Universität Lüneburg
WS06/07
FBIII - Angewandte Kulturwissenschaften Sprache und Kommunikation
Seminar: 63500 Jane Austen Goes To Hollywood
Abgabetermin: 24.04.2007
Updating Emma: Clueless
by:
Lena Ostermann
7. Semester
2
Index
1. Introduction _____________________________________________________ 3
2. Updating Highbury________________________________________________ 4
What's happening here? A Twin Peaks-experience _____________________ 5
4. Playing hide and seek, or: who is who? ______________________________ 6
5. In power? - Cher's loss of control ___________________________________ 8
6. As if!!! Issues of class and social status ______________________________ 9
6.1 Dressed for success on Alaias and backwards-caps _________________ 10
6.2 Well, so, whatever talking like grown-ups __________________________ 12
7. What's so funny? Narrating a comedy _____________________________ 13
8. Don't you know who my parents are? Parentage in Clueless __________ 15
9. And in conclusion... ______________________________________________ 16
Bibliography ______________________________________________________ 17
3
1. Introduction
,,Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and
happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existance; and had
lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."
(Austen, p.5)
,,Cher: 'Okay, so you're probably going, "Is this like a Noxema-commercial or what?"
But seriously, I actually have a way normal life for a teenage girl.'" (Clueless)
Some things don't ever seem to change: whether it is England in 1816 or Hollywood
in 1995, the stories of Emma Woodhouse and Cher Horowitz have a lot in common.
Of course, the first one was written as a novel by Jane Austen and the other one is a
movie directed by Amy Heckerling, one takes place in Highbury around the landed
gentry of 19
th
century England and the other one is set in 1990's Beverly Hills, but
when you take a closer look, the similarities are stunning. Even though it never was
officially credited, it is clear that ,,Clueless" is a contemporary adaption, or as Lesley
Stern chose to call it, an update, of Austen's ,,Emma". In the same time, it is the first
one released during the 1990's, being followed by no less than ten different
adaptations of Austen's work, amongst them Ang Lee's ,,Sense and Sensibility" (1995
as well), the BBC-miniseries of ,,Pride and Prejudice" (1995), two other versions of
,,Emma" (both 1996) and the latest Hollywoos-success with Keira Knightly, ,,Pride and
Prejudice" (2005). This ,,Austen-movie-trend" does not seem to stop the Internet
Movie Database names two tv-productions already completed for 2007 and another
three (one Bollywood- and two tvproductions) being in production. But what is it that
makes Austen's six novels, and especially three of them, so popular as draft for
screenplays, for visual adaptations? On the following pages, I will take a closer look
at the the update of ,,Emma", Amy Heckerling's ,,Clueless".
It is not the easiest thing to compare a book with a film, two totally different media.
The question the fidelity of the adaptation towards the original always plays a role.
But is it the most important one? What is it, actually, that makes someone recognize
the original in the adaptation especially, if the original is not credited? So, what I will
try to do, is approach the film through different questions with the book in mind,
rather than list differences and similarities of story and plot. A lot more interesting to
me is a question that Phillips and Heal posed on different cinematic adaptations of
,,Emma": ,,In what way do elements of any particular adaptation cause us to re-
engage in a dialogue with the novel?" (Phillips/Heal p.2). This includes questions
4
concerning references and quotations, as well as characters and setting. Not only the
question of who-is-who, but most important: how are their values, their connections
between each other transported from the book to the screen? What happens to them
when you update them to teenagers in the 1990s?
2. Updating Highbury
As a teen-comedy, a subgenre under the genre teenage-movie (or ,,teen-flic"),
,,Clueless" stands in the tradition of films such as ,,The Breakfast-Club" (John
Hughes, 1985) or ,,Pretty in Pink" (Howard Deutch, 1986). A year after ,,Clueless",
with ,,Romeo and Juliet" (1996, Baz Luhrman) another piece of classic english lite-
rature was turned into a teenage-movie, thus together starting a trend for moderni-
zing classic plays and novels which still goes on today, as shows the 2003 MTV-
version of Emily Brontë's ,,Wuthering Heights". Another quite large influence on the
movie seems to have had the at the time popular tv-series ,,Beverly Hills 90210",
circling around the everyday life of rich teenagers in Los Angeles.
So, you could say that it is the mask of a teen-movie which disguises ,,Emma" from
the viewer on first sight. But what does this mask, this genre, imply? Apart from the
characters we meet, it is mainly the setting, i.e. the when and where. Plot and story
as well seem to differ completely from the original, but I will come to that later. And
maybe, above all, a natural tendency towards exaggeration should not be forgot.
First, the genre is, usually, set contemporary, at around the same time the movie is
shot, meaning that for ,,Clueless", the story takes place around the middle of the
1990s. Another important feature of teenage-movies is the school, mostly, appro-
priate to the characters' age, highschool. Their homes and other places where
teenager hang out, for example shopping malls or parks, play an important role as
well.
Main character Cher lives together with her father in a huge, white house in a rich
area in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills. It has a big tree and greek-style columns at the
front, which we learn from Cher, ,,date all the way back to 1972" (which, by the way,
is the year of the release of the BBC ,,Emma"-mini-series (cf. Phillips/Heal p3)). Both
house and garden are taken care of by a maid and a gardener, and apart from going
to school, parties or shopping, Cher does not really leave it very often, making her
neighbourhood the centre of her world something she shares with Emma, who
5
herself never leaves her home apart from visits to Highbury or Donwell Abbey. This
becomes especially apparent when the whole group of friends is on their way to a
party and get lost on the map: ,,all i see is Bel Air". Even though Los Angeles takes
up a much larger area than Highbury must have, their relative size seems still quite
the same, considering both means of transport and the rather small circles of L.A. in
which Cher and her friends and family move. When her father calls Cher at the party
in Sun Valley, he tells her that ,,everything in L.A. takes twenty minutes" and that he
wants her home in that time. Twenty minutes might be the probable time it might
have taken Emma to walk the halv mile from Randalls back to Hartfield. So, even
though life in 20
th
century metropolis L.A. may not seem to have a lot in common with
the 18
th
century english community of Highbury, there are still parallels to be found
which may indicate similarities in lifestyle and setting.
What's happening here? A Twin Peaks-experience
,,I had this character in my head, the girl [...]. But I needed a strong plot and I had
read Emma in college. I read it again and said, [...] this is just the perfect structure for
what this girl should go through. [...] It was all there in Jane Austen." (Heckerling,
p.2).
Phillips and Heal suggest in their essay the term ,,alphabet puzzle approach" (Phil-
lips/Heal p.3) for the result of Heckerling's work with ,,Emma", a term to which I agree
very much. ,,Events in the story are divided up and rearranged in a kind of image
anagram for the Emma-familiar viewer to solve" (Phillips/Heal p.3), or, to use Cher's
own words: we have a Twin Peaks-experience
1
. To find familiar scenes and events, it
is necessary to depart with the familiar straight storyline and search a bit deeper
under the surface of Story and Plot.
A wedding takes place, not in the beginning, but at the end of the movie. It is the
result of Cher's matchmaking, not her own one (after all, as she says, she is only 16
and they live in California, not Kentucky). The party at Randalls takes place as a
party in Sun Valley, and the ball at the Crown as a party organized by Josh's old
friends. Tai, the Harriet-character, goes through a dreadfull experience, not with
gypsies, but still with two weird guys at the mall.
1
Referring to David Lynch's tv-series ,,Twin Peaks" (1990), in which a murder is solved bit by bit and
unrecognizable events take place.
0 Kommentare