He goes to parties, but he doesn’t really party hard. He doesn’t have a lot of close male friends, at one point mentioning that his yearbook inscriptions all say stuff like “Lloyd, see ya around maybe,” but he’s intensely loyal.
Lloyd is socially awkward, but he’s not exactly a nerd. Heathers, in other words, became archetypal, and while the scene from Say Anything where Lloyd stands outside Diane’s window hoisting up a boombox playing Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” as a defiant reminder of their defunct relationship has certainly cemented itself into popular culture, the rest of the movie defies stereotypes. While neither movie was a blockbuster (and Say Anything was much more widely seen in its original release), Heathers is still making Twitter headlines and inspiring imitators, both directly (a troubled Heathers TV show has yet to properly air, but a season of it was produced!) and indirectly: Mean Girls is its most-cited descendant, but there have also been lower-rent imitators like Jawbreaker, and any post-1990 teen comedy that features a cadre of pitiless, cartoonish popular girls probably owes at least something to Heathers. Heathers walks the line where petty social transgressions turn into horrifying crimes of vengeance in Say Anything, a father who commits tax fraud so betrays his daughter that she disowns him. Say Anything, in which smart and sensitive but vaguely underachieving Lloyd ( John Cusack) embarks upon an unlikely post-graduation summer romance with his overachieving crush Diane ( Ione Skye), is very funny, but it is utterly, achingly sincere. Heathers is far from heartless, but a lot of its comedy is pitch black, enough that an inexperienced writer set Twitter ablaze with a recent ill-considered essay about watching this decidedly (intentionally) offensive comedy for the first time. For example: Say Anything was released just two weeks after Heathers, two decidedly different specimens of the 1980s teen comedy that nonetheless represent twin peaks of the era, both coming in right at the end. Cameron Crowe’s teenage romantic comedy Say Anything… turned 30 years old this week, but more notable than its particular age (one that would put Lloyd Dobler and “ Diane Court whoa” on the cusp of their 50s) is the peer group turning 30 right around the same time, and how these other movies influenced culture in its stead.
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