Heathers (1989)

directed by Michael Lehmann

Lacey N. Dunham

There are a number of scenes in Heathers that linger and disturb, but it’s one midway through that troubles me most. The film’s teenage protagonist, Veronica, is on a double-date with her friend Heather McNamara. Both girls are in the popular/mean girls clique of their high school (the others in the group are all named Heather). Their dates are boring and oblivious, engaging in literal cow tipping rather than paying attention to the girls, and Veronica eventually stomps away while her intoxicated date flails in mud.

But Heather isn’t so lucky. As Veronica leaves the stupid boys behind her, we watch—slightly out of focus in the background—as Heather is date raped. The moment happens so casually and without commentary that it almost becomes possible to forget about it as the rest of the film plays out. This reaction is telling. A scene in which a girl’s bodily autonomy is ignored becomes just one more thing in a movie where a repeated plot point is the silencing of women. Heather’s rape becomes a story that is never heard.

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I first saw Heathers soon after I moved to Washington, DC, where I experienced daily street harassment in the course of quotidian movements: on my walks to and from the Metro station, on trips to the grocery store, while biking down neighborhood streets strapped into my helmet and a backpack. This harassment typically took the form of catcalls—whistles and comments about my body with the occasional entreaty to smile, as if I was meant to not only endure the humiliation and helplessness I felt, but to pretend I was enjoying it. Men told me I had nice legs, a nice ass, they called me “baby” and “sexy,” they leered when I walked by, they told me they wanted to fuck me.

Street harassment isn’t just about having your body commented on by a stranger. It’s also about a disruption of private, psychic space, those moments of solitude when you are with yourself and your thoughts, and which necessarily exclude the man on the park bench vying for your attention. If you’re a cisgender woman, your attention is meant to be interrupted because not even your solitude belongs to you. Your attention belongs to someone else at their insistence, and you better damn well smile while you give it.

Street harassment is a way to silence a woman’s reflections, to pull awareness away from herself and her inner thoughts and redirect it, forcibly and without consent, towards another.

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Heathers is a difficult film to like, and yet I became briefly obsessed, watching it half a dozen times in the span of two or three months last year. I read commentary, original reviews, interviews with the cast and crew, and retrospectives as the film celebrated thirty years. Here was a film meant to be edgy teen satire, an anecdote to the feel-good John Hughes movies of the era, that instead illustrated the silencing effects of toxic masculinity on both men and women.

Toxic masculinity is a function of misogyny, which itself enforces expectations for how men and women should behave within patriarchy. (Under patriarchy ideology, gender is definitively binary, which is how we get bathroom policing and protests about Drag Queen Story Hours.) The thing is, toxic masculinity and misogyny hurts men, too.

As the feminist writer bell hooks notes, toxic masculinity silences men by forcing them to “engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation.” In Heathers, the male antihero J.D. reaches again and again for violence rather than acknowledge his grief at his mother’s death—a probable suicide that was also a likely means of escape from his aggressive, violent father. Angry that two students direct homophobic slurs at him, he pulls out a gun on them in the school cafeteria. Furious when his girlfriend Veronica dumps him, he goes to her house to kill her. Dismayed and aggrieved that his new high school is filled with the same social caste system of all the other high schools he’s attended, J.D. makes plans to blow up the school during a pep rally, thereby killing the entire student body. Again and again throughout the film, J.D. is unable to acknowledge his real emotions; instead, he cuts himself off from his feelings because toxic masculinity instructs that to show feelings other than anger is weakness and being weak is unacceptable.

Misogyny and toxic masculinity silence women much more deeply—politically, socially, culturally. When people criticize the Oscars for having no women represented in the Best Director category, the criticism is about more than the fluff of Hollywood; it’s about what stories get reinforced as important and deserving, and who gets validated and rewarded for telling those stories.

And women are silenced, too, through violence. Although women represent a small portion of murder victims annually, over half of murdered women are killed by someone they know, such as an intimate partner or a family member. For many women, affection and aggression are shades of the same color. When J.D. seeks to murder Veronica for dumping him, he unleashes a monologue of fury. “I loved you. Sure, I was coming up here to kill you. First, I was going to try and get you back.”

Violence is effective even when it isn’t executed. You don’t have to kill someone to change their behavior—the threat alone is enough. It’s easy, therefore, to be silenced—in your thoughts, your voice, in your freedom of movement. How many times have I been told never to go out by myself after dark? To always use public restrooms in the company of other women? The violence of Heather’s rape conveys two very different messages, depending on who you are. For girls, sexual assault and non-consensual physical activity can be considered an expected rite of passage, as much as sexual conquest and a willful ignorance about consent is considered a rite of passage for boys.

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Another memory of street harassment: Mid-morning. I was walking in boots to a work meeting, my heels click-clacking along the sidewalk. A man followed me down the street, yelling obscene language and growing angrier when I didn’t respond. We were in the suburbs and the day was overcast; no one else was around. “You think you can just walk and make noise like that,” he shouted. “You think you have a right for anyone to hear you!” I kept walking and he kept following. I managed to lose him at a busy intersection, but not before he shouted across at me: “One day, someone won’t let you get away, you bitch.” I arrived at my meeting shaking. I wanted to puke, throw something, and cry all at once. The situation might have escalated to violence. It didn’t for me, but a few months ago, a nineteen-year-old woman in Chicago was murdered by the man whose harassment she ignored. There’s no greater power than in deciding whether someone lives or dies, and in death the victim doesn’t get to tell her side of the story.

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Heather’s date rape is just one scene of violence in a film that brims with aggression from the opening credits. In the first fifteen minutes alone there are homophobic slurs, verbal degradation of women, and a shooting in the high school cafeteria. It was this last detail that I remembered most from my only prior viewing, before my recent obsession took hold. I remembered thinking then how a shooting at a high school in a teen movie seemed quaintly pre-Columbine, though my recent viewings and subsequent research revealed that this isn’t at all true. In fact, the movie was released only two months after what was, at the time, the deadliest K-12 school shooting in the U.S. If there’s anything quaint, it’s that this shooting would become an early harbinger of an occurrence that—while still statistically rare—has nonetheless increased in frequency in the thirty years since.

Several mass shooters have expressed particular rage against women. The Isla Vista mass shooter in 2014 felt an entitlement to women’s attentions and affections that he believed were being denied him. He viewed women not as human beings with their own agency but as trophies that were the rightful property of “the alpha male,” which he naturally believed himself to be. His beliefs led him to murder six people as he sought to punish women for not dating him.

Mass shootings are one of the most visibly externalized forms of masculine aggression. Women internalize their anger; men externalize it. It’s notable that Veronica is at her most genuine and unfiltered self when she’s writing in her diary. Narrated to the audience through voiceover, it’s not surprising that these moments are filled with private rage. Meanwhile, her boyfriend J.D. murders three people, stalks and intimidates Veronica, and plots to blow up their high school. While her anger is limited to the pages of a notebook, his rage takes a public and deadly form. What Heathers does so well is to take a moment of extreme violence, such as a shooting, and juxtapose it against more quotidian incidents of aggression to show how extreme violence perpetuates in our culture and how it functions to silence women. More pointedly, Heathers draws a through line between casually joking with your buddies about the girls you’d like to fuck and acts of mass violence.

Make no mistakes: gendered violence exists on a spectrum. It starts with street harassment and stretches to acts of mass violence. Actually, it starts earlier, with admonishments in childhood: Sit like a lady! (Meaning: make yourself small, do not take up space.) Boys don’t cry! (Meaning: you must strangle your emotions because feelings are soft and as a boy, you must be hard.) For girls—and in different ways for nonbinary and trans folks—these admonishments become silence for who you really are and how you want to act that might not conform to your gender identity.

This silence looks like many things: being interrupted or spoken over or simply not called on in the classroom or at a work meeting; not being believed when you are assaulted; being told you deserved that assault because of what you were wearing. Being grabbed—by the pussy or another body part—without your consent. Being told what decisions you can and cannot make for your own body. Having to perform politeness, deference, pleasantness, grace, and acts or words of flattery towards others, even if it means ignoring your own discomfort or swallowing your anger—as I did in high school when an older male classmate shoved me against my living room couch to grope and forcibly kiss me. He followed this by tearing up an essay assignment I had written that was sitting on a nearby table, ripped it up just because he could, because it was within his power to ignore my requests that he please, stop. He silenced those words and also literally mutilated my words on paper. The essay for class was about, funnily enough, Lady Macbeth.

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J.D.’s attempts to undertake a mass killing at his high school are disrupted by Veronica, and the two engage in a violent fight. In the film’s final moments, Veronica, battle-worn and bruised, stands on the school’s front steps as J.D. stumbles bleeding from the building, having failed to detonate the explosives he planted under the gymnasium. He looks at her and says, “You got power. Power I didn’t think you had.” He’s complimenting Veronica’s anger, which has morphed into a just, necessary aggression no longer silenced and matching J.D.’s own truculence. He is both surprised and impressed. She’s won, and he is left physically limping and weak by comparison. Having failed to blow up the school, he spreads his arms wide. The gesture could be viewed as an embrace of the inevitability that is to come, or a crucifixion pose intended as a final attempt to fashion himself as a savior-figure. Instead of blowing up the school as planned, he blows up himself while Veronica silently watches, a cigarette dangling from her lips.

What are we to take from this ending? Only after Veronica has risen to J.D.’s level of violence is she able to seize her own story and affect change in the social strata of her high school. My belief is that engaging in violence is possible for Veronica only in response to the violence committed against her. Though even when a woman’s violence is justified, she is punished for externalizing it; look no further then Cyntoia Brown, who was only recently released on parole after serving fifteen years in federal prison for shooting in self-defense a man who had picked her up during a forced sexual encounter when she was a teenager.

In many ways, Veronica’s story is all too familiar to me. I would like to believe that, having ended her silence and successfully found her way out of the labyrinth of subdued female rage, Veronica is now better equipped to experience her anger as justified, but to use that anger productively to address injustice without resorting to violent means. Because after J.D. there will be other violent men. There is still patriarchy, and toxic masculinity must still be contended with. I hope that Veronica and the women in Heathers will not be silenced any longer.

Lacey N. Dunham is a writer and editor whose fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Ploughshares, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, CHEAP POP, and Full Stop, among others. She lives in Washington, D.C.