“All you need is a bikini and a diaphragm,” declares Laurie (Lynn-Holly Johnson, the bad tempered, blind figure skater from Ice Castles) at the outset of Where the Boys Are ’84. The quartet of Spring Break–crazed students (the others are played by spiketop sexpot Lisa Hartman, Wendy Schaal and Lorna daughter-of-Judy-sister-of-Liza Luft) descending on Fort Lauderdale acted as demented and rapacious as the swinging dicks that ogled and belched through a million male-dominated raunchfests. But, due to an irrevocable cinematic double standard, the girls on the beach could not enjoy quite the same kind of dirty good time as the baboons on the balcony, who squirted happily in their shorts every time a thing in a thong jiggled past. Horny Laurie may have been hot for “a bonehead with the most incredible bod,” but deep down she really wanted to find true love. And when she thought she’d stumbled over Mr. Right, he turned out, as a punishment for her earlier lusty pronouncement, to be a male hooker.
Just as recasting actresses like Sharon Stone, Bridget Fonda and Lori Petty as Action Babes would prove fruitless in the nineties, so altering the chromosomes of existing teen formulas was, a decade earlier, a box-office no-no. The grossout and the splatter were too firmly entrenched in the business of pressing male buttons to capture the imaginations or customs of girls. However, as the eighties drew to a close, the previously neglected gender would have its revenge in the shape of a movie that banged the last nail in the coffin of the teen era.
Veronica Sawyer: “Why can’t we talk to different kinds of people?”
Heather Chandler: “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw. Do I look like Mother Teresa?”
—from Heathers, written by Daniel Waters
If nineties prime time’s most beloved Virtual Companions had been in business in the eighties, it would have been an altogether less adorable affair. “I’ll Be There for You,” their signature tune would have crooned and then carried on, “Stabbing you in the back, spreading rumors about you and making your life a living hell.” War movies had Nazis. Spy movies had Commies. Cowboys had Indians. Eighties teen movies had friends. Hip, cool, powerful friends. Icy, perfectly accessorized arbiters of taste who decided with the arch of an eyebrow or the curl of a scarlet lip who would be allowed to continue breathing the precious air of the inner circle and who would be plunged into social oblivion. Wielding their power of exclusion like a psycho with a kitchen knife, friends caused eating disorders, soiled sheets, nervous breakdowns and capsized relationships. Their reign of terror was quiveringly depicted in movies like Valley Girl, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful and Can’t Buy Me Love. In all those films, the moral superiority of the downtrodden prevailed over the vicious manipulation of the wealthy oppressors. And then there was Heathers (1989), whose visionary screenwriter, Daniel Waters, took as his inspiration the abuse of power among the popular and whose solution to their smirking sadism involved absolutely no moral superiority whatsoever. Black of heart, glossy of hair and tart of tongue, Heathers is more quotable than the Old Testament and crueler than an off-duty call girl’s candid conversation.
Westerburg High in Springfield, Ohio is dominated by three witches: evil-eyed she-wolf Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), her ass-kissing second-in-command Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk) and bulimic Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty). Perfectly coiffed and coutured, they patrol the playgrounds and dining halls of their fiefdom, striking fear into the hearts of the lower orders with a withering putdown or a roll of the eye. Their numbers are swelled by the reluctant addition of someone who has the spotless, crease-free look of a Heather but is actually a Veronica (Winona Ryder). Troubled by the duality of her popularity-by-proxy and her internal qualms about being associated with the wicked queens, Veronica finds herself, by day, going along with whatever soul-crushing prank Heather Chandler has dreamed up, then, by night, repenting and venting into a frenzied journal. Thus, she is forced to forge a “hot and horny yet realistically low-key note,” in the handwriting of a jock to fool school blob Martha Dumptruck (Carrie Lynn) into thinking he has the hots for her. “Come on,” commands Heather, “it’ll be very.… The note’ll give her shower-nozzle masturbation fantasies for weeks.” Martha Dumptruck is summarily hoodwinked and mocked by the slobbish object of her affection. Heather exults, “They all want me as a friend or a fuck. I’m worshipped at Westerburg and I’m only a junior.”
Veronica’s salvation lurks in the shape of J.D. (Christian Slater), the new kid in school with the laconic drawl, the permanently arched eyebrows and the gun he pulls on two dumb jocks when they try and intimidate him. “I don’t really like my friends,” Veronica confides to J.D., after Heather Chandler has made her snub childhood friend Betty Finn in order to attend a college dance. “They’re people I work with and our job is being popular and shit.” She opens up even more to her diary. “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 … East … West. God, I sound like a fucking psycho. Tomorrow, I’ll be kissing her aerobicized ass but tonight let me dream of a world without Heather, a world where I am free.”
For Veronica, J.D.’s Bad Boy influence soon becomes as intoxicating as Heather Chandler’s gift of popularity. Soon, he has her convinced to play an innocent little prank on her mentor/tormentor. Sneakily ensconced in the Chandler kitchen, the mischievous pair attempts to concoct a cocktail that will make Heather puke. First, they try to hawk up some phlegm in order to garnish the drink with spit. Both come up dry (for all the murder and teen-suicide jokes that abound throughout the film, this spit scene is the only one ever excised when Heathers is shown on TV). J.D. plumps for some lethal Hull Clean Liquid Drainer. “That’ll kill her,” chides Veronica, but he sneaks the poison into the drink without her noticing. J.D., remarkably, convinces Heather to down the brew by surmising it might be too intense for her to handle. She rises to the bait, swallows, gasps “Corn nuts” and collapses through a glass coffee table. “I’m gonna have to send my SAT scores to San Quentin instead of Stanford,” panics Veronica. But J.D. makes Heather’s death look like a suicide, even faking a note: “I died knowing no one knew the real me.” This has the effect of making a martyr out of the previously hated and feared Heather. “I blame not Heather,” intones the priest at her funeral, “but rather a society that tells its youth that the answer can be found in the MTV video games. We must pray that the other teenagers of Springfield know the name of that righteous dude who can solve their problems. It’s Jesus Christ and he’s in the book.” Amen. “Technically, I did not kill Heather Chandler,” prays Veronica over the coffin, “but, hey, who am I trying to kid? I just want my high school to be a nice place.”
But it isn’t. It’s full of slugs like Ram and Kurt, the two dumb jocks who filled their shorts when J.D. pulled a gun on them. Heather McNamara persuades Veronica to accompany her on a double date with them. It inevitably ends in a bout of cow tipping, but Kurt spreads rumors that the evening came to a satisfactory climax, with Veronica providing both of them with oral accommodation (“He said that he and Ram had a nice little sword-fight in your mouth last night,” says bleeding heart Peter Dawson). J.D. invites Veronica to avenge this slander by luring the two goons into the woods where he will shoot them with a rare form of bullet that breaks the skin but inflicts no lasting damage. Once unconscious, he plans to frame them as participants in a gay death pact. He’s already composed a note: “Ram and I died the day we realized we could never reveal our forbidden love to an uncaring and un-understanding world. The joy we shared in each other’s arms was greater than any touchdown, yet we were forced to live the lives of sexist, beer-guzzling jock assholes.” He also takes pleasure in assembling a tableau of homosexual artifacts: a copy of Stud Puppy, a candy dish, Joan Crawford postcard, mascara and mineral water. Veronica expresses puzzlement over the last choice. J.D. says, “This is Ohio. If you don’t have a brewski in your hand, you might as well be wearing a dress.” Totally under the spell of her hot, if fiendish, new boyfr
iend, she acts as bait luring both jocks into the woods where J.D. shoots them both. Dead. She finds herself at another teenage funeral. At this one, Kurt’s dad stands over the casket, bawling, “I love my dead, gay son.”
Teen suicide becomes media topic du jour. The hapless Martha Dumptruck attempts to kill herself in a failed effort to court popularity. Teachers and classmates search for meaning in the suicides of Heather, Ram and Kurt. The hit single “Teen Suicide (Don’t Do It)” by Big Fun receives heavy rotation (coincidentally, a British teenybop group called Big Fun was enjoying their momentary burst of success at exactly the time the movie was released in the U.K.).
Depressed by the posthumous acclaim bestowed on her unwitting and undeserving victims, Veronica moans to her mother, “All we want is to be treated like human beings.” Mrs. Sawyer, up to this point a chirpy automaton, responds with probably the most stirring retort ever delivered by an adult character in a teen movie. “Treated like human beings? Is that what you said, little Ms. voice-of-a-generation? How do you think adults act with other adults? Do you think it’s just like a game of doubles tennis? When teenagers complain that they want to be treated like human beings, it’s usually because they are being treated like human beings.” Wow. Mrs. Sawyer’s light blinks off after that diatribe, but it’s still a killer. So, Veronica decides, is J.D. She breaks up with him, suddenly seeing him as less of a hunk and more of a homicidal maniac. Taking her defection to heart, he plans to blow up the entire school when they’re gathered in the gym for the big basketball game. Heathers doesn’t exactly fizzle out at this point but the climax is definitely problematic. The boiler-room gun battle between Veronica and J.D. and the ticking-clock race to defuse the bomb before it blows the school sky high are played in such a straight action-movie way that you expect Veronica to deliver a sneering “School’s out” after she blows off J.D.’s finger. Instead, she says, “Know what I’d like, babe? Cool guys like you out of my life.” And he obliges, setting off the bomb that’s strapped to his chest.
In the movie’s closing moments, Veronica squashes the possibility of a revival of the Heather dictatorship by confiscating the scrunchee of power from Heather Duke and publicly aligning herself with the now wheelchair-bound Martha Dumptruck. Would a climax as black as the preceding content have worked better? Scenarist Waters banged out several variations, including endings where Veronica blew up the school, where she was shot through the chest by a not-quite-dead Heather Duke and where students of all social classes were finally united in a mixer in Heaven.
Winona Ryder called the movie “one of the greatest pieces of literature I have ever read,” a point she went on to prove by starring in several literary adaptations that weren’t anywhere near as entertaining, insightful or audacious as Heathers. Daniel Waters’ script is ablaze with imagination, his lexicon of freshly-minted teen colloquialisms is thrilling and his plotting is crap (the scene where J.D. explains the origin of “Ich Luge” bullets and how they don’t kill the victims is painful to behold). The rhythmic spring of his dialogue is not dissimilar to that of John Hughes, which is ironic because it was Waters’ mingled fascination and revulsion with the way that kids were coddled and catered to in, among others, the Hughes movies that inspired him to pen a script that laughed loudly in the face of teen traumas.
Highly praised though her later work has been, Winona Ryder has never come close to bringing to a character the complexity she brought to Veronica Sawyer (and she’s certainly never let herself be smeared with dried blood and gunpowder). Christian Slater brings exactly what he brought to Heathers to every other film he’s been in, but to less satisfying effect. As for Shannen Doherty, at that point known solely as Wilford Brimley’s tomboy granddaughter on Our House, that stroke of casting surpasses visionary and touches on sinister (legend has it she stormed out of an early screening in tears, bawling “Nobody told me it was a comedy!”). It isn’t a perfect movie, but it’s kind of a masterpiece. And, released in 1989, when the flood of teen movies had slowed to a trickle, it stands as an unanswerable Last Word. Any adolescent-based movie that followed it would have had to have been sharp as a Samurai sword to avoid incineration by comparison (the only film of consequence to wash up in its wake was Say Anything). Heathers, in fact, killed the genre that inspired it stone dead.
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Way-ass back in time, at the beginning of the eighties, indications were strong that we were about to be knee-deep in Girl movies. There was Foxes (1980), Adrian Lyne’s hilariously overblown expose of little Hollywood girls Growing Up Too Fast. Abandoned by indulgent parents, these Spandex-clad nymphettes get their education in bedrooms, barrooms and backstage areas. A feather-haired Jodie Foster is, of course, the sensible, social glue bonding the movie’s quartet of titular temptresses together. Cherie Currie, ex-frontbabe of The Runaways, is the hot hedonist, pumped full of drugs and happy to sell her soul for an Access All Areas laminate. Future daytime talk show host Marilyn Kagan is the bighearted fat girl struggling to keep up as her buds speed along the fast track (she winds up finding true love with Randy Quaid), and the never-heard-from-before-or-since Kandice Stroh is the head-turning flirt. Foxes has many moments of madness—Currie’s molestation by a pair of married swingers, a guest appearance by glam-metal hags, Angel—but nothing tops Sally Kellerman’s crackpot tirade against these rotten, ungrateful kids: “You’re like miniature forty year olds. And you’re mean. And you make me hate my hips!”
Making the Foxes hate their hips were the barely formed bitches in Little Darlings (1980). Summer camp class warfare between pugnacious urchin Angel (Kristy McNicol) and well-groomed princess Ferris (Tatum O’Neal) is resolved, not by a catfight or a breakdown, but a loss-of-virginity contest.
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Rich and poor girls set aside their petty differences in Times Square (1980). Heavily promoted as the new wave Saturday Night Fever, Allan Moyle’s feverishly ill-conceived movie paints a picture of Manhattan’s human sewer as a neon theme park filled with electricity, with vitality, with Life! And it’s that life that pampered Robin Johnson, daughter of the city commissioner, is sheltered from, until she falls into the clutches of foul-mouthed street queen Trini Alvarado. Robin’s commish dad is involved in one of those evil redevelopment programs threatening to rid 42nd Street of its heart, its soul and its streams of squishy semen. But once Trini has taken her new friend for a fun evening of stealing ambulances and hurling TV sets out of windows, she knows her heart belongs among the bright lights and the peep shows. Local DJ Johnny La Guardia (Tim Curry) hears of the duo’s late-night exploits and turns them into folk heroes, labeling them The Sleez Sisters and whipping the city into a frenzy with tales of their anarchic antics. The movie sputters to a close with the girls giving a screechy rendition of their notion of punk rock atop a Times Square marquee, while underneath freaks, straights, mohawks, tourists and hookers gyrate, united by the beat and the magic of the big city. The passing of the years, the getting of wisdom and the lowering of expectations; none of them have dimmed this film’s proficiency in inducing the plaintive reaction, “Huh?”
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And, of course, there was Brooke. She may have been a big bore with her declarations of eternal chastity and her adoring appearances on the arms of Bob Hope and George Burns, but Brooke Shields had a brief reign as America’s make-out queen. Though it was her Calvins commercials that compelled Mr. Short Horny 14 Year Old to spend that extra hour in the bathroom, her movie output had two high spots. The Blue Lagoon (1980) was both a riot of titillation and a mush-minded Babies Playing House fantasy, with its stranded boy and girl speedily shrugging off the constraints of civilization and building their own desert island love nest. (It inspired a very pale imitation in Paradise (1982) with Phoebe Cates and Willie Aames.) If that movie centered around the notion of an adult-free idyll, Endless Love (1981) was a long, sobbing scream of “It’s not fair!” directed at the narrow-minded parents who attempted to keep Brooke away from the only boy who ever made her feel like
a natural woman (it’s said director Franco Zeffirelli achieved the elusive natural-woman effect by squeezing Brooke’s big toe during the sex scenes). This early burst of activity was never equaled. Girl movies, some splendid, some rancid, peppered the rest of the decade, but their appearances were always sporadic.
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Leaving Las Vegas may have given Elisabeth Shue a burst of belated recognition but, in my own private academy, she was already basking in commendations for her incandescent showing in Adventures in Babysitting (1987). “I was never that sweet,” she now says, trying to put some distance between the girl-next-door tag that kept her mired in lightweight work for years. Deny it though she might, Shue is a beacon of niceness (she’s probably doomed a whole new generation of actresses to playing hookers-with-hearts-of-gold), and her presence saves this film from sinking into a swamp of shoddy stereotypes. This first movie to be directed by Chris Columbus (who, as a screenwriter already had Gremlins and Young Sherlock Holmes to his credit—or shame) was intended as a teenage, suburban After Hours, dragging a gaggle of whitebread tykes out of the safety of their comfortable environs and into the mean streets of Chicago.
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