July 20–27, 1995

movies

Clueless

Clueless is Ridgemont High revisited — funny, knowing, and so po-mo.

by Cindy Fuchs

Written and directed by Amy Heckerling
A Paramount Pictures Release

Cher is a Betty. She's beautiful, popular and repulsively rich, a Beverly Hills high school student who drives a bitchin white jeep even though she only has a learner's permit, who shops to feel "in control" (with her lawyer-dad's credit cards). Named after a certain infamous infomercialist, she chats on her cellular phone, hangs out with only the majorly cool people, and appreciates the existential depths of Ren and Stimpy. She spends her time watching her father's diet and thinking up ways to "do good stuff" for other people. Like, she's the Anti-Heather.

All this sweetness and light might sound like a little much. Yet, writer-director Amy Heckerling's new film is totally adorable and often quite funny, in large part because Cher is played by Alicia Silverstone. You know, the girl in the Aerosmith videos who's not Steve Tyler's daughter, the blond with the killer kick and the bungee cord. Her film debut as a psycho-Lolita in The Crush landed her MTV's Movie Awards for best breakthrough performance and for best villain. At that point (around this time in 1994), it looked like she was just that month's flavor of babeness — looking good in tight jeans, 18 years old, like, all right, whatevarrr.

In Clueless she reveals a comic flexibility and apparent sense of irony (though it's hard to tell "at this age" where her moves between ingenuous and cunning, childish and sultry, might be coming from). She also seems to have a flair for slapstick and an expressive face — you know, like an actor. The film doesn't take you anywhere you haven't been before, especially if you watched the first few years of 90210, before they went off to college and became socially conscious. But it revisits this territory with an engaging mixture of affection and acerbic awareness. It's got a ready-made hits soundtrack (including songs by Luscious Jackson, Counting Crows, Jill Sobule, Coolio, Cracker). And the basic character types familiar from Heckerling's own feature debut Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) reappear — updated, of course: the best friend (Stacey Dash), the awkward but quick-study newcomer (Brittany Murphy), the loader (dope-smoker) skateboarder (Breckin Meyer), the pretty, thud-headed stud (Jeremy Sisto), the fashion-conscious gay boy (Justin Walker), and the witty nerd who turns out to be the maximum love-object (Paul Rudd).

As this lineup suggests, there's not much going on here that's subversive or remarkable (except perhaps that it's so watchable, which it may have no business being). As "teen movies" go, Clueless is obviously, self-consciously, lightweight: There are no suicides, no violence, no generational battles (no mothers in sight, either). There's no class or money angst (Cher's large white house features "classic columns, dating back from 1978"), no racial conflicts (multiculti-ness is taken for granted: there's a student face in the crowd representing most every ethnicity), no sexual crises (except that Cher is a virgin, or as Dionne observes, "hymenally challenged," and thus understandably concerned about her future). The world of the film is ideal, shimmering, stable. Cher believes she's completely clued in: she alternates between Jane Fonda and "Buns of Steel," watches The Real World (because it's so, you know, real), and successfully negotiates for better grades with her terminally unhip teachers (Wallace Shawn teaches the debating class).

Like Heckerling's other big-studio flicks, the lucrative Look Who's Talking and Look Who's Talking Too, this movie has an absurd sensibility: unserious in the extreme, dense-packed (and well-paced — this movie moves) with familiar eccentricities passing for problems passing for eccentricities. Closer in tone to TV's derivative, mostly clever, and broadly sarcastic Parker Lewis Can't Lose than the more "original," self-consciously anthemic Ferris Bueller's Day Off, it's got that po-mo thing going on: It assumes its audience knows all about malls and, moreover, that life in this particular fast lane is both titillating and ridiculous, that reality — what counts, fashion and morality options — is a matter of media images. (This despite and because of producer Robert Lawrence's assertion that the young actors were cast for how "real" they would be on screen. Yeah yeah. Next?)

So there are some (deliberately) vague gestures toward characterization: Cher is initially way superficial, overly concerned with her wardrobe (she uses a computer program to organize matching outfits from her mega-closet full of designer clothes) and her career as magnificent babe (she has no interest in those scrungy high school boys, the ones uniformed in baggy jeans and flannel shirts). No surprise that she Develops, which means learning something about something resembling Values and Love, which means finding romance, predictably right under her perfect little nose. While she's busy orchestrating Tai's (Brittany Murphy) love life, she inadvertently stumbles upon her own (and the realization scene is appropriately excessive: a huge fountain lights up behind her like an oracle).

Cher's precocious and precious voice-over provides much of the film's humor (the press kit includes a glossary of terms: "tscha!" means "surely you jest," a "baldwin" is a hunky guy, a "barney" is a loser guy, "surfing the crimson wave" means you're menstruating, etc.). Her narration grants the film an approximated coherence and point of view (as if Tori Spelling could put her best intentions into words). More to the point, it ratchets up the film's self-consciousness level, articulating the joke for its in-the-know viewers. Malls are real life. Like, get a clue.