The 1990s saw a revolution within the film industry, where Sundance breakout hits from young, transgressive filmmakers were treated with the same enthusiasm as the established masters of cinema. It was also a decade in which Hollywood’s blockbusters got bigger, and often better; while it's easy to grow cynical at the corporate greed that their success inspired, blockbusters like Jurassic Park and Terminator 2: Judgment Day are as close-to-perfect as populist filmmaking can get. The one detriment within this period was that Hollywood left its adolescent audience behind; successful films could either be family-oriented (Home Alone, Toy Story) or exclusively for adults (Eyes Wide Shut, Ghost), but teenagers that looked to see themselves represented on screen were disappointed.
The decline in high school comedies was the natural conclusion to the end of the “Brat Pack” era, which overstayed its welcome by the point that Fresh Horses and Kansas were met with bitter reviews. Although early John Hughes projects, such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club, celebrated the the adolescent experience, there was a limit to the audience’s nostalgia; the “Brat Pack” quickly lost their charm, as it was evident that films centered on moody, obnoxious teenagers didn’t contain any fresh insights. The members of the “Brat Pack” also aged out, as Anthony Michael Hall, Andrew McCarthy, and Rob Lowe failed once they were no longer believable as high school students.
Among the few filmmakers of the “Brat Pack” era that challenged the definition of the subgenre was Amy Heckerling, whose directorial debut Fast Times At Ridgemont High offered a harsher critique on the vapid nature of teenage soul-searching. Raunchy and thought-provoking, Fast Times was a compelling narrative that just happened to center on teenagers. Hollywood attempted to keep Heckerling in a box with gigs like National Lampoon’s European Vacation and Look Who’s Talking, but she escaped from sanitized mediocrity with 1995’s Clueless.
Clueless offered an immediate correction to the melodrama of teenage soap operas through the depiction of high school as an escapist fantasy. Enough attention had been paid to nerds and outcasts that it was more subversive for Clueless to center on the popular, wealthy kids who entertained the luxuries of their privilege. The “Brat Pack” films sought to affirm to their audience that the problems they faced in high school were universal, but Clueless laughed them off, as none of the stresses of being a teenager would stick with them. Clueless showed that experiences could be traded like luxuries, but didn’t burden the audience with an overt cry for sympathy. The joy of Clueless is the recognition that young minds were capable of insight, even if it was dedicated to trivial topics.
Clueless continued an Old Hollywood trend, in which a classic work of literature was revamped for a different generation; given that the social cliques of suburban California bore a lot in common with the high society of Victorian-era England, it was no surprise that Clueless took inspiration from Jane Austen’s Emma. Austen described her protagonist as “handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition,” and challenged the notion that a privileged character would be self-serving; in the same way that Emma Woodhouse appointed herself as a matchmaker, Alicia Silverstone’s Cher Horowitz aimed to rectify the unfortunate characters in her high school through a series of “good deeds.”
Silverstone’s performance was a novelty, as Cher was a character who was too blissfully ignorant or aggressively stubborn to serve as a compelling protagonist. However, Silverstone was able to craft a clever, bubbly persona whose natural ability to see the integrity of others gave her an edge in social interactions. Cher’s concern about the well-being of her peers captured the joy any teenager felt if they discovered a talent; nonetheless, Silverstone also acknowledged that Cher’s passion for improving the circumstances of others was a method to avoid discussions about her own desires.
Clueless has aged well in comparison to the films it inspired as a result of its selective affinity for the popular culture of its era; while the references to current media in She’s All That or Never Been Kissed are hopelessly debated, Clueless is a celebration of 1990s alternative rock and the revival of Valspeak. Clueless doesn’t grant any credence to any particular fad, as Cher’s areas of interest are as erratic as her social gambles; nonetheless, the rare moments of unadulterated jubilation are endearing enough to become an appropriate time capsule. Clueless may be the best way for teenagers in 2025 to understand what wish fulfillment in 1995 looked like.
Despite how many trends it epitomized, Clueless didn’t turn around the careers of its most integral collaborators. Silverstone’s career was torpedoed after the venomous reaction to her performance as Barbara Gordon in Batman & Robin, and her most memorable co-star, Brittany Murphy, tragically died in 2009. Although Paul Rudd has sustained himself as a mainstay in American comedy, it’s his role as Cher’s love interest, Josh Lucas, that’s deemed most “problematic” by today’s standards.
Even if Heckerling’s trajectory was similarly stalled, the immediate effect of Clueless was felt on the next generation of teen films; 10 Things I Hate About You was just The Taming of the Shrew, She’s All That was inspired by Pygmalion, and Cruel Intentions modernized Dangerous Liaisons. Considering the underwhelming era of edgeless Netflix high school dramedies released in the 2020s, Clueless is even more impressive as a divergence from the norm.