The Patient Is on Life Support but Is Not Yet Dead

Gordon Gekko is a street fighter, an alleyway financial brawler in an expensive suit. Pretty Woman presents James Morse as an old-schooled, buttoned-down, but tough-as-nails industrial capitalist. If Bud Fox is no match for Gekko, then what James and David Morse find in Edward is a PEF who is, if not possessed of a conscience lately come by exactly, then a postindustrial capitalist who, at the very last second, it seems, decides to check on the ever-weakening pulse of industrial capitalism.

The verdict is peremptory but not inconsequential. American late industrial capitalism is on life support. Every now and then—and it does not matter if we’re talking about the early 1990s or the third decade of the twenty-first century—the patient blinks. Or the patient, ailing and almost beyond economic recognition, reaches out a feeble hand, just enough to suggest that it still has a pulse. The occasional call for the revitalization of the American manufacturing industry is that speaking, with a regularity that should not surprise us but nonetheless always does, of an economic nationalism that can always be brought to life. Especially in those moments when the United States fears that its global dominance is under threat.

It is, of course, in precisely those moments when the racism and xenophobia that are so constitutive of this economic nationalism are mobilized, sometimes subtly, sometimes less so (as in the current battle for global dominance with China). Economic nostalgia is always embedded within the American political.

The PEF’s decision to keep building ships submits, as befits the movie’s romantic thematic, to a strain of nostalgia. As such, the desire to resuscitate late industrial capitalism operates as a secondary discourse in Pretty Woman. The determination to “make something in America” (to “make things in America again”) is the story that suffuses the movie’s main plot—the redemption of the wanton, destructive venture capitalism by the prostitute. It might even be more appropriate to say that Pretty Woman functions in a redemptive Christological register in that it stands as the desire for the resurrection of industrial capitalism, against all hard economic evidence that declares this mode of capitalism dead; or at the very least, that industrial capitalism has for decades been surpassed as the dominant capitalist mode of producing—reproducing—wealth. (Industrial capitalism will not, some three decades after its heyday, unlike Jesus the Christ, rise again on the third day.)

However, thinking late/industrial capitalism’s deep attachment to its outmoded modality, which also serves as a shorthand for its motto, “Make things in America, again,” resonates in a distinctly different timbre in a post-2016 America. The 1990 economic nationalism of Pretty Woman, in which were always incubating the seeds of a white nationalism potentially virulent in its xenophobia, in which could always be detected the strains of a white racism angry at the (largely) meager economic gains made by black Americans and other minorities, can be said to have come fully into itself since 2016.