Lived It

Main: ‘Heathers’ was the blueprint for teen cinema

Episode Summary

This week’s premiere pick ‘Heathers’ and how it influenced a generation of dark teen films. Also everything we love about Winona Ryder in this episode with Alexei Toliopoulos and Gen Fricker.

Episode Notes

This week’s premiere pick ‘Heathers’ and how it influenced a generation of dark teen films. Also everything we love about Winona Ryder in this episode with Alexei Toliopoulos and Gen Fricker.

Tell us your favourite Winona Ryder movie at @netflixanz on Instagram and Twitter, or tag #thebigfilmbuffet.

Episode Transcription

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Jake Gyllenhaal, male Winona Ryder. Same big eyes, gothiness about them. Intensity. Hello. You're listening to the Big Film Buffet with me, one of your hosts, Alexei Toliopoulos. And joining me as my cohost as always, is the wonderful, the wickedly talented, the one and only Gen Fricker.

Gen Fricker:

I love the way you say wickedly talented.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Well, I embody Travolta himself, one of the golden gods of the art that we discuss in this podcast, which is movies, darling. We are talking to you about what our what to watch recommendations are for this weekend on Netflix. And Gen, what are we talking about today?

Gen Fricker:

This weekend, we reckon you should get around Heathers, a teen cult movie classic that is on Netflix right now.

Speaker 3:

Your true feelings were too gross and achy for you to face.

Speaker 4:

I did you not want them dead.

Speaker 5:

You did too.

Speaker 4:

I did not.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Gen, I think you accurately call this movie a cult classic. I think this movie embodies what a cult is because it has such a big fan base that are so passionate after it came out what, over 25, 30 years ago now, in the night late 1980s. And how would you describe Heathers to the uninitiated?

Gen Fricker:

The logline of this film in one sentence is mean girls, but with murders. As you said, Alexei, it's a film that came out in the late 80's and it is a pitch black teen comedy. It is so dark. Basically, you have Winona Ryder's character, she's part of the popular group but she's become very bored with how cruel they are to the rest of the highest school. And she fantasises about them dying. She meets Christian Slater's character. They fall in love. He starts murdering people and it all unravels from there. It sounds dark. It is very, very funny. It's really quite a surprising 80's film. For me, a lot of my knowledge of that era was from the John Hughes movies, Breakfast Club, that kind of thing where it's quite saccharin and sweet. This is not that at all. This was written as a response to those films being so saccharin. It is dark, there's a lot of swearing, there's a lot of murders and it's a very cynical world that these kids inhabit.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Absolutely. This was also a first time watch for me as well. Obviously I've heard about it a lot because it is an iconic teen classic. I remember that poster with Christian Slater holding Winona Ryder in front of a blackboard. So it has this look. That poster sets your expectations into thinking, "Well, this is going to be your classic good girl, bad boy, teen romcom from the 80's." But like you said, it is so dark. I can't even fathom this movie being made at any other point in history.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. I'm not going to say it's an easy watch because of how dark it is. It is very dark. So it's really for people who like their comedy pitch black, who are ready to get into some dark areas. Because yeah, the way they talk about things, these murders, there's a bit of gun violence in the film. Where we're at historically now, that has a completely different meaning to where people were at culturally in the late 80's. So you've got to flag it as that. It's very much a product of its time and tonally it's very of its time, but it is so influential, this film, across all teen movies. If you've watched a teen movie ever, it is likely being influenced in some way by this film. So it feels like watching a history of cinema.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Totally. I think that's what grabbed me about this film, is that the way that it's stylized through costuming, through production design, through the camera even, there is this look of capturing that 1950s idea, that very American ideal of suburbia where we've got the jocks wearing the letterman jackets. We've got the Heathers themselves, which is a group of four popular girls, three of them are called Heather. One of them is played by the great Shannen Doherty. And then Veronica, played by Winona Ryder, being the offset outcast leaving that group. But they're these very cruel, popular girls, but they all wear those plaid push-out skirts and the little cardigan jackets and stuff like that.

Gen Fricker:

A lot of pastels.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

A lot of pastels.

Gen Fricker:

Colour graded for the gods this film.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Absolutely. This is for the back of the room, the colour grading on this.

Gen Fricker:

My condolences to dogs because you will not see any of the vivid colour in this.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Heathers will mean a little less to you if you're the canine variety of listener. But it captures this idea and this look of 1950s America. But then it's a satire of that for the modern age. So I think Heathers, it's a teen comedy, but it's also, like we're saying, very dark. It's surprisingly how much this reminded me of the work of [inaudible 00:05:11] of that year up. Singular voices in film that are like your David Lynch, who would talk a lot about American suburbia through stuff like blue velvet. Really would capture that same kind of vibe. And then of course, the big one for me watching this, is John Waters, who would do stuff like polyester, I think is a real tree ties on American suburbia, as was credit through melodrama. He would have so much iconography of the 1950s, especially teenage films in the 1950s when he would have been a teenager watching those movies from the 50's and 60's that are all about that angst.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

And he would imbue it with very high camp comedy. I think the camp is all there and this is quite a camp comedy, but there is so much dread and darkness. And teen films work in this heightened world so well, where there are heightened stakes. And I think this captures them in a really interesting way by bringing them to be literally life and death and all the dreads surrounding some stuff like that, that makes it so darkly resonant.

Gen Fricker:

Yes. Something that really spoke to me in this film was this sense of alienation. And when you are a teenager, there are moments where you're like, "I don't relate to anyone and who are my friends?" And I think that's one of the reasons that this movie is so timeless, is that that is always going to be something that teenagers across all history can relate to, is looking at your parents and being like, "Oh, they're not the perfect people that I thought." Looking at what the future could be and wondering how you fit into that, then maybe having that moment where you realise that the people around you aren't going to be in your life forever. How that manifests in this film is Veronica wanting to kill her friends.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah. And I got to say, everything you've just talked about is so powerfully embodied by this rockstar of a movie star, which is Winona Ryder, who is just so with this film coming right hot on the heels of Beetle Juice, she embodies this gothy outsider. She's already in that Tim Burton world. Now she's doing it again in a much darker cult classic. And this was a part that she really chased after. Really, she went after this role because this script existed, it was out there, people knew about it, but she was in Beetle Juice. So she liked this darker material, but because that's such a big, funny movie and pretty mainstream for something as weird as that, she was being pushed more into a mainstream movie star direction, especially teen idol thing. And then she was like, "That's not me. I am this gothy person. This is the movie that I want." And so she jumps on it. And I think Winona Ryder, to me, is such a fascinating actor, such a fascinating star because she has this huge movie star career around this time.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

And often it's playing really interesting young, independent women that are different from everyone else around them, are out of time or out of sync, but they are so strong and so strong of valued. To me, as much as I loved the new Little Women adaptation, the Greta Gerwig one with Saoirse Ronan, Winona Ryder in Gillian Armstrong's adaptation of Little Women is my Jo March because she captures that theatre girl energy, that goth energy that makes that character sing so much for me. And I think that she embodies everything. She's such a singular actor and movie star that I'm so glad that she's had this cultural revitalization and this new arc of her career now that when people go back, like we have this week, to rediscover Heathers, you can just understand so fully who she is as not just a cultural icon, but as an actor.

Gen Fricker:

Building on what you're saying, I've been thinking about it a lot, the difference between cinema and TV. Because the way I've been consuming pop culture and stuff over the last year, like most of us have, is being at home via like TV, via the internet, that kind of thing. Everything on a small screen. And what you're saying about how she's such a singular actor, really speaks to me because she's really cinematic in her performance. It's so small. And I feel like when you watch teen movies now, they're these very big broad paintings, they really try to sell you this idea of, "Yeah, I'm hot, but I'm insecure or whatever." And for Winona Ryder, you see her in these films like Edward Scissorhands and stuff like that, where she's so striking on screen and her performance is so intimate and small. You have to lean in but she's so incredible to watch, that every single movement of an eyebrow or the way she looks, her eyes and stuff like that, it's all so fascinating that she really doesn't have to like do a lot for you to be completely pulled in.

Gen Fricker:

And in this film, the premise of her character being, I'm a mean hot girl who hates her friends and wants them to die, for that to be pitched as a lead character and to make that likeable, for you to want to route along for her is so hard. And I feel like that's also why she's such a singular talent because she can just carry that off. And then pair that with Christian Slater, who is... I get it now. You know what I mean? Culturally, I was aware that he was hot. You know what I mean?

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yep. We get it. The guy is a hunk, the guy is a stud, the guy is a spunk. We'll say it on the record. We are believers of the Christian faith, which is the Christian Slater faith. Okay with Christians on this podcast.

Gen Fricker:

But the two of them, I'm like, "This is incredible to watch, just next to each other." So hot, so charismatic, so much chemistry.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Absolutely. And they both have this satirical energy that's innate to them. I think Slater, this is a breakout role for him too. And he does this parody, this impersonation of Jack Nicholson.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah, totally.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

He does this Jack Nicholson thing.

Gen Fricker:

Greetings and salutations.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Oh, that's good, dude.

Gen Fricker:

Thank you.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Greatings and salutations. It's me, Christian Slater and Jack Nicholson talking through the same fricking head, okay? We're the same fricking guy, okay? And I think he captures that dangerous Jack energy, that devilish charm of Jack Nicholson. And I think he does that here and then he does that for 40 years. He does that forever.

Gen Fricker:

Because, I guess, that's what people want from him.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Because he is such an innate bad boy. And he's just got that charm and energy. And he does this thing in this movie that blew my brains into the dust, I'll say, because I had never seen this before. And it was such an interesting thing and I wonder if it's on a script level by Daniel Waters who was the writer of this film, or if it was in the performance and finding it in this. He's got this weird relationship with his dad. His dad is an absentee father who is a multimillionaire corporatist.

Gen Fricker:

His dad's trade is that he's a demolition man. He blows up buildings and he thrives on that.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

He lives on it. He thrives on it.

Gen Fricker:

And it's a real 80's idea of capitalism. They've got a big minimalist house, lots of marble and black furniture. And it's very cold.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

It itself is commentary on the John Hughes exemplification of Reaganism, Reagan era, Republican politics in those films. But then they have this dialogue exchange where they call each other father and son, and they play.

Gen Fricker:

But they swap it, right?

Alexei Toliopoulos:

They swap it around where the dad's calling him, "Oh, hello father, how are you? And I've got a girl you'd like..." Playing around with it. And I was like, "I hadn't seen that before." And it felt like such an interesting way to get into these characters. These two people are close because they are father and son, but there also is this gap between them. So they have to play the games to even be able to get into what a regular father and son relationship is.

Gen Fricker:

They're representing to each other an idea of family rather than existing in a family dynamic.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

And I thought, this is just some rockstar movie stuff, dude.

Gen Fricker:

The whole film has this real edge to it where you just... It feels dangerous to watch.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Really, it does.

Gen Fricker:

And because Winona Ryder's character could so easily be unlikable, because Christian Slater's character is so anarchic that you feel a bit on edge. There's an anxiety to this film that makes it really compelling. And as audiences watching movies today, I think because there's so much competition for audiences and keeping people involved, we don't usually get that tension and anxiety. I don't know. I did keep feeling at moments watching this film, I was like, "Do I want to turn this off? Is this actually too much?"

Alexei Toliopoulos:

I would say that it took me a minute to buy into things. I didn't warm to this movie straight away, but by the end of it, I'm like, "This is a new favourite for me. This is a real new teen favourite."

Gen Fricker:

The design is incredible.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

I think you see through that design, kicks off stuff that come later on in the next decade. Clueless looks like this and that's still modelled in the 50's and then the 80's as well. And then the darker teen movies that are in the realm of dark stuff like horror, but they're still more so about the dynamic of teen groups than stuff like your Halloween's on Nightmare on Elm Street [crosstalk 00:15:12].

Gen Fricker:

Like the craft. Obviously it's a horror, supernatural film, but it's also about being a teenager and trying to figure out who you are and fitting in within a dynamic and feeling that alienation. It's really interesting to watch this movie because it exists in an amoral universe. When I was watching this film, I really could see the history of cinema from that point. For example, yeah, you mentioned Clueless before, and you see it in the Heathers uniform. They all have these individually colour coded identities. One of them is red, one of them is yellow, one of them is green. It really reminded me of Clueless with the main character, Cher. And she's got her big shoulder paddy, plaid, blazers that she wears to school and stuff like that. And it's a social identifier. And you're like, "That definitely feels like it came from Heathers." It was made about six years afterwards.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

I think the language as well, there's something in the use of language and the odd vocabularies that translates into when 90's teen films went for a while. Another movie that really feels like it's a descendant of this film that I had a little bit more when I was growing up, was Jawbreaker with Rose McGowan.

Gen Fricker:

I love that film. I was obsessed with them. And again, so dark. Such a dark film.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

But I feel like that movie could never exist if Heathers didn't come in and break the mould down for what a teen movie could be, that we could get something even weirder with Jawbreaker.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. Winona Ryder, the characters that she plays, it'd be easier to say they're [inaudible 00:16:44], but there's something that's less fetishized. She's a girl that isn't really performing for men.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

No, not at all. Yeah.

Gen Fricker:

Whereas I feel like [inaudible 00:16:53] generally has that idea of, if you're an [inaudible 00:16:56] you're cute and beautiful and aloof and amused for men. And I feel like Jawbreaker definitely has a spirit of that in the female characters, where yeah, they are hot and terrifying, but again, it's really about the dynamics of women in social settings together and that prison that beauty puts people in, perhaps. We all feel sorry for hot people, obviously.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Oh, of course. Thank you so much for feeling sorry for me.

Gen Fricker:

Exactly.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

But yeah, I agree to have friends being empathetic with my life and my struggle.

Gen Fricker:

I don't understand your struggle but I stand with you.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Thank you.

Gen Fricker:

Classic me, Googling a film while I'm watching a film.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah. What did you unlock?

Gen Fricker:

Well, I found out that this film was originally written as a spec script for Stanley Kubrick.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Really? The Stanley Kubrick.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

We're talking Stanley Kubrick, who we know from The Shining, we know from Full Metal Jacket.

Gen Fricker:

From the moon landing.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

From faking the moon landing.

Gen Fricker:

Faking the moon landing, yeah.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

2001: African Space Odyssey. My favourite movie set 20 years ago. Okay. Same year that Ghost World happens. There people are up in space and they're on the moon looking at cool shit. And then people are looking at vinyl records in Ghost World on earth.

Gen Fricker:

Do you believe that those two movies exist in the same universe?

Alexei Toliopoulos:

I do. And I actually tweeted that once and the director of Ghost World replied to it saying, "I like this theory."

Gen Fricker:

That's awesome.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah. Thank you, Terry Zwigoff. We love you brother.

Gen Fricker:

Daniel Waters wrote it as a dark satire in the way that Doctor Strangelove.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Oh, was a satire on Cold War. This is a satire on the lives of corporate America's children and suburbia and stuff.

Gen Fricker:

Which, when I was watching, I'm like, "Yeah, I wonder..."

Alexei Toliopoulos:

What could he have done?

Gen Fricker:

I feel like maybe he would have leaned more into a horror thing, perhaps.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah, perhaps.

Gen Fricker:

I'm really glad that this movie exists as it is. It is just interesting to imagine what Kubrick would have done with it.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah, because he's covered so many genres. I'm like, "What would he have done with the teen stuff? What would he have been able to do with it?"

Gen Fricker:

I don't know. I know that he usually has these very strong female central characters, but they usually, they're quite a hysterical performance from him. And I feel like this all works because Winona Ryder's character, Veronica, is so cool and calm and collected and can understand right from wrong. Just when I was watching it, I was like, "I just couldn't imagine this in anyone else's hands."

Alexei Toliopoulos:

And especially in this era, Kubrick is coming off epic cinema and then eventually going into more intimate, weird stuff like Eyes Wide Shut.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. Maybe it'd be more masks and stuff.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah, a few More masks, some Christmas trees and lights around. This movie so has the language of those original Archie comics in here. It so has that look. I think that JD character, the Christian Slater role, is almost like a real messed up version of Jughead or something. And then of course, Winona Ryder's character is literally called Veronica. There's another character called Betty. So I feel like it is taking that language that America would have been so familiar with and then making it dark. And then you watch Riverdale, which I'm a fan of, I love Riverdale because I do love Archie so much as well. And to see that go, "Yeah, we're doing Archie, but it's like Heathers." To see it come full circle and get that understanding...

Gen Fricker:

It's like if Heather's was directed by David Lynch.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Absolutely. Twin Peaks.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah, Twin Peaks. Yeah, Heathers is Riverdale.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

It's the bridging film between Archie the comics to Riverdale's take on Archie.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. And it is, I feel, equally as dark as Riverdale.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

I'd even go it's a little further down the darkness path, which is what I call any walk across into darkness is down the darkness path. But I would say that if you're a listener of this podcast and you love Riverdale, I really do think you'll get a lot out of watching Heathers, but it does come with a bit of warning because it does talk about quite some controversial and mature themes in a way that's quite unusual.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. I think if you were used to watching teen movies, there's usually a lesson or a heart to it, and that does not exist in this movie.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah. There's a heart but it's a real dark, rotten one.

Gen Fricker:

It's rotten out. It's an amoral world that these characters live in. It really feels like quite a claustrophobic movie because these teenagers really don't see a future. And there's a lot of talk of suicide in the film. There's gun violence, there's shootings and stuff that, watching it now, can be quite confronting. So just an absolute warning. If you're not into that, then maybe this isn't a film for you. But I will say, it is such a great indictment of American culture and the way it sells itself through teenagers and through this idea of capitalism and freedom and things like that. And watching these kids see their parents literally destroying the world and being like, "I don't want to grow up. I don't want to grow up to be that, so I'm just not going to grow up."

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah. I would agree with you. This gets my highest recommendation if that's the kind of thing that you're into. It is worth watching because I really feel like this finally filled the gap missing in my film knowledge, watching this movie. I find it incredibly rich text. So it gets a huge recommendation from us here at the Big Film Buffet. If you just watch Heathers and you're looking for a little bit more, there are a few other films on Netflix I think will settle that itch for you. I would give Jawbreaker a big recommendation, as we already did in this podcast. It's right the next one in line.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

I would say Easy A, that interesting take on the Scarlet Letter that we had a few years ago with Emma Stone. A few years ago, I reckon I saw that movie in high school. So it's a little more than a few years ago, but I absolutely adore that movie. And then another one that's a bit of a slip hit, a hidden gem on there, is Anya Taylor-Joy and the late great Anton Yelchin, in this movie called Thoroughbreds, which is really weird, really dark, new take on a teen film.

Gen Fricker:

Murderous horse girls?

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah, dude. Big time.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. I'm really keen to watch that. I've heard so many good things.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

I think it's right up your alley. It's just a big recommendation from me to Gen Fricker.

Gen Fricker:

Thank you. As a listener and a purveyor of pod, I appreciate the recommendation. It really reminded me so much of, and I think we've talked about this before and I'm not sure, one of my favourite films growing up, but I feel like it says so much about me.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

You look so embarrassed already. I can't wait to hear what it is.

Gen Fricker:

Because it's so cringe. I was obsessed with Donnie Darko growing up.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Oh my god. Of course you were, dude. Of course.

Gen Fricker:

I know. In hindsight, I'm like, "It's so obvious." But I was like-

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Oh my God. I know you.

Gen Fricker:

I'm like a little arty goth girl who just loved Donnie Darko. And I was like, "Yeah, I freaking get it" when I did not get it at all.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah. You can't can't see him but I got a big, tall rabbit called Frank follow me around the world right now, dude.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah, man. It's a modern film that was set in the 80's. But it, I feel like, inhabits the same universe. Extremely dark comedy.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah. It's almost like a supernatural-ish version of Heathers.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. And it deals a lot with death and alienation and growing up rich in the suburbs and the emptiness of that Reagan era, commercialization and stuff like that.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Can I say something I just had a thought off?

Gen Fricker:

Please.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Jake Gyllenhaal, male Winona Ryder. Same big eyes, gothiness about them, intensity. And I think oddball fellows really go, "Yeah, I love Gyllenhaal, dude. I'm a night crawler, dude."

Gen Fricker:

Actually, can I tell you something funny?

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah.

Gen Fricker:

I was going through my notes and I found an email that I'd sent to myself from 2010, and it was a quote from Charlie Kaufman about cinema. And I was just like, "Of course you..."

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Oh my God, dude.

Gen Fricker:

Don't you reckon I would have just been the worst cinema bro.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

No, you would have been. Yeah.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. And I just was like, "Of course I loved Donnie Darko growing up." I still feel like those are good films, but of course I was like, "There's a meaning here, man, and it's bigger than what we all think."

Alexei Toliopoulos:

That's so good. I think one of the greatest saving graces of my life and career was, I had my film bro phase when I was 13. So nobody saw it. I had no friends to talk to about it because none of them watched movies like that. So I escaped it so cleanly.

Gen Fricker:

Far out. Heather's is out right now on Netflix. Get around it if you love a dark, dark teen comedy. And make sure you subscribe to the Big Film Buffet on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

This episode was hosted by me, Alexei Toliopoulos, and Gen Fricker.

Gen Fricker:

Produced by Michael Sun and Anu Hasbold.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Edited by Geoffrey O'Connor.

Gen Fricker:

Executive produced by Tony Broderick and Melanie Mahony.