02.14.07
Clueless, or Clued In?
In his article “Emma, Cher, and the Maze of Unknowing,” David Kelly sets out to examine why Austen’s novel was not formally listed among the source material for Amy Heckerling’s film. This sets up the way Kelly looks at the film itself,“ an ironic play between two opposing principles: on one hand, an awareness of and attribution of authority, and on the other hand an ignorance of and indifference to it” (3). In other words, it explores the difference between who’s clued in and who’s clueless. Kelly first looks at Cher’s interaction with her wardrobe. Do the clothes shape her, or does she shape the clothes? Kelly concludes that “they are stripped of that original meaning while being invested with a new sense, invented by Cher, which establishes and projects for her a public persona of glamour and individuality” (4). This theme is seen, not only in Cher and Dionne’s names, but in Murray’s language, and they are all something that functions in their current lives. However, Cher “understands the world only as something she fashions…as its egoistic center, she doesn’t realize how small this world is, but we do as we watch her attempts at fashioning a world in which she is totally clued in, colliding with another world in which she hasn’t got a clue” (6).
Kelly then looks at comic moments in the film that require the view to have an external cultural knowledge. Here, Kelly posits a theory that the “film’s silence on its debt to Austen…by not signaling that it is a contemporary adaptation of Emma, [it] requires us as readers to make the imaginative connection” (7). In this way, Kelly interprets the film as a satire, noting the wit Heckerling displays throughout the film, particularly when she adds Cher’s own voice to the film, allowing her to fashion herself. That Cher is given her own voice while Emma is not, signifies to Kelly that Emma must be “taken in hand,” (12) something Cher will never allow to happen to her. For Kelly, “the text can function satirically only by virtue of us bringing to moral and cultural frames of reference which Cher not only does not share but in face in personally and socially incapable of conceiving” (9). Kelly also examines “clue” as a thread, one that “ought to bring other cultural understandings to bear in the reading of this narrative” (9), such as Theseus’s thread he unwound and followed back out the labyrinth. This moves Kelly to a discussion of metaphorical labyrinths in Clueless, most notable Cher’s “maze of personal relationships” (9), seen particularly in her interactions with Christian. Another labyrinth, the Los Angeles freeway, plays both a role as both a metaphorical and tangible maze. These labyrinths single to Cher “the narrowness of the world in which she can operate effectively, the narrowness of that social space in which she in clued in” (11).