Heathers and Mental Health Part 3: The Tiniest Lifeboat

Part 1
Part 2

            There is one more interesting fact however about Heather McNamara that is worth considering in relation to her mental health. Heather wears yellow, the color of sunshine and happiness.  This reflects her personality well as she is the head cheerleader which implies provoking cheer.  She generally has a positive personality, and in the movie was the only person who seemed sad when Heather Chandler died.  However, yellow is also the color of fear and caution.  That ironically also makes it the perfect color for her depression and lack of will.

            Heather would suffer from what could be called “Smiling Depression.”  Often, people who struggle with mental problems or even just unhappiness will try to mask it with different emotions.  The hope is to either become those emotions or just hide them in the hope of being seen as normal.  Often though, this can feel like who we project ourselves as is a lie because we are not what we try to present and that only furthers us down a self-loathing path because we cannot be what we want to be.  So for Heather that just leads to furthering her own dissatisfaction and even makes her feel unworthy to be head cheerleader.

            Masks are a common theme throughout both versions of Heathers.  Heather Duke is actually a bulimic yes-girl with no personality, but after she becomes queen bee she tries to emulate Heather Chandler (to the point of wearing Chandler’s signature color red in the film) to pretend she has Chandler’s strong will.  However, she still gets slapped around by JD and then Veronica when she’s finally dethroned. JD meanwhile presents himself as an aloof, emotionless bad boy, but that’s just to hide that he secretly hates himself and feels like nobody cares about him, including his parents. Finally, Veronica tries to present herself as the popular girl, a member of the most important clique in school, but in reality she’s just an average girl who just doesn’t want to be picked on. In the end, all these mindsets just end with the character denying their own pain and distancing themselves from who they are.

            The truth is that happiness comes from withinand an acceptance of who we are.  Sure, as previously stated, it is a mistake to wear your emotions on your sleeve.  However, the truth is constantly denying your emotions only causes them to bottle up. The more one tries to be someone else, the less they will be able to live with their selves.  Inevitably, it will only hurt more.

            So those are three key mental health themes Heathers discusses throughout its story.  There is the apathetic approach, the coddling approach, and the masking approach.  All three of them only lead to more misery. There is of course much more to talk about such as JD’s utilitarian approach to societal reorganization and the significance of Heather Duke’s color green, but those will have to wait for potential future blogposts as this has gone on for long enough.

Part 4