What Dionne and Murray From Clueless Taught Me, 25 Years Later
Glad to see my favorite movie is aging well.
The only thing that didn’t was Stacey Dash. Funnily enough, I have a quotation about Cher’s debate class speech about immigration painted in my own room. I’m old enough to know Cher’s debate class was probably the first public speaking class I saw onscreen that had an impact on me, the one where she first received an average grade.
“It does not say RSVP on the Statue of Liberty.”
Cher getting teachers to change her grades is a great visual lesson in getting what you want by asking for what you need.
It’s been 25 years since the movie. It’s older than me at 23 years old.
As for the painting in my room, it is a college painting, from a time where I used colors to de-stress. Mostly a sketch.
Based on the Jane Austen novel, Emma, where instead of the heroine being a poor woman who must face off with a Rich Bitch, the heroine herself in Clueless is the Rich Bitch. Amy Heckerling directed one of my favorite book to movie adaptions, because the representation (mostly queer & Black) it provided for me did wonders to further my exploration of the era it exists in. It was a great study in tokenism and co-existing. Also, I loved Jane Austen novels, as well as any novel I was allowed to read so to have this movie be an adaption appealed to my early senses.
There was nothing better than a book that felt like an ecosystem and I felt that when I watched the movie for the first time during my body’s fashion awakening. A makeover gave me a sense of control in a way of chaos. That and my love for Sims 3. As costume designer for the movie, Mona May put it earlier this month, “the outfits in ‘Clueless’ brought femininity to a time when grunge was trending.”
Cher’s femininity was powerful, in a way she recognized, but was clueless on how to use. That was something I could relate to. Especially when it came time to navigate her love life. In the first few scenes of the movie, we are introduced to Dionne and Murray, the best friend and best friend’s boyfriend to our protagonist. Dionne and Cher were both named after starlets of another generation, Cher and Dionne Warwick who I both love. Like Tai (Brittany Murphy) articulates on their first day as friends, they “..talk like grown-ups.”
“High school is hypnotic.” — cult teen movie star Fairuza Balk
Well, the flirty step sibling trope sucks in comparison… let’s think about real life…
Thank God it’s Paul Rudd because Josh having a crush on his step sister could ruin a movie if it wasn’t directed to be a classic sleeper hit. I learned that here and The Fosters reinforced that. Only their parents were still married so it’s still weirder. Cher being taught how to drive is still Josh’s only good scene. So my preferred romantic relationship in the Clueless universe was always definitely Dionne and Murray.
Cher, the white (Jewish) protagonist based on the titular character Emma from the Jane Austen novel, narrates on how she feels Dionne and Murray’s volatile relationship, stating “I think they’ve seen that Ike and Tina Turner movie way too many times.”
Honestly, What’s Love Got To Do With It is a great movie. It deserves a shoutout so I’m not even mad about the white gaze being fixed on the token minority couple and initially applying stereotype. As I said, the movie is about a flawed woman, who lost her mother early, and is conceptualizing a life. That starts when you realize everyone’s love was different. Cher is not the only young woman in the movie with flaws.
While it is true that most of the time Dionne and Murray are snapping at each other, Cher recognizes during critical character development, that when they think no one’s looking, they are actually very caring and affectionate with each other. Today, the kids would call that toxic.
In the beginning of life, we are not always afforded the best depictions of love. That’s the danger of having a child with the wrong person or just circumstances of fate. Children shouldn’t be blamed for this, as we are all not asked if we would like to come into the world, we just are.
Yet, It’s interesting how we come into this world. We sit and we wonder: were our parents arranged, were they former step-siblings, were they high school sweethearts? And what of their grandparent’s love?
There are generations of young people today lamenting on how their immigrant grandmother’s love story is that she was a victim of kidnapping by their grandfather as a teenager. The act being done by a man who is smiling and in the room because things worked out. The thing about social things like poverty, which is part of what drives people to do such things as steal a 15 year old girl and make her marry you is that it persists. In countries and old time periods, when those were the options, and how we come to be, these can become fantasies that drive our egos. But like Cher and most of these grandchildren on Tik Tok, I can’t drive. My ego isn’t going anywhere these days, least of all outside or towards marriage. Seventeen is too powerful an age for that.
Cher was 16 and I was the same age watching the movie; it’s clear we are both meant to be eternally learning, all-consuming in both action and knowledge.
I appreciate that driving tenet being central to the plot. As the movie goes on, I gain a deeper understanding of the love each character has for each other, especially Dionne and Murray when they’re driving on the freeway, panicked.
Back to Josh, who is supposed to be in college. Cher, Dionne and Murray are supposed to be in high school. The thing about the teen drama genre is that it is limiting in the character’s maturity, too much or too little threatens the plot that it will begin to drift into lacking realism.
Back to the secondary couple, I can understand Dionne’s frustration when her boyfriend calls her “woman” instead of her name and I can understand her pride seconds later when he’s able to articulate the nuances of his new hip hop lexicon.
Ego, love, and power are what robs us too. So my ego and I cannot ignore its origins. Or is this me having main character syndrome?
Whether either coupling ends in a happily ever after, which can only be a statistical guessing game defined here as a life where generational curses are broken and things are as good as they can be 25 years later, is a mystery.
It’s never a guarantee, young or as old as you are, for as far back as it has been.
In both Cher’s mid-90s Beverly Hills and Jane Austen’s 19th century Southern English world, it is important to warn young femmes that they face a choice between financial/social security and marriage or being poor but independent. Cher lacks motherly guidance so she provides it, trying to get Tai hooked up with Elton to guarantee her social status, unaware that the world around her feet was changing. That is high school for you. She probably goes on to join a sorority.
So the message of the 1995 movie, as the messages of Austen’s literary worlds, has aged. Aging well is another thing entirely, can that rely on looks alone?
In the world we have now, where Clueless aesthetics rage, femmes are becoming increasingly dependent regardless of marriage. The happiest reported groups of people alive are unmarried and childless women. Although finding a life partner and having children are typically considered markers of success in our society, women who don’t care about this pressure, despite the stigma, tend to be happier and healthier as a result. Boom. Currently, only men benefit from having partners with markers like longevity of life.
This is all according to Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioral science at the London School of Economics, who says that while men benefit from being boo’d up for the rest of their lives, women generally don’t. So the message of the 1995 movie, as the messages of Austen’s literary worlds, has aged. Aging well is another thing entirely; can that rely on looks alone?
Yet, gratefully, it doesn’t have to.
We’re so obsessed with nostalgia… and for what?
Cher’s monologue about the impossibility of successful relationships in high school has modern replications and implications as far as the eye could see.
Take Amazon Prime’s Selah and the Spades. In Selah and the Spades, where five social factions run the underground life of a prestigious east coast boarding school, the head of the most powerful faction — The Spades — sits Selah Summers, below, walking the fine line between being feared and loved. In Clueless, it is Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone). Her journey mirrors Cher’s sentiments in the beginning of the movie but takes it the step further that we’re allowed to take upon exiting a generation still tied down by gender, tradition, and the people pleasing pursuit of success.
Starting or continuing a family begins with blood and water. Raw materials. It’s important to people in a lot of ways. Whether we actually like to do so or not. Even if we achieve a world with compulsory couplings eradicated, family and society does and would still meddle. Media would have to figure out something new to sell. We would still all fall in love with each other. But will we continue to communicate these expectations in our messaging, especially from women in cinema? Check out Malcolm & Marie and see if that answers your question.
Yet Cher and Selah (Lovie Simone) are both people at the top of their game who could feel power somehow draining from them, and they just did not understand why because of their unbelievable need for control and respect. Only Selah’s in a world without compulsory heterosexuality and monogamy. The role of Josh doesn’t have to be written, instead reshaped into Jharrel Jerome’s incredible performance as her ride or die. Selah’s monologue explaining that she abstains from romance because she rather do things that wouldn’t make her cry in a bathroom is among some of the best aromantic/asexual representation in the recent half of the decade, from a darkskinned Black woman at that.
It’s interesting how we come into this world. Were our parents arranged, were they former step-siblings, were they high school sweethearts?
So what now can we ask about love?
The movie is full of people I’ve seen many times before, in English class or in Young Adult novels. There was something about that cast: Brittany Murphy, Alicia Silverstone, Donald Faison, Paul Rudd, Stacey Dash, etc that gave life to new, specific stereotypes that I see beginning to repeat themselves in Generation Z.
Take the strange case of Dionne for example. I fear, now rewatching, that Dionne was honestly a clever and cute way to display the younger or perhaps more apolitical version of what Stacey Dash is now. In recent years, she has worked as a conservative political commentator for Fox & Friends and ran unsuccessfully for Congress in California.
After all, classist privilege is the movie’s hometown. We can see this Beverly Hills upbringing and the tokenism as foreshadowing to Dash’s political affiliation. I doubt the character of Dionne would be political at all, if she was, perhaps she would be conservative. The only time Dionne doesn’t have this image, for me, is in her scenes with Murray. It’s because of my undeniable affection for hip hop. California is a funny state and makes me wonder about rich black women who want so badly to fit in, almost the same way I wonder why some women in hip hop share and then hide from their sometimes conservative opinions (…looking at Asian Doll and Summer Walker…do they do it for money? Who knows?)
The way we fall in love with people, we fall in love with the spaces that tell us about ourselves. The way I love hip hop, Jersey Shore, Tik Tok, and so many other things. The way we go about these kinds of connections directs a lot of our course in life. One thing is certain: it does not and cannot define us.
So for some, it is worthy to abandon the mission of monogamy or coupling altogether, to fulfill a different purpose. This is someone that is often seen as selfish. Something Cher and Selah both know quite a lot about. Them along with most modern American woman, who have gained more freedoms than ever thought possible before.
The painting still hangs in my tiny closet, flaws hidden in the dark. It makes me excited about color, fashion, books and film when I look at that painting. The sketch of a painting is the one that is loved but gets re-done. Exercising the right not to be governed by time, forwards or back.
