Clueless is a romantic comedy film that integrates teen and coming-of-age matters.
Clueless centers around a wealthy and popular 15 year old named Cher Horowitz who lives in Beverly Hills and is caught up in the stereotypical and materialistic matters in her high school. Though they have good intentions Cher and her best friend Dionne, who also understands the pressure of social hierarchy and expensive shoes, naively conceive, construct, and degenerate several relationships around them. With the knowledge of different communication theories, resolutions, and understandings of different working relationships, Cher Horowitz can conduct appropriate interpersonal interactions and reinforce the relationships in her life through nonverbal messages, self concept, and stereotypes.
Cantos !2
Cher Horowitz is the queen of her high school, her friends, and believe it or not her family. Though sweet, she is also popular, superficial, and well off due to her father Mel’s ferocious career as a successful lawyer. Her best friend is Dionne Davenport who is also of high status and understands what it is like to be at the top of the pyramid. While most of the kids at Beverly High envy Cher and Dionne, Cher’s ex-stepbrother Josh is one person who will feud with her as a result of their oil and water personalities. Cher is egotistical and naive while Josh is earthly and socially conscious. At school Cher and Dionne have A+ style but C- grades. In an attempt to loosen the reins on their debate teacher Mr. Hall, Cher plays matchmaker to set Mr. Hall up with an equally challenging teacher Miss Geist. After Cher slips a fake love letter to Miss Geist, she and Mr. Hall start dating and as a result both teacher become more relaxed in their grading, which pulls Cher’s grade up to an A-.
Soon a new student named Tai transfers into the school, catching the attention of Cher and Dionne who decide to befriend her and boost her social standing by giving her a makeover. After Tai’s “renovation”, she catches the eye of a skateboarder stoner causing major disapproval with Cher and Dionne who then try and direct her attention to a rich boy named Elton by giving her after school workouts. When Josh finds out about this project, he majorly rejects the idea and accuses Cher of turning an innocent person into an airhead snob. While Cher tries to get Tai and Elton to notice each other, Elton reveals having eyes for Cher as he drives her home from a party. Shocked, Cher immediately leaves the vehicle and is left in the middle of nowhere with her only resort to call Josh to pick her up. Once he does on the drive home, Cher suggests that they pick up some food for her father and his partners who are working on a difficult trial at the house. Taken aback by her kindness, Josh begins to see Cher in a different light.
Cantos !3
At another party, Cher dances with new student, Christian, as Tai stands insecurely in a corner until Josh comes up and offers her a dance to cheer her up. Cher notices and is impressed by his thoughtfulness. Later, Tai confesses to Cher that she likes Josh and Cher is confused by her defensiveness when she states that they are not good together, and later realizes that she is in love with Josh. In an attempt to impress him, she collects items to donate to charity and ends up shocking him with her selflessness. Back at home Cher helps her concerned father with a case but only ends up making errors. Josh stands up for her and they end up confessing their true feelings to one another. The last scene takes place at Mr. Hall and Miss Geist’s wedding that Cher and Josh, Dionne and Tai attend.
In this movie there are several forms of nonverbal communication that relay disconfirming messages. Nonverbal communication is expressed through non-semantic ways. The formal definition in the book Interpersonal Communication: Building Connections Together is, “people’s actions or attributes, including their use of objects, sounds, time, and space, that have socially shared significance and stimulate meaning in others.” Several ways that we can nonverbally communicate are through gestures, appearance, and sound. (Gamble, T. & Gamble, M. p. 152). One form of nonverbal communication that is prevalent in Clueless is proxemics. Proxemics is the use of distance and space in communication and is generally used to express the interest or disinterest to communicate (Gamble, T. & Gamble, M. p. 167-168). Customarily a smaller distance between people can reveal friendliness, dominance, and engaging interaction. A larger distance can reveal unfriendliness, submissiveness, and lack of interaction. A weakness that Cher shows is through her lack of education about this use of personal space. When she tries to pair up Tai and Elton she spends a lot of time with Elton giving him reasons why Tai is such a
Cantos !4
good match for him. Since their interactions are usually in places with lots of people around them, like school or at parties, Cher closes the distance between them so that no one else can hear her. Elton mistakes this as Cher being into him. Since Cher is the leader of this project, she often takes the reigns and does all the work so that Tai doesn’t have to. As a result of this control, Tai hardly spends any time with Elton and if they are in the same proximity, they are far apart so that Tai doesn’t mess things up. Since we cannot not communicate, I would encourage Cher to pay attention to nonverbal messages and match the degree of closeness with the nonverbal behavior she displays (Gamble, T. & Gamble, M. p. 182-183). Cher doesn’t realize that her closeness to Elton expresses flirting interest and Tai’s distance expresses disinterest. If Cher was aware of how Elton would lean towards her when they spoke or how his posture was relaxed, she could have suspected his interest in her. Similarly, if Tai could have revealed her interest towards intimacy with Elton if she stood close to him, touched his arm while they were speaking, or just spending time together in an intimate (0-18 inches) or personal distance (18 inches-4 feet).
Self concept plays an important role in the movie because coming from a first person narrative, we are steadily hearing Cher’s own self perception and the transformation of her thoughts over time. Starting in childhood, self-concept is the recognition that we have of ourselves as being separate from the things around us and how it affects our behavior and thoughts. Although the idea of self-concept is developed internally within ourselves, outside others also manage to shape our self-concept particularly through one theory, social comparison theory. Social comparison theory is a theory that describes how we compare ourselves to others to see how our qualities and abilities measure up to theirs (Gamble, T. & Gamble, M. p. 41).
Cantos !5
Cher unknowingly practices this theory with Tai and it shows Cher’s weakness through a seemingly positive, but actually negative self-concept.
Through Cher’s thoughts as she’s narrating the film, we learn that she sees herself as someone who is confident and giving. When new girl Tai arrives to school, Cher sizes up her impression of Tai as an unfortunate, outcast soul and attempts to transform Tai to be like her. We see that she thinks she’s prettier than everyone else and puts herself on a pedestal, and while she seems to be selfless, she’s actually doing more harm than good by changing someone to someone they are not. I would teach Cher that when her high self-esteem isn’t related to doing any good deed, it conducts harm because it can “lead to your developing a favorable self-appraisal that will not be matched by others’ views of you.” (Gamble, T. & Gamble, M. p. 40). There has also been studies that state how people with higher self esteem may be a threat to others and can encourage a bullying culture (Gamble, T. & Gamble, M. p. 40). If this skill were applied, Cher’s confidence would shine from the inside out and in return, encourage others to be confident in their natural selves for who they are. One short term outcome of this hypothetical situation would be that Josh would see Cher for a kind and encouraging person and their disagreements wouldn’t have been there in the first place. For long term outcomes, I believe that the outcast students, nerds, new transfers, and students who aren’t like Cher would be content and they would demolish any social hierarchy that schools have as a result of stereotypes and different school cultures.
Stereotypes are fixed images of a particular person or a group of people. It is suggested that they lead us to sort others based on recognizable qualities and distribute qualities to members of a whole group. One example assumes that, “all persons of Asian descent are soft- spoken and shy,” (Gamble, T. & Gamble, M. p. 71). When we stereotype we create expectations
Cantos !6
and conclude that they are binding and we being to generalize people who are so unique. Some stereotypes that exist in Cher’s high school are the rich kids, the nerds, the jocks, the teachers pets, the stoners, and the nobody’s. One situation involving stereotypes is when Cher attempts to set up Elton, a wealthy boy with a similar personality as Cher’s, with her “project” Tai. Elton responds by announcing that he only dates girls with the same social status. Another stereotype that Cher makes is to her family maid, Lucy. One scene involves dialogue between Lucy and Cher while the two are in the kitchen. Cher says, “Lucy I don’t speak Mexican!” Lucy then claims, “I’m not Mexican!” and storms off scene. Cher’s big weakness is that she believes she is truly adapting to different cultures, but she’s adapting to her thoughts. Cher engages in standpoint theory, which is, “A theory that one’s place in the power hierarchy influences the accuracy of one’s perception of social life.” (Gamble, T. & Gamble, M. p. 63).
I’d advise Cher to develop cultural awareness because ignorance affects the outcome of interpersonal communication interactions and can cripple our ability to create relationships with those around us. Learning more about others facilitates healthy interaction and relationship building. Cultural awareness usually applies to people of different ethnic cultures, but I think that it can also be applied to stereotypes. If Cher were to show her cultural competency, a short term outcome would have been that Tai and Travis (someone who is quiet and observant like Tai) would have been able to start a relationship and they would have been happily together rather than Tai being forced with Elton. A long term outcome would’ve been that Lucy and Cher could have started their relationship when Lucy first started working for the family. Rather than viewing Lucy as a minority and lower social class, Cher could have developed a grandmother- granddaughter type of relationship with her.
Cantos !7
Miscalculations, assumptions, and lack of clarity can present relationship and communication problems. The movie Clueless teaches us that what we think and know about communication can be misleading and inaccurate. Ultimately, by honing in on our nonverbal communication, understanding of healthy self-concept, and competency or deterioration of stereotypes and cultural boundaries, Cher Horowitz alike many others, can adequately create meaningful and deep relationships with those around her.