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Big Important Fads

Just saw the dark teen comedy Heathers again for the first time in, like, a decade.

For those who haven't seen it, Heathers is about a high school couple who kill off students who bother them. To cover their tracks they invent elaborate backstories for their prey which lead, inevitably, to said prey's unfortunate suicide.

In hindsight the most interesting element of the film is how, by taking their lives, the two teenagers are somehow magically given the opportunity to write a new (secret) life for their victims that transforms them retroactively in death and in the eyes of the other students. In one case they stage the double-suicide of two football jocks and contrive for the police to find them naked with a bottle of mineral water (realizing that, ironically, everyone will think they were gay on account of the mineral water--this is the 80's, remember). Later, at the funeral, the two "gay lovers" in matching caskets with football helmets on, one of the fathers screams pathetically, "I love my dead gay son!"

But Heathers is not as funny as it used to be and I was surprised when I realized why.

When the movie was made the big hot-button Issue of the Day was, of course, Teen Suicide. It was all over the news, every fresh suicide reported with a grim and proper but also unintentionally morbid air. Teenagers at the time were submitted to a pervasive propaganda blitz designed to "raise consciousness" of the issue. Several pop songs pretended to address the problem, including the outrageously idiotic "Teen Suicide: Don't Do It" which I feel confident in asserting never helped anyone.

It was mass hysteria. Teens were offing themselves left and right, they said. One almost had the feeling that we were on the verge of a new society bereft of teenagers altogether. Statistics were cooked up, support groups formed, teachers trained, and a new social disease was born. Like all social diseases it was So Serious that no one could be suffered to question it; so serious that it merited only the most quiet, most respectful, most concerned tones. It was a good time for platitudes and sham solemnity. It gave everyone's life that little extra gravity which we all appreciate now and again, gave us something to be serious about. Any questioning of the idea or use of less than a reverent tone would immediately spark indignation, or course, this being interpreted as showing insufficient concern for the dead and suffering.

Everyone knew it, no one had to say it, that this epidemic was merely a symptom of our sick society. No one was quite sure what this sickness was, but no one could doubt it was there, and of course it would be the teenagers, those most vulnerable of people, who would be our canaries. The cult of the martyr-teen was born.

Yes, these were heady times to be a teenager. Now that I'm reminded of it, it all seems so strange, like the memory of a dream, triggered by some random smell or shade of blue. I readily forgot that I'd ever experienced it until I saw this movie again.

But, really, this happens all the time, doesn't it? At what point, in the past two or three decades (or five, or six), has American culture not been gripped by some overblown fear, some obsessive fixation, some grand theme, some fear of itself, of some inner corruption that will bring us all to ruin? We certainly are not free of it now.

Posted by Alan Hogue at October 1, 2004 03:24 PM