Watch It Like a Girl: Legally Blonde

Elle Woods wins a murder trial because she knows how a perm works.

That is the climax. Chutney Windham takes the stand and testifies that she was in the shower washing her hair when her father was shot, and Elle establishes that Chutney had received a perm that same morning, and then asks whether she is familiar with the cardinal rule of perm maintenance, and Chutney answers correctly without stopping to think, because of course she is familiar with it, she has been getting perms for years. You do not wet your hair for at least twenty four hours after a perm or the ammonium thioglycolate has not finished setting and the curl relaxes out. She would not have been in that shower. She has just confessed on the record to the only detail in her story that could not be faked, and she confessed it by being an expert, and the expertise is what convicted her. Elle is the only person in that courtroom who possesses the relevant information, and the reason she is the only person is that every other person in the room had already decided the information was not information.

Everyone has been watching the wrong thing in this movie for twenty five years.

The standard reading, the one that gets rediscovered online every October and posted as a hot take, is that Legally Blonde is secretly smart, a feminist text in a pink jacket, and that Elle succeeds despite being blonde and from Bel Air and carrying a chihuahua into a lecture hall. Despite is the wrong preposition and I want to fight about it. She does not win despite any of it, she wins with it, and the knowledge that cracks the case is knowledge she acquired through precisely the life Harvard held against her. The film's actual argument, which is stranger and considerably better than the one it gets credit for, is that her frivolous expertise was expertise the entire time and nobody had bothered to classify it as such. Which makes it a story about a profession discovering it has been throwing away data, rather than one about a woman overcoming her femininity. I have made this argument before in a different register and I will make it again here, because it is the same argument every time: knowledge about wars is history, knowledge about textiles is shopping, a man who can date a battle to the year is a serious person and a woman who can date a dress to the decade is a woman with a hobby, and the two operations are cognitively identical, and only one of them gets a department and a budget line. Legally Blonde is the only movie I know of that gets to prove it in a courtroom with a stenographer present.