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Totalizing systems of thought. “As if,” Cher says in the film a total of four times to vent contemporary spleen against those who misunderstand her. Get rich. Live life to the fullest. Destroy the world.
    Later that night my friend said to me, “What do you think, is Cher an exemplary figure of first world mobility and the central conflict of the film is the sudden social intervention against her primary motivating force that she must ‘win back’ through alternative means, that is, as an automobilist whose privilege to a car is revoked and whose life is unshackled to the banality of financial concern of any kind, lack of car equals a death that can only be stopped via some hierarchy-splitting behavior like sleeping with your brother? Or is the film, like, an allegory for the failures of US ecological policy? That whole thing about the Clean Air Act and Wallace Shawn. Something totally dumb like that.” She took a sip of her (second) whiskey sour and put her underwear and bra back on. She sat cross-legged across from me and smiled. I remained still and naked, thinking. “Also you look like the Buddha,” she said.
    â€œPaul Rudd plays her stepbrother ... and I don’t know what that means. Are you, like, calling me fat?” I asked.
    â€œNo,” she said. “I’m saying you look like the Buddha. Smart, you know.”
    I slipped into my form-fitting Calvin Klein briefs. The tight fabric felt good against my cock and made me hard again. She noticed my dick as it grew against my thigh and began to play with it through my underwear, laughing as I squirmed a little. I pushed her hand away.
    â€œI don’t think Clueless is an allegory for the Clinton Administration, with its various failures to respond to the emergent ecological crisis,” I said. “Or any administration for that matter. Rather, I think that Cher is a flâneuse whose primary objective is to be carried through urban space without having to engage it herself. Like, no maps, just the directional privilege of wealth in which events and places simply materialize as though they were designed exclusively for her. Antiflâneuse, really. Like Baudelaire, who walked around but depended on his mother for financial support (like so many male geniuses of the nineteenth century) but updated for a culture on the cusp of GPS. Cher is perfect for LA’s virtually unknowable supersprawl. Like, why bother? The central conflict of the film is not immobility, which, as you say, can only be rectified by some outrageous act against the traditional hierarchy. It is the fact that she does not want to go where she is going if she has to know how to get there. That was her original violation: driving around omnidirectionally without any attention to the regulating restrictions that give form to driving around in the first place. Stop signs, speed limits. Sure, she’s only fifteen, about to turn sixteen, but not driving changes her position in the world such that she has to know how to get somewhere. Not driving allows her to give directions, to be picked up, to be taken somewhere. It’s executive, easier—a non-problem. Sex with her stepbrother only paves over the problem of her position by eliding hers with his such that the unity of their relationship erases the issue that brought them together in the first place. Chauffeur becomes lover: all becomes one. Being a pop film, of course the act is watered down in that she sleeps with her cute but dirty stepbrother, Paul Rudd, instead of a blood relative, which would have been so much more interesting. But Baudelaire didn’t sleep with his mother either, I guess.”
    â€œUm, I didn’t need you to lecture me,” she said.
    â€œUrgh, I wasn’t,” I said.
    I woke up late the next day in my friend’s bed, but she was gone. It was the first day of spring break and she had gone ahead to the beach without me. She left a sticky note on the