Is the Iconic Cher a Stereotype of a Dumb Blonde?

Blonde hair, shopping, dressing up, makeovers, superficiality: all the things that describe the dumb blonde trope. Luckily Cher wasn’t all about pink

Maria Jose Vargas Uribe

Nov 5 2021

(Entertainment Weekly, 2015) 

It has been 26 years since Amy Heckerling’s modern take on Jane Austen’s Emma, Clueless, hit the cinemas, giving us plenty of fashion inspo, but also laughs and iconic quotes.

Clueless stars Alicia Silverstone as Cher Horowitz, the 16-year-old main character who narrates us through her high school experience as one of the most popular girls in school. Her schedule is packed with activities such as making two lonely teachers fall in love, giving her new friend a makeover, and finding her a popular boyfriend, while at the same time trying to make a gay guy fall for her, but in her defense, she was totally clueless of his sexuality.

When I was younger, I was compared to Cher, and let me tell you I was totally buggin’! How could someone compare me to a superficial blonde? Only because I liked fashion? I was the best in my class! Now that I am older, and Clueless has become one of my comfort movies and Cher is like my fashion icon, I started reflecting on Cher’s character, and I wondered: is Cher a stereotype or a critique of one?

 

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In order to ask myself this question, I needed to understand what the “dumb blonde trope” was all about. I read articles and watched mostly video essays. Basically, the “dumb blonde trope” makes reference to the idea that blondes are dumb (I mean the trope kind of says it). There are many types of blondes portrayed in the media, and they are all pretty, and they are all dumb. A couple examples are the Marilyn Monroe character in the famous movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or Karen Smith in Mean Girls. Usually, what characterizes the “dumb blondes” is the obsession with fashion, shopping, money, pink, and of course, they need to be dumb and mean. That way they can contrast with the main brunette character, which follows the “not like other girls” trope. For example, Anne Hathway’s Disney movie The Princess Diaries or the 90´s movie Heathers and even 13 Going on 30.

Now when we look back at Cher, she kind of follows all the characteristics of a dumb blonde: she loves fashion, shopping, makeovers and she is very superficial, but is she actually dumb?

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In order to answer this, I started analyzing Cher’s dumb and smart moments in the movie. To be honest, she is indeed a little bit clueless. She even calls herself “totally clueless” in her voiceover, and tells her step-brother Josh that she has no idea what she is talking about. Her cluelessness is put on display at the beginning of the movie, when she debates a classmate about Haitian migration to the United States. Her debate was extremely unstructured, unresearched and well, it was not a good argument (however, in that scene we can see a lot of smart ideas from Cher, but we’ll get to that later)

Another obvious dumb mistake by Cher was to not realize the boy she was falling for was gay. I mean, it was kind of obvious; there is no way a teenage straight man in the 90’s,  when baggy pants and street style was at its peak, could dress as well as Christian did. He did give off a lot of Giorgio Armani Fall Winter 1998 1999 Menswear collection vibes.

But really who could blame her? She was a 16-year-old girl influenced by 90’s media. She did have moments where she was not the smartest but, overall, Cher was actually quite bright. Let’s begin with the fact that, at different times in the movie she uses two sides of  Plato’s rhetorical triangle for good argumentation (stay with me here). She employs both Ethos (the role of the writer in the argument, and how credible his/her argument is) and Pathos (appeals to the emotions and the sympathetic imagination) when she persuades her classmates to accept Haitian refugees and not make a big deal out of violence in the media. When she found a teacher she could not easily persuade, she found a way to soften him. Also, let’s not forget how she corrected a college student for incorrectly quoting Hamlet.

Intelligence not only refers to being good at school, but also to emotional intelligence and maturity. At the beginning of the movie, she was very immature, and cared only about superficial things. In the end, she was able to reflect on her own mistakes and realize how her “makeover” transformed her friend Tai from a sweet girl to a total superficial monster.

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Not only that, but she started realizing that makeovers are not a good way to leave a mark, but helping people is.  For example, she realized that instead of wasting her dad’s money at the mall, she could spend it on the Pismo Beach disaster relief.

The verdict, then, is that Cher is an iconic intelligent blonde. Even if she follows most of the dumb blonde tropes, she breaks them all with her unique kind of brilliance. Though she is not the smartest of all, she is 16 and has a lot to learn and grow. Maybe when she grows up she can manage all three aspects of the rhetorical triangle: Ethos Pathos and Logos to be a great lawyer or even make a great fashion career for herself, and have all the people who doubted her totally buggin’