Heathers / YMMV - TV Tropes

For the musical, see here.
For the 2018 show, see here.

Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Was Veronica manipulated into killing Heather Chandler and Kurt Kelly, or did she know exactly what she was doing? When she takes the cup of poison to Heather, she feels for the mug while kissing J.D. The poison mug has a lid, while the safe one does not. The film clearly shows Veronica's hand on the lid, indicating that she knew exactly which cup it was. Likewise, when she lures Kurt and Ram to the woods, J.D. shoots Ram with what J.D. has told her are tranquilizers, but are in fact real bullets. Veronica misses Kurt, who runs off, J.D. giving chase. While they are running, Veronica examines Ram's corpse, and it is clear that she knows it is really a corpse. Then when J.D. chases Kurt back, she shoots him. So, was Veronica manipulated into killing Heather and Kurt, or did she know exactly what she was doing? J.D. even argues that Veronica knew exactly what she doing but acted horrified because she couldn't face that that was exactly what she wanted. Arguably, she crossed the Moral Event Horizon as soon as she shot Kurt, so he would never be able to tell what really happened in the woods.
- Did J.D. bounce around from school to school only because his father needed to do demolition jobs in different cities? Or did his father have a keen nose for when his son started trying to get his own back at the cliques in his schools? J.D. seemed awfully ready to scare the pants off the football jocks, being armed with a gun that shot blanks after a Pre Ass Kicking One Liner. See JD's awkward silence when Veronica jokingly asks if he's "done this before" when he's saying what to write in Heather's fake suicide note.
- Is Heather Chandler really as bad as Veronica thinks she is, or did she have some skeletons in her closet not unlike what Veronica implied? While the note was obviously faked, one scene in particular implied that she may have probably become a Heather by pressure. Said scene involved her, with some hesitation, get coaxed into performing fellatio with an older University student. Then later she is seen in the bathroom, with a traumatized look on her face when she goes to wash her mouth out.
- Was Heather Chandler's cruelty towards Heather Duke just because she could, or did the former realize how power hungry the latter was and doing her best to rein her in? As the latter interpretation relies on the common fallacy that bullying is necessary to keep some people in check, is that what Heather Chandler believed she was doing?
- Speaking of Heather Duke, was she deep down always as malicious as she acts after Chandler's death and simply lacked the power to unleash it? Did the jealousy and bullying with Heather Chandler- and lack of intervention from MacNamara or Veronica- cause Duke to resent the clique? Or did she simply let the power corrupt her?
- Heather McNamara is revealed to be suicidal herself, spurred on partly by Kurt and Ram's deaths and she attempts it after Heather Duke makes fun of her. She admits that she'd jump off a bridge if everyone else did it, so was she in the clique to follow the crowd? Or since she's the one character to actually be sad about Heather Chandler's death, were they genuinely friends beforehand and she stayed by her side as she became the Alpha Bitch? She also doesn't seem to have a problem with the bullying of Martha in the beginning, but maybe her suicidal ideation was partly brought on by guilt that Martha tried to kill herself too.
Awesome Music: The song on the soundtrack that plays when J.D. gets blown sky-high.
Common Knowledge: Heathers is sometimes talked about as a film that was a huge hit in the 80s and "couldn't be made today" because of how darkly it treats its subject matter. In actuality, it was a Box Office Bomb when it came out and critics only considered it So Okay, It's Average. They even had trouble securing funding because of the dark tone, and Winona Ryder's agent literally got down on her knees and begged her not to do it out of fear it would destroy her career. The movie only acquired its cult fanbase when it was released on home video.
Crosses the Line Twice: The entire movie was intended as this, but has become harsher to watch over the years. But the conversation about how to kill Heather Duke definitely goes there. J.D. and Veronica argue over using a kitchen knife, which Veronica doesn't want to use because it's dirty.
Veronica: Trust me; if Heather were going to cut her wrists, the knife would be spotless.
Cult Classic: The movie didn't make very much money and has difficulty finding a fanbase since the story is so morbid and cynical, but the fandom is very devoted.
Draco in Leather Pants:
- J.D, which is inevitable when he's played by Christian Slater in a trenchcoat, especially given his victims are ginormous assholes (at least initially).
- Heather Chandler is often imagined to be much more sympathetic than she actually is, based off one humanising moment where she's pressured into performing oral sex on a college boy and looks shaken afterwards. In her short screen time, she does nothing but bully Heather Duke, antagonise Veronica and be mean to every other person at school.
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- For being the ringleader of the title characters, Heather Chandler is actually in the film surprisingly little, lasting less than a third of the run time before she is poisoned by J.D. Among fans she's perhaps the most unanimously beloved character (her only competition being Heather M.), with many feeling she makes the idea of being a high school queen bee seem utterly badass, stylish, and hot, plus the very strong insinuations that she's secretly hurting deep down giving her endearing qualities as well. The vast majority of fan works find some way to either avert her ignominious end entirely or otherwise keep her around longer - extending to the musical, where she becomes a Deadpan Snarker ghost who offers commentary on the events her death set into motion.
- An example that's legitimately a minor character is Betty Finn, Veronica's ex-friend who serves mainly to demonstrate the crowd she ran with before the Heathers scooped her up, and is otherwise so inconsequential that the musical dropped her completely and gave her more plot-relevant traits to Martha. Fans absolutely love the adorkable sweetheart, and many fanworks include her and Martha side by side, giving Betty a playful trickster personality and a large role in getting Veronica and her love interest together.
Evil Is Cool: J.D. may be a sociopathic Stalker with a Crush and a murderer, but he's sold very well and it's satisfying on a dark level to watch him kill the Jerkass teens.
Fair for Its Day: Framing the football players as gay and their funeral actually being played relatively straight with their parents apologizing and professing how much they loved them and missed them was, for 1988, a fairly positive portrayal of gay people (even if the football players weren't actually gay). Suffice it to say that in the decades since, this particular scene has not aged well.
Fan-Preferred Cut Content: Plenty of fans would have loved to see the planned three-hour version that was originally scripted.
Fanon:
- It's generally agreed that Veronica and J.D. had sex in the car after killing Kurt and Ram.
- A hamster cage (with a hamster still inside) can be seen in J.D.'s room when J.D. is building the bomb. Fans have embraced this, naming it "Slushie" and making it J.D.'s literal Morality Pet in fanfiction.
- Another briefly glimpsed character is "Country Club Courtney," apparently another Rich Bitch at Westerberg whom the Heathers dislike. Fan works giving more sympathetic takes on the trio will thus often promote Courtney to the Hate Sink role, portraying her as much, much worse than them, with their dislike being at least partly motivated by thinking she's a despicable excuse for a human being.
- The Heathers' parents are never seen, but are generally agreed to be neglectful if not outright abusive, which is both in keeping with most of the other adults in the story and an easy explanation for their daughters' misbehavior. They too often get the Hate Sink role in pro-Heathers fics.
Fan-Preferred Couple: While the Official Couple of Veronica and JD is the most popular straight pairing by far, even this is outstripped by the Les Yay shippers, themselves roughly evenly split into pairing Veronica with Heather Chandler or Heather MacNamara - the former being popular for the two girls' Like an Old Married Couple bickering being easily read as Belligerent Sexual Tension, and the latter for the scene where Veronica saves Heather's life, which is one of the few genuinely heartwarming scenes in this pitch-black comedy.
Friendly Fandoms: Lots of Charmed (1998) fans are also Heathers fans, due to Shannen Doherty having prominent roles in both. Likewise, Jennifer Rhodes stars in both; as Veronica's mother here and as Penny "Grams" Halliwell in Charmed.
Genius Bonus:
- One of the earliest hints that Veronica's dream sequence is a dream is the reference to Eskimos in Antarctica, whereas they're actually found in the Arctic.
- The word does appear in Moby-Dick, just not with that spelling. ^(excerpt)
Harsher in Hindsight: And how. Let's just put it this way: this film has its own separate page for this trope.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- The voice Christian Slater gives J.D. is a dead ringer for Heath Ledger's Joker, and at one point he says "we live in a society".
- J.D is a violent, trenchcoat-wearing psychopath who tries to get a bunch of people to sign his petition.
- Brad Pitt got rejected for the role of J.D. because producers thought he was "too nice". Then came Pitt's roles in Kalifornia, Fight Club, Snatch., and Inglourious Basterds. And he would get to play a J.D. in Thelma & Louise who, while not as nasty as the J.D. here, still robs a woman who also had the surname Sawyer, of her life savings from her bedside table.
- Jennifer Rhodes plays Veronica's mother. She later plays Shannen Doherty's grandmother in Charmed. Shannen's character in that was also a former Alpha Bitch.
- If you watch this film back to back with The Legend of Billie Jean, it creates a bit of hilarity. Christian Slater fires a gun with blanks in this, while in Billie Jean he gets accidentally shot by a trigger happy policeman.
- This wouldn't be the last time Patrick Labyorteaux would play a Jerk Jock.
- As of 2018, all of Shannen Doherty's best known roles have been rebooted for television. First was the 90210 revival in the 2000s, then Charmed and Heathers getting theirs in 2018.
- Shannen Doherty also refused to go blonde for the role of Heather Duke. In an episode of Charmed, involving a Bad Future - where Prue has become a Corrupt Corporate Executive in what's implied to be a Tyrant Takes the Helm situation (not unlike Heather Duke's rise) she has blonde hair (although it is clearly a wig in Shannen's case).
- In the 2000s, Daniel Waters's brother Mark ended up directing Mean Girls - which has been noted to have a lot of similarities. Michael Lehmann said he may have been offered Mean Girls or considered to direct, but he said the films were different entities.
- The “I’ll have to send my SAT scores to San Quentin” line is this now that people incarcerated at San Quentin can earn degrees at Mount Tamalpais College while serving their time.
Hollywood Homely: Betty Finn is meant to be unattractive, but she’s played by the beautiful Renée Estevez, and what is meant to make her ugly are her frumpy outfits, mousy brown hair and thick glasses.
- Martha Dunnstock “Martha Dumptruck” is bullied for being obese and ugly, but she’s quite cute really. Sure, it’s understandable that she would be bullied but really, she just has cropped short Brown puffs and tacky outfits. Everything else about her isn’t really unappealing and many see her as a Big Beautiful Woman.
Hollywood Pudgy: Present in the casting sessions, if not the film itself. When casting Martha Dumptruck, Michael Lehmann recalls casting directors constantly bringing in actresses who were really quite slim, just not Hollywood Thin. He insisted on someone who was actually overweight, and found Carrie Lynn performing stand-up in a bar.
Ho Yay: Ram and Kurt, to the point that they start a rumor about having a three-way with Veronica. One where their swordplay is front-and-center.
Jerkass Woobie:
- While much more villainous here than in the musical, J.D. is still a Tragic Villain once you get down to it. He not only had a shit childhood (his mother died by walking into a building set to demolish in a few minutes right in front of his eyes, his father wasn't exactly a stand up guy either especially since J.D. most likely got his idea that the only way to beat the high school social system was to kill the popular kids from his behavior in some way), he was implied to be treated as an outcast by all of the schools he went to, he never had a true friend until Veronica met him. In the end, it's no wonder he ended up as a psychotic monster.
- Heather Duke was bullied by Heather Chandler and suffered from an eating disorder that was worsened by the way Heather Chandler had treated her. And then Heather Chandler died, and she became equally malicious.
Les Yay: Veronica grabbing Heather Duke and kissing her roughly on the cheek at the end, followed by Heather's somewhat dazed stare.
LGBT Fanbase: Although the movie has no out and out queer characters, the Les Yay between all the girls and the lack of actual heteronormativity (the movie ends with Veronica letting her ex-boyfriend die, kissing her former friend and asking another girl to spend prom night with her) means that Heathers has a strong queer fan base. The 2018 reboot would attempt to incorporate this into the text to...mixed results.
Love to Hate: Heathers Chandler and Duke are shamelessly mean to everyone, as are Kurt and Ram. They get most of the Crosses the Line Twice dialogue and as a result are very easy to enjoy rooting against (though some do apply Draco in Leather Pants to Heather Chandler).
Magnificent Bastard: Jason "JD" Dean is a rebellious teenager who swoons the heroine Veronica with his bad boy image by scaring Ram and Kurt by firing blanks at them in the high school cafeteria. JD convinces Veronica to jointly prank Heather Chandler with a mystery drink, not informing Veronica that she had grabbed the drain cleaner after he noticed. When Heather dies, they cover it up by forging a suicide note. JD follows this up by having Veronica lure Kurt and Ram into the woods with the offer of a threeway, then fatally shooting them both and make it appear as a Suicide Pact between two secret homosexual lovers, tricking Veronica by telling her that he's using special "Ich Lüge" bullets. JD also facilitates Heather Duke's rise to prominence in order to have every student in the school sign a petition for a mass gathering. JD intends to blow up the whole school with a bomb stolen from his father's demolition company and frame the entire thing as a mass suicide, believing he's doing them all a favor by sending them to heaven with no social differences to fight over. After Veronica dismantles his bomb, JD follows her outside to compliment her spirit and blow himself up in front of her.
Memetic Mutation:
- "I love my dead gay X!"
- "Oh, fuck me gently with a chainsaw."
- "What's your damage, Heather?"
- "How very."
- "Are we going to prom or to hell?"
- Photoshopping JD into other movies and having him play a sort of Bad Angel role to those films' characters, advising them to solve their problems with casual murder.
Misaimed Fandom:
- As mentioned in the Draco entry, J.D. He's a sociopath who wants to murder his classmates. Since those he targeted at first were genuinely horrible people, a lot of people think J.D. was doing society a favor by killing them. This ignores how he did most of these acts with sadism and spite in mind. As well as final and most heinous plan of blowing up the school, which even he admits was more for a reason he thought "sounds deep".
- On a similar note, modern fans tend to paint the four main girls in a rosy light, despite the fact that they're also morally grey like J.D. (with the exception being McNamara; she was a bully too, but easily has the most sympathetic depiction of them). It's more difficult to find modern fans talking about the actual themes in the movie than them fangirling/fanboying about how lovable the characters are or Shipping them.
- Related to the lack of discussion on the film's actual message: the musical. It's a cult hit, but many feel like it fails to grasp what the original was actually trying to say.
  Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the Broadway version really gets the genius bleakness of the original. An early preview of the musical Heathers reveals that Veronica’s monologues are now big numbers about how high-school can be suffocating. None of the songs have the film’s creative profanity, or even a tinge of satire. It’s a sad thought, Heathers turned into a mere Glee episode about suicide. (The Atlantic)
Moe: Betty Finn, Veronica's childhood best friend. Her dorky style, huge eyeglasses, and sweet, shy personality qualify her for this trope.
Not So Crazy Anymore: The film got made in the first place only because the idea of outcast high schoolers killing each other was considered patently absurd. Post-Columbine, the movie can feel uncomfortable.
O.C. Stand-in: As mentioned under Fanon, very minor character Courtney is a popular villain in stories giving more sympathetic looks at the film's antagonists, typically given the role of an even-more-detestable would-be usurper to the titular trio.
Retroactive Recognition:
- Mr. Moseby is in this movie. Yes, really. (He's the editor of the yearbook Veronica talks to about the "Heather Chandler memorial spread.")
- Veronica's mother is played by Jennifer Rhodes, who would later be best known to Charmed (1998) fans as Penny "Grams" Halliwell.
- Indeed, while Shannen Doherty had starred in Little House on the Prairie and Our House, she would become even more famous a couple of years later as Brenda Walsh on Beverly Hills, 90210.
Signature Line: "My teen angst bullshit has a body count," "Chaos is what killed the dinosaurs, darling," "Our love is God," and "You look like hell." "I just got back." all qualify.
Special Effect Failure: When Heather Chandler dies and falls onto glass- it shatters in a very unconvincing way.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Despite the potential of the character, and the movie exploring Hidden Depths for the likes of Heathers Duke and McNamara, we never really get to know Heather Chandler beyond being the cruel Alpha Bitch. There are moments that suggest she could have become a Heather by pressure, similar to Veronica, but the film never has any moments where Veronica is compelled to actually find out more about her former friend.
Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The two protagonists embark on a spree of murdering the classmates they don't like - who are equally rotten - and passing them off as suicides. This is Played for Laughs, with the effect that the Crosses the Line Twice humour has now become uncomfortable.
Too Cool to Live: Heather Chandler, being a constant source of delightfully nasty and witty bitchiness, gets killed off not too far into the movie. The musical seemed to have realized this, as she has a bigger role in the beginning of the story and makes several appearances as a ghost or hallucination to antagonize Veronica.
Unintentional Period Piece: Not only are the fashions on display and the tropes it's satirizing immediate indicators of the time in which it was made, but so are many key story details, to the point where many have described it as a film that would be flat-out impossible to make at any point after the Columbine massacre — and a reminder of how flippantly teen violence was treated before then. Today, JD's Establishing Character Moment, in which he pulls a gun on two Jerk Jock bullies in the cafeteria and fires blank rounds at them in order to scare them, would've ended with him getting expelled and sent to reform school, if not juvenile hall or prison.
Values Dissonance:
- It's hard to imagine a film about teens actually murdering each other and planning to murder an entire school getting greenlit as a comedy these days. See the Harsher in Hindsight entry above. Although Word of God has responded to the claims that it "couldn't be made today" with...
  "People come to me a lot and say, ‘The movie couldn’t be made today,’ but my point is that it couldn’t be made then either!" (Daniel Waters in a Vice interview)
- It wouldn't be made today simply for practical reasons. A lot of what happened in the movie is only possible because of hands off parenting and free range raising, which forced kids to "grow up" that felt out of favor in the 2010s decade, specifically because of the increase in the prevalence of real life school shootings and teenage suicides; even if we're talking about late teenagers who are borderline adults a lot of parents still keep constant track of their kids thanks to new technologies where, while not impossible it's much more unbelievable, at least in the way the movie portrays.
- One scene showed that them placing bottled mineral water in the jocks' bags as evidence that they were gay. These days, drinking mineral water isn't considered sissy or snobby; at worst one might be thought of as slightly over-health-concerned. This is discussed in the movie, where it's pointed out that even back then, drinking bottled water was being seen as acceptable, but J.D. points out they're all the way out in the sticks where it still hasn't caught on.
- And in the wake of the aforementioned school shootings, there's no way a teen these days would get off so lightly for even bringing a gun to school - let alone firing it in the cafeteria. J.D. gets off because they were blanks. Kids have been expelled from school for drawing pictures of water pistols, or accidentally bringing a butter knife to school for lunch. There's no way he could get off without jail time.
- The implied Black Comedy Rape of Heather McNamara. Although in that case it's worth noting that it might be the Intended Audience Reaction, since JD turning a blind eye to it shows him as a hypocrite and Veronica ignoring it is presented as a negative thing. So the dissonance in how callously the characters treat it is possibly intentional (especially as Heather gets revealed to be suicidal afterwards).
  Lisanne Falk: I thought we were doing this funny scene in the background. I'm not going to call myself stupid but I want to say 'naive.' I didn't over-think it, but I look at it now and think: 'I guess that was pretty horrible.'
Values Resonance:
- There's a lot of Black Comedy and murder played for laughs, but characters that willingly want to kill themselves are treated far more seriously. What's more, it was one of the few movies at the time that didn't glorify the high school experience as nostalgic and showed the students to be largely miserable people. With the rise in awareness of teen suicide and mental health issues, society has become much more sympathetic to high school abuse, something Veronica would definitely approve of. In fact, two characters shown to be suicidal are Martha Dunstock and Heather McNamara. The former is bullied by everyone, while the latter was one of the popular girls; showing that anyone can suffer from mental health problems, regardless of social status.
- As discussed here, JD's Freudian Excuse is not used to justify or explain his actions - the movie also frames him as a Hypocrite for exploiting the same homophobic stereotypes that Kurt and Ram mocked him with, and turning a blind eye to Heather McNamara getting sexually assaulted in front of him.
- One of the only humanizing moments Heather Chandler has is when she is peer pressured into giving a guy head and walks away with extreme self-loathing. With the evolution of ideas regarding consent and the objectification and sexualization of minors under greater scrutiny than ever, Chandler comes across as even more sympathetic.
Vindicated by History: The movie wasn't a huge financial success upon release, but built up a strong cult following and got something of a resurrection following the stage adaptation. Modern review compilations of the movie are overwhelmingly positive.
The Woobie:
- Heather McNamara becomes one by the latter half of the film, where she's revealed to actually be suicidal, in heavy contrast to the faked suicides of Heather Chandler and Kurt and Ram. In fact, she even says "the last guy I had sex with killed himself the next day" and she seems the only character genuinely sad about Heather Chandler's death. It's not drawn attention to much but it's also said her parents are divorced, and she's implied to be under pressure to succeed at school and cheerleading. To Kick the Dog further, after she confesses this on a public radio station, she's mocked at school the next day.
- Poor Martha Dunstock, who shows up only to be bullied or made fun of by the popular crowd. She and Heather Duke used to be friends, and the latter is now embarrassed to even admit that used to be the case. She's the first character to be revealed as actually suicidal. Thankfully she gets a happy ending where Veronica offers to hang out with her instead of going to the prom.

YMMV / Heathers

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