He wasn’t safe. He wasn’t a poster you bought because everyone else had one. He was the guy in the back of the room who already knew the whole thing was a performance and found it vaguely hilarious. For a girl who felt more at home with a book than a pom-pom, that was everything.<\/p>\n
In the late 1980s, teenage heartthrob Christian Slater made me believe there was more to life than pom-poms and keggers<\/p>\n
![\"christian](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/christian-slater-heathers-movie.png\" "\\"The")
Cinemarque-New World \/ Kobal \/ Shutterstock<\/p>\n
It was Christian Slater\u00a0who told me puberty had certainly arrived<\/p>\n
My earliest love was Bill Murray, but I was so young; it was literally grade-school stuff. On the cusp of teendom, I crushed on the Coreys,<\/a> flipped for Michael J. Fox, cocked a head at Kirk Cameron (who now, well, you must get lessons in regret somehow<\/a>).\u00a0<\/p>\n But those guys were mere posers (and posters \u2014 thanks, Bop and Tiger Beat!) compared to Christian Slater. Christian Slater was 3-D, break-me-off-a-piece-of-that blood flow to my nether regions, but in a cerebral way. (Mmmhmm, I’m going to make it noble.)<\/p>\n For sure, no one purloined my adolescent loins the way he did: from the moment he uttered his first “Greetings and salutations” (oh, god, a guy with a vocabulary!) on-screen in Heathers,<\/a> as Winona Ryder’s mirage-like rebel relief to her Heathers and their social-scheming, I was greeting and salivating over the prospect of a romance with this devilishly grinning dude.<\/p>\n I wanted so badly to be Ryder’s Veronica, smart-girling as she posed what she knows is a stupid question of the week \u2014 “You inherit five million dollars the same day aliens land on earth and say they’re going to blow it up in two days. What do you do?” \u2014 to Slater’s J.D. Alas. I could only watch, but at least my questions about what went into the ultimate guy were answered.<\/p>\n What more did I need than a cocky eyebrow raise and the perfect response \u2014 “That’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard.” \u2014 to assure me I wanted no baby-faced heartthrob, but a guy who knew, or would at least pretend to know, the whole heartthrob thing was stupid?<\/p>\n As a girl who was maybe a bit of a misfit \u2014 a good-girl, honors-student, no-talent-at-flirting and fancying herself some kind of future great writer\/thinker\/something artsy with a Sassy-mag wardrobe<\/a> \u2014 well, Christian more than tapped into my non-conformist aspirations. He got it, with his hand-through-the-already-mussed-hair and a sly grin that I refused to credit Jack Nicholson with inventing.<\/p>\n RELATED: What The End Of Rom-Coms Tells Us About A Disturbing Trend In Today’s Society<\/a><\/p>\n Christian Slater knew there was more to life than pom-poms and keggers<\/p>\n Or I told myself he did, knowing full well I’d never make cheerleading or be invited to many parties. Slater’s smirky impertinence struck me as more than just an act. He, the real him, knew, too. He knew it was all conformist sameness, as he tossed off lines like “Seven schools in seven states and the only thing different is my locker combination.”<\/p>\n The fact that I fell hard for a character who was actually a murderous sociopath? I could overlook that. It was just a movie, after all. Besides, as my infatuation hit peak fan-girl, I learned that Video City was carrying his new movie.<\/p>\n I gathered a group of girlfriends firm in their Slaterdom. (None of them as devoted as me, but I wouldn’t be the one to tell them.) The plans were normal sleepover stuff: practicing dance moves to a VHS tape of Madonna’s Blonde Ambition tour, prank phone calls from a landline, and then a double-feature of Heathers and the new movie, Pump Up The Volume<\/a>.<\/p>\n A slick of Chippendales (that’s what you call them in a group) couldn’t have ignited my friends’ parents’ impropriety meter faster.<\/p>\n “Tell them we’re just watching Gleaming the Cube,” I urged one girl, naming an ultimately harmless skateboarding movie where Slater has to solve his brother’s murder (hey, it was the ’80s).<\/p>\n But really, we were pumping up the volume, memorizing every line and look of Slater’s lead, Max Hunter, an introverted, thoughtful high school student by day and Happy Harry Hard-On, a dirty-minded, freedom-fighting, good-music-playing ham radio personality by night.\u00a0<\/p>\n And we were holding our breath as Samantha Mathis’ character undressed for him on-screen. It was another part he played so well that I couldn’t necessarily separate the actor from the role. Or didn’t want to.<\/p>\n RELATED: 10 Gen-X Movies We Loved As Kids That Have Aged Horribly<\/a><\/p>\n Christian Slater had an appeal that came from his ability to assure me that the world was so much bigger than high school<\/p>\n If you ask me, Leo DiCaprio’s Titanic performance \u2014 outsider guy telling insider girl that the trappings of the life she knows don’t really matter when you get down to it \u2014 wouldn’t really exist without Slater’s Heathers and Pump Up the Volume performances.<\/p>\n It’s to his credit that I don’t know what celebrity crush replaced him. There may not have been one, as I entered high school, bringing me into a world of real boys who ignored me as well (if not better) than my Christian Slater poster could.<\/p>\n He made a couple of ill-fated choices in the early ’90s, eschewing teen rebel-dom for Kuffs (why?) and bad boy Lucky Luciano in Mobsters, a movie where he should have been hot but came off like a cartoon. An illusion-bubble-bursting cartoon. Maybe it taught me that no one is perfect.<\/p>\n And my love didn’t fade entirely, so in 1993, fresh off the heels of my first real boyfriend (whose best line was calling me a Porsche in a sea of Yugos) dumping me, I found Slater again in the Quentin Tarantino-scripted True Romance<\/a>. He played shy but utterly romantic loner-slash-movie buff Clarence Worley, who falls for a hooker, marries her, and willingly gets caught up in all the bloodshed it takes to keep her.<\/p>\n It was maybe who I’d wanted Christian Slater to be all along: A grown-up version of the guy on the outside who knows true love matters more than the rest of the garbage we worry about.<\/p>\n All I knew for certain was that Patricia Arquette’s character, admiring him amid the carnage, echoed exactly what I’d thought of Slater all along: “You’re so cool.” And he was, not least for making me feel like no matter how gangly and awkward I may have been at the time, there was something so cool about me, too.<\/p>\n![\"christian](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/christian-slater-pump-volume-movie.png\" "\\"The")
New Line – \u00a9 1990 New Line Cinema via IMDB<\/p>\n