thought..
‘Heathers’ serves as a potentially interesting modernizatation of Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet, not in any dialogue or even characterization or plot, but in the theme of two children falling fast and hard in love with each other and how that end disastrously, and lethally for many, because of the larger societal surrounding them. In Romeo and Juliet, their families were in a long-standing feud against each other. This would not work in any modern tellings because modern teenagers simply don’t have the same concerns for upholding their family’s legacy or carrying on feuds over generations. Instead, Veronica and JD are caught in both more personal and more broad barriers; their mental and familial troubles, and the social structure around them (the school system in particular) that prevents them from breaking the cycle. Veronica and JD’s relationship becomes what they hope to be a reprieve from their awful world, just as Romeo and Juliet see each other in secret in spite of their families’ feud, but in doing so they cause the precarious status quo to fall apart. However, even though the characters could be seen at fault for others’ (and their own) deaths, they are not presented as the villains ((though this point is definitely more dubious in JD’s case)). It is understood that, whatever actions these characters took, these children took, it was as a result of situations built from others. The characters made decisions in a given environment that didn’t fit, and because of that, the underlying problems of the environment escalated their situation (Romeo and Juliet in defying their parents and all they stood for, and Veronica and JD defying their school’s will to make outcasts miserable).
“Here’s a school that failed not because society doesn’t care, but because that school was society” indeed
