20. Gently with a chainsaw

Can Heathers make nice?

I went to see Heathers: The Musical. It’s fun, and it’s got some baller numbers. (I’d pick “Lifeboat”, “Kindergarten Boyfriend” and “Dead Gay Son” as the highlights — none of which, weirdly, are allotted to the actual leads.) My daughter came with me, and this was pretty typical of the audience, which largely consisted of Gen Z girls who might be having their first Heathers encounter, and Gen X parents who will have watched the original film. (Strictly, I count as “geriatric millennial” but I’m not sure there’s much dignity in clinging onto that distinction.)

The musical debuted in 2010, and the version I saw has had a few tweaks since. The most notable one is that in the original, the attempted rape of protagonist Veronica by hell jocks Ram and Kurt was soundtracked by the song “Blue” (that’s “blue” as in balls). In 2018, “Blue” was replaced with “You’re Welcome”, which is both a better song and a better dramatic vehicle — while “Blue” mostly narrates Ram and Kurt’s intent to fuck Veronica, “You’re Welcome” covers the threat, the attack and her escape.

But the demise of “Blue” wasn’t purely, or even mostly, on aesthetic grounds. The musical’s writers said this to Playbill in 2022:

Although it was fun to write and it’s fun to perform, “Blue” has always been polarizing. Some thought “Blue” was wonderful and all in good fun. Others were offended, feeling we were treating date rape as a laughing matter… Additionally, the fact that the number often plays successfully makes it dangerous. It plays into the lie that sexual harassment or assault can be trivialized as “locker room talk” or “boyish antics.” Unlike “Blue,” “You’re Welcome” doesn’t shy away from showing that Veronica is in real danger from these two drunk football assholes. In “Blue”, Veronica says about three words total. In “You’re Welcome” she gets to articulate her fear and her dilemma, and then she gets to solve her problem and score a victory over her tormentors.

That mention of “locker room talk” explains a lot about why “Blue” got written out — it’s a reference to Trump’s defence of the Access Hollywood tape — the one leaked in 2016, in which he makes the “grab ’em by the pussy” comment, and which he dismissed as “locker room talk”. Trump, of course, went on to win the presidential election. A year later, the NYT broke the Weinstein story, and the pent-up distress at America’s “rapist in chief” found outlet in the #MeToo movement. When Heathers opened in the West End in 2018, a jaunty song from the perspective of two wannabe sex offenders was not going to cut it. Hence, “You’re Welcome” made the move from the High School Edition of the musical to the main one.

But even in “Blue”, the musical quietly bowdlerises the film: in Heathers the movie, we see Veronica make her escape from Kurt, leaving Heather McNamara behind to be raped by Ram. It’s an incredibly unpleasant moment, but the film plays it at least a little ambivalently. We know that Veronica hates the Heathers, and because she’s the movie’s narrator and protagonist, we side with her. Part of the pleasure of the film is seeing bad things happen to the hot, popular girls. The Heather of 1989 is the Stacy of now: the girl you want, and can’t have, and want to see punished. (While Heathers is a girl-focused movie, it’s also a movie written and directed by two men.)

When you take it out, though, it leaves a hole in the McNamara character. Later on in both movie and musical, we see her attempt suicide. In the film, this makes sense as — at least in part — the act of a girl who’s been traumatised and is falling apart. In the musical, it feels less motivated. And while cutting the rape of Heather McNamara makes Veronica superficially more sympathetic (she isn’t literally leaving her friend to be assaulted in a pile of cowshit), it also makes Ram and Kurt’s subsequent murder by Veronica and JD feel less justified. After all, the jocks didn’t actually rape anyone. They’re being punished for the intent, not the act.

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These wobbles in the axis of Heathers’ moral orbit fascinate me. The development of Heathers: The Musical covers a period I think of as the Great Nicening — and more than that, it adapts a source text that belongs thoroughly and wholeheartedly to the Anti-Nice Gen X era. Heathers (the film) makes jokes out of things that have subsequently been decreed very much not funny, including rape, bulimia and suicide, and so the musical has to work out what kind of funny is acceptable to a contemporary audience.

As Veronica and JD kill their way through their classmates, they frame each death as self-inflicted, leading to an outbreak of suicide contagion at their school after a do-gooding teacher makes heroes of the victims. The grand finale (in both film and musical) comes when JD tries to blow up the school and present it as a mass suicide in protest at the vacuity of their existence. “People will look at the ashes of Westerburg and say, ‘now there’s a school that self-destructed, not because society didn’t care, but because the school was society.’ Now that’s deep,” he gloats to Veronica. The joke is that treating the supposed suicides as “meaningful” has only served to enable JD’s psychopathic violence.

As nihilistic as Heathers is, its approach to suicide is a lot more humane than the one made dominant by the Great Nicening. Even though the Samaritans guidelines are clear that suicide should never be treated as a simple or heroic act — because doing so is liable to encourage imitation — self-inflicted death is now routinely presented as an important, meaningful statement to which society should attend. I wrote about this in 2015, after the hagiographic treatment of Leelah Alcorn, a trans teenager who died by suicide. (The reaction to this article is among the most vicious I’ve ever received — I was accused of wanting trans children dead for not wanting trans children to be exposed to suicide-contagion inciting coverage — but about two months later, the Washington Post reported anecdotal evidence that the Alcorn frenzy had indeed driven copycats.) This month, the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry received similar treatment: it was presented as a judgement on the inspection system, and has become a rallying point for those who want Ofsted reformed or eliminated.

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Under the terms of the Great Nicening, pain equates to authority, and suicide is the greatest possible expression of pain. This is disputable on purely factual grounds — how much you suffer has nothing to do with how correct your position is — but more importantly, it’s harmful. Making suicide into a high-status act incentivises suicide. It’s not the only reason someone would kill themselves (Heather McNamara makes more sense as a character when she’s not merely jumping off a cliff because everyone else is), but it pushes the threshold of self-destruction just a little closer than it was before.

One of the precepts of Heathers the movie (and this is carried over to the musical) is that your personal anguish isn’t a get-out from responsibility. It’s a punchline that Ram and Kurt are imagined posthumously to be sensitive victims because Veronica and JD posed them as a gay Romeo and Juliet: it’s just a way for the left-behind to rationalise the dead boys’ horrible characters. Actually, no one in Heathers has suffered more than JD, who is abandoned by his mother and abused by his father. It doesn’t matter in the end, because he’s still a psycho who can only be redeemed by blowing himself up (the only actual suicide in the story).

I think it’s fair to say that you wouldn’t write Heathers: The Musical as it stands if it wasn’t drawing on the pre-sold commodity of Heathers the film. And you can tell that Heathers: The Musical isn’t wholly comfortable with the film’s nihilistic satire from the way the musical’s writers have stressed that their show is “exploring serious issues”. (You can have your high school Bonnie and Clyde, but only if you make a gesture of eating your moral greens with it.) But its film origins make it a hold-out against the poisonous sentimentality of the Great Nicening, and give it an edge that feels forward looking to me. There is, I think, a certain exhaustion with the insistence on the superior virtue of the oppressed. My daughter told me afterwards that she enjoyed it a lot.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• THE PARIS MEMOIR IS HERE and so is my review for the Sunday Times. No one has navigated the Great Nicening more deftly than Paris IMO, and the book is as entertaining as you’d hope. It’s also, in places — the reform school abuse, the sexual violence — heartbreaking and horrifying.

• I’ve got obsessed with Search Party. Fun 2017 interview with the show’s costume designer.

• This old piece popped up on Twitter and reminded me to belatedly beef it. “Gawker Media is dead, of course. But it’s not dead because it failed; it’s dead because it was murdered by a vindictive billionaire and there existed no legal infrastructure to protect it.” Listen, lads, nobody forced Gawker to publish revenge porn. As a person who has spent an unholy amount of time on the Wayback Machine version of Gawker Media sites for book research, there are things I can’t unsee.