Turns out I'm not the only one chomping at the bit for any excuse to talk about Heathers: the powers that be have jumped the gun on its anniversary to release a twentieth-but-if-you-actually-count-it-only-nineteenth anniversary DVD edition. It's two decades later and the romantic glorification of the American teenager ("Adolescent is the New Consumptive") no longer obtains, but Heathers still has a lot going for it, and not just two classic cigarette moments--when JD lights his off of Veronica's smoldering hand and, of course, the end.
One would expect a teenage pop-philosophizing psycho-killer to be a Nietzschean, right? But Christian Slater isn't. (The real Nietzscheans are the Heathers.) He's the proto-Joker, a force of pure chaos, except that he blows things up not because he's insane but because he knows chicks dig it. This is just a hunch right now, so feel free to back me up or shut me down, but one way to tell superficially nihilistic art (Heathers) from genuinely nihilistic art is whether it has any sense of eros. To put it another way: does the word "sterile" apply to the piece of art in question? If so, it is modern and you should run.
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