Heckerling's Movie Clueless example essay topic

The transformation of Jane Austen's novel Emma into Amy Heckerling's movie Clueless does not trivialize the original text, but rather, enriches it by repositioning the responder. Clueless allows for a whole new understanding of Austen's Emma. An apparently superficial teen flick whose onion-like layers of meaning are peeled back one by one. The class structure and social mores evaluated in Emma are transformed in Clueless, reflecting modern values and relationship power plays. The similarities of each text comments on the universality or unchanging nature to aspects of humanity.

It is looking at the modern day equivalents in each text that we see can the contrasting values of these starkly different worlds. Thus, on close examination, comparisons are revealed, making the process a truly enriching transformation. By examining heroines in both texts, we are forced to revisit familiar themes and issues. Heckerling's characters may use the language of the 1990's and have modern-day interests and occupations, but they depict similar traits as Austen's characters: they display self-interest, vanity and practise deception but also demonstrate personal growth and perceptive honesty. Heckerling does this in a persuasive and engaging manner in order to target a larger audience.

Heckerling conveys a similar message by utilizing and exploiting the technique of film. It is true as Jocelyn Harris writes, "In an age when the visual is said to have superceded the verbal, the movie Clueless provides extraordinary pleasures to people who still read books". It takes Austen several chapters to introduce her characters - Heckerling is able to do it in seconds through facial expressions, tone of voice, style of dress, gestures, body language and the frame of shot. Thus, Heckerling caters for a wider and more literate audience. Heckerling establishes immediately that Cher will be the subject of dramatic irony. She opens the film displaying teenage lifestyle as it's portrayed in TV commercials, but for these teenagers this surreal world is the real world.

The audience is then introduced to Cher's voice-over, whose incongruity with the images on the screen is a source of dramatic irony. There's a comical gap between her assertion that she "actually [has] a way normal life for a teenager" and the image of her choosing her outfit on a custom-built computer programme that drives an electronic wardrobe. Clueless has the ability to appeal to all intellectual levels and entertain all viewers, an aspect which the novel Emma lacks. While Heckerling uses film ic techniques, Austen on the other hand uses dramatic irony. Although an educated person would not have trouble understanding the novel, someone of less intelligence would find Emma difficult to comprehend.

The social values connected with Clueless are a clever interpretation of morals set in a world familiar to mass audiences of the 21st century. Social context is strongly distinguishable, with the use of technology and machinery. Everyone in the film owns a mobile phone, beeper, and an expensive car. This instantly identifies the technological revolution, and the symbols of wealth, consumerism, superficiality and prestige. Clueless succeeds in making the other characters of the novel updated to make them more relevant to modern audiences. Many characters have been transformed to fit the social contexts of today, in a different gender, personality or relationship to Cher over their fore running characters.

Heckerling transforms the character of Emma's governess Mrs Weston to the younger more modern Dionne, a 17 year old, wealthy, well-dressed socially conscious character of African American origin. Heckerling has not only targets the audience of adolescent girls and boys, but also creates a politically correct and very modern atmosphere by making Cher's best friend, the recreated Mrs Weston, as a young and vivacious black woman. Heckerling reassesses new values, but also maintains the author's ironic voice and moral sense. The director illuminates the ongoing issue of woman's place in a patriarchal society as well as the miasma of self-awareness and the realisation of love. She renovates old rhetorical devices to create new insights.

The spirit of transforming Emma serves to generate a new network of relationships that makes Clueless an undoubtedly enrichment to Jane Austen's Emma. Clueless is a clever transformation of a classic text. It ultimately engages a wider and generally more literate audience who appreciate the verbal and the visual..