ABSTRACT
While recalling many of the themes of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (David Mirkin, 1997), the even more popular Legally Blonde (Robert Luketic, 2001) thrusts the neo-feminist subject into the world of men, recounting the story of a young woman, Elle (Reese Witherspoon), who follows her boyfriend to Harvard Law School, where she proves more successful than he.2 In many ways, though continuing the preoccupation with fashion that characterizes Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990), Legally Blonde has more in common with Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1988), in which a secretary from Staten Island successfully proves herself in the world of high finance, finally acquiring an office and a secretary of her own at the film’s conclusion (see Figure 4.1). Unlike Working Girl, Legally Blonde, however, softens and sentimentalizes the predicament of a woman in a man’s world, while emphasizing the importance and pleasures of feminine consumer culture; this places it much more clearly in the girly category than the earlier film.
