Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Heathers
1989 · Michael Lehmann · Heathers on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the color each Heather wears and carries. (light)
Chandler is red, Duke green, McNamara yellow, and Veronica blue. The scheme runs through clothes, scrunchies, props, and the rooms they happen to be standing in.
Payoff: You can read rank from color alone, so pay attention when a color turns up on a new body.
Watch the croquet game under the opening titles. (staging)
Flat lawn, hard sun, symmetrical placement, and Veronica buried to the neck serving as a wicket. The shot is arranged with the fussiness of a fashion spread.
Payoff: The film states its terms before a word of dialogue. The cruelty here will be pretty and it will be posed.
Watch the low, slightly tilted angles on the popular girls. (camera)
Kenny works in a bright, hard, over-lit key with wide lenses and shoots teenagers from below so they loom like statuary. Nothing gets the softening a teen film usually applies.
Payoff: The camera grants a high school clique the gravity of a monument, which is exactly how the clique sees itself.
Listen for the choir and orchestra behind cafeteria politics. (sound)
David Newman scores teenage social maneuvering with full orchestral and choral grandeur. The music takes the Heathers as seriously as the Heathers take themselves.
Payoff: The gap between the sound and the stakes carries much of the comedy, and it never winks at you.
Listen for the Nicholson purr in Slater's delivery. (performance)
Slater builds J.D. out of Jack Nicholson's cadences, the low purr and the sudden climb into delight. He plays a boy performing cool with complete conviction.
Payoff: The borrowed voice tells you his nihilism is secondhand long before the plot has to demonstrate it.
Once you have seen it
Watch who is wearing the red scrunchie in each scene. (setting)
It passes from Chandler to Duke and onward. Nobody explains the transfer and nobody needs to. The object works like a chain of office.
Payoff: A whole theory of power gets delivered by a hair tie, and the script never says a word about it.
Watch what scene the film cuts to right after a death. (cutting)
Hollyn cuts from a body to the institutional response: the assembly, the news crew, the counselor's workshop. The transition carries the satire no character voices.
Payoff: The joke lives in the join, so the cuts are where the film's argument actually gets made.
Track what Veronica's handwriting gets used for. (structure)
The diary voiceover supplies the intimacy the teen genre runs on, and the same handwriting forges the notes. The device that grants access also manufactures the lies.
Payoff: She is not deceiving you. She is deceiving herself, and the narration closes that gap only when she stops calling herself a bystander.
Watch the genre change about every thirty minutes. (structure)
It opens as a comedy of manners about cliques, turns into a farce of staged suicides, and finishes as a thriller. The last move is small: a scrunchie taken, a movie offered.
Payoff: Nothing gets reformed at the end. The hierarchy survives her, and the film is clear-eyed about that.
Carry this in: Watch the colors. Red, green, yellow, blue. The film gives you the pecking order with a wardrobe rack.