Fashion Plate

About 30 minutes into Clueless, a disposable new teen comedy starring MTV-spawned glamour girl Alicia Silverstone as a spoiled Beverly Hills princess, I started to picture myself as the protagonist of a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie.

I'm playing a hard-bitten journalistic loner, a cross between Mad Max and Andrew Sarris -- the last surviving alternative press film critic. Brought into a black granite courtroom of Riefenstahlian proportions, leg chains rattling, I'm forced to kneel before a tribunal of pop-culture-conscious android judges. The charge: treason against rationality.

"Exhibit A, your honor," barks the prosecution's lawyer. "He freely admits to enjoying Clueless!"

Well, what can I say? I'm guilty, Your Terminatorships. Tear up my Pseudointellectual Film Critics Society membership card and toss my sorry carcass into the atom smasher.

I'm not alone, thank goodness. The rest of the country also seems to be in love with Alicia Silverstone, an 18-year-old model-turned-movie-icon. Recently, during a week when the brilliant documentary Crumb finally went into wide release, she adorned the cover of Entertainment Weekly -- which, considering that Crumb is a genius and Silverstone's track record includes two forgettable horror pictures and a raft of Aerosmith videos, should be reason to despise her on general principle. There's another: Clueless, her first star vehicle, raked in nearly $3 million on its first day, instantly transforming a peroxide blond who's barely old enough to vote into one of the most sought-after female stars in the movie business.

But if I said I didn't understand her popularity, I'd be lying. Silverstone is our guilty pleasure of the moment. She's an adorable little jailbait pixie -- Drew Barrymore without the tragic undertones. Bopping around Los Angeles in Clueless in a succession of sleek, colorful, astonishingly expensive outfits and dealing with seemingly insoluble crises that involve dating, shopping and report cards, she carries herself like a pint-sized Cybill Shepherd during her early-'70s Breck Girl phase -- a young, vacuous, golden-skinned goddess who's forgone carrying the world on her shoulders in favor of wearing it on her back.

Curvy hips swinging, flaxen hair flying, she looks like she was created on a software program titled, "Heterosexual Teenage Boy Fantasy Fun Kit." If he could see the way Silverstone grins when she wriggles across a dance floor in a slinky red dress in Clueless, even Pope John Paul II might start drooling like Humbert Humbert.

Ultimately, though, what makes Clueless so beguiling is that its writer/director, Amy Heckerling, doesn't turn Silverstone's character, a Jewish American Princess improbably named Cher, into just another object for male viewers to pant over. She doesn't condescend to this poor little rich girl. Instead, Heckerling places us right inside Cher's defiantly trivial consciousness, so that we see the world through her ditzy, sweet-natured eyes -- glittery orbs that, to her pals and assorted suitors, always seem to flash either dollar signs, smiley faces or little cartoon hearts.

If Clueless makes Silverstone a bona fide star, as opposed to a flavor of the month, she'll have Heckerling to thank. The filmmaker has taken a pubescent clotheshorse, molded her tics into something resembling a comic style and created an assured young comic actress: straight men want to date her, and everybody else wants to be her best pal -- or, at the very least, to spend an afternoon at the mall with her while pushing their MasterCards to the outer limits.

Which would be fine with Cher. She's the only daughter of a feared Los Angeles litigator (Dan Hedaya, looking like his neck veins are about to explode at any moment) whose wife died when Cher was very young. Our heroine is obsessed with surfaces and oblivious to anything deeper. She has an expensive car she hasn't learned to park, and she's always getting in trouble with traffic cops for assorted violations. "Next time you drive, do it with an adult, not one of your friends," Dad warns. "Two learners permits do not equal a license."

Cher spends a lot more time thinking about popularity, clothes, aerobic workouts and parties than schoolwork or the future. Every morning, she picks what outfits she'll wear on a custom-made, wardrobe-planning computer program. When that doesn't completely satisfy her, she has her best pal Dionne (Stacey Dash) take Polaroids of her. ("I don't rely on mirrors," Cher explains.)

She's decided she's perfectly happy being who she is. As a result, she has plenty of time and energy to devote to matchmaking. Clueless takes a leaf or two from Jane Austen's novel Emma, which also concerned a young woman so fond of getting her acquaintances together that she was too busy to listen to her own heart. Of course, you just know that sooner or later she'll figure out there's one guy who's perfect for her -- and that she'll fall for him for reasons that have nothing to do with the pursuit of popularity.

Heckerling, who directed the 1981 hit teen comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High, has the eye of a satirist but the soul of a guidance counselor. She tends to pick projects best painted with a broad, somewhat cruel satirical brush. Then, once she gets to know her territory and the people who populate it, she becomes a convert to their lifestyle, even a cheerleader urging them on to short-term happiness.