I just finished watching the romantic comedy Pretty Woman (1990), which recently had been mentioned in the comments section. This film pairs two of the biggest stars of their time, Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. In the 1990s, this was comparable to pairing up Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, albeit both of them look a bit trashy and do not at all come close to the somewhat aristocratic look of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. Pretty Woman is a surprisingly well-made film, which was also incredibly successful at the box office, making $463 million on a budget of $14 million dollars. This is an ROI you no longer see in Hollywood. While I was familiar with the name of the film, and the basic premise, or so I thought, there were still a lot of surprises. The main one is the pretty intelligent dual structure of the story.
Pretty Woman tells a modern-day fairy tale. While I had assumed that it tells the story of a high-class escort and her rich client falling in love, the premise is a lot more unrealistic, but it sets up a dynamic that, evidently, can be much more easily exploited commercially. The female protagonist is a cheap street hooker with comically bad manners whereas the male protagonist is an ultra-Chad, an exceptionally good-looking and wealthy business owner who closes billion-dollar deals. He is also a man of culture, in both the original and the modern interpretation of the term. After he got fed up by his high-class girlfriend, he picks up a hooker and because he likes her so much, he pays her to stick around for an entire week. Instead of only using her as a sex kitten, he also uses her as arm candy. Presumably, he brought her along to an business dinner with the rich guy whose company he wants to buy, break apart and sell in pieces, in order to alienate him. There is a passive-aggressive element in Richard Gere’s character but this is not properly exhibited.
Being introduced to the world of the wealthy, the female protagonist start enjoying herself quite a bit. The film sometimes makes on-the-noise social commentary regarding the haves and have-nots, in order to further highlight the gulf between the rich guy and the street hooker he pays 3,000 dollars for, plus expenses, in order to keep him company in his fancy hotel suite. He also buys her heaps of designer clothes and even flies to a different city on a private jet so that they can attend an opera premiere. Long story short, after a week-long emotional roller-coaster, the street hooker finds her Mr Right and they presumably live heavily ever after.
The main audience of this film are women. They get told that even a street hooker can get one of the most desirable men in the world. Taking looks, social class, and money into account, a guy like the male protagonist in this film has probably never existed. Yet, in Pretty Woman he is there for the taking. Julia Roberts’ character did not even have to do much to get him. By being herself she endeared herself to him, and her low-class behavior only appealed to his protector instinct or amuses him. Telling women that there is a great guy out there waiting for them is bad enough, but making a film around a street-hooker getting a handsome and wealthy business man is laughable. In essence, the story is that even a woman of the lowest social status imaginable can get a guy who holds the absolutely highest status in society. It is not difficult to see why Pretty Woman was catnip for female viewers.
There is also a message for men, and this is where I think this film ascends typical romcom slop. It manages to subtly insult men while flattering their ego. The insult, which addresses the female sense of grandiosity, is that even a high-status man may fall in love with a street hooker and hand her his resources. Surely, if you wanted to date a street hooker, being wealthy and handsome would not be prerequisites. Thus, there is an element of humiliation that hateful women surely reveled in when watching this film. No guy wants to even admit that he is dating a slut, and with a hooker it is even worse. More interestingly, though, this film also panders to the men who were dragged into the cinema by their wife or girlfriend. We laugh about the captain-save-a-hoe stereotype. However, men who are trapped in this pattern derive meaning out of it. The vision of turning some (non-literal) whore into a dutiful housewife motivates them, however futile this may be. In this film, the male protagonist achieves exactly that: he takes a literal gutter-trash street whore and achieves remarkable success in turning her into a lady. She quickly learns how to walk, move, talk, and behave in public, yet still shows the occasional not-to-crass behavior to remind the viewer that the transformation is not complete yet. In the captain-save-a-hoe league, turning a streetwalker into a lady is the toughest challenge there is. Yet, this film tells you that it is possible, so why are you to complain about your wife or girlfriend having, for instance, problems with managing her money or keeping her legs together? Maybe you would not struggle so much if you had more money or looked better? Thus, a failed save-a-hoe project is due to male insufficiency not due to the woman being beyond help.
Pretty Woman is a very well-crafted film that manages to appeal to both deluded women and blue-pilled men. The story is utterly ridiculous, yet by being on-the-nose, it appeals to a very wide audience. I think this film is worth watching for the plot alone as a lot of thought went into it. For a romantic comedy, the level of depth is quite surprising. Compared to today’s Hollywood sloop, this film is probably the equivalent of high literature. It is probably also the most unrealistic romcom ever made. It surely is no coincidence that it is also one of the commercially most successful films in this genre.
I have to quote Charlie Sheen here, you don’t pay hookers for sex you pay them to leave.
I think part of the appeal is that he was a troubled, brooding man that women find fascinating (his looks didn’t hurt). Remember the scene in the bath tub when he admitted that the first company that he bought and broke apart was his own father’s? Because his dad left his mom for another woman.
This is a great comment! You are right that there is also the female fantasy of “fixing” a man, and this hooker is shown to help the main protagonist deal with his personal flaws. This goes so far that in the end he does not even want to buy and chop up that company but instead retain the workforce and keep it in business.
I forgot that he bought a company and was productive with it. We all just need to fall in love with a hooker 😊
While we are at it, two decades later the same Julia Roberts also starred Eat, Pray Love (2010) another film that is basically romantic porn for middle aged women. I did not want to dignify it by watching it, but I read a few reviews and the premise is equally unrealistic.
(Here is a fund review, if you want to check it; https://www.somethingawful.com/current-movie-reviews/eat-pray-love/3/ )
Middle age woman has an affair, dumps her husband, takes a year off to travel around the world and “find herself”, and stumbles upon her prince charming in the person of Javier Bardem.
The idea of being able to get a better man in middle age is a powerful delusion. Needless to say, both actors are orders of magnitude more attractive at their age than most real world average human counterparts.
There is a market for that shit. Another film tried to do the same about a decade earlier, How Stella got her Groove Back (1998). Equally ludicrous.
Both films are based on “real life stories” but as soon as you look them up you find the stories have been… embellished, to say the least. The younger man Stella married turned out to be a gay dude looking for a green card.
The saddest part of all this is some women take these movies seriously and make life choices based on them.
Eat, Pray, Love sounds like a film I should watch. I have sat through quite a few NPC-films, not so much for the exclusive sake of entertainment but to gain a better understanding of the kind of propaganda the general public is exposed to. In this light, Pretty Woman is an absolutely fascinating film. You can probably take any box-office hit, watch it with a critical eye, and distill main propaganda topics the elites wanted to push at that time. Films targeting women often push radical feminist ideas, which lead to undermining the fabric of society. Men are not immune either. In films targetting men aggressively push transhumanist themes are commonly pushed, and in a very aggressive manner. In Terminator 2 you get told that there will be a future in which humans and robots have to collaborate, and that there is a sentient artificial intelligence. Decades later that is one of the biggest topics the elites are pushing, with their general AI bullshit.
I find the hypothesis that the elites engage in “predictive programming” highly plausible, i.e. presenting technologies and concepts in works of fiction before they enter the mainstream. You can find a lot of examples, too many for it to be coincidence. Partly this is being done deliberately, and sometimes it just so happens that Hollywood writers attend spirit-cooking sessions run by Marina Abramović, in which they can hobnob with the satanic elite.
> The female protagonist is a cheap street hooker with comically bad manners whereas the male protagonist is an ultra-Chad, an exceptionally good-looking and wealthy business owner who closes billion-dollar deals.
John Carter (Postcards from Barsoom) nailed this formula:
“For men, the play-by-play events of a competitive environment are high drama. Not so for women. Women, as the old saying goes, don’t care about the struggles of the competitors: they just wait at the finish line and fuck the winner. The drama women tend to care about focuses more on the heroine’s struggle to distinguish winners from posers, to decide which winner she wants, and/or to stand out from the other girls so she can catch the eye of the winner. “I’m so torn … do I go with the musky barbarian warlord werewolf rapist, or the the aloof immortal billionaire vampire knight?” the heroine asks herself for three hundred pages. How he became an immortal billionaire vampire knight in the first place is of much less interest than whether or not he’s really interested in her.”
I think he also pointed out the “heroine” – to use the word loosely – must be a boring plain Jane, because her whole purpose is to serve as a self-insert for the female audience.
> Being introduced to the world of the wealthy, the female protagonist start enjoying herself quite a bit.
Shocking.
> He also buys her heaps of designer clothes and even flies to a different city on a private jet so that they can attend an opera premiere. Long story short, after a week-long emotional roller-coaster, the street hooker finds her Mr Right and they presumably live heavily ever after.
Of course it hardly needs explaining why this is a recipe for disaster. I’ve read stories where even a “girlfriend experience” hooker, after being paid up front, refused to hold up her end because the guy wanted to “romance” her instead of just doing the deed, and so revealed himself as more cringey than she could stand.
Also:
https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGbMqO28WcAAvxGh.png
1. How is Hooters not on that list?
2. I’m supposed to believe that Western women are going to turn down a trip to Cheesecake Factory?
3. Is “dating” even a thing for anyone but the most blue-pilled at this point?
> By being herself she endeared herself to him, and her low-class behavior only appealed to his protector instinct or amuses him.
There’s also the Pygmalion complex, where a man’s ego gets an extra boost from “teaching her everything she knows” in addition to the sex. Maybe he feels he’s creating/building something (i.e. a high-class woman out of a street hooker).
I just ran across this:
https://billionairepsycho.substack.com/p/pygmalion-and-the-anime-girl
“[Pygmalion’s/My Fair Lady’s] plot structure was later adapted into the 1990 romantic comedy, “Pretty Woman.” But here, what began as a male fantasy (escaping from reality by designing the Platonic ideal of femininity) was subverted into a female fantasy. After an emotional breakup, a disillusioned Gigachad billionaire hooks up with a tacky, forgettable roastie. He gravitates towards this diseased streetwalker, and hires her to give him “the Girlfriend Experience”.”
“Depressed Gigachad billionaire had planned to retire and sell off his company. But now, inspired by this clumsy prostitute, the talented corporate raider asserts control over his expansive business empire, culminating in a scene where Gigachad billionaire violently assaults, humiliates, and fires a subversive executive.”
“The excited prostitute watches this sadism, gasping and panting. Her hair is tousled, disheveled. She is frightened, and fiercely aroused. Dripping wet.
Afterwards, the sly roastie rejects her dream man, and the film ends with the billionaire begging for her forgiveness, pedestalizing the whore.”