Michael Lehmann and Daniel Waters’ Heathers was one of three films I watched in a constant rotation in the summer of 1989. It, along with Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile and Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark , was validation of my pitch-black, confused, turbulent worldview during the darkest time in my adolescence; they were guidebooks for whatever life I might have after my suicide attempt and a map through the tangle of the mess I thought I’d already made of my life after just 15 troubled years. They each held a bit of the puzzle for me, though I wouldn’t begin to untangle the pieces or the shape of it for decades.
I didn’t know what they were telling me, but I craved them like an anemic person might crave iron-rich food. In the repeated viewings, all the while thinking about another attempt, I felt understood, even seen. Feeling seen, even if it was through three VHS tapes that eventually stretched and wore through in the countless repetitions that summer — one after the next after the next and again — was enough to be a lifeline for an angsty kid, lost and forlorn, until I found land again, .
Waters’ screenplay for Heathers is a marvel. In the course of attempting to avoid the cliches of John Hughes films or replicate the slang of an era that would inevitably fall into obsolescence, he invents an idioglossia to rival, at times, Anthony Burgess’ muscovite jumble from A Clockwork Orange . “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw,” invites Heather Chandler (Kim Walk.