Profiles in Ontological Rebellion: The Presence of Moby-Dick in Heathers

Profiles in Ontological Rebellion: The Presence of Moby-Dick in Heathers RANDY LAIST University of Connecticut I t is common internet knowledge that Daniel Waters, screenwriter for the indie cult classic Heathers (1989),1 about a disaffected high school girl whose ennui gradually evolves into mass murder, had originally intended to use Catcher in the Rye as the principal literary motif in the movie, but could not because of the famous copyright taboos that envelope J. D. Salinger’s writings. Thus thwarted, he turned to that other omnipresent article of the high school object-scape, Moby-Dick. However, nothing about this choice seems arbitrary or unfortunate. It is difficult to imagine Holden Caulfield’s voice poking into Heathers. Holden’s rhetoric is too personal, too humanly resonant and vulnerable, to reflect the operatic, archetypal cartoonishness crammed into this movie. Holden’s voice in Heathers would emit an aura of real worldliness and an echo of real shootings that would unbalance the knife-edge tone of rampant zaniness that the movie achieves. But Moby-Dick is perfect. On the one hand, Melville’s world is full the same blend of strutting satirical types, rhetorical indulgence, manic pathos, cryptic wisdom, and panoramic inclusiveness that characterizes the movie. And on a second hand there is Moby-Dick’s status, even and perhaps especially for those who have never read it and never will, as the Archetypal American Novel. The namedropping, in collusion with the allegorical fairy-tale sheen of the filmmaking, elevates the plane of discourse the movie engages. Furthermore, Heathers goes backwards and rewrites Moby-Dick as a rock video, a zany jaunt into the heartland of the American apocalyptic wet dream. Conversely, something of Melville’s profound moral vision trickles into Heathers, complicating its conventional Hollywood ending. Heathers is a black satire of John Hughes-style high school movies which de-sentimentalizes the cliché of “teen angst bullshit.” Veronica Sawyer is the fourth member of a coven of merciless bitches (the rest of them all named Heather) who tyrannize their school’s loose assortment of nerds, jocks, stoners, C  2009 The Authors Journal compilation C  2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Heathers, dir. Michael Lehmann, perf. Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, and Shannen Doherty, New World Pictures, 1989. 72 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S M O B Y - D I C K I N H E A T H E R S dorks, preppies, and wannabes through a mixture of sexuality, loser-baiting, and an unflappable indifference to fairness or compassion that is straight out of the Reagan 1980’s. But Veronica is a only a reluctant fascist; and she lets herself be seduced away from her clique by the cartoonishly cool outsider JD, played by Christian Slater as a sixteen-year-old Jack Nicholson, who institutes another kind of reign of terror by murdering the popular kids and disguising their deaths as suicides. JD’s new kind of justice grows in scope and pathology until it reaches its final form; JD will blow up the whole school and make it look like a unanimous suicide pact on the part of the entire student body. In the original draft of the screenplay, he succeeds, whereas in the final cut, his plan is thwarted, by Veronica specifically but also, more fundamentally, by Hollywood conservatism. The floating presence of Moby-Dick references throughout the movie goes unexplained, as if the significance of this text to the movie’s narrative were totally self-evident. A character is reading Moby-Dick in one of the first shots of the movie. JD quotes at length from and makes several references to Melville’s novel. The book itself, “suggestively underlined,” is employed as a prop to make a suicide look authentic. Taken together these references invite us to read Westerburg High as a contemporary Pequod, a community whose fate will be determined by the character of its social climate, and the “lunchtime poll” sequence fulfills the similar atmospheric function of introducing a catalogue of social types...