UGH, AS IF!

The Surreal Nature of Amy Heckerling’s Clueless & Gregg Araki’s Nowhere.

This is how I prefer to remember Stacey Dash:

waist length braids covered by a white church hat that holds a patent red flower bow in its center. The hat’s vinyl brim matches the shiny lapels of her black and white plaid jacket and accompanying skirt. Though she is not Stacey Dash in this memory but Dionne, best friend to Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone).

Cher wears a corresponding yellow plaid skirt suit that accentuates the blondeness of her long locks. She sits in the driver’s seat of a brand new jeep she is not licensed to drive, parked in front of Dionne’s mansion. Both Cher and Dionne know what it means to be subjects of envy and the fixations of desire. Even at sixteen, they’re aware of the currency of their beauty which is bolstered by their parents’ wealth, ensuring their place at the top of their Beverly Hills High social hierarchy. 

Clueless, which saw its 30th anniversary this past weekend, is the story of a teen girl who is bountiful in possessions but bereft, at times, of self-awareness. In an effort to maintain the near frictionless nature of her world, Cher schemes. She tactically approaches adults to bend them to her will and makes her peers over in her image. Though her aims are selfish, any happiness gained by her antics for her subjects, does delight her. In the special features of my DVD copy, director and writer, Amy Heckerling, describes her heroine as “very manipulative but in a nice way…she lived in a sort of fantasy of what could be for everyone else.” It’s easy to picture Cher as a fan of life simulation videogame, The Sims, controlling avatars down to the minute detail of when they shit and to the larger whims of who they can fuck.

A loose adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, Clueless stands as one of the most faithful reimaginings of the book’s title character. Though Douglas McGrath’s Emma, released a year later, is a direct reworking of the book, there’s a charm missing from Emma. Gwyneth Paltrow’s portrayal of the character sees her as stunted and prone to sobbing when her plans go awry. It’s accurate that the character would be played as entitled, spoiled, and bratty but perhaps these traits are more palpable when exhibited by a teenager. 

I was years away from adolescence when I first watched Clueless, the network television sitcom and the original film. Upon initially seeing the movie, I was taken by the fashion that veers into zany. The design of this website is inspired, however unconsciously, by the lasting impression of the vibrant coloring and girlish typography first made legible to me by the franchise. With costumes by designer Mona May, the whimsical preppy outfits of Cher, Dionne, and Brittany Murphy’s Tai Frasier remain influential, cropping up in inspo posts on social media and conspicuously referenced in fast fashion catalogues. 

The film’s official logo.

Beyond the clothing, Clueless remains beloved for its quippy language and dialogue that manages to feel both timeless and a capsule of the 1990s. As a child, many of the jokes sped past me. The subtext of scenes like Dionne’s boyfriend Murray (Donald Faison) questioning if “it was that time of the month again” during an argument were missed. While I didn’t always fully get the witticisms (Q: “Do you like Billie Holiday? A: “I love him”), I did understand the humor in the varied affectations of the characters while they cracked lines as if in a Howard Hughes comedy updated for the MTV generation. 

Often credited with popularizing phrases “as if” and “what-ever,” Heckerling has described the process of developing the vocabulary of the movie as intensive. She sat in on high school debate classes and witnessed the proliferation of “likes” in the sentences of teen girls. Referencing books of contemporary youth slang as well as materials dating back to the 1940s, Heckerling developed a vernacular that was assimilated into culture. Cher’s valley girl intonations are spoken with elegant sentences contrasted against Tai’s unpolished twang. Murray uses Black English to signify his cool and sophistication. Josh (Paul Rudd, dashing as ever) speaks with the pretentious overconfidence familiar to anyone who has taken undergrad liberal arts classes. Transfer student, Christian (Justin Walker) evidently moved schools from the 1950s with his jive talking. Representing the array of stereotypical youth characters, the language of the film is not a complete or accurate portrayal of teen speech of the time. It’s an invention that melds existent teen parlance of the past and (then) present to orchestrate its lexicon, adding to the unreal Beverly Hills setting. 

 “To use absolute reality wouldn’t have been as colorful, wouldn't have been as specific, wouldn’t have been as interesting,” Heckerling says in the DVD special feature on writing the movie. “It’s more of a made up world. It's a fantasy world.” 

Photo credit: Bob Jagendorf via Flickr

10 miles from Heckerling’s fanciful Beverly Hills, I imagine the absurd Los Angeles of Gregg Araki’s Nowhere. Released two years later in 1997, the film’s marketing poster featured the blurb, “It’s like Clueless with nipple rings.” The quote gestures to the commonalities between the two. The final installment in Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, Nowhere depicts a sordid day in the life of a group of young adults as they traverse sex, relationships, and for some characters, alien abductions and an impending sense of doom. I happened upon the movie in high school. Bored one day during the summer, I picked Nowhere from a selection of free movies from our cable’s on-demand offerings after seeing it starred Rachel True of The Craft.  I rewatched it repeatedly in secret, knowing it would raise suspicion among my family for its illustrious non-Christian values. Disturbed and intrigued, amidst the violence and lurid visuals, I found solace in the pervading alienation felt by Dark (James Duval).

I didn’t know of the other films in the trilogy or of Araki. It wasn’t until college that I would meet someone who knew of the movie and who’d be my closest friend throughout undergrad. On my twenty-first birthday we huddled around her MacBook in her off-campus apartment to watch the movie. Drinking Red Stripe and eating bags of microwaved pop-corn, we laughed at its vulgarity and commented on the attractiveness of the cast. A few years later, I wandered into Happyfun Hideaway in Bushwick where my roommate bartended and I frequently loitered for free drinks. On the TV above the bar, there was Duval in his shaggy hair with a young Rose McGowan and an actor I didn’t recognize. My mind bounced between recognition and unfamiliarity. Had I forgotten a scene from Nowhere? No I would soon learn, it was Doom Generation, the second movie in the trilogy. 

Like Clueless, Araki’s films often take place in a stylized reinvention of a city, in his case, LA. The Teen Apocalypse series becomes increasingly lurid from the use of real, uncanny billboards, illuminated at night in Totally Fucked Up to the designing of mono-colored and patterned motel rooms in Doom Generation. As the final act in the triad, Nowhere catapults into the surreal with everything upped, “to the nth degree.” The world and costuming are saturated in flamboyant colors with dreamlike sets staged like a play. If Clueless shows an exaggerated prep school teen of the 90s, Nowhere can be seen as its gaudy alt peer, full of big and dyed hair, tongue rings, and grungy T-shirts. The teens speak with a similar quick-paced cadence that is not quite deadpan or impassioned as they tee up punchy jokes: Q: “Have you ever heard of the rapture?” A: “The Siouxsie and Banshees album?” 

Nowhere

In a conversation with Senses of Cinema Araki said, “I’m not so interested in plain old reality… Reality to me is boring. What’s interesting is taking that reality and creating this hyper-reality. That’s where my films exist, in this controlled and created world.” His remarks echo Hecklering's, who did not seek to create a “real Beverly Hills,” but a hyperbolic adolescent experience. The straightforward tale of a straight kid becoming more open-minded may seem juvenile in comparison to the themes of homophobia, the AIDS crisis, and sexuality that frequent Araki’s work.

But in Clueless and Nowhere, the characters’ shallowness and vapidity shield them from life’s complexities and brutalities. Dark’s longing for deeper connection threatens to kill the buzz of his friends who are determined to party in a merciless world. Cher’s creeping awareness of her life’s depthlessness stands to inconvenience her pretty existence. Yet she too knows of callousness. After rejecting the repeated attempts of kissing from a boy she considered a friend, she’s left stranded in a deserted parking lot at night. When she’s then robbed at gunpoint, we know she’ll be fine—it’s not that kind of movie. But even in Cher’s ultra-idyllic Beverly Hills life, the exhilaration of youth doesn’t come without its vulnerabilities. 

Heckerling and Araki have been celebrated for their authentic portraits of youth culture within the surrealistic containers of their films. Despite the hijinks and ironies, there’s an earnest interest in the issues that preoccupy teens and young adults from the most banal to the menacing. Clueless and Nowhere can be considered generational films, encapsulating the sardonic attitudes and trends of the ‘90s and Gen X. Yet, I discovered them more than a decade after their debuts with each imprinting a new phrase or style to incorporate into my then burgeoning self, as they have for many kids since. What will be thought of as the generation defining films of this present moment?  It's impossible to predict what will outlive our current culture’s short memory. Or what will circulate among a dedicated few, before proliferating to a wider audience like the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy. Though my guess is that some of those future lists will include many of the same titles we’ve seen from the 80s through the 2000s (Breakfast Club, 10 Things I Hate About You, Mean Girls, Superbad) that point to a culture that was never entirely mono but once significantly less fragmented, alongside movies like Barbie with enough IP recognition (and money) to guarantee longevity.

Lately, it feels like we’ve been inundated with attempts to decipher and explain the social mores and interests of Gen Z, as the oldest members of the cohort approach thirty. Perhaps we can also look to other forms of media that may be generationally defining. When I began writing this essay,  Love Island USA was in its final week of airing. Though the American version of the British reality show debuted in 2019, it struggled to capture the countrywide attention that its originator has commanded. It seemed the series was ill-fated until last summer’s sleeper hit season. Its most recent and seventh season saw record-breaking rankings, especially among young viewers. 

A game and dating show, Love Island presents a dizzying microculture. The contestants, known as “islanders,” inhabit the “villa”—a fluorescently lit set littered with plastic plants, a rarely used pool, and furniture and neon decor reminiscent of a Wayfair search page. At the start of the show, the islanders split into boy-girl pairings referred to as “their couple” which will be disbanded and remixed throughout the season in “recouplings.” Romantic interests are “connections.” Conversations are “chats.” Participants who join the cast after the first night are dubbed “bombshells" as opposed to “OGs.” 

One could almost mistake the garish environment as a pop art social experiment not too far away from the absurdity and world building of Araki or Heckerling. But here, there is no beauty to be found apart from the smoothed face contestants. Hollowness is the point, in spite of, or perhaps because of the show’s intense directive to find love in less than six weeks. There’s a consciousness among the islanders, many of whom are in their early twenties, as they attempt to craft their images. When they speak they use common pop psychology terms and idioms from popular TikToks. This Gen Z slang is laced with vernacular and features of Black English, causing several non-Black islanders to take on what can best be described as blaccents when nervous or excited. 

With the bikinis-and-swim-trunks-during-the-day ordinance and the shared beds between hot strangers, one might expect the villa to be pulsating with desire. But excepting some conspicuous under-the-cover movements at night, Love Island USA is surprisingly sexless and conventional (more so even, than PG-13 Clueless, with its central romance involving Cher and her college enrolled, former step-brother). The women contestants’ declarations of being “the prize” and “high-value,” may point to arguments regarding Gen Z’s proclivity toward conservatism and less sex. These claims are further supported by young viewers with disdain for high body counts and who condemn contestants for keeping in-step with the breakneck pace of the show by having multiple partners. I've even seen accusations of women contestants “weaponizing”  sex to deepen intimacy, which in normal circumstances would be considered building a relationship. 

Photo credit: VentureBeats via Flickr

Audience participation is fundamental with episodes airing practically live and almost every day. Viewer voting on favorite islanders influence the course of events of the show. “America” is omnipresent. Bleary-eyed contestants plead their case for redemption and thank their viewing overlords for their support. The interrelations between Love Island contestants and fans proves crucial post-show as cast members pivot their followings into influencer opportunities. Fans record updates on contestants' social media profiles, public sightings, purported brand partnerships, and speculated beefs or break-ups. These parasocial interactions create a feedback loop where visibility heightens the casts’ chances of influencing careers but at the expense of remaining subjects of intimate scrutiny. 

The microcosm of Love Island USA, may provide insight into a generation that is, if not welcoming, then extraordinarily accustomed to surveillance. The youngest members of Gen Z have no experience of life prior to reliance on cell phones and apps that simulate social connection, while rendering each user a marketable product. This fact may seem distressing as young people experience increasing loneliness. But there have always been concerns about kids’ technological dependencies. Cher’s incessant use of her cell phone in her high school’s highways and during family dinner emphasize her adolescence. In Totally Fucked Up, a young filmmaker is most comfortable expressing his vulnerabilities to his camcorder, an act that’s not so dissimilar to divulging one’s life in a selfie camera.

Maybe what is most unique now is that the attention economy is not fixed to a singular generation. Are we experiencing a collective arrested adolescence aided by a stagnant culture? Is it why it’s easier to revisit impactful art discovered in my youth? I watched this season of Love Island as it aired and was astounded by the hours I spent not just in viewing but reading about it. Facebook (the social network site used more frequently by Boomers, Gen Xers, and even some millennials) has a robust Love Island community as does the cosmopolis of Reddit. On TikTok, it’s not just teens but older adults offering up bite-sized analysis of reality TV contestants, seeking to monetize their fixations. Love Island itself is the successor of Big Brother, which debuted in 2000 and introduced the twenty-four-hour live stream of participants. People in their thirties and forties may be the most active users of generative artificial intelligences that are atrophying brains and worsening the planet. The president of the United States posts news of life-threatening executive orders from his phone. If the kids have retreated, who can blame them? And if they’re not alright, it’s likely because none of us are.