Legally Blonde

Introduction

The blogpost this week for us is to find out the feminist film theory elements that could be found in the movie Legally Blonde. By that, the goal of this post for me is to study about this movie, watch it, and get to know about what theory is used in it which showed the semantic and syntactic approach to genres for the film. Along my study of this film, by accomplishing my goal, I would also have an attempt to determine the feminist film theory elements that would be found in film by stating it out in the analysis section of my post.

Theory Discussion

Talking about genre, it come with semantic and syntactic, in which the semantic is basically things or parts that are expected in the genre of a film, while in which the syntactic is the ideology of the certain genre. To separate semantic and syntactic views accurately, we can easily differentiate between the generic definition of both. Basically, semantics contain areas such as the setting of location, character, also the props or materials that need to be use in the film. These are the things what usually give the film their generic genre traits, for example the genre’s common traits, scenes’ attitudes, ways of shooting, specific locations, commonly used sets and so on. According to Rick Altman (1984), he stated that, while the semantic approach has little explanatory power, it is applicable to a larger number of films. Conversely, the syntactic approach surrenders broad applicability in return for the ability to isolate a genre's specific meaning-bearing structures. For instance, semantic approach stresses the building blocks of one genre, while when syntactic approach might focus more on arranging the structures.

As for the evolutionary part that we have discussed in class, I guess every genre also need to know where and how each genre should be at and stay, but production teams must have extremely creative ideas even if they are making the same genre kind of movies again and again to attract and lock the audiences. No matter how time changes, the genre will only increase but not decrease and the ideas must be keep being innovative and unique unless films these days will have no improvement at all. There are always universal traits for each genre to be passed down generations by generations because they are to keep the origin and meaning of each genre.

Synopsis

This film is about the story of a blonde girl, given the name Elle Woods, a president of Tropical girl sorority, tries to win her ex-boyfriend back by going to law school and gain him back while studying. The story goes around when she started her new life at Harvard Law school. As the incidents revolve around, she wins the respect of everyone and overcomes the “dumb blonde” stereotype to ultimately declare herself proudly Legally Blonde.

Analysis

There are few themes in feminist theory such as discrimination, stereotyping, objectification, oppression, and patriarchy. In the movie Legally Blonde, I could make it into few parts to analyse the scenes based on the themes given in feminist theory.

For objectification, this theme could be explained by the part of the film where Elle wants her boyfriend back as she thinks his boyfriend as an object. Also, the scenes where the panel of judges is watching the introductory video or recommendation video of Elle Woods. Elle is being portrayed as a sexual object in front of the panel as she dressed inappropriately in the video and the panel does not stop watching the video immediately.

For discrimination, it was shown at the part where Elle is being molested by Callahan but then she got discriminated by Vivien right at the moment after that incident. It hurts Elle very much as the way of Vivien discriminate her is far away from the truth that has happened. The patriarchy part is shown at almost the end where Callahan kept holding his position as the lawyer of the victim because he doubted the gender that is replacing his position.

For stereotype theme, the line which Elle Woods says, “gay men know designers while straight men don’t” is exactly stereotyping the gay men. There is no concrete proof that all gay men should get to know the designers. Just because the gay man in film recognise a shoe designer, does not bring the meaning that every gay man in the world should be like that too. Besides, as how the main topic of this film comes from, “Legally Blonde”, which is to deny the fact that “blondes are stupid and they are committers”, the stereotype of blonde is stupid is being used in the whole film.

Conclusion

This film has listed into one of the movies that I really like. I love how the storyline goes and how the events happened that make her become a girl who finally care about what’s inner is more important than the outer look. It is also very exciting for me to watch because Elle successfully overcomes the tag “dumb blonde” for all the blondes.