The Žižekian Ethics of Mick Jagger
Still, it is Mick Jagger’s question that haunts: Is this what Edward wants? We can safely say that, at least in economic and (petty) Oedipal terms, Edward has gotten what he needs. Pretty Woman, however, has the distinction of making of Mick’s question an ethical one, ethical in the Žižekian register. Not only, an ethical question, however, but an ethics that cannot be disarticulated from Žižekian morality. In strict, by which I mean perverse, Žižekian terms, Edward has behaved morally toward his father. In fact, Edward has been more moral—again, perversely so—than his father. He has done more unto his father than his father did unto him. Live by industrial capitalism, die by postindustrial capital.
The ethical kernel of the Mick Jagger–Slavoj Žižek question, however, is a different one. A fundamental one, even. Is Edward behaving in a felicitous way with his desires? Succinctly phrased, what does Edward want? This is the ethical difficulty that Pretty Woman poses and, it must be said, the movie answers. At least in one register.
By the end of Pretty Woman we can say this about Vivian. The small-town girl from Georgia can distinguish between what she needs, even if only as a negation, and what she wants. What she needs is not to be Edward’s kept woman. When, on their final day together, Edward suggests that he will furnish Vivian with an apartment, a driver, and credit cards so that she can shop to her heart’s content, she refuses. When Edward insists to Vivian that “I have never treated you as a prostitute,” she responds, almost in a whisper, out of his earshot, “You just did.”
To be a kept woman, a former prostitute on (a handsome) retainer, as it were, is what Vivian does not need. What she wants, as she tells Edward on the balcony of the penthouse suite, is the “fairytale.” The knight—or, as Vivian would prefer, the “prince”—on a white horse who rescues the damsel in distress and whisks her away to . . . well, in this case, a destination to be determined. The fairytale is not, needless to say, what Edward is proposing, and Vivian walks away from what would seem a very sweet deal.