10.09.2005 | The power of love

Time for what might seem an unserious post, about a very unserious movie: "Legally Blonde". We just watched it, and its plot is seriously contrived and most definately not asking to be taken as a metaphor for anything. What you see is what you get.

And yet, while watching this ostensibly silly piece of eye candy unfold, I couldn't help thinking about Matthew 22:39: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

On the surface, "Legally Blonde" is about a shallow sorority girl, Elle Woods, who decides to go to Harvard Law in order to show her equally shallow boyfriend who just dumped her that she is worthy of his affections.

This movie being a Hollywood fantasy, of course our heroine, played by Reese Witherspoon, gets into Harvard. And succeeds. Not by using her obvious physical charms. In fact, succeeds by denying those charms and applying Jesus' commandment: love, not in the carnal sense, of our fellow men and women.

No, "Blonde" isn't a Christian movie, per se. Religion, other than a mention of the magazine Cosmopolitan as being the bible for the fasion-savvy, does not appear. Love, however, is the theme. It is the not-so-secret of Elle's astounding success at Harvard -- she takes care of her friends, and she wins over her enemies, with her love.

Watch the movie, and it is a bit of a test for the oh-so-serious among us (yours truly most certainly among 'em) to suspend our wish that Elle Woods wasn't such a bimbo. But that's the whole point -- one should never judge a person by the shallow standards that allow us, the viewers, to enter the movie thinking that Elle is a shallow bimbo. She's anything but; we're the shallow ones if we don't see through the facade to the glorious person who is Elle Woods.