Heathers, Jawbreaker & The Timelessness of Killer Cliques

[Music] you wanted to be a member of the most powerful clique in school if i wasn't already the head of it i'd want the same thing come on veronica you used to have a sense of humor school is different for everyone but whether you remember it with fondness or disdain there's one thing that everyone has in common all the [ __ ] flicks your school had them my school had them and if you didn't have them you might have been homeschooled it's the one thing that movies and tv and why novels about magical dreamboats with crooked smiles and gold flecks in their eyes get right of course it is exaggerated not all the mean girls are flawless beautiful heavenly creatures but they exist school is full of cliques because the world is full of clicks when you leave school there will be clicks at work if you become a stay-at-home parent there will be clicks in the pta emergency pca meeting tonight tell all your friends oh i don't have any friends uh i'm pretty isolated at home i have four kids okay good please move along thank you emergency pta meeting thank you for inviting me oh my god she just got all her sadness all over me they're everywhere it's a small scale form of age-old tribalism sticking with what you know and with who you know and with the utmost loyalty school is just the building block but it's basically how we meet people and how we socialize how we interact etc etc the adler and adler study of 1998 determined that clicks were important to the social development of kids so if you were that kid in kindergarten who was shunned from playing with other kids during recess then don't worry it was good for you also i'm sorry it's not all sunshine and rainbows like anything social clicks can have many aversive effects like how the sameness of a group and the group's unwillingness to open up to outsiders can make it harder for people to communicate with anyone else and easier for them to stereotype others it can stunt a person's social group and make them more susceptible to peer pressure every year thousands of kids enter our high school succumbing to terrible peer pressure let's face it high school can be tough and kids can be cruel picking on others for just being different well i say [ __ ] them because they don't know [ __ ] it also gives power to individuals who do things they wouldn't otherwise do alone like say a mean girl who gossips and spreads rumors about someone they don't like presence of their group of friends or if you will are made skanks makes them feel empowered because they know their friends are loyal and that they'll support them even if they do something heinous for years people have speculated on what the true meaning is of the 1989 film heathers and if it even has one you could probably make a room 237-esque documentary detailing all the theories i'll give you an example the heathers and veronica wear signature colors red for heather chandler green for heather duke yellow for heather mcnamara and blue for veronica sawyer it's obvious what these colors represent and some cultures red represents fortune wellness and high status all things that heather chandler has as the leader of the pack and veronica blue like the blues so what does it mean then that heather chandler is killed by a blue drink that jd is shrouded in the blue light when he comes to veronica's rescue i'll tell you the civil war the red states and the blue states in 1861 okay that's gone on long enough written by daniel waters heather's is a dark comedy about high school cliques and the glorification of suicide waters had envisioned the original script as a three-hour long epic and the person he had in mind to directed stanley [ __ ] kubrick kubrick did a war film he did a science fiction film he did a horror film what if kubrick did a team film waters recalled thinking as he worked on the screenplay so out of complete robust pretentious naivety i thought i'm gonna write a stanley kubrick teen film stanley kubrick didn't end up directing the flick but you have to admire water's ambition the film found its director and michael lehmann who was one of the first people water showed the script to at 200 pages the script was very much a satirical deep dive into everything going on with teenagers at the time psa is about drunk driving and suicide paired with a love for john hughes and a cynical outlook made heathers what it was it stood out so much from other teen films at the time that in the years after its release film scholars would cite the movie as the death rattle to the john hughes era of the teen comedy and maybe it was a death rattle but it was also an exciting new beginning or as joy and gabriella might put it the start of something new and something new it was you can bet on it okay i'm done the opening scene of heathers prepares you for the world you're about to enter three girls poised and seemingly well-mannered drink tea in a beautiful garden they stand and walk in unison stumping all over the pristine red roses leaving damage in their wake it's a moment that subverts your expectations on a small scale before pulling you into the cruel and darkly humorous world of teenagers our main character veronica narrates through her diary entries which she writes while wearing a monocle realized sucks losers dry if you want to [ __ ] with the eagles you have to learn to fly veronica is in with the popular clique perhaps the most popular in school a clique full of heathers like all queen bees heather chandler is vile and never misses an opportunity to talk down to others even the people she considers her friends and despite her brief screen time she has some of the best one-liners in the movie [ __ ] me gently with a chainsaw do i look like mother teresa my afterlife is so boring if i have to sing kumbaya one more time did you have a brain tumor for breakfast the heathers are exclusive but veronica is bored with them it's just heather why can't we talk to different kinds of people so they do they talk to veronica's old friend betty finn the geeks the stoners spartos the motor hits geeks [ __ ] bloods waist toys dweebies [ __ ] and the new kid jason dean jd for short veronica's frustration with heather c's cruelty and self-centeredness comes to a head at a college frat party the two have an argument that reaches its peak with one of the best lines ever i got paid in puke lick it up baby vic it up after that disaster veronica spends time with jd and they both hatch a plan to play a prank on heather c that turns into murder like these things tend to do thinking on his feet jd says they can make the death look like a suicide to avoid being found out and from this moment begins a phenomenon there's a suggested uptick in the suicides at westerberg high because the most popular girl in school did it the yearbook wants to put her suicide note the one that veronica wrote in the yearbook and after veronica and jd do the same thing to curtain rams suicide becomes glorified there's a song about it by the band big fun [Music] [Applause] when an unpopular character martha dunstock attempts to commit suicide and lives through it heather duke who has taken heather chandler's place laughs it off it's another case of a geek trying to imitate the popular people of the school and failing miserably is that pate heathers was a special kind of teen movie and the studios had no idea how to promote it the first poster released for it was saccharine and looked more like a rom-com than a satirical crime film michael lehmann denounced that first poster when the movie came out it was the floppiest kind of flop on a budget of 3 million dollars the opening weekend saw the film earn a little over 100 000 but critically it was admired people called it brave and witty and the best teen movie ever made heather's is a morbid comedy about peer pressure in high school about teenage suicide and about the deadliness of cliques that not only exclude but also maim and kill because theories are fun heather's is about the civil war it's about the cold war it's about the breakup of the replacements but what it's mainly about are clicks social hierarchies suicide glorification and the psychology of mean girls although the film was received positively by critics there was a lot of negative criticism from a different kind of critic parents parents who were concerned with their children watching a film that they thought glorified suicide instead of critiquing that very glorification despite feeling rejected by the casting director at her first audition they apparently wanted jennifer connelly for the role and didn't think winona writer was pretty enough winona writer auditioned again because that critique of how the world glorifies suicide is what attracted her to the story she even told the director that she didn't have to be paid for the movie that she'd be more than happy to do it for free actually just gone through something where a girl had committed suicide who was you know called everything from a freak a witch you know just a girl who dressed differently and who was um kind of goth and she committed suicide in my school and then as soon as she committed suicide everybody was talking about how great she was and saying that they were friends and her funeral was huge and it was like and then i got the script and you know it just really struck me because i was so disgusted with the behavior christian slater had this to say when asked about the controversy um to me uh what the film does is it kind of glorifies how society um you know uh or it laughs at how society glorifies suicide i think it's it's you know satirical and all those things so and there really is no suicide in the film you know it's all murder but uh i'm a killer today shows like riverdale and elite boast themselves on being dark crime mystery set in high school shows like these have a couple of things in common they both went way downhill and they may not have happened without heather's or the 1985 film better off dead both of which took social issues arising amongst the teen population and satirize it to the point of gleeful absurdity the script was about all the issues that we were talking about at the time like teen suicide and drunk driving and any of the various one-line moral tales and putting them all in a blender and mixing them up and throwing them at you in a way that you definitely didn't expect and you're kind of going whoa am i allowed to laugh these films sparked a new kind of teen movie that wasn't always lighthearted heather's influence in particular would bring us cruel intentions shows like gossip girl and glee and more importantly the 1999 film jawbreaker remember everything is peachy keen peachy [ __ ] cane heather's was unsuccessfully rebooted as a tv series in 2018. its failure has been dissected many a time so i won't add to it i don't have anything clever to add anyway i simply want to say that its failure maintains jawbreaker status as being the best piece of media inspired by heathers in my book at least as a kid i was afraid of jawbreaker but i was also drawn to it it felt like a horror film but a horror film with really cute outfits and memorable needle drops this movie debuting 10 years after heather's is what gave teen films the sub genre of killer clicks which is yes a sub-genre that i just made up but i'm hopeful for its future like heather's jawbreaker is a black comedy about the inner workings of social groups of status and power and of course murder but unlike heathers it satirizes almost nothing and is transparent in its straightforward campiness for the film's 15th anniversary darren stein and rose mcgowan did an interview with dazed magazine where they were asked what the film was really about whether it has a message to it to which they both said simply no that's what i love about it it's so nihilistic and from mcgowan it's an anti-message movie in this suburban peachy [ __ ] king community girls have a tradition of kidnapping each other on their birthdays for a day of fun pancakes light hazing and an all-around exhilarating day writer director darren stein who grew up in a community like this one wanted to make a horror film on what would happen if one of those fake kidnappings went horribly horribly wrong as he started writing he realized it was more of a black comedy and he went with it after accidentally killing their best friend liz with a jawbreaker candy the remaining trio of a popular quartet courtney julie and foxy decide to cover up the murder courtney now the leader dictates what everyone does and how they do it to ensure no one gets caught in the midst of their cover-up though they're seen by firm the school's invisible girl who is fascinated by liz in exchange for her silence they offer her the chance to be one of them to take liz's place and like cinderella she is transformed into violet violet verges on becoming more popular than liz and courtney combined julie ridden with guilt leaves the clique and makes friends with people she normally wouldn't talk to all the while pam greer is investigating liz's death look at her and julie just wants to come clean the movie consists of a bunch of twists and turns of manipulation catchy one-liners high fashion and corruption in stein's own words jawbreaker is inspired by a lot of things heather's is just one of them stein found encouragement in other films he grew up on and some that were essential to the gay community like rocky horror picture show and carrie in greece the dialogue makes no attempt to be grounded or easy it's worthy the cadence of its delivery sounding more like something from the 1940s or 50s even rose mcgowan said she found inspiration for courtney shane in the film leave her to heaven specifically with the character played by gene tierney the movie is dramatic and gleefully can't stein was unafraid to make a movie as true to himself as possible that's why it's hard for me to not kind of love jawbreaker it's a flawed movie but it's a movie that knows exactly what it is and what it wants to be and doesn't really care if anyone gets it because there's nothing to get it just is and it is boldly from its plot you can see the obvious heather's influence but from things like its wardrobe and its dialogue and carol kane you can see its rocky horror influence its greece influence and its rock and roll high school influence out of all the queen bee click teen movies i mention in this video jawbreaker is also the gayest one the scene where courtney shane has her boyfriend give head to a popsicle has been according to the director the scene that people mentioned to him the most often cited as a scene that quote made me realize i was gay i grew up on john hughes movies greece heather's rock and roll high school and more subversive films like carrie the shining and alien the hunger so i think i was rebelling against the john hughes films of the 80s because they were so heterosexual there were no queer characters then there's violet's fascination with liz initially it seems more like she just wants to be friends with liz but it becomes clear that she's harboring a huge crush and seems like this no honey you're the [ __ ] oh so aggressive julie it kind of turns me on when the film premiered at festivals it was applauded but then you know the jewel went to theaters and it was torn to shreds for mainstream audiences it proved to be too campy and too girly and two other the movie plays by its own rules it's not designed to appease an audience and it vibes with queerness that is not overt i think that was off-putting and upsetting to heterosexual critics but it became a cult movie so i'm happy the fans have the last word like many cult classics it took a lot to get jawbreaker off the ground and in the end the production was granted three million dollars and only 30 days to shoot years later stein would share how stressful this was he was a young director in his mid-20s and every day shooting the film while fun and memorable was emotionally taxing though the critical reception was harsh enough for stein to not make another feature film until 2013 with gbf what he ended up making in 1999 became a cult classic a candy-colored goth cult classic one of the numerous issues critics had with the film was that it lacked substance all it is are mean girls and losers and cliques in popularity and some might argue that these things aren't enough to make a substantive film but i'd argue that they are enough because the girl world of high school is complicated and that's something that movies like heathers and jawbreaker understand that there are [Music] [Applause] what became clear to michael lehmann and the 80s into darren stein in the 90s was that girls particularly mean girls and bullies had an interesting way of taunting their enemies and their friends and that sometimes the two were one and the same i just killed my best friend and your worst enemy same difference the first glimmers of psychological research done on bullying amongst young teenagers was done by dan ayo no matter how i say it i'm gonna [ __ ] it up in 1978 he published aggression in the schools bullies and whipping boys although his study did primarily focus on boys it started to expose the more sinister aspects of social cliques in peer groups the adler and adler study of 1998 on pre-adolescent culture and identity dope deep into the friendships of children and teenagers including popularity and perceived power the study points out the cons of such social groups but also acknowledges that these social groups are necessary for kids they learn how to make friends how to communicate a positive peer group can encourage them to focus in school or give them confidence the downside is that scent kids tend to be very clicky and selective with their playmate there's always the risk of someone getting left behind or harshly excluded the kids left out of these social groups can have trouble socializing later and think that the way to make friends is to go up to someone they like and offer to make them a playlist high school was not easy it wasn't until years later that research started to circulate around girls because where boys might bully someone by physically hurting them and taunting them girls could be different you had the occasional mean girl who started physical fights but in girl world all the fighting had to be sneaky it's hard to pin down exactly when the term relational aggression was coined but it was certainly a phenomenon in the late 90s and early 2000s for a while people didn't seem to think girls could bully other girls that they all sat inside during recess holding hands and making charm bracelets for each other but then something happened and rachel simmons published odd girl out the hidden culture of aggression in girls and rosalind wiseman wrote queen bees and wannabes both of these self-help slash research books came out in 2002 and both of them had movie adaptations odd girl out became odd girl out the lifetime movie starring alexa vega the one that if you're my age and have the same [ __ ] memory you forgot existed until just now and queen beads and wannabes became mean girls the instant classic that to this day makes us acknowledge october 3rd and wear pink on wednesdays mean girls is a film inspired directly from the book but it's also comparable to heathers and yes even jawbreaker all three of these films are different in their approach to the subject matter heathers is a gruesome dark comedy not suited to everyone's taste jawbreaker is a pastel colored high camp romp and me and girls is one of the best straight up comedies to come out of the 2000s but all of them are about high school girl world social cliques and how the exclusion or inclusion of said clicks can affect individuals especially the divide between these minute social classes the movies and the people behind them never make the claim that clicks are inherently bad after all we're naturally inclined to align ourselves with people who like the same things we do all of them are cognizant of this the existence of these social groups isn't where things go sour it's the division and the hierarchy it's one group being perceived as being better than the other it's the social groups being so closed off from one another that no one gets the chance to talk to anyone else and so they rarely get to expand their worldview one of the cons found in these researches of clicks is that some can be so close-knit and closed off that they rarely talk to or befriend anyone else when things like bullying are involved there's no outside perspective so all the nasty tricks and taunts become normalized i hate to do this but you know how in good fellas karen says after she married henry they only ever hung out with other people in the mob only jimmy and tommy and paulie and frankie and jimmy two times who got that name because he said everything twice like i'm gonna go get the papers get the papers it's a lot like that when we start heathers veronica is bored and even annoyed with her friends when she and heather do the lunchtime poll heather gets annoyed and all veronica can say is heather why can't we talk to different kinds of people later she even tells jd that she doesn't like her friends very much and why would she they play vile pranks on unsuspecting people they harshly judge others and they're self-serving and shallow it isn't just that veronica is bored with her friends but she wants to be able to talk to and hang out with whoever she wants like betty finn and martha dunstock in essence that's what heather's is all about it's his motive for killing heather chandler and curtin rand he decides heather's fate when she orchestrates the cruel prank on martha in the cafeteria and curtain rams when he spots them bullying another kid and spouting homophobic slurs kurt and ram had nothing to offer the school but date rapes and age jokes it's veronica's fascination with jd before she realizes do you actually think you're a rebel you're not a rebel you're [ __ ] psychotic she wants her high school to be a nice place she wants people to get along she doesn't want anyone putting themselves above anyone else and in the end she takes charge and does exactly that and jawbreaker after fern walks in on the girl setting the scene for liz's fake murder courtney draws her in and says i'm courtney shane i don't think we've officially met what with the cruel politics of high school and all the movie opens with a bit of narration from fern we're introduced to the beautiful ones the flawless four through her eyes and the disconnect is clear on the outside looking in you can understand how someone like courtney could be worlds away from someone like fern when fern is made popular and transformed into violet her popularity does something interesting she doesn't quite unite the different social groups but all of them adore her equally the captain of the cheerleading squad played by tatiana ali which loki makes me kind of sad because tatiana lee was such a big star in the 90s and i really wish she had the opportunity to start her own high school movie like the ones mentioned here but a punk girl lower on the social ladder than violet even saves the bathroom stall for her violet talks to whoever she wants except julie and that along with her burgeoning popularity is what causes a rift between her and courtney then courtney betrays violet posting pictures of her before her makeover and everyone turns against her because they're shallow and they want to believe in the beautiful ones the flawless four and if by their standards you're not that naturally then you're deceitful and being deceitful is worse than being satan in heels what really gets these different social groups to come together is when courtney is revealed to have killed liz deal with it and they all team up to put her to shame the sentiment is the same in mean girls after everything happens with the burn book and that prom people befriend other people karen hangs out with katie and kevin dupour regina's on the lacrosse team and has no beef with katie people get along and that's all anyone really wants upon its release mean girls was critically acclaimed and a commercial success unlike heather's which had positive reviews but was a box office bomb and jawbreaker which critics took joy in lambasting and people barely saw in theaters but all three of these movies have left a lasting impression on generations decades after their release all very different films tonally but their shared theme of social clicks and high school hierarchies has stood the test of time because those social hierarchies and those bullies we come to know in school are really just a preview for what's out handyman regina george and bing bong from inside out have in common yes they're all fashion icons but they're also given power by the act of remembrance and belief you are not content with the stories so i was obliged to come and inside out bing bong vanishes after the person who created him stops believing in his existence and mean girls numerous characters throughout the school share stories and theories about regina george and later about katie the gossip about them creates a lore that gives them mystique and in turn makes them more popular and more powerful than they already were and candyman is given power by those who believe in him and by those who challenge his existence in any social circle a person's status is given by those around them celebrities don't become famous by themselves there's a vehicle of people behind them bands who celebrate their wins who elevate their name who build the pedestal they're put on and that's why it's so easy for things like celebrity and popularity and social influence to crumble and heathers and jawbreaker high school is like a kingdom the popular girl is the queen liz is a good queen kind respectful and understanding ruling with empathy and not cruelty courtney ruled with terror but liz liz ruled with kindness she was like the princess die of reagan high courtney makes things interesting but she's not beloved in the same way that liz was in the end when everyone turns on her it is because of liz's death the people chose their queen their queen was murdered so prepare to die this moment was inspired both by the end of carrie and the cover for the 1994 album by whole live through this it's kind of funny mean girl sort of almost ends at prom jawbreaker ends at prom and in the original heather's ending jd successfully blew up the school and everyone got along in heaven where they attended prom together the original ending was the bomb was strapped to me and i give this amazing speech on the steps of the school and the camera moves in on my face and then it cuts to black and you hear my voice go boom but we end in a big prom in heaven with the punch bowl filled with the blue chemical but i do love the ending as it is i love that he lights my cigarette brahms can be a cathartic affair huh sometimes bloody but always cathartic and heather's the rain had by heather c is taken over by heather d not simply because she decides to wear the red scrunchie but because she takes charge and because the people choose her they talk about her they feed the monster a monster who turns against her friends makes light of tragedies and maintains the divide between social groups there can only be one queen bee and in some strange fascinating way the people choose who it is the people make the place the people make the queen [Music] i really only wanted to make this because i enjoyed jawbreaker a lot as a child i know i shouldn't have been watching it who cares it turned out not terrible and out of the three main movies i discussed here this was the only one whose influence has been downplayed and undermined throughout the years it was ripped apart upon its release but even though the harsh reviews stung derenstein said he never felt ashamed of what he made when asked whether the negative reception had an effect in his career stein said i'm sure it did everyone thinks of those things in the business i didn't make a direct correlation to it because i'm proud of the film and the pantheon of teen icons courtney shane tends to get left out of the conversation in the pantheon of teen movies in general jawbreaker generally gets left out of the conversation which is unfortunate because it inspired so many other films particularly mean girls its candy-colored style and dramatic flares have been praised by the likes of john waters in that dazed interview i mentioned earlier darren stein talked about the faint similarities between mean girls and jawbreaker he stated i remember going to see mean girls at the chinese theater and being a little bit bitter because i felt like structurally it was pretty clear that it was influenced by jawbreaker but that being said without heathers there would be no jawbreaker jawbreaker was influenced by others so i feel like it's all very space-time continuum in a way a teen movie hierarchy slash the passing of the torch heather's handed its niche down to jawbreaker and jawbreaker to mean girls and mean girls to mean girls too which we don't acknowledge i gotta say after re-watching all of these i'm just desperate to see another high school comedy focused on a click but on the unfriendly black hotties also before the credits roll for the thank yous to the womanizer patrons thank you womanizer patrons i have to say actually the existence of this video is all owed to them because i was trying to pick my december video and it was between this jawbreaker heather's thing and looking at black christmas through the years and this one won the poll and i'm happy about it because i'm happy to have an excuse to talk about clicks [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Yhara zayd

Views: 207,966

Rating: 4.9872494 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Pgl9pTmws7E

Length: 32min 28sec (1948 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 25 2020