Clueless director addresses ‘creepy’ incest plot 30 years after release

Few romantic teen comedies have had the lasting cultural impact of Clueless over the past three decades. Released in 1995, the witty adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma cemented Beverly Hills high school life on the big screen. Three decades later and we're still quoting “as if!” and wearing yellow plaid.

The film follows the wealth teen Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) and she navigates friendships, romance and her own journey to becoming a more thoughtful person. Along the way, she realises she has feelings for Josh (Paul Rudd), her former step-brother, whose father was once briefly married to her mother.

This plot detail has divided fans for a while, with some viewers claiming it’s ‘creepy’ and even going as far as to call it an ‘incest plot’. In a thread on Reddit, a user posted a thread titled, “Why isn’t Clueless called out for its incest”. They wrote, “Just because they aren’t blood related doesn’t mean it’s okay.” Other commenters said their blossoming relationship can’t be incest because they aren’t blood related.

Cher and Josh are former step-siblings (CBS)

But writer-director Amy Heckerling has weighed in on the interpretation that Cher and Josh’s relationship is incest. She recalled that studio executives questioned the romance during he film’s development. Speaking to Vice in 2016, she said: “They were going, ‘How can you have sex with your stepbrother?!’”

She explained: “They’re not related: Their parents were briefly married and [Cher’s] father is still nice to [Josh]. That’s not verboten, you know?”

Heckerling, who has defended the plot in throughout the 30 years the film came out, explained that she considered the objections misplaced because Cher and Josh were not biologically related and had not grown up as siblings in the conventional sense.

Director Amy Heckerling has addressed the controversy over the years (CBS)

She later revealed the storyline was inspired by her own family. In a 2020 interview with TheWrap marking the film's 25th anniversary, Heckerling expanded on why the relationship never struck her as controversial.

"They're not blood-related at all," she said, adding that, in her view, the romance followed the familiar romantic comedy trope of discovering that the right person had been there all along.

She also revealed that the idea came from her own family history.

"20th Century Fox was like, 'That's disgusting,' and I was like, 'Why, it's not incest because my grandparents were step-siblings...'" Heckerling said.

She went on to explain that her grandparents became step-siblings through remarriage in circumstances that were not unusual in earlier generations of Jewish families, where widows and widowers sometimes married within an extended community and blended families together.