Heathers
In the early 1920's, two young men who had read more Nietzsche than was good for them got it into their heads that, being Supermen, they could commit the perfect murder. And so -- as if straight out of the pages of Dostoevsky -- they committed a terrible crime and were caught as quickly and easily as any other philosophy students would be who attempted the same thing. The case of Loeb and Leopold became the "crime of the century" mainly because they were defended by Clarence Darrow and not because Nietzsche so much influenced them or that Dostoevsky predicted this very behavior almost a decade beforehand.
It's been a common place since to blame some outside intellectual-cultural influence for an otherwise incomprehensible act, as video games are blamed for school shootings and pornography for toxic masculinity -- whatever in the long run that might turn out to be.
Among other parallels, an untimely prescience is one of the eerie qualities of Heathers that loos backward to Loeb and Leopold and forward to even darker crimes that I scarcely need mention. At the time, Heathers could be seen as a rather clever and black satire on social trends and classism; but now, especially in the wake of the late 90's and most of the 21st century, Heathers has a resonance far beyond perhaps what its creators might have intended. What Heathers was in theory we have seen in practice, time and time again, and yet we still grapple with the level of violence a cynical cult movie from 1989 had the balls to display and still fall short of understanding the answer to a question Heathers asked long ago. What Heathers is about, after all the quirky lines and set pieces, is how morality as an excuse for violence lead to violence on a scale that self-interest alone cannot either inspire nor sustain.
Criminal profilers, as you probably know form watching at least one crime show, have a few basic motivations for murder. Rarely, indeed, does any criminal justify a crime with some lofty moral purpose. Revenge, anger, concealment, monetary gain -- these are often motives that spring from self-interest and are easily enough, if somewhat disturbing, to understand. Even the brutal and senseless slayings of serial murders have absolutely nothing to do with categorical imperatives or the greatest good foe the greatest number. But when morality excuses for the sake of some higher purpose -- even the flimsiest moral excuse and the most horrible murder -- than the limits of self-interest conceal themselves in hypocrisy as the horizons excusable homicides expands, even to the point where morality ceases to operate completely as a justification at all.
Such is the case with JD and Winona Ryder.
Heathers is a movie with a subtle moral flux of justification and increasing incongruity with the killings. JD, whom Nietzsche would call a master moralist, is probably a psychopath. He glorifies in himself, is fully of pride and violence and doesn't rely on any moral justification of his murders. He kills because he wants to. Ryder, on the other hand, is a slave moralist: she sees the oppression that she suffers from her clique both on herself and the unpopular kids as cruel and unjust, and thus defines herself as good in opposition to it.
Ryder is initially drawn to JD because he is a double of Heather, the ruthless bitch that dominates her social life, without realizing that JD has the same personality characteristics only inverted: JD is cruel towards the popular kids, but not, as she eventually learns, necessarily because he is sticking up for the unpopular ones, So she replaces her codependency with Heather onto JD, and after a bad night of partying in which Heather shows her truly inhuman dominance, subliminally allows JD to kill her. From thus follow other murders that JD excuses with a moral sophism she at first falls for and then eventually sees through and stops him, breaking the dialectic of dependence between a psychopath in need of energetic support and a depressive in need of justification to kill her oppressors.
But the really telling moment in Heathers is when Veronica, who seeks to replace Heather as the queen of the school, mocks Martha Dumptruck for attempting suicide, having lost Ryder as an accomplice, JD seeks Veronica to further his now mass-murdering ambitions, knowing that she will agree to a fake petition to get Big Fun to play the dance in order to further her own power. JD cares as little for popularity as he does for morality, but popularity is all that Veronica cares about, and she isn't too squeamish about manipulating Heather's death to achieve that. This is a really dark theme that suggests the bullies and targets of school violence are as complicit and co-dependent on the violators as the people they manipulate to commit mass homicide, and its a shame Heathers didn't develop it further. Because it shows that the people supposedly targeted in school violence will often try to revert the power back onto themselves by claiming that the murders were forced to kill because they were bullied, rather than simply wanting to, because they are better and more cruel bullies themselves.
And so the bullying increases on those suspected of being JDs and Ryders, without however an increase of more violence, but -- more suicides.
It's been a common place since to blame some outside intellectual-cultural influence for an otherwise incomprehensible act, as video games are blamed for school shootings and pornography for toxic masculinity -- whatever in the long run that might turn out to be.
Among other parallels, an untimely prescience is one of the eerie qualities of Heathers that loos backward to Loeb and Leopold and forward to even darker crimes that I scarcely need mention. At the time, Heathers could be seen as a rather clever and black satire on social trends and classism; but now, especially in the wake of the late 90's and most of the 21st century, Heathers has a resonance far beyond perhaps what its creators might have intended. What Heathers was in theory we have seen in practice, time and time again, and yet we still grapple with the level of violence a cynical cult movie from 1989 had the balls to display and still fall short of understanding the answer to a question Heathers asked long ago. What Heathers is about, after all the quirky lines and set pieces, is how morality as an excuse for violence lead to violence on a scale that self-interest alone cannot either inspire nor sustain.
Criminal profilers, as you probably know form watching at least one crime show, have a few basic motivations for murder. Rarely, indeed, does any criminal justify a crime with some lofty moral purpose. Revenge, anger, concealment, monetary gain -- these are often motives that spring from self-interest and are easily enough, if somewhat disturbing, to understand. Even the brutal and senseless slayings of serial murders have absolutely nothing to do with categorical imperatives or the greatest good foe the greatest number. But when morality excuses for the sake of some higher purpose -- even the flimsiest moral excuse and the most horrible murder -- than the limits of self-interest conceal themselves in hypocrisy as the horizons excusable homicides expands, even to the point where morality ceases to operate completely as a justification at all.
Such is the case with JD and Winona Ryder.
Heathers is a movie with a subtle moral flux of justification and increasing incongruity with the killings. JD, whom Nietzsche would call a master moralist, is probably a psychopath. He glorifies in himself, is fully of pride and violence and doesn't rely on any moral justification of his murders. He kills because he wants to. Ryder, on the other hand, is a slave moralist: she sees the oppression that she suffers from her clique both on herself and the unpopular kids as cruel and unjust, and thus defines herself as good in opposition to it.
Ryder is initially drawn to JD because he is a double of Heather, the ruthless bitch that dominates her social life, without realizing that JD has the same personality characteristics only inverted: JD is cruel towards the popular kids, but not, as she eventually learns, necessarily because he is sticking up for the unpopular ones, So she replaces her codependency with Heather onto JD, and after a bad night of partying in which Heather shows her truly inhuman dominance, subliminally allows JD to kill her. From thus follow other murders that JD excuses with a moral sophism she at first falls for and then eventually sees through and stops him, breaking the dialectic of dependence between a psychopath in need of energetic support and a depressive in need of justification to kill her oppressors.
But the really telling moment in Heathers is when Veronica, who seeks to replace Heather as the queen of the school, mocks Martha Dumptruck for attempting suicide, having lost Ryder as an accomplice, JD seeks Veronica to further his now mass-murdering ambitions, knowing that she will agree to a fake petition to get Big Fun to play the dance in order to further her own power. JD cares as little for popularity as he does for morality, but popularity is all that Veronica cares about, and she isn't too squeamish about manipulating Heather's death to achieve that. This is a really dark theme that suggests the bullies and targets of school violence are as complicit and co-dependent on the violators as the people they manipulate to commit mass homicide, and its a shame Heathers didn't develop it further. Because it shows that the people supposedly targeted in school violence will often try to revert the power back onto themselves by claiming that the murders were forced to kill because they were bullied, rather than simply wanting to, because they are better and more cruel bullies themselves.
And so the bullying increases on those suspected of being JDs and Ryders, without however an increase of more violence, but -- more suicides.