heather, heather, heather (and veronica !)

That’s quite the mouthful, isn’t it? If only there was a shorter, more efficient way to refer to the three of those ladies who all have the same name! Well fear not, my fellow classmates! Such a word does, in fact, exist! The goal of the (visual) assignment I completed today was to use this non-translatable word generator to choose a word from a different language that does not translate into English, and then insert that word into an image that better defines it. Interested? Check out the original assignment bank post here!

My word was “naamgenoot”, which is Dutch for “people who share the same name.” The image I selected stemmed from the fact that I had recently watched the 1989 Heathers movie, and have been a big fan of the soundtrack for a while now (its “Big Fun” amiright?), so the moment this word popped on the screen, my brain was filled with echos of “♪ Heather, Heather, Heather, and someone♪” on loop. However, I decided to table the musical for the sake of sticking more accurately to our 80’s theme. The final product ended up looking like this:

and I am pretty pleased with how it turned out, although I do wish I could have figured out how to recreate the gradient sort of look (any ideas?). It definitely takes a little bit of somewhat niche knowledge (or at least that’s what my mother said when I showed her), but I think once the plot of Heathers– heck, once the names of those three lovely ladies down the side are revealed (I’ll give you a hint: its Heather!)- the meaning of “naamgenoot” becomes pretty clear. To create this, I started out with the 1989 Heathers movie poster.

I then opened it up on Gimp (Photoshop but free!) and started editing the photo. First, I color dropped the navy blue and painted over the orange letters that were on the navy blue chalkboard thing. Then I did the same thing with the parts of the background that were black. From there, I chose a font that looked similar to the one in the 1989 poster, and bing bang boom, she was complete! However, this was not the first iteration of my Heathers-but-make-it-naamgenoot poster. This was.

Come on, doesn’t that just scream “people who have the same name” to you? To explain myself, I was attempting to mimic the colors each Heather wears, and was going to add some croquet mallets (which I was originally spelling “crochet”) to give a more abstract feel. I actually spent upwards of an hour and a half trying to make this idea work, without fruition. It probably didn’t help that this was my first time ever using Gimp (or any software similar to it). But all’s well that ends well!

Overall, I really liked the way the over-the-top 80’s style and aesthetic meets underlying crisis that I was referring to in my earlier post (this one!) in the movie Heathers. Heathers does contrast to the other 80’s media I’ve noted in that the strong independent female protagonist does Not end up a mellow mother/housewife (*ahem* Regina from Night of the Comet). To me, this piece highlights the way each Heather in the film is essentially interchangeable. When one falls, another will take her place and everything will remain exactly as it were. To the world, they are the exact same person, and this word is a convenient way to lump them all together while sounding scholarly, rather than just straight-up rude.

-liz