JUSTIN WALKER ACTOR MOVIE
JUSTIN WALKER ACTOR SERIES

Similarly, Cher's gay friend (Justin Walker) is both semi-closeted and named 'Christian,' as if to assure viewers that he fits in to that mainstream with all the assimilated Jews who love to shop. Cher's best friend, Dionne (Stacey Dash) is black, wealthy, and like Cher 'named after great singers of the past who now do infomercials.' Success on America's terms means commodification and shallowness. But that diversity is nervously predicated on the uncomfortable JAP ethic of sameness. Assimilating means assimilating to classism, and to racism.Ĭlueless has been praised for its unusual diversity compared to the utter whiteness, or outright racism, of the John Hughes teen comedies it follows. Having submerged her own cultural distinctness, Cher’s oblivious to the differences, and therefore to the feelings, of others. 'I don't speak Mexican,' she blithely tells her El Salvadoran maid. In Re-Constructing the Man of Steel, Lund's book about superheroes and Jewishness, he explains that the Jewish American Princess of the 1980s and 90s 'was an unpassionate figure of passive consumption and consumerism, a product of integration into the middle class and the frustrated expectations of those who had achieved the dream and found it lacking.' He adds, 'Significantly, the Princess was not a figure of difference, but of sameness.' Named for an Armenian-American who became the embodiment of American pop kitsch, Cher is shallow, materialistic, and clueless precisely because she's willfully jettisoned her ethnic identity. In being Jewish, she is more American than mainstream America, and vice-versa.Īggressive, vapid normality is exactly the JAP stereotype, according to scholar Martin Lund. Thus, Cher Horowitz, all-American wealthy Beverly Hills icon, is also an icon of assimilation. Hall, ad-libbed her last name as ' Horowitz.' Director Amy Heckerling and Silverstone are both Jewish themselves, though, and they chose to keep the name. Supposedly Cher only ended up Jewish when Jewish actor Wallace Shawn, playing debate teacher Mr. Which is to say, she's a Jewish American Princess. She's an abnormal stereotype of normality. Cher is the atypical, typical heroine we've all seen before.

JUSTIN WALKER ACTOR MOVIE

Alicia Silverstone is white, thin, blonde, young and (as her step-brother Josh tells her) 'gorgeous.' Even wealth is a typical part of the fantasy movie package.

But she’s also dead-center Hollywood normal. Cher is absolutely not normal she's fabulously wealthy-so much so that she needs a computer to collate and organize her hundreds of fabulous designer outfits. As with much in the film, it's a multi-leveled joke. 'I actually have a way normal life for a teenage girl,' Cher (Alicia Silverstone) declares at the beginning of the classic teen comedy Clueless (1995).

JUSTIN WALKER ACTOR SERIES

This is the eighth post in a series on women filmmakers.

Justin walker actor