“It Must Be Very Difficult to Let Go of Something So Beautiful”
“It must be very difficult to let go of something so beautiful.” This line belongs, as it properly should, to the concierge-sage Barney Thompson. It is a remark, resonant with romantic meaning (giving up Vivian’s love), that Barney offers to Edward when Edward asks him to return to the store the jewelry (a necklace and a pair of earrings) that Edward had borrowed for Vivian to wear to their night at the opera in San Francisco. Barney, consummate professional that he is, of course agrees, after which he offers his insight, thereby setting in motion Edward’s ride (in a limousine, of course) back to the wrong side of town, where Vivian’s apartment is.
Having decided that he cannot, after all, “let go of something so beautiful,” Edward now has to overcome his acrophobia. Vivian doesn’t, of course, live in a penthouse, but Edward does have to brave, in his expensively tailored suit, two flights of rickety, poorly maintained, iron stairs. Cheap, bodega-bought red roses in hand, Edward duly performs his chivalrous duty. “Cinda-fucking-rella,” as Kit describes the phenomenon, is rescued. By rescuing her, Edward gives Vivian what she wants.
Whereupon the tables are turned, and Edward is given something.
We know Edward’s business ethics. His desire is for money and more money. Power, political influence at the highest levels of the US government, these are for him a means to his ethical end. Power and political influence allow him to be continuously felicitous to his ethics. But, the question persists, is this what he wants? Pretty Woman suggests that the ethical is, at best, a composite whole, better apprehended in its fragmentation, recognized as comprising more than one strand.
The other ethical strand, the one that escapes Edward’s grasp, is the one that Vivian makes immanent to him, one that only Vivian can make immanent. Edward’s “ex-wife,” who now “lives in his ex-house with his ex-dog on Long Island,” could not make this immanent. Neither could the string of rich socialite girlfriends, including his most recent ex. What needs to be made immanent to Edward is the economy of un-equal exchange. “Un-equal” because it operates in a register—“love” is the only name we can give it—in which there is no room for the discourse of profit and loss, because it is nothing if not an imprecise, speculative, life-affirming metric. (This is Hollywood, after all.) To commit to the un-equal is to give to the other with the expectation of reciprocation that is never guaranteed. Love is that risk where every gesture, every act of giving to the other, every act of self-sacrifice, every exchange, intimate or not, is fraught with the possibility of inequality—there is no guarantee that the other will respond in kind or, of course, equal measure. Love is the ultimate form of speculation. Loving the other always involves the risk of squandering the self—the only capital that has any currency in love—in the cause of the other.
Love locks the self and the other into the economy of un-equal exchange. Love habituates self and other into a bond of un-equal exchange. Love is the contracting of the self into an un-equal bond with the other. Love, as Shakespeare might say, has no measure and so does not bear refutation. Or, denial, as Edward finds out. Faced with the prospect of losing Vivian, Edward directs the limousine driver—Daryl—to Vivian’s neighborhood. Thereby finding what he was on the cusp of losing.
Vivian, who is totally committed to the un-equal, offers Edward the best possible deal, gives him the only guarantee she can. Vivian’s is the Cinderella economy that strives to install the equal, as far as is possible, at the core of the relationship to the other.
Having rescued Cinderella, Edward asks, quite naively (as if he is not really expecting an answer), “Then what does she [Cinderella] do?” Vivian’s answer catches Edward off guard, a matter for some concern for Edward’s physical well-being because he is precariously balanced on the rickety landing: “She rescues him right back.”
From the moment that Pretty Woman transforms Edward from a ruthless vulture capitalist into a bastard, it is unarguable that, as Vivian surely intuits, while Edward can get everything that he needs, he needs a lot of help in trying to understand what he wants.
(What a disappointment Edward must be to Mick and Keith: he can always get what he needs, he just doesn’t know what he wants.)
Hence, the rescue operation. In saving Cinderella, the prince himself is saved. Except that this Cinderella’s prince doesn’t know what he wants, at least not in any way that would suggest he is beginning to know it.
Let us name the economy of un-equal exchange the complementary ethical strand: the other revealing to the self what it is the self wants because the self itself does not know what it wants. Such ethics, as it were, is not only as felicitous to the self’s desires but as the possibility of the self’s being instructed into what it should be felicitous to. In a word, Edward does not know what he wants so he must be taught ethics, an admonition at once as preposterous and searingly appropriate as it sounds—teaching ethics through the un-equal that is love.
That such ethical work should fall to the prostitute is, in the architecture of Pretty Woman, not at all surprising. Vivian, unlike Edward, already operates in two registers, the moral and ethical, and for Vivian the ethical is not singular but operates as a composite structure. Vivian, unlike Edward, both has her feet on the ground (she walks the streets) even as her ethics locates her in a higher—perhaps even a lofty—place. Vivian does not suffer from acrophobia. Edward must, literally and ethically (figuratively) be instructed into how to ascend to those heights at which the various composite strands and their (incipient) entanglement can be glimpsed. Strands that are dangling, entangled, yet discrete; discrete but in need of being reconstituted into a provisional object—love. To see what is on the ground, Edward must be made to go up.
And not in a fancy elevator—not in the exclusive kind of hotels where elevator operators are still the norm—but under his own steam. Edward must make the ascent, literally, step by terrified step. In any case, the view from the penthouse may be too much for him. That way he’d have to look down into the abyss, and Vivian clearly understands that Edward, as he is happy to acknowledge, has his limits. “That is all I can offer,” Edward says to Vivian when she refuses his offer to be kept by him. Looking down from Vivian’s landing, his eyes betraying a palpable fear (love has not yet been able to cure acrophobia), between the first and the second floor of the Las Palmas hotel is, at that point, his maximum point of elevation.