A Film Canon

The prototypical 90s neocon romcom, Pretty Woman plays like a radically denuded American Gigolo, describing the complications that ensue when lonely businessman Edward (Richard Gere) hires Hollywood prostitute Vivian (Julia Roberts) for a week. The whole film is driven by a fairly disingenuous analogy between corporate businessmen and prostitutes - both 'screw' people out of their money - which operates largely to disavow the more pervasive analogy between Edward's existence as a mere conduit for capital - he doesn't make, build or invest in anything himself - and Vivian's existence as a mere conduit for affect, taken to its logical conclusion in the girlfriend experience that Edward makes her provide. In each case, it's the commodity fetish, rather than the commodity itself, that makes for a worthwhile investment - and it's this commodity fetishism that Rob Marshall ultimately disavows, in a series of lame backstories and gestures that deepen out Gere's character - or, alternatively, remove any residual association of him with his character in American Gigolo, or suspicion that his very employment of Vivian is a kind of service - as well as through the constant, numbing reminders that we're in the midst of a fairytale. However, fairytales are, by their very nature, both fantastic and fetishistic, and far more suited to the "magical" and "obscene" proliferation of capital that characterises the relationship in its earliest and most honest stages. Even then, it's only possible to fetishise wealthy alienation with a proportionately fetishistic style - something Marshall's opening portrait of Beverly Hills never quite achieves, as if Edward's fear of heights, balconies and windows had curtailed the sublimely vertiginous commodity fetishism the film might have possessed. For all that it lends its glossiness to Roberts' subsequent string of romantic comedies, it's little more than the relaxed stylishness that comes with a huge shooting budget, rather than any directorial idiosyncrasy or deftness. The result anticipates the Sex And The City demographic, relocating cultural capital from objects or acquisitions to a kind of performed rapture that is neither completely public nor private - Vivian in orgasmic ecstasy at her first opera appearance, with Edward approvingly looking on - and only occasionally glimpsing the paradox that would presumably have been developed in the original, darkly dramatic script; namely, Edward's need to pay someone to avoid mistaking romantic for financial investment: "I have never treated you as a prostitute" "You just did."