"What You Want"

So this evening I was in my car, racing back to campus to try (alas, in vain) to be on time for a floor meeting, and I had my IPod on shuffle (a tactic to keep my eyes on the road and off the IPod screen that has proven to be rather difficult for me because I tend to want to skip songs I’m not in the mood for. It’s frustrating because I can’t; I’m driving). The song “What You Want” from Legally Blonde the musical came up. As I was singing along (another car habit) I realized that it (both song and the musical itself) totally pertained to strategies and tactics. Eureka: a blog topic!

Wednesday morning we decided as a group that a goal is what you want to accomplish (duh), a strategy is a generally idea of how you want to go about accomplishing the goal and a tactic is an actual action that you act out in order to achieve the goal. So basically a tactic is a more specific, acted upon part of a strategy. For example we looked at the tea bagging protests that happened Wednesday. The goal was (if I am not mistaken) to lower taxes. The strategy was to rise up the people and inspire and spark protest. The tactic was, well, tea bagging. The twitter, facebook and TV promotions could also be called tactics.

But how does Legally Blonde fit in? Elle Woods, the stories protagonist, has a clear goal, a strategy and tactics that are shown within the play. For those of you who haven’t seen the musical, it basically follows the same plot of the 2001 movie version. If you haven’t seen the movie version, go shoot yourself in the foot. Everyone has seen that movie, get with it. But for now, here is a plot synopsis.

Elle’s goal is fairly simply. She’s been dumped by the man she believes to be ‘the one’ – Warner - because she’s not serious enough for the future Harvard Law student. Elle’s goal is to get Warner back and to make I'm realize that he still loves her. Her strategy is to prove she is serious. She has several tactics to accomplish this. One tactic is to get into Harvard law. This in itself is also another goal with its own strategy and tactics. Elle’s strategy to get in is “What [Harvard] Wants”. Her tactics to prove this are as follows. First Elle must get her parents to agree to pay for the expensive education (technically also a goal, but really this could go on all day so we won’t go there). After this she must get a good enough LSAT score (“of more than 174”) to be even considered by Harvard, which she accomplishes by studying rather than going to parties. To top it off she’ll “need a killer essay” to even be able to hope to get accepted. Rather than writing an essay (because after all “an essay’s so boring and so much does not fit”) Elle and the entire UCLA marching band descend upon the office of the Harvard acceptance committee and insists that she is exactly what they want.

I suppose all of these tactics are also in their way minor tactics to reach the major goal: operation ‘get Warner back’. They are like tactics to accomplish a tactic. Once Elle’s first major tactic to get Warner back (get into Harvard) is accomplished, she must then succeed in getting his attention. For this she tries several friend suggested methods including “shaking her junk” and “getting a chip on her shoulder”. Eventually Elle realizes that she must actually get serious in order to prove to Warner that she is serious. Her tactic is to actually study. Do homework and try in her classes. Elle’s final tactic is to win an actual court case that no one believes she can win (which she does using a finely tuned ‘gay-dar’, the always handy ‘bend and snap’ and her knowledge of hair care). Her strategy, and the tactics that puts it into action, succeeds because in one of the last scenes of the show Warner proposes to Elle. Unfortunately for him Elle’s journey of strategies and tactics has led her to discover that she deserves better and she doesn’t need him and her answer is “Thank you, but no.” Denied.

But despite the fact that Elle’s original goal was not the same as what she realized at the end she wanted, her series of strategy and tactics clearly worked. Elle, along with a group of trusted friends, planned out (and admittedly fumbled through) a strategic plan of action (tactics) and in the end achieved their goal (Elle does in fact find love, though it’s not Warner). Like Klein and Juffer show, it is all good and fine to have a goal, but without effective strategy and tactic that goal goes nowhere.