Category: Politics/Theory

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The Unintentional Genius of Legally Blonde

Legally Blonde is genius. Stop rolling your eyes.

I get the critique. Reese Witherspoon’s character, Elle Woods, is a stereotypical–to the point of being a caricature–dumb blonde. Law school is equally dubiously stereotyped as heartless, a place for narcissistic minds to exorcise their domineering ambitions. Lawyers are portrayed as corrupt and sexually manipulative, promoting students to exclusive positions based on the success of sexual passes. While Elle overcomes her blondeishery and romantic demons to graduate with honors, she does so in a fashion that instrumentalizes appearances, physical attraction, and shallow relations. Despite her academic and courtroom victories, Elle never fully bends and snaps her way into being, well, not-blonde.

And that’s the point.

Immediately, the film unabashedly immerses viewers in received ideas, thrusting them upon us like case histories on 1Ls. Elle is a Californian sorority girl majoring in fashion merchandising, who pursues Harvard Law to retain her lost love interest. Once accepted, she employs a pink computer, chihuahua, scented paper, playboy bunny costume, and gallons of nail polish, jealousy, and motivation to prove her worth–to her ex, not herself or the legal community (until the end of the movie, perhaps). Professor Stromwell isn’t Dumbledore; she steamrolls students with icy interrogations and delights in their discomfort. Professor Callagahan, gatekeeper to a prestigious clerkship and partner in a prominent firm, places himself above the law he practices, exchanging bar practicum for blowjobs. All of the movie’s women are treated terribly, often by each other. Staple dialogue after stock character is bluntly injected into the script, all playing upon our culture’s tritest sociocultural clichés.

It’s a lot like Wal-Mart, when you think about it. Consider what Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (one of the world’s best known social theorists; go look him up if you’re lost) had to say about the price-busting retailer, as relayed by literature professor Christopher Schaberg:

As we walked toward the store, perhaps exuding a bit of guilt or shame, Slavoj launched into an expostulation about the sheer visibility of consumerism, and how the warehouse-y, cavernous-feeling Walmart was so much better than high-end places, like, for instance, Dolce & Gabbana stores that conceal consumerism behind a sheen of glamour and minimalism. We were standing on the threshold of the store, taking in Slavoj’s tirade and watching him gesticulate and begin to dominate the space, when I remembered that we were on a tight schedule. So I grabbed Slavoj’s arm and led the way back to the electronics department, because, of course, as a human raised in the U.S. in the 80s I have a built-in sort of GPS that automatically kicks on when I enter any big box store.

(Shameless plug: go buy Chris’s book The Textual Life of Airports. It’s cheap and really good.)

Zizek’s comments about the forthrightness of Wal-Mart commercialism could be analogously applied to Legally Blonde. Unlike most mainstream movies, Elle’s cinematic narrative is naked in its pretensions and cultural assumptions, so much so that viewers are forced to confront the horror of their own expectations. We know that Elle is blonde caricature; we know that she will rise above her peer’s stereotypical expectations and the institutional limitations of those who wield the power to judge her prospects. Exceeding expectations is a dramatic trajectory, one with which we identify less because of our individual alienation than the shared familiarity of the metanarrative, a grand arc that becomes less affectually resonant with each retelling. What makes Legally Blonde more compelling than, say, Avatar is that it announces its pretext. As a visual object (and to put it in Heideggerian terms), the former portends the blockbuster revelation of its unveiling, while the latter employs technological wizardry (in an attempt) to sever alētheuein from deloun and foreclose any emancipatory unveiling that could be made possible by the film’s aesthetic relation to its viewers sensibilities.

In a quasi-theological sense, Legally Blonde plays upon the gap between our dissimulated cultural projections and their material spatialization, from whence doubt about the resonance and universality of our assumptions extends. Yet, our doubt need not lead to despair. If we recognize our projections as (among other things) iconic panaceas for sociopolitical alienation or autopoietic cogs in the reproduction of systems of power, we may be equipped to enact the material change necessary to divorce critique from its dominance-recapitulating utopianism. We might start by admitting that the gap is not truly external to ourselves as political agents or desiring-sub/objects, and that its closure by affirmation of our projections is a fantasy that will never be realized.

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I Dream Of Objects

Two views. Pick one. Or none, if you disagree with both.

Dreams as affective manifestations: Virtually no one denies that dreams can be affective, productive of nonconscious phenomenological vectors capable of precipitating new patterns of thought and forms of relation. But are they fully embodied and substantive objects, things-in-themselves retaining their own autonomous and withdrawn inner being? According to Levi Bryant, the answer is no. For an entity to be deemed objectal, Bryant’s argument holds, its being must exist independent of all other entities. Full stop.

Since dreams are dependent upon the being of a dreamer, neurological impulses, semantic memories, neocortices, and the like, dreams cannot enter into, be extricated from, or form relations with other objects, and are, thus, reduced to the status of qualia, or ‘local manifestations’, an animation of qualities expressed by objects interacting within a specific and fragile spatiotemporal configuration, one that is broken upon the dissipation of the dream or the act of waking. From this view, dreams do not possess difference or becoming apart from the material difference effected by the entities from which it is drawn. And since, for Bryant, being is difference, dreams cannot be said to possess autonomous being, no matter how forceful their emotional residue may be.

Dreams as material objects: Claiming that dreams are nothing more than ‘local manifestations’ involves denying the mereology of dreams-in-themselves. If we grant that whole objects are existentially severable from and ontologically inexhaustible by their constituent parts, then we can say that dreams are quasi-imag(in)ed beings comprised of neurological and psychoemotive bits, made intelligible in the way that other mental manifestations, conscious or otherwise, are presenced and, for that matter, withdrawn. We get hung up on the putative immateriality of dreams, which appears to foreclose standard modes of sensory perception. Yet, at some level, dreams are ‘percevied’, inasmuch as they produce memories and corporeal effects–ever wake up shaking, following a powerful nightmare? Once we dismiss the correlationist circle–dreams exist for no other entity than the dreamer, who only has access to meta-cognized oneirological ideation–we’re left with the the possibility of dreams as agential beings, whose existence exceeds qualitative apprehension. Dreams cannot even be denounced as pure products of consciousness, in light of nonconscious biological factors involved in their fruition.

Borrowing from Ian Bogost‘s phenomenological interrogation of video game characters, we can ask the question: What is the real dream? Is it the dragon that chases me as I sleep? The electrical flow of information between the hippocampus and neocortex? Protoconscious processes that suppress the release of norepinephrine and serotonin? Sublated experience and neuroses? Perhaps the answer is, as Bogost would hold for Mario or Zelda, that all of these are the dream, meaning that all of these entities exist immanent to one another, such that no one entity is singled out as being more ‘real’ than its counterparts and relata. Like Zelda, the dream is real for each of its aforementioned components, leaving the sleeping dreamer as just one object among many toward which the dream gestures, distorts, and translates into its own terms. Dreampomorphizes, as Timothy Morton would say.

Your thoughts?

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Faded Relations

A fading swimming pool set amidst flourishing foliage. A fish-topped fountain, now inhaling musky air. A lone chair, overlooking a dried aquatic hotelscape. These are a few of the many objects contained in Jeff Brouws’ “Famoso Inn (with swimming pool),” in which the San Francisco photographer’s anthropological exploration of bleak aesthetics interrogates the origin, decay, and memorial space of industrial modernity.

Yet, the static moment musters not just collapsing markets, but caressing entities, each translating its enmeshed ecology into its own unique terms. Decay, capital, and bleakness are, themselves, implicated as conceptual objects in the frame, recorded as finite beings in a contingent material array. Here, we see a set of objectal powers unfurled before the human gaze, such as earth toned saturation and blue-hued siding soiled by brusquely textured debris. At the same time, we are exposed to the inadequacy of our own perception in representing the hyperpluralized being of Others, both human and nonhuman, that are constantly animating their own relational architectonics and spatiotemporality, encountering the sublime horror of uncertainty with each burst and retreat.

If this is an image of the deindustrialization in which Donald Trump’s ascension is so heavily ingrained, then it also an encounter with the uncanny core of automation: humanism is the remainder in need of elimination for capital to accelerate. There is no labor; there is only occupation. There is no wealth; there is only finance. There is no code instructing our capacity to resist; there is only the urgent call to resist as a mode of existence and with a fierce belief that an alternative politics is in desperate need of emancipation.