Heathers (1989)
A film by Michael Lehmann (review by R. Ebert)

 

The obvious issue here is the cruelty of high school students (particularly female students) towards other students. This is taken to extreme lengths (from "I wish she were dead!" to actual murder)--with final redemption. In the last scene the 'most deserving to be the top girl' publicizing her association with the least likely (grossly overweight, wheel-chair bound after a failed suicide attempt) girl.

This is an expanded telling of a well-described phenomenon that is also a myth and a set of performances: the high school 'cliques' as that which one has to write about when one writes about the organization of (high) schooling in the United States from the Lynds in the 1920s to Warner and Hollingshead in the 1940s to my own work in the 1970s (1982, 1983) and continuing ().

Wrapped up within the 'clique' issues are issues of sexuality that themselves hide (particularly) in media representations issues of class or race. Quite hidden are issues of actual schooling (see my 2000 Emory lecture for more on this).

This should be read in the context of my pages on 'entextualization' of people and experiences, themselves part of my work with McDermott on the facticity of cultural identifications with consequences (1995, 1998).