This first appeared on Splice Today.
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The first scene of Pretty Woman (1990) is devoted to the ritzy lifestyle and rocky romantic life of financier Edward Lewis (Richard Gere). Edward is the guest of honor at a massive LA soirée for his obscenely wealthy business associates and friends. In quick succession, he breaks up with his girlfriend by phone, seeks affirmation from a now-married ex, and drives off with the hot car of his asshole-but-subservient lawyer, Philip (Jason Alexander). It’s only after this montage of privilege and pique that we turn our attention to the female lead, the prostitute-with-heart-of, Vivian (Julia Roberts.) The first shot of her we see, however, focuses not on her heart, but on her panty-clad ass, followed quickly (as she turns over in bed) by a close-up of her crotch.
Pretty Woman, and its treatment of women, was in the news this week when Miss Ohio cited Julia Roberts’ character as a positive role model for women. This sparked a predictable, and justifiable, backlash, encapsulated by Amanda Marcotte who pointed out that Roberts’ “character is functionally a warm-blooded dress up doll with no will of her own.” Along similar lines, Crooks and Liars took the opportunity to quote Darryl Hannah, who in 2007 said that “[O]ne of the things I’m most proud of is refusing to take Julia’s role in Pretty Woman.” She went on, “Every time I see it I like it less and less. They sold it as a romantic fairytale when in fact it’s a story about a prostitute who becomes a lady by being kept by a rich and powerful man. I think that film is degrading for the whole of womankind.”
I don’t really disagree with either Marcotte or Hannah—Pretty Woman, as that opening crotch shot makes immediately clear, treats its main character as a body to be dressed up, eyed, manipulated, condescended to, and fucked. The film appears to grant Vivian’s every wish—riches, a perfect lover, a happy-ever-after ending. But in defining those wishes in such a limited way, and by robbing her of agency in their fulfillment, it ends up treating her with a systematic and remorseless contempt.
The problem is, sneering at Roberts (or at Miss Ohio) doesn’t so much undo that contempt as replicate it. To sneer at Vivian for being a “dress-up doll with no will of her own” is accurate, but it’s also a reiteration of the way the movie (more subtly but still) sneers at Vivian for being a dress-up doll with no will of her own. Similarly, Hannah’s comments seem powered by her disgust with prostitution—a disgust which is not at all foreign to the film, and which is indeed at the center of its own misogyny. Turning Vivian into a critical object for censure and revision simply replicates the mechanics of the film. You say she is vulgar and stupid? Richard Gere agrees with you! Let’s laugh at her pitiful yet charming efforts to eat escargot together, and then take her to the opera for some consciousness raising!
If you want to read against the film, then, I think you have to do it by taking your eyes off Vivian, and focusing instead on Edward. Admittedly, this is difficult to do, since Julia Roberts is appealing and funny and animated and Richard Gere has the proportional charisma and energy of a gray-suited slug.
Beneath that colorless exterior, though, there lurks a well of bland viciousness. Edward makes obscene amounts of money by buying companies, selling them off in pieces, and fucking over whoever gets in his way. His job is his life, not just in the sense that he works all the time, but in the sense that it defines how he sees everyone around him. He uses people as things. As I mentioned, one of his first acts of the movie is to break up with his girlfriend because she isn’t jumping through all the hoops he wants her to; shortly thereafter he drives off in his employee’s car without permission just because he feels like it. He dickers with Vivian over how much he’ll pay her to spend a week as his escort, and then gloats about how he got her for a bargain price—which is supposed to be cute and flirtatious, but given the power disparities and how much money he has, just ends up seeming like he’s a miserly asshole. And, of course, his business dealings are vile. At one point, he finds out that the shipbuilding company he wants to purchase has a defense contract in the works that will make its stock spike. So he calls his pal the Senator and tells him to hold up the contract in committee. It’s okay though; political corruption and naked influence peddling are charming when you’re cute like Richard Gere.
Of course, the film is aware that Edward is a dick. He had a bad relationship with his father and as a result has difficulty expressing emotions. The love of Vivian, though, is supposed to transform him. He takes a day of work; he smiles more; he decides to go easy in his business dealings. Instead of breaking apart the shipbuilding company and selling it for parts, he decides to invest in it. He is no longer a parasitic financial leech; instead he’s a patriotic enabler of America’s global imperialism. “I’m proud of you!” declares the elderly shipbuilder whose company Gere has decided to spare, and it’s a lovely father-son moment. Daddy issues resolved.
From this perspective, Pretty Woman isn’t really about Vivian’s retooling; it’s about Edward’s. Vivian gets new clothes, but she doesn’t really change as a person. The emotional dynamics of the film depend on her being the same charmer from the beginning to the end. That charm saves Edward and teaches him how to be a good man—which is to say, it teaches him how to exercise patriarchal power with a touch of generosity and emotion. He still is surrounded with sycophantic servants, but he treats them better. He learns the name of the manager of the hotel where he’s staying; he brings Vivian flowers, and will apparently take her to New York with him rather than just putting her up in an apartment in LA. Furthermore, the limo driver seems touched to see Vivian and Edward get together. Who doesn’t revel in the happiness of their betters, after all?
In the beginning, then, Edward purchases Vivian to be at his sexual and romantic beck and call. In the end, he’s learned that you shouldn’t treat people that way. So instead, he uses Vivian to make him slightly kinder and slightly gentler and to help him work through his issues with older men. Thus Vivian goes from being a blow-up doll for wanking to being a blow-up doll for emotional growth. Not exactly an inspiring career arc, but that’s hardly her fault. When pimps rule the world, everybody’s a whore—even, or perhaps especially, if we’re supposed to believe that the biggest pimp has a heart of gold.
I don’t think it excessive to call this film evil. I read an interview with a Ukrainian woman running a shelter for ex-prostitutes; she said Pretty Woman has convinced many young girls that prostitution is the road to wealth and romance. The flick’s a recruiting device for pimps and slavers.
Apparently the original script was much darker: it was the suits at Disney who prettied it up.
I don’t think they were supposed to get together at the end is my understanding….
This movie is probably the textbook case of how the Hollywood development process can completely transform (and falsify) a screenwriter’s material.
J. F. Lawton’s original screenplay (click here) was much, much darker than what ended up on screen. There was no mistaking what a sociopathic asshole Edward was, and Vivian was a coke addict who’d been streetwalking for years. The story ended with him throwing her out of his car. He dumped her, her new clothes, and her payment on the sidewalk. He then drove away, presumably never to see her again. The epilogue had her and her roommate on a bus to Disneyland.
The head of Disney thought it had potential as a romantic comedy. So he hired “Happy Days” creator Garry Marshall to develop the project. The shocking thing is that the script wasn’t really changed all that much. A few scenes were replaced, and others were tweaked. The amount of revisions–putting aside that the entire tenor of the story was changed–weren’t enough for anyone but Lawton to get screenplay credit under Writers Guild rules. Although I can’t imagine he identified with the movie at all when he saw it.
Apparently every age-appropriate actress in Hollywood was considered for Vivian, and just about every one of them turned it down. Jennifer Jason Leigh, who met with Garry Marshall, had this to say about him and his attitude towards the material:
“[He] actually said something so hysterical to me about the character. […] He said: ‘She’s only been doing this a few weeks, so it’s still a lot of fun for her.’ Yeah, it’s a lot of fun getting into a car with a 68-year-old and giving him a blow job. Really exciting.” (link)
In a Movieline interview, Leigh said, “The script was so dark, I couldn’t believe Disney was making it. And, of course, they didn’t. Instead, they turned it into a recruiting film, the Top Gun of prostitution.”
Alex & Noah–
I didn’t see your comments before posting this.
Wow, that Jennifer Jason Leigh quote is stomach-churning.
The question is…did anyone turn down the Richard Gere role? Any male Hollywood actors who looked at the script and said, holy shit this is repulsive, I’m not doing this? I don’t even have to ask the question, do I?
I gather Christopher Reeve came close to doing it. So did Al Pacino. Although they may have been considering the project with the script as originally written.
I do recommend everyone go to the screenplay link I posted. Just scroll down to page 119 and read the last two scenes. It’s really startling when you consider the final film.
At least a reference should be made to Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review — virtually a cult item among cineastes — of the film:http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/meat-john-dough/Content?oid=875998
That’s a good review. He agrees with me that Edward is the really despicable character, which is nice to see.
I think it’s not that women hate Vivian, but they hate the Big Lie in this story, and how it degrades her and what story it tells us, as women, about what our choices result in and how we (ought to) react to our options.
The moral of this shitty film is use your body and your sex, and you too can climb out of any gutter! Which is a story we’ve heard a lot. Our cooters are like honey, attracting geezers. Put up with any appalling graying haired old dude, because he will saaaaaaaaaave you. If the sex is good enough.
But of course, that’s fucking bullshit. Even if you get to the marrying, in a couple years, he’s have a mistress on the side and fuck you over in the marriage settlement, and you’ll still have herpes. (Also, most dudes aren’t going to marry their hookers.)
And I think what is most unpleasant about this story is the way that Julia portrays this as Fun! Perky! Awesome! It’s so much fun to be degraded by an asshole! Wheeee! Yeah, no thanks. It’s not fun. It’s work. The sex workers I’ve known, and the people who have done sex-for-rent money, or similar, all have contempt for their Johns. It’s not fun, it’s work. Often grim, depressing, and gross work. Lots of dissociation involved. Portraying that story as Fun Times is insulting to women. This isn’t Cinderella, it’s…I don’t know what it is. A horror film, maybe.
Also, you know they decided Julia Roberts didn’t have a nice enough bod, right? They used a body double for her. (If Julia’s body isn’t enough, all us ladies are inadequate.)
Interesting, Robert. Yeah, most of the sex workers I know did coke. The pressure to stay thin is immense and the work is often soul-crushing. It can turn into a vicious cycle (more work to pay for coke, more depression, hence more coke, hence more need for money, etc). Throwing Vivian out of the car is just about the right ending.
Hey VM. At least reading reactions, I think there’s often a thin line between hating the movie and hating Vivian/Roberts. Which is understandable! She is the film in a lot of ways; without her talent and charm (which is considerable) I don’t know how they could have sold it.
My point just being…it’s worth taking your eyes off her and focusing on/hating other things. So that, for example, you can sneer at Richard Gere for taking that role, rather than just making it up to Roberts (and/or other women) to turn down roles in incredibly misogynist films. There’s no reason guys shouldn’t have the same moral imperatives as actors that women do.
Sure. I’m all for also hating Gere. But I think there’s an element of betrayal with Roberts–because she should be on our side. If you see what I mean.
Yeah, I totally get that, and it’s an entirely reasonable reaction. I think it’s worth resisting a little, just because, as I said, you end up working with the movie in a lot of ways — in that, the film itself focuses on Vivian/Roberts and despises her not a little.
It’s somewhat analogous to a discussion I saw a bit back (can’t remember where) where black actors are always asked about race in hollywood till they’re sick of it. The question being, why don’t white actors have to talk about race in Hollywood? Why don’t they constantly have to answer questions about their white privilege? The folks getting screwed just have to answer more for being screwed than the people doing the screwing, it seems like….
I just reread the script. It’s a lot darker than I remembered–chopped liver marinated in castor oil. It pulls no punches about the reality of prostitution. Edward is depicted as a scumbag to the core. He has no daddy issues in the script. He doesn’t end up playing Mr. Nice Guy with the ship-building business. He doesn’t stick up for Vivian out of any sense of chivalry; he takes people’s rudeness to her as a sign that they’re not sucking up to him enough. There’s a scene about midway through, where in Vivian’s presence, he smugly tells his lawyer what a better deal it was to pick her up off the street than to hire his usual high-end call girl. He then offers the lawyer a tumble with her.
I’d be very wary of attacking the actors for their participation. You don’t know at what stage of development they came on board. You also don’t know what was shot and left out. Jennifer Jason Leigh was apparently interested in doing the film until she caught wind of what Disney and Garry Marshall actually had in mind. Richard Gere has no problem taking on repellent characters–he nearly played Gordon Gekko–and he doesn’t have a history of quitting projects over differences once he’s on board. His career was on a downward curve when he made Pretty Woman, so it would have been professionally damaging to quit after a certain point. It’s been reported he was not allowed to give the performance he wanted in the film. Marshall ordered him to dial it back; he was told his job was to play straight man to Roberts. Marshall is said to have told him, “No, no, no, Richard. In this movie, one of you moves. And one of you doesn’t. Guess which one you are?” He recently said it’s his least favorite film of the ones he’s done (click here).
The film deserves the scorn, but I think it’s best targeted at Marshall and Disney chief Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Just read the script…. I think it’s not quite fair to blame the whole debacle on the rewriters. The script is darker, no doubt, but it certainly has it’s own problems. Edward comes off as much worse, it’s true…but that makes the fact that Vivian sort of falls for him almost completely unrealistic to the point of being insulting.
I’d say also that the script is pretty thoroughly excited by its own authentic sleaziness and cynicism. It’s not at all clear to me that Edward isn’t supposed to be admirable because of his crassness and hardness.
I mean, I’d agree the final version is worse, but the seeds of its transcendent awfulness are there in the script, I think. The final version seems like a fulfillment of some of the script’s worse impulses, rather than a refutation of them.
What’s up with the posts that haven’t nothing to do with comics lately?
We always have lots of non-comics related posts. In part, that’s because I’m interested in lots of things other than comics, and in part it’s because I think it’s important for comics to be seen as part of a broader conversation about art, rather than as a specialty subcultural interest.
I’ve loved this thread.
Going along with the last tangent, I very, very strongly agree with Noah on the contextualization of comics in wider discussions of art. So I hope I don’t defeat that by bringing up one of the few memorable comics about prostitution…this post makes me want to page back through Paying For It. The book doesn’t commit any (or most?) of the atrocities of Pretty Woman, but I remember feeling pretty queasy about it anyway.
I would agree that Paying For It has a very different take…though I think you could argue that it romanticizes prostitution as well, albeit in a very different way.
We had a number of posts and threads on Paying For It; you can find them all here.
Yay! Will enjoy going through these. I did a cursory search on it last night, but didn’t page back far enough to find these. Thank you!
This is one of those movies that my wife is incredulous that I’ve never seen, but the more I hear about it, the more I’m glad that I’ve never had the displeasure.
Has anyone else seen the movie Center of the World, which was apparently intended as a counterpoint to Pretty Woman? It’s about a super-nice young millionaire who hires a stripper to spend the weekend with him and then tries to start a relationship with her, with unsatisfactory results. I saw it about 10 years ago but remember liking it.
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vommarlowe says:
Sure. I’m all for also hating Gere. But I think there’s an element of betrayal with Roberts–because she should be on our side. If you see what I mean.
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Yes; isn’t her “happy hooker” (the title of an autobio bestseller some years back) the equivalent of an “Uncle Tom” character, one which confirms the audience’s prejudices, caters to their comforting, self-validating delusions?
Why, it’s as if a Jewish actor were to star in an anti-Semitic propaganda film, as a greedy, rapacious, exploitative Jew. Is it then “wrong” to detest the character, feel anger at the thespian who brought it to such vivid life?
Get a load of the comments re that purportedly non-fiction “Happy Hooker” book:
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Ms Hollander tells all in this book. If you think you know all there is to know about enjoying sex, you should read this book. Women will learn how to make their men and themselves happier and men will learn what they’ve only dreamed they’ve been missing.
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I loved this book. As a young man I was amazed at Ms. Hollander’s feelings for her “customers” and her compassion. Really beautifully done.
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http://www.amazon.com/The-Happy-Hooker-Xaviera-Hollander/dp/1568492472
Yeah, right. Because women should learn from prostitutes not only how to satisfy themselves, but how to enjoy sex; because hookers love their work so much!
Oh, and they have the deepest affection for their Johns, too…
I recall there was also a critique by Noah at HU about the autobio “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star” book; couldn’t find it using the site’s search feature, though…
The review of the Jenna Jameson autobio is here.
Thanks for the link!
And hey, how ’bout that “It’s so cool to be a pimp” — ’cause that what it sure sounds what Tom Cruise’s character has become at the end — movie, “Risky Business”?
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…In a final voiceover, Joel reveals that, for his Future Enterprises class, he “deals in human fulfillment” and it has turned quite a profit.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risky_Business