To Steal, to Make of Steel
Love, to simultaneously invoke and invert Bob Dylan, is the “one direction home.”1 Instead of declaring that there is “no direction home,” Pretty Woman instead presents the possibility that only love can show you the way, that the path that runs through the phantasmatic, through surrogacy. That is how you get to your purloined destination.
The only way to get to where you’re supposed to be is to steal your way there, to steal from the phantasmatic father so as to give life to the surrogate father: love as stealth. As Edward finds out, Vivian can’t be bought—well, not after a point, anyway.
But there is a way to steal his way into her heart.
By agreeing to make a “great big ship” that is made of steel.
By agreeing to build again, Edward makes it possible for his morality and the ethical to be brought, for what he hopes is a sustained moment, into a perfect symmetry, one not so much lodged within the other as continuous with the other. The unity of fragments. Unity in the fragmentary. Sometimes you not only get what you need, but you also get what you didn’t know you needed, that which you could never have imagined yourself to have wanted.
Just once, and that may be the best we hope for, we can claim that it is possible to prove Mick Jagger wrong.
Note
1. No Direction Home—Bob Dylan (youtube.com) (February 7, 2024). This Martin Scorsese documentary of Dylan opens with a British fan asking Dylan for an autograph. Dylan, being Dylan, refuses, saying, “You don’t need my autograph. If you did, I’d give it to you.” Dylan recognizing that there is a significant existential difference between what the fan wants and what that fan needs. That which is needed must be given. That which is wanted is not to be granted. At least not in the ecosphere that is Bob Dylan’s relationship to his fans.