Thanks be to Heathers – a film that helped make me who I am

Thirty years ago, Winona Ryder’s character Veronica Sawyer taught me the liberating lesson that you don’t have to conform

Heathers celebrates its 30th anniversary this year – and is getting a rerelease to celebrate the fact. No other high school movie has affected me in quite the same way, nor offered a teenage female character like Veronica Sawyer that I could relate to as much. I didn’t see the film when it first came out; I couldn’t have, it was made in 1988, the same year I was born, so it would be a long while before I got to see Winona Ryder in action. It would be another 14 years before I actually saw the movie, having stumbled across the VHS tape while perusing my parents’ collection and sneakily watching it after school one day.

After that initial viewing, I must have watched it 100 times. I was in awe. The film was meant to be an antidote to the John Hughesian high school films that had dominated the earlier 1980s, like The Breakfast Club or Pretty in Pink, but even 14 years later it still functioned as a refreshing alternative to the teen comedies of the 2000s that skimmed over any real social or cultural comment on youth culture.

What Heathers offered was an examination of rape culture, eating disorders, school shootings and teen suicide – all taboo subjects that the mainstream wouldn’t have deemed fit to be explored in a teen comedy. And it presents these dark themes through the perspective of an imperfect, and sometimes unsympathetic, female protagonist.

Thankfully, when I was at secondary school, these weren’t exactly the issues I was dealing with but the dynamics of the social hierarchy were still pretty much the same. We all aspired to be the popular people at school, or at least their friends, and you often felt like you had to change yourself to get there: whether it be getting drunk on White Lightning on a Friday night or dumbing yourself down so you’d seem more appealing to the boys, and some of the girls too.

Veronica had risen up the school ranks to “the Heathers” – the popular clique – before the movie had even started, earning a spot on their squad even though her name was nothing like theirs. That’s the first point you realise this girl was still an outsider: that, although she rolled with them between classes and after school, she was still an individual who wanted to fight against their social dictatorship. Michael Lehmann, the film’s director, says this is the eternal appeal of Veronica, because “she could be on either side of the fence”.

“She can hang with the geeks and hang with the people that were not being included but could also fit in with the group of powerful girls who rule the roost,” he explained. “I think we all relate to this because we all experience this. We want to be in the popular crowd, we want to be accepted by the people in power, in social power but, at the same time, if we identify at all with the people who are subjugated by that power then we fall into this moral no man’s land which is exactly what the story’s about.”

High school is all about sheep and shepherds and, when I was a teen, I felt that as an outsider – a brown girl from London in a predominantly white northern school – I had to conform to what the popular kids thought was cool. However, seeing Veronica fight against this, dismantle the Heathers and their iron grip on Westerberg High, then walk off into the distance with the formerly bullied Martha Dunnstock, my 14-year-old self felt empowered to start embodying that attitude too. I stopped trying to dumb myself down, stopped feeling like I had to lose my virginity just because some of my peers had. I wasn’t suddenly wearing a red scrunchie and ruling the roost for the rest of my high school days, but Veronica helped me realise I didn’t need to put so much pressure on myself to conform to the status quo.

That’s a timeless perspective that is relevant today as it was 16 and 30 years ago, and I will always hold it with me. Thank Heathers for Veronica.

Hanna Flint is a freelance writer and editor

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