'Clueless' is 30 — as if! — but what this totally important movie did for "girly art" is forever

It’s funny and smart and charming. The clothes are delightful, the jokes still make me laugh (Cher on remaining a virgin: “You see how picky I am about my shoes and they only go on my feet”). Murray is a treasure, and I coo like a baby when Cher and Josh finally kiss at the end.

This movie just injects my veins with sunshine. For 90 blissful minutes, I can escape my troubles and experience simple, sweet Beverly Hills relief.

Sometimes escapism gets a bad rap as wilful ignorance to real-world problems. But in moderation, escapism is both necessary and good. Even George Orwell agrees with me — and he’s perhaps the world’s least likely defender of silly art considering his grim-ass books “1984” (1948) and “Animal Farm” (1945). In essays and reviews, Orwell vigorously defended “light literature” precisely because it offers readers much-needed reprieve.

In a flawed world, art can provide a balm, can give readers and viewers vicarious frivolity and light-heartedness when they most need comfort. When life feels draining, demanding, and oppressive, girly art has your back. It requires nothing from its audience. Instead, it provides. A sweet rom-com offers viewers pleasure, rest, and laughter. Girly movies let us check out from an imperfect world and experience solace.

Entertainment and diversion don’t fully escape capitalism — duh, people make these movies to make money — but when I’m at home watching my old “Clueless” DVD, I do feel free from the grind. I am not optimizing my time by watching Dan Hedaya yell “Get out of my chair!” for the one hundredth time. I am not achieving something productive or frankly achieving anything beyond my own relief. But my own relief, even if it’s not immediately productive, is well worth my time and attention.

It’s a form of self-care, and by this I don’t mean the Gwyneth Paltrow method where you buy $500 candles, pound celery water, and insert various rocks into one’s pelvis. I’m gesturing towards Audre Lorde’s original meaning of self-care as keeping yourself intact so that you have the energy to challenge systems of oppression.

This distinction gets us to different ideas of “good” rest. As much as I understand and support the need to check out of this unpleasant world, I’m also wary of arguments that simplistically defend “guilty pleasures” as a-okay and even transgressive when some of these stories enforce brutal status quo that makes comfort watches so desirable in the first place. I’m thinking here about the worst that femme genres like rom-coms and soap operas have to offer: one-dimensional glamorizations of selfish partners (“You’ve Got Mail” [1998]), coercive relationships (“Twilight” [2008]), and women who happily consent to being second-class citizens (“Kate and Leopold” [2001]). If we think about girly art as a mental rest, these movies would score a 4/10. They distract me, yes, but they don’t provide deep sleep. For genuinely restorative art, we need to look elsewhere.

This pivots us to another way to consider girly art — as generative. Girly art isn’t just an opportunity to rest and relax, but to cultivate goodness.

Girly art has a small scale. Rom-coms and teen movies are about (hot versions of) normal, recognizable people dealing with normal, recognizable problems. Most of the time, the conflict boils down to characters not getting along with their parents, friends, and/or love interests, then learning to communicate more effectively. In other words, characters go through the kinds of everyday struggles that viewers experience. Importantly, though, where real life could end messily, these movies always end happily. People clock their foibles, correct them, and make amends; everyone lives happily ever after. Through accountability and growth, reconciliation and understanding, these characters improve themselves and their little social worlds.

This plotline is so obvious that it almost hides in plain sight. But if you zoom out and summarize the big moves made in foundational girly art of the last 50 years, some shared stances and arguments emerge. Alongside “Clueless,” the plots of teen movies like “10 Things I Hate About You” (1999), “Bring It On” (2000), “Mean Girls” (2004), and “She’s the Man” (2006) all move from deception to reconciliation.

We watch as young people experiment with lying, cheating, and stealing everything from boyfriends to award-winning cheer routines, only to learn that competition, selfishness, and duplicity are ultimately unsatisfying. Living life well means rejecting these values and embracing friendship, co-operation, and honesty.

We see something similar with girly bildungsromans such as “Little Women” (1994 and 2019 — both are great), “Practical Magic” (1998), “Uptown Girls” (2003), “13 Going On 30” (2004), “Bridesmaids” (2011), and, yes, “Clueless,” too. These movies fixate on how women move through moral challenges in their relationships with themselves, their friends, their families, and their workplaces. They take seriously how women navigate the ethical conundrums of daily life. The cure to their ills? Compassion, integrity, and a willingness to be vulnerable. In the movies listed here, immature protagonists of all ages develop by earnestly cultivating these essential qualities.

Romantic comedies like “Moonstruck” (1987), “Clueless” (duh), “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” (2002), “The Big Sick” (2017), and “Plus One” (2019) all consider the complexities of interpersonal communication and romantic love. As a genre, rom-coms hinge on the fact that when people get together and form social bonds, things can get confusing and messy. People have different priorities and perspectives — how can characters balance these disparate needs? How do well-intentioned but imperfect people navigate the give and take of a relationship? These are the kinds of ethical questions people deal with on a daily basis.

You can even think of these movies as a glossy, entertaining version of a philosophical symposium. You take people with different histories and beliefs, then put ’em together and see how they handle shared experiences and problems. As anyone who’s seen one of these movies knows, things never go smoothly — and that’s the point. By watching characters muddle through the messiness of everyday life, viewers can almost run simulations on their own problems.

“Clueless” is a lighthearted teen film, coming-of-age story, and romantic comedy all at once. It combines all these genres and their hopeful, moral messages — plus, by adding some satiric bite, it never feels preachy.

According to Sarah Pitre, the founder of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema’s Girlie Night series, the movie is the best of all possible worlds: “It’s like a guilty pleasure without guilt because it does have substance.” Zadie Smith judges mainstream movies with a simple metric: “How much pleasure they give versus how stupid one has to be to receive said pleasure.” By this criterion, “Clueless” is a masterpiece. It is a fun, enjoyable movie that in no way requires viewers to turn off their brains in order to appreciate its brilliance.

Veronica Litt is a writer, reader, teacher and hobbyist letterpress printer. She holds a PhD in English and Book History from the University of Toronto and teaches post-secondary classes on English literature. 

Excerpted in part from Ugh! As If!: Clueless by Veronica Litt. Copyright © by Veronica Litt, 2025. Published by ECW Press Ltd.