Clueless Movie Analysis Essay

721 Words2 Pages

An Analysis of the Film Clueless Amy Heckerling’s movie Clueless focuses on an upper middle class 16-year-old girl, Cher, who lives in a nice neighborhood with her father and stepbrother, Josh. Cher and her friend, Dionne, take in a new girl, Tai, to help her fit into their high school. All of the major characters in the movie are in adolescence, which ranges from 10-19 years of age. In adolescence, teenagers undergo cognitive and emotional development. According to Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory, adolescents are in formal operational period from 11-20 years of age. During this period, adolescents develop abstract thinking and rational decision making. They experience two aspects of adolescent egocentrism, imaginary audience …show more content…

Cultural differences include when Cher mentions coke with her lunch and Tai thought she meant the drug coke, also known as cocaine, instead of the beverage coke. Because Cher comes from an upper middle class background, her upbringing, culture and language are different. Tai, on the other hand, comes from a middle class background and coke, short for cocaine, is a common street word. Therefore, the different backgrounds and upbringings cause word confusion between the girls. There is social class difference among the group members present in the film. In the beginning of the film, Tai shows interest in Travis, a skateboarder, but Cher directs Tai’s interest toward the rich, popular boy in school, Elton. Cher is trying to mold Tai into someone who she thinks is acceptable and she believes that her end-results are too good for a mere skateboarder. Cher looks down on the other group because of their lack of money and their different interests. Social class is determined by “educational attainment, income level and occupation status” (Peterson, 2010). Out of these three major components of social class, income level plays a major role in the high school social hierarchy. Elton is supposedly a better match for Tai just because his family is …show more content…

When Tai falls down the stairs, she feels embarrassed and self-conscious. She feels like the imaginary audience is judging her. The imaginary audience is an aspect of egocentrism where one feels like everyone is watching him/her and listening to his/her conversation. This is common in adolescence because when the teenager starts developing their own identity, they tend to focus a lot on themselves and become somewhat self-centered. Adolescence is also the time when emotions run wild. Emotions are affected by hormones such as “estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone that are produced by the gonads” (Kulkarni, 2015). In the film, when Cher mislabels the August files with September files she becomes embarrassed and starts crying for damaging her father’s case. Her emotions are running freely in this scene because the hormonal changes cause the situation to affect her

Open Document