Things Could Be Beautiful: Christian Themes and Heathers The Musical

What is Christian media? Is there a Bible verse quota or “Jesus is the Answer” counter? Some Christians will disagree, but I propose a case study of how music and story need not mention the Bible to be Christian: the pop Broadway production Heathers The Musical; a dark high school comedy with a soundtrack rife with drugs, sex, and rock and roll. Though its edgy comedy isn't the work of a nun, I argue that its examination of what it means to live in a broken world is remarkably Christian. Heathers is a good reminder to Christians that it is easy to say, “Jesus is the Answer” while not addressing: an answer to what exactly? Heathers never turns to the audience and declares that Jesus is the answer. But it certainly does ask some of the questions He answers. After all, a Redeemer is worthless unless something needs redemption. Heathers the Musical, albeit by means of gratuitous sex, murder, and high school drama, reveals that a sense of justice in a broken world is a formational Christian principle leading to Christ.

Based on the 1989 dark comedy film of the same name, Heathers focuses on social nobody Veronica Sawyer, who, along with everyone else lives under the heel of the high school elite, particularly the designated “demon queens of high school:” Heather McNamara, Heather Duke, and especially Heather Chandler. Veronica, along with her bullied friend Martha, just wants to survive her senior year of Westerberg High. That is until she finds herself in the good graces of the Heathers and becomes a partner in crime (literally) with vagabond JD. Veronica’s journey from zero to hero and back is told through show-stopping rock tunes featuring a longing for something beyond the cruel high school halls. 

Westerberg High is a symbol of our own world, and Heathers unpacks that it can be a really awful place. Most everyone feels themself a social reject defined by uncontrollable flaws. Those outside of the losers possess unfathomable power. The popular Heathers are “solid Teflon, never bothered, never harassed” (“Beautiful”) and even just sitting with them makes bullies think twice. From their high tower, the Heathers cruelly prank Martha, and even Veronica begins to participate. Jocks Kurt and Ram are also beneficiaries of the social order, exploiting their power and status to harass girls for the sake of their sexual desires (“Blue”). Yet even those in power aren’t safe. Heather Duke is bulimic from the stress of maintaining her place in the Heathers clique, and Veronica and the Heathers are not free of Kurt and Ram’s harassment. Westerburg, like our world, is a place where physical power and shallow characteristics appear to arbitrarily decide what's true and what's good. Everyone knows the social order is bogus, but no one can stop it. 

And it's not just the social system that doles out social credit unfairly. The interior scars that these and other evils create make people like JD and Veronica “damaged, really damaged” (“Seventeen”). JD’s life was broken by his mother’s suicide and his dad’s inability to settle down. Events and people out of his control deny him the love and sense of self everyone needs. Martha, a kind and trusting girl, is driven to attempt suicide by her bullies. No matter the efforts of individual actors, forces outside our control inflict seemingly unhealable wounds. Just like the popularity lottery, doled out in an infuriatingly abstract manner, the evils and divisions of everyday life often become inescapable internalized wounds.

Yet despite all the awful things in Westerburg, there is never any doubt among our protagonists that something right is out there. Veronica’s primary musical motif from the first song to the last reprise claims that “things could be beautiful”. The world is not just an amoral state. It is a place that, though immoral, could and should be moral. Similarly, JD is blindingly enraged by the vast injustices inflicted on him or others. During his final angry monologue, he laments that “The only place that Heathers and Marthas can get along is in Heaven!” (“Dead Girl Walking Reprise”). Just like Christians in a broken world, JD and Veronica both realize that the state of affairs as we know it isn't right. The injustices of Westerburg cannot be left the way they are, but must instead be addressed in terms of how things should be. It is the gap between how Westerburg is and how Westerburg ought to be that sets up Veronica, JD, Martha, and the Heathers’ struggle to find an answer to, “What do I do?”

The Students of Westerburg develop a range of compelling but ultimately unsatisfactory answers to this problem. The most common answer, regardless of social standing, is to take, consume, and enjoy. The Heathers prank Martha into being rejected by Ram just for the fun of it. Ram and Sweeney use women around them purely for sexual gratification. Veronica, after falling out with the Heathers, decides to spend her last 30 hours “getting freaky” (“Dead Girl Walking”) with JD. Martha, unable to actualize her longings, copes by daydreaming of a loving boyfriend, a dream that prevents her from living in the moment. But none of this taking, consuming, and enjoying actually satisfies anyone. Martha’s delusions, when confronted with reality, lead her to attempt suicide. Even the high-class Heathers, such as Heather Duke, develop deep anxieties from defining themselves by fleeting status (“Lifeboat”). Ram and Kurt’s quest for sexual pleasure is so obsessive that they end up blindly seduced to death—the folly of their sexual exploits revealed by a gun. 

But not everyone stops at pleasure. JD, Veronica’s terminally obsessed lover, takes a more novel approach. Though he too initially “freezes his brain” to get rid of his pain (Freeze your Brain), with Veronica by his side he attempts one of the greatest fascinations of modern man: Utopia. He commits a regicide of high school queen Heather Chandler. He thinks these and his later actions righteous, declaring, “We’ll burn it down and then we’ll build the world again, Our love is God” (“Our Love is God”) as he murders Kurt and Ram (simultaneously framing them as lovers). As the song progresses, the same chorus becomes distorted, twisted, and evil in its melody, reflecting JD’s increasing violence. He thinks that if he can just eliminate one more Heather, one more bully, then things will change. But they don't. Heather Chandler’s spot is filled by the next Heather, who inaugurates an even worse reign of terror. Kurt and Ram, though major perpetrators, will be replaced. Nothing changes. JD, for all his efforts, can only resort to a bloody end: blowing up the entire school. If he cannot create his own world, he resolves to end this evil one. But in the end, JD’s attempts to fix everything only add to the same destruction he wanted to end.

So the unchristian principles of hedonism, utopia, and blowing it all up failed. But how does Heathers actually point to faith or Christianity? As previously stated, Heathers doesn’t make any attempts to define what God might be, but it does present the evidence that might lead someone to become a Christian. Veronica doesn't need the Gospel to figure out the world is unbroken, or that it could be saved, or that she can't do it herself. Veronica sings in her final song, “I can’t promise no more Heathers…[but] we can be seventeen, we can learn how to chill, if no one loves me now, someday somebody will, we can be seventeen, still time to make things right.” (“Seventeen Reprise”). Her place is not changing the world today, but humbly doing what she can as who she is: a seventeen-year-old girl who can be there for her friends, not an arbitrator of right and wrong. 

Christians may then recognize a parallel to the story of the Anointing at Bethany. When a woman was scolded for anointing Christ with perfume instead of selling it to the poor, Christ said, “Why are you bothering this woman? She has performed a good deed for me. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. In pouring this ointment on my body, she has prepared me for burial. Amen, I say to you, wherever in the whole world this gospel is proclaimed, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.” (Matthew 26:10-13, NCB). Christ, like Veronica, diagnoses the world as a place that will always have suffering. Christ’s example is also a lesson in acceptance. Veronica, like Jesus, knows a period of waiting for righteousness is coming. In Christianity this is the time before the second coming.

But Christian waiting, like Veronica’s waiting, does not entail complacency. Both Veronica and the Christian have the tools to do more than watch the world burn. Both have a conscience that shows them right from wrong. Both find their calling through being in the presence of the downtrodden. Christians have Divine Revelation and the Holy Spirit that give them a map of where they are now and where they are going. Similar to how a Christian need only be faithful and engaged in practical ministry, Veronica doesn't need to be a Heather, or make her love god; she just needs to know she is seventeen. As she says, “Can’t we be seventeen? That's all I want to do.” (“Seventeen”)  Veronica has not acknowledged the Christian answer that she is a child of God, but she has nonetheless come to a conclusion that similarly acknowledges human evil, human good, and the place within the cosmos that she belongs to. 

I cannot say whether Veronica Sawyer would leave her final year of Westerburg as a Christian. But I do know that the brokenness Veronica and JD encountered is the same disconnect that began my own walk with Christ. Veronica looks at creation and, for reasons otherwise unexplainable, realizes that what is and what ought to be are different. But she also sees it's not her job to make everything right. So she will pick up the small pieces left to her, and like the Christian, live a life of small steps, growing as she knows she can.