Clueless

[music]

0:00:03.8 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke, I’m Landry Ayres. I don’t know about you but I am totally buggin’ because today we are gonna party like it’s 1995. Joining me today to discuss a movie we are all totally butt-​crazy in love with, Clueless, are editor-​in-​chief at Reason, Katherine Mangu-​Ward…

0:00:27.3 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Howdy.

0:00:28.6 Landry Ayres: And the OG, my ride-​or-​die, we tried to bar the doors but she barged her way in anyway, deputy managing editor at Reason, Natalie Dowzicky.

0:00:39.1 Natalie Dowzicky: I am happy to be back.

0:00:41.5 Landry Ayres: There are movies that scream ‘the 1990s’, movies we’ve done on the show before. Hackers is one.

0:00:49.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh my gosh. Terrible. [chuckle]

0:00:51.7 Landry Ayres: Exactly. But they do so in a terrible, in a cringe way, but Clueless to me screams it in the most endearing, beloved, heart-​warming, nostalgic way. It comes off as a real distillation of this era in a way that is fun and bright and bubbly. What makes this movie so ’90s in a way that has staying power without being cringe-​inducing?

0:01:26.6 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: So I asked us to talk about this movie on this podcast, and I wanna set the stage for you because I think my answer has to include this information, which is that I went for a ladies weekend with a bunch of elder millennials or like Xennials, a very specific age band who were born between 1978 and 1982. There was a rainy day on this weekend, so we said, ‘What are we gonna watch?’ ‘Let’s watch Clueless.’ And all of us were psychologically destroyed by this rewatch, absolutely destroyed. What we realised is that a huge amount of the things that we believed about the world as teenage girls derived directly from this movie, that this movie was like a portrait of our psyches in 1996. And that it was not… Your intro was interesting to me because it was not always a bright picture. There was actually a lot of the pathologies of the ’90s and of ’90s feminism are very much on display and rewatching it, I think, for the first time as an adult, it just hit real different. So for me, actually, a lot of the takeaway was, ‘Yes, iconic, yes, deeply, deeply embedded in my psyche and maybe an entire generation’s psyche, but also a fair amount of poison in there, like some darkness as well.’

0:03:00.4 Landry Ayres: Sure.

0:03:00.9 Natalie Dowzicky: I think it’s also different ’cause I was watching it from a standpoint of like, ‘Wow, my high school was not like that. [chuckle] ‘Cause my high school experience was not like this.

0:03:10.0 Landry Ayres: You mean Philadelphia wasn’t exactly like Southern California?

0:03:13.5 Natalie Dowzicky: No. [chuckle] Also, I thought a lot of parts that are iconic about the movie to me, that have staying power now is like the soundtrack, the costumes. That’s one of the most popular… Like the yellow get-​up is one of the most popular Halloween costumes to this day.

0:03:31.1 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: 100%. We cannot talk about this movie without really just giving the yellow plaid two-​piece ensemble its due because that thing gets reinvented like every five years. It’s always back. It’s not just back now ’cause we’re having the ’90s revival or whatever.

0:03:47.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. That and flare jeans. But I do think the iconic parts of the movie that have helped it cement itself as a movie that has staying power are definitely the other aspects of it. I mean some of the script is just real… I think is cringy. Like the parts that like she’ll make off-​handed comments about how she couldn’t drink the coffee ’cause it stunts her growth. It was comments like that you’re like, ‘What the heck? No one thinks this.’

0:04:16.4 Landry Ayres: Well, I’m curious, I think it is cringe-​inducing and that poison that Katherine mentioned I think is really evident and I would totally agree. I think it is aesthetically bright, and obviously just based on the colour palette and everything, it has that vibrant, almost surreal quality to it but I definitely agree, I can understand how there are these amazing heights where it treats some of these characters in really creative and nuanced ways, while in others reverting to very odd, dated norms about gender and sexuality in general. So I think maybe that’s a good place to start with you two, especially Katherine because you mentioned it. What were some of the things that leapt out at you that made you second-​guess some of the concepts that you drew away from it, or the norms or the mores of the time that now give you pause?

0:05:18.6 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Yeah. So I think… I mean it’s an adaptation of Emma. Right? And I’m a big Jane Austen fan. I have definitely reread Emma and consumed other adaptations of Emma in the meantime since I last saw Clueless. And I think the older you get, as you’re reading Emma, the more you realise that her initial busy-​body cheerful inclusiveness is in the end not a favour to the people around her, That it’s perfectly well-​intentioned and that she’s in many ways better than the other people in her social class, who are just snobs, but she’s still wrong. She’s still wrong to try and make people, in this case, Tai, in the Clueless context, to try and make people something that they’re not and to convince them to want something that they maybe can’t have. And that is a very, very interesting message in the Year of our Lord 2022 because that’s still a very… That’s actually still a really tough debate.

0:06:23.1 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Like this is what our affirmative action debates are about in some ways. This is what our debates about worker retraining are about. This is what our debates about who should go to college are about. And in some way, I think all of us are Emma or Cher, like in the political class. We’re all trying to drag people who are not suited for a life that they don’t want into a place where they find themselves wanting it and then suffer horribly for it. And there’s a happy… Spoiler alert, I guess, there’s a happy ending for Tai in Clueless. But in real life, there isn’t always a happy ending, and people really suffer from this particular kind of do-​goodery, well-​intentioned elitism that Cher/​Emma displays.

0:07:19.0 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: I don’t think I understood that when I saw this movie initially, I was like, ‘Oh, it’s a makeover sequence. Who doesn’t love a makeover sequence?’ And to this day, I will stand by the glorious power of the makeover sequence, but it’s a lesson about letting people be who they are, including letting people of different social classes be who they are. And even as I’m talking, I’m not sure I’m allowed to say this. And I think that’s interesting. This movie let itself say this partially unself-​consciously because the ’90s wasn’t so sensitive about these types of debates, but also because it’s true to the source material, and that’s what the source material leads us to.

0:08:02.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. I also think that a lot of the more problematic lines especially reading it now is, the role a woman plays in her relationship with a man. So when you go through that whole sequence when Cher is waiting for… Shoot, I’m blanking on his name, to come over and she’s getting… Or her friends helping her do her makeup and she has bread powder all over her face. And then she’s like in the dialogue in the back, in the narration that Cher is doing. She’s like, ‘And you always have to have something baking while a man is over.’ And then there’s the classic scene where she realises whatever she’s baking is burning.

0:08:42.5 Natalie Dowzicky: But that, when I watched that… I’ve seen this movie like 800 times, but when I watched it more recently, I thought of like, ‘Wow, that just screams like 1950s housewife.’ Which I don’t think that was something that the ’90s… I mean, yeah, I thought the culture was completely different than that, so that was why that part was a little bit confusing. And that was also speaking to… I feel like speaking to more of the elitism aspect than anything else. Also because the parents in this movie, the dad is an absentee lawyer. [chuckle]

0:09:18.2 Landry Ayres: That reminded me of the ’80s parent vibe of something that they sort of lampooned in Stranger Things, where it’s like because everyone is out and working all of the time, the parents are never there to monitor these kind of latchkey kids who are always out and about doing their own thing. And even when they’re older and they can have more freedom and stuff, that there’s never… The lack of authority in any context, both parental and within the school, that is just chaos, like you mentioned before is clearly evident. But there’s also this weird kind of the… It was at the time and is in the movie as well. There’s this weird 1950s nostalgic quality, mostly aesthetic, but it might come through in some of those gender norms, seeping up from the bottom, but with Christian, his character, with his big high-​waisted pants, and he’s reading Burroughs and he drives that old vintage car.

0:10:18.3 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: The classic exchange when they go out for the date, when Cher and Christian go out for the date and he says, ‘Do you like Billie Holiday?’ And Cher says, ‘I love him.’

[laughter]

0:10:28.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Also a moment for Paul Rudd, that man never ages.

0:10:32.0 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Oh my God. Absolutely wild.

0:10:33.3 Natalie Dowzicky: It is crazy.

0:10:33.7 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: I mean that was… As I’m watching the movie with my gals, that was the first and most… All of us just like screaming… What do the kids say? Screaming, crying, and throwing up just like Paul Rudd appears on the screen and we’re just like, ‘What’s happening?’ [chuckle] And I think that the movie really deserved props for how well it handles source material that doesn’t map neatly onto modern mores. In the end, Cher ends up with essentially her stepbrother, similarly in Emma, it’s the man who was there all along who sort of shaped her as a person. That would’ve been less problematic, I think, in Austen’s time, but they actually sort of managed to handle it with a complicated LA in the ’90s style.

0:11:27.2 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: They’re not really related and it’s okay and whatever. But I think there’s been some discourse around the age difference stuff these days. And she is meant to be very young but she’s also, as in Emma, meant to have assumed some of the roles of basically the woman of the house. Right? Her mother is dead and her father is well-​intentioned but as you say, somewhat absentee, the absenteeism is not painted as a problem in this movie because it wasn’t perceived as a problem in 1995, in 1996. It was just like, ‘Yeah, your parents are busy. I don’t know.’ ‘Where are they?’ ‘Who knows?’ I will say on rewatch, the dad makes no mistakes, real talker.

0:12:11.6 Landry Ayres: No, he’s a great dad.

0:12:12.3 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: He is a great dad. I did not know that when I watched it the first time. And this is actually, it’s similar to the dad again in Emma, who comes through in the clutch, the key scene between Emma and her father, and also this recurs in Austen. There’s also a key scene between Lizzy Bennett and her father, where the fathers basically say, ‘Listen, I know the rules but you should do what will make you happy.’ There’s some version of that speech in Austen that recurs and that sort of father figure, but he actually does everything right. I guess you could quibble with the one of the iconic lines about when she gets her report card and she says, ‘Well, some teachers were trying to low-​ball me, daddy, and I know how you say ‘never accept a first offer’, so I figure these grades are just a jumping off point to start negotiation.’ Personally love it. Feel that that is…

0:13:13.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Okay, but you’re raising your child well if she can argue that way.

0:13:17.5 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Yeah. Like, no, no, it’s good parenting, but I recognize that some people might read that in a more declinist sense.

0:13:25.4 Landry Ayres: Oh, I’m sure a lot of people would disapprove of a lot of the… I’m always curious, and I like to imagine the question and just the thought experiment of like, ‘Could you make this movie today, how would it be different, how would it be the same?’ And a character like Cher, I feel like it would be hard without some sort of adjustment for her to be as likeable to audiences today because she is just so unapologetically upper-​class and makes no apologies for the things that she has been born into. And in some sense, I think for people who don’t really examine the movie, and it gets a lot of grief for this, is that people call her ditzy or something like that. And I think that isn’t quite the term that I would use for it. I really think they do a good job of saying clueless or maybe naive, because Cher is very bright and smart and organised and works very hard. She is by no means the sort of lazy, upper-​class, like super-​entitled person. While she might be half of some of those things, she does have a lot of really, really strong qualities and tries to attempt virtuous… Tries to act virtuously and has the best intentions. But she isn’t necessarily just someone that we would get on the screen now and a lot of people would scoff at and be like, ‘Oh, I can’t empathise with a person like this at all.’

0:15:06.0 Landry Ayres: She has a kind of what you were talking about it earlier, Katherine, with this sort of trying to pull people into positions that they may not wanna be in or be suited for, it has a kind of Leslie Knope attitude to it, where she’s like, ‘I have all of these great intentions and ideas but not everybody wants to follow them.’ And in the end, I think even by the end of Parks and Rec, you see that both her town and the people that she’s close friends with don’t need to all work in government and strive in the same ways that she wants to strive. Really, when they split up and each go their separate ways and pursue the things that they want to do, they all end up exponentially happier and more fulfilled.

0:15:56.6 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Full disclosure, obviously, I’m an Emma. Obviously, I’m a Cher. I’m absolutely exactly this character, so I have a lot of empathy for her of like, ‘I really do think I know best for lots of people lots of the time’, and one of the sources of my libertarianism is I know intellectually that that’s wrong. I have these…

0:16:17.3 Natalie Dowzicky: There’s an internal struggle.

0:16:19.7 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: I have these authoritarian tendencies, which is why I am a libertarian, and I think those on the interpersonal level are just like a charming quirk and on the political level are a sinister cause for all of our problems. But the impulse manifests itself also in extremely positive ways like her fantastic debate class speech about immigration…

0:16:44.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh, my gosh.

0:16:45.0 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Which is just frankly like, again, I think it’s funny ’cause the teachers are quite caricatured in this movie. They’re exasperated by their ridiculous student bodies. They are not however angry or burnt out. Right? They’re just bemused. And I think that is interesting, but they are also absolutely not interested in doing what I think like 21st century teachers would do, which is they would hear this speech that she gives and say like, ‘Yes, actually, that was great. Let me like nurture and feed what is special in you.’ They are just like, ‘That was not the assignment. What the hell, man?’

0:17:27.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:17:28.7 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: But the fact that she calls them Haitians is incredible, but it’s a speech about immigration. And she says, ‘It’s like when I had this garden party for my father’s birthday. Right? And I said RSVP because it was a sit-​down dinner but people that came like did not RSVP, so I was totally buggin’. I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food, squish an extra plate size, but at the end of the day, it was like, the more the merrier. In conclusion, may I remind you, it does not say RSVP on the Statue of Liberty.’ Girl, yes, yes. That’s 100% yes to all of that.

0:18:04.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, cheers to that.

0:18:06.8 Landry Ayres: As a former high school speech and debate competitor… Well, former high school and college speech and debate competitor, there was a part of me that was like…

0:18:13.2 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Landry, I’m so surprised to learn that.

0:18:14.7 Landry Ayres: I know. Right? It’s shocking when you meet me. You’re just… There’s a part of you that both, it clenches every muscle in your body ’cause you’re like, ‘You spoke for like 20 seconds’, but then also you’re like, ‘But she was the most succinct, she had evidence, she had claims and a bit of a warrant.’ I thought it very much… I felt conflicted.

0:18:37.3 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Honestly pretty good.

0:18:37.8 Landry Ayres: But I also was like, ‘Open borders queen. I support her.’

0:18:41.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yes. Also, the teacher’s reaction was just like, ‘Are you… What? Are you kidding?’ [chuckle] But I appreciated that, like Katherine was saying, it was like the teachers, they’re like, a little bit like, ‘Well, we’re stuck in this situation because we have this student body and you know this is how it’s gonna go from here on.’ And I think it’s interesting, I saw Landry put this in the notes, but to me, when I think of a movie set in a high school drama, I think of Mean Girls, because that was the iconic high school cliquey drama movie when I was younger. And when you juxtapose Mean Girls with this movie, they have some similar trends, but obviously, the movies are very different. The whole trend of trying to change someone to make them like they… When you know what’s… When you think you know what’s best for them, that’s what they do to Lindsay Lohan’s character in Mean Girls. They changed her completely, and how Lindsay Lohan’s character buys into it and goes the whole, ‘On Wednesdays, we wear pink.’ But I think those two movies show a little bit like different sides of what was going on culturally at the time they were released. Like Mean Girls was in like 2005, I think.

0:20:00.2 Landry Ayres: 2004. 2004.

0:20:00.5 Natalie Dowzicky: 2004. And I think that was much more like they really leaned… Of course Landry knows that date.

0:20:06.0 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Well, totally, totally.

0:20:06.1 Landry Ayres: I googled it, I googled it beforehand, I watched it on a plane to Disney World in the sixth grade. It was the first time I was on a plane, that’s a core memory. Leave me alone.

0:20:17.6 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s a core memory. So I think, but that movie seemed like incredibly negative. Right? Like, and the whole… I mean it’s called Mean Girls. So it’s like all about cliquey, all about, ‘Who thinks Regina George hurt them the most?’ And that that movie has like a completely different vibe than Clueless. Clueless seems more like optimistic, even though there are like some cringey moments, Mean Girls, I never walked away from thinking that it was optimistic. And then when I was like thinking about more of like the high school movies I’ve seen that reminded me of Clueless, I also thought of Princess Diaries, which sounds weird, but like that’s also like there was like that weird high school… There’s lots of weird high school moments. They go to like a small, private high school somewhere in California ’cause they’re near the beach. But again, that has that same like vibe of trying to change someone to make them into like what you think is best for them. And like, I know I’m a Princess Diaries stan, that movie came out in 2001, Landry, you can check it and…

0:21:18.3 Landry Ayres: Only if I check that real quick.

0:21:20.9 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Take it to the bank.

0:21:22.9 Landry Ayres: Let me check that. Checked out.

0:21:25.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. And, but again, like that’s another interesting portrayal of like the high school scene. That movie is also just like a little heart-​warming ’cause like every girl wanted to be a princess at that age, whatever. But I think when you like look at all three movies at the same time and you juxtapose them with each other, Clueless definitely is like the most optimistic in the sense that like, you don’t necessarily… You don’t see… Like in theory, Cher should be the mean girl. Right? In every high school setting, Cher is the mean girl from like the movies of the early 2000s, but she’s not, so they almost like flipped who you thought was going to be the mean girl in that sense.

0:22:05.9 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Well, or she is, she actually does all the same things that the Mean Girls do in other movies that use this trope, but the movie’s told from her perspective. And so we have this empathy for her. Right? And I think to me, the other film that’s like, if you’re gonna put it on the spectrum, is Legally Blonde. Right? And so that’s…

0:22:21.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Classic.

0:22:25.2 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: But that one is like where the person being made over is making over herself. Right? And so there’s the three different variants here of like the Mean Girls makeover, The Clueless makeover and the Legally Blonde makeover, which hit different… Again on the feminism spectrum as well as on the, I don’t know, just where they’re sitting in their cultural moments. And I think the idea that there was discourse at the time around whether Alicia Silverstone was fat. Right? Like that was a thing. Like looking at her in her like cute little unitard in this movie. It like breaks my heart that that was a conversation.

0:23:04.7 Natalie Dowzicky: And they have her saying lines like, ‘Oh no, I had two mochaccinos this morning and I feel like a heifer.’ Like they just like put those words in the mouths of 15 and 16-​year-​old girls who were watching this movie with no thought at all about like, ‘What… ’ And I don’t… I think it’s because it wasn’t… It didn’t originate in that movie, that was just, it was just in the culture, and this was the period where heroine chic is coming in and there’s like a very particular aesthetic which, Alicia Silverstone is in many ways the sunny California counterpart to that look. And she suffers later I think for that in her career. But also, there’s just lots of casual, inter-​lady warfare, the line about someone being a Monet, and then Tai says, ‘What’s a Monet?’ And she says, ‘It’s like a painting, see, from far away, it’s okay, but up close, it’s a big old mess.’ What?

0:24:05.7 Landry Ayres: Rude. What?

0:24:07.4 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: What?

0:24:08.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:24:10.6 Landry Ayres: It’s weird, there’s the lineage that we’re talking about of like other films that exist on this spectrum. Like I thought of Mean Girls also Natalie because at one point Paramount, in the midst of like looking at all these films they owned, they wanted to release like CD-ROM games and they were like, ‘We’re gonna do Pretty in Pink, Clueless, and Mean Girls.’ And I saw the connection between the latter two, but the Pretty in Pink one was much more tenuous. And I was thinking of other things that exist within this network of movies and influences. And I can see how we get to Mean Girls from Clueless. But I think it takes because… Especially because not only is it really similar, they crib at like exact moments and lines.

0:25:00.3 Landry Ayres: Like Katherine was saying, the perspective of Cher is what we take instead of Regina George in Mean Girls, where they do the makeover and try and make this girl into something that she isn’t, and then that new girl takes the place of the one who did the makeover, which happens to Tai after she is almost thrown over the railing of a shopping mall and everyone suddenly flocks to her and she becomes the centre of attention for a brief moment in time. But the movies that exist in the Clueless line or like Clueless and Legally Blonde exactly, but what came in and intersected with those to make Mean Girls? And to me it’s Heathers and Jawbreaker, which are both really, really interesting, much, much more dark, biting dark comedies about this idea of the high school girl and all of the tumult that goes on in her life. And then when those two films come together, we get the Mean Girls thing that wraps them up together, and isn’t quite as hard edged, but is not nearly as sunny and encouraging by the end but it still has that kind of like, ‘Everybody gets a little bit better at the end’, even though Regina George gets hit by a bus.

0:26:23.1 Natalie Dowzicky: I was just gonna say Regina George gets hit by a bus.

0:26:26.4 Landry Ayres: Yeah. But she gets better. She doesn’t die.

0:26:30.3 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Yeah. There’s also a certain… Again, in keeping with the title, there’s a certain naiveté in Clueless that I think… Again, this may just be me speaking to the person that I was when I saw this movie the first time, but I was an absolute sucker for all the health class propaganda. I legit believed that if I did a drug, I would die. And when we have Cher saying stuff like, ‘It’s one thing to spark up a Doobie and get laced at parties but it’s quite another to be fried all day.’ She really is bringing this Protestant work ethic to her Los Angeles ’90s teen social life. It was resonant. There’s something there that’s like this longing for the pretence of a kind of… It’s the baking-​bread thing that Natalie mentioned. There’s a sort of like 1950s, you work hard, you make good, you could be anything you wanna be, all you need is to be culturally literate and follow the rules. And by the end of the movie, by the end of the movie, we have Tai saying to Cher, ‘You’re a virgin who can’t drive’, and it hits, it cuts deep. Right?

0:28:00.6 Landry Ayres: It does. It’s so crazy.

0:28:01.0 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: And it’s like she is a… She in choosing this weird blinker ’90s version of ’50s virtue, she has overly circumscribed to her life and she wants to take a woman who was in many ways more sophisticated, who has seen more shit, and draw her backwards into this less broadly aware… And I think we should probably take a minute and talk about race in this movie, which is like… Both, the cringe levels are astronomical in the sense that the black characters are given lines that are… It’s not like minstrelsy but it is like every line spoken by a black character is written in this strange pastiche of the way that actual black Americans spoke at that time and whatever Hollywood screenwriters thought black Americans sounded like, I guess. I don’t know, maybe that is what people sounded like in LA. But my high school was 50% black, people didn’t sound like that. I don’t know what to tell you.

0:29:10.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, that was definitely one of the more cringy parts, especially watching it back more recently. I didn’t pick up on that kinda stuff when I watched it when I was younger ’cause this used to be me and my sister’s favourite movie. And every time a black character talked, I was cringing this time. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s so painfully just obvious that there’s a disconnect between what Hollywood thought the lexicon was and what it actually is like.’

0:29:42.2 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Well, and at the same time it’s like… I can’t remember fully but certainly at that time, people thought nothing of populating their movies exclusively with white characters. So on the other hand, it’s like, okay, well, but at least at least they tried.

0:29:56.2 Landry Ayres: It was a step, a single step. Right. Yeah, especially…

0:30:00.1 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: And then also, you have to give the movie credit for like… It passes the Bechdel test with the flying-​est of colours but it also also passes… The characters whose experience is outside of that, of our admittedly attractive white female main character, they have their own lives. They have their own conversations. They interact about things that are not just our main character. You do have to give it credit for that. Again, small credit. It’s those hats, the hat situation.

0:30:34.3 Landry Ayres: The topics of discussions that pass the Bechdel test in and of themselves have their own issues that come across, especially with that sort of inter-​female discussion.

0:30:45.2 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: That’s correct.

0:30:48.0 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Now, my case for this movie is that it is the Hamlet of my generation, the number in that, wait for it, in that a lot of phrases that you think are just phrases in the English language are actually from this document. I think that this is like when you’re in high school and you read Hamlet for the first time and you realise that just stuff people say all the time is in Shakespeare and that it’s right there, it’s in the text, it’s clearly written for the first time in this text. And I think rewatching this movie made me realise how many of the phrases that I just casually thought were things people said in the ’90s were in fact lines in Clueless that just got into our heads. The ‘as if’ is the most classic of the lines, but the ‘rolling with the homies’, the ‘totally buggin”, there’s just so, so, so many turns of phrase and lines in this movie. And also when they’re in… The line for tennis, and she says, ‘My doctor says I can’t do anything where balls fly up my nose’, and someone says like, ‘Well, there goes your social life.’ Every line in this movie, when they open their mouths to say it, I was like, ‘I remember that line too.’

0:32:07.7 Landry Ayres: ‘I was riding the crimson wave, I had to haul ass to the bathroom.’

0:32:11.2 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Yes. Yes. And I don’t know if… I doubt that Clueless is the first movie to do the anthropologist’s exploration of the lunchroom where it’s like ‘There’s the stoners and there’s the’, whatever. That is a trope.

0:32:27.3 Landry Ayres: Another Mean Girls bit that they took. Exactly.

0:32:29.9 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: In Mean Girls, in many other subsequent movies. I doubt that it was invented in Clueless but it certainly reaches its initial… It reaches its peak form in Clueless. And that is 100% how I perceived my high school cafeteria. I could have given you the Clueless map, I could have given you the Mean Girls map of that cafeteria because that framework was given to me by this film, so I think there’s… I think for all of its cringe or all of its flaws, I do think that the number of things that are just incepted into the brains of elder millennials is actually astounding.

0:33:09.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, I was thinking about this when I was rewatching it, do you think the people that watch… Anyone younger than us that watches Clueless now, we’re all rewatching it because it’s a core memory for Landry, it all had pivotal moments in our lives, like me and my sister loved watching it, but the high school age and older kids that watch it now, well, one, are they even watching it? Is it something that’s on their radar or do they watch it now and laugh and are like, ‘Hahaha, mom, that’s like how your high school was.’ You know what I mean? I don’t know if it’s cherished anymore.

0:33:48.1 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: I think it might be like Hamlet in that watching it is irrelevant, you don’t have to consume the original document.

0:33:53.3 Landry Ayres: Right.

0:33:53.7 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Like we’re living in the world that Clueless made, man. That’s an overstatement but like…

0:33:58.8 Landry Ayres: I mean only slightly.

0:34:01.9 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: But I mean the fact that I think many, many people who are in High school today would recognize the yellow plaid skirt that we started out with it. Right? And they might even be able to source it to one of those ’90s movies. Right? Like maybe they don’t know it’s Clueless but maybe they certainly know…

0:34:20.4 Landry Ayres: They would go, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve seen that GIF’, or like, ‘I know that meme’, but they would have no idea its source, it’s totally divorced from the source.

0:34:29.9 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: But I suppose this is like maybe too big a question to take on, but what is a better legacy that some list of movie nerds thinks that you made a great film or that you incepted a bunch of stuff into the culture that lives beyond even the awareness of the movie. I don’t think…

0:34:49.0 Natalie Dowzicky: And there’s a Broadway play now too. Right? There’s a Broadway play…

0:34:53.6 Landry Ayres: They did, they did a musical. Yes.

0:34:55.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:34:56.7 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Although, I think Broadway nostalgia musicals are like, if anything, it’s like when the New York Times does a trend piece, like if Broadway has made a nostalgia musical about it, like it’s over. For sure. Like it’s…

0:35:05.1 Landry Ayres: Yeah. The shark has clearly been jumped over.

0:35:08.4 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Just leaping over the shark.

0:35:08.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, they did that for Mean Girls and Legally Blonde, actually.

0:35:11.4 Landry Ayres: They did it. Yep. Yeah. And Heathers.

0:35:15.5 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: My point stands. Yeah, I feel like… Thank you for the…

0:35:17.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:35:19.6 Landry Ayres: Though I will say the Mean Girls musical, not terrible, Legally Blonde, a big hit. I can’t say I’ve listened to it too much but people love it, they still love the musical, which I was not expecting, I was thinking people would scoff at it and be like, ‘This is a cash grab’, but no, people, they eat it up. They eat it up.

0:35:41.7 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Can we talk about one last element in this movie, which is the centrality of the driving test. Right?

0:35:46.6 Landry Ayres: Yes.

0:35:47.8 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: So this is a thing…

0:35:48.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Okay. Yeah.

0:35:52.7 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: So this is the thing that I do think is like a huge cultural change. Right? Like if you’re a teenager now watching this movie, I’m not sure that you understand the crushing… Like you’re a virgin that can’t drive, like the crushing feeling of failing a driving test in the year 1995. Like catastrophic. Right? And now it’s like… Well, I mean like a lot of kids don’t even get their licenses, whatever. And I wonder what that… I don’t know what that… I don’t know what that says. Always, Natalie and I are joking about every story as a zoning story if you look closely enough, or like a licensing story.

0:36:31.4 Natalie Dowzicky: That is so true.

0:36:31.5 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: And I do think there’s probably like the peak of prosperity in this period that the film is set, and especially in Los Angeles during the period that this film is set, is this sprawly McMansion car culture, and a lot of our libertarian brethren at that time spent a lot of energy defending sprawl. This is a dream that people wanna pursue, they want this, and to be told by environmentalists or certain types of urbanists or whatever like, ‘You shouldn’t want this.’ It’s the same as Cher saying like, ‘You shouldn’t want the stoner skateboarder, you want the wrong things and you’re bad because of it, and I can fix you.’ We’re not in a moment right now where people want that life. Like the most elite people are living in high-​density downtowns and they want to Uber around and they want their kids to take mass transit or whatever, I guess. But I think we might be returning to that, there’s this urban decay meme that’s going on now, there’s not… We never… Other than the Pismo Beach disaster, which exists in the distant background of this film, we never see a person suffering. Right? Like except for love.

0:37:57.0 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: But we know in the background, like when she gets mugged at gunpoint in a parking lot, lest we forget, that was a thing that happened in the ’90s that people were like, ‘Yeah, that just happens to people, like it’s totally normal to sometimes get held-​up at gunpoint and have to ruin your Christian Siriano dress on the ground, because you’re face down in a parking lot in LA. And it was like it was a very different moment in terms of crime but I think at least the perception is that we’re returning to that, and so it’d be interesting to me to see if this kind of siren song of the car-​based suburban utopia, like if that goes back to being the thing people want, is that gonna reorient some of our cultural fights in public policy? Do we wanna be Cher’s dad or is there something else?

0:38:50.2 Natalie Dowzicky: There was also… It was funny because at least when I was in high school too, like your driver’s test was like… That was something everyone talked about. There was like a pivotal moment in high school when you could drive your friends around, it was also like people would be quiet about when they were taking their test in the event that they failed so that they could re-​sign up and no one would know, like it wouldn’t be like a huge embarrassment if they failed, and I just don’t think as many people… Like me and my siblings, we went for that driving test the day we could, and it was like we signed up, we were there at 9:30 AM in line at the DMV, and it was all hunky-​dory. I don’t think kids do that anymore…

0:39:26.5 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: They don’t.

0:39:27.1 Natalie Dowzicky: I don’t think it’s like… But it’s also my parents wanted to stop driving us to school, so they had like other motivations to get us a driver’s licence as soon as possible, but that and the amount of people that just don’t own cars, but maybe this is also a little biassed just because we all, well, besides Landry, live in the cities that you don’t really need a car and I think…

0:39:52.1 Landry Ayres: I don’t need a car where I live. It’s great.

0:39:56.5 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: But I think you’re right Natalie. The centrality of this rite of passage of getting the driver’s licence, and that it was also a referendum on like… It was our bar mitzvah, it’s like, ‘I’m an adult now.’ Right? And it was like we were not adult… Narrator, they were not adults, like, but…

0:40:15.8 Landry Ayres: When you have that agency and the ability to go outside the geographic bounds that you’ve never had access to before, it’s a huge, huge turning point in your life, absolutely.

0:40:25.6 Natalie Dowzicky: It was like a freedom. It was like a freedom. Yeah.

0:40:27.4 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: And in fact, the scene where Dionne accidentally goes on the freeway, and then there’s this panic and they’re driving on the freeway and they’re all gonna die, and the truck is honking, and then you’ll recall in the movie that what happens is like, then she loses her virginity. Right? It’s like an actual… It’s like multiple rites of passage that are all based around automotive competency, and that’s just gone. I think it’s still actually a reality for much of the country but the teenagers that I know and the sort of people who live in cities, it’s much less central, and so I guess just among other things that age weirdly in this movie, the emotional drama around failing your driving test. It’s like, ‘Well, just take it again. Who cares?’ ‘No, everyone cares. It’s the most important thing.’

0:41:21.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. My life is ruined.

0:41:22.0 Landry Ayres: I’m always curious. I always think it’s probably not as big of a deal because access to resources and social media and socialisation is just… The barriers are so much lower than they were when we were younger, because to see people and talk to people, it was either a call on a landline… I was at the age where kids younger and younger were starting to get cell phones, so there were plenty of people that still didn’t have access to them at a certain point while others were. And even just a few years before that, it was still very common for people to not have cell phones, so to go socialise with people and also to gain information, whether it’s to go to the movies or go to the record store or anything like that meant going somewhere else.

0:42:08.0 Landry Ayres: And in a car-​dominated culture, there were only so many ways that you could do that, and today it’s exponentially easier to log on to Spotify and listen to the entire catalogue history of the world, or you watch something on one of the 50 million streaming services that we have all while messaging people all at once and carrying out 15 different flirty text message threads with all of the different boys and girls that people are awkwardly teenager-​ly flirting with, it’s a completely different ball game and one that is just so daunting and other-​worldly compared to what Clueless exists in. So it’s just a really interesting time capsule of what the world looks like at that period, even if it’s not super real, there’s enough in there that is real.

0:43:07.1 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: I’m always team when people say like, ‘This movie was revolutionary for its time’, or like, ‘This movie really captures… It’s a period piece’, that makes me not wanna see it, I don’t know, maybe I’m just like a Philistine, I just don’t… Obviously, I’m on this podcast talking about Clueless, where I know you all have done some high-​brow stuff, and so I’m feeling a little self-​conscious about bringing my…

0:43:29.3 Natalie Dowzicky: We also talked about the Simpsons, so.

0:43:33.1 Landry Ayres: I love to make people watch terrible things and everyone to be like, ‘You wanna do what movie?’ And I’m like, ‘I wanna put you through hell for this show.’

[laughter]

0:43:42.6 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: But this is a delight, and short.

0:43:43.6 Landry Ayres: This was a treat.

0:43:46.2 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: Remember when movies were short?

0:43:48.6 Landry Ayres: It went down easy.

0:43:48.7 Katherine Mangu-​Ward: It went down easy. It went down easy but it was nutritious in the end.

0:43:53.0 Landry Ayres: Absolutely.

0:44:00.6 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to keep in touch with us and get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter, you can find us at the handle @popnlockepod, that’s pop, the letter N, Locke, with an E, like the philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We look forward to unravelling your favourite show or movie next time.