Heathers, The Hobbit and Other Things Allegedly for Children

Warnings: mild spoilers, and Heathers is a dark ride in general, though I don’t get too graphic.

I read The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien! I really thought it would be too serious and nerdy for me, hence the wait until I was 47 to read this sweet lil children’s fantasy adventure but—it’s a sweet lil children’s fantasy adventure and I liked it pretty well. Tolkien has a pretty good sense of humour—surprise!—although some bits are a bit too dark for my liking (two separate sets of ponies get eaten at two different points in the book, and one major character dies). I really liked the opening chapters best—so funny, interesting, and exciting. The middle lags a bit, in my opinion—oh no, goblins, then oh no wolves, then oh no spiders, then oh no elves. Not a lot of differentiation in the adventure. Also, there weren’t any women in this book. Like, it wasn’t that they had small roles or secondary roles, or didn’t get to do anything cool—there were NONE. At the very end, one was mentioned as existing in passing, so it’s not a world with females, but they just don’t come up ever. Very strange.

A lot of children’s literature has an underlying theme that, as an adult, annoys me slightly—that one person, one kid, or one hobbit, is the most special and the best, and can do and see and understand everything while everyone else is just duncing along, missing all the clues and getting into trouble and not being special or interesting at all. I find that in the better of these types of novels the special one at least learns to do special things by trying hard and teaching themselves or overcoming obstacles, and in my least faves the special traits are just inborn by right of a certain class or genetic trait (f-ing Harry Potter) because what is that supposed to teach us/the children? Anyway, the Hobbit is sort of a hybrid, because basically Bilbo Baggins is able to do a lot of things because he is a hobbit, full stop, and everyone else on the quest is a dumb dwarf, which is not much of an arc. But Bilbo does learn a few things about himself and become a bit braver and more selfless, after a fashion, and I guess that’s what we have to work with. It’s not bad, but I did grow tired of 13 dwarves proceeding on a quest they were utterly ill-equipped for, and continually needing rescue by one tiny hobbit. Imagine if someone tried to run a company that way, with Gandalf as CEO? Anyway, it may be evident that I don’t have kids and am not the right demographic to be reading this but anyway, I didn’t actually mind it, as long as I didn’t analyze too much, which I am in danger of doing right now so I will stop.

The other major cultural product I consumed this week is the 1988 film Heathers. What I was actually trying to do is see if the film stands up from when I first watched it as a tween/early teen, and loved it—back then, I thought it was so very dark and daring. But in an effort to make this post have a theme other than “things that start with H” I could also analyze it from the point of view of is there actual character development of the young protagonist as she rises above the fray in Heathers? Or is she just the Most Special One from the start?

Heathers is about a high-school clique of very mean popular girls—Heather, Heather, Heather, and Veronica—and how they are overthrown by violence when a cute boy comes to town and starts to date Veronica, who is played by Winona Ryder and is the protagonist. Winona R is one of my most favourite celebrities of all time—I watched Stranger Things for her (every season!), even though it was disgusting, and I would be happy to watch her in almost anything at all. She’s absolutely perfect in Heathers, the darkest of dark comedies. She’s the weird member of a bitchy terrible group of mean girls—it’s unclear how she became so popular and doesn’t entirely make sense—until JD (Christian Slater, a perfect 1980s cast) comes to town and they fall for each other. And then when Veronica jokingly wishes the head Heather dead, JD makes it happen and makes it look like a suicide, kicking off a string of murders set up the same way.

Told you it was dark.

I figured I would not like the movie anymore, since it is about the murder of people who are no longer my peers but literal children, at a developmental phase when many people behave badly and then get over it unless someone makes them dead they are unable to proceed to another better developmental phase. As it turned out, and maybe this reflects badly on me, I still really liked it. The characters were all so hyperbolic, and clearly played by adults, that I could never quite viscerally get the gut-punches of their on-screen deaths, though I really tried.

What about Veronica’s development as a character? Welll… She starts out sarcastic and witty and pretentious, but also weak, without the courage of her convictions—she doesn’t like the Heathers but she goes along with whatever they want, mocking the less-cool kids, playing croquet, going to obnoxious parties. Then she moves from being under the Heathers’ thrall to being under JD’s—she doesn’t really want to kill people but she’s in love with JD so she doesn’t do anything to save anybody, and believes his very transparent lies—and then she finally finally breaks free from everyone and does her own thing at the very end. It’s satisfying but very quick—she goes from a complicit murderer to a saviour so briskly that her character arc is nearly a vertical line. But she was kind of always half in half out withe badness so it sort of makes sense.

I wonder if I want too much from my character development. What inspired me to go back to the film version of Heathers was coming across the musical soundtrack, which came out in 2014. In 2014, Veronica was rewritten to be much nicer and stronger from the start—always kind to the nerds, not promiscuous, and most notably, not a murderer nor even violent. I haven’t seen the musical, just listened to the soundtrack and read about it, but doesn’t sound like a dark comedy to me. It’s not like I WANT my protagonists to be bad, but hobbits and teenage girls have to LEARN something along life’s journey, you know? Even if it’s that murder isn’t the answer. Otherwise the character arc is just…a dot?

I don’t know. It is one billion degrees in here, and the cats kept me up most of the night. What is the shape of your ideal character arc? Also, did you ever notice that Veronica’s character, when she writes in her diary, wears a monocle? I feel not enough is made of that!