"Ya Got Me Clueless, Look Into Your Eyes And The Skies The Limit..."

My disdain for John Hughes High School fare like The Breakfast Club (especially The Breakfast Club) is well-known but there's no denying, no matter how I felt about such projects, that they left a massive impact on pop culture. In the years following the 1980's, when such movies were released, a swath of High School set comedies came out and tried to replicate the identity of those John Hughes directed features only to come off as derivative and fade off into the oblivion. It was only those High School set movies that tried to be something different that managed to create their own impact on pop culture.

High School Musical brought heavily stylized musical shenanigans to the world of High School and became a pop culture phenomenon in the process, American Pie brought R-rated raunch to the subgenre and Mean Girls placed a greater emphasis on social hierarchies of High School that had previously been treated as just fodder for background jokes and became a comedy classic in the process. As for the 1995 Amy Heckerling movie Clueless, it brought the High School movie into the 1990's and placed a greater emphasis on female characters, something only High School-set movies like Heathers and Pretty In Pink had really done in the past.

For the lead character of Clueless, we have Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone), the daughter of a super wealthy litigator, shoe doesn't have a drivers license but does have a love for her wardrobe and maintaining her social status at school. Wher her father's college Freshman stepson, Josh Lucas (Paul Rudd who hasn't aged a day since 1995), comes to live with the the two of them for awhile, he puts Cher's personality under the microscope and declares that she's far too self-absorbed and too selfish, Obviously, Cher can't stand the idea of herself being any of those things, so she set outs to be totally selfless so she can feel better about herself.

The way Cher decides that she'll manage to prove her selflessness is by taking new student, Tia Frasier (Brittany Murphy), under her wing and make her just as popular as herself. It's a mission that soon dovetails into all kinds of social awkwardness and other High School antics that prove to be all sorts of amusing because of how much humor they bring to well-worn stereotypes of the High School scene. Clueless doesn't just utilize archetypes of High School movies like The Popular Girl or The Stoner, it embraces them and makes them so entertaining that you remember why these character staples are so enduring in the first place.

Cher herself manages to be the singular embodiment of every rich, Blonde, white popular High School girl that tends to pop up in these movies but both the script and Alicia Silverstone's performance turn Cher into something more than a stereotype. There's a few times in the movie that I'll freely admit made me wonder if Cher was a character who could sustain an entire movie centered around her antics, but thankfully, those bumps in the road don't detract from the numerous humorous moments that derive from her character and Cher's gradual growth over the course of the story (Heckerling's screenplay, thankfully, keeps Cher delivering plenty of gags  even when she starts to improve herself in the third act).

22 years later, it becomes clear why Alicia Silverstone's performance here became so iconic and beloved, she really does play off the more self-centered nature of Cher in a way that feels realistic to how teenagers typically are self-centered (I speak from experience as a former teenager myself!) but you can also see there's not all that much mean-spiritedness in her self-centered tendencies, which is key. Silverstone plays the character like a harp and she shows real comedic chops that pair up well Heckerling's sharply-written dialogue. Some of the biggest laughs that Cher delivers come from recurring voice-overs from Cher herself that let the viewer inside her psyche. Not only does this give a greater understanding as to how the characters reacting to certain events, but it also serves as a vessel for some of Clueless's funniest moments, like how Cher notes that, to attract a potential male, "...you have to show a little skin. This reminds boys of being naked and they think of sex., which Silverstone delivers in a matter-of-fact tone that had me rolling. That's a super funny moment in Clueless, a film far from short on such hillarious bits.