Clueless
It seems unlikely that Jane Austen would have enjoyed the MTV beach-party premiere of Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s savvy new film version of Austen’s novel Emma. Even when she was alive, Jane never had much use for watering places–in 1801 her father’s ill health forced her to move to Bath, and she left there in 1806 with “happy feelings of escape.” But no doubt she would have understood perfectly the impetus behind the whole affair. The woman who wrote Sense and Sensibility, who described Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars as “neither of them quite enough in love to think that three hundred and fifty pounds a year would supply them with the comforts of life,” would certainly understand the need for a sensible approach to marketing, the need to reel in the lucrative teen market by trotting out Coolio, Luscious Jackson, and Arrowsmith video vixen Alicia Silverstone.
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Sure, we talk and dress a lot differently than people did in Austen’s day; we have fancy new forms of communication and transportation, even new diseases. But we still get married, and despite feminism and the pill and those never-ending debates about who pays, courtship hasn’t really changed much in the past 200 years: women today obsess on exactly the same romantic dilemmas that plague Jane Austen’s heroines. How much encouragement should you give a boy who may like you? (Too much and the entire world will know you like him, too little and he’ll think you have no use for him.) How can you tell the difference between a cad and–to borrow an expression from Liz Phair–“the kind of guy who makes love ’cause he’s in it”? (A hint: Don’t rely on either his looks or his manners.) How can you save face when you overhear some guy dissing you at a party? (Tell the story with great spirit among your friends.) If your prospects look dim, at what age do you give up and settle for someone you don’t really love? (Not a minute before 27.) What do you say to a man who thinks you mean yes when you’ve just told him no? (One suggestion: “I do assure you, Sir, that I have no pretension whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. I would rather be paid the compliment of being believed.”)
Heckerling clearly feels equally confined by seriousness. At the MTV Clueless beach-party premiere, when Daisy Fuentes–no doubt inspired by the Paramount PR that describes Clueless as an “update on teenage chaos…focusing on teenage girls who are worldly, rich and hyper-hormonal”–asked her how her current film differed from Fast Times, Heckerling just couldn’t bring herself to take the question seriously. She said that since more than ten years had elapsed, she’d just gone ahead and made the same movie over again. Her joke was clearly lost on Fuentes; the exchange was uncannily like one of those classic moments in Pride and Prejudice when Mr. Bennet is making fun of Mrs. Bennet and she hasn’t a clue she’s the butt of the joke.
The straight boy who convinces Cher to give up Contempo Casuals and act in a socially responsible fashion–to forgo MTV’s The Real World and start watching CNN–is her ex-stepbrother Josh (Paul Rudd), who has many of the qualities of Emma’s patient suitor. Critic Ronald Blythe has called Mr. Knightley “the timeless Englishman, the real thing, modest, unaffected, somewhat inadequate of speech…just, intelligent but not intellectual, loving rather than lover-like.” Though Josh isn’t the timeless Englishman, he is the timeless Josh: a sweet, well-groomed “school nerd.” We can tell right away he’s a stand-up dude because he wears an Amnesty International T-shirt, listens to mope rock, and wants to be an environmental lawyer.
Though Cher obviously doesn’t spend much time researching her debates (she refers to the inhabitants of Haiti as “Hate-ians”), she obviously has no fear of public speaking and loves to talk–yet another thing she has in common with Emma, who talks more than any other character in all of Jane Austen: according to one study, Emma speaks 42,800 words, more than twice as many as her closest competitor, Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. Only Silverstone’s agent knows how many lines she has in Clueless, but she’s in just about every scene and has a significant number of voice-overs. The other characters do a great job of swirling about Cher, but Clueless rests mainly on Silverstone’s shoulders: Heckerling’s snappy lines would fall flat without this actress’s priceless facial expressions and intonations.
