When Brittany Murphy died earlier this week, everyone went straight to the Internet, looking for clips on YouTube and trying to understand how a 32-year-old healthy-seeming actress dies suddenly from cardiac arrest. For me, though, it came back to Clueless, since I hadn’t seen her perform in anything else. Clueless was such a groundbreaking movie, from the mid-90s but with a footprint so unmistakable in this decade. And though Brittany Murphy played more troubled characters in 8 Mile and Girl, Interrupted and Sin City, the references I saw all over Twitter and Tumblr were to “Rollin’ With My Homies” and “That was way harsh, Tai.” The innocence of that breakout role — and what it represented, as the new girl who gets a high-school makeover as everyone tries to figure out who they are — is what stayed with me, and more than a few others of my generation (see Annie Barrett at EW).
Yes, there were lots of reports online, and RIP notes on Twitter, but this is where a site like Tumblr is a great crowd-sourcing archive. Still largeley in the early adopter stage, most of the people on it are, as Rex put it in his 5QQ, “hyper-mediated” — which is why I saw photos there that I didn’t see anywhere else. Some of them were really beautiful, and I decided to collect a few here (I also took some from EW’s gallery, which has some lovely ones). I find Tumblr a different way to crowd-source, with different results than searching in Google (not a fan of what you get on Google Image). I bet there are shots that you haven’t seen below, and they are really nice.
“Rollin’ With My Homies” seems to be most of what’s out there on YouTube featuring Murphy as Tai, but I liked her slapstick moments the best, a few of which you can see at the end of the Clueless Trailer, below:
…and here’s Rollin’ With The Homies (and here’s the song):
As another celebrity lost in 2009 might have said, gone to soon.
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