Stacey Dash wants to stay on script. Specifically, her publicist at Mayhem Entertainment Public Relations, a PR firm that mostly represents child stars and is currently suspended from Twitter, wants to stay on script, and the script is Clueless, the 1995 mid-budget teen comedy which turns legal car-renting age this July.
Dash, who is 53, played the clothes horse with a cute sneeze, Dionne Marie Davenport, in director Amy Heckerling’s cult classic. She also spent the past eight years as a conservative commentator, endorsing Mitt Romney’s presidential bid in 2012, and later Donald Trump’s in 2016, before publishing her first book that same year, There Goes My Social Life: From Clueless to Conservative. On a recent Wednesday in Los Angeles, a few weeks before the film’s 25th anniversary, the three of us are on a conference call from our respective quarantines, where Dash’s publicist lays out the parameters.
Staying on script apparently means no questions about Dash’s arrest in Florida last fall on charges of domestic battery against her fourth husband, Jeffrey Marty. It means no questions about her one-month-and-four-day congressional campaign for California’s 44th district in 2018, run on a baffling platform against something that sounded like income inequality, but she called “Plantation Politics.” It means nothing about her brief stint as a Fox News pundit covering “cultural analysis and commentary,” where she said things like “I’m not here to judge” neo-Nazis and “there shouldn’t be a Black History Month” until there is a “White History Month,” and from which she was eventually suspended for saying Barack Obama “didn’t give a shit” about terrorism. “For the politics questions,” Dash’s publicist says, “we just wanted to stick to just Clueless, so if you want to, just revert everything back to the movie.”
There’s a lot to revert back to in Clueless, director Amy Heckerling’s reimagining of Jane Austen’s Emma, which has persisted in the cultural vernacular for a quarter of a century. There’s the roster of catchphrases (“There goes your social life”) or the Mona May wardrobe—itself almost a character in the film (notably, the top keywords on Clueless’ IMDb page are “miniskirt,” “girl wears a miniskirt,” “short skirt,” “virgin,” and “girl wears a short skirt”). There’s also the slyly scathing takes on teen tropes, material culture, and class. When Heckerling was tapped by 20th Century Fox to do a project “about teenagers” and “the in-crowd,” she found the premise boring. “I thought,” Heckerling says in a DVD commentary clip, “I’ll do it if I can make fun of them.”
The result was an homage to Valley Girl femininity and teen-magazine style tips, very much in keeping with Heckerling’s one-word vision of its aesthetic—“happy”—but which needled and mocked its protagonists, even as it made you like them. (“Dionne and I were both named after famous singers of the past,” Cher Horowitz says, as Dionne leaves her massive estate, “who now do infomercials.”) The bubbly, Club Libby Lu happiness of Clueless was always winking, pointing outside itself, highlighting what made its prosperity possible (money). Few would call Clueless especially political (though Wallace Shawn did come out as a socialist last week), but the movie’s portrait of upper-class existence ribbed at the excesses, apathy, and casual racism of Beverly Hills conservatism, not unlike the kind Dash now defends.
It has been several years since Dash last watched Clueless, but she remembers reading the script clearly. “You know, you read so many scripts,” Dash said. “Some of them are really tedious. This one was just—I ripped through it.” She remembers connecting with Dionne instantly. “I knew it was me. I knew I was Dionne,” Dash said. “I thought she was just a spoiled, rich brat but she had a good heart—which is what I loved about her. She was just everything. Great parents. Wealthy. Great friends. Popular. She was everything.”