Excerpted: Ugh! As If!

2

A Ditz with a Credit Card:
Innocence and Ignorance

DIONNE:

“Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, but thy eternal summer shall not fade.” Phat! Did you write that?

CHER:

Duh! It’s like, a famous quote.

DIONNE:

From where?

CHER:

CliffsNotes.

The ditz is the primordial ooze from which the bimbo, dumb blonde, scatterbrain, space cadet, and stoner crawl. From airheads like London Tipton (the Suite Life franchise [2005–2011]) and Phoebe Buffay (Friends [1994–2004]) to gentle himbos like Kronk (The Emperor’s New Groove [2000]) and Josh Chan (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend [2015–2019]), pop culture loves a beautiful dum-dum — but why?²⁰ If we overthink the ultimate under-thinker, we learn that ditzes are a gateway into compelling topics like innocence, privilege, and hope.

While there are plenty of variations, the classic ditz has three key characteristics: She is rich, she is conventionally beautiful, and she is untroubled. Expressed as a math formula, the equation for a ditz might read: Rich + Beautiful = No Worries.²¹ As such, Cher Horowitz is the platonic ideal of the ditz. She’s loaded, thanks to her dad Mel’s litigation practice (read: Dan Hedaya yelling at people on the phone). Cher’s extravagant house features a double staircase, Greek columns, an immaculate turquoise pool, a sculpture garden, and, most important, a massive, mechanized closet with a virtual program to pre-empt sartorial mismatches. Cher is also stereotypically beautiful, a sentence that feels absurd to even have to write given the evidence that is Alicia Silverstone in 1995. She’s just luminous with her halo of blonde hair, glowing skin, and exquisite bone structure. Of course, Cher also fulfills the final element of our ditz equation: Back when Heckerling was pitching Clueless as a TV show, the original title was, you guessed it, No Worries. Because, yes, while Cher goes through some stuff, for the most part, her problems aren’t real problems. Like, she’s bad at driving, she gets flushed before a date, and she doesn’t get a good grade in debate class. Looking at it all together, I can confidently say: She’s fine. Even when things are objectively dire, the movie stays in a light comic register. When Cher gets robbed at gunpoint (!) and has to kneel in a dirty parking lot, she pouts about her designer dress far more than she panics about her life. Her attacker awkwardly stammers “thank you” when he takes her purse and runs away. These characters both know, like we do, that we’re in a light-hearted comedy. Even dark moments are played for laughs because nothing truly bad could ever happen in a movie like Clueless.

Beyond basic tenets of the girly movie genre, Cher’s blissed-out existence is also caused by her head-in-the-clouds perspective. Clueless cinematographer Bill Pope emphasized Cher’s outlook with multiple close-up shots of the heroine. He used camerawork to “bring the audience close” to Cher and her “amazing point of view, which she takes as obvious, and we take as miraculous.” Viewers know that Cher’s perspective isn’t objective. Instead, she sees the world with such a glass-half-full attitude that bare reality becomes fantastic.

“There’s something profound about these dimwits.”

As much as Pope admires Cher’s sunny outlook, Clueless also — true to its title — satirizes the heroine’s blinkered view of the world. Amy Heckerling has a lot of fun pointing out Cher’s ignorance with a gentle irony that would make Jane Austen proud. Some of the movie’s cleverest jokes occur when Heckerling pinpoints the difference between Cher’s idealistic voice-over and the camera’s neutral observation. Early in the film, Cher walks out of a party thinking that she’s just matched Tai and Elton (Jeremy Sisto). Through voiceover, she proclaims, “I had to give myself snaps for all the good deeds I was doing. It was so great. Love was everywhere!” Meanwhile, the camera shows a drunk guy puking into a pool as horrified swimmers flee. This is a clue that, actually, no, Cher, things aren’t going as smoothly as you think — as Cher herself will soon uncover when Elton drives her home and professes his love. Later, Cher goes to a dance with Christian (Justin Walker) and coos, “I mean, look how he ignores every other girl,” while her (unbeknownst to her) gay date chats up a cute male bartender.

Scenes like this poke fun at Cher’s obliviousness, even as others let us know that she and her friends aren’t complete fools. Heckerling makes sure to give equal airtime to the girls’ cleverness, like when Cher corrects Josh’s pretentious date, Heather, about Shakespeare,²² when Dionne redefines Cher’s virginity as being “hymenally challenged,” and when Tai poses a riddle for the ages: “If I’m too good for him, how come I’m not with him?” Even through the satire, you can tell that Heckerling adores her silly, sweet creations. David Denby’s New York Magazine review puts it well: “Heckerling loves Cher and her friends: Their posing conceals a small gift of poetry.”

He’s right. There’s something profound about these dimwits. For Cher in particular, her poetic appeal lies in her naïveté, a term that means an endearing lack of wisdom, judgment, and experience. To be naïve means that someone lacks the common sense that we take for granted in most functioning adults. This tracks because ditzes like Cher aren’t usually seen as adults anyway. Even when they’re in their 30s (or even their 60s. See Rose Nylund of The Golden Girls [1985–1992]), sweet airheads are more like children. The word “naïve” latches precisely onto this dimension of ditziness. It comes from the Latin for native or natural; being naive doesn’t mean being dull, but returning to a childlike state of wonder and innocence. This is a good-natured outlook that defies the cynicism of adulthood by insisting that change is possible, that kindness can overcome cruelty. A naïve person doesn’t know a lot, but in not knowing, they know more than the average person knows. You know?

This is part of why Clueless’s production team consistently cast actors with childlike energies. Heckerling described her leading lady, Alicia Silverstone, as “so adorable and sweet and really innocent,” while Twink Caplan (who played Miss Geist and acted as associate producer of Clueless) recalled the actress’s “purity of spirit.” Cher’s wardrobe cements this theme. Throughout the movie, she’s dressed in a whimsical schoolgirl style: empire waistlines, Mary Jane shoes, knee socks. Costume designer Mona May insisted that the “youthful, charming, sweet” outfits did not sexualize the characters, who she saw as fundamentally “childlike.” She opted for A-line skirts, cap sleeves, little bows, and headbands because they made the teenage Cher look “like a little girl.”²³

Alicia Silverstone really was perfect for this innocent, childish role, a casting kismet best displayed in the famous debate scene. While arguing that the United States should accept those in need, Cher specifically mentions Haitians, pronouncing the word “hay-dee-ans” when the correct pronunciation is “hay-shens.” In a famous piece of Clueless lore, this flub was not scripted. Alicia Silverstone genuinely didn’t know how to pronounce the word. Heckerling thought the error was perfect considering Cher’s ditzy character and let the camera roll.

Even in a culture where everyone’s supposed to grow up, immaturity has its perks. Childishness has links to playfulness, enthusiasm, and openness to new experiences. According to the queer theorist Jack Halberstam, juvenile “unknowing” can, funnily enough, lead to a higher-than-average willingness to listen, learn, and reinvent.²⁴ We see this facet of the ditz when Cher suddenly opts out of social rules she followed previously. Even though Dionne urges her not to take Tai under her wing (“Cher, she is toe-up. Our stock would plummet”), Cher shrugs her warnings aside to welcome the new kid. Later on, Miss Geist is visibly shocked when Cher, seemingly out of nowhere, volunteers to captain the Pismo Beach Disaster Relief. When Cher previously banished her classmate Travis (Breckin Meyer) to the stoners’ “grassy knoll,” by the end of the movie she cheers him on at a skateboarding showcase.

From a certain perspective, this could read as flighty. Cher’s a teenage girl flip-flopping through different opinions and identities; mean girl one day, do-gooder the next, what’s the guarantee she’ll actually stick to her new principles? But it’s her openness to mixing things up that interests me. Yes, it’s dangerous to let yourself be too influenced by others, but it’s also dangerous to dig in your heels and close yourself off to change. Through their humility and wide-eyed wonder, ditzes remind us that there’s still plenty to learn.²⁵

Notes

²⁰ I went down the rabbit hole on ditzes while researching this chapter. For a dangerous drinking game, take a shot whenever I mention a different bonehead. See the following interlude for a data visualization of dummy sub-categories.

²¹ In the original script for Clueless, Heckerling introduced Cher as “beautiful, rich, and damn happy,” a direct reference to how Jane Austen describes Emma as “handsome, clever, and rich” in the novel’s first sentence.

²² Heather lectures Josh about how their college professor is “restraining” their “fecund minds” from “wandering through the garden of ideas” (oof) before concluding that, “It’s just like Hamlet said, ‘To thine own self be true.’” Cher, remembering Mel Gibson in the 1990 adaptation, pipes up that Hamlet “didn’t say that. That Polonius guy did.” She’s right!

²³ I have a theory that this was also an overcorrection of Alicia Silverstone’s rock ’n’ roll image. In 1993–1994, she broke into the mainstream as a bad girl in Aerosmith’s music videos for “Cryin’,” “Amazing,” and “Crazy.” Things she does in these videos: skip school, steal a car, get a tattoo and a belly button piercing, beat up a would-be mugger, dress in male drag and eye-fuck Liv Tyler, sky surf, bungee jump, refuse to wear a helmet while riding (and boning on) a motorcycle, etc.

²⁴ Halberstam has a phenomenal essay on how this idea transforms the way we can understand the stoner comedy Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000). I adore this piece of writing. It’s funny and smart and hopeful and it changed the way I thought about scholarship and pop culture. Find it in The Queer Art of Failure (2011).

²⁵ This element of the ditz reminds me of some of Jenny Odell’s ideas about identity as characterized by potential and openness. For Odell — an artist and writer fundamentally concerned with one’s responsibility to their community — we have to “leave room for the encounters that will change us in ways we can’t yet see.” The alternative would mean reifying our traits and preferences to such a point that nothing can surprise us. Every day would be the same as the one that came before, which is no way to experience life. Odell describes this kind of set-in-stone outlook as being “basically dead before [our] time.” Through their open-mindedness, ditzes are beautifully immune to this existential threat.