Pretty Woman [Media Notes 179]

I’ve seen Pretty Woman (1990) at least three times, once when it came out, once before on streaming, and just last night. I like it. It’s a nice romantic comedy and something of a fairy tale, but that’s OK, I suppose.

It is very much a story of its time. Richard Gere plays a corporate raider, Edward Lewis, but not one so ruthless as Michael Douglas playing Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987). Julia Roberts plays a Hollywood street walker, Vivian Wood. Lewis picks her up, because he knows where his hotel is, but also because she seems to know something about the car he’s borrowed from his lawyer (a Lotus), and ends up engaging her for the week. She accompanies him to several business meetings, but also to a night at the opera. They fall in love, of course; he relents on the deal he’s been chasing; and she goes back to New York with him where, we are to presume, they live happily ever after.

The world, of course, is not like that, not quite. And I doubt that anyone over twenty who saw the movie believes that. But it’s a nice alternative to the  self-glorifying  Gordon Gekko. I can even believe that Gordon Gekko would have liked it, or if not Gekko himself, perhaps his understudy, Bud Fox (played by Charlie Sheen). Corporate raider types are not long on self-knowledge, no more than today’s Silicon Valley tech bros, and so are as vulnerable to fairly tales as to tales of Viking raiders.

And perhaps that’s why I like it. It’s as though Gordon Gekko is so reprehensible in his thralldom to Homo economicus that Hollywood just had to show us an antidote. It picked a perennial, the Hooker with a Heart of Gold, disguised, in this case, as a hooker who knows how to drive a stick shift and carries a rainbow assortment of condoms in her thigh high boots. Which is to say, the film acknowledges that we need some kind of Homo ludens alternative, even one that includes a bunch of rich folks stomping divots on a polo field, not to mention that Mr. Lewis betrays his soulfulness by noodling on the lounge piano in the wee hours of the morning.

The movie resonated with the public and made Julia Roberts a star. From the Wikipedia entry:

Pretty Woman received mixed reviews from critics upon release, but widespread praise was directed towards Roberts' performance and her chemistry with Gere. It had the highest number of ticket sales in the US ever for a romantic comedy, with Box Office Mojo listing it as the number-one romantic comedy by the highest estimated domestic tickets sold at 42,176,400, slightly ahead of My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) at 41,419,500 tickets. The film grossed US$463.4 million worldwide and at the time of its release, was the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time worldwide, behind only E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ($701 million at the time), Star Wars ($530 million at the time), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ($474 million at the time), and Jaws ($470 million at the time). It was also the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time (surpassing Rain Man) until it was surpassed by Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991, but remained the highest-grossing R-rated film released by Walt Disney Studios (surpassing Cocktail), holding the record for 34 years until Marvel Studios' Deadpool & Wolverine surpassed it in 2024.

From critic snippets Wikipedia:

Pretty Woman received mixed reviews from critics, with positive reviews praising the stars' chemistry and the dialogue. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 64% based on 78 reviews. The website's critical consensus states, "Pretty Woman may be a yuppie fantasy, but the film's slick comedy, soundtrack, and casting can overcome misgivings." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 51 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.

The film's detractors criticized the overuse of the "hooker with a heart of gold" trope.[14] Others opined that the film sugarcoats the realities of sex work. [...]

Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "D," saying it "starts out as a neo-Pygmalion comedy" and becomes a "plastic screwball soap opera", with the "kinds of characters who exist nowhere but in the minds of callowly manipulative Hollywood screenwriters". Gleiberman conceded that with the film's "tough-hooker heroine, it can work as a feminist version of an upscale princess fantasy." [...] 

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave a positive review, praising how the film is about "a particularly romantic kind of love, the sort you hardly see in the movies these days". He added it "protects its fragile love story in the midst of cynicism and compromise. The performances are critical for that purpose. Gere plays new notes here; his swagger is gone, and he's more tentative, proper, even shy. Roberts does an interesting thing; she gives her character an irrepressibly bouncy sense of humor and then lets her spend the movie trying to repress it. [...]

The New York Times' Janet Maslin wrote: "Despite this quintessentially late 80's outlook, and despite a covetousness and underlying misogyny [...] 'Pretty Woman' manages to be giddy, lighthearted escapism much of the time. [...]

Carina Chocano of The New York Times said the movie "wasn't a love story, it was a money story. Its logic depended on a disconnect between character and narrative, between image and meaning, between money and value, and that made it not cluelessly traditional but thoroughly postmodern." In a 2019 interview, Roberts expressed uncertainty over whether the film could be made today due to its controversial premise, commenting, "So many things you could poke a hole in, but I don't think it takes away from people being able to enjoy it".

I’m with Ebert on this one.

Ebert Defends Literature on the uncharted seas

Bumping this seven year old post to the top of the queue. The issues are still unresolved. Regert Ebert died on April 4, 2013.

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I’ve recently become interested in Roger Ebert. As I’ve indicated earlier, he’s long served me as a reference critic, someone I’d consult on movies that interest me. My current interest extends beyond that.

The nature of my current interest is not entirely clear to me. Oh, sure, Ebert is one of the most prominent intellectuals in America these days, and is readily available on the web. As is Stanley Fish. That Stanley Fish is an intellectual is obvious on the face of it. But Roger Ebert, he’s a film critic, no? Yes, and we don’t normally think of film critics as intellectuals. But there are film critics and there are film critics.

And Roger Ebert is more than a film critic. Perhaps he’s always been more than a film critic. But it’s his writing in his blog that interests me, and that’s what’s prompted me to think of him as an intellectual. Yes, I find it just a bit strange. But I’m going with it. He’s not the type of intellectual Stanley Fish is, but an intellectual he is. And, for what it’s worth, he’s more widely known.

And that’s worth something. Just what, I don’t know. But something, and that something is part of my attraction.

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You may have heard that Ebert’s been kicking up a fuss about video games. He doesn’t think that they can ever be art. This little tempest in a teapot led him to Tweet and then blog a simple question: “Which of these would you value more? A great video game. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.” The answer came back 13,823 to 8,088 in favor of video games.

And so Ebert posted that result to his blog, while also admitting that there was nothing remotely scientific about his procedure. It’s just an informal question, with an answer that didn’t please him. And he launches into a defense and justification of literature without, however, saying anything more against video games. For the moment, that’s done and gone.

Ebert tells us that he first read Huckleberry Finn when he was seven – I believe I was a bit older than that when my father read it to me. He quotes Hemingway’s line about all modern American literature descending from Huck Finn. [He illustrates his post with scans from a Huck Finn comic.] And he quotes his favorite passage from the book: “Read it over a couple of times and then read it aloud to someone you like. It's music. Can you imagine a more evocative description of a thunderstorm?”

Here’s the nub of his concern:

I believe reading good books is the best way we can civilize ourselves even in the absence of all other opportunities. If a child can read, has access to books and the freedom to read them, that child need not be "disadvantaged" for long. What concerns me is that reading competence and experience has been falling steadily in America. Most of the adults I meet are not very "well read." My parents were.

And then:

Beyond a certain point, we take our education into our own hands. We discover what excites us intellectually, and seek it out. The world of books allows us to walk in the shoes of people who lived in other times and other places, who belonged to other races and religions. It allows us to become more humane and open-minded. In exposing us to prose of the highest level, it encourages us to think in a way that isn't merely "better" but is more fanciful, creative, poetic and expressive. It makes us less boring, and less bore-able.

This is all quite traditional. It could have been written fifty or sixty years ago. No doubt it was, by other intellectuals, in other words.

It’s as though the intellectual ferment that ripped through English departments in the 70s and 80s, ferment in which Stanley Fish was a major rabble rouser, it’s as though that had passed Ebert by. Ebert is writing as a traditional humanist in a world where the academic stewards of humanism have all but abandoned the tradition. The promising new ideas of the 70s and 80s have, indeed, changed the field of discourse. But the way forward is no longer apparent. We’re in a swamp, we have no map, nor compass, and so we don’t know where we’re going.

Yet Ebert defends reading in traditional terms as though Fish’s swamp didn’t exist. What’s particularly interesting is that it’s literature that Ebert is defending, not film. Literature is very important to him, but it’s film that he’s put at the center of his intellectual life. I don’t know what terms he’d use to defend film, though one could certainly say that it allows us to walk in the shoes of people who lived in other times and other places, who belonged to other races and religions. It allows us to become more humane and open-minded. In exposing us to prose of the highest level, it encourages us to think in a way that isn't merely "better" but is more fanciful, creative, poetic and expressive. It makes us less boring, and less bore-able.

Such words, once again, ignore Fish’s swamp. But they’re apt. Moreover it seems to me that we’re living in a world where film has the kind of importance that novels had in the 19th century. In fact, film may be less important now than it was 30, 50, 80 years ago. And video games, I’m told the video game market is bigger than the film market. Do video games allow us to walk in the shoes of people who lived in other times . . . . ? I don’t know, I don’t play them.

So, in consequence of an argument that video games aren’t and will never be art, Roger Ebert, a film critic, mounts a traditional defense of literature. That’s were we are today. That’s our uncharted sea.

Roger Ebert: “I’m not a miracle.

And neither are the Chilean miners.” Thus Ebert opens a recent entry to his journal. Ebert continues:

We are all alive today for perfectly rational reasons. Yet there is a common compulsion to describe unlikely outcomes as miraculous -- if they are happy, of course. If sad, they are simply reported on, or among the believing described as "the will of God." Some disasters are so horrible they don't qualify as the will of God, but as the work of Satan playing for the other team.

After a bit of this and that he returns to the miners:

How much better to describe the rescue as the result of the fortitude of the miners and the skill of the good-willed people on the surface who reached them in what was, after all, a very short time. How much better to say the outcome in Chile was the result of intelligence and good will. But there seems to be a narrative in these matters that requires the citing of divinity.

From there Ebert brings it home by discussing his medical emergency when his carotid artery burst just as he was leaving the hospital after successful surgery. Since he was still in the hospital, surrounded by his medical team wishing him well, that team switched into rescue mode and saved his life. Improbable? Yes. But not a miracle.

Then: a discussion of the status of miracles in Roman Catholic theology. On Ebert’s word that theology is quite subtle about the miraculous. Most things casually asserted to be miracles are not so in the conspectus of Roman Catholicism, certainly not the rescue of the Chilean miners nor the saving of Ebert’s life. And, nearing the end – where he declares that he doesn’t himself believe in miracles (he’s a lapsed Catholic) – he mentions evolution and then darts away from it:

That puts me in mind of all the arguments against evolution that depend on a complete ignorance of the definition of a scientific theory. But let's not go there today. Returning to the subject, what has all this to do with my carotid artery, or the Chilean miners? I argue that few people have a good idea of what a miracle actually is. It's not like entering the lottery. God doesn't perform miracles for a few lucky winners. They take place for one purpose only, and that is not to spare lives, cure disease, heal limbs or prevent a bus from falling off a mountain. Their only purpose is to demonstrate the glory of God.

But let’s return to evolution. One implication of Ebert’s argument, it seems to me, is that the habit of mind that treats the rescue of the Chilean miners, and so many other things, as being miraculous, belongs to the same discourse that dismisses evolution and that dismisses evidence for anthropogenic climate change. It’s one thing to dismiss science in cases where the causal mechanisms are obscure and incompletely understood and where the data is difficult to gather and interpret. That’s not the case with the Chilean miners. But if routine habits of mind deny rational explanations in cases where such explanations are ready at hand, then obscure and difficult phenomena, like evolution and climate change, they haven’t got a chance.

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That’s one thing, then, Ebert’s article itself. But it’s posted to the blog and, as such, garners comments. Ebert’s posts routinely attracted many comments, many of them long and thoughtful. Since his blog is monitored, and Ebert himself does the monitoring, he reads all the comments. People know this.

This post attracted an extraordinary comment, from one Eric Schmidt. He identifies himself as a grad student, gay, and in long-term conflict about Catholicism. At the time he read Ebert’s post he was in an atheist phase:

And yet, reading your post at 7:25 a.m., I felt the overwhelming, almost out-of-body urge to go to Catholic mass and confession. My parents, who were staying with me over the weekend, must have seemed rather startled when I jumped out of bed and drove hastily to a church I knew would have a mass this early with opportunities for confession. ...

And in the confessional I poured out -- admittedly with some stuttering and prodding -- all my hurt, my agony, my anger at God, my anger at my fragmented adolescence, my anger for those years of my life when it seemed God was looking down and laughing. I didn't cry or beat my breast. That's the Hollywood version of catharsis. Mine wasn't a majestic confession, just a true one. And I feel back on a path toward God now.

There is, of course, a bit more, but you’ll have to read it at Ebert’s joint. Here’s part of Ebert’s response: “. . . you take seriously what I take seriously, but it draws us in opposite directions.”

There’s an old term for it: Concordia discors.

Ebert on Burden

I’ve been reading around in Roger Ebert’s blog, which is most interesting. Most interesting indeed.

I’ve always thought about him as a movie critic, one I first encountered on TV, where he was teamed up with the late Gene Siskel. For the past several years I’ve used him as a ‘reference’ critic, a critic I’d consult on any movie that interested me. It’s not that I expected Ebert to get it just right, but only that I expected to learn from whatever he said.

As I read around in his blog, I’m learning that there’s more to Roger Ebert than a film critic. Just how much more, I don’t know. Nor, I suspect, does Ebert himself.

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I’ve just finished a post on Chris Burden, a very impressive essay indeed. Who, you ask, is Chris Burden? Fair question.

Though I may well have heard of Burden back in the mid-1970s when he was doing his best-known work, I don’t having known about him. As far as I can tell, I first heard about him a few years ago in an informal lecture by Eric Fischl, who was lamenting and protesting the sorry state of contemporary art. Fischl used Burden as a case in point, talking about a ‘piece’ in which Burden had a friend shoot him in the arm with a 22 caliber rifle (Normal Mailer referenced this piece in his superb essay on graffiti).

Which is to say that Burden is / was a performance / conceptual artist (as far as I know, he no longer does such things). And performance / conceptual art never much interested me.

Ebert’s post is about a piece Burden performed in Chicago in 1975. As Ebert says, quoting the news report that he filed at the time:

At 8:20 p.m., the body artist Chris Burden entered a large gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art, did not look at his audience of 400 or more, set a clock for midnight, and lay down on the floor beneath a large sheet of plate glass that was angled against the wall. So commenced on April 11 a deceptively simple piece of conceptual art that would eventually involve the imaginations of thousands of Chicagoans who had never heard of Burden, would cause the museum to fear for Burden's life, and would end at a time and in a way that Burden did not remotely anticipate.

That’s after Ebert had introduced his subject and compared Burden to Franz Kafka’s The Hunger Artist. Ebert continues quoting from his old news report while interrupting it every few paragraphs to insert new comments on Burden and whatever it is that he’s been doing. So we have Ebert, in the present (well, October of 2009) in dialogue with the Ebert of 1975, both contemplating Chris Burden.

Ebert’s illustrated his post with old photos of several of Burden’s performances:

In gathering art and video for this entry, I discovered something that rather surprised me. Burden had made no particular effort to photograph or film his performance pieces. The photos that exist are of low quality, suggesting snapshots by casual visitors. Some of the video was done by news organizations. When David Blaine is frozen into a block of ice or buried alive, he is always visible, and takes care that his performance is documented. For Chris Burden, I believe, the experience is what remains. His experience, and ours. Continuing as an artist, he eventually ended his body art, and became a teacher. For some years he has refused to discuss that period in his life.

That ends Ebert’s post.

It is well worth reading. Of course he tells how Burden’s 1975 Chicago piece ends, as well as discussing several other Burden performances. He makes a compelling case for those performances.

Not that he attempts to argue that they are great art, or even art. He doesn’t. But he makes some kind of case for – or is it merely around? – those performances. I’m tempted to say that the universe prompted Burden to do those performances so that Ebert could write this essay.

What’s tricky is whether or not Ebert’s post depends on the fact that Burden actually did those things. Sure, he wouldn’t have been assigned the story back in 1975 if Burden weren’t really doing such things. But the way Ebert handles his current piece, evoking Kafka (a writer of fiction), inserting comments on it, well somehow he manages to sublime those past events into his current meditation.

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In another post Ebert tells us that his mother had wanted him to become a priest. Well, he’s edging up on that zone in this post. And, I gather, he’s a secular man these days.

Ah, the mystery, the mystery!

That Ebert, he’s a comer. Bears watching.

Chaz Loves Roger

They are husband and wife. She is Chaz Ebert. He is Roger Ebert. He is, as I’m sure you know, a well-known film critic.

How do I know that Chaz loves Roger? That they are husband and wife is indicative, but not definitive. Such relationships are complex, not to be taken for granted. Nor at face value.

I do not have any inside information. What I know about their relationship, I know from a long profile of Ebert that appeared in Esquire Magazine earlier this year. It was written by Chris Jones, who knows how to tell a story.

The story he told was not the Chaz and Roger story. It was the Roger story. Not all of it, but just a report on the current situation. And Ebert’s current situation is one that deeply involves his wife.

As you know, Ebert has had a bad battle with cancer these past few years. The spirit’s won. His mind is as sharp as ever. His pen as productive, perhaps more so now that he’s gone on the web with his blog. He is happy, and conducts his life with sure and optimistic purpose.

But his body has taken a beating. He lost his lower jaw and, in consequence, cannot eat or drink. The liquid diet has trimmed him down. Nor can he talk. He’s got a repertoire of hand gestures. He scribbles notes on a pad and on post-it notes. He can ‘speak’ through a device that synthesizes speech from his written text.

He’s become frail beyond his years and cannot climb stairs. Nor can he watch three or four films at one screening. He requires a live-in nurse. Chaz accompanies him everywhere.

Jones tells us all this, and in some detail, while also recounting the story of his his relationship to his beloved compeer, interlocutor, colleague, and friend, the late Gene Siskel. These accounts are interwoven with reporting on Ebert’s activities over two days or so: a film screening; a reception for the new owners of the Chicago Sun-Times, Ebert’s journalistic home; dinner out with a friend; and a walk in the park.

Some time during these two days Chaz decides that Roger must take a walk  around a pond in nearby Lincoln Park, as they’ve done many times in the past few years:

At the start of their walk around the pond, Ebert worries about falling on a small gravel incline. Chaz lets go of his hand. "You can do it," she says, and she claps when Ebert makes it to the top on his own. Later, she climbs on top of a big circular stone. "I'm going to give my prayer to the universe," she says, and then she gives a sun salutation north, south, east, and west. Ebert raises his arms into the sky behind her.

It was reading that paragraph that the thought slash feeling hit me: Chaz loves Roger. It came to me just like that, unbidden, almost a little voice in my head: “she loves him.”

Read the paragraph again. Think about it. Here’s the first half:

At the start of their walk around the pond, Ebert worries about falling on a small gravel incline. Chaz lets go of his hand. "You can do it," she says, and she claps when Ebert makes it to the top on his own.

It is, I suppose, a bit like the encouragement a physical therapist might give. But the therapist is paid to provide a service, and coaching is part of the service. It’s also like a child encouraging a young learning to walk. Roger is not a young child and Chaz is not his mother. Yet, there’s a reason some spouses refer to one another with terms of parental endearment and address, Mama, Daddy, or perhaps Mother, Father.

It’s the second half of the paragraph that got me:

Later, she climbs on top of a big circular stone. "I'm going to give my prayer to the universe," she says, and then she gives a sun salutation north, south, east, and west. Ebert raises his arms into the sky behind her.

What an extraordinary gesture. At once intimate and open to the universe. And they do it together. They’re in it together. The Universe.

Yes, Chaz loves Roger.

And Roger loves Chaz.