‘Pretty Woman’ or — Enough to Make Noam Chomsky’s Head Explode?

‘Pretty Woman’ (1990) might carry itself with the sassy strut of a film ready to plunge its hand into your crotch or fuck you on top of the piano but, in reality, it’s an oddly virginal affair. Julia Roberts plays a prostitute who looks like she’s never had sex in her life whilst Richard Gere approvingly glows at her like some benevolent, yet insane, blazing sun. We also suspect that, despite using prostitutes, Gere’s STD-free genitalia might also gleam with the luminescent purity of a new-born Disney princess.

She is spunky. He looks like the reincarnation of JFK returned to prepare us for the coming of Clinton’s America (there’s a weirdly fetishistic presidential air about this movie). She needs money. He can blast away the very meaning of poverty from her life simply by gazing upon her. She shops. He takes her to the opera even if he looks like he listens exclusively to Kenny G.

They fall in love and the audiences leaves the cinema with the warm fuzzy feeling inside that everything works out for the best if you’re a self-centred, obscenely rich white man. D’aww.

‘Pretty Woman’ is one seriously fucked-up movie with a whole host of problems that would make your head spin and for a whole variety of socio-economic, sexual, political and moral reasons. Yet the biggest and most surprising problem of all is that it actually, sort of works.

Directed by Garry “capable-enough-if-you’re-into-this-kinda-shit” Marshall ‘Pretty Woman’ has the vibe of having possibly started out as a dark, realistic look into the struggles of a sex worker before being re-written (by a man) as a frothy, lighter-than-air comedy that’s a love-letter to Golden Age Hollywood (there’s a reason Roberts watches ‘I Love Lucy’ and when she walks the street it’s over the names of bygone stars).

This means there’s an almost in-built narcissism to the movie as it falls madly in love with itself and the pleasures of cinema as it riffs (steals?) on classic screwball romances. So Roberts fizzes like potassium dropped in water whilst Gere simply sits back and is mesmerised by the sparks she emits. Besides, it’s not as if his character has to undergo any growth or change so he hasn’t any work to do here anyway. He is the unchanging centre of creation and it is reality that must bend to his will. What a catch!

So they’re cartoon characters and when the film is functioning as such it’s a legitimately breezy delight. The “I told you not to pick up the phone” scene is genuinely funny and nicely handled and when Roberts silently eats the mint on her dessert whilst everyone else talks business I burst out laughing at how achingly adorable and beautifully played it was. The dialogue is frequently screwball inspired too with the line “Avoid a steaming divot!” being a great example. So there’s a reason this made a tonne of money at the box office and transformed Julia Roberts into a star and that’s because it’s an enjoyable experience.

Still, the film does have the unsavoury, clinical construction of a misogynistic cruise missile or a fairytale for psychopaths. And I suspect it was also coincidence that an hour before watching ‘Pretty Woman’ I’d been reading about the Italian fascist comedies of the 30’s and 40’s because I can safely say that judged on those criteria — conformity, materialism, male dominance, cinema as “dream factory”, the fantasy of upward mobility, the glorification of money — that ‘Pretty Woman’ is vastly more fascistic than anything made under Mussolini.

Make of that what you will.