When someone finally did come along and pursue me the way I thought I wanted to be pursued—insistently, unapologetically—I was surprised to find that instead of feeling romantic, it felt uncomfortable.
Patrick, another member of our college honors program, was the first person to tell me I was beautiful. He’d call late at night to tell me he was thinking of me. If I didn’t answer, he’d message my suite mate to see if I was home. When I went out, he’d ask who I’d been with and where we’d gone. “Do you love me?” he would say. All I could muster was an awkward “I’m not sure.”
I wanted to be loved so badly at eighteen that, even though I didn’t love Patrick, I felt that I should be grateful for his interest—even as he told me I should wear more vintage clothing, or that he wished I’d given him a more thoughtful Christmas gift, because he had not noticed all the flags on the pages of the e. e. cummings book, the best poems, all marked for him.
But still, I thought he understood something about me that the others had missed; he’d chosen me.
And I recognized myself in Patrick—I was familiar with the sting of unrequited love. So I tried, for weeks, to reconsider my lack of interest. Then one night he called to ask again: Did I love him? If not, he said, he didn’t want to live. He wouldn’t get off the phone. He demanded an answer. He threatened to hurt himself.
It was the first time I really got it: He wasn’t being sweet, he was manipulative. He was using my own romanticism—my fear of being unloved—against me.
• • •
In The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall argues that humans are addicted to stories, citing our dreams as evidence that we are always, even in sleep, telling ourselves stories.6 “The storytelling mind is a crucial evolutionary adaptation,” he writes. “It allows us to experience our lives as coherent, orderly, and meaningful.”7 Intuitively, this makes sense to me.
The book argues that over the long term, narrative has the power to shape us into deeply moral creatures—with effects that transcend religious or political dogma. In other words, fiction makes us better. I want this to be true. I want to believe there is a great moral arc in human history and that our stories are ever pointing us toward our best selves. But when I look closely at our love stories, I’m skeptical.
Gottschall acknowledges that happy endings “make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is.”8 And on this we agree completely. He believes the benefit of this lie is that it motivates us to trust that good behavior will be rewarded—and to act accordingly. But aren’t there also some consequences that come with this lie? Isn’t there something problematic about suggesting that romantic love is a just force—that those who are loved are loved because they, above others, deserve to be?
If we believe stories motivate us to be more like protagonists so that we can earn their same rewards (love, wealth, social promotion, political allies), then we must also believe that protagonists are mostly good. The problem with this idea is that it fails to account for the many stories that offer love as a reward for some rather unimpressive personality traits and behaviors.
Take Cinderella: She doesn’t have much in the way of personality, but we identify with her essential decency, which is made sharper when contrasted with her wicked stepsisters. Gottschall might say that her happy ending is one that motivates us to behave more morally, to be more like Cinderella and less like her stepsisters. Beyond, perhaps, kindness to animals, which we could all benefit from, Cinderella’s other qualities fall somewhere on a sliding scale from largely unremarkable (an aptitude for singing and dancing) to wholly undesirable (passivity in the face of abuse). Her stepsisters, on the other hand, are unkind and selfish, but they also possess a few qualities I’d encourage in my daughter, if I had one. They are assertive and ambitious and incredibly confident.
Linda Holmes at NPR argues that the “reed-thin story” of Cinderella is why different versions pad the narrative with talking mice or musical numbers, things that “tell you what kind of Cinderella this is and whom it’s made for.”9 She calls the story “a kind of cultural tofu that takes on the flavor of whatever you’re mixing with it.” If we think about it this way, it’s easy to see why Disney’s 1950 animation celebrates a mild, seen-but-not-heard, Miss America style of femininity. And it would be easy to dismiss this version of the story as a relic of the past if it hadn’t been re-created for contemporary audiences in 2015—or if so many other contemporary narratives, from Bridget Jones’s Diary to Taylor Swift videos, didn’t contain some version of this story: that of the good girl underappreciated until she is loved by a powerful man.
“Tofu” seems an apt descriptor for the 2015 movie. Its most remarkable quality is its inoffensiveness, best described by the critic Norman Wilner: “For a movie that has no reason to exist, Disney’s Cinderella is pleasant enough.” What it lacks in depth and narrative, it compensates for in style: Visually, the movie is flawless. Everything—from the prince’s codpiece to the fairy godmother’s cartoonishly giant white teeth—was styled for innocuous aesthetic perfection. (Rumor has it that parts of the prince had to be “wrangled” to ensure his charm was his most distinguishing feature.) Of course, the movie did have a reason to exist: the more than $500 million it made at the box office.
I think of all the five-year-old girls who now own this movie and watch it again and again and again. Yes, it is largely inoffensive. But Cinderella’s feminine goodness doesn’t seem all that worth celebrating. At five and ten and then fifteen, I was a “good girl” because my parents and community encouraged goodness, which for me meant following rules, being nice, pleasing adults, and generally putting others’ needs before my own. But it wasn’t just my parents or teachers who were invested in my goodness; it was—and still is—the culture at large.
When we talk about being a good girl, we usually mean enacting a culturally sanctioned version of girlhood. Being good isn’t the same as being kind or generous. Too often goodness, with all its moral connotation, is depicted as pleasing people in positions of power: adults, teachers, and yes, boys—especially boys with high social status. In my twenties, being a good person and being a good girlfriend looked pretty similar. A good person didn’t overassert her own needs; she wasn’t loud or demanding; she didn’t ask for anything that wasn’t offered. A good girlfriend wasn’t needy, but she was available; she didn’t nag, but she accepted criticism about her shortcomings; she was, above all, low-maintenance. I didn’t learn this behavior from previous relationships—I learned it from every story where the good girl gets the guy.
Even if it is true that, given a long enough time scale, storytelling has a positive impact on our moral development, it’s also true that the individual narratives we consume today are shaped by and produced for the culture we live in. Rather than encouraging truly pro-social behavior, it seems that many of our Cinderella narratives actually function to maintain the status quo by reinforcing patriarchal norms.
Gottschall says that the stories we encounter in TV shows and fairy tales provide us with a shared set of norms and values. And it’s true. I’m just not sure these values are making us better.
• • •
“You deserve to be happy,” my dad said on the phone one day after I finally confessed that my relationship with Kevin had somehow stopped working. I was twenty-nine, and I felt totally stuck.
“No, I don’t!” I snapped back.
What I was trying and failing to say was not that I thought I should be unhappy, but that I did not believe deservingness was part of the equation when it comes to love.
I wanted to tell my dad that I already had so many things I did not deserve: good health and a comfortable home, a rewarding job and cold beer. By global standards, my life was full with luxury—how could I also demand happiness in love? But in the moment, worried that my desire for a better relationship was born solely of a sense of entitlement, I couldn’t articulate any of that.
I think what my dad was trying to say wa
s that he would support whatever I did to seek my own happiness. But the language of deservingness is hard to avoid. We use it all the time—especially with love. When a friend ends a relationship with a jerk, I inevitably use the mantra of well-meaning friends everywhere: You deserve better.
It took me a while to realize that part of what bothered me about my dad’s focus on what I deserved was the sense that equating love with deservingness is part of the same ideology that equates deservingness with feminine goodness. And I just didn’t want to be loved for my goodness anymore. I didn’t even really want to be good.
• • •
When I finally sat down to rewatch Pretty Woman for the first time as an adult, I was not expecting to love it. I was expecting to find that, as with Cheez Whiz and the Grease sound track, some things become impossible to enjoy once you start thinking critically about them. But instead I found myself telling everyone I knew they should probably watch it again, too, because it’s actually kind of great.
Admittedly, some part of my pleasure was purely nostalgic. From the moment Richard Gere got into the Lotus Esprit and I heard the sweet opening beats of “King of Wishful Thinking,” I felt a giddy, almost reflexive rush of joy. But maybe what surprised me the most was that I didn’t have to turn off my critical brain to enjoy the movie—it really is a pretty good movie, and in ways that I couldn’t have understood as a kid.
For one, relatively unknown Julia Roberts is delightful. It’s totally unsurprising that this movie made her a star and earned her an Oscar nomination. She is goofy and sweet, unguarded and utterly charming. You can’t help but root for Vivian.
The movie is a Cinderella story in obvious ways: Gere is the prince and Roberts is the persecuted heroine and Hector Elizondo is the hotel-managing fairy godmother whose crash course in table manners gives Vivian access to Edward’s world. But it’s also self-aware. When Vivian confesses that she might be falling for Edward, Kit, her best friend and sex work mentor, points out that the only one “it really works out for” is “Cinderfuckinrella.” The movie seems to understand the ways in which its own premise is absurd—of course it is! And yet it never quite feels unbelievable, even with its super-cheesy, totally unironic fairy-tale ending. It helps that the two leads have such convincing chemistry—and that their intimacy feels genuinely earned after long days and nights of conversation in Edward’s penthouse suite. So when Vivian inspires Edward to be a less terrible human (because he is, by all honest measures, a cold, money-obsessed workaholic), it feels legitimate.
I think part of what I’m drawn to about Vivian is that she isn’t good in conventional ways. She has a robust sexuality and isn’t ashamed of it—or shamed for it. She isn’t polite or well mannered. She’s tough and resourceful and she doesn’t care what people in positions of power think of her . . . at least not at the start of the movie. I am, to my surprise, somewhat cheered thinking of my ten-year-old self loving this character.
For the film’s twenty-fifth anniversary, several media outlets covered its surprising creation story. It turns out that the script was originally titled 3,000 (the sum Edward pays Vivian for a week of her time), and was conceived, according to Kate Erbland, writing in Vanity Fair, as “a dark fable about a financially destroyed America and the perils of showing the good life to people who had never experienced it before.”10 In this version, Vivian is a drug addict and Edward is a john actively looking for a hooker (rather than inadvertently picking one up when he gets lost in the wrong neighborhood). Needless to say, the two do not have a happy ending. Only when the film was given to the director Garry Marshall—and Gere and Roberts were cast as the leads—did it become the much beloved, much lighter tale of unlikely romance we have today.
But the dark side of the film wasn’t completely written out. Though it sometimes feels like fantasy, the movie never forgets that Vivian is a prostitute. This is evident not only in her unrefined mannerisms, which fade as her wardrobe improves (though this isn’t all that unlikely—her job is, in part, to become who her clients want her to be), but also in the way Jason Alexander’s creepy Stuckey reminds Vivian again and again that she is a woman society deems unworthy of respect. Toward the end of the movie, Stuckey tries to rape Vivian. The disturbing moment would feel out of place in almost any other romantic comedy, but here it feels like a PSA for social justice: Consent matters, even for sex workers.
In the movie’s romantic climax, as Edward stops the limo to buy flowers, we overhear Kit interviewing a new roommate: “So you got a lot of stuff?” she asks a fellow prostitute. “No,” the new girl says casually, “Carlos burned most of my stuff when I said I was moving out.” Even as Vivian gets the happy ending she dreamed of, violence continues on Hollywood Boulevard. As Darrin Franich smartly observed in an article for Entertainment Weekly, Stuckey and Kit function as the “real life versions” of a corrupt businessman and a jaded prostitute, freeing up Gere and Roberts to play the “fantasy versions” of these characters—people who are miraculously uncorrupted by the dark worlds they represent.11
“You and I are such similar creatures, Vivian,” Edward remarks halfway through the movie. “We both screw people for money.” Maybe it’s because of this—the way they both inhabit such a moral gray area—that it’s so easy to believe in their compatibility and the promise of mutual reform.
Despite everything it does well, there are still problems with the movie—lots of them.
Roberts was twenty-two when the movie was filmed and Gere was forty. One reason this works is that Vivian has no real ambitions or life plans—she can get her GED and still accompany Edward to polo matches. And she’s okay with the fairly paternalistic nature of his affection. I thought nothing of this as a kid, but now it feels weird. We want more ambition and independence from our heroines these days.
It’s hard to watch the movie without noticing that it’s obsessed with money. If you have it, you matter in the world of Pretty Woman. And if you do not, you don’t. It’s money—and the things money can buy—that ultimately redeems Vivian and makes her a suitable mate for Edward. That famous shopping scene, which is still enormously entertaining to watch, is shameless in its glorification of consumerism. When Edward promises the store manager that he intends to spend “obscene” amounts of money, it occurred to me that he probably spent more on Vivian’s clothes that week (including a cocktail dress and an evening gown) than he did on her company. Wouldn’t Vivian realize this at some point while she’s shopping? I can’t help but wonder if, in the era of occupying Wall Street, a truly likable protagonist could ever get away with such extravagance.
When I was at my mom’s house recently, my sister pointed to a photo of her and a friend playing dress-up. “That was my Pretty Woman outfit.” She laughed. In the photo she’s probably seven or eight, wearing a short dress and knee-high black patent-leather boots that our aunt had worn in high school band.
When we worry about how popular culture influences kids’ lives, we talk about things like this. What does it mean that a seven-year-old is stomping around the playroom dressed like a prostitute? In Casey’s case, it meant nothing in particular. She didn’t aspire to life on the streets—or even understand, for years, that sex was a major part of the movie. “When she pulled those condoms out of her boot, I always thought they were lollipops,” she confessed.
Watching Pretty Woman doesn’t make girls into sex workers, but watching ten or twenty or fifty movies in which being loved is the thing that ultimately confirms a woman’s value does have a cumulative effect. At least it did for me. All my life I’d believed that being good would make me desirable. It took a long time to realize that goodness and desirability didn’t have a 1:1 correlation.
Vivian may not be good in the conventional sense of the word, but she is available, low-maintenance, quick to meet others’ needs. At one point Edward accuses Vivian of hiding drugs behind her back. But he pries her hand open to discover that she’s actually concealing a travel-size container of dental floss—not o
nly is our protagonist free from addiction (the moral scourge of the D.A.R.E. era), she’s adorably committed to oral hygiene. She’s also a willing emotional caretaker to Edward; she makes him kinder and more fulfilled. Kit, on the other hand, is a drug addict who seems embarrassingly coarse next to Vivian by the end of the movie. Like that of the stepsisters, Kit’s apparent undeservingness is what makes Vivian, who over the course of a week has shed any hints of her life on the street, seem even more worthy.
If our narratives of romantic love did in fact encourage us to be more moral—and thus better community members and citizens—then I might be able to forgive them for also implying that those who are not in a committed romantic relationship are somehow undeserving or unworthy of love.
But Pretty Woman perfectly illustrates how a heroine’s deservingness is often tied to cultural values at a given time and place. For Vivian this means being beautiful and spirited and unexpectedly wholesome, but also having no agenda more demanding than enabling Edward to become his best self. Significantly, she rejects Edward’s offer of a condo and an allowance toward the end of the movie: “I want more,” she says. “I want the fairy tale.”
At the polo match, Vivian meets the movie’s own wicked sisters, Gwen and Gretchen, who, Edward says, “have made an art form of marrying well.” Their explicit interest in status, as opposed to Vivian’s pursuit of true love, makes them unlikable. It’s a strange message: If you’re looking for money, you don’t deserve love; but if you’re looking for love, you do deserve money.
How to Fall in Love with Anyone Page 10
