I was afraid to hug you . . . I might wrinkle you. – Kit DeLuca to Vivian Ward a.k.a. Julie Roberts a.k.a. Pretty Woman

One of the disadvantages of raising oneself up on a steady diet of books and stories is suffering a tendency to want life to fit the form of a plotted story, with its exposition, rising action, climax, and denouement. Things don’t work that way, obviously, but an appetite for the sentimental stirrings of a well-told story doesn’t respect the way things work. It wants satiation, and doesn’t find it, which then results in the person who it afflicts looking far and wide for symbolism in the sound of the truck idling outside and the way the woman sweeps her hair out of her eyes.
I am that person. Grand narratives are always lying underneath the quotidian everyday goings on around me. I am not charmed so much as delusional, which isn’t so bad when you get used to it, and most of us do. I have learned to guard against overreaching when I thank someone for some small gesture, because effusiveness seems so fitting but bears little aside from awkwardness and perplexity. Someone invites me out for a beer, and I get the sense that great things are potentially afoot – the stirring strings of a crescendo at scene’s end sound in my mind before I walk through the door of the meeting place.
Stories are dangerous, and a good thing, that, or else we’d have a hard time finding anything to care about except maybe people. But we care about people from the way we weave them into our lives, yes/no? How they take on whatever accent we transfer to them? If so, it’s not too far to say that we care about characters in the same way as people. Well, no not same, it must be similar – “same” connotes full-blown pathology. I read an interview somewhere, and I forget who, but the person admitted that he cared more about certain characters than about strangers. I can’t say what that is – honesty maybe.
The prelude being over, I can say that I watched Pretty Woman tonight in my neighbor Pete’s apartment. Pete works nights at the dorm appended to the high school at which I work, and periodically I have talked myself into borrowing his key for televisual intake purposes. I would say this happens once a month tops – tonight I needed to borrow his car keys so I could jump my battery-dead vehicle – and the keys were in the apartment, so I had access to the Idiot Box and had no compunction about making use. And in switching from the Pistons-Sixers game, I ran across Mrs. Roberts’ face and really wanted to understand Lyle Lovett. I am not one who sings Julie’s praises or scoffs at her purported effect; I leave her more than I take her, but overall I am neutral like Switzerland.
Pretty Woman is secretly about the ease money confers, and the limits that easiness encounters when it runs up against emptiness. Love is not all that’s the case, because the character of love undergoes the requisite alteration: at first, it’s to be immediately resisted by both parties – remember, no kissing on the mouth this is strictly business, and then it’s cultivated in a way that honors the resistance all the same. So it’s not that true love will prevail, it’s that true love is underwritten by the exchange of money for sex that – initially at least – falsifies the true love it also makes possible. Not a Wallacian double bind, but a head scratcher to be sure, especially if you are susceptible to the money/power love/sacrifice matrix that constitutes God only knows how many uber-narrative threads.
(At this point, I’m not going to try to defend how I came to devote energy to unpacking the reservoir of significance that is Pretty Woman. Its schmaltz and high cheesedick factor are apparent to one and all, but I can ignore it whereas with other early nineties breakout movies I run to go hug porcelain and heave until it doesn’t hurt anymore.)
Whore or not, Vivian has star power – it just hides in the detritus of the situation in which she finds (and places) herself. Once Richard Gere and his Hidden Hand economy noblesse oblige enter the picture, fulfillment becomes more complex, a concept that suddenly takes on unexpected nuance. Money? Sure, it’s hand in glove with the uptick in dramatic momentum – 3 grand for six days and six nights, and she undersold him – but having the money just makes the question of what one should do that more urgent because it is an uninterrupted question all of a sudden. Now to kiss or not to kiss mouths is an open proposition, which is a problem, considering that up to this point – as she tells him – kissing mouths was the only prohibition she respected. Is wanting to break a self-made promise more acceptable if the premise on which the promise is made may no longer hold? This is, I guess, where the inevitable happy ending renders asking questions a moot activity.
We’re not there yet, though; we’re comfortably situated in medias res. Gere’s dad died a month before, and she has 44 inch legs as a kind of therapy, what kind we’re not sure. He’s too detached and consumed with detachment, the elegant well-off hovering above the unwashed masses kind of detachment, to consider the situation as much more than an aside to the business dealings in which his company is involved. But the plot thickens – the cocktail dress and the way they mutually disarm each other, she with the laugh and fidgeting, he with the please and thank you and “I ordered the menu” the morning after their first night together, plus the overall well-put-together austerity of his existence . . . did I mention I’m back on the Joni Mitchell escapade? It’s unprecedented, this – I feel like I will soon find myself in a field full of nubile girl-women doing the circle hippie dance. You know the one: head back, hands up to the sky, circling aimlessly but always answerable to the hidden rhythm – maybe the Mitchell ploughed up the ground in such a way as to make me more receptive to the Cinderella story.
Where were we? Ah, the risks inherent to fiction and stories in general. I enlist a professional philosopher whose pedantry may suggest resonance with the above but on second look, I think, is merely pedantry for its own sake:

Words come to us from a distance; they were there before we were; we are born
into them. meaning them is accepting that fact of their condition. To discover
what is being said to us, as to discover what we are saying, is to discover the
precise location from which it is said; to understand why it is said from just
there, and at that time. The art of fiction is to teach us distance – that the
sources of what is said, the character of whomever says it, is for us to
discover. This is not an injunction against speaking but a definition of
speakers. Speaking together face to face can seem to deny that distance, to deny
that facing one another requires acknowledging the presence of the other,
revealing our positions, betraying them if need be. But to deny such things is
to deny our separateness. And that make us fictions of one another.

Food for thought, yes, but paltry food (and paltry thought). The new CD is A Grand Don’t Come For Free, by the Streets. I don’t come from the streets, but I have been to Britain, so I can vouch for the supposition that “if she plays with her hair she’s probably keen.”