She’s a Pretty Woman

She’s a smalltown girl from Georgia. It’s around midnight and her shift is just beginning. She, Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts), is a prostitute working the strip in one of the sleazier parts of Hollywood. He, Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) is a private equity financier (PEF—a corporate raider or venture capitalist) from the tonier environs of Long Island, New York. He’s divorced and has proven himself unable to sustain a meaningful relationship with the women who have passed through his life since his divorce. Driving his attorney’s car, a late-model Lotus Esprit, our corporate raider is lost. What is worse, the Lotus Esprit belonging to Philip Stuckey (Jason Alexander) is, as it should be, a stick shift, which Edward cannot drive. (Surely no self-respecting car enthusiast even considers purchasing the automatic version of the Lotus. God forbid. What’s the point of driving an automatic sports car? Where’s the fun in not having a manual transmission?)

Even worse is the fact that Edward’s ignorance about the layout of Los Angeles has seen him arrive in said seedier part of the city. This is Vivian’s neighborhood, where the prostitutes, their pimps, the junkies, the drug dealers, and their ilk hold sway. He is a long way from Philip’s Beverley Hills mansion where he was the guest of honor earlier that afternoon.

A lost man needs directions. Vivian knows the urban geography of Los Angeles. They haggle, briefly, over the price of directions. They settle on a price for directions, a price that includes her accompanying him to his very upscale hotel. She is unable to abide his mechanical incompetence—it is a thing of pain for her to hear him try to change gears. Consequently, she asserts her authority and takes over the driver’s seat from Edward. And, boy, can this pretty woman drive a stick.

Therewith the scene is set. Seasoned corporate raider meets the prostitute and in Hollywood that must be a love story. And Pretty Woman is exactly that. In the terms of this essay, however, the love story is the narrative (Hollywood, if you will) gloss that provides us entrée to the economic substance. Contained within the substance, of course, is the critique of late industrial capitalism. It is a critique that is sometimes, often, submerged within the movie’s dominant narrative. At other times it breaks through the veneer, while in still other moments it presents itself, maybe boldly, for our thinking. But, to begin with, we must acknowledge the effect of the gloss, because what a gloss it is.

The swanky Regent Beverley Hills Wilshire hotel, where Edward occupies the penthouse suite whenever he is town, the splendor of the exclusive stores that line Rodeo Drive, the urbane sophistication of a polo match. What does not accord comfortably with this ostentatious display of wealth is the specter of late industrial capitalism. It’s the fly in the ointment, this last (or, very close to last) gasp of industrial capitalism, this late but not yet obsolete mode of generating capital through production, that disturbs this otherwise well-modulated, carefully calibrated, PEF surface, which does nothing to disguise the utter ruthlessness of venture capitalism. If Gary Marshall’s 1990 Pretty Woman is, in the first instance, rich-boy-meets-poor-(prostitute)-girl romance, then it is, in a register lower but perhaps more sonorous, a singular critique of corporate raider capitalism. Its singularity derives from the ways Pretty Woman articulates a profound nostalgia for late industrial American capitalism. Late industrial capitalism’s last stand.

As if Marx’s analysis could not fully account for the unexpected, stubborn, manifestation of the residual. Much as industrial capitalism has, to all intents and purposes, exhausted itself, much as “new, higher relations of [non-]production have come into being,” the unwelcome, bastard child that “matured in the womb of the old society itself” insists upon its right to an untimely arrival. Late industrial capitalism, out of joint with the economic modality of the times, would seem to hold with the Pyrrhic logic of “better late than never.” In giving voice to late industrial capitalism’s untimely manifestation, Pretty Woman, inadvertently or not, suggests that there may yet be at least one more “productive force” within industrial capitalism that has not yet been exhausted.

But, like all last stands, it is only a matter of time before there emerges the perfect alignment that Marx expects between the “social order” and the “higher relations of production”; it is but a matter of time before this symmetry is achieved—or restored. Or that there may come into being the congruence between the “social order” and the “higher relations of non-production,” to phrase the matter as an economic truth. What Marshall’s movie stages is that moment of economic and philosophical disruption within the “social order,” annotating more than just the impossibility of a seamless transition between economic modalities. Marshall’s movie articulates, true to the spirit of nostalgia, the spectral presence of the past as an interrogation of the modality of the present. An interrogation that shades, unsubtly, into an indictment. The question posed by this logic that is felicitous to Pretty Woman nostalgia is not (at least not so much), What is this modality that you are upholding? as it is, How could you uphold this nonproductive modality? The force of this interrogative nostalgia is singular. And it is singular because it is, as will see, a resilient rhetorical beast.

Pretty Woman is a tribute to that resilience, and as a rhetorical cinematic device, this nostalgia is possessed of a Hollywood grandeur peculiarly its own. But we should not be mistaken, this nostalgia for late industrial capitalism is less a product of the Hollywood imagination than it is an ideological phenomenon that finds, as noted in the Introduction, an enduring articulation across the American political spectrum. As such, Pretty Woman’s nostalgia speaks the irrepressible yearning for that (American) economic modality that we might conceive of as a productive America.

It is a nostalgia for that America where the US economy can be said to “still make something.” A fundamentalist economic ideology: you are only if you make. It is if as Marx’s explication of profit, the difference between use and exchange value, had been rendered a matter of no economic consequence. Not even as Marx says in Volume I of Capital, a “mixing up of use-value and exchange value.”1 Productivity not only as the only economic virtue, but as the very raison d’etre of the (national) economy itself.

Late industrial capitalism sets itself against the predatory venture capitalism that has, unceremoniously and without apology, put paid to industrial capitalism. The triumph of the postindustrial American economy is nothing but a matter of obeying the law of profit margins. Selling services generates far greater profits than making products. The ways of capitalism are, as Joseph Schumpeter recognized the better part of a century ago, “essentially evolutionary,” and, because of that, capitalism must evolve itself or it will “atrophy.”2