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A word to the wise - Heathers is by no measure afraid to linger on disturbing or crude imagery. Almost every teen actor of note at the time turned down a role in this movie, and across America many were horrified that a comedy would dare breach the subject of teen suicide. To be fair, Heathers treats this sensitive subject as something of a red herring instead of as base subject matter. Rather than suicide itself, Heathers makes effective sport of the glib way we often assign simplistic causes to the complex reasons why some people lose hope. To say more would be to spoil the plot but while criticism of the film's tone has merit, to portray Heathers as nothing more than a crass dismissal of human decency is to entirely miss its point.

I'm not afraid to claim Heathers as one of my favorite films, or to admit that like all the movies I examine in this column, it certainly isn't for everyone - yet it is more than the sum of its parts. I recall a time at my own high school when a somewhat unpopular student passed away suddenly and predictably, a wave of soul searching ebbed and flowed over the campus for some time. Parents and teachers wrestled with how to address the issue and we students spent a great deal of time trading fond reminiscences of someone very few of us actually knew.

I was taken aback by the cruel irony that someone so roundly ignored by her peers in life had suddenly become, in death, the most popular and beloved member of the class. It's human nature of course to rhapsodize over the recently departed, and to this day I've never attended a funeral where the deceased was not described as the finest human being on earth - regardless of their actual level of character. But I recall thinking at the time that this must be how we wrestle with guilt. Perhaps we wax nostalgic over the past because it often represents lost opportunity that we'd like to have back. And maybe sometimes we dote over the memories of people we wish we'd treated with more care while they were with us. We are sometimes neglectful of one another and then we fail to notice it until it's too late. But this doesn't mean we don't deserve a chance for redemption, and perhaps that's what the lives we've been given are all about. We make mistakes, we are cruel, we are wasteful, we disappoint ourselves and others - but we all can do better. And in its weird, warped way, this is the point Heathers ultimately attempts to make - that we all deserve the chance to try.

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