards. As if they have a choice in the matter. First though they plot to make Heather throw up, since she finds vomit so hilarious. They break into her kitchen. JD seems to be mixing some pretty dangerous fluids there but I think Veronica's just kidding about wanting to kill Heather. That's the language kids use. They kiss, and afterwards JD looks like he's got some shady ideas he stops short of articulating.

They take the "hangover cure" they've made up to Heather's bedroom and she insults them but guzzles it down anyway and she starts to puke, except now it looks more like a protracted death choke and suddenly she keels over in her dressing gown face down through a glass table! Oh no. She's not moving. Veronica looks shocked and horrified. "Oh my God. I can't believe it. I just killed my best friend." JD looks shocked and fascinated. "And your worst enemy." That's another Betty and Veronica reference right there. Veronica seems more worried about herself than Heather, now she's going to San Quentin instead of Sanford. Ha-ha. JD says he's freaked but I think he's getting off on this. And the bedroom walls look like something from a bedtime story, all lit up in pale amber light. JD's pacing around in his black trenchcoat and cool haircut trying to look anguished but he's plotting something. His eyes fall on Cliff Notes of The Bell Jar. They've committed murder but if he makes it look like suicide then that's all right. Erm, no, love. Who taught you ethics? Veronica knows how to do Heather's handwriting and they have a debate what vocabulary she would use. JD has some empathic insight, for a sociopath. Between them the doomed clichés come too easily. "This is good. You've done this before?"

"You might think what I've done is shocking to me though suicide is the natural answer to the myriad of problems life has given me. People think just because you're beautiful and popular life is easy and fun. No one understood I have feelings too. I die knowing no one knew the real me" There are some interesting inversions going on here. First of all Veronica wrote that fake love note, she writes her diary, now she writes suicide notes. But whose voice is this? Heather? Veronica? JD? What people think of Heather? What Heather thinks people think of Heather? What Veronica and JD think Heather thinks people think of Heather? What do people think? I don't know. If I tried to guess it would probably reveal more about me than it would about them, and not in a good way.

The schoolteachers don't really know how to react to the "suicide" but one of them is impressed Heather used the word "myriad correctly in her suicide note. The Heather played by Shannen Doherty looks to be the new leader of the Heathers. It's a battlefield promotion. Veronica drenches herself under the shower fully clothed perhaps to see if it's possible for anybody to feel anything at all. Next some screwy teacher who is really into feelings is passing the suicide note around. The teacher seems to think what everybody feels matters more than the detail and meaning of what has actually happened. She's a moron. Veronica bursts out laughing at the drivel they're all speaking and just about covers it up as sobbing

JD are watching a video tribute diary to Heather and can't believe how popular this girl is who everybody hated. JD's dad comes in and starts walking on a treadmill. Father and son have this cool way of talking where JD says the lines his dad's supposed to say and dad says the lines JD's supposed to say. It's a hoot, but also an ironic commentary on how messed up it is when parents act like friends. JD's dad sounds dangerous to me. Veronica's parents by contrast are disconcertingly well adjusted.

A preacher delivers a hilarious eulogy damning the "MTV video games". He looks creepy standing in front of a stained glass window and behind an ugly bronze statue with outstretched arms. Apparently Jesus Christ is a righteous dude who can solve teenagers' problems, and he's in the book. The congregation look mortified. The open casket makes Heather look like Sleeping Beauty. The kids take turns to kneel down beside her and make self-absorbed prayers. Even Veronica has the chutzpah to join in. "I just want my high school to be a nice place. Amen." That's dark!

Outside the chapel the football players, Kurt and Ram are their names, beat up a pair of kids, as JD rides past on is motorbike, watching. Veronica gets dragged along on double date with these goons and they end up tipping cows in a field at night. Veronica ditches them and slips away to find JD lurking in the woods.

At school Veronica finds work has begun in earnest on the "Heather Chandler yearbook". She's also a victim of gossip that Kurt and Ram had a sword fight in her mouth last night. Ewe. She starts plotting revenge. JD wants to write another suicide note and has his gun, but Veronica tells him "My Bonnie and Clyde days are over." Well I guess now they must be Kit and Holly, because I think things are going to get worse before they get better. JD tells her this tall tale about bullets that are like tranquilliser darts. It's just a practical joke, like when he fired blanks at Kurt and Ram in the canteen. I don't believe him, but Veronica has already written the note, which is also a confession of a secret love affair between the high school linebacker and the quarterback.

When she lures them into the woods one of them is wearing a red sports jacket, so perhaps that makes Veronica the big bad wolf. She talks them into taking their clothes off, thinking they're both going to sleep with her, making the gossip true since everybody believes it already. These guys are dumb. JD appears with his gun from behind a tree and fires it. Veronica has a gun too. She shoots but deliberately misses. She still thinks this is a joke. One of the guys runs away. JD chases him and it dawns on Veronica that the other guy is dead. JD shot him. JD chases his pray back round in a circle and cries out for Veronica to shoot him, which does, in shock. They hastily plant the suicide note and some other paraphernalia and flea the scene as two smarmy bungling cops show up to investigate the gunshots. Now JD and Veronica are being pursued through the woods but they easily get to their car and start making out to look inconspicuous. By now the cops think they've got the suicide all figured out. The note says "We realised we could never reveal out forbidden love to an uncaring and un-understanding world." The cops mock the dead bodies.

JD and Veronica smoke cigarettes and she burns one out on her hand - perhaps to see if she still feels anything at all. JD tells her she knew what they were doing but she denies wanting Kurt and Ram dead. They're shrieking at each other and the kids walking past think the couple inside the car are having a love quarrel, which they kind of are. Gossip is spreading about the latest suicide.

Another funeral and Kurt and Ram are kitted out in matching suits and matching coffins and, for some reason, matching red football helmets. One father tearfully tells the congregation "I love my dead gay son". Veronica finds it funny as JD makes snide remarks until she sees a little girl crying and swallows hard.

"Dear Diary. My teen angst bulls*** has a body count". Ha-ha. "The most popular people in school are dead. Everybody's sad but it's a weird kind of sad. Suicide gave Heather depth, Kurt a soul, Ram a brain. I don't know what its given me, but I've got no control over myself when I'm with JD. Are we going to prom or to hell?" This not only seems to me like a pretty damning indictment of dating, but there also seems to be a Wizard of Oz theme running through these diary entries.

Things at school are completely nuts. Veronica's angry about it. JD thinks: "Today was great. Chaos is great. Chaos is what killed the dinosaurs, darling." JD is a stone cold psycho. He thinks they're teaching people to be better people by scaring them. She calls him immature. JD's psycho dad comes home and puts on a video of a controlled demolition he just carried out. He kind of insinuates he may have killed a few people. JD's dad is a very, very creepy guy. To emphasise this fact, he has an extraordinary haircut that looks like a wig. Perhaps he should consider a career making "MTV video games" with that loony preacher and the deluded school guidance counsellor. He says "some days its great to be alive"

When he's gone Veronica asks JD if he likes his dad and JD says he's never given the matter thought. He says he liked his mom but she's dead. Everybody said it was an accident but he knows she knew what she was doing. She walked into a building two minutes before his dad blew it up. Okay. That's messed up. "Boom". Veronica looks rather troubled. A song, Teenage Suicide Don't Do It, by Big Fun, comes on the radio, which incidentally looks like something Fred Flintstone might own. JD shoots it. "That's it. We're breaking up." Veronica's freaking out. JD's trying to force himself on her but she makes a speech about how she used to think he was cool but now he shouldn't mess with her. She storms out.

JD goes to talk to the Heather that's played by Shannen Doherty. He's encouraging her to fill the power vacuum. Meanwhile Veronica invites her old friend Betty Finn over to play croquet and tries to be really nice to her. Shannen Doherty shows up. She has pretty much mutated into the first Heather, and is even dressing like her. I think she was the one who was insecure and bulimic to start with.

The TV is going overboard reporting on teenage suicide. Veronica is the only one who seems to see what mixed messages it's sending out. She has the unique vantage point of knowing that JD murdered these kids and they didn't just kill themselves. No wonder her sense of perspective is so well adjusted. Good lord. She has a heated discussion with her parents. Her mother calls her "Little Miss Voice of a Generation." He-he. She asks her how she thinks adults behave. "When teenagers complain that they want to be treated like human beings it's usually because they are being treated like human beings." Good point, Mrs Sawyer. Veronica says she's picked a bad time to be a human being. Heather arrives and says the fat girl, Martha, tried to kill herself. Heather thinks this is a great story to relate. Martha was just trying to copy the popular kids, and she failed miserably. Veronica slaps her. They're patching things up when they recognise the third Heather's voice calling a radio phone-in to discuss suicide. She says her life is a mess.

Veronica writes another of her diary entry voiceovers in class. She cut off Heather's head and Heather's head grew back again like a hydra. Nothing has changed and she can't get JD out of her head. She finds the new weakest Heather gobbling sleeping pills in the bathroom and has to calm her down. JD and the strongest Heather are conferring again. He wants her to organise a petition, like those goofy quizzes the last Heather used to conduct, only no one knows what they're signing. Heather tells Veronica "people love me." Veronica tells her "people love you, but I know you." She refuses to sign the petition. She goes to slap Heather a second time but this time Heather catches her hand. Heather tells Veronica Sawyer that Betty Finn wouldn't want to be her friend if her fairy godmother made her cool. I'm not so sure about that. I'm thinking Betty and Veronica are meant to be friends in the same way Tom and Huck are, but I could be wrong, so don't lay any odds with a bookie on my account. Heather leaves and JD turns up again and asks Veronica out. Veronica jokes they could slit Heather's wrists and make it look like suicide. JD says he could be up for that. In fact he's already begun underlining meaningful passages in Moby Dick, which is Heather's favourite book. He tries to caress Veronica but she elbows him and rushes away. She says it's over and he needs to grow up.

Later Veronica's parents tell her Jason Dean stopped by and he told them he was concerned their daughter might kill herself. He left a note that Veronica opens and all it says is "Recognise the handwriting?" Oh no. That's disturbed. In her room she finds a doll hanging by its neck. She curls up in a foetal position on her bed. JD is outside her house on his motorbike lighting a cigarette...

JD must have climbed through Veronica's window again although the time jump seems kind of odd here. Hmm. This time she looks scared, or at least repelled by him. You know, all this creeping about at night reminds me a lot of the teenagers in Twin Peaks, which remember was also a high school show, in part. JD is leafing through Moby Dick. "Get off my bed you f****** psycho!" Smart girl. "You say tomato, I say tomato". JD says he might leave a note that just says "Eskimo."

JD leads her into a kitchen and suddenly is brandishing a huge carving knife from one of the draws. JD has a knack of getting Veronica to talk about the little hypothetical details instead of the bigger issues like whether what they're doing is wrong. Last time it was vocabulary, this time it's hygiene. They debate whether Heather would slit her wrists with a knife that wasn't spotless, so JD starts cleaning it, and then he shows Veronica her own reflection in the blade. Veronica says if Heather goes somebody else will take her place tomorrow and that person could be her. Interestingly, her argument for not killing Heather doesn't seem to be that murder is inherently wrong, but that it won't accomplish desirable change. This feels like the rationale of a calculating politician to me, not the mixed up kids we've been led to believe Heathers is all about. What was that line Mrs Sawyer said about treating kids like adults? Now Veronica's defiantly telling JD that only she can do Heather's handwriting and she's not doing another suicide note so that's the end of it. JD looks nuts. "You don't get it do you. Society nods its head at any horror the American teenager can think to bring upon itself. Nobody's going to care about exact handwriting." Except, what about that teacher who liked the word "myriad", which you yourself argued for including, psycho boy? Except, why did you just clean the knife when Veronica told you to? Huh? But to prove his point he forces a pen in her hand then scrawls it around a sheet of paper, her hand in his, writing the words "Life Sucks!" The room is all shadowy and stormy and he's got a knife in one hand and Moby Dick in the other and now we see through a door Heather is already slumped unconscious in a bathtub. Huh? I thought this was Veronica's house.

Smash cut to Heather in a coffin at the chapel and the creepy rotund preacher eulogising. "Es-ki-mo." Ha-ha. "Heather Duke underlined a lot of things in this book, but I believe the word Eskimo underlined all by itself is the key to understanding Heather's pain. On the surface Heather Duke was the vivacious young lady we all knew her to be, but her soul was in Antarctica, freezing with the knowledge of the way fellow teenagers can be cruel, the way that life sucks." Visually this sequence is more surreal than usual as the camera roams along the pews lined with kids in white robes wearing 3D cinema glasses. Veronica is stood alone looking somewhat like Alice in Wonderland, when the first Heather, dressed up like some gothic queen or witch, walks up to her, and says at least seventy more people turned up for her funeral. The wall is backlit in red with slit windows like a castle in a fairytale. "The afterlife is so boring. If I have to sing kumbaya one more time..."

It's a dream. I knew it. Veronica's still in the foetal position we saw her in earlier in her bedroom. Her mother calls her for dinner. Veronica puts on her monocle and writes. "Dear Diary. Last entry. No one can stop JD, not the FBI the CIA or the PTA." ha-ha. "He once told me that the extreme always makes an impression. Well now it's my turn. Lets see how the son of a bitch reacts to a suicide he didn't perform himself."

JD is still outside on his motorbike like a Twin Peaks plotline only this time he's got a gun not a cigarette. We actually see him put a ladder to the window this time and climb. We put our head through the window, from his point of view, and see Veronica hanging from the ceiling limply by a tied white bed sheet, rather like that doll she found earlier, after he left the creepy message. Oh God. JD enters the room and starts speaking. "I can't believe you did it. I was teasing. I loved you. I was coming up here to kill you. First I was going to try and get you back with my amazing petition. We students of Westerberg High will die. Today our burning bodies will be the ultimate protest to a society that degrades us. F*** you all! It's not very subtle, but neither's blowing up a whole school. When our school blows up tomorrow it's going to be the kind of thing to infect a generation. It's going to be Woodstock for the 80s." He takes out that cigarette to smoke. It's all very Shakespearian having a character give a soliloquy like this to a dead body. Veronica's parents call her for dinner again, so JD scarpers out the window. Her mother enters the room and finds her daughter hanging, and starts whimpering apologies for something totally trivial. Veronica abruptly raises her head and unties the bed sheet and collapses on her bed. The makeshift rope was also fastened tight around her waste. Clever girl.

We see JD making something with dynamite in his room then school the next day and ominous but soft pipe music. Veronica's teacher is surprised to see her because JD told her she committed suicide last night, which she says like its what the cool kids do all the time to ditch school. "We have to talk. Whether to kill yourself or not is one of the most important decisions a teenager can make." Now that's satirical. Veronica tells this hippy idiot of a teacher "Get a job."

JD is prowling round the corridors and staircases and Veronica clocks him. He goes to the bathroom and takes out some dynamite in a cubicle as Veronica tiptoes around deserted corridors. Then JD is under the bleachers in the gymnasium wiring up explosives before he goes downstairs to hide out in the boiler-room below. Classes pour out and Veronica wants to know why everybody is going to the gymnasium, and more importantly, what's underneath it. The boiler-room.

"May I see your hall pass?" Veronica has JD at gunpoint now but he easily overpowers her and knocks her unconscious. The boiler-room is all smoky blue light. The gym is packed with kids clapping and chanting in time to a cheerleader routine. JD is wiring more dynamite in the basement as Veronica rouses and crawls towards him cautiously. There's a countdown timer. It says two minutes twenty seconds. Nineteen seconds. Eighteen. The principal is leading the chants like a politician at a rally. Veronica has found a blunt object. Someone strikes a match underneath the bleachers but this is totally a fake-out because somebody's sneaking a cigarette. Look out! She's behind you! Veronica swings at JD and he keels over and his gun goes flying. He turns the tables and they grapple on the floor. The cheerleaders keep dancing. In the boiler-room JD kisses Veronica and she knees him in the groin. She's got the gun now but he knocks over some canisters to distract her and he escapes. Lucky for him those canisters were there, hey? The pipe music sounds serious as a cheerleader cartwheels in slow motion and the kids cheer cheerfully in the gym and Veronica edges around the boiler-room with the large pistol held out in both her outstretched hands. We continue to inter-cut for a while and then she turns a corner and has JD at gunpoint again. He's got a knife. He tells her she can't end it. She says "I'll kill you I'll f****** kill you I swear to god!" She wants to know how to defuse the bomb and he tells her where to go. She shoots him in the hand.

We're still inter-cutting to the gym and JD is bleeding. She begs him to help her stop it. Forty-two. Forty-one. Forty. JD says nobody loves him but I think he's mocking her and the whole situation. He reckons "the only place different social types can genuinely get along with each other is in heaven." He's kind of a pathetic wounded animal now but a tricky, dangerous one none the less. The principal whistles. The band bangs a drum. Cheerleaders stampede their feel. "Seriously, people are going to look at the ashes of Westerberg and say now there's a school that self destructed not because society didn't care, but because the school was society." He sounds manic. He encourages her not to press the red button. Veronica starts to say "You know what I want babe?" and JD lurches at her, and she shoots him, startled, in the chest, once, and then twice, when he keeps coming, and finally he goes down. "Cool guys like you out of my life." The faint music is spooky and echoing, just sound effects really, and you can hear some of the noise from the gymnasium. Winona, sorry, Veronica glowers at him then wipes her brow. Her face is all smoky and her hair is unkempt. It's not clear what's up with the timer.

Veronica emerges wearily from the boiler-room and sees the school celebration. She smiles and shuts the door behind her. She walks out the front of the school and down some steps and leans on a railing. JD comes through another door onto the steps behind her. Thought that dude was dead. He says he's impressed. She messed him up pretty bad. He's limping and his hand is bloody and he's got blood on his cheek but he looks alright for a guy with a cool haircut who just got shot three times, although Christian, seriously, the black trench-coat is not a good look for you man, I mean who do you think you are, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold or somebody? Oh, wait. He's got the bomb wired under his coat and the timer is set to forty-five seconds. He walks away and he looks back at her, half-bent-over with his arm at his gut. "Pretend I did blow up the school, all of the schools. Now that you're dead what are you going to do with your life?" I liked the scenario with aliens and five million dollars more. She takes a cigarette from her jacket pocket and places it in her mouth. He seems to like that. She just watches him nonchalantly as he stretches his arms out. A smirk comes across her face. The camera cuts back to behind JD and pans up and over him to show her stood alone of the left of two red staircases coming down form the school. Inside the gym they hear the explosion. Outside Veronica looks totally dishevelled with blood and soot on her face as a cloud of smoke clears, but hey, at least the explosion lit her cigarette for her, even if her tangled black hair looks totally hysterical, and she takes a drag and poses archly on the steps as the smoke billows in a dreamlike mist around her feet. She looks kind of cool but I hope she's not the new JD or the new Heather.

She walks back into the school in entirely the opposite and wrong direction to everybody else in the scrum of kids now rushing to see what just happened. We don't get to go with them or look for ourselves. Veronica meets Heather coming towards her and Heather tells her she looks like hell and Veronica says yeah she just got back. Ha-ha. "Heather my love there's a new Sheriff in town." Veronica takes the red hair sash that Heather took from the old Heather and ties back her own hair and kisses Heather on the cheek leaving a sooty mark. She asks Martha to stay home with her on prom night and watch movies and eat popcorn and Martha says she'd like that a lot as Heather rolls her eyes and walks away and Veronica walks in the opposite direction as Martha kind of scoots around her on this little handicap cart she's riding and then the two of them sit talking as the credits roll and Sly and the Family Stone strike up a blues version of Que Sera, Sera, "Whatever will be will be / The future's not ours to see," you know how it goes, and then fade to black. The End.

Summary: Deserves its classic status