There's a scene in Clueless when Cher Horowitz, nervously searching for an outfit to wear to her biggest challenge, the driving test, offhandedly asks the maid, Lucy, to have a word with the gardener for her, since she ‘speaks Mexican’. Lucy indignantly replies that she's not Mexican and flounces off. When Cher tells Josh she doesn't understand why Lucy is so upset, Josh tells her Lucy is from El Salvador and rebukes her: ‘You get upset if someone thinks you live below Sunset.’

For some commentators, this is one of the film's parallels or analogies with Emma. It mimics that important exchange in the novel when Emma, thrown off her stroke at the Box Hill picnic, lashes out – the spite not the less pointed for the politeness of the address – at the vulnerable, accommodating spinster, Miss Bates, who has just taken up Mr Weston's invitation to entertain the company, if not with wit, then with ‘three things very dull indeed’: ‘That will just do for me, you know.