{"id":9744,"date":"2019-04-01T22:51:08","date_gmt":"2019-04-02T05:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=9744"},"modified":"2019-04-13T22:55:43","modified_gmt":"2019-04-14T05:55:43","slug":"heathers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2019\/04\/01\/heathers\/","title":{"rendered":"HEATHERS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/touchstones\/an-appreciation-of-the-dark-comedy-heathers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>from The New Yorker<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h1>\u201cHeathers\u201d Blew Up the High-School Comedy<\/h1>\n<h3>The 1989 cult classic ushered in a darker, weirder, more experimental era for teen movies.<\/h3>\n<p>Text by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/contributors\/naomi-fry\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Naomi Fry<\/a><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/x2AxfjxwFxw\" width=\"480\" height=\"292\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h3 class=\"collection-dek block narrow\">\u201cTouchstones\u201d is an ongoing interactive series in which New Yorker writers guide us through the works that shaped them as critics and as people.<\/h3>\n<div class=\"block narrow text\">\n<p><em class=\"descender\">I<\/em>n the course of the eighties, nothing formed my understanding of what it meant to be a teen-ager, and particularly an American teen-ager, more than the movies of John Hughes. I was an Israeli kid who occasionally, thanks to my dad\u2019s job, spent time in the United States, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/personal-history\/what-about-the-breakfast-club-molly-ringwald-metoo-john-hughes-pretty-in-pink\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hughes\u2019s \u0153uvre<\/a>\u2014especially \u201cThe Breakfast Club,\u201d \u201cPretty in Pink,\u201d and \u201cSixteen Candles\u201d\u2014served, for me, as both an anthropological document and a how-to guide. For American teen-agers, I learned, daily life was a battleground: their parents pushed them around or ignored them; their teachers were bored and boring; they were confused about sex, and even more so about love; race was rarely a problem (the American teen-ager was almost always white), but class, and especially money, was; and class and money translated into the chief issue seemingly dogging every American teen-ager\u2019s life\u2014high-school cliques, and one\u2019s ability to break free of their constraints in order to discover who one <em>really<\/em> was.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block narrow text\">\n<p>No matter how difficult these issues were to deal with, however, teens were able to overcome them by the end of Hughes\u2019s movies. No problem was unmanageable, no adversity insurmountable. The movies\u2019 redemptive arc guaranteed that the burnout and the prom queen could set their conflicts aside\u2014as could the rich guy and the poor girl, and the jock and the weirdo\u2014and the result was a new, more perfect union, which was more often than not sealed with a kiss.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block medium\">\n<div class=\"heading narrow\">\n<h2 class=\"subhead\">The Hughesian Ending<\/h2>\n<div class=\"subdeck\">\u201cMake a wish,\u201d Jake tells Samantha in the last scene of \u201cSixteen Candles.\u201d \u201cIt already came true,\u201d she replies.<\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"block narrow text\">\n<p>The constancy of this teen-movie template was likely why \u201cHeathers\u201d\u2014directed by Michael Lehmann, written by Daniel Waters, and the feature-film d\u00e9but for both\u2014came as such a shock. Though the movie was released in the States in 1989\u2014where it was, for the most part, a critical hit, though a box-office flop\u2014it had not come out in Israel, and I saw it only in 1990, which I spent in Seattle. That year, I had fashioned myself as a sophisticated outsider, and had begun going to see movies alone, as sophisticated outsiders tend to do. (Making friends was a little bit of a struggle.) And so I settled down alone in a cinematheque-style theatre to watch what I believed would be another Hughes-style comedy. \u201cHeathers,\u201d I imagined, would focus on two attractive young people, played by Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, who would, against the odds, fall in love, come to resist the cliquishness of their school\u2014embodied by a trio of popular mean girls, all named Heather\u2014and bring on an improved, quasi-utopian social order.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block narrow text\">\n<p>But about twenty-five minutes into the movie I experienced a strong cognitive dissonance: I watched as J.D. (Slater) and Veronica (Ryder) gave Heather Chandler, the cruellest, most powerful member of the Heathers, a poisonous concoction. Had they just killed her? A teen movie couldn\u2019t include murders, could it?<\/p>\n<p>[ <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/touchstones\/an-appreciation-of-the-dark-comedy-heathers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">click to continue reading at The New Yorker<\/a> ]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from The New Yorker \u201cHeathers\u201d Blew Up the High-School Comedy The 1989 cult classic ushered in a darker, weirder, more experimental era for teen movies. Text by Naomi Fry \u201cTouchstones\u201d is an ongoing interactive series in which New Yorker writers guide us through the works that shaped them as critics and as people. In the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}