YMMV / Clueless

• Accidental Aesop: Schedule driving lessons for your kids if they need to learn how to use a car. A lot of Cher's problems in the film could be avoided if her dad set her up with a proper instructor rather than telling her to bum lessons off Josh.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Is Josh really any better than Cher? She at least admits that she's shallow, and takes pride in it. Plus, her Book Dumb nature shows that she has a big heart. While Josh applies himself at school, unlike Cher, he also hangs out at the same club where she has her date with Christian, for hours on end, and is implied to have casual sex when not studying. Josh also benefits from the same wealth and connections that she does and is being trained to take over a wealthy law firm, but because he's a guy, the movie focuses on that less.
  • Josh at several points acts more like a snotty older brother than a potential love interest. Case in point that he reacts with worries and a Big Brother Instinct when she calls him from a pay phone, explaining that she was mugged, and he comes over with no hesitation, just teasingly saying she owes him for the long drive. When did the transition happen, exactly?
  • Some people have theorized that Cher is actually a closeted lesbian, with her stated attraction to Josh actually being her buying into compulsory heterosexuality.
• Awesome Music:
  • The Muffs' punk cover of "Kids In America".
  • "Tenderness" playing during the teachers wedding.
  • "Shoop" by Salt-N-Pepa playing during Murray's introduction scene as he confronts Dionne.
  • "Just A Girl" by No Doubt playing as Cher drives to school.
  • "All By Myself" by Eric Carman (covered by singer Jewel) as Cher slowly realizes she's in love with Josh.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Travis attempting suicide after getting low grades on his report card, and Mr Hall's reaction is as if it's a mild nuisance that he sees every other day.
• Designated Villain: One has to wonder what Amber did to be considered the villain of the piece, besides not agreeing with everything Cher says (and even then it comes across as a case of Strawman Has a Point). At one point, she even says hello to Cher without a hint of malice only for Cher to immediately be rude to her for wearing the same dress Cher had worn a day ago. She's also deemed a "hag" and a "Monet" (Looks really good from far away but up close is a big old mess)! It can be argued that this is part of the point; the film satirizes teen cliques and hierarchies, and borderline blood feuds based on minor or even non-existent differences and slights can be a pretty big part of that. Amber herself isn't really a villain at all, but the movie treats her like one simply because she and Cher dislike each other and the movie's told from Cher's perspective. It's also worth remembering that Clueless is a modern take on Emma, and Amber is based on Augusta Elton - who, in the book, is also not technically a villain but is nevertheless an annoyance to the title character.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Elton may be a snob and a half who abandons Cher on the side of the road, but he's still mostly remembered as the hot almost-love interest.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Amber is decently liked by many fans for being a rival but not really an antagonist, getting some of the more...notable outfits of the movie and having a few Only Sane Man moments in protesting Cher's lackluster debate effort.
  • Travis is well-regarded, mainly for for his Adorkable behavior towards Tai and (completely serious) "acceptance" speech after getting the record for the most class absences.
  • In the TV series version, there's Sean, Murray's goofy but lovable Heterosexual Life-Partner. He technically didn't appear at all in the film^note arguably, he was in only one scene at the Christmas party as Murray's buddy Lawrence who convinced him to shave his head and his two lines were "It's the bomb!" and "As will you!", but became a rare instance of a popular Canon Foreigner.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Dionne and Murray's constant bickering being Played for Laughs isn’t as funny since Stacey Dash's own trouble with Domestic Abuse. Not helping is Cher comparing them to Ike and Tina Turner!
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • On a somewhat lighter note, Cher says at one point that she knows her Mel Gibson. Alicia Silverstone is Jewish (and so was Brittany Murphy), and Mel Gibson is, well...
  • Josh makes a crack about getting Marky Mark to "take time from his busy pants-dropping schedule to plant trees." Two years later, Mark Wahlberg became an A-list celebrity after starring in Boogie Nights where he did, indeed, drop his pants. (At the time, the line was a reference to his modeling underwear in Calvin Klein ads.)
  • The movie basically has Batgirl falling in love with Ant-Man.
  • Brittany Murphy basically plays a Lad-ette who has to be taught how to act like a Girly Girl. She'd later get typecast in Cher-like roles in the 2000s.
  • Cher also says she's named after a famous singer who "now does infomercials". In the late 90s, Cher would have a Career Resurrection with her biggest hit "Believe", and would also achieve even more acting success (although at the point the movie was made, she'd already won an Oscar for Moonstruck, so this might have been meant to sell Cher as The Ditz).
  • Cher has Drives Like Crazy as one of her defining characteristics. This becomes hilarious if you watch Blast from the Past - in which this time Alicia Silverstone has a sequence where she's the responsible one in a car with a reckless driver.
• Hollywood Homely: Amber is compared to a painting that looks good from far away, but is a mess when seen up close. Elisa Donovan is just as pretty as the other girls - although her unconventional sense of fashion (she seems to love '60s Hair throwbacks for one) probably alienates her from Cher and Dione's tastes.
• Hollywood Pudgy: After Brittany Murphy's death, all articles reporting on the subject referred to her as "...the chubby girl from Clueless." The issue is that while Tai's original look has her in baggy clothes (with badly dyed hair), after her makeover anyone with eyes can see she's basically as thin as the other girls.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Ugh! As if! Whatever!
  • It's easy to find on Tumblr a post detailing Cher's speech about immigration.
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • Cher's speech about immigration is meant to show that she goes off-topic easily and Brilliant, but Lazy given that, as her teacher points out, she failed to use any actual research and that the point of debate is to state your case. Due to some Values Resonance about immigration, this instead makes Cher look way ahead of her time and generous.
  • Despite the film's message that superficiality is NOT how to live one's life, many young girls aspired to be as airheaded as Cher initially was, and the phrase "As if!" took on a monstrous new life.
• Moe: Tai. Being played by Brittany Murphy at her most Adorkable will do that to a person. It's quite telling that upon seeing her for the first time Cher feels compelled to "adopt" her!
• Out of the Ghetto: While considered a 'girls' movie', much like Mean Girls in the 2000s, it broke out of both the Girl-Show Ghetto and the Comedy Ghetto by being a Box Office smash, and earning critical acclaim (being based on a Jane Austen novel certainly helped in that area).
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Donald Faison would of course become better remembered as Turk from Scrubs.
  • Jeremy Sisto likewise became more famous for Six Feet Under and Law & Order.
  • Sabrina the Teenage Witch fans might recognise Amber better as Morgan from the last three seasons.
• Squick:
  • Elton flossing his teeth during class.
  • A random teenager projectile vomiting into a swimming pool at the party.
  • Travis spitting a loogie into the air and catching it in his mouth, much to his classmates' disgust.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The 1996 follow-up series got this in spades. Aside from complaints that it ruined the legacy of the film (and ironically helped to popularize many of the themes that it was parodying in the 1995 film), specific changes got the most ire:
  • Most infamously was the casting of Canadian actress Rachel Blanchard as Cher. In addition to concerns about her acting, her version of the main character lacked a lot of the charisma, confidence, and finesse that Alicia Silverstone's Cher embodied.
  • Having the beloved Tai, who rounded out the Power Trio in the film, Demoted to Extra. Even worse, through her scant appearances, she wasn't played by Brittany Murphy.
  • Changing Mel from the intimidating and snarky Straight Man to a Nice Guy Bumbling Dad also garnered criticism.
  • Retooling Josh and Cher's relationship. While this is more justified, what isn't as forgivable was writing him out of the series altogether once it went from ABC to UPN.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The film is a mix of this and Intentional Period Piece. Yes, the Grunge and Hip-Hop fashions and ubiquitous cellphones establish it as a '90s film, but much of the music is actually from The '80s, and Cher Horowitz would likely feel right at home in a movie like Valley Girl. One of the more subtle notes that pins this to The '90s is the character of Christian, who is gay and whose tendency to dress stylishly is cited as clear proof of his sexuality, firmly placing the movie in a period before the metrosexual ideal took off.
  • The image of fashion and wealth in the film suffer from this, especially the already mentioned mobile phones, as well as a very foolish-looking fashion by modern standards. To such a level that it can look like modern Stealth Parody on the rich of that time. Not to mention that Clueless basically pulled a Reconstruction of the teen movie after Heathers killed it with a deconstruction - so any teen-oriented comedy made after 1995 owes its existence to Clueless in some way.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • Cher is meant to be ditzy, "clueless" about the world in Josh's mind, and unable to read social situations for anything more than power structure interactions. She's certainly a sweet girl who worries about her dad's health and wants her friends to be happy, but flawed and oblivious about how life works. The "sympathetic" part comes in when you realize her dad doesn't know how to raise a teenager; he tries to set boundaries but enables Cher's tendency to argue for better grades as well as her driving off to parts unknown for social gatherings. She's a kid, with a lot of money and upper status. Cher is genuinely confused when Josh tells her she's taking advantage of Tai's naivete, asking what is wrong with making the new girl popular and hot. Additionally, she was interested in Christian, who didn't have the courage to tell her he was gay while she kept flirting with him and asking him out on dates - but when Murray tells her, Cher switches gears immediately (despite being a bit disappointed) and makes Christian part of her friend group, as well as a shopping buddy.
  • Amber, in a Designated Villain way. Our only real cue to dislike her is that Cher and Dionne dislike her, and she's only as catty to them as they are to her.
• Values Dissonance:
  • It's implied that Cher's dad is perfectly fine with his stepson dating his daughter, and the pair's bickering is meant to come off as Belligerent Sexual Tension rather than Sibling Rivalry. Not to mention the fact that he's old enough to be in college while she is still in high school. In fairness to the movie, Cher mentions that her dad was married to Josh's mom for "barely a year" before divorcing, and Josh mentions he's taking 101 level courses, which would make him a freshman, so unless he took some years off, he'd only be 2-3 years older than Cher at worst.
  • Tai assuming that Elton rejected her for her hip size and that he was right to do so makes more sense during the “heroin chic” and forgiving-of-body-shaming '90s.
• Values Resonance:
  • The fact that absolutely no one makes any kind of big deal about Christian turning out to be gay is shockingly ahead of its time, and his sexuality isn't played for laughs (other than Murray having to spell it out to Cher a few times before she twigs, so the joke is more at her expense). More than that, he isn't immediately dropped from the plot but is instead brought into Cher's circle of friends.
  • What Cher says in her immigration speech.
    Cher: So, O.K., like right now, for example, the Haitians need to come to America. But some people are all, "What about the strain on our resources?" But it's like when I had this garden party for my father's birthday, right? I said RSVP because it was a sit-down dinner. But people came that, like, did not RSVP. So I was, like, totally buggin'. I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food, squish in extra place settings. But, by the end of the day it was, like, the more the merrier! And so, if the government could just get to the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Haitians. And in conclusion, may I please remind you that it does not say "RSVP" on the Statue of Liberty.
• Wangst: Tai acts like she's utterly heartbroken over Elton, even though they weren't even dating, complete with banging her head on the table, tearing up over "their song" playing, and coming over to Cher's house to burn a box of things that reminded her of him. Bear in mind Tai didn't even know who Elton was until Cher and Dee pointed him out to her as a possible boyfriend. This is arguably part of the point, as blowing minor problems into life-ruining crises is one of the "privileged teenager" points being satirized.

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