How ‘Clueless' bucked the trope of the rich mean girl

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4 days ago

A girl who appears to have everything must at least be in want of sympathy. That's what Jane Austen assumed about her fictional heroine Emma Woodhouse, whom, the author reportedly declared, 'no one but myself will much like.' How many people could fall for a heroine who's not only handsome and clever but 'rich, with a comfortable home' and who has 'very little to distress or vex her?'
Legions, it turns out. Including after the character's transplant to 1995 Beverly Hills, where the high-gloss perfection of her everyday life raises the opening question, 'Is this, like, a Noxzema commercial or what?' 'Clueless,' which turns 30 this week, remains an exception among teen movies the same way its literary inspiration, 'Emma,' marked a radical turn in the tradition of the European novel when it was published in 1815. Then as now, young, wealthy female characters were, if not altogether mean, at least not often rendered as deserving of our affection.
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From Heather Chandler to Regina George, moneyed girls in high school movies tend to be deliciously coiffed villains, while those of humbler means and countenance, such as Andie Walsh ('Pretty in Pink') and Laney Boggs ('She's All That'), harbor innate goodness. But the movie's Cher Horowitz is a radiant anomaly, decked in head-to-toe designer duds and played by Alicia Silverstone, fresh off her breakthrough stint writhing around in convertibles in Aerosmith music videos. Plenty of teen movie heroines have been comfortably middle class, but the fabulously affluent kind are rare and briefly became something of a microtrend: There would be no Elle Woods marching off to Harvard Law in pink leather (in 2001's 'Legally Blonde') without a plaid-clad Cher arguing away her lowball grades.
Pop culture lately has an appetite for eating the rich. But writer-director Amy Heckerling makes a clear distinction in 'Clueless' that seems nearly impossible today: The wealthy world Cher inhabits is the subject of the film's playful satire - not the ingenue herself. Cher is beautiful, popular and maybe not quite as clever as Emma, though she has her moments. But like Emma, Cher isn't overly conceited about her outward advantages. As Mr. Knightley (the model for Paul Rudd's Josh) observes of his future wife early in Austen's novel, 'considering how very handsome she is, she appears to be little occupied with it; her vanity lies another way.'
Emma is vain in assuming she knows what's best for others when she acts on their behalf - out of a caring instinct that leads, time and again, to misunderstanding and folly. She has leisure to meddle in the romantic affairs of her friends because, unlike Elizabeth Bennet (of 'Pride and Prejudice') or Fanny Price (of 'Mansfield Park') before her, Emma doesn't need to marry to secure her fortune. Freed from the economic constraints of the conventional marriage plot, Emma has room to make mistakes, delude herself (and poor Harriet Smith, the primary casualty of her misguided matchmaking) and come around to love without the burden of necessity.
'Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor,' Austen wrote in a letter to her niece, Fanny Knight, 'which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.' That same Fanny K., on encountering her aunt's sole protagonist of independent means, confessed that she 'could not bear Emma herself,' an opinion hand-noted by Austen on a page currently displayed at the Morgan Library and Museum, where the exhibit 'A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250,' commemorating the anniversary of the author's birth, runs through Sept. 14. Like most of Austen's intimates, Fanny rated 'Emma' 'not so well as either P&P or MP,' referring by initials to the novel's immediate predecessors, though she found Mr. Knightly 'delightful.' Austen's frequent confidante, Anne Sharp, gave perhaps the best praise of all, being 'pleased with the Heroine for her Originality.'
W.H. Auden, reflecting on Austen's work in 'Letter to Lord Byron,' shuddered at her clear-eyed treatment of matrimony's financial incentives:
'It makes me most uncomfortable to see/ An English spinster of the middle-class/ Describe the amorous effects of 'brass'/ Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety/ The economic basis of society.'
The young women of '90s Los Angeles aren't mating under pressure for survival, as so many of Austen's characters did in Regency England. But Heckerling's delightful skewering of social hierarchies and material excess - which includes everyone palming a cellphone the size of a stapler - is part of what makes 'Clueless' such a brilliant and enduring adaptation. (The 2022 film 'Fire Island' approaches similar sophistication, drawing from 'Pride and Prejudice' to illustrate status-obsession among queer men.) Ceilings soar, nose-job bandages are everywhere and the fashion, by costume designer Mona May, holds up a fun house mirror to Rodeo Drive. Such flourishes are still funny today because they're so deliriously over the top. But at the start of the first dot-com boom, all that ostentation was aspirational, too. Crucially, how anyone comes upon money in 'Clueless' is less important than having gobs of it to spend.
But Cher's peculiar likability - how she manages, like Emma in Knightley's estimation, to be 'faultless in spite of all her faults' - is what makes her so difficult to replicate. Partly, that's because of Silverstone's high-pitched, puppy-dog performance, which included serendipities (such as the 18-year-old's unscripted mispronouncing of 'Haitians') that make the character's naivete indelible. Cher's limits of perception are guileless. There's an innocence about her - she's a virgin with a good heart who can't drive - that makes viewers as protective of Cher as her guard-dog father (Dan Hedaya) and do-gooder stepbrother-turned-love interest (Rudd).
Could we love a character like Cher today, when the only quality less endearing than an abundance of privilege is being ignorant of it? Consider Olivia Mossbacher, Sydney Sweeney's deadpan manipulator in Season 1 of 'The White Lotus,' whose awareness of her family's advantages drips from every blank stare over her copy of 'The Portable Ni­et­zsche.' (Incidentally, Josh also reads Ni­et­zsche by the pool.) There's still an aspirational allure - call it privilege porn - to the HBO series and other recent satires of extreme wealth. But there's a reason so many of them ('Saltburn,' 'Triangle of Sadness,' 'Bodies Bodies Bodies') also involve murder: We're past the point when laughter alone expresses our distaste for disparity.
Still, Cher Horowitz aspires to live on in the present. A stage musical adaptation, a passion project of Heckerling's, played off Broadway in 2018, and a revised version (with music by KT Tunstall) is running in London through Aug. 23 following its premiere last summer. And Silverstone herself is slated to reprise her role in a sequel series reportedly in development at Peacock, from the co-creators of 'Gossip Girl,' a far more ironic take on the genre. Can the heroine who already has everything enjoy yet another comeback? That depends how clueless she could possibly remain about having the one advantage that still matters most.
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