‘Heathers’ Would Never Have Worked If Not For Shannen Doherty’s Iconic “Megabitch” Transformation

Michael Lehmann and Daniel Waters’ Heathers was one of three films I watched in a constant rotation in the summer of 1989. It, along with Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile and Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, was validation of my pitch-black, confused, turbulent worldview during the darkest time in my adolescence; they were guidebooks for whatever life I might have after my suicide attempt and a map through the tangle of the mess I thought I’d already made of my life after just 15 troubled years. They each held a bit of the puzzle for me, though I wouldn’t begin to untangle the pieces or the shape of it for decades. I didn’t know what they were telling me, but I craved them like an anemic person might crave iron-rich food. In the repeated viewings, all the while thinking about another attempt, I felt understood, even seen. Feeling seen, even if it was through three VHS tapes that eventually stretched and wore through in the countless repetitions that summer — one after the next after the next and again — was enough to be a lifeline for an angsty kid, lost and forlorn, until I found land again, . 

Waters’ screenplay for Heathers is a marvel. In the course of attempting to avoid the cliches of John Hughes films or replicate the slang of an era that would inevitably fall into obsolescence, he invents an idioglossia to rival, at times, Anthony Burgess’ muscovite jumble from A Clockwork Orange. “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw,” invites Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), the leader of a clique of popular girls whose job (as they see it) is to be terrible to their peers and each other in order to maintain their bully pulpit. “Everyone here wants me as a friend or a fuck,” Heather says and it’s true. They call themselves “The Heathers” because of the four of them, three of them are named “Heather.” The fourth, Veronica (Winona Ryder), is the ostensible center of the film, filling her journal with pained expressions of displeasure about her buddies and her complicity with their inhumanity. There’s something of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 to Heathers, just one of dozens of referents in a film several times more pithy than it needed to be. Veronica falls in love with new kid J.D. (Christian Slater doing his best Jack Nicholson), a black trenchcoated ne’er-do-well who seems to share her frustration when, on his first day, he pulls a gun on two jock meat-sticks and fires blanks in their faces. In 1989, J.D. gets away with a slap on the wrist and a brief suspension for his act of rebellion. We are still ten years away from Columbine.

Columbine. I lived in Littleton in April 1999. One morning the sound of helicopters cut through the air above our townhouse and not long after, lines of kids, some led by cops, were marched through our neighborhood. I opened the door to watch them go by. They were terrified. They weren’t even talking to each other. I asked a neighbor if she knew what was happening. When I turned on the television, I saw the coffee shop I went to and the bookstore I shopped at swarmed with first responders and the first of what would be months of national media camping out in essentially our community’s collective backyard. The next year was muted. People whispered in public places. More atrocities happened: two teens who survived the shooting at their high school were killed at a local Subway in a murder that remains unsolved; a child’s body was found in a dumpster behind a Bed, Bath & Beyond; some maniac fired shots into the drive-thru window of a Burger King just off-campus and then drove his car into the local library. We were cursed. The nation was appalled. It wasn’t normal then, just yet, to send our kids into the meat grinder with bulletproof backpacks and thoughts and prayers. And I thought of Heathers that day and year and how the fictional administration’s ridiculous response to tragedy among its student body surely wouldn’t be reflected in Columbine’s… but it was.

Heathers is about how teenagers suffer and how adults misunderstand and magnify that suffering through their fumbling, desperate, poisonous solipsistic intentions. Veronica and J.D., like Bonnie & Clyde or Holly & Kit, engage in a murder spree of the very popular, privileged, beautiful, and wealthy people who are running their school. They masque their righteous deeds under the cover of a string of fake-suicides sold through forged notes complaining about how the struggles of kings cannot be understood by the plebian proletariat. We would use terms now like “white privilege” and “racial resentment,” but Lehmann and Waters laid it all out in stark, satirical, savage terms. Veronica and J.D. get away with it for so long because the narrative of the ruling class’s underappreciated struggles is so compelling to the systems of authority put into place by the ruling class. Consider how just the suggestion that a pair of football stars were gay is enough for the testosterone-inflated cops to accept the conclusion that the horror of homosexuality would lead to a suicide pact. Heathers resonated with me on a genetic if not fully intellectual level when I was fifteen. Now fifty, I find it to be no less fascinating as a kind of prophecy for how violence is politicized, the death of children never remedied lest the threat is removed as a cattle prod for donations for both sides, and how the politics of fear have ironically deadened us to true empathy for the misery of others. Heathers nailed it all as sharply and precisely as A Clockwork Orange predicted Starbucks’ sprouting off ubiquitous locations peddling stimulant-laced milk.

Upon hearing of Shannon Doherty’s death from complications of a breast cancer that she might have survived had she not lost her health insurance in 2014 (a distinctly American irony cruel enough that it could have originated from Heathers), I was surprised by how much I was shaken. I was never a big fan of Beverly Hills 90210 or Charmed, turned off I think by rumors of her being difficult that I have since learned to take with a grain shaker-full of salt, especially when it’s applied to women in this industry. But my connection to her through Heathers has remained steadfast through all these years. Stronger than I suspected, even. I don’t feel the same about the other Heathers: Kim Walker’s Heather Chandler is a force of nature, but not in the picture long enough to develop a third dimension (Walker herself left us way too soon with a terminal illness at the age of 32) and Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk), less developed and less evil as a consequence, more victim swept along in a toxic wake than memorable instigator. But I realize now that Doherty’s Heather Duke, clad in a shade of green (each of the Heathers is assigned a wardrobe color) that I have always associated with life, is perhaps the only character in the film to experience an arc. If we look at Heathers as a bildungsroman, its star isn’t J.D. or Veronica, it’s Heather Duke. 

During the film’s prologue, Heather Duke is shown reading Moby Dick during a croquet match with her friends. Later, she asks Veronica to help her vomit up her lunch in the bathroom, the first hint of the pressures of maintaining physical appearances to remain “popular” and accepted. After Heather Chandler is killed, Heather Duke is shown in the locker room the next morning, eating a chicken leg. After Veronica teases her for actually “digesting food,” Heather Duke takes another bite and says “fuck it.”

We glimpse her again at the end of this scene, looking up and to the left in an attitude of religious genuflection as she chews. Veronica, meanwhile, steps into a shower fully clothed in an aspect that resembles baptism. One has assumed the role of holy icon; the other as penitent looking to wash away her sins. It’s not the only moment in the film that sees religion as feckless, empty ritual used to excuse selfish behavior and justify good fortune. At Heather Chandler’s funeral, Heather Duke thanks God for answering her prayers that her friend would die. She’s conciliatory at first, but then she puts on a smile, a saucy tilt to her head, and thinks: “Now I know you understood everything. Hallelujah.” Not long after Columbine, the religious right pushed “alternative” kids (those who wore black and memorized Shakespeare… like me) out of the company of their classmates to home study and demonized rock groups like Rammstein and first person shooter video games. The party of not politicizing school shootings immediately used an epochal one to solidify their hateful, non-inclusive monocultural hegemony over a public institution. I don’t know when they started writing their blueprint for 2025, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t start at places like this where they pulled out a pulpit and nobody pushed back.

Heather Duke seeks out interviews on local television where she talks about how she and her friend were the “same size” so they could share clothes, underscoring her insecurity about her dress size while foreshadowing her eventual transformation into the leader of this vicious pack. And through it all, scene-by-scene, even in the background Doherty changes. Meek, smart, pretty in the beginning, she’s an obvious and natural follower. Targeted during a game by Heather Chandler, after a minor victory she sighs, exasperated, and asks “why?” — but crucially doesn’t do anything to fight back against her best friend and tormentor. Waters likes to joke that Shannon never knew that they were filming a comedy but I’ve come to think it’s not so much a joke as an expression of admiration. Heathers isn’t a comedy, not really, it’s a warning about how easily followers become leaders in exclusionary, fascist movements. When J.D. and Veronica find themselves at cross purposes, J.D. corners Heather Duke to ask for her help in causing further discord in an organization (the school) he would like to literally destroy. Heather doesn’t need to be asked twice. She doesn’t even need to be asked once, she anticipates J.D.’s mephistophelian bargain and is immediately warm to the idea. It’s almost like she thought of it herself.

Watch Doherty’s performance. I don’t think the film works without her. She puts on Heather Chandler’s red scrunchie and steals earrings out of her dead friend’s locker. She shows up later with bright red lipstick and red flats to laugh about the attempted suicide of one of their more aggrieved classmates. She says “Heather and Kurt were a shock but Martha Dumptruck? Get crucial. She dialed suicide hotlines in her diapers.” I remember this kind of cruelty. I have engaged in it when my own self-loathing frothed over into contempt for human beings I could feel superior to for just a moment of quiet between my ears.

Heathers is unerring in its aim. “Holy shit, we’ll crucify her,” Heather Duke says when they fumble upon embarrassing gossip about Heather McNamara while, her smile, Shannon Doherty’s smile, lighting up the entire room. “She’s going to cry,” and the delivery is so perfectly, so deliciously despicable. Lehmann lights her in a red filter, the fire of a few burning documents popping around the angles of her face in honor of the demon she’s become. Her ascendance to king of this castle is complete: “People love me,” she says and Doherty’s delivery is, forgive me, fucking perfect again. Veronica asks why she has to be “such a megabitch?” and Heather says “because I can.” If Doherty weren’t believable in this transformation from foot soldier to Red Queen, if she couldn’t pull off her final close-up of the film that must register at least five different and conflicting emotions, the film falls in on itself. If she plays it like a comedy instead of straight down the line, Heathers becomes smug instead of a twenty megaton bomb, armed and still dangerous to the unctuous, ineffectual establishment thirty-five years on.

“If Shannen Doherty weren’t believable in this transformation from foot soldier to Red Queen, if she couldn’t pull off her final close-up of the film that must register at least five different and conflicting emotions, the film falls in on itself.”

Shannen Doherty was so gifted. She was so terribly young. If you haven’t seen Heathers in a while, even if you have, today is a good day to give it another spin.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for purchase.