This essay is part of Avidly’s RomCom Superlatives series
You know what Paul Rudd looks like—now but also then. Then, he was Josh. Josh in Clueless: Radiohead-listening, Nietzsche-reading, annoying, adorable, super-hero-cleft-chinned and soft-eyed. We first meet him in Cher’s Beverly Hills mansion’s kitchen, his back to Cher and to us as he leans into an open fridge, scrounging for snacks. We can’t see his face. He turns, we see his Amnesty International tee beneath an unbuttoned flannel shirt, but he’s still in profile to the viewer as he (this is awful) negs Cher about her body. We don’t get a close-up on him, his dark hair and light eyes, until a few moments later when they’re squabbling over what to watch, Beavis and Butthead or the news. Josh turns away from the screen to squint at Cher in annoyance, and suddenly he’s squinting at us. We see him from where Cher sits—where we sit—as he looks right at her—at us—just for a second before the scene ends.
For the whole first half of the movie, Josh barely says anything; there’s only a smart-alecky retort here, a quick response there. Mostly, he just looks. Then, almost exactly halfway through, Josh doesn’t look: he sees.And then everything changes. Josh watches Cher walk down the grand staircase in her home in her white slip minidress as the music of a whole orchestra suddenly soars. His face doesn’t move but his eyes do as they follow her as she walks. Is there a flicker of surprise? He looks down, he looks up again. This is the best longing look. We had seen him already from where Cher sat, and now we see her from where he sits. The orchestra soars only in Josh’s head.
But wait, rewind. Can you summon this memory if I remind you of it? Go back to the movie’s beginning. You hear scrubbing guitars, and then, arriving in the dark even before the neon geometry of the title sequence, a word: “looking.” It’s The Muffs, it’s “Kids in America.”
“Looking out a dirty old window? “Down below the cars in the City go rushing by I sit here alone And I wonder why.”
*
Last December, I watched Clueless, and then the next day watched it again, for the first time, and then second time, in a very long time. This time, I watched with my young daughter. We had flown to California to see my parents, and, as we’ve done for the past few years, stayed in the studio apartment that once was their garage while we got tested for covid; my mom’s immune system is severely compromised. Unlike every other time we did this, my daughter tested positive, and now we were looking out the window at my parents’ house across the patio through incessant downpours during a historically rainy winter on the West Coast. So: how to salvage this now totally fucked trip? What could we do that’s special, what was enabled by the two of us being together, behind glass from everyone we hoped to hug? My daughter wasn’t that sick. I felt fine. Let’s watch all the Jane Austen movie adaptations. Especially: let’s watch Clueless.
Rewatching Clueless a whole generation later revealed half-remembered aspects. Some I loved in new ways with new vocabulary; others I hated with keener antipathy. But most of all, the changed context made me hyperaware of the movie’s direct address to its viewer, its watcher. We’re hailed in the movie’s first line of dialogue. Cher’s words overlay a montage of her friends frolicking in luxury as The Muff’s song fades: “So, okay, you’re probably thinking, ‘Is this, like, a Noxema commercial or what?!’ But seriously, I actually have a way normal life for a teenage girl.” That addressed second-person looker-on, this time, was my daughter and me, watching side by side on an old couch before and after our teenagerhoods. My smudged laptop screen, a dirty old window.
But we’re not the only ones watching. In the movie’s first scenes, the watcher is also Josh. He gazes at Cher through the rearview mirror after he picks her up from the Valley. As she corrects his beret-wearing date’s misquotation of Shakespeare. Across the dance floor, and next to her over depositions at the dinner table. He’s looking at her—he tells her father “I’ll watch her for you”—as an outsider to what he names to her as “your whole social world.” Josh, like us, watches these particular kids in America.
That’s why the moment when Josh looks at Cher walking down the stairs marks a real shift: because after she descends onto the same floor as him, Josh stands up and joins her. He joins the movie. He looks with longing at Cher, and that longing is longing for her but also longing to be included, to be part of it all. He decides at that moment to stop being merely an onlooker. He rises from his seat. He goes out the door, following Cher. He enters the plot. The movie’s plot turns out to be a marriage plot, since it actually ends at the wedding of the teachers set up by Cher, Miss Geist and Mr. Hall. But also, all the young people are paired up by then too; Josh sits alongside Travis and Murray and their respective girlfriends Cher, Tai, Dionne. Murray, weirded out by the girls’ talk of their own future weddings, says “I’m completely buggin’!” Josh, in one of the last few lines of the movie, and definitely its last joke, adds, “I’m buggin’ myself.” He kisses Cher after she catches Miss Geist’s bouquet. He’s on the other side of the window now, no longer alone, fully part of the social world.
*
“There was a little too much kissing,” says my daughter, who, after all, was in third grade. Already this year, though, she’s rising, looking elsewhere; those are the demands of the genre of growing up. I will watch her, I hope, as someday she has a way normal life for a teenage girl. While we watched Clueless last winter, though, she draped her legs over mine, she rested her head on my upper arm, and she wanted to hold hands at an exciting part of the movie (the makeovers). We had already watched Emma earlier in the week, and anyway, there are no surprises here; I wasn’t sure if my daughter knew the word genre but she definitely understood genre. She murmured as Cher walked down the staircase, as Josh looks at her, “he’s staring at her because he knows he loves her.”
She’s right: Josh’s longing look at Cher is about knowledge. He realizes, all of a sudden, not just that she’s different than he thought she was, but that he already knew her. It’s himself—his own feelings about Cher—that he didn’t know and then suddenly does. In Clueless, we watch Cher for almost two hours; she’s rarely off-screen. But we love Cher, or anyway we love her more, because Josh does, and because we come to see and know her the way he comes to see and know her. We realize that we already knew her too. And Cher has the same realization about Josh thirty minutes later in the movie as she kicks rocks around Beverly Hills and says the movie’s eponymous line: “It all boiled down to one inevitable conclusion. I was just totally clueless.” Josh, she says, “dresses funny. He listens to complaint rock. He’s not even cute…in a conventional way…he’s a hideous dancer. Couldn’t take him anywhere. Wait a second. What am I stressing about? This is, like, Josh.” A montage begins of Josh smiling at her, and Cher has her own metaphorical staircase moment as music plays: “Oh my God. I love Josh. I am majorly, totally, crazy in love with Josh.” She suddenly knows what she already knows.
Knowing herself, knowing she loves Josh, and not knowing what to do next, Cher asks her dad, “Did you ever have a problem you can’t argue your way out of?” He replies, “Tell me the problem and we’ll figure out how to argue it.” But instead of reframing the problem, he reframes her: as like her mother, in one of the movie’s three fleeting references to Cher’s nameless mom, who, she says, as she walks by her mother’s portrait at the base of those grand stairs, “died when I was just a baby. A fluke accident during a routine liposuction. I don’t remember her, but I like to pretend she still watches over me.”
Cher’s motherlessness didn’t break my heart when I saw Clueless when I was a teenager. When I watched it with my daughter as we stayed carefully away from my own mother, it did. Even worse: Cher doesn’t seem to realize, or want to realize what—who—she lost. Only Josh tells her the painful truth about how her mother’s absence shadows her life. Only he sees that her mother’s portrait is just a sign of who is gone.
What does it mean to be clueless? To not look. Maybe to avoid considering that you even could. It means to not know what you don’t want to know, what you aren’t ready to know yet about the people who love you and also about yourself. What did my daughter understand about that time last winter, when we watched Clueless in the garage apartment because we couldn’t see the people we had come to see? When some of the people we love most felt very near to us and also very far? What did Clueless have teach her about longing, and love, and what is and isn’t lost? I knew more than her but not that much, not yet.
We closed the laptop. We waited for my parents to bring us dinner; we watched them leave it on the wet patio table, dash back inside, and wave at us from the other side of the french door. We knew the rain would stop, eventually, and that we would rise and be part of it all again. It did, and just a few days later, at least for the short time before flying back east, we were.
Johanna Winant (@johannawinant) is assistant professor of English at West Virginia University, and finishing a book about poetry and logic.