Whore-text

Edward and Vivienne, played by Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, finally get down to business in Garry Marshall’s 1990 hit Pretty Woman. This and other exchanges throughout the movie continually draw parallels between the Hollywood Boulevard prostitute and the Beverley Hills millionaire. Edward Lewis is the owner of a characteristically 1980s business that buys out manufacturing companies and sells off their assets for huge profits, but he seems to have an equivocal attitude to his profession. As he later says to Vivienne, ‘you and I are such similar creatures, we both screw people for money’. In the movie, Edward is about to screw a father and son partnership, the owners of a shipbuilding firm, a symbol of traditional US manufacturing industry, family values and paternalistic industrial relations. They make a stark contrast with Lewis and his own father, with whom he had not spoken for 14 years before his death. The father’s silence and death followed the son’s liquidation of the family’s own paternalistic firm for profit. It was Edward’s first patricidal success. Cold and dysfunctional, estranged from his wife and girlfriend, alienated from what is left of his family, Edward Lewis is clearly a symptom of everything that is wrong with a heartless capitalism, popularly exemplified by the money-obsessed 1980s chronicled in movies like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and so on. He has one great asset, however, he is a glamorous multimillionaire, and it is as such that he functions as the prize for Vivienne, the down-to-earth street girl who can melt his heart.