Clueless

The year was 2007. I was living out the beginning of sixth grade in a way that seemed as if I was making a conscious effort to embarrass my future self. I sported a questionable haircut, invested all of my money in patterned Converse sneakers and danced so absurdly to the pop hits of the time I could have made Rihanna herself question releasing the song “Shut Up and Drive.” Around this time, just as I was at the height of impressionability, my friend and I discovered a VHS tape of the 1995 cult classic, Clueless. 

Suffice it to say, the film changed my entire perspective of the way I was living my life. Clueless is bright and vibrant, full of bright yellow plaid, perfect hair, plentiful drama and larger than life personalities all packaged under a bright Los Angeles sun. When I first viewed the movie, it was a glimpse into a teenage world that I would never inhabit yet would expect to be my reality for years to come. 

The sleeper hit, which is turning 20 this month, follows Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone), a fabulously wealthy teenager living in L.A. who wears designer clothes and zooms recklessly around in her brand-new white Jeep. Clueless has everything that a teenage cult classic needs: scenes of crazy high school parties that would never happen outside of a movie, a giant makeover, music-filled shopping montages and it’s loosely based on a classic novel (Jane Austen’s Emma). Plus, it features a young Paul Rudd playing a character who wears flannel shirts, enjoys current events and reads Friedrich Nietzsche by a swimming pool, who to my young self (and my current self and probably my future self) was (is and will be) the holy grail of movie men.  

What has helped to make Clueless stick for years is that it’s endlessly quotable. In the world of Clueless, exclamations such as “as if” and “totally buggin’” are commonplace. The film was written so that brand-new sayings and catchphrases seem as if they could exist outside of the movie itself (and eventually, after the film’s success, they did). Girls on their period are “surfing the crimson wave,” the classic “hot or not” is replaced by referring to someone as a “Betty” or a “Barney” and, of course, the worst possible combination of character traits is being a “virgin who can’t drive.” 

Clueless also brims with actual pop culture references: Cher loves watching the cartoon The Ren & Stimpy Show, a student complains about accidentally leaving his Cranberries CD on the quad and speakers blasting Coolio’s “Rollin’ With My Homies” accompany parties in the film. 

Does Clueless teach valuable life lessons? Well, sort of. After giving her friend Tai (Brittany Murphy) a makeover, Cher eventually realizes she can’t mold people into something they’re not. Initially, Cher believes that Tai is the clueless one when, in reality, Cher had been clueless all along. She hadn’t seen what was right in front of her, which is that she had to let Tai be herself and also that she should date her ex-stepbrother Josh (Rudd). 

But what’s more important than the hazy lessons is the brilliant package that encases it. What has made Clueless a classic is not a heartfelt storyline, but the bright, exciting and dramatic world that the characters live in. Clueless garnered a cult following because it sculpted a world so similar to our own, yet unlike any other. A world in which rich girls have computers hooked up to their closets to help them pick out clothes, a world in which people have absurd catchphrases, a world in which someone can offhandedly say their mother died  “during a routine liposuction.”  

Clueless is simultaneously exactly like every other classic teenage movie and wholly original. It spawned a short-lived TV series in the ’90s and inspired Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” music video from 2014. Will it ever completely slip away into irrelevancy? As if.