Heathers

Heathers - Mean Girls meets Girl Interrupted.

Ingredients:

3 popular bitchy girls (with varying degrees of dominance...hey make it easier and call them all the same name)

1 popular yet less bitchy girl (be sure to make her name different to prevent confusion)

1 sociopath male outcast (add a sob story to ensure a sympathetic taste)

5-10 handfuls of sex, violence and guns

3 tbs of suicide

Mix and enjoy!

Branding
Branding within Heathers is clearly identifiable. Jocks are found only in their letter jackets (with the exceptions of attending funerals and fornicating), nerds are dressed in collared shirts, hiked-up pants, their glasses attached to strings, spewing out milk at the sight of popularity, the delinquent is dressed in black, carries a gun, rides a motorcycle, sits in the back corner of the cafeteria, and the popular girls are dressed in various colours of identical outfits. The queen bee is clearly identified through a red hair tie representing a metaphorical crown.

Social Acceptability
Not only is the film creating an almost humorous tone of teen suicide with reference to the hit song "Teen suicide, don't do it" but it also demonstrates a disgusting view of "heteronormativity". Apparently, a girl is supposed to stand idly by while her friend is being raped, or is 'ruining everything' if she won't put out for an obvious creep (who looks like he is a forty-year-old-virgin who has failed high school multiple times), or gives in to male urges despite her own reservations. The one female character that stands up for herself sleeps with a sociopath and becomes so desensitized to death and violence that she lights a cigarette off of a dynamited corpse. This is...normal?

Relationships
The relationship between Veronica and her parents represents the idea of 'The Grooves'. Her parents represent the straight and narrow/ career and materialist groove. Initially, Veronica was veering slightly off the groove by not wanting popularity, and she eventually drove right off when she met JD. JD represents the groove of teenage narcissism, believing that his life is already over and meaningless. By the end of the film, Veronica is able to find a happy medium between these two grooves, thus allowing her to be the representation of a 'Meta-Code'.

(I just thought this picture was hilarious)