The television reboot of Heathers opens with a guidance counselor asking the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Veronica whether or not she is “a hermaphrodite”—the implication being that even though she has a 4.2 GPA and a high SAT score, Veronica needs some sort of marginalized identity to get accepted anywhere other than her safety school....I added the link for watching it free, but do you want to watch it? I'm kind of interested in the turnabout, if it could be done with real intelligence and sharp writing. And I love the original movie. I watched it many times... before Columbine. Once outsider kids killing their schoolmates started happening in real life, the satire lost its fun and its edge. Who wants to laugh at schoolkids killing schoolkids now? Fortunately, I can still enjoy "Dr. Strangelove."
If you believe that kids these days are fragile “snowflakes,” that political correctness is running amok, and that LGBT people are now society’s true bullies, this new Heathers is the show for you. The premiere of the rebooted cult classic, now airing for free online, takes place in a universe—clearly a fictional one—where the football team is oppressed and yesteryear’s fat, queer, and black victims now rule the school with manicured fists. The show feels like it was written for aging Fox News viewers who get angry about people’s gender pronouns—which is odd because it’s clearly being marketed to a young and therefore progressive-leaning audience who may not remember the 1988 original.....
The new Heathers is for people who want to see a heteronormative status quo restored before it has even been meaningfully disrupted. (“You know, what if the next truly revolutionary thing was just to be totally normal?” Veronica asks.)
February 23, 2018
"The New ‘Heathers’ Is a Trumpian, LGBT-Bashing Nightmare."
Samantha Allen at The Daily Beast reviews the new TV show based on the great 80s movie about high school outsiders who murder the mean popular kids.
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Samantha Allen at The Daily Beast reviews the new TV show based on the great 80s movie about high school outsiders who murder the mean popular kids. [my emphasis]
I don't know anything about the 'great' 1980's movie but it would seem to be a bad theme to emulate, under the circumstances.
But then, it's bait.
You can't get buzz without bucking the trend.
Normal is the new transgressive.
Clearly fictional, so like campy?
The Left is apparently still unaware that they are the oppressive, reactionary Establishment.
"Once outsider kids killing their schoolmates started happening in real life, the satire lost its fun and its edge."
This is the sort of "everyone knows it" assumption that I love to pick apart.
Is it really true that "outsider kids killing their schoolmates" is something new -- something novel that started with Columbine?
Or is it rather that the way the media *covered* these events changed.
Well after a review like that, maybe the show needs to be watched. If she sees it as written for “aging Fox News viewers who get angry about people’s gender pronouns” then it may just get a huge following from 50 percent of the country (you know, the irredeemable deplorables).
Sounds like she’s all butt hurt over someone remaking a movie with a new culturally current edgy twist.
Usually those things lean the other way (left) and try to take a classic and add an edgy “new normal” lefty slant. They usually suck. Sounds like this goes the other way and may lean right (or non pc at least - I guess that’s more to the right?). Then again, it’ll probably suck too.
I wonder if she has any idea how insufferable her smarmy “I’m better than all you little fuckers” attitude is? Maybe that’s just the way they write in the bubble, and all clap along and nod their heads.
Trump bashes gays? I hadn't noticed that. The leftmediaswine are so perceptive they see things that aren't there.
Somebody financed this in a town that recoils from any un-PC stance. Now that's the story I want to read. What business model decided this is a good investment and who had the chutzpah to fund the project?
Oh, sorry (8:58) should have read: "Trump bashes LGBTs?"
"...which is odd because it’s clearly being marketed to a young and therefore progressive-leaning audience..."
Isn't this sort of what the legal profession calls facts not in evidence?
"which is odd because it’s clearly being marketed to a young and therefore progressive-leaning audience who may not remember the 1988 original....."
So young = progressive-leaning.
Nikolas Cruz = young.
Young Nikolas Cruz = progressive?
This is Social Mathematics, so: no need to show my work.
The Germans have a word for this.
"which is odd because it’s clearly being marketed to a young and therefore progressive-leaning audience..."
Maybe there are a lot of young people who are tired of identity-politics bullies and feel disrespected because they're only "normal" (plain vanilla) and just trying to be good students, at home where they can watch a TV show and feeling left out.
We don't know much about the generation after the millennials.
And there are always people who are secretly anti-LGBT (or just tired of them and keeping quiet about that un-PC feeling) who might enjoy seeing this kind of fun-making. That it's frowned upon by the elite opinion-leaders could gives it a transgressive frisson.
I remember how much people enjoyed Archie Bunker in the 1970s. Of course, the show's producers officially deplored him, but there was always the retro-transgression they feared: people liked Archie and cheered him on.
Never watched the original or the new, and have no interest. But from reading the article I suspect the "intentional inversion" would have one key difference. Whereas the old Heathers used social position to bully, the "new Heathers" are manipulating the power of the state to bully. Although not mentioned in the article, who would surprised to find that its the teachers and school administrators too who have to keep their heads down in the new environment?
The new Heathers is for people who think that “identity politics” is the most pressing problem in American schools today—not, say, bullying or gun violence. (“Everybody’s gotta be something,” Veronica complains, early in the premiere.)
Rebooting a story with a new power dynamic doesn't necessarily mean it's "the most pressing problem."
And wouldn't it be creators/fans of either incarnation of the evidently snuff-themed movie/show who would be downplaying the problems of bullying or gun violence? Both versions sound ghoulish. But only the new one un-PC?
What's your damage, Samantha?
Not sure how they could convert the original to an episodic format. The essence of the original is the fall into the destructive behavior and really how in the end it destroyed. Christian Slater explicitly. But the Winona Ryder character is not going to have a really successful life. Without that ending, it just becomes a normal bad high school movie with bullies and bullied. Just looks like someone changed the bullies and the bullied around thinking it makes it "edgy".
"Maybe there are a lot of young people who are tired of identity-politics bullies and feel disrespected because they're only "normal" (plain vanilla) and just trying to be good students"
There seems to be a lot of people who feel that way in society at large, thus Trump. It's probably much worse for students in schools these days than for adults. Adults have much more control over where they spend their days, who they have to associate with and who has authority over them.
You can see ep 1 for free here:
http://www.paramountnetwork.com/episodes/cwmbrm/heathers-pilot-season-1-ep-1
It's not bad. Kind of raunchy.
"Maybe there are a lot of young people who are tired of identity-politics bullies and feel disrespected because they're only "normal" (plain vanilla) and just trying to be good students, at home where they can watch a TV show and feeling left out."
You certainly don't need to be young to to be tired of identity-politics bullies. Nor to feel disrespected for being vanilla. But at some point in my life, feeling "left out" ceased to be unpleasant and instead became an intense relief.
Bob Boyd said...
"It's probably much worse for students in schools these days than for adults."
Yes, being required by law to get up early each morning and go to a place where people larger and stronger than you are allowed to beat you, mock you and generally abuse you while the people in charge pretend they don't notice is a decidedly unpleasant experience. I certainly recall wanting to kill several of my fellow students when I was in school. And I think it was a lot better then. I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often.
I almost got sucked into arguing about this stuff, and then I remembered.
These media contrived controversies have no actual resonance in my life.
There is no identity politics kerfuffle going on among people in my family, although there are gays in my family. Nobody cares or talks about about “gender roles.”
This stuff used to have some concrete existence in my life, but that was because I worked in media in NYC and media was dominated by people who wanted to yak about this stuff and inject it into advertising and corporate politics.
Now that I’m retired, I have to make an effort to go find these controversies, otherwise they don’t exist in my life.
Thank you for the Dr. Strangelove clip. What a great movie. “Animals can be bred and slaughtered.”
Heathers is a great movie... I have said for years that TV shows with a conservative i.e. normal, bent would be successful. Ideology even trumps cash in Hollywood. I'll check out the premiere of the new show.
Its significant in public shools, no question, but the nature varies among the schools. For the usual CA school the effect of PC is fairly indirect. Note that here the ethnic factors are far more significant than anything else. There are hardly any white-majority schools in California.
The most significant official effect is on the level of instruction (low), the material used (poor), and the messaging - that is, one opposed to integration.
But as usual it is the unofficial social situation that matters to children.
Socially, white children in a very mixed school are in a peculiar position. The "best" of them, the handsome, the athletic, and the well rounded achievers - are if anything in the best of all worlds, it seems to me, unofficially the most socially desirable though unapproachable, on the part of the rest. A (small) caste most definitely "above".
There is a very large ethnic factor, including a large degree of social separation, of parallel structures. There is a great deal of envy of course, and no little aspiration.
The not-so-blessed of the white kids are as usual invisible, and ignored. There is a great deal of white-Asian integration on this level, even socially. The "nerds" definitely exist, in places anyway, and where it exists it is an integrated white-Asian fraternity.
The kid with a high SAT score, in any given school, would be fairly rare, unless there is a substantial Asian population.
I have never heard of a high school counselor suggesting that sexual oddities had a leg up in college admissions.
This is the picture I got over the last @15 years, though my last direct impressions are @5 years old.
Why is it "Trumpian"? Trump doesn't care about where you shove or what you shove into your own genitalia.
Brandon Fraser looks like he's put on some weight.
"...aging Fox News viewers..." As if the viewers at the major networks aren't aging? Entropy has us all.
DougWeber: Not sure how they could convert the original to an episodic format.
It depends what you mean by "episodic." If you mean something like, say, Star Trek or M.A.S.H. where each day is a random adventure and the show keeps running open-ended, then Heathers is probably a poor choice for that format. However, if it is a heavily scripted show where a single plot is followed for an entire season, then that could work. You can have single episodes to delve into various topics, while keeping the plot moving along as a coherent and, more importantly, believable narrative. High school students murdering their classmates for 5 years gets beyond the suspension of disbelief, but you could certainly do 13 episodes to cover a month long period.
Of course, making a season 2 would be a challenge, but given this appears to be a very dark comedy that's less of a problem. And what is a better oppressed minority than the survivor of a massacre of her class, or, better yet, the murderer of her entire class? There are not a lot of those going around. Heathers: The College Years is plausible.
I've been watching the pilot. It's actually pretty funny.
After realizing she has just sort of accidentally murdered a class mate, Veronica says,
"Oh my God. I'm going to be experimenting with lesbianism at San Quentin instead of Sarah Lawrence."
Some British cop shows stretch a single case over 6-8 episodes. Requires binge watching to keep track of what's happened. Hinterland managed to tie multiple seemingly-separate murders together with lots of angst and tears.
I'm not even tempted to click n it. If ever there was a bad time to debut a show featuring high school assassins, this is it........I did watch one episode of Riverdale though. This is based on the Archie comic. Holy shit. Miss Grundy sleeps with one of her students. Archie is the qb of the football team, but really wants to develop his talents in music. Jughead is an existential nihilist. Veronica and Betty share a lesbo kiss. Moose is tormented by his gay yearnings. That was in the first episode, The show is a hit.
"Samantha Allen is a senior reporter for The Daily Beast. She holds a Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University. In 2013, she received the John Money Fellowship for Scholars of Sexology from the Kinsey Institute. Previously, she was a Sex + Life reporter for Fusion."
Lol.
I laughed, but then I looked up Emory's WGSS program, found that their "PhD is one of the top ranked WGSS graduate programs in the US", and looked around their site a bit.
The I laughed even harder.
"You can't say that!" But, maybe you can "say that"?
Well maybe you can, but you shouldn't!" But, how will you ever know whether you can "say that" unless you actually do "say that"?
Trump is not politically congruent. People on the transgender spectrum are equal, not "=", and their relationships deserve no more normalization than any other loving but unproductive cooperative. The anti-LGBT-whatever are the "No Labels" class who demand relationships be assigned government labels, too many labels, which are notably Pro-Choice or selectively exclusive.
Samantha Allen is a senior reporter for The Daily Beast... Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Predictably Pro-Choice and prideful.
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