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  • Introduction
  • Melissa Lenos (bio)

On June 2, 2013, some friends and I attended a “Quote-Along” event for Amy Heckerling’s 1995 film Clueless at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Kansas City. Patrons were greeted at the theater door with giant inflatable “mobile” phones and brightly colored, fluff-topped ballpoint pens. The announcements for the event encouraged us to sing, shout, and “as-if ” along with Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, and Brittany Murphy—but only at approved moments, which were helpfully annotated with bouncing-ball-style text highlighted at the bottom of the screen. The Alamo chain, known for its themed events and dine-in theaters, also boasts a famously strict etiquette policy and encourages ritualized viewing behaviors. The theater emphasized this with a full-screen portrait of nineties-era Heckerling superimposed with the text, “At the Alamo Drafthouse, we do not disrespect Amy Heckerling.”

My friends and I, almost certainly the only attendees old enough to have seen the original release of Clueless, observed the other audience members: young, female (the event was advertised as a “Girlie Night”), and wearing Heckerling-inspired approximations of nineties fashion in their matched plaids, kneesocks, and hats. The evening had a cheerful, slumber-party feel (Figure 1). In an additional nod to the new, younger Clueless demographic, the Quote-Along’s countdown to Cher and Josh’s (Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd) first kiss included a superimposed animation of Pinkie Pie (a character from the popular contemporary show My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic [Hub Network, 2010–present]) firing off a cannon filled with glitter confetti. The countdown ends, the characters kiss, and the cannon explodes to cheers from the audience.

When Clueless was released, some heralded it as Jane Austen for a new generation, and others pondered whether the target audience [End Page 123]


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Figure 1.

Clueless Quote-Along attendees, with “portable” phones. Image courtesy of Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas.

was familiar with Austen’s Emma at all and saw the film as a possible “gateway” for interesting young audiences in Austen.1 The film, part of the late-1990s trend of basing teen movies on classical literature, grossed $56 million—it was made on a $12 million budget—and is often listed among the top sleeper hits of the mid-1990s.2 In terms of its more immediate impact, Douglas McGrath’s 1996 adaptation of Emma (starring Gwyneth Paltrow in the title role) was a traditional period drama but included aspects [End Page 124] of implausible twentieth-century feminism that some read as an unavoidable echo of Clueless.3

The film’s influence and prescience are examined from several perspectives in this issue’s “In Focus.” Ben Aslinger’s essay explores the film’s refusal to adhere to traditional generic boundaries in its sound track, instead sampling hip-hop, rock, pop, and singer-songwriters, and so presaging our postalbum era of Spotify and Pandora. The postgrunge cultural lull following the death of Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain is further investigated by Alice Leppert in her consideration of the film’s connection to teen magazine trends, particularly the “makeover” feature. Heckerling’s relentlessly “happy” film created an unusual convergence of “intertextual excess” with YM and Seventeen, and with the explosion of the “teen”-themed subbrands of Elle, Cosmo, and Vogue in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The spread of Clueless Quote-Alongs to all Alamo Drafthouse theaters in the United States, as well as to the Prince Charles Cinema in London, suggests that interest in the film remains steady and attendance consistent enough to continue the event at regular intervals. Besides the repeated screenings, the announcements of myriad Clueless-inspired and related projects (from a Heckerling-directed Clueless “jukebox musical” to a successful Kickstarter-funded documentary, Beyond Clueless, on teen film from 1995 to 2004) reinforce that the film has transcended its original target audience and is not a relic of 1990s pop culture but a manufacturer of that culture, an important influence on later films, and a touchstone of teen transmedia.4

The Quote-Along I attended, along with BuzzFeed “listicles” and YouTube compilations, illustrates how Heckerling’s hyperstyled world generation has lodged in...

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