Towards the end of the movie Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde, the 2003 sequel to Reese Witherspoon's Legally Blonde, her character, Elle Woods, the protagonist, says while addressing the US Congress: "I know that one honest voice can be louder than a crowd. I know that if we lose our voice or if we let those who speak on our behalf compromise our voice then, this country is in for a really bad haircut. So, speak up, America. Speak up! Speak up for the home of the brave. Speak up for the land of the free gift with purchase...And remember, you are beautiful. Thank you."
You might wonder what's "wrong" with me waiting for 20 years to watch the sequel of Legally Blonde. All I can say is that our priorities seem to change with age. When I was studying in Malaysia, I went to watch Legally Blonde more than once at a cinema in the capital Kuala Lumpur.
My juggling of life, in that, trying to keep a somewhat precarious balance in doing "everything" that I love, means that certain cultural productions do end up in a backlog, and in Legally Blonde's sequel, two whole decades!
I don't mind. In a certain sense, it means I have material in my stock and storage that I can fall back on in order to get engaged and entertained in the present and the future. So, I don't regret not watching Legally Blonde's sequel for so many years. I also went through that age and phase where it seemed that gobbling down everything as they were introduced into the market was a priority. But I suppose I am now at an age where there's no such priority like that anymore.
Few actresses can deliver a punch along a comedic line; watch her equally funny Just Like Heaven, another romantic comedy I have watched countless times. Sure, Reese Witherspoon's Legally Blonde franchise seems to border on feminine stereotypes but not exactly: beauty doesn’t seem to be an obsession with women only; see how men comb their hair with their hands every time they happen to pass a mirror.
Of course, there are things that women can understand from their unique point of view, and I take the risk of diverting this “movie review” to political issues because that’s what Legally Blonde 2 is about: politics rather than Elle’s pursuit of crime cases as she did in the first installment of the franchise.
A late Maldives' female politician once told me that the "problem" with Maldives' governance is that, our "congress" or parliament (the "Majlis") is dominated by men and therefore, they fail to see "issues" from the viewpoint of the other half - gender-wise - of the country's population.
Legally Blonde, therefore, seems to be an attack not only on politics but something more personal to everybody: the presentation of their selves to the public. And by this, I tend to wonder whether most of humanity suffer from a condition called “Body Dysmorphic Disorder” or BDD in which people suffer from an overwhelming preoccupation with a perceived flaw in one's physical appearance.
Legally Blonde 2 is told through the eyes of "beauty", with an emphasis on cosmetics and accessories as contributing to “health”, both pertaining to men and women and yes, animals, of whichever genders. So, it didn't come to me as a surprise that this sequel took on a hilarious take at animal sexuality way before the term "transgenderism" entered the national consciousness of the "Western" world.
And when the phrase "deals and trades and secrets" is mentioned by Elle, that word "deal", which have already entered into the national consciousness of Maldives, reminded me how our own so-called law-making representatives can gang up against citizens and pass legislation for their own selfishness. This is one reason why most Maldivians cannot support a parliamentary system of governance at the moment. It's too easy to "buy" Majlis members and therefore, horror of horrors, easily get someone to become Prime Minister, even if he is an outright criminal.
Some people seem to dislike the new president Dr. Mohamed Muizzu's appointing and sacking officials within short spans of time but why don't we consider things from his viewpoint: His mentor, former president Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom, is not supporting him anymore, and didn't even care if their rivals, the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) won the recent presidential election, on the selfish objective that if he doesn't come to power from his PPM-PNC coalition, then nobody from that coalition should ascend to the presidency too even if the "other" party (MDP) won, which definitely would have. Why should not Muizzu, after having appointed who he thought were loyalists, to political posts, and then in a span of a few days, finding them openly supporting Yameen and not Muizzu, sack them? Of course, there was no choice for these political appointees to support Muizzu because their whole livelihoods were helped built by Yameen and therefore they felt obliged to openly support Yameen.
Abdul "Adhurey" Raheem Abdulla, the Director-General of Transition, the Chairperson of the People's National Congress (PNC), and now the Special Advisor to President Dr. Muizzu, therefore, became king-maker and advisor, because he foresaw what we already know: PPM-PNC did boycott the election as per Yameen's whims and wishes, and consequently MDP's incumbent president Ibrahim "Ibu" Mohamed Solih would definitely have won, as former president Mohamed "Anni" Nasheed's The Democrats enjoyed only a relatively small following as demonstrated in the outcome of the presidential election.
The word "deals" would forever haunt me of Ahmed Adheeb, who was favored enough to warrant parliament members to wake up one fine morning and change the law to accommodate him as the youngest Maldivian to fill the second highest post in the position of power in our country. In my view, this indeed is a sort of ganging up by a few (exactly 87 MPs) people and terrorizing the rest of the 382,000 citizen population by trying to maintain the narrative that each citizen should try to get elected to our unicameral legislative body a member who is friendly to him/her in order to survive. Which begs the interesting question: What exactly did Ibu fight for when he was a parliament member for 25 years?
Like Avatar: The Way of Water being a first sequel that builds up on an introductory first part, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde is also a sequel that expands upon the first part by exploring where Elle ended up after she was shown to successfully graduate from Harvard Law School and embark on a promising career.
Sticking to expanding of Legally Blonde's first part, in which we saw Elle contribute to an individual criminal case as an "amateur" intern, the sequel shows she as a professional career lawyer taking on a nation-wide moral and ethical issue that seems to be gathering momentum across the world in modern times: the rights of wildlife as advocated by American philosopher Martha Nussbaum who has extensively written and advocated the cause of animal rights as lives of all living beings should matter.
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