Sunday, August 17, 2003 I did have a brain tumor for breakfast!
I actually haven't eaten yet, but last night the mate watched Heathers for the first time. It was kind of painful for me to be in the same room, because I saw that movie so many times when I was a kid, and at the time I thought it was like, the coolest thing on earth.
I don't think it was healthy for me to be exposed to it so young. I was absolutely disdainful of the rich, shallow popular kids long before I ever met any in person. I don't think I missed much, but I think the movie contributed in a big way to my generally bad attitude and mood throughout my school career, which was only six years long, pre-college, because I'd been homeschooled. That turns kids weird and self-involved enough. I perhaps did not need pre-conditioning to be a nutsy loner.
Winona Ryder, when I come to think of it, probably did more to turn me weird than any other one person. I probably wouldn't have tried to cut my bangs into points in 10th grade if it wasn't her. It wasn't even her in Pump up the Volume, but it might as well have been, and it also starred her accomplice in child-warping, Christian Slayter. If wearing black and being moody were wrong, I didn't want to be right. Movies had taught me all I needed to know by the time I got to highschool. There were three subsets of kids: the pencil-necked pocket protector wearing nerds, the shallow and mean popular kids (which included jocks), and those noble creatures, the cats who walked alone, and sat alone at lunch, and wore too many dark colors regardless of whether it flattered their complections.
I'm not saying I wouldn't have gone that route anyway, or that I wish I had been cooler in those long-ago days. They're kind of a blur now, and I've forgotten most of the fairly mild, fairly run of the mill bad stuff long ago, with mainly the good memories remaining.
Still, I probably could have saved myself about a hundred hours of listening to moody dork boys rattle on about their knife collections and moody dork girls compare self-injury scars (you see the symbiosis in action here, I trust?) if I'd decided to walk in the sun just a little bit.
Heathers is and was a fine movie. Even after having seen it well past the point where I could enjoy it, I found myself anticipating my favorite lines, noticing little in-jokes I hadn't before, and still envying Winona Ryder's mastery of the wide-eyed look. Still, it makes sense to get a chance to feel the unadulatered bullshit of the object of the satire by going through it a little bit before eating the satire up with a spoon. posted by Frenz | 8/17/2003 10:33:00 AM
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