Oedipal Drama, Pretty Woman Style

Edward, however, is not only a capitalist “bastard” but, in his own quasi-Oedipal way, a de facto “bastard” too. It turns out that Pretty Woman is something of a Lewis family drama—family tragedy too, according to the terms of conventional tragedy as founded upon a tragic, irreparable, loss or injury that turns out to be life-altering: the murder of King Hamlet or the destruction of a black community in the work of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon or Paradise. As Edward explains to Vivian, in the comfort of the luxurious bath they’re sharing, his father abandoned his mother for another woman, taking the older Mr. Lewis’s wealth with him. Edward’s mother died afterward, although it is not clear how much being dumped for another woman had to do with it.

Edward being Edward, however, he got his revenge. The third company he took over, he tells Vivian, without any ostensible glee, was his father’s, in relation to which he behaved in a thoroughly Edwardian fashion. We presume he treated it as he did the first two companies he liquidated, and as he is now promising to do to Morse Industries: He broke it up and sold it—at a profit, of course. In Pretty Woman, at least, maybe it is not vulture capitalism we’re talking about. Maybe it is better understood as revenge capitalism. The only way to kill the father is to take from him the very thing that he spent his life building. In so doing, the son—rather than behaving in the normative Oedipal terms by killing the father so as to possess the love object (the mother)—instead avenges the mother, post facto: revenging the mother in death by putting the father to death, financially. Psychologically, too, by being the instrument of economic wrath. Hell hath no fury like a son abandoned. Pity the industrial capitalist father.

The love that the son lost when his father abandoned him and his mother cannot be retrieved, so that the lost love becomes the weaponized object of nostalgia. Nostalgia, that is, on the order of the Rolling Stones: “You can’t always get what you need / But if you try sometimes, you just might get what you need.” And what Edward needs, at least in this particular iteration of the Oedipal drama, is to render the unloving father without his love object. The elder Mr. Lewis is free to hang on to his ill-gotten gains (his second wife), but the source of his wealth, the denial of which became the source of Edward’s (relative, we presume) impoverishment (no more limos), is violently wrenched away from him.

Edward could not regain his father’s love, as is evidenced by his long estrangement (fourteen and a half years; no final goodbyes—“I wasn’t there when he died”), but he got what he needed: revenge. The son learned the value of capital extraction and, to phrase the matter in Schumpeter’s terms, the son learned the art of “creative destruction,” which becomes the denouement, the brutal twist in the tale, or the final twist in a brutal generational revenge saga.