Clueless (1995)
Director: Amy Heckerling

---

JUMP DOWN:        Look Who’s Talking        Clueless        Satiric Energy       
Star Maker        Jane Austen Was Here        Emma Rules        Austen as Moralist       
Austen Lite        Social Vision        American Teen Comedy       

Counterculture Chick

Amy Heckerling, born in 1954, was the first American writer-director with the rowdy sense of humor of an impudent counterculture chick, the kind who talked about sex freely and enjoyed ribaldry for its own sake. In her three major releases--Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Look Who’s Talking (1989), and Clueless (1995), all deserved hits--she’s as little "sensitive," in the connotation synonymous with "precious," as any woman director. She’s a tough funnywoman, but her toughness shows none of the Hollywood-insider coarseness of a Penny Marshall. And though her movies focus on women’s ups and downs there’s none of the half-submerged resentment of a Nora Ephron comedy. Heckerling expends her intelligence conceiving her settings and premises thoroughly, and you clearly feel that she enjoys her characters in their milieu. Best of all, her enjoyment is infectious.

At the same time you have to acknowledge that Heckerling’s timing can be sloppy and she doesn’t appear to be capable of crafting a solid plot. Both failings make Fast Times, a comedy about lower-middle-class kids in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles, somewhat too loosely episodic. Nevertheless, there’s often compensation for what Heckerling can’t quite pull together. For instance, one result of her tenuous craftsmanship is that although Fast Times is meant to be the story of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s initiation into high school tribal rites, Sean Penn as the stoned surfer Spicoli takes over. His right of eminence rests on the fact that he has a more identifiable accent, lingo, and outlook. Heckerling’s nose for a distinctive comic idiom always leads her.

In addition, though a bouncy teen sex comedy, financed by Universal as an exploitation cheapie, Fast Times has the virtues of the naturalism that in the ’70s opened American movies up to the realities of our relaxing mores. For instance, you see a teenaged boy coaching his friend on how to appear confident enough to score, and a young girl using a carrot in the high school lunchroom to instruct her friend on oral sex technique. The high schoolers are at times as jaded about the game of sex as might seem natural for characters ten years older or more. And Heckerling pointedly avoids melodrama so that even when Leigh has a lousy first lay, later gets pregnant by yet another casual pick-up who ejaculates prematurely, and then undergoes an abortion, the movie takes it all in calmly.

Look Who’s Talking

For her second picture, Look Who’s Talking, Heckerling returned to New York, her hometown, and built some comic episodes around the idea of a career woman getting pregnant by her married lover and then looking for a daddy for her son. This time the female star had no competition for Heckerling’s attention, and Kirstie Alley, with her cracked voice which can sound like either a whine or a bark, and sometimes both at once, put over the convincing comic premise: that a contemporary urban woman, addled about how her self-sufficient professional life should mesh with her conventional emotional desires, might be totally unprotected against the oldest con in the world and then have her guard up when she shouldn’t. Alley has the squinchy-faced comic skills of Gilda Radner but with the assets of a romantic heroine--the Rita Hayworth density of hair, the hungry big-cat eyes. Of course, she has the dark-ringed eyes of a big cat with insomnia, but that just adds a plaintive note to the glamorous giddiness. And the fact that Heckerling has taken the coy romantic comedy set-up of the 1939 Ginger Rogers picture Bachelor Mother (in which the working girl finds a child on her doorstep) and naturalized it by having the heroine get pregnant by her married lover, allows Alley to give the antics some hormonal bite. The movie is a mess but Heckerling pumps Alley up to a pitch of dizziness she was able to sustain for a decade.

Heckerling tends to skip from gag to gag in a way that prevents them from building on each other, and so she holds Look Who’s Talking together with the central joke, referred to in the title, which is that we can hear the son’s innocent-wiseass thoughts from the time he’s a fertilizing sperm onward. (Bruce Willis reads these lines in voice-over; when the child is older they match Willis’s voice to lip movements, as if the kid were Lancelot Link.) This is the most TV-like aspect and probably added to the movie’s otherwise rightful success. Heckerling’s willingness to go low--for instance, when the fetus first notices his penis and says, "Ahhhh, look at that, another little arm comin’ in down there. ... Now how am I gonna get that in my mouth?"--bails her out from the almost overwhelming cutesiness of the concept.

But the story, a reversal of a romantic comedy in which the baby comes before the decision about a mate, and which makes the movie feel up-to-date compared to the old Tom, Dick and Harry model, would require more structure to really work. It’s far too clear whom Alley will end up with since the child picks him out for us. And the structurelessness gives way to free association montages on the theme of baby-rearing, for instance, a montage of the baby crying set to Janis Joplin’s "Cry Baby." This is worthless on almost every count besides the song. But part of Heckerling’s problem stems from a virtue: she is equally good-humored about male and female foibles, which probably explains why the comic melodrama involving George Segal as the oozily self-centered married man falls flat. Heckerling herself is nothing of a cry baby.

Heckerling did show an advance in technical proficiency with Look Who’s Talking, but that’s not all to the good. The lighting and editing were better, but you also had to sit through pointless car chases in Manhattan traffic and squint at hideous upscale interiors. For Heckerling’s scrappy sensibility the low-budget look and feel of Fast Times is in some ways ideal--as little as possible gets between you and the kids’ interactions. Visually Fast Times has more in common with Floyd Mutrux’s 1971 Dusty and Sweets McGee, a grainy frieze of the lives of junkies in the Valley, than it does with Heckerling’s second movie set among Los Angeles-area high school students, Clueless. There’s only one gorgeous shot in Fast Times, Judge Reinhold’s slow-motion masturbatory fantasy of Phoebe Cates coming up through the water of a backyard pool. Clueless on the other hand looks like the fantasy of Beverly Hills teen life that Valley kids must entertain while baking over in smoggy flats.

Set among sultanically posh Beverly Hills teenagers, Clueless would not have benefited from a low-budget look. In fact, after a jittery opening montage of kids in expensive, showy clothes enjoying their privileges, including an expensive, showy car, the heroine, Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) chirps in voice-over, "So, okay, you’re probably going, ’Is this, like, a Noxzema commercial, or what?’ " The revelation of this line is that Heckerling has adopted a flamboyantly designed look, in saturated colors meant to vibrate in the Southern California sun (the reds that Cher wears at night seem to glow with stored-up radiation), without losing her irreverent sense of humor. From this first zinger Heckerling maintains her vision of Beverly Hills while laughing in disbelief at these teens so rich and spoiled they’re as confident as models in advertisements.

Satiric Energy

It’s not uncommon for comedy to focus on a subject, in this case the deluxe superficiality of Beverly Hills kids, in a way that’s both satiric and energized by what it’s satirizing. So, for instance, early on when Cher is scanning the faculty lunchroom to find a mate for her social studies teacher the camera follows her gaze while she narrates. When her eye sweeps a table with a candy bar on it, she interrupts herself, "Ooooh, Snickers," and the camera swerves down before resuming the love hunt. There’s no anger in Heckerling’s satire, though there is a figure, Cher’s ex-step-brother Josh (Paul Rudd), a college student who wants to be an environmental lawyer, who could justify introducing it into the tone. But you can’t get too upset about a character’s gnatly attention span when it’s the occasion for a kinesthetic visual joke about a Snickers bar. Heckerling has got so far into the way of life she’s portraying, with fantastic exaggeration, to be sure, that she doesn’t seem to want to change the butt of her satire. Who’d change the gaudy markings and billowing fins on tropical fish?

In fact, the movie is energized by the characters’ vanity. Cher has entered on a computer the contents of her massive closet, which has moving racks like in a dry cleaners, so that she can plan outfits in the morning without taking anything off a hanger. And she can’t make a mistake because the program warns her of mismatches. When she gets down to dressing for a date rather than school she holds clothes up while her best friend takes Polaroids--she doesn’t trust mirrors. So these kids have technological resources for primping unavailable to the masses, as well as around-the-bend ensembles inventively designed by Mona May. Plaids come in optic colors that throb as if the clothes could be used to hypnotize you. The girls’ woollen stockings have chased their skirt hems to their upper thighs, riding higher than pirate boots and giving their long, exposed stems a teasingly wholesome look. They wear skin-tight clothes and expose their exercise-video-trained tummies, but also go in for show hats and Zsa Zsa feathers that make these fifteen-year-olds look full-blown. What’s alarming is that these kids just naturally rise to the demands their extreme ensembles make on their posture and manner, as if Beverly Hills were a couture consumer breeding ranch. Of course, when both boys and girls are so concerned with style other problems arise. As Cher says of a guy she can’t get it together with, "He does dress better than I do--what would I bring to the relationship?"

The movie gets even more comic energy from the kids’ slang. There are the kind of terse undercuts that adolescents find so effective, the common currency of the decade: "Hello-o-o-o-o!" and "Whatever" and "As if" (which is especially good because it’s almost impossible to translate out of slang). But their argot also combines teen shorthand ("411" for "information" in any context) with peculiarly ornate locutions, for instance, when Cher tells a teacher that she was late to class because she was "surfing the crimson wave," meaning she had her period. They sound like idiots and at the same time it’s extremely catchy; they’re such stylishly self-possessed idiots. And Heckerling packs it in, as if she’d translated the script into a language she’d discovered on an anthropological foray. (Which she did to an extent, sitting in on classes at Beverly Hills High and talking on the phone to students she’d befriended there, reading a UCLA linguistics study, and watching music and comedy TV programming aimed at teens. 1 ) Even if the lines aren’t always classic the phrasing is often so memorable you laugh at that, and the slang is practically non-stop. As a result the dialogue is as relentlessly stylized as in the great comedies of the ’30s and ’40s, with the choice tidbits tumbling over each other at a rate closer to those movies than in almost anything we’ve seen since.

Heckerling went from a first movie about Southern California teen culture in which the central girl’s story didn’t quite dominate, to a second movie strongly centered on a woman’s story, which is more intense overall but less satisfying. Though Heckerling is a career woman from New York (the Bronx), her comedy is more striking when she works on people who are younger and from another world. This may be because she herself attended an arts high school in Manhattan with students from all boroughs; their geographical dispersion kept them from being able to hang out after class. So in her high school movies she’s living the teen scene as she never did in her youth. And she combines strengths in Clueless, a teen movie with a strong lead role for a young actress, and made the teenaged Alicia Silverstone a star.

Silverstone had been a pouty, baby-slut camera subject in a couple of Aerosmith videos, and she has the carriage--back straight, shoulders squared, head arching down to look at you--of a born pop princess. But she’s not just a camera subject, she’s a comedienne. As Cher, she’s conscious of the comic potential in every asset and privilege, for instance, the way being daddy’s special girl enables her to flirt with boys, teachers, a DMV road test examiner, even an entire classroom of kids to whom she makes an oral presentation. She can flirt with Josh when he’s openly contemptuous, for example, when he chides her for watching cartoons, and she counters that Ren and Stimpy are "way existential." He asks if she has any idea what she’s talking about, and she unself-consciously says, "No," but, willing to take credit for a lucky hit, adds perkily, "Why, do I sound like I do?"

You can hear her sense of entitlement in her voice, as well as the lazy thinking that comes from haphazardly disciplined leisure, but Silverstone, playing a girl most kids would hate in high school (as she says of her closest pal, "She’s my friend because we both know what it’s like to have people be jealous of us"), gets laughs just from the platinum squeal her voice takes on when she wants to emphasize something, for instance, the "monster sound system" in the Jeep her father gave her. Even Silverstone’s upper lip offers a distinct advantage, thickening to pout and purse, thinning out in a child’s crayon drawing smile. There isn’t a line in Silverstone’s performance that doesn’t contribute to the sketch, and all of it is imbued with an instinct for foolishness that is completely compatible with the teen chic necessary for the role. Cher can fall off her bed in the overbalanced follow-through of a seductive hair toss and pop back up looking like a cover girl. No American actress Silverstone’s age has ever given as confident a comic star performance, and Heckerling has to receive some of the credit.

As for the movie overall, the obvious reason it’s a more unified piece of writing than Heckerling’s previous scripts is that it’s an updated transplantation of Jane Austen’s 1816 novel Emma. Austen did the foundation work that Heckerling isn’t adept at--a marriage plot in which we see the heroine emerge from her adolescent cluelessness and then claim her prize, the man who loves her deeply more than dazzlingly--and it’s amazing how much Heckerling was able to prune without altering the spirit. We lose Jane Fairfax (because Frank Churchill has been changed in a way that precludes her) and Miss Bates (a particular loss when you consider how vivid Sophie Thompson would make her in Douglas McGrath’s 1996 straight adaptation), while Mr. and Mrs. Weston have been adapted in a way that gives them much less impact. However, changing Emma’s father from a querulous hypochondriac to a scary corporate lawyer brings out how spoiled Cher/Emma is when she maintains her cool in the face of his paternal bluster.

Clueless isn’t a photocopy of Emma, but I can’t imagine anyone’s complaining about that. McGrath’s Emma has all the major characters and scenes, but the star, Gwyneth Paltrow, lacks a quality that Alicia Silverstone has in aces: forwardness as a comic actress, which is necessary if Emma’s formation is to absorb us. She has to live up to what Mr. Knightley says to Mrs. Weston in the book about why he’s more interested in Emma than in her sister Isabella: "There is an anxiety, a curiosity in what one feels for Emma. I wonder what will become of her!" 2   The actress has to come up with a style for translating into comic pleasure the book’s organizing suspense of a young heroine’s development.

It’s a wonder to see an adaptation of Emma that is extremely funny and feels plugged into contemporary pop culture and still works as a version of Emma. Even the use of slang is appropriate in a sense, because the demands of decorum make Austen’s own characters use a highly coded language. They speak so decorously that for one of them to announce to another, "I understand you," is not weird. (In Clueless the slang is always understood, no matter how eccentric, except perhaps by adults in the audience.) And there’s a reason for being happy in particular that it’s Emma rather than one of the other novels. Though Emma lacks Mansfield Park’s feverish literary invention--the sequence in Sotherton Park, for instance, in which Fanny Price sits exhausted on the bench while all the couples, giddy with illicit desires, seethe around her and over the wall--its moral sense seems more in step with the natural rhythms of a community, less allegorical. Emma is Austen’s most sustained vision of how an orderly society should function, probably because the heroine, being wealthy, is more rooted in place. It’s the only Austen novel in which the heroine, and hence the narrative, never leave her home base.

In addition, Emma is more appealing than the other novels because it’s the only one in which the heroine isn’t vulnerable in the process of finding a mate. Austen believes that your sisters’ or your parents’ careless behavior does reflect on the whole fambly. (This is clearest in Pride and Prejudice, but altogether Austen’s novels provide a bleak view of family life as a public circuit of irritations and offenses.) This makes heroines vulnerable for things they can’t help as well as things they can, and lack of money or rank hurt them as much as the shenanigans of family and companions. Austen is sympathetic to the women in their precarious positions, and she always has the heroines overcome their disadvantages. But there’s something refreshing about Emma in which there are no social liabilities, hence no potential for self-pitying identification.

Emma is the duchess of her community; she simply has to learn noblesse oblige to earn the best and wealthiest man in her vicinity. (Austen’s characters stack in pyramids with the heroine and hero always the most virtuous and half the time the most attractive or appealing woman and man in the book.) In Mansfield Park Austen pushes Fanny’s pitiable vulnerability to the limit, that is, as close to the wall that Clarissa was backed against as a book with a happy ending would allow. In Emma it’s as if Austen had seen what was morbid nearly to the point of camp about poor little "creepmouse" Fanny weeping because she’s being blamed for following her unshakable moral instincts. For example, Fanny saves a letter Edmund had begun writing to her, beginning, "My very dear Fanny"; in Emma Fanny’s saving this treasure becomes Harriet Smith’s treasuring insignificant scraps that Mr. Elton happened to touch, and we’re clearly prompted to laugh. In Emma the masochistic vulnerability of Fanny seems to belong properly to a lower order of character such as Harriet Smith. Emma represents a lightening of mood, though not a loosening of strictures.

Austen is always a strict moralist, "self-command" the supreme social virtue in her world. No matter what you feel, or how intensely, you must suppress it in the interest of maintaining civil discourse. Feelings are private and are to be indulged only up to a point, and never purposely cultivated for their own sake (what Mrs. Dashwood encourages in Marianne, to her daughter’s peril, in Sense and Sensibility). Thus, decorum is invariably necessary, yet grace and vivacity are distinct plusses. But you must keep an eye on them as well. Manners are all-important but there’s a point at which they become so fine they’re suspect. Too often attractive manners cosmetically cover a moral void, as in the case of Mansfield Park’s Mary Crawford. (Austen is very consistent in her judgments from work to work; among the lead characters only Henry Tilney of Northanger Abbey and Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice might be considered trifling by Fanny, the paragon of Mansfield Park.) What’s paramount is that your manners, controlled by your sense of self-command, also be directly connected to your sense of moral judgment, which will always guide you properly, if nature has been cultivated by useful education and correct precepts.

Though Jane Austen promoted bourgeois marriage as medieval romances had promoted courtly love, she was thinking more of its fitness than its seductiveness. The goal for a heroine in marrying is to find a husband who can guide her in principles of conduct and whose character in turn will be amenable to her wholesome influence. To Austen marriage is a mutually reinforcing exchange of virtues. Thus, in Emma, though the heroine is made aware of her faults by Mr. Knightley, especially after her spectacularly insensitive display of wit at the Box Hill picnic, we see that Austen believes that conscience is innate. (Austen also appears divided about her own sharp tongue.) Hence, in Sense and Sensibility, when Willoughby confesses his misery to Elinor, he’s not just sorry he ended up with a cold wife, he’s suffering from remembrance of the bad behavior from which he profited. He’s suffering from moral guilt, and the scene has the power of something imagined by a modern, Protestant Dante, with the middle-class heroine scolding the man writhing in marital hell. So Mr. Knightley is merely waking Emma up to what’s inside her all along, and the mutuality of their moral union is symbolized by his moving into her home after their marriage rather than the reverse.

However, Heckerling is drawn by the very fizziness of her talent to Austen’s less strained mood in Emma. Clueless is not morally serious, even though you can say that categorically making fun of the leisure class might be a salutary thing, though it’s limited to pointing out the barnacles on their yachts rather than confiscating them. So Heckerling maintains Cher’s superiority in every way to every other girl in the movie while tweaking it at the same time. For instance, Cher convinces Tai, the Harriet Smith character, that a skateboarding stoner is not good enough for her once she has become a close friend of Cher’s. Cher establishes her authority by asking Tai how old she is--sixteen next May. This is Cher’s in: she was born in April and so can give advice "as someone older." It’s no less groundless than Emma’s meddling in Harriet’s courtship by the farmer Robert Martin, but it is funnier, and nothing Cher does requires sterner correction, as Emma’s unfeeling and impractical denigration of Martin’s love suit does in the novel.

Heckerling does find a correlative for Austen’s very tricky double-edged tone (which was hard for Austen herself to perfect, and then to maintain). For instance, in Emma the narrator says of Mrs. Goddard’s school that it was "a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies." 3   The trick is that it’s minutely accurate reporting yet with a saucy, even bitchy, tone. It is, of course, ambiguous: is it that the parents don’t want their daughters to come back prodigies, or that anyone’s daughter is unlikely material to be made into a prodigy, or both? In any case, we trust Austen to be at once delicately comic and quite frank about the extent of a girl’s gifts. (Think of Lady Catherine’s high-fatuous refrain in Pride and Prejudice: "Anne would have been a delightful performer, had her health allowed her to learn." 4 ) But though Austen does not think of Emma as an unlikely prodigy, we’re happy to take the blissfully satisfied Cher at about this measure, for instance, when she delivers an oral report about violence on TV, which she concludes by saying, "And so until mankind is peaceful enough not to have violence on the news, there’s no point in taking it out of shows that need it for entertainment value." Cher is the flower of Beverly Hills maidenhood.

This dopey sunniness has its cost. Clueless lacks the quality that makes the novel profound (as does McGrath’s Emma)--the idea that people must stick to their given place in society, respecting those above them and aiding those below. At the end of Emma it’s appropriate for Emma and Harriet no longer to meet as inseparable companions. They don’t belong to the same sphere, and Harriet, an illegitimate child farmed out to a provincial school, seems genetically inferior to Emma. At some level the novel is a justification of class society, not from a snobbish point-of-view, which would value rank for its own sake, but as a vision of how the greatest benefit can come to the greatest number of people (distinguishing snobbery from utility even if they always co-exist in individuals who embrace hierarchical social organization). Higher rank may imply superior aptitudes to Austen, but it also carries more extensive obligations. For example, it is to Emma’s shame that she has not regularly visited the inane chatterbox Miss Bates. And though Emma had recklessly fiddled in the affairs of Mr. Elton, and insulted him to boot, he is the minister who officiates at her wedding to Mr. Knightley. No personal discomfort could justify not patronizing the parish church.

Obviously, this is an aspect of the novel that would not translate to contemporary America. We don’t think of virtues and aptitudes as being aligned with class. In fact, we think that the possibility of crossing, or jumping over, class lines confirms the virtue of our society overall. Still, Cher’s being fabulously wealthy does carry responsibility, which she meets by organizing relief donations for a local disaster. However, this is an ad hoc responsibility, not an ongoing one, as Emma’s are. Emma’s obligations make up the suitable vocation for the most prominent young married woman in her town. It’s her Christian duty and presumably will be her entire occupation after running her own household. Cher’s disaster relief makes us see her as mature enough for the more serious Josh, but is something Heckerling can still get laughs over. Having combed her own closets and the pantry Cher is able to include among her donations a pair of skis and a pot of caviar.

Thus, the genre of teen comedy, which so far has proven Heckerling’s forte, pulls Clueless down from Austen’s level, and makes it inconsequential as a vision of life. Even the romance is less consequential, since Cher is only sixteen by the end of the movie and her Mr. Knightley not a seigneurial landowner but merely an idealistic college kid (whom Cher goads for listening to self-serious "complaint rock"). Emma is nearly twenty-one at the opening of the book, and Mr. Knightley in his late thirties; as right for each other as Cher and Josh may be, they’re teenagers and we don’t expect them to be settled with mates for life. (Heckerling knows this and supplies an American punchline.) Heckerling also tries but doesn’t come up with an equivalent to Austen’s famously commanding prose when Emma realizes that she’s in love: "It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!" 5   (Thankfully Heckerling steers clear of an Ally McBeal-type visualization.) But still, Clueless is a better movie version of Austen than any other American adaptation, and it certainly provides more buoyant entertainment than even the finest Austen movie, Roger Michell’s English production of Persuasion of the same year. Clueless feels like it’s aimed at bright teenaged girls, and so there’s probably just the right amount of Emma in it.

It is true that because Heckerling has concentrated with such intensity on putting Cher forward while getting the overall setting down, almost none of the other characters stands out, merging instead with the colorform panorama backing Silverstone. Heckerling never has been able to do it all at once, but she’s never done as much at one time as in Clueless, not just an impressive, intricate literary adaptation, but an amazing fabrication on its own terms. (It’s such a coherent creation that it bred a subgenre of its own.) In recreating life in Beverly Hills Heckerling has transformed all the details into a parodic idiom, so that the reality of the movie is tangible and yet marvelously synthetic, the way that the process of petrifaction replaces the cells of the wood, prettifying it and leaving nothing organic behind.

1. Information about Heckerling’s preparation of the screenplay for Clueless and about her own high school experiences comes from the John Sacret Young Lecture she gave at the invitation of the Princeton Film Studies Program in April 1999. (return to text)
2. There is an anxiety: Austen, Emma 29 (vol. I, ch. 5). (return to text)
3. a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school: Austen, Emma 14 (vol. I, ch. 3). (return to text)
4. Lady Catherine: Austen, Pride 130, 132 (ch. 31). (return to text)
5. It darted through her: Austen, Emma 320 (vol. III, ch. 11). (return to text)