What American comedies hide: a semiotic analysis of Clueless

Abstract

We aim at analyzing the movie Clueless (directed by Amy Heckerling, 1995) based mainly on the ideas proposed by contemporary French semiotics, especially regarding the conditions and values related to the processes of mestizaje (Zilberberg, 2004), and on the ideas related to comedy proposed by Henri Bergson (1991). We seek to find the thresholds between the superficiality of the comic — characteristic of the genre of the movie — and some depth that could be subject to analysis in order to infer the value system, the axiology underlying the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, central to the movie. It tells the story of a girl from the East Coast who moves to Beverly Hills. In the new school she is welcomed by the leader of the most popular students’ group. As the plot unfolds, the membranes which separated the classes are diluted, leading to the construction of a surface effect of acceptance of differences. However, an attentive viewer notices that in the place of acceptance of differences, one may actually find their effacement, which facilitates the blending of classes that were initially outlined as closed. With the opening of classes, there is the passage from the exclusion logic to the participative logic. In other words, the characters, who initially operated guided by absolute values??, begin to act according to universal values.