Turns out Caring is Cool

The New Elle Woods Makes the Case for School Spirit

*Elle Woods (Lexi Minetree) in ELLE. Photo Credit: Jessica Brooks/Prime Video*

Picture this: it’s 1995, you’re entering your junior year of high school, and everything is going according to plan. You have an enviable back-to-school closet, the potential of a perfect first kiss, and a three-point plan to rule the school with your best friends and a stack of trusty Cosmopolitan magazines by your side. That is, until your parents suddenly uproot your family, plucking you out of your bright Beverly Hills bubble and dropping you down in rainy Seattle.

This is where we meet the newest iteration of our beloved Elle Woods in Prime Video’s Elle, a prequel to Legally Blonde that imagines our hero at sixteen, a hot pink fish-out-of-water among a sea of skateboarders, flannels, earth tones, and apathy.

In classic Elle fashion, she attempts to win over her new classmates with wide-eyed charm, relentless optimism and lavender-scented paper, but can’t figure out why everyone’s acting so weird towards her. She even tries her hand at DIY-ing a Nirvana t-shirt, only to later learn what the term “poser” means. Down but never out, Elle decides to do what she does best: event planning. She’s determined to organize the school’s first-ever homecoming pep rally, setting out to revive the not-so-cheerful cheer squad with new choreography, and rally students around the closest thing they have to a “big game” (a cross country meet).

Where Have All the Cheerleaders Gone?

The lack of school spirit is not a fictional problem. Open just about any student newspaper in America and you’ll find teen journalists who are fed up with a lack of connectedness (what one student paper called “the Nonchalance Epidemic”) and the idea that trying is embarrassing and caring is cringe. Search “nonchalant” on TikTok and you’ll see thousands of videos like “3 Ways to Be More Nonchalant (School Edition)”, from teenagers earnestly explaining, on camera, how to look like you don’t care. The WikiHow page for “How to be Nonchalant: 14 Steps (with Pictures)” has over half a million views. That’s a lot of people trying really hard to look like they’re not trying at all.

Forced nonchalance has real consequences. Education researchers at the Aspen Institute published a report on what they call “a crisis of belonging” in American schools: nearly 40% of high schoolers say they don’t feel connected to their schools at all — impacting everything from attendance and grades to self-esteem and social well-being. (It doesn’t get better with age, either: students at Harvard, teenage Elle’s future alma mater, graded their school’s spirit at a dismal 2.47 out of 5 in a campus survey, with one respondent begging: “We need literally any mascot! Literally any!”)

The good news? The crisis of belonging can be remedied. Psychologists Carol Goodenow and Kathleen Grady defined “school belonging” as the extent to which students feel “accepted, respected, included, and supported” by the people around them. And research shows that school belonging grows when students get to express their individuality and pursue what genuinely interests them – which is exactly what a certain blonde transfer student is about to figure out.

Trying Rocks

The pep rally only comes together once Elle learns to relinquish her party planning perfectionism and allows her new friends to do homecoming their way. She starts paying attention to what her classmates already love: their interests, their music taste, their unique talents. And after pulling it all off – complete with a performance by the cheerleaders of “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen – one of her classmates remarks, “I didn’t know trying could be so rewarding!” to which Elle quips, “Yeah, trying rocks!” The lesson is clear: caring is cool, indifference is not.

This fall, I invite you to redefine school spirit the Elle Woods way: by noticing what the people around you are good at, and showing up for them with enthusiasm – at the cross country meet, the debate tournament, the musical, the art show. Join a club or start your own, try out for that team, be your friends’ personal cheerleader, and maybe even throw your own pep rally.

What, like it’s hard?

Elle is streaming now on Prime Video.

Turns out Caring is Cool

Wear Naré