Clueless (Movie) vs. Emma (Novel)

Clueless (Movie) vs. Emma (Novel)

In Clueless, a 1995 movie adaptation of Jane Austen's classic novel Emma, writer/director Amy Heckerling took broad license with many aspects of the story. The plot, language, and setting were adjusted not only to modernize the novel but also to sell it to Hollywood producers and movie-going audiences; some symbols stayed consistent while other were don away with, and the same could be said of characters. But the similarities, and the popularity of the story, are even more striking than the differences. It could be said that Clueless is even a truer version of the story for the generation growing up in the mid-nineties. The novels portrayed people in settings contemporaneous to those of the original readers, and the adjustments made to character and point-of-view in Clueless are enough to make the story relevant and engaging to modern audiences in the same way.

Popularity and true literary greatness rarely go hand-in-hand; as Brian Southam notes, "it seems a contradiction in terms to talk in the same breath about literary greatness and popularity [...] in this light the case of Jane Austen is remarkable" (Southam, sec. I). Her popularity was an outgrowth of her relevance as a writer and her ability to create engaging characters; so engaging and life-like, in fact, that "She was plagued by people who went round finding originals for the characters" (Southam, VI). If these characters were to inspire the same effects on a modern audience, they would need to be updated.

One of the major adjustments in Clueless concerns the character of Christian, who replaces Emma's Frank Churchill. Christian's secret is not an engagement, like Franks, but his sexuality. Though he never says it himself, it is heavily implied -- and explicitly stated by one character -- that he is gay (Heckerling, 1995). This produces the same effect of disappointing Cher's (Emma's) love interest in Christian (Frank). In addition, homosexuality carried a similar social stigma to that created by the secret engagement Frank Churchill had. In the end, both men remain likeable and wholly forgivable for having disappointed the heroine.

Though the reasons for this shift in character are fairly straightforward -- a secret engagement simply would not have meant the same thing to today's audience as it would have in Austen's time -- the effects of this change are less immediately clear. Though acceptance of homosexuality has been steadily growing over the past several decades, there is still a fair amount of discrimination directed towards homosexuals. This could partially explain why Heckerling never has the character of Christian explicitly confirm his sexuality; it could also explain why the character is a little less sympathetic than the generally gallant Frank Churchill. In comparison, a secret engagement seems tame. But it is important to remember that Austen "wrote for and about her own class. She deals with relationships in that small social group and the relationships between particular individuals in that group [...] Marriage was the most important concern of the period both for men and for women" (Guney, 527). A secret engagement, especially when the issue of class difference between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax was so unclear, would have been as scandalous in Austen's time as Christian's homosexuality was in the mid-90s. It would not have been unheard of, but neither would it be something one would have talked about loudly in public.

Heckerling also updates Austen's character's on a broader scale; because the extreme hierarchies of class that existed in Austen's England did not transfer to American soil well, especially in 1995, the class system is replaced by a network of high school cliques. Instead of the lower-class farmers and other tradesmen, Clueless presents the group of slackers and druggies, who regularly miss class and with whom it is disgraceful to be seen. The most important individual in this group, both in Emma and in Clueless, is Robert Martin/Travis, love interest for Emma/Cher's friend Harriet/Tai. In both works, the heroine determines that he is beneath the dignity of her friend, not wanting to see the lower sensibilities that Harriet/Tai possesses, or to admit that she dos not understand the heart as well as she thought. As Emma says, "Mr. Martin is a very respectable young man, but I cannot admit him to be Harriet's equal; and am rather surprised indeed that he should have ventured to address her" (Austen, 59). or, as Lindsay Green puts it, Emma and Cher "are very confident and self-important and, because they have been spolit, are quite unaware of how misguided their opinions are" (Green, 123). Because of the differences in their social status to Robert/Travis', they cannot conceive of Harriet/Tai's attraction to and ultimate love for him, the one due to his wealth and the other due to his habits. This change is necessary for the sympathies of the audience to remain intact. Had Cher objected to Travis simply on the grounds of his financial standing, the audience would not have any sympathy for her. But because he is a stoner and somewhat stupid, her desire to find Tai someone better makes some sense. In Austen's time, class and money were everything; people could be cut off for marrying beneath them, so such a seemingly shallow stance on Emma's part would have been not only understood, but expected.

Character is by no means the only -- or even the most important -- adjustment that Heckerling made in adapting Emma into the movie Clueless. The entire method of narration is switched. Jane Austen wrote Emma in the third person, and Clueless is narrated in the first person by Cher. There is definitely some aesthetic reasoning behind this; the disembodied voice of a third-person narrator would have done much to pull the audience out of the story, as opposed to the instant personal connection established by Cher as a first person narrator. Many of the films comic moments come from this narration, as well, such as Cher interrupting herself when she spots an outfit she likes in a window (Heckerling, 1995). Even this comedy and sense of style is a necessary adaptation. Standing out was not a good thin two hundred years ago in England; it still isn't in many parts of the world. America in the nineties -- and today -- celebrates individualism, and the narration of Clueless needed to reflect that to keep it believable. "An emphasis on performance, or what we may generally call personal style, leaves little room for manners as conceptualized by Jane Austen" (Macdonald, 217).