Hawthorne Ripley Prompt #1

The turn of the 21st century saw multiple Jane Austen novels revived and re-appropriated in film. Amy Heckerling’s 1995 coming-of-age comedy Clueless is not necessarily defined by Emma any more than Bridgette Jones Diary is by Pride and Prejudice, and neither intends to appeal exclusively to scholars of English literature—that’s the whole point. Clueless attempts to demonstrate that the romantic misunderstandings and naiveté that coming-of-age stories involve transcend social mores, time and place. Blockbuster adaptations of capital-R Romantic comedies reflect a roughly contemporaneous leveling out of the pedestals on which high and low art stand. In the field of cultural studies, such a reckoning allowed for critical insights otherwise limited by an arbitrary academic focus on “high art” (Storey 1998.) A critical look Clueless reflects the thesis that modern culture can be better understood in academia under democratized conditions which blur the line between high culture and popular or mass culture (Schudson, 1998.)
For a rom-com so emblematic of the 1990s in its values, fashion, music, language, and humor, the plot points of Clueless match up near-perfectly with Austen’s 1815 novel of manners. In both, a well-off young woman has been brought into early adulthood by the death of her mother, left to take care of her father as the female head of the household. This circumstance gives her a great deal of confidence and a (perhaps misplaced) sense of superiority over peers and suitors. Attempting to play matchmaker, she comes to find herself far less worldly than she imagines, and she and her friends fall happily for men Cher (Emma) never wanted to look twice at. Clueless’ literary origins are satirized by Cher’s own naïve precociousness. Brazenly confident, she imagines herself a gifted interpreter of literature, politics, law, and life itself, and self-consciously adopts high-brow references in her daily speech. Not quite remembering Charles Dickens but getting the message, Cher reflects: “It’s like that book I read in ninth grade that said, “’Tis a far, far better thing doing stuff for other people.” She earlier describes the appearance of another girl as “a full-on Monet:” from far away, it’s okay, but “up close it’s a big old mess.” (Heckerling, 1995.) These moments mirror the film’s own appropriation of high art and satirize class distinctions. Value-labels awarded to cultural objects are also rendered ridiculous by Cher’s despair when she a mugger tells her to drop to the pavement— “you don’t understand,” she says with a gun to her head, “this is an Alaïa.”
Cher’s attempts to intellectually and physically make-over her high school’s awkward new girl also mirror Emma’s embrace of lower-class woman Harriet Smith in Austen’s novel. Cher/Emma teach Tai/Harriet a word a day to achieve an affect of wealth and glamour. The makeover montage which ensues in Clueless exemplifies a pattern Katherine Sender deftly identifies in “Queer Eye:” wielding beauty standards and stereotypes to entrench consumptive habits, TV makeovers embeds the neoliberal order into their self-improvement scheme (Sender, 2009.) The absence of a makeover in Emma is evidence of the trope’s relationship to neoliberalism. The immediate transformation of Cher’s first failed love interest from possible sex partner to gay shopping buddy similarly projects what Sender calls a “longstanding reputation” of gay men as affluent and fashionable, which Sender argues is used to court heterosexual consumers “who want to be associated with the positive aspects of the gay market” (Sender, 2009.)
Clueless’ subordinance to Jane Austen’s “high art” allows it to engage in contemporary political discourse independently and light-heartedly. Given that its plot was lifted from a whitewashed / straightwashed story from another century, attention is owed to the film’s insertions of marginalized groups. Dionne is a trope-defining “token Black sidekick” to Cher, and her messy relationship with her long-term boyfriend Murray plays on and reinforces stereotypes about women and men of color: she struggles to prevent Murray from calling her “woman,” to which Murray responds facetiously: “Okay, but street slang is an increasingly valid form of expression. Most of the feminine pronouns do have mocking, but not necessarily a misogynistic undertone” (Heckerling, 1995.) The exchange is made more endearing by Murray’s participation in Cher’s innocent attempts to speak, as Tai says, “like grownups” (Heckerling, 1995.)
Elements like these which are non-essential to the adaptation of Emma lend themselves to an analysis of 1990s culture. The increasing prominence of politically correct and incorrect language is a frequent punchline -- “do you prefer fashion victim or ensemble-y challenged?” (Heckerling, 1995.) And Cher’s virginity is, like Emma’s, preserved and celebrated. Only in Clueless does it seem to go against the social grain however, with her friends mocking her innocence and high standards. Standing in the heart of the AIDs epidemic and in the aftermath of the free love movement, Cher’s prim and proper values reflect a culture increasingly averse to casual sex, while her world-peace-oriented revelations reflect Americans embracing the language of humanitarian intervention. Thus, the cultural and socio-political contexts that Clueless overlays on Austen’s novel are highly informative. Yet there is a stark contrast in the stature of the two cultural artifacts in cultural valuation, with the former being a Blockbuster film intended for masses of (mostly) adolescent girls, and the latter being a classic work of literature with long-standing respect as “high art.” The distance between the two, and the demonstrated utility of Clueless to cultural analysis, lends credence to Schudson’s view that mass media is as useful for the study of society as high-art cultural artifacts (Schudson, 1987.)

Works Cited:

Heckerling, A. (Director). (1995). Clueless. [Film]. Paramount Pictures Studios.
    
Schudson, M. (1987). The new validation of popular culture. In J. Storey (Ed.) Cultural theory and popular culture, pp. 495-503. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Sender, K. (2006). Queens for a day: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the neoliberal project. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23(2).

Storey, J. (2009). What is popular culture Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, pp. 1-16.