Socrates and Elle Woods

This may seem far-fetched, but stick with me.

While I was reading Gorgias, I kept coming back to this scene in my head. First of all, I want to say that I think the way that Plato presents Socrates makes Socrates look like that guy at the party that no one wants to talk to because they'll all just end up hating him even more; he's kind of a big jerk. Gorgias actually made me feel sorry for Gorgias and want Socrates to go jump off a cliff.

Back to the clip. The reason I picked this was because, while it's much more watered down than Plato's dialogue, it is very much in the same character as the Socrates Plato creates. Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) starts out her case much the same way Socrates starts out his dialogue- calm, non-combative, and appearing as someone that would be easy to speak to. Socrates states he wants to speak to Gorgias to "learn from him what the power of the man's art is, and what it is that [Gorgias] professes and teaches" (26). Innocent enough. However, as soon as their conversation begins, Socrates starts in on Gorgias. In this way, he is similar to Elle because, though she is more timid, once she realizes she has a hook in her defendant, she goes in for the kill, much like Socrates.

The moment in the dialogue that this clip reminds me of is when Socrates is speaking to Polus:
 "SOC: So does this thing suffer what the doer does and suffer the sort of thing that the doer does? I mean something of the following sort: if someone beats, is it necessary that something is beaten?
POL: Necessarily.
SOC: And if the beater beats violently or rapidly, must what is beaten be beaten in this way too?
POL: Yes.
SOC: Is the passive condition of what is beaten, therefore, such as what the beater does?
POL: Certainly" (63).


This kind of circular speaking, while confident, reminds me of Elle's returning back to the fact that the defendant took a shower. The similarity that I saw with this moment in Gorgias and the clip from Legally Blonde is that both Elle Woods and Socrates use their opponents confusion to prove their own point. Elle gets a slight advantage during her questioning, and she takes off, talking too fast for the defendant to respond, and eventually gets the girl in such a state that the girl confesses to a crime. In a way, Socrates is trying to get Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles to admit to the crime of being sophistic. He could take some pointers from Elle on how to use his knowledge to bring someone down.


Polus also says "Socrates, you really lead the discussion into such tiresome things, suited to a popular speaker- while claiming to pursue the truth" (73). You could almost hear the woman Elle is questioning making the same statement at the beginning of the court case. Elle can't get around to her point, and while Socrates talks a lot and attempts to back people into a corner, Socrates doesn't seem to make a point. In this way, Elle is actually more successful with her case than Socrates is. She actually proves her point and convicts her opponent, while Socrates has to rely on the unsteady arguments of two students instead of keeping up with a debate with Gorgias.

It could also be seen as Gorgias is the judge, Elle is Socrates, and the defendant is Callicles. Elle backs the defendant into a corner, just as Socrates backs Callicles (and Polus) into a corner and Gorgias just sits by. I will say that was one thing I didn't like about Gorgias; he allowed his students to take the full brunt force of Socrates instead of taking up for rhetoric like he should have. Instead, he acted as a judge, observing but not interfering. Elle attacks the defendant until the girl gets angry enough to shout out things she doesn't mean to, just like Socrates attacks Callicles until Callicles backs down.

Hopefully I didn't go too far off the charts for this one, and even if I did, I hope I was able to make a few connections.