ABSTRACT

With the emergence of Clueless as a cult film, moreover, its audience has expanded into the twenty-first century. The release of Clueless in 1995 was a defining moment in youth cinema, screen comedy, girl-centred popular culture and the career of writer and director Amy Heckerling. The dialogue in Clueless suggests that the characters themselves are complicit in the film's exaggerated view of teenage life. Clueless became the first in a succession of releases that constituted a resurgence of teen films, defying what Timothy Shary terms a 'relatively dormant period' for the genre in the early 1990s. Allusions in Clueless to contemporary events are playfully combined with references to earlier popular culture. Clueless offers a view of contemporary youth culture that both celebrates the present and fundamentally exhibits a historical sensibility. Clueless defies the contemporaneous high profile of such discourses of generational decline and intergenerational conflict, which remain evident in the twenty-first century.