Timing

Tonight was a rough night.

I was trying to unwind after the most confusing and scattered first-day-back ever, one that began with a fifteen-mile bike ride (Bike the Drive in Chicago, everyone should do it) and ended with this. After going in my hot tub with a friend of mine, C, I settled in to bed with half a cantaloupe to catch up on my life.

The first thing I did was catch up on the news. There was a shooting in Isla Vista on Friday night, one that left many of my peers shaken (UCSB is still in the UC system, and many students at Berkeley know students at SB, so many people that I know were personally affected by this awful, awful tragedy). I have no words of my own to attempt to process this event, but I will link you to articles here, here, here, and here. For a world where news travels so fast, I was vastly under-prepared for what I was about to read. It's a horrific thing in and of itself, and as a female member of the Greek system at a closely-linked university, it was particularly hard to stomach due to the targeted attack on sorority women in the area. My LITB and Panhellenic love goes out to all women at UCSB; I cannot even imagine having to be in your shoes and am extending love and support your way.

After taking a minute to process one person's devastating lack of value for other human life, I turned to Amazon Prime Instant Video. Wanting to watch a movie that would allow myself to relax, clear my mind, I skipped past all the action movies and settled on a comedy about high school life in the eighties. Made in 1988, this movie was cited as the precursor to Clueless and Mean Girls, among other films, and existed in the same time frame as John Hughes movies, so without any more information on the subject matter or the plotline of the movie, I began watching Heathers.

Forty minutes in, I was horrified. The timing of my processing of the shooting, then watching the movie, could not have been worse. For those of you (like me) that are unaware of what Heathers is about, the plot follows a girl named Veronica who has succeeded in joining the popular clique in her high school called the Heathers: a group of beautiful popular girls all named Heather. After a college party night goes awry and alpha Heather makes fun of Veronica (in a very clever, scathing way), Veronica plays a game of strip croquet with the new-to-the-neighborhood psychopath, JD (whom has jokingly "shot" two people with blanks in the school, already, with no consequence), to whom she gripes about Heather and vocally wishes alpha Heather dead. Now JD takes things literally, so in a well-intentioned prank to make alpha Heather throw up the following morning by having her drink a mixture of orange juice and milk (Veronica's idea), JD decides to ratchet up the stakes and feed alpha Heather drain cleaner instead. She dies, and JD convinces Veronica to help him pass it off as suicide. After killing two more students at the school (this time, misogynistic football players, killed by shooting them) and also passing them off as suicide, Veronica and JD have a relationship reminiscent of Bonnie and Clyde.

Without going too much into detail and ruining the movie, let's just say I was appalled. I took to the good ol' interweb to see what the fuss was about Heathers (specifically, if my disgust was shared by the mass populus), and was floored. Reviews of it as a cult classic were overwhelmingly positive, lauding it as an important dark comedy, a necessary piece of cinema, and a gem, even 25 years later. All I saw was a movie glorifying suicide and murder, which left a horrible taste in my mouth. I didn't understand how the movie could have ever been made, let alone celebrated, let alone labeled a "classic", with or without the world "cult" in front of classic. I was shaken, shocked, and appalled.

Then I took my surroundings into account. I don't know that I would ever love Heathers, given its dark subject matter and my reluctance to personally jump on board with the whole murder/suicide thing, but had I seen it on a different night (i.e. not right after hearing about Isla Vista), I would have felt differently. I will say that I appreciated it for it's biting wit and it's cleverness, and it's commentary on social cliques in the high school scene. It's a well-done movie, and though I won't throw the word "important" around, definitely has earned it's place in the history books, in my mind.

Maybe I'll try again to watch it, give it some time, and see what I think. For now, I'm just going to bed. I'm on Pacific time, and even for that, 2/4 am is too late to be awake.

God bless.

EDIT: I did do some reading on Heathers that changed my mindset just a little, or at least put my viewing of Heathers in the correct frame. I'll link ya: here, here, and here.