C is for Clueless

The four phases of my love for Clueless, one of the greatest movies of all time:

Phase I, 1995: The summer Clueless came out, I was visiting my godsisters in Georgia. Every single day, MTV showed some new promo clip or cute little moment with the cast (in character). I specifically remember there was an ad spot wherein Cher and Dionne talked about how they heard sucking on lemons helped burned calories and then did so before eating their salads. I laughed so hard. I was desperate to see the movie. However, my godsisters had just moved to the middle of nowhere and their mom had just started a new job, so we didn’t get a chance to go. And then I went home at the end of the summer and didn’t get a chance to go.

I eventually rented it and watched it on VHS later that year. I liked it. It was fine. I moved on.

Phase II, freshman year of college: One of my friends had the movie on VHS. My school, though close to a major city, was actually quite far from it if you didn’t have transportation, which none of us did. We watched a lot of movies that year. A lot. But we constantly rewatched Clueless. We started speaking in Clueless quotes. We started noticing background details about the movie. We pointed them out. We were probably annoying. (This guy my friend dated said after they stopped dating that we were annoying.) Ask me if I cared? It was glorious.

Phase III, graduate school: Remember how I said that I watched a lot of TV in grad school? I also rewatched a bunch of movies because I found that I wrote papers best when I used movies I knew very, very well as background noise. You know, movies I could pretty much recite line for line as I was watching.

Clueless was one of those movies. But it kind of went beyond that. I actually was so obsessed with it that I screencapped the entire movie. For fun. I spoke almost exclusively in Clueless quotes (there’s a Clueless quote for every occasion). I created a mood theme on LiveJournal. For those of you who don’t know, that takes an extremely long time. Not only did I have to find a picture for every mood, but I also then had to crop them and upload them and etc., etc., etc.

You know, now that I think about it, I was a little nuts in grad school. But I digress.

Phase IV, now: I own Clueless on DVD of course (and VHS, too, naturally), but I may or may not have watched it a time or two or several on Netflix. Most importantly, though, I have introduced my daughter to Clueless, and she enjoys it. Does she love it the way I do? No. Did she consider blowing her road test to get her driver’s license to imitate Cher? Maybe.

Shout out to my daughter for the driving test bit since I wasn’t sure which clip to pick for this. How do you choose your favorite scene from your favorite movie when you love every. single. scene? I mean, they are pretty much all perfection. Even this clip is infinitely quotable — and that’s even before the actual driving test.

So, yes, Clueless is amazing, and if you haven’t watched it already, you definitely should. And if we ever have a conversation, you’ll get about a quarter of the pop culture references I make.

For the A to Z challenge, I’ll be blogging about fannish pursuits (aka things I’m a fan of or have strong feelings about). Tune in tomorrow to see what I picked for D!