Can I Please Give You Some Advice?: Clueless and the Teen Makeover

Hitting theaters in midsummer, mid-decade, Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995) was poised to make maximum impact on teen culture. Coming on the heels of Kurt Cobain’s suicide and suburbia’s love affair with gangsta rap, Clueless steered white, middle-class teen culture in a different direction—one that director Amy Heckerling described simply as “happy.”¹ As Catherine Driscoll has pointed out, Clueless’s release date sandwiched it among the teen social problem films The Basketball Diaries (Scott Kalvert, 1995), Kids (Larry Clark, 1995), and Dangerous Minds (John N. Smith, 1995), but by contrast, “Clueless did not take itself seriously, promoted with tag lines like ‘Sex. Clothes. Popularity. Whatever.’”² Peter Travers, reviewing Clueless alongside Kids in Rolling Stone, pinpointed the film’s departure, and its comedic tone, noting, “The materialism in Clueless is almost as scary as the hopelessness in Kids. Whatever.”³ Instead of reveling in teen angst and rebellion, Clueless painted a picture of teen life that looked glossy, carefree, and familiar. Angela Curran has suggested that the film is a parody of teen advertising, yet the film’s form, narration, and visual style also evoke teen magazines.⁴ While these publications have long featured embarrassing moments and personal crises, the general address to the reader is one of hope and aspiration. Advice for making over one’s appearance, wardrobe, social life, and romantic entanglements abound—characterized by a notably can-do tone—and the magazines are splashed with the bright colors and bold fonts that pepper Clueless and its promotional materials. In borrowing—and simultaneously mocking—the mode of address and visual style of teen magazines, Clueless engages in the sort of intertextual excess that Valerie Wee argues characterized teen media of the late 1990s while simultaneously making over teen fashion and media culture.⁵ Marking a shift away from the mainstreaming of grunge fashion and music, Clueless’s engagement with teen magazines and teen fashion paved the way for the ascendancy of a late-1990s teen culture marked by the “happy,” “whatever” attitude that begat a return to preppy, ultra-girly fashion and squeaky clean pop stars, all despite Cher’s (Alicia Silverstone) own eventual revelation that she, herself, is clueless.

Cher introduces herself as a makeover expert in one of the first books in the Clueless young adult book series, Cher’s Guide to . . . Whatever, a tongue-in-cheek how-to manual that borrows liberally from the film’s dialogue. She announces, “Everyone has a gift. Everyone has a talent. Mine is makeovers.”⁶ As proof of her ability, she claims, “Even Josh, who was always all serious and flanneled out, credits me with bringing out his lighter side. He laughs more now and reads paperbacks.”⁷ With her constant disdain for the “grunge” fashion statements made by the “loadies,” Tai (Brittany Murphy), and Josh (Paul Rudd) (all clad in plaid flannel, dark colors, and baggy pants), Cher (and to a lesser extent, Dionne, played by Stacey Dash) endorses the opposite: cheery, preppy fashions epitomized by kneesocks, plaid skirts, and sweater sets. Alicia Silverstone’s persona had already made this fashion and attitude transition in her wildly popular series of Aerosmith videos that initially attracted Heckerling’s attention, beginning with her grungy rebel look in “Cryin’” and ending with her Catholic schoolgirl uniform in “Crazy.”⁸ While in “Cryin’” Silverstone’s character seems wholly unstable and feigns suicide to get back at an ex, by the time “Crazy” rolls around, she’s joyfully cutting class, going on a road trip with a girlfriend, and skinny-dipping. In Cher’s Guide to . . . Whatever, Cher distances herself from Silverstone’s “Cryin’” look (which featured trips to a body-piercing and tattoo shop) by admonishing the reader, “Navel piercing and tattoos—get over it!”⁹

When Cher and Dionne decide to make Tai over, the film sounds its death knell for grunge. Upon meeting Tai, Cher and Dionne size her up with a point-of-view shot that carefully examines her appearance, tilting up from her yellow skater-style sneakers and baggy pants to her oversized flannel shirt...