Clueless

How does a failed tv pilot turn into one of the most iconic films of the 1990s, whose influence is still felt today in and outside of movie theatres? By the time Amy Heckerling’s high school rom-com Clueless came around in 1995, the teen drama was in a low. The glory days of John Hughes were gone, and the decade confused between the ending of slacker culture, with its alternative renaissance in film and music, and the incoming Disneyfication of teenage life and pop culture. Conservative, Paramount, the studio behind the production, initially pushed for a male protagonist, but Heckerling kept by Alicia Silverstone. In a Hollywood dominated by male heroes, making a virtually unknown 18-year-old Silverstone the lead in a female-directed movie as a sure risk, so the studio thought. How they were wrong. Clueless made a box office of almost $60 million internationally and of Silverstone a darling of the 1990s.

Retrospectively, it’s easy to place Clueless in the basket of the Mean and the Gossip Girls and the generalized Paris Hilton simulacra that has since become the capitalist horizon of femaleness (and of wide swaths of queerness as well), with Valleyspeak adopted as a sort of post-ironic, agressive brand. A sort of capitalist nihilism, far from the early days of the 1990s, that has coopted much post-2000 contemporary culture — after all, somewhere along the way, it became cool to be a sell-out. On the contrary, Clueless’s portrait of rich girl Cher — a peak Silverstone — and her Beverly Hills’ Bronson Alcott High School crew is much more the product of early 90s self-awareness and, even, naiveté. Despite being a spoiled brat, with a mansion for a home and a ruthless layer for a father, Cher is never “mean” — her good intentions genuine. There is no cynicism in Clueless; only humour at teenage aloofness and pretence. Sure, the rich girl is as much a cartoon as the skater boy, but the representations neither feel like they subsume nor denigrate both. In this regard, the film is a unique and rare transitional artifact of a particular point in time, impossible before and after.

This quality is also what makes Clueless such an honest and humorous adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. Cher Horowitz is literally Emma Woodhouse, and so with all the other characters — including an ageless Paul Rudd as Cher/Emma’s love interest. Its plot points too are more or less the same, including the transformation of suburban new student Tai/Harriet into a girl of social status, who, to Cher’s shock, turns into a “mean girl” monster. There wouldn’t be another such self-conscious, modernized and irreverent take on spoiled girlhood until Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. The match-making and its comedic errors (“As if!”), the unforgettable jokes (delivered nonchalantly and totally convincingly), the half-sibling romance (which would be censured today), and the fashion (oh the fashion!) — all of it makes Clueless a joy to rewatch.

The film opens with Cher choosing her daily wear on a desktop computer and opting for her signature yellow plaid outfit — and the catwalk just keeps getting better from there. To capture the glamour, Heckerling’s called cinematographer Bill Pope, who had recently shot both Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness and The Wachowskis’ Bound and would go on to do The Matrix trilogy and Raimi’s unmatchable take on Spider-Man. Pope opts for a bright and colorful cinematography, yet rich in details, capturing Cher’s style choices in LA’s bubble-gum light — an aesthetic that would be copied to exhaustion and made-plastic in teen comedies since.

Many recent films and television series are condescending towards the present-day youth — they/them pronouns are a running gag, for example, from Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt to Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Or, inversely, blindly romanticize it. Teenagerhood is a hard period to portray by adults without moralism. Clueless, like Emma, knows better than to attempt a portrayal of a generation. Instead, it offers us what is classic and intemporal in teenagers: overblown yet superficial intrigues; coded yet childish humour; hormones and mood waves; exploration and guilt; and just about the right degree of cockiness for entertainment.