Michael Lehmann's Heathers (1989)

Heathers is the first movie that Film Club has shown twice in eight years. Is it the best movie we’ve shown such that it bears repeating? Not necessarily – we think that honor would go to Cidade de Deus (City of God) – but Heathers fits neatly into this year’s theme, The Movies Go to High School, as it did eight years ago, when the theme was Adolescence on Film. And it is an excellent film.

You wouldn’t know it from the box office receipts. Heathers bombed when it opened in 1988, only earning roughly a million dollars (that’s about two million today). Compare that to Mean Girls which earned almost 130 million worldwide in 2004. So what accounts for the continued interest and screenings of Heathers? We would argue that it is a product of its satirical approach to its subject – conformity and cliquishness in the American high school.

If you’re not familiar with the nature of satire, it goes like this. Satire is a literary form that mocks, ridicules, or shames the behaviors – foolish, greedy, misguidedly earnest, or otherwise – of people who have power over us and carries that criticism to the society that allows it as well. English teachers often point to Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal,” in which the writer suggested, in the 18th century, that the Irish might solve their economic and domestic difficulties if they simply sold their kids to rich people as food. No, he wasn’t serious; he was mocking people’s insensitivity to the impoverished and the ineffective Irish policies that exacerbated the situation.

Heathers takes on a less national political issue and instead focuses on the politics of social groupings within the high school community. In this way, it is very much like Mean Girls, except that because it was made 16 years earlier, we have to say that  Mean Girls  is a lot like Heathers. Whereas Mean Girls exhibits a relatively tame satire, though, Heathers pulls no punches. The Heathers, a triumvirate of social queen bees, is the equivalent of Girls’ Plastics, but not all of them will survive the movie. Mean Girls jokes about killing off the Plastics; Heathers actually does it. And a couple jocks, to boot. And while  Mean Girls attacks cliquishness per se, Heathers goes after social tyranny, homophobia, and the superficiality of judging people by how they look. So people get murdered, schools get blown up, students promote a national suicide day, and everyone says the F-word a lot. From this we come to understand just how undesirable these behaviors are. Satire, see?

Of course, this makes some viewers uncomfortable. In general, mainstream readers, viewers, and art-goers can be fairly literal minded. Satire, by its nature, is outrageous. If you took Heathers literally, you might conclude that it promotes the murder of adolescent jerks. But we at Film Club believe that you are a discerning and sophisticated movie-goer. We believe you can tell the difference between satire and realism. Just in case, we have a little test for you.

Our cartoon tonight is Chuck Jones’s iconic “Rabbit Seasoning,” in which Daffy Duck tries to distract hunter Elmer Fudd from the fact that it is duck hunting season by convincing him it is rabbit season. Bugs deftly and wittily turns the tables on him at every turn, usually resulting in Daffy getting his bill shot off. If you see this cartoon on TV, it is almost certainly edited; all the seconds of violence (a boom and a cloud of smoke around Daffy’s head, then his bill relocated in a place different from where it should be) gone, and with them the punch-line of most of the jokes. It is UNwatchable. But censors have determined that kids watching the cartoon might misunderstand the violence, that they might determine that it’s “okay” to shoot people. Studies support both sides of the issue – children are affected by constant exposure to violence on TV and in video games; children easily distinguish between “cartoon violence” and the real thing. So there’s your test: which are you?

We feel that both “Rabbit Seasoning” and Heathers ask the audience to think (and both use humor to do so). We’d rather have that than the alternative. So enjoy Heathers, but please don’t kill anyone.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

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David Lynch's Eraserhead (1976)

David Lynch finds horror in unlikely places. We were going to write about his being a difficult-to-categorize director, but then it occurred to us – he directs horror films. But not the kind you’re used to, not slasher pics like Friday the 13th or monster movies like The Host or fantasy horror like The Howling or psycho scary films like The Grudge or The Cell. No, we’d put Lynch in more of the existential horror mode.

Take a movie like Blue Velvet for example. In the opening scene, the camera moves in slowly on an idyllic suburban setting: cute little house, white picket fence, green lawn. The camera keeps getting closer and closer, moving down to ground level, then into the grass, then into the dirt. Where we find creepy crawly things. And a severed ear.

Yeccchh. The scene works as a good metaphor for Lynch’s early work, that beneath the seemingly benign or pleasant exterior there is a seedy, seething corrupt creepiness, that we find this creepiness more horrifying because it exists not just next to but inextricable from the ordinary. We see it in the overdone, psychotic makeup that Diane Lane wears in Wild at Heart. We see it in Dennis Hopper sucking pure oxygen in order to amp himself up to do something evil in Blue Velvet. We see it in the endless revelations of unexpected corruption in the TV-show Twin Peaks. And we see it the whole vision that is Eraserhead.

Lynch has been asked, many times, what Eraserhead is about, or what inspired it, or just “what the heck?” His answers are frequently elliptical or philosophical or oblique, never straightforward or concrete. Eraserhead is like one of those pointillist paintings, where you have to step back from it a bit to get a clear picture of what it represents. In this movie you’ll see a young man and his wife. They have a baby. What could be more ordinary than that? The stress of their relationship drives the woman away, leaving the man to take care of their baby. Okay, that’s basic conflict and good substance for a film. But if you’ve never seen Eraserhead, then what you’re imagining right now as you try to picture the film is nothing like what you’re going to see. That’s why critics tend toward the word “surreal.”

But it’s more than that. It’s horror. Lynch’s movie makes visual the terror we suppress not just in difficult situations like the one in the film, but in every moment of our daily lives. He suggests that we live in a nightmarish world, and the normalcy is just the clown make-up we plaster over it to feel safe.

As Lynch got older (he made Eraserhead, his first feature-length film, when he was 31), he moved away from the rawness and near avant-garde feel of this film. Now his movies feel more packaged, more polished. In some ways that has only enhanced his message, although movies like Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire are far more than just existential horror films. He’s pushed his work into other genres, like the thriller, and turned up the psychological volume a bit, bringing his films closer to a world we recognize and acknowledging his audience’s lust for conventional entertainment forms.

As you watch Eraserhead, enjoy its weirdness, its vision of psychic turmoil, and rest easy in the knowledge that some day, when you’re at a party, and someone asks “what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen?”, you’ll have a ready answer. And on that other day, when life is beginning to grind you down, and your perfect life is bending under the strain of finals, or your job, or bills, or those goons who’ve threatened to break your knee caps, you’ll have an apt visual image for the pressure you feel – it’s like someone’s putting your head into a pencil sharpener.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984)

“The life of a repo man is always intense.” “The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.” “No one is innocent.” These, and other lessons, can be learned from the mid-‘80s film Repo Man, written and directed by Alex Cox.

Repo Man follows the path of a disaffected young punk named Otto (Emilio Estevez), whose odyssey is a result of his disillusionment with his friends, his parents, and his life. His girlfriend dumps him for his friend who recently got out of prison. His parents send the money in his college fund to a televangelist. And he loses his mindless job in a grocery store. Otto is an individual with no direction until he meets Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) and learns what the life of a repo man offers. Otto does not find direction immediately, but after a while on the staff he finds what he wants do with his life and what is really important to him.

But Repo Man is no typical coming-of-age or message movie. It’s a howling satirical attack on the substancelessness of American culture. Instead of being about typical American existence, which is about buying and getting items, Repo Man is about repo men, whose only function in society is taking things away from people. Cox increases the irony when he calls attention to American consumerism by highlighting the absence of glaring product labels. In Repo Man, for example, there are no corporate labels on food, or anything else. Beer is “Beer,” Corn Flakes are “Corn Flakes,” Canned Beans are “Canned Beans,” etc. The products may be generic, but it reminds us that we are surrounded by advertisement. This simplicity clashes with the American identity that is the consumer.

The life of a repo man is simple as well. As the quote “repo man’s got all night” shows, all that a repo man does is pick up cars. Again, Cox is tweaking our sense of irony, making heroes (or at least protagonists) out of a profession that is more likely to be reviled by anyone who takes the time to think about it. The entire movie could be defined as similarly counter-culture, from the ‘80s punk soundtrack to the anti-consumerist actions of the repo men to the focus on people who repossess vehicles. And we haven’t even mentioned the UFOs and deadly top-secret (possibly alien) substance in the back of that Chevy Malibu.

The surrealism of Repo Man is what makes it so funny. Through another character’s eyes, Otto’s world could be a horror film. However, we watch as Otto encounters goofy people, gets into goofy situations, and says goofy things. What happens to Otto is so strange and unrealistic that it is funny, especially the nature of what happens to him.

Sam Rock
Film Club

Michael Lehmann’s Heathers (1989)

Set in the late eighties in a stereotypical high school in Ohio, Heathers follows the story of Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder), a student who identifies herself with the notorious clique called The Heathers. The Heathers pride themselves on being the four prettiest and most popular girls in school; they are also the most powerful, a characteristic they maintain often through the humiliation of others. Veronica, however, wishes to detach herself from this exclusive clique and, in doing so, soon finds herself caught up in a dangerous relationship with loner Jason Dean (Christian Slater) that leads to a series of murders.

With its dark comedic humor, Heathers asks us to re-evaluate our attitudes about individualism, conformity, and the high school social structure as metaphor for all society. It is a satire, and satire, as it often does, forces us to look at something from two points of view – first as an object of satire and ridicule and second as a reflection of a real-world institution that we cannot treat the way the satire does. When Stephen Colbert tells the president, sitting not 10 feet from him at the 2006 Washington Correspondents Dinner, that having a 32 percent approval rating means that 68 percent of the people approve of the job he’s not doing, we scowl or laugh – nervously – because the powerful is being held up to ridicule. But we also reflect on what approval ratings and the office of the presidency mean. Heathers forces us to look at adolescent cliques the same way. Do we laugh at the demise of the popular “bitches” who make everyone’s life hell? In doing so, are we just as shallow as they are because we fail to see them as complete human beings? Does Heathers want us to laugh?

In addition, Heathers directs us to confront our fetishistic obsession with death. Held up for inspection and ridicule are our generation’s many odd responses to shocking and untimely death – from hypocritical eulogizing to group trauma therapy to the uncomfortable idea that we often pay more attention to an individual who has died than we do to the same person while alive.

Heathers is a film that bears watching repeatedly. The first time through is comic absurdity, but its messages, which become clearer with each viewing, are iconic, transcending its time period and the subject matter, and rendering Heathers a true classic.

Sonya Aziz-Zaman and R. Findlay
Film Club