My overall take on this film was I felt like I’ve already seen it a million times, even though this is the first time I’ve watched it. There are so many recent films similar to it: they are all set in high school with the types of people that we know, and with cliques that follow a specific hierarchy. Someone mentioned the comparison of Heathers and Mean Girls, and even though I actively hate Mean Girls I cannot get the comparison out of my mind. Where you are on the class scale is the most important part of your high school career, nothing else matters except doing whatever you can to be as close to the top of the hierarchy as possible. And I think that part of that is what makes Heathers post-modern. Nothing in the rest of society (in other words concepts of significance that really should matter) is talked about or has any value.
What is interesting about Heathers though is that it uses a significant matter to exemplify or even reinforce the hierarchy of the school. Committing suicide becomes something that the cool kids do. After Martha tries to kill herself and fails, she is only seen as just example of another loser trying to be like the in-crowd. It doesn’t matter anymore if she was trying to fit in or if she would have killed herself regardless just because of the meaning that the other “suicides” brought to the act. Heathers takes the meaning of suicide completely out of context.