Pretty Woman (1990) might be the clearest of the film condemnations of the cold-hearted capitalist. Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) is, at least at the beginning, an icy takeover specialist, a la Larry (the Liquidator) Garfield in Other People’s Money (released as a film the following year, but already a popular play) and Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. He has no time for his girlfriend, or even to wait for the valet to get his own car, so he takes his lawyer’s (Phil Stuckey, played by Jason Alexander) Lotus, and gets lost on Hollywood Blvd. There he tries to get directions from Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts), a hooker who charges even for this service.
We already have met Vivian, and know she’s a good sort who really needs the money because her roommate has spent the rent on drugs. We also know that she has to fend for herself – she doesn’t want a pimp to run her life.
Vivian ends up staying the night in Edward’s palatial penthouse hotel room, and then the week with Edward, who “rents” her to fill a female slot in his life without the complications that Edward has been getting from his non-paid girlfriends and ex-wife. So Vivian wants to be an independent contractor rather than an employee, while Edward is looking for an employee to replace the independent women he has had to deal with. They negotiate this like business transaction it is – she offers $4,000, he counters with $2,000, and they settle for $3,000 (the original working title of the film).
During this week, Edward is trying to buy a piece of Long Beach from its owner, Jim Morse (Ralph Bellamy) to turn into a residential development. The problem is that the property already has a shipbuilding factory with employees who would be thrown out of work. Edward, being a cold-hearted capitalist, doesn’t care about the employees. Morse is hoping to get a Navy ship order from the government, but Edward has used his contact with Senator Adams (Stacey Keach Sr) to find out that this is buried in appropriations.
Edward has dinner with Morse and his grandson during which he makes his liquidation plan clear, to their chagrin and strong opposition. Morse points out that Edward’s father, though also a capitalist, was a better person.
Edward describes to Vivian what he does as not actually making or building anything, just buying property and selling it. She says that it’s like stealing cars and selling them for parts, except that it’s legal. As in other films (see The Godfather) crime is no different from legal business.
During this week, Vivian proceeds to remake Edward in her fun-loving image. At breakfast, the morning after the pickup, Edward is such a remarkably uptight capitalist that he complains about Vivian sitting on his fax on the table right in front of him rather than further away in a chair. He almost kicks her out the night before because he thinks she has drugs in the bathroom (it’s really dental floss!). Vivian, meanwhile, is a fun-loving frolic. (An unusual aspect of the film is that we see televisions playing the actresses on whom Julia Roberts seems to have modeled her performances – Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy and Audrey Hepburn in Charade (1963), opposite Cary Grant).
The film’s characters are firmly placed in categories that should sound familiar to readers of my article. Edward and his lawyer Phil are cold-hearted capitalists, just as are the pimps that Vivian refuses to entangle herself with. (Although in this film, the capitalist actually comes out looking better than the lawyer. This is signaled early in the film when Vivian says that Edward looks like a lawyer because he has that “sharp useless look” lawyers have.) Morse and his grandson are capitalists of the worker-friendly sort. The others are the workers who must slave for the capitalists – Vivian and her roommate and fellow prostitute, Barney Thompson (Hector Elizondo), the hotel manager who must keep his prized guest and his guest’s whore happy, and the sales people in the dress shop where Edward buys clothes for Vivian. (Edward says “stores are never nice to people, they’re nice to credit cards.”)
Although Edward likes to compare himself with Vivian – he says “You and I are such similar creatures – we both screw people for money,” tells Phil that Vivian is “in sales,” and describes her turf on Hollywood Blvd as her “office” – in fact they’re obviously very different, since one is the capitalist and the other is the worker.
Eventually, though, Vivian turns Edward into a capitalist of the good, worker-friendly, sort. After a few days with Vivian he’s remembering his creative self – playing the piano, playing with blocks. He tells Phil, “You know what’s wrong with us – we don’t make anything.” Phil responds that they make money, but that’s obviously not good enough.
Moreover, we even find out why Edward was such a cold-hearted capitalist – he hated his father, who left Edward’s mother. That’s why Edward bought his first company – to throw his father out of a job. Apparently he went on getting back at his father by destroying other companies and jobs. Then he was estranged from his father, and his father died. Now he sees old Morse as his father, and an opportunity to make up for all the bad things he did in his life.
Eventually Edward offers a real romantic relationship to Vivian, and helps Morse get his defense contract to build ships. Edward says it was “a business decision.” Vivian says, “it was good.” Edward says, “it felt good.”
But Phil, who thinks it’s enough to make money, is left as the unreconstructed cold-hearted capitalist. He can’t think of Vivian as anything other than a hooker, and makes a repulsive attempt to rape her when they are alone in Edward’s hotel room.
It is no secret who the audience is supposed to like – elegantly handsome Richard Gere (Tibetan activist, once voted “Sexiest Man Alive”), or Phil, played by bald, short (four inches shorter than Julia Roberts) Jason Alexander, one of the few people less sexy than Danny De Vito, and who went on to play nerdy George on Seinfeld.
Not that the audience ever had a real choice, since cute, perky Audrey Hepburn/Lucille Ball/Julia Roberts is making the real decisions. The cold-hearted capitalists are one-dimensional clowns, while the workers and the reformed warm-hearted capitalists are all beautiful people.
If the film left us any room to think, we might ask whether the original Edward and Phil really were such bad people. If the Long Beach property is worth more as a residential development than as a shipyard, then this does say something about whether society is better off if Edward buys it. This seems even more obvious here than in Wall Street and Other People’s Money, since the competing use isn’t even provided by the market, but rather by the government. We have regressed in industrial history from cable (Other People’s Money) and airplanes (Wall Street) to boats. During this late-80’s period, Hollywood sees the government as better than business even when it is building destroyers.
Finally, the attitudes on display in this film are more obviously those of the artist behind the film than they may be in other projects. The artist in question was a previously struggling writer, J.F. Lawton, who had previously made one film, Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death (1989), and obviously was fairly far down on the artist/capitalist food chain when Pretty Woman came along (he went on to write Under Siege).
