🎥 Watched Legally Blonde.

This was the year rewatched the very famous, very popular, feminist comedy film about a pink-obsessed very feminine blonde young lady who takes herself off on a life-changing journey in a somewhat misguided attempt to preserve things as they are. Eventually she realises she’s worth so much more than a trophy wife to an idiot man living a 1950s lifestyle - she’s more than just a pretty face - and, hey, we all learn some sanitised but important bits and pieces about the necessity of feminism along the way.

Not Barbie, that was earlier this year. Instead, 2001’s Legally Blonde. A classic from my formative years. One of the rare films I deigned to watch more than once per lifetime, and might even spring for tickets to the musical in the future if the opportunity should arise.

Our hero is Elle Woods, a young lady who’s into beauty, hair, nails, hanging out with her girlfriends, the colour pink, small dogs and anything else that you could popularly code as “feminine” back in the year 2001.

Her privileged and wealthy boyfriend dumps her. He still likes her enough. but really she’s just a fun time, a bimbo, a silly little girl. Certainly not someone who he can imagine as the serious person that the serious politician he has an ambition should be married to. And you know, male careers come first.

She does not enjoy this decision. Rather than smash up his expensive car though, she decides to follow him to the prestigious only-brainiacs-need-apply Harvard Law School in order to study law and prove she’s a worthwhile and serious person really.

This might be more than a little wince-inducing as the defining motivation for the character - but do remember we’re talking about early 2000s Hollywood-sanitised pop-feminist takes here. Barbie wasn’t perfect and that was more than twenty years later (it was great though). Besides, it’s an important part of the setup. But yep, the film is necessarily something of a product of its times. Don’t expect intersectionality et al. - it’s all pretty young White Heterosexual Lady trying to win her man back stuff. At least at first glance. The feminist focus here is instead more explicitly on the late 90s style priorities of smashing various glass ceilings, girl-bossing it, becoming respected male-dominated places of learning and work. Of changing the world by yourself, not having to be content with hanging off the arm of someone else who does.

Which, spoiler alert, of course she does. But perhaps the most empowering point it makes is that she can do so without changing herself, without donning a mask - refusing to conform to what 1990s (and yes, 2024 for plenty) saw as the image of a fancy lawyer who happens to be female.

Here we see that yes, it is possible to be a young lady who enthusiastically likes “feminine” things and has “feminine” interests and still make waves in spheres of life beyond being pretty and dating eligible bachelors - not that there’s anything wrong or lesser about being interested in those things as well I’m sure Elle would be the first to tell you.

From the New Statesman review:

If its message – that a woman can be smart and enjoy lip gloss simultaneously – does not feel especially radical now, it is worth noting that a generation of millennial women first enjoyed it at the age of ten or 12, when such an idea could be experienced as a revelation.

Thanks to Wikipedia I also learned that the film is based on a novel of the same name by Amanda Brown based on her own experiences of going to Stanford Law School with the same kind of innate preferences for fashion, beauty and the like as our fictional protagonist here.

There’s also a new prequal spinoff TV series called Elle supposedly coming soon, showing her high school lifestyle. But given the second filmic sequel, Legally Blonde 3, was supposed to be released in 2020 and there’s no sign of it yet it’s probably best not to hold one’s breath.