33. School &...

Lyrics

I can see you in the morning when you go to school
Don't forget your books, you know you've got to learn the golden rule,
Teacher tells you stop your play and get on with your work
And be like Johnnie - too-good, well don't you know he never shirks
- he's coming along!

After School is over you're playing in the park
Don't be out too late, don't let it get too dark
They tell you not to hang around and learn what life's about
And grow up just like them - won't you let it work it out
- and you're full of doubt

Don't do this and don't do that
What are they trying to do?- Make a good boy of you
Do they know where it's at?
Don't criticize, they're old and wise
Do as they tell you to
Don't want the devil to
Come out and put your eyes

Maybe I'm mistaken expecting you to fight
Or maybe I'm just crazy, I don't know wrong from right
But while I am still living, I've just got this to say
It's always up to you if you want to be that
Want to see that
Want to see that way
- you're coming along!


The studio version of Supertramp's School cannot be found on YouTube. It can be heard on this site though: http://mp3skull.com/mp3/school.html. While School is the most popular Supertramp song among the Dutch, I cannot remember ever hearing it before now. This despite the fact that I quite like Supertramp, especially Breakfast in America and The Logical Song. After hearing School, those previous two are still my favorite Supertramp songs. School is quite weird though. It feels like a mix of what I expect from Supertramp and some poor version of Pink Floyd. The lyrics are also pretty interesting. There are many songs (and books and movies), which criticize a school for being old-fashioned or too collectivist. But most of them imply that the particular school could change for the better. This song on the other hand seems to imply that the whole institution called 'school' is bad. That there simply cannot be a good school. So the movie I chose to link it too is a movie I knew not much about, only that it was a pretty insane 80's comedy that looked very irreverently at a high school. I expected it to be a funny, very raunchy comedy. It turned out to be so much more.

The Movie: Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1988)

I haven't often been so pleasantly surprised by a movie as I was by Heathers. This is not only an incredibly funny film, full of great dialogues and great scenes. It is also quite wonderfull stylistically and has a truly great performance by Winona Ryder. But what I liked most is that this is quite a vicious satire. And it actually satirizes two things at once, both eqully brilliant and succesfull. It not only satirizes high school life, but also our media's (and culture's) tendency to sensationalize death and destruction. And the satire is really vicious. I mentioned that the movie is funny, but the humor is some of the darkest I've ever seen in an American mainstream movie. I am now also quite fascinated by the director Michael Lehmann. I've seen two movies of him now, Heathers and Hudson Hawk. In both of these movies he is doing Tarantinian things, before Tarantino. Both of these movies were ahead of their time. By sheer coincidence I saw Heathers just a couple of days after the horrible shooting in the primary school in Newtown, Connecticut. It really felt like Heathers could just as easily have come out in 2012 without changing much. At one point a character is even encouraged to tweet(that's the exact wording!) her frustrations.

Heathers is brilliant from the opening shots. It starts like some David Lynch movie. On the soundtrack we hear a slightly odd version of Que Sera Sera. We see three perfectly groomed young women play a game of croquet in a perfectly cultivated garden of an obviously wealthy family. All these three women call each other Heather. First we think that it is some sort of a weird cult they are in. It turns out that they simply really all are called Heather. During this game of croquet we see them at point hit Veronica's (Winona Ryder) head with a croquet ball. This wouldn't be very weird if it wasn't for the fact that Veronica has her body underground, with only her head sticking out. This makes it seem like this is a dream sequence. But it is never presented that way. After this scene, the movie simply goes on without acknowledging the weirdness of the scene. Besides there is a dream sequence later on in the movie. And in that case it is explicitly made clear that it is a dream sequence.

These Heathers and Veronica are the most popular girls at high school. This fact is acknowledged and respected by everyone at their high school, even though no one seems to really like them. Being popular as Veronica says is their job. One of the funniest things in this movie is how everybody in this high school seems to have a role assigned to them that they have to play. Now, most movies set in a high school/college have geeks, tough guys, popular girls, fat kids, etc. But I have rarely seen a movie in which these roles are made so explicit. And in which everyone behaves so much as if the role they play is completely natural and unchangeable. The high school in Heathers seems to have a natural hierarchy that can olny be changed by doing something radical. All of this is made clear near the beginning of the movie in one wonderful and funny scene in the school cafetaria. Everybody working on the film is on the top of his/her game in this scene.

Veronica is tired of her job as the popular girl and is afraid that the only way to quit it is to kill the leading Heather (yes, there even is a hierarchy among the popular girls). She befriends (and more) J.D. (Christian Slater, who tries to imitate Jack Nicholson, but is ufortunately completey outacted by Winona Ryder). J.D. is a complete outsider at the high school, because he seems, at first, to be the only normal three-dimensional person in the high school. But he doesn't have a role, which makes him a threat and an outlier. In his first appearance, in the cafetaria scene, he is threathened by two senior football jocks. Before threathening him though, they first discuss what they should do as senior football jocks. The very much want to beat the shit out of him, but they can't do that because they are too old. Their current role only allows them to scare him. This doesn't end up well for them, as J.D. shoots blank bullets at them. He is suspended for a week, but Veronica is smitten. So she teams up with J.D. to do some small harm to Heather. J.D. has bigger plans though. So he cons Heather into drinking cleaning chemicals and she dies. From here on the movie becomes really great.

Veronica and J.D. are shocked by Heather's death, though they are more shocked because of the consequences her death might have for them. So they make it look as if it is a suicide, complete with a suicide note in which Heather claims to have a 'myriad of problems.' The use of the word myriad here provides one of the best jokes in the film. Another great joke in the film is the use of mineral water as a connotation for homosexuality. That's how J.D. and Veronica make their second murder in the movie look like a suicide. They now kill the two senior jocks who previously tried to humiliate J.D. Though the reason they are killed is because they were annoying Veronica. While all these scenes are pretty funny, the movie is really great because it is not really about J.D. and Veronica doing bad things and trying to get away with them. Though it is quite successful in doing that too. When they are nearly caught after killing the two jocks, the movie manages to achieve quite some suspense, because we are actually rooting for J.D. and Veronica to get away. But to get back at what I was saying, the movie is really great because it uses this murders/ 'suicides' to viciously satirize the tendency in our media and culture to sensationalize tragedies, for all kinds of reasons.

 While J.D. and Veronica go to pretty great lengths to make their murders seem like suicides, they really don't have to. As J.D. says 'Society nods its head at any horror the American teenager can think upon itself. Nobody is going to care about exact handwriting."  In the film, everyone's reaction to the deaths of the teens serves only to achieve personal gain. The media are very eager to interview crying teens. Emotion sells. Most teens crying for their dead  'friends' here only do so to show that they were mingling with the popular crowd and that they are really decent, caring people. For the hippie teacher these deaths are a good opportunity to sell her ideals to the school and the rest of the world. 'Eskimo' a word J.D has randomly underlined in the Moby Dick copy of one of his victims, is being used by the priest to explain the (mental) state of the dead teen and the world as a whole. Hereby of course sounding very intelligent and powerful. And the editor of the high school newspaper sees the suicides as a great opportunity to make his newspaper popular. He is quite elated that not only did Heather commit suicide, but she committed it during a time that the song 'Teenage Suicide, Don't Do It, is a hit on the radio, making his story even more relevant. A story on food shortage in Africa will have to go for his story on Heather. In the process the dead teens are glorified. Even though no one really liked them alive, as Veronica writes in her diary, their 'suicides' have given them a heart, a brain and depth. And this is dangerous, because it may lead to truly troubled teens committing suicides. In the most daring and somehow darkly funny sequence, the only decent person in the movie, a really fat girl without friends who is being bullied by everyone tries to commit suicide, by walking on the road hoping to get hit by a car. The suicide fails (apparently, we don't see this) because she is too fat and the car didn't have to much power to run her over. It is a testament to the greatness of the movie that this works as a joke and not as a very tastefulness scene. After hearing about this the teens come together excitedly to inform each other what happened. And afterwards nothing really happens. The fat girl is completely forgotten. Everyone is too busy paying attention to the dead people. That is the easiest way to show that we are deeply caring good people.

Lastly, I was looking at what other movies came out in 1988 and it turns out that was a great year for comedy. Besides Heathers, Coming to America, The Naked Gun, Bull Durham, Midnight Run and A Fish Called Wanda (probably my favorite comedy) were released.