Introduction to Part II

This book surveys Amy Heckerling's work as a director, yet her skill as a writer has been most evident in her deft use of dialogue among her characters. Weaving together innovations in contemporary lingo with verbal irony, Heckerling has been able to enliven her characters’ traits with humorous aplomb: the snarky sarcasm of baby Mikey in Look Who's Talking (“Somebody burp me before I blow up!”); the ostentatious outbursts of Cher and her peers in Clueless (“Your face is catching up with your mouth!”); and the witty wisdom of middle-aged cynicism in I Could Never Be Your Woman (“Tobacco is natural, Prozac's unnatural. Earthquakes are natural, television's unnatural. Natural sucks!”).

Heckerling's writing tends toward the comical, but for every bon mot tossed between her protagonists, she has offered often poignant comments about culture, class, and, particularly, gender, as the two chapters in this section demonstrate well. The politics of consumption and class that Heckerling first explored through Cameron Crowe's script for Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) are taken up by Andrea Press and Ellen Rosenman in their distinctive examination of youth identity in Heckerling's writing of Clueless (1995). Rather than merely discussing the upper-crust status of the characters in the film, Press and Rosenman set out to consider how the film's messages about economic identity have been received by contemporary teenagers. Theirs is one of the rare film studies that employs a sociological approach, using focus groups, to explore the intersection of cinematic language and classconsciousness, resulting in a provocative argument about the impact of visual and spoken signifiers in understanding cultural positions.

In the latter chapter, Lisa Richards further analyzes the teenspeak of Heckerling's characters, placing their linguistic practices in the wider context of the teen genre to argue for the various hierarchies and nuances of youth culture. Through her investigation, Richards demonstrates the expressive reaches of Heckerling's dialogue, illustrating the means by which the characters are identified in social groups and as cultural tropes. By scrutinizing this use of language in generic and political terms, she reveals unexpected statements that Heckerling's writing evinces about youth in terms of community membership and generational status.