Let us consider the curious case of Alicia Silverstone, an under-theorized figure on the celebrity landscape.

Silverstone’s first movie break was 1993’s The Crush, in which she played a sexually and intellectually precocious teenager who almost but not quite seduced her much older neighbor and then wreaked havoc on his life for the unforgivable crime of refusing to bonk her. It was basically the role that Drew Barrymore had played so well, the year before, in Poison Ivy, and basically one of the foundational pornographic fantasies of modern American culture — i.e. the hot babysitter fantasy mixed with the femme fatale fantasy — but Silverstone did it credit in her own right.

That same year, she starred in the series of Aerosmith videos that’s become known, I’m told by Wikipedia, as the "Cryamazy trilogy."

Cryin‘ features her as a kind of hyper-sexualized, borderline personality disorder-type in a volatile, edgy relationship with a skeezy but still hot guy who appears to be Stephen Dorff. There’s a fair amount of sex, some blood, piercing and tattoing, and actually a quite sophisticated, if somewhat idealized, dramatization of why that kind of woman is so seductive.

Crazy is the story of Silverstone and Liv Tyler as Catholic school girls who cut out of school to go wild. (we know that they plan to go wild almost immediately because their first significant act, after leaving school and getting in their conveniently availale convertible, is to take their shirts off; also a tip-off are the skintight leather pants that Tyler puts on instead of her schoolgirl kilt. Then there’s the amateur stripping contest they win through the strategic deployment of hot lesbo action, the bouncing on the hotel bed interlude, the skinny dipping with the hot farm boy etc., etc.)

And "Amazing," finally, is the ultimate nerd fantasy: weird science meets virtual reality meets having sex with Alicia Silverstone on a motorcycle (I’m not sure what’s particularly nerdly about a motorcycle, but maybe it’s that the ultimate symbol of what the nerd wishes he was, the bad boy). Or, alternatively, it’s a video about a guy wanking off to Silverstone porn online.

Then in 1995 she got genuinely famous in Clueless.

And then … nothing. Silverstone dropped off the map. She showed up in a variety of mediocre movies and television pilots, trying to be the poor woman’s Drew Barrymore — cute, silly, self-deprecating but also, almost incidentally, exceptionally good-looking. But it just wasn’t that interesting. She was okay in Blast from the Past, playing the modern chaste girlfriend to Brendan Fraser’s necessarily chaste man from underground, but for some reason Silverstone seemed to decide, after 1993, to shed almost all traces of the sexy that was precisely what had made her compelling in the first place.

Even the one movie she’s done in the last few years that on its surface seems to be all about sex, 2005’s Silence Becomes You, prompted this peeved review:

I found some other elements of the film quite annoying as well. (1) Alicia Silverstone must have done ten sex scenes in this film, and never showed any kind of flesh at all – not even a good look down a nightgown. I suppose there are those who would be entertained by a profusion of fully-dressed sex scenes, but I do not count myself among them. Sex scenes can be boring even when they are performed by beautiful naked people, but they slow a movie to a funereal pace when they involve average people who are completely covered.

In a sense this generalization is unfair, because Silverstone never really got naked in The Crush or the Aerosmith videos either, and was sufficiently sexy in those. The problem is that she has, by this point, fetishized her modesty, and so the fully-dressed sex that was so titillating in the Aerosmith videos–when she was a teenager having sex –now seems like just a big tease in a B-movie which sells itself, basically, as an opportunity to see the grown-up Alicia Silverstone get naked and have sex.

Not that she, or anyone, is obligated to have sex on camera– or even to be sexy on camera–for our delectation, but Silverstone was a genuinely compelling person to watch precisely for her sexiness, so it’s a bit strange to watch her chase fame in exactly the wrong direction.

The big exception to my Silverstone Sexy Success Correlation Theory, of course, is Clueless, which was Silverstone’s biggest hit and also a role in which she was almost totally de-sexed, but in this case I think it’s an exception that proves the rule. She got lucky. It was a great script and a great cast. It captured the zeitgeist perfectly, and it happened to be a role that allowed her to channel her sexual aggression into social aggression without making her too unappealing.

It also fooled her into thinking that she was charming enough to subsist on charm alone, and it’s turned out that she’s not. She’s no Meg Ryan or Sandra Bullock or Drew Barrymore. She could have maybe competed for parts, though, with her Scooby Doo 2 co-star Sarah Michelle Gellar, but it appears that it’s too late, and too many mistakes have been made, for that.