After a very rocky, controversial
journey towards the screen, it appears that Paramount's TV series
reboot of the 1988 cult classic film Heathers
has downed a cup of liquid drainer and died amid the wreckage of its
coffee table. The already-completed show – allegedly the first
season of a wannabe-Ryan-Murphy anthology series in which subsequent
seasons would have followed different ruthless cliques in different
times and places – was originally set to premiere in March, but was
pushed back to July following the Parkland shooting, which left the
studio understandably skeptical about a comedy centered around the
murder of high school kids. Now Paramount has announced that the show
is being shelved altogether, and they currently have no plans to air
it at all. And honestly, as someone who has considered Heathers
to be one of their all-time favorite movies since I was fourteen, I
couldn't be happier. This is a reboot that the world absolutely did
not need, and one that is probably better off dead – though not for
the reason that Paramount Network killed it.
Over
the years, on the many occasions when I have introduced Heathers
to people who have never seen it
before, I have commented that it is a film that could absolutely
never be made by even a semi-major studio in this post-Columbine era;
the subject matter, and the handling of that subject matter as
comedy, would almost certainly scare most production companies and
distributors off. I was honestly quite surprised when Paramount
announced that it was making a Heathers series,
and completely unsurprised when they announced that it was delayed,
and now shelved. There is no doubt that in an era when school
shootings are tragically, infuriatingly common, making a comedy in
which high school mass murder is a looming major plot point is a very
tricky, controversial proposition; to say that it could easily end up
being a bad idea that touches a real social nerve is an
understatement. But that in itself is not why this series probably
shouldn't air; far from it. The subject matter requires serious care
and thoughtfulness in its writing, but if handled right, it could be
a very relevant, conversation-starting social commentary. That's
exactly what the original film is, because it is written so
intelligently, with such cleverness, comedic elegance, and genuine
empathy towards the socially hellish experience that high school is
for many kids who are bullied or feel like outcasts. It's not a
murder fantasy or a piece of exploitation, but a sharp-witted social
satire which is not only still relevant thirty years after its
release, but possibly even more relevant than ever in this era when
violence all too often invades our schools. If Paramount's TV series
looked like it was going to be anything even close to that, it would
really be a shame that it is getting buried simply because it might
touch a nerve that's too close to our current reality; touching a
nerve is something that the film does very deliberately, and more to
the point, for good reasons. The film isn't just being controversial
for the sake of it, and it isn't trying to be a manufactured
“shocking” cult classic; its take-no-prisoners approach to satire
is utterly genuine and authentic, and therein lies its power which is
so undiminished after three decades. Also therein lies the main
reason why this reboot appears to have very little merit, and appears
to be a huge, bizarrely reactionary slap in the face to everything
that its namesake film succeeds in doing.
Of all
the (dare I say) myriad reboots of beloved 1980s films, this Heathers
series appears to be one of the most shamelessly calculating in its
transparent desire to monetize nostalgia, due to how little it seems
to understand the film it is adapting, or what the point of it was.
In the original Heathers,
a disaffected outcast (Christian Slater) and a popular girl who
secretly hates the wanton cruelty of her social-hierarchy-reinforcing
peers (Winona Ryder) fall in love and team up to enact some
much-deserved justice on the popular bullies of their school; but
while she is merely looking to play some humiliating pranks to even
the score, she doesn't realize that his goals are a bit more...
permanent. Together they represent both the outcasts who are on the
receiving end of bullying and social shunning as well as those who
have experienced the game of high school social circles but see it
for the pointless and petty cruelty that it is; unless you yourself
were one of the popular bullies, or the “Heathers,” in your high
school, the film in eminently relatable. Crucially to these themes,
the Heathers and their jock counterparts very much represent the
dominant power group in both high school and, sadly, America at
large: privileged, glamorous, beautiful, straight white people, who
stomp all over anyone who is different, to leverage their own
privilege and further their own gain. It is high school politics as a
microcosm for our unjust society (as JD himself says in one of his memorably unhinged monologues), and it isn't actually advocating
violence as a solution, but bitterly screaming the arbitrary
unjustness of it all into the void. This TV series, on the other
hand, bizarrely inverts everything about that premise in a way that
not only seems to completely miss the point, but seems to warp the
film's empathy into a cruelly reactionary, almost alt-right-seeming
perversion of it.
The
series presents a vision of high school where the social hierarchy
has been reversed: the outcasts have taken over and become the
popular kids, and the groups that once would have been popular are
now picked on. The Heathers this time around are a plus-size girl,
a genderqueer person, and a black lesbian, and they are the ones
picking on everyone else; which means that over the course of the
season, they will be framed as “deserving” revenge from a couple
of pretty, skinny, straight white people, and at least one of them
will be murdered by them. That is messed up. That is several
varieties of messed up. At face value, it seems to feed right into
the alt-right extremist narrative that white straight people are
endangered and being oppressed, and that said white straight people
need to “take their society back,” and (dare I say it) “make
America great again.” It may have been Parkland that got this show
shelved in the first place, but it is the Toronto van attack, in
which the mass-murderer was a self-identified “incel” waging a
misogynistic war on a society he claims oppresses men, that makes
this premise sound not only wildly ill-advised, but potentially
dangerous to propagate.
Of
course, I assume that this is not the show's intention, but that no
one realized that this undertone is fairly obviously there just goes
to show what a poorly thought-out, opportunistic reboot this is. The
premise seems to come from a perspective that is either naïve or
oblivious, that we're living in an age when people are no longer
bullied for their weight, sexual orientation, gender identity, or
skin color, and thus high-school bullies can now be equal-opportunity
without regard to those factors. The problem, of course, is that that
simply is not true. A quick look at the world around us shows that
not only is that obviously not true, but that the strides we have
made in equality since the film's release have prompted an even more
violent and vitriolic backlash from certain segments of society. Yes,
society at large has made significant strides in thirty years terms
of LGBT and racial equality and body positivity, but it is equally
true that hate-crimes are on the rise, and depending on where you go,
it is sometimes more dangerous than it has been in years to be an
LGBT person or a person of color. We are still a LONG way away from a
world in which it would be believable for the queer, black,
nonbinary, and overweight kids of a suburban high school to be the
most powerful and ruthless clique around, rather than the ones being
bullied by that clique, and for the show to suggest otherwise
indicates that it is either coming from a very Trumpian perspective,
or is hopelessly out of touch with the reality that marginalized
teenagers (or marginalized anyone)
still faces. And that JD and Veronica are still being portrayed as
traditionally “normal” and “ideal” beautiful skinny white
people just completes the glaring impression that this show is
courting an alt-right revenge fantasy.
The
show's creator, Jason Micallef, pushed back against this
interpretation before its intended March release by saying that
Veronica and JD are not supposed to be the heroes of the story;
they're supposed to be the villains, and the Heathers themselves are,
if not the heroes, the antiheros we're still supposed to like. “The
main thing to really take away is I don’t view the Heathers as the
villains,” he said in a January interview with Entertainment
Weekly. “The three Heathers are incredibly powerful and ruling the
school; they’re the people you would want to be. In the original
film, the Heathers were the ones I always loved, and it’s the same
with the series. The Heathers are the aspirational characters.”
Wow. Congrats, Jason – you completely missed the entire point of
the film, in which Heather Chandler unequivocally is
the villain, even from beyond the grave. Yes, Heathers Duke and
McNamara eventually become more sympathetic as the film goes on, and
yes, JD eventually becomes a villain in the last act, but the film is
purely aligned with Veronica Sawyer as our hero the entire time, as
should the audience be. The Heathers are absolutely not
aspirational characters in the film; they are the characters we
should aspire to never be.
That Micallef doesn't understand this, and has apparently created a
show in which the cruel, bullying clique members are the sympathetic
characters, seems to indicate that he himself is more than a bit of a
Heather, in the original film's sense. F*** me gently with a
chainsaw.
Micallef's
Heathers appears to be
a show that America in 2018 really does not need; not because of mass
shootings per se, but because of the alt-right, MRAs, incels, and
similar dangerous fringe groups that the show's “now it's the
average white folks being bullied by everybody who's different”
premise seems to feed into. That the show is apparently not doing
this intentionally doesn't really help its case; this appears to be a
piece of media so eager to jump on the '80s nostalgia bandwagon that
it honestly has no idea that its premise is a completely toxic
inversion of everything the original Heathers
stands for. I would not be surprised if no serious thought at all was
given to what this show was actually saying, because it was too busy
trying to strike while the money-making iron was hot. And of course,
while this reboot looks exceptionally awful for all of the reasons
outlined above, the simple fact remains that we do not need a
Heathers reboot of any
kind: while that film is in many ways potently steeped in the 1980s,
it is still extraordinarily relevant in its social satire, and it is
still as sharp-toothed and savage as ever. It is one of those
once-in-a-lifetime pitch-black comedies that pulls off an incredibly
difficult balancing act which could hardly be repeated, let alone
improved upon. It is definitely best that its cult-classic legacy not
be tarnished by an inferior reboot, let alone a reboot like this
which appears to not only aggressively miss the point, but invert it
in what looks like a very toxic way. I'm sure it will see the
light of day eventually, likely quietly dropped onto an on-demand
platform without much fan-fare, but personally, I think it's just as
well that this new generation of swatch-dogs and diet coke-heads move
right along to a boring afterlife off the air.
-
Christopher S. Jordan