In recent days, I have found nothing more frightening than the eerie uncanniness and timelessness of Clueless. The Amy Heckerling film from 1995 that stars Alicia Silverstone in a parody of Jane Austen’s Emma introduced a number of regrettable phrases into our lexicon, but also foreshadowed the dilapidating education system throughout the country, limning it as one built solely on social structure with little attention paid to the quality of education.
Even scarier, the education disseminated is far from traditional; instead, it teaches each student that everything in life is negotiable and to “never accept a first offer.” Cher’s notion that the initial grades on her report card are merely a “jumping off point” is mordantly comical in that it highlights how superficial and privileged she is, but it’s also a dark foreboding about the fluidity of systems that we idealize as structurally sound.
The flimsy education disseminated similarly relates to the fluidity of language, with nouns like “jeep” transformed into the verb “jeeping.” One can see the perpetuation of this linguistic phenomenon in our ubiquitous use of the contemporary “Googling” or “Facebooking.” While these later words establish a commercial synecdoche from which we can hardly escape, the linguistic transformation itself creates an air of superiority around those who manipulate the language. In this linguistic evolution, Clueless creates a world in which teacher and student, parent and child are equals, and a world in which knowledge becomes circuitous and almost accepted as unchanging. Therefore, knowledge does not transcend; rather, it merely becomes repackaged in another form. Take for example Cher’s knowledge of Hamlet and the line “to thine own self be true.” Her memory of this line is not because of its context but because of whether Mel Gibson delivers it. While she is oblivious to the conversation that Josh and his unnamed girlfriend have, she is able to disrupt it by dropping pop-culture rooted knowledge that provides a fallacious air of superiority.
The same faulty knowledge offered in Clueless exists in today’s ubiquitous use of the Internet or, more specifically, Google. The intent here is not to rant on either, but to suggest that easily accessible information should not be misunderstood as knowledge. The ability to find out the Rutherford B. Haye’s favorite color should not be misconstrued as a scholarly understanding of the 19th President of the United States.
Clueless is still entertaining in its light-heartedness and nostalgic for anyone who came of age in the 1990’s, but it’s also frightening how much the privilege bestowed on the characters manifested itself in real life only a few decades later.
