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The number of media outlets that did stories on the 20th anniversary of the movie "Clueless" — and tried to reach for meaning — was kind of astounding. Here's just a sampling that I heard or saw — so far.
"I don't know why Dionne's going out with a high school boy, they're like dogs," Cher famously laments. "You have to clean them and feed them and they're just like these nervous creatures that jump and slobber all over you."
Would she ever date a high school boy? "Ugh. As if!"…But the movie was about more than teenage angst over clothes and boys. It challenged stereotypes about the way young women speak — you know, like, the "Valley Girl" thing. Cher knew her Shakespeare as well as her Calvin Klein, and in one memorable scene from the film, she corrects a pretentious woman on a line from Hamlet.
Saturday on KPCC's Off-Ramp, John Rabe talked to director Amy Heckerling. The interview runs 12 minutes. Sample:
"Clueless" was more than the source for "as if" and "whatever." It was more than a movie about L.A. — "Everywhere in L.A takes 20 minutes." It was more than the precursor to "Legally Blonde," with its pretty, somewhat ditzy, but highly intelligent blonde heroine.It was, in fact, a rare accurate movie about teenagers and their world. On the whole, they're good kids who try to get along with each other, and the adults in their lives try to do the same. For my money, that's why we're still watching it, and quoting it, 20 years later.
Then there are the Clueless-spawned LA guides. Curbed LA offers a map of the Clueless spots in LA:
Clueless endures, not just as a portrait of a certain class at a certain time (heroine Cher totally has a loqued-out Jeep), but also of Los Angeles in the mid-nineties, with its indoor malls, nouveau megamansions, Valley tract house parties, and "everywhere you go has valet."
And Grantland offers us its journey through the LA as seen in the film.
To this day I can quote the opening speech from Clueless the way Cher can quote Hamlet (the Mel Gibson version, of course)….
Clueless, celebrating its 20th anniversary on July 19, was the first movie I ever saw in theaters multiple times. From the first time I watched it, at the Sherman Oaks 5 theater, with a Primus music video (“Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver”) running before it, I was obsessed. The moment it ended, I wanted to see it again. At the time, I had no idea that it was such a rare bird: a movie that is generous-hearted and funny, stars women as allies, and portrays Los Angeles as a basically benevolent, diverse place. It’s also written and directed by a woman, Amy Heckerling, which I was blissfully unaware was not the norm.
