The Menacing, Exuberant Cluelessness of ‘Clueless’

I am not the first viewer of this movie to see it as essentially apocalyptic.

This is Lurid Speculations, a column on ’90s movies and t4t sexuality by Grace Elisabeth Lavery.

Lip gloss, painstakingly applied, lends itself especially well to the fetishizing glare of the close-up—the cinematic technique that, in Laura Mulvey’s famous argument, disarticulates the female body, materializing and necessitating a particular way of looking at women that, prior to narrative cinema, visual art could only enable rather than enforce. The contours of the shot are familiar: The lips protrude against a dark background, as a finger or an instrument moves into the frame and pushes onto the lip, whose plumpness receives it with a slight shimmy. Deep red gloss stands out against the dark background; this shot is conventionally abstracted out of the film’s narrative sequence, although it is not, exactly, a montage. The cavity stretches open, tongue retracts, and vertical lines on the bottom lip carve the flesh into alien striations. The sharp philtrum towers above its voluptuous red counterpart, the two so different in composition and texture as to render the fact that we use the same word, “lip,” for both, an absurdity.

Todd Haynes’ 1996 movie Velvet Goldmine opens by exploring the alchemical implications of this type of shot. At the climax of a dreamy pre-credit sequence, a young boy named Jack Fairy is beaten by his schoolmates, then walks home through what looks like a theatrical set until he arrives in this dark room, bleeding slightly from his mouth. The camera follows his finger as it makes a remarkable discovery: the very blood that was intended to display his shame can be swiped over his lip to gloss it; to make it shiny. His mouth pulsates as he learns this secret, and in so doing teaches us something about the cinematic tradition into which he has been placed: The body as it is fetishized and disarticulated in this shot is, perhaps perversely, unsexed by the very act of sexualization. It is a sexy body—even the boy Jack Fairy’s body is growing sexual, hence the panic he has engendered—but it is not a body that possesses a sex. Velvet Goldmine depicts a body absorbing shed blood back into its own function, somaticizing what had appeared as adornment or falsehood (the two meanings that converge on the ambiguous phrase “make-up”). Haynes’ shot suggests that it is not merely the drag queen who is invested in the technological efficacy of the lip shot—although of course no drag queen movie has been made in which full advantage of the phallus-in-mouth suggestion of the lip gloss shot is not taken—but rather, that this image delivers a testament to flesh itself, flesh as it wills itself into sexuation. The good news, if it can really be called that, is that the very femininity that had rendered the flesh an intolerable encumbrance derives from a Phoenix force of such power that it can and will overwhelm the very logics of time, space, history, and sociability.

Such an apocalyptic pronouncement will strike the reader as a hifalutin way to begin an essay on Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s 1995 high school comedy, because it ignores the two usual aspects of that film on which critics have generally chosen to remark: The fact that it is a loose adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Emma, and its confident inhabitation of a made-up Valley Girl argot—some of whose vocabulary was absorbed into IRL slang, and now (“as if”) feels appropriately dated. I am not, however, the first viewer of this movie to see it as essentially apocalyptic—Peter Travers, the reviewer for Rolling Stone, saw (perhaps jokily) Heckerling’s movie as a comic restaging of Larry Clark’s Kids, released the same month.

The funny lingo and the Austen parallels have served to reassure reviewers that Clueless is “clever,” as the summary on Rotten Tomatoes has it, or “smart,” as everyone from the LA Times to Vanity Fair said. The perception that the Emma references made Clueless smart was enough to warrant the movie pride of place in John Kucich and Diane Sadoff’s introduction to their co-edited collection of scholarly essays, Victorian Afterlife, and Clueless remains a popular choice for college syllabuses (I’ve taught it myself) because of its perceived literacy—despite the almost complete disposability of the Austenian framework. Elton, the handsome young socialite whom Cher attempts to foist onto her young charge Tai, is based on Emma’s Mr. Elton. Perhaps, at a push, Mr. Elton’s early departure to Bath explains his analogue’s often-repeated-but-never-paid-off desire to leave the room—in his first appearance, he attempts to bolt to retrieve a Cranberries CD that he is concerned might be stolen—but it’s a stretch. Nobody watching Clueless needs Jane Austen for anything other than reassurance.

I am not the first viewer of this movie to see it as essentially apocalyptic.

Yet if the smartness might be understood as a kind of genre-embarrassment, an attempt to engraft a trashy genre flick onto something more legitimate, one would have to admit that the attempt fails spectacularly. If there are pleasures in Clueless, they are not finally located in the exchange of cultural capital for luxury goods—the movie’s costumes as well as its general representation of fashion, for example, are closer to Toys than to Sex and the City. They are located in the drive of flesh becoming sexed, of blood being smeared over lips, of two mochaccinos that prompt an immediate desire to ralph. It is a pleasure rooted in the hysterical ambivalence of the femme autogynephile.

Clueless is not merely not smart—it is thrillingly, terrifyingly, exuberantly dumb. For one thing, it features a cameo appearance by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. For another, its characters all become gradually less smart: Mr. Hall lowers his standards in debate class. Tai starts off goofy, goes through a bimbo phase, and eventually synthesizes the two by maintaining the speech patterns with which she has been endowed while pairing off with her stoner crush, Travis. Josh, the central male love interest, is displayed reading a book with the word “NIETZSCHE” prominently written on it (a cliché which, again, is signaled as a mark of dumbness rather than smarts), and, in his final shot, speaks the shibboleth “buggin’” indicating that he, too has slipped into an idiolect that, at the movie’s start, he would have considered beneath him. Cher’s breakthrough is that she is as clueless as Tai, and also “butt crazy in love”—where the adverb “butt” intensifies “crazy” as it does “butt naked,” while introducing into the anagnorisis a generalized anality, suggesting the imminence of both shitting and buttfucking. Such characterological stupidities are beside the point—they might, after all, be attributed to a kind of strategic canniness that, if it is not smart, works providentially to make life more bearable for these characters. (Such is the tactful dumbness of the blonde who doesn’t want to marry a man for his money—she wants to marry him for your money.) They might be, were it not for the structural dumbness of which the characters’ individual inarticulacies are merely symptomatic, and which organizes the movie as its grounding cosmology.

The inability of a body to identify precisely the source of its discomfort—a theme that arises several times in Clueless—is nowhere more vigorously exemplified than in Cher’s massage. Alicia Silverstone’s body, as white and as SoCal as many other Hollywood A-listers, nonetheless exhibits—in its voluptuous receptivity to being pressed and jiggled—a femme difference that, afterward, would elicit such notoriously fatphobic attacks as to cause her to retreat from Hollywood a few years later. But this is more than a body that Hollywood can’t handle—it is a body that cannot handle itself, and whose spectacular exhibition on this baby-pink catafalque only proves that her discomfort during the massage is not soothed by the abundance of feminized luxury. Rather, because the condition of discomfort is femininity itself, self-causing and self-replicating, this kind of luxurious somatic manipulation only externalizes the interior condition of being, at all times, the princess lying on the pea—a pea of such atomic obduracy that no number of pillows can smother it. It is not merely trans princesses for whom the necessity of scrubbing the P from the body conditions any and all physical sensations, then—but also for this femme embodiment laid into a funereal pink casket and touched all over.

Nobody watching Clueless needs Jane Austen for anything other than reassurance. 

When Cher (named, literally, after Cher) makes up her face, she is awaiting the arrival of Christian, the obscure young gentleman whose mystery Murray eventually dispels with the revelation that he’s a “cake boy,” a “disco-dancing, Oscar Wilde-reading, Streisand-ticket-holding friend of Dorothy.” But can we be sure that, when Murray then adds “he’s gay,” he is summarizing that litany of descriptors rather than simply adding another one to their number? Is that all he is? Let’s look at the evidence. Next to the rainbow on the perimeter of the school noticeboard is a headline that reads, simply “how guys live their lives.” What about this wee guy, high waistband on his pleated slacks, greaser quiff, Chris-Isaak–cum-French-Stewart moue, enters a room like Sky Masterson looking to land a sucker bet: Is everyone in this movie transsexual?

Maybe—I’ll return to that hypothesis shortly—but for now I just want to note that time pools around Christian, who operates on a different timeline to everyone else. Not only does his appearance and eccentric speech, which Cher’s Dad inexplicably diagnoses as a “Rat Pack” thing, excavate the nostalgia for the 1950s that holds together the genre of the high school movie (Grease and Happy Days being two important cases) and thereby produce an odd kind of anachronism in the movie’s appearance, but he himself seems to inhabit time weirdly—he can party all night; he ducks out of movie dates awkwardly early; he arrives midway through the school year, a new boy.

Is everyone in this movie transsexual? Maybe.

In this, of course, he is like Tai, and therefore like the catalyzing event that supposedly gives the movie its title, but in this respect too we can see that Clueless inhabits genre far more cluelessly than is generally acknowledged: Unlike other high school movies, the temporal scaffolding of the academic calendar is almost entirely disregarded. Josh is being pressured to go to his mother’s house for spring break, but other than that, it is extremely difficult to determine either the time of year or the duration of the plot (what narratologists call the “story time,” distinct from the “discourse time,” which in this case is ninety-seven minutes).

What I have called the pooling of time around Christian is notable mostly because it draws attention to the chronological anarchy of the movie as a whole—expanded out from the not-exactly-a-montage quality of the make-up sequence I described in my first paragraph. The phrase “not exactly a montage” is not mine, though—nor, probably, does it originally belong to Tai, who uses it to describe to her new fans what flashed before her eyes during her brief and perilous encounter with the two boys who held her over the side. There are so many moments of not-exactly-montage in Clueless that one can hardly be surprised that’s how Tai understood her own life: the opening “Noxzema commercial”; the photoshoot where Cher tries to set up Tai with Elton . . . there are more.

The movie as a whole is not exactly a montage: There are no events, no high school football game, no graduation, barely even a prom. In this sense, its real comparator is not Mean Girls (which genuinely is smart, and therefore less compelling) but Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, another movie in which the perpetual summer of the Southern Californian high school is occupied by sedimented histories collapsing on top of each other—not exactly a montage, but not exactly not.

There are so many moments of not-exactly-montage in Clueless that one can hardly be surprised that’s how Tai understood her own life.

To reopen the whole “is everyone in this movie transsexual?” can of worms: Christian, sure. And obviously also Amber, in her “designer imposter perfume,” who appears to be the drag queen who perhaps started where Tai is and moved towards Cher, but overshot the latter and ended on the wrong side of parody, such that the “balls flying at [her] face” that dismay her surgeon may as well be her own. And, sweetly and certainly, Miss Geist and Mr. Hall, the classic t4t pairing of late-in-life transitioners, surprised and delighted to find with each other a romance founded on a feeling of being known. It’s a beautifully sentimental vignette whose consummate execution in the first reel is Clueless’s one real coup.

On the other hand, the sense of Clueless as a kind of transsexual universe—which is, full disclosure, a conversation I have had, by sheer coincidence, with about ten different trans people over the last few months—reveals another of the psychic forms in which trans identifications, especially trans erotic identifications, tend to embed themselves: as one set of flowers within the wide garden of lesbianism. The named characters, or most of them at least, seem to have grown in trans directions, but the agar culture in which they are growing is deep lez, as Elizabeth Freeman calls it. Shortly before we learn that Ms. Stoeger “seemed to be same-sex oriented,” we learn that the mean and frumpy pair of lady math teachers are “actually married”; and perhaps more surprising than that the entire faculty appears to be queer is that the most startlingly L Word: High School Years moment in the whole movie frames Stacey Dash’s Dionne, rather than Cher, as the queen bee.

To recap: Clueless is not smart; Clueless uses and quickly dispenses with smartness as an alibi to excuse its catastrophically incompetent performance of genre-literacy, a performance conditioned by an immobilized timeline, by a ubiquitous sense of trans identity emerging from a kind of ambient lesbian aesthetic, and above all by the smooth femme flesh of its central characters, which object is the true subject of the picture. About which subject, and on which implied question—what does femme flesh want?—Heckerling is as clueless as anyone. Indeed, it is the stupefied condition of contemplating such a question that seems, in the end, to have been the referent of the word “clueless” as it has been spoken, in a strangely incantational tone, by Cher and Josh.

On the question what does femme flesh want?—Amy Heckerling is as clueless as anyone. 

The irony of the latter is cheap but unavoidable: When one hears Josh pronounce that Tai is “even more clueless than you,” and we feel that he is insinuating something, although we can’t tell what—and when, again, we detect the same note in Cher’s voice as she finally realizes that she is clueless, after all—when, that is, the movie speaks its own name—it is offering neither more nor less than a clue, a clue that it neglects to decrypt.

Because the problem itself is impervious to decryption: what does Cher want; what does Cher’s body want; what does the face that receives the push of the flesh in the pink sarcophagus want? Opening her landmark study of the place of sentimental women’s fictions in American culture, Lauren Berlant writes: “Everyone knows what the female complaint is: Women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking.” Is this living? That by which we are assailed in Clueless, which appeals to us to offer us love in return for praise, is not exactly a force that wants to be loved. Rather, it wants to be lovable but unloved—to which end, it leaves behind no clue, and effaces everything it has touched.