Clueless by Design
For years, I'd somehow managed to avoid seeing Clueless.
Heathers and Mean Girls, to which Clueless is often compared, are the quintessential high school movies of Generation X and the Millennials, respectively. Based mostly on the 1995 release date, I’d long suspected that Clueless would be the defining high school film of Gen Y.
Having finally seen Clueless, it's uncanny how spot-on that description was. The cultural--especially the generational--touchstones are so plentiful here that I can skip the plot analysis and do a thorough review from a purely generational perspective.
For those who haven't read my generational breakdown which includes generations that the media and pop culture have memory holed, Generation Y is between Gen X and the Millennials. It's a transitional generation like the Silent Generation and Generation Jones.
Related: Lost Generations
Some people accuse me of making up an ad hoc generational cohort to fit a preexisting theory, but they forget that Gen Y used to be talked about in the news media and popular entertainment all the time.
But then the Millennials came along, and Boomers decided they made much better punching bags than the previous two generations. Thus, Ys were ex post facto folded into Gen X and the Millennial Generation.
Due to coming of age in a transitional period and suffering the deliberate blurring of their generational identity with the cohorts on either side, Generation Y can be hard to pick out from the Xer and Millennial crowd. That is, until you know what to look for.
There are real and definite qualities that distinguish Ys, but these behaviors and attitudes are arbitrarily assigned to Ge X or the Millennials depending on the--usually Boomer--commentator's immediate rhetorical needs.
Let's take a look at some defining Gen Y traits.
Born 1979-1989.
Have personal memories of the Cold War.
One foot in the pre-internet world and the other in the internet-dominant world.
Grew up being told that majority-minority America was inevitable but enjoyed a relatively high trust childhood environment.
As the Boomers' younger children, were sheltered and bribed for their affection instead of being manipulated and neglected like their elder Gen X siblings.
The divorce and latchkey kid epidemics that started with Gen X were in full swing during Gen Y's formative years. Many Ys came from broken homes and perceived it as normal.
To compensate, Ys were raised in a fool's paradise of cartoons, plastic toys, video games, and suburban enclaves. They grew up on the Truman Show.
American culture still had a vestige of vaguely Christian morality when Gen Y came of age. Many Ys were even taken to church regularly as kids but fell away when encouraged to, "Decide what's true for yourself!"
Raised with the unquestioned expectation that they would all go to college. Yes, Xers got the, "You wanna flip burgers all your life?" speech, but in 1969 it was still assumed that some people weren't cut out for college. To Ys, college was a normal life stage that just happened, like losing your teeth or dying.
Grew up during peak racial harmony. No memory of 60s and 70s unrest, and saw the 90s riots as aberrations.
Education focused almost exclusively on rote memorization and regurgitation of ephemeral facts instead of practical skills. The "good at tests" generation.
The first guinea pigs of Leftist social engineering back before the process was perfected. Escaped the Millennials' full on indoctrination but picked up some residual utopianism.
Related: Marketing Millennials
To drive the differences home, let's compare and contrast Xers', Ys', and Millennials' generational vices.
Generation X: pretentious, cynical, and nihilistic
Generation Y: hapless, tractable, and naive to a fault
Millennials: self-absorbed, needy, and entitled.
Now that the picture's a bit clearer, let's dive into Clueless and see why it's the definitive Gen Y high school movie.
After a brief opening montage, we're introduced to our main protagonist, Cher, played by Alicia Silverstone. Right away, she hits all the Gen Y high notes.
You know the old, "Bob is such a perfect example of _____, that if he didn't exist, we'd have to invent him," quip? Cher comes off as writer/director Amy Heckerling trying to invent the epitome of Generation Y.
The movie was released in 1995 and takes place over the course of a school year. That means the story either happens between fall 94 and spring 95 or fall 95 and spring 96. Cher's age is stated as 15 at the start of the film, meaning she was born in 1979 or 1980. Either way, she's early Gen Y.
Cher's dad is a widower and multiple divorcee. Cher appears to be his only natural child out of all those unions. She has grown up with a succession of stepmoms and at least one stepbrother, though it's strongly suggested she has other stepsiblings. Broken home: check.
As a corporate lawyer who's made his fortune by parasitically latching onto the system, Cher's dad is always busy with work. He tries to compensate by furnishing Cher with every material luxury, including a lavish room in their palatial home, a seemingly limitless line of credit, a cell phone.
Interesting side note: Cell phones feature more prominently in Clueless than in Mean Girls, which was made a decade later. Remember that in 95, having a cell phone was as much a mark of affluence for a high school kid as having a sports car.
Speaking of emerging technology, Cher dips her toes int he digital world by using a desktop-based foreshadowing of a fashion app to select her outfit each morning. She then takes Polaroid selfies to make sure the ensemble is to her liking.
If there's anything more Gen Y than a Polaroid selfie, I haven't found it. I don't want to find it.
Cher's best friend Dionne is black. She never brings up her friend's race because it's simply not important. The two girls act, talk, and live almost identically. Dionne perfectly represents the peak blank slate/colorblind era that Clueless chronicles. You could recast that character with Reese Witherspoon or Michelle Rodriguez without having to rewrite the part at all.
This colorblindness pops up again in a speech Cher makes in her debate class. The topic is whether or not the US should admit Haitian refugees. I was floored when I saw this scene because the same disastrously naive outlook behind the immigration policies that have destroyed America is on full display.
In her argument, Cher likens illegal immigrants to dinner party guests who show up to her father's mansion without RSVPing. She glibly argues that all the government has to do is rearrange some chairs, and the party can go on as before.
We could pick this ridiculous argument apart by pointing out that the dinner guests were invited or even hypothetically ask Cher how many Haitian immigrants she'll be housing at her mansion. But that's not the main point of this post.
The point is that Cher, like most of Gen Y, has grown up so insulated from the real world that she accepts her own facile argument uncritically. If she thinks of Haiti at all, she assumes it's populated with clones of Dionne who just have less fashionable shoes.
The blank slate isn't the only Leftist canard the movie openly broadcasts. Plenty of screen time is given over to PSAs for feminism and environmentalism, for example. What's fascinating isn't so much the wall-to-wall Leftist messaging. It's that the movie embraces the earlier, utopian strain of Death Cultism.
The Gen Y kids are urged to recycle, use PC jargon, and cheerlead for the loss of their national sovereignty under the pretext of achieving some universal moral good. And they lack the frame of reference to realize they're being duped.
If nothing else, Clueless is a stunning time capsule from the not-so-distant past when the Left still pretended to care about human betterment in general. Their real agenda is present in a subtle, nascent form, most clearly in the character of an implausibly Caucasian mugger.
It's not that Cher is willingly vicious. Unlike her nearest analogue from Mean Girls Regina George--Cady is too atypical a Millennial for an apt comparison--Cher is driven by a genuine desire to do good. But her conscience is so malformed and uninformed that she misses the mark.
Just as Mean Girls' main character is a poor match for Cher as a moral agent, Heathers' protagonist Veronica is not her movie's primary moral catalyst. In that instance, it's more insightful to contrast Cher with Heathers deuteragonist J.D.
Here again, a fundamental difference between Gen X and Gen Y is highlighted. J.D.'s Boomer father has exposed him to the evils and injustices of the world. Cher's Boomer dad has sheltered her from the world.
Having knowledge but lacking a firm moral foundation, J.D. despairs and seeks to burn it all down, including himself. Lacking both knowledge and a firm moral foundation, Cher drifts on the deceptively placid sea of pop culture, oblivious to the tsunami surging below.
Cher clearly isn't Gen X, but you might object that she's just a low tech Millennial. After all, isn't she terminally self-absorbed?
Taken at face value, the short answer is yes. Both Cher and Regina are selfish characters. But there's a world of difference in the underlying reasons for their egoism and even more so in their reactions to being called out.
Regina is self-absorbed because she's been raised to see herself as the center of the universe and the sole arbiter of morality. When her selfishness is pointed out to her, she takes it as an attack on her identity. She experiences deep cognitive dissonance and responds by lashing out at her accuser.
Cher is self-absorbed because she lives in a gilded cage where her every whim is catered to. Her dad built the cage to protect her, but to his credit he did instill in her a mercenary system of ethics that provides at least some moral foundation. Cher acknowledges a moral standard outside herself.
This dynamic plays out when Josh, Cher's more worldly Gen X stepbrother, states that self-interest motivates 90% of her decisions. Cher is initially shocked, but she actually engages in some self-examination and resolves to perform at least one selfless act.
Of course, being Gen Y, she's incompetent, and her project blows up in her face. But at least she embarks on an honest search for the true and the good. It's the epistemic bubble she lives in, diligently maintained by her elders, that keeps her from finding the truth.
What ails Cher and the rest of her generation is the illusory vision of the world they've been imprisoned in since birth. They've spent their lives in a mirage of an oasis eating sand.
It will take a plot device from another 90s movie--made not by a Boomer, but by two members of the also transitional Generation Jones--to cure Gen Y's cluelessness.
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