Heathers: The Data and Presentation

I'm going to try breaking down the semiotics in relation to either the musical or the movie. Whatever that doesn't cover I'll ramble about in a paragraph or so in the end. Everything in each subcategory will also be in roughly chronological order, but I make no promises. Ready?

Heathers: Semiotic Data 

Syntagmatic Relationships- 

• Colors: All the popular girls (the Heathers and Veronica) each have a singular color that stands as their symbol- red, green, yellow, and blue. It makes them and anyone/thing associated with the Heathers easily identifiable. 
• Shoot First-: The first act of violence we see in the movie is J.D pulling a gun out and shooting (blanks) in the middle of the cafeteria. So, we get our first look at the kind of tone the movie is going for, when J.D responds to generally annoying people with extreme violence. 
• Party Time: At a college party, Veronica snaps and lashes out at Heather, ostracizing herself from the popular crowd. 
• Throughout the scene, while it's not explicitly shown, there's imagery and vague (and less vague) lines of dialogue suggesting the college men are all there to sleep with high school girls. 
• Window Break: J.D breaks into Veronica's room at night, while she's frustrated by the college party, and this cuts to a scene of them in the backyard after they've had sex. This is the point that solidifies, yes, the two characters are in a seemingly solid relationship. 
• Killing Heather: "At least you got what you wanted, you know?" The hint of the tone we saw when J.D shot blanks in the cafeteria is now fully established, as this killing opens a sort of Pandora's Box: First Heather, then the jocks, and an attempt at the entire school. 
• The Boiler Room: the climax to the movie ties together J.D's plotline. We learned earlier that his mother died (by suicide) in an explosion set by his father; now he is using the same method of explosives in an attempt to blow up the school. Veronica is able to find and stop him in time because she knows this about him, which begins her redemption. Then J.D kills himself with his own bomb as his form of repentance. 

Anchorage- 

• Colors (red): We see the relationship between the color red and power as symbolic here. While Heather Chandler was the queen of the school so to speak, after she dies Heather Duke takes up that role, and symbolizes this with a change of outfit from green to red. 
• Social Hierarchy: Because of the nature of the movie, how you're supposed to feel for any one group in particular is left purposefully ambiguous. The rich popular kids aren't always good, and the one against them is down right psychopathic, yet his ideology is the focus of the movie! 
• Mrs. Fleming: She wears and is made fun of for her "hippie" clothes (and habits)
• Snappy Snack Shack: Veronica and J.D share textbook moments of flirting: (sarcastic) excessive smiling, leaning towards each other, asking questions and sharing personal information
• Window Break: Within the movie, I think this scene is meant to play as romantic; the guy swoops in when his lady is feeling down and makes her feel better. However... 
• Killing Heather: this is another point in the movie when we're presented with two different ideologies, which can be summed up in the question: Is it ok to kill for the right reasons? Throughout the story, every death seems to have immediately positive effects- on everyone except Veronica, who suffers a massive guilt trip. 
• The Boiler Room: Finally, we have a good guy to this movie. It takes until the end for Veronica to distance herself from the death in order to become the hero. Unless you consider J.D a hero for blowing himself up. Antihero? Maybe. 

Paradigmatic Relationships- 

• Colors: Had Heather Duke remained in her green outfit, the transition to leader would not have been as powerful. I could take this a step further and say this made her position as second leader in the movie stronger than in the musical, because in the musical the transition was symbolized only by a red scrunchie, not an entire outfit change. 
• Social Hierarchy: This is one of the features in the original movie I'd argue it was most aware of- the fact that schools were all categories of people that were constantly separated and fighting. As J.D puts it sometime later, you can substitute high school for society at large here ("Now there's a school that self-destructed, not because society didn't care, but because the school was society.") 
• Snappy Snack Shack: Originally, the convenience store was supposed to be a 7/11, but executives from the company pulled out at the last minute (Nerdist, 8/22/16). So, how we view the scene is altered slightly, by factors out of anyone’s control; a 7/11 would’ve been a more familiar environment, but instead we have a made up store and even made up products like Turbo Dog- in place of familiarity, we get creativity. I think it helps make the scene more memorable, at the cost of making it more comedic.
• Window Break: (See Musical, Syntagmatic) 
• The Boiler Room: We don't get to see much of what happens to the school after J.D dies, so whether or not everyone ends up ok is really a toss-up. It's implied there's a happily-ever-after at least as far as the rest of high school is concerned, when Veronica takes over as leader from Heather Duke and starts hanging out with Martha, merging the popular group with the nerds. So maybe one bomb going off managed to destroy social cliques in the school forever? 

Articulation- 

• Outfits: This is an early indicator of class, and even social hierarchy ranking, in the movie. While the Heathers wear prim suits and big hair, you also see jocks that only ever wearing their letterman jackets, nerds with glasses and plaid shirts and collars, and goths in long coats with messy hair. Ever person that has at least a few seconds of screen time in the movie can be easily sorted into categories, which is ultimately part of the conflict of the movie. 
• Party Time: "It's so great to be able to talk to a girl and not have to ask 'what's your major?'" This is a direct quote said to Veronica by a guy at the party, heavily implying he wants to get with someone younger. While Veronica is uncomfortable at the party, it takes him explicitly stating that he's there "to get laid" before she finally storms off. The message conveyed here is clear- guys only want sex with attractive women, and that's all they want out of women, but (smart) women at this time are trying to fight back at this. 
• Of course, in the scene immediately following J.D breaks into Veronica's house and they sleep together, so the message is blurred. 
• Window Break: ..Not only does this scene directly contradict the scene before it (Party Time), but it takes away power from one of the two main characters. Veronica throughout the movie is more of a subject than an independent character. This I think is due to the sort of backlash for feminism going on in the same period. While in the 70's feminism was seen as a socially acceptable movement, the 80's, and in particular the Reagan administration, ushered in a period of anti feminism that blamed anything bad happening to women on the movement. (TIME,  2001, June 24). 
• Mrs. Fleming (and all the rest of the women): Consistently, the female characters of the women are belittled (sometimes by each other, often by male peers). Mrs. Fleming's methods of bringing the school together after bouts of teenage "suicide" are mocked. Veronica is ostracized by the popular girls for not wanting to play along at their parties, and embarrassing Heather Chandler as a result; also at the party, all the women are treated like objects.  
• The Boiler Room: (continued from Paradigmatic) The school is presented as "society", as having definitive cliques that ever person fits in. Until in the last couple minutes, that idea is literally blown up. The implications range anywhere from "look how easily you can stop social hierarchies, just hang out with other people", to "you literally have to kill to change the natural order of things". I think you can't separate these two ideas, because the whole movie presents two ideas: Veronica's and J.D's, respectively. 

Heathers: The Musical 

Syntagmatic Relationships- 

• Colors: Here you have 3 distinct popular girls, in red, green, and yellow; they're always wearing these colors bright and full-body (as opposed to the movie, where Heather Chandler isn't literally always in a bright red coat). Red is still the symbol of power and gets passed from girl to girl. 
• Insults: There's one part of the opening song that is just the whole school hurling insults to each other; it's slightly updated in that the f word for gays is replaced most often with 'homo' 
• Window Break: In the musical, roles are reversed. After the party, Veronica breaks into J.D's house, catching him by (pleasant) surprise. The flip demonstrates a sort of reclaiming of female empowerment that was lost in the 80s. 

Anchorage- 

• Colors: (see movie Colors anchorage) 

Paradigmatic Relationships- 

• -Ask Questions Later: (Yes this carried over from forever ago in the movie's syntagmatic relationships, roll with it.) The first act of violence in the musical is technically from the same scene as in the movie, but it's very downgraded. Instead of firing a gun, J.D beats up the jocks with some cool slow-motion acting. 
• Colors: The musical answers the question people may have had after the original movie, "how did a girl like Veronica end up with the Heathers in the first place?" Answer: She's useful! Her talent for forgery is what got her into the group. 
• Beauty: Because we see a transition for Veronica, the terms for what makes someone popular are laid out more obviously than in the movie; usually, it's some combination of wealth and beauty. We see this in Veronica's move to the Heathers, while they sing about making her over- the meaning of the song "Beautiful" switches from its original purpose (of envisioning what the school would be like without the usual harassment seen between "classes") and the literal term beauty. 
• Our Love is God: One strong change between the movie and musical is what light J.D is in. In the movie, J.D is the one that instigates the relationship between Veronica and himself, and he holds visual power over her; even towards the end, when Veronica is breaking up with him, he physically tries to hold her there. He's also presented as the villain, even though Veronica is more compliant with the murders in the movie (she shoots one of the football players in the movie, but isn't even holding a gun in the musical); despite the fact that his backstory remains largely unchanged, something about how he acts makes him not as sympathetic. Now in the musical, their relationship begins in reverse: Veronica instigates it, and there's even a brief moment where we think they may stop the violence and just agree to be a normal couple ("Seventeen"). In other words, the musical made two changes: there's a larger focus on the love connection between the two main characters (to make the story more sympathetic than the original), and in order to accomplish that, Veronica takes more active control of the relationship. With J.D's psychopathic, almost manipulative behavior, this still becomes a bad thing, ultimately leading to the same result- just with more drama, fit for theater. Therefore I think the change in how the story was presented was conscious of apparatus. 

Articulation- 

• Shoot First, Ask Questions Later: Why is the early gun use removed from an otherwise still violent show? This is where the topic of school shootings comes in to play. Between the movie release and the writing of the musical, the rate of school shootings had begun increasing rapidly. Some stats, to give a better picture of this: in the 20 years leading up to (and including) the release of the movie, there were 57 shootings in K-12 schools. In the 21 years after, that number nearly doubled, to 107; some of these later shootings skew deadlier, too. All this is to say that, the context of J.D pulling out a gun in the middle of a school in 2010 would've been vastly different than when he did in 1988. In the movie, it was speculated he would only get a few days suspension, and the topic was treated like interesting gossip. The threat of a school shooter could not be taken as lightly in today's context, so the scene had to be changed to something lighter to keep the original tone intact. 
• Outfits: While the outfits in the musical are slightly more modern than the movie, the musical is still set at about the same time period (they're seniors instead of juniors). The character outfits are all still distinct to the character's social class. 
• Window Break: (see movie Window Break articulation)

To Sum Up 

A lot has changed since 1988. Now in the face of the MeToo Movement in particular, I think it's impossible to rewatch the movie with the same... laziness, as to what context is on screen. But even before MeToo, the times were changing fast enough that some of the original themes had to be, if not buried, reversed. Watching both the film and the musical with the context of the feminist movement explains some of the choices made in changing the musical. Other choices could be explained by the difference in crime/school shootings over the years, ultimately altering how the violence in the story is portrayed in the musical somewhat. An interesting factor that barely changes at all is the classism, the social hierarchy view of the high schools, but there is some small distinctions here and there. Over all I think the musical was able to reach a deeper message, in that while people separate into these cliques, it's because people are all alone, and social groups are used as a mask to hide that fact. That's a happy enough note to end on, right? 

Heathers: Speech Outline

·     Intro-  “I’ll ruin the movie for you”

o  “Go from most to least depressing, 123”

Overview statement- gonna compare by movie to musical

§  School Shootings

o  Crime rate [U.S Crime Rate]

o  Shootings- [Tribune-Review- last 50 years]

§  From 1968-May 2018

§  1968-1988: 57

§  1989-2010: 107

o  moved from “what” to “why” about crime

§  Feminism- “It’s so great to be able to talk to a girl and not have to ask what’s your major.”

o  Window

o  Reagan white house – [TIME (War Against Feminism)] (recession ’81-2)

§  Antifeminism: “by age 40 a woman was “more likely to be killed by a terrorist” than to be married” [Newsweek]

§  Social Cliques

o  Color is power

o  “Optimism, see, has no place in Heathers’ appeal” [Zilberman, the Atlantic]

§  Anthropological exam of high-school cliques. 

o  Cliques are a mask

Heathers: Organizer Slide