let's get fiscal: hollywood romance and the construction of the self in modernity

Articles Let's Get Fiscal

14 | film international issue 53

Let’s Get Fiscal:Hollywood romance and the mechanism of the self in modernity

By Garry Leonard Keywords: modernity, tradition, Hollywood, self-identity, romance, It Happened One Night, Pretty Woman, ‘true love’

I. Genre, gender and modernity: the self as a narrative construction

[T]here is a direct (although dialectical) con-nection between the globalising tendencies of modernity and what I shall call the transforma-tion of intimacy […] the construction of the self

Below Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night (1934)


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becomes a reflexive project. (Anthony Giddens 1990: 114) ‘Your ego is colossal.’ ‘Yeah, not bad. How’s yours?’ (Peter [Clark Gable] to Ellie [Claudette Colbert] in It Happened One Night (1934))

All Hollywood genres present narrative and visual formulas with radically different empha-ses from one another, and yet each is intended to do the same thing: discover the transcendent within the secular, the enchanted within the scientific, the soulful within the bureaucratic, the unexplainable within the rational. What all these searches have in common is they seek the traditional within the modern. The differ-ence between the traditional and the modern, according to the sociologist Anthony Giddens, is the difference between social systems that are externally referential (traditional) and those that are internally referential (modern). Tradi-tional constructions locate consciousness in relation to such external phenomena as the transcendent, the enchanted, the unexplainable and the soulful. By contrast, the secular, the sci-entific, the bureaucratic and the rational are all institutions designed to generate and moderate constructions of ‘self’ with its internal refer-entiality, as opposed to soul with its external referentiality. In terms of function, the soul is designed to operate in accordance with an external, indeed transcendental, referentiality. The self operates according to internal referen-tiality.

The other difference is that the soul situ-ates the individual within an ‘eternal’ context beyond time, and the self is designed to keep us ‘on schedule’, scanning from moment to moment. This also means the soul is presumed to be essential from the outset, fully formed and impervious to development. The self, by contrast, is a project, something we can, and must, improve upon (a dynamic handily con-tained in the ubiquitous phrase ‘self-help’). The soul invites us to navigate experience in relation to something not a part of the experi-ence; the self narrates experiences in relation to other experiences and supplies a steady ‘voice-over’ of internal referentiality. ‘Lacking external referents supplied by others, the lifespan […] emerges as a trajectory which relates above all

to the individual’s projects and plans’ (Gid-dens 1991: 147). The self in secular life, uncon-nected to assumptions about the transcendent, becomes the pursuer of a ‘lifestyle’, one con-ducted over the course of a ‘lifespan’. Inter-nal referentiality prompts the development of ‘new mechanisms of the self’ whereby the ‘self’ becomes a ‘reflexive project’ that adjusts itself in accordance with experience, rather than attempting to remain unchanged and inviola-ble, as would be the goal of a soul attempting to remain ‘pure’ relative to something beyond the here and now.

In other words, the ‘self’ is a chronic work in progress, a sort of personal Wikipedia, gath-ering and accumulating as it moves forward, deleting what proves to be false, and preserv-ing whatever is able to retain its status as true. Such a construct allows for flexibility, but at the expense of stability. Anything currently acted upon as truth might yet be proved false. Appar-ent falsity may prove true. For this reason, the self in modernity is a narrative construction inextricable from the institutions it draws upon to establish and stabilize itself; hence entire sections of bookstores are devoted to ‘self-help’ books. Stabilization of the self is a chronic chal-lenge and the lack of external referentiality makes it particularly vulnerable to ‘upset’. The immediate stabilizing force is a coherent, con-tinuous narrative that is able to move forward, ‘making sense’ of events as they occur. If this

…the ‘self’ is a chronic work in progress, a sort of personal Wikipedia…

Below Julia Roberts and Richard Gere in Pretty Woman (1990)



narrative is disrupted, the individual can expe-rience a ‘cognitive dissonance’ where nothing makes sense and various breakdowns under-stood along spectrums of anxiety and depres-sion are the result. Simultaneous with the rise of this modern self is the rise of cinema. It is an institution, but, unlike other bureaucracies, it concerns itself not with facts, information and advice, but with visually constructed narratives that help a viewer ‘piece together’ an operative construction for the part of the self dependent on narrative as a forward-moving force.

If, as Walter Benjamin argues, modernity is experienced as a series of shocks, then the pro-cess of editing does not merely reproduce these shocks (as he claimed); it also can contain these shocks and take the otherwise random energy and harness it to operate as a propulsive force for the ‘engine’ of the self. As I have argued elsewhere, this interrelationship parallels the construction of the mechanism of the self and the construction of the internal combustion engine which also deliberately produces shocks, or explosions, in order to force the movement of pistons which in turn convert inertia into for-ward motion (Leonard, ‘Modernity, the Internal combustion Engine, and Modernism’). Likewise, the genre of the Hollywood romance (and oth-ers genres, not discussed in this essay) also can be seen as vehicles with engines. The purpose of the Hollywood genre is to ‘drive’ the modern self from negotiation, which is a way of being in the modern market economy, to intimacy, which is a commercial-free oasis in this same sea. No wonder that in the continual explosion of self-help books the topic in more than half is how to find and sustain a romantic relationship. Giddens calls the modern romantic relationship the ‘pure relationship’, and though he doesn’t make the connection with the loss of commu-nal faith in the soul, the highly self-reflexive transformation of intimacy into the ‘pure rela-tionship’ is a secular retrofitting of the soul that functions in a similar way: as ‘proof’ against the anonymity and restless flux of a continually negotiated modernity.

Hollywood genres are consistent and reliable over space and time, thus offering a consis-tent and reliable stabilizing narrative for the fine tuning of the mechanism of the self. Such fine tuning can either help pre-empt cognitive discourse, or aid in rebuilding a progressive,

ongoing narrative for the self after it has broken down. The narrative formation of the Holly-wood genre has another advantage in that it is both recognizable over a considerable span of time – It Happened One Night and Pretty Woman share qualities as a ‘Hollywood romance’ – and yet also can credibly reflect radically different sociocultural realities: Vivian (Julia Roberts) is a prostitute and Ellie (Claudette Colbert) an heir-ess, which would make them worlds apart, and yet both are recognizably adrift in the space between childhood and adulthood, both have never been in love, and both will discover what they need to ‘improve’ their self-reflexive appa-ratus through romance, and thereby ‘move on’ to the fulfilling life in modernity that awaits them.

Hollywood genres have organizing prin-ciples and social dynamics that are recogniz-able across a great number of movies, produced throughout the development of the twentieth century, and over the entire development of cin-ema itself. I wish to take this further and argue that these dynamics are synchronized with the ‘mechanisms’ of the modern self, particularly in the way they convert the unavoidable ‘shocks’ of modernity into the forward propulsion of a continuous narrative. In this analogy, going to a Hollywood genre film is, in effect, a ‘tune up’ for the organization of a modern reflexive con-sciousness operating according to an internally referential narrative construction we experi-ence as the ‘self’. Giddens distinguishes modern institutions – and by extension modernity itself – ‘from all preceding forms of social order in respect of their dynamism, the degree to which they undercut traditional habits and customs…’ (Giddens 1991: 1). According to Giddens, ‘the transmutations introduced by modern institu-tions interlace in a direct way with individual life, and therefore with the self’ (Giddens 1991: 1). Hollywood genres employ dynamism as well, but it is a compensatory dynamism intended to supply narratives to be incorporated into the construction of a self that must operate in a manner that is internally referential.

In models of order based on tradition, such as Alexander Pope’s concept of ‘the great chain of being’, the ‘self’ is merely a benighted frag-ment of a presumably enlightened whole, and therefore bound to make short-sighted deci-sions that are forgivable from a perspective of


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omniscience because they are necessarily based on a limited view:

'Tis but by parts we follow good or ill; For, vice or virtue, self directs it still; Each individual seeks a several goal; But Heaven’s great view is one, and that the whole. (Alexander Pope, ‘Essay on Man’, 59)

We can already see in nascent form that Pope’s ‘self’ will become the principle of ‘self-interest’ that drives the engine of market-based capital-ism, and that the market will become a secular equivalent of ‘Heaven’s great view’.

Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. (Alexan-der Pope, ‘Essay on Man’, 53)

The ‘self’ in Pope’s great chain of being is a small, contained particle.

We can operate for good or ill, but either way our actions will have no effect on the chain wherein we will either eventually learn our place or die having never really lived. Such a self, based on a system of external referential-ity, focused us on the task of learning what and where we already are, rather than pursuing the never-ending project of ‘becoming’ whatever we need to be to ‘arrive’ at wherever we want to be. The currently in vogue self-help phrase, ‘Be the change you want’ captures this nicely. An antithetical phrase, were one to be pronounced from within the context of Pope’s great chain of being would have to be: ‘Stop trying to change what you already are, because it is the sum total of who you are supposed to be and the only incarnation you can inhabit if you wish your share of happiness.’ There is no hint of a dynamic configuring the self as a project that needs to progress.

By contrast, a ‘self-identity’, according to Giddens, ‘has to be created and more or less continually reordered against the backdrop of shifting experiences of day to day life’ (Giddens 1991: 198). All Hollywood genres tell ‘stories’, but they are stories particularly well-suited to the vicissitudes of modern life because they offer not only various narratives for the shap-ing of a modern ‘self’, but they do so in a way that is synchronized with what Giddens calls ‘the emergence of new mechanisms of self-

identity’(Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 2, my emphasis). In a culture based primarily on tradition, learning to know ‘who one is’ locates one’s foreordained place. This is superseded in modernity by a chronic and unstable need to build an internally referential ‘self’. The nar-rative construct of the Hollywood genre helps prop up the narrative construct of the modern self in that it establishes and sustains a narra-tive arc through a variety of otherwise unre-lated ‘shocks’, which are, in turn, converted by the properties of the genre itself into a forward motion. Such an arrangement of consciousness is continually threatened by various forms of cognitive dissonance, but breakdowns in the mechanism of the self can be forestalled with regular recalibrations performed by various Hol-lywood genres which also move through space and time, recognizable and continual, but also undergoing constant adjustment.

II. A kiss is not just a kiss: navigating through negotiation (capitalism) to the commercial-free zone of intimacy

Edward: What do you do? Vivian: Everything. But I don’t kiss on the mouth. Edward: Neither do I.(Pretty Woman)

In this article, I will be looking at It Happened One Night and Pretty Woman. The films are separated



by sixty years. The elements of the romance genre are easy to identify in both, but how dif-ferently they are configured! Take a standard moment of any Hollywood romance: the first kiss. The ‘first kiss’ in It Happened One Night is delayed throughout the entire movie, as is, of course, any sexual interactions. In Pretty Woman, however, Vivian (Julia Roberts) performs oral sex on her client Edward (Richard Gere) within an hour or so of their having first met. And yet, just as in It Happened One Night, the ‘first kiss’ will still be delayed for nearly the entire film because she tells him, before they begin, she never kisses on the lips. Despite their overtly sexual act performed within their first hour of having met, the genre requirement that the would-be lovers only kiss as an indication of genuine intimacy is upheld. Vivian’s refusal to kiss on the lips, even as they embark in every other way on a sexual relationship, becomes the equivalent of the ‘Wall of Jericho’ (actually a blanket) Peter strings up in a hotel room every night as he and Ellie make their way to New York by bus, walking and hitch hiking.

In both romances, the lovers are in close physical proximity, their bodies synchronized to each other, but emotional intimacy is put on hold until the genre has a chance to show what must be accomplished first before it can be established. Just as Vivian’s unilateral deci-sion to kiss a sleeping Edward on the lips marks her movement from negotiation to an arrival at intimacy, Ellie’s walking around the blanket to Peter’s side of the room notes the exact same arrival on her part. What the genre of romance requires, then, is not this or that plot device, but rather ritualized markers that chart the progress for the audience of a movement from negotiation to intimacy. But what is this ‘work’ that needs to get done in the post-traditional context of modernity before this transition can occur, that is to say, before we are satisfied that the couple have found ‘true love’, and not mere physical attraction? The couple must arrive at what Giddens calls the ‘pure relationship’, but which might more commonly be understood in pop songs and romances as ‘true love’. True love is an emotional engagement whereby one’s perfect complement is ‘found’ as the result of a chance encounter.

‘True love’, as configured by the Hollywood romance, distinguishes itself from lust or mere attraction when it proves itself to be ‘com-mercial free’. Although Giddens doesn’t say what the ‘pure relationship’ is pure from, it would appear to be this. Certainly Vivian is no virgin in Pretty Woman, but she is presented as not having sold herself however much she makes money by offering sexual services. This point is made clear when Edward tells his col-league she is a prostitute and she walks away

Below It Happened One Night (1934)Bottom Clark Gable and Claudette

Colbert in It Happened One Night (1934)


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from their arrangement leaving the money he owes her on the bed. But ‘true love’ is not just emotionally intimate, priceless and the product of chance; it is also non-substitutable and irreplaceable. As such, it offers both selves in the relationship a respite from the cease-lessly competitive relativism of the commodity marketplace. The ‘commercial-free zone’ of the couple’s intimacy, in other words, also provides an internally referenced reassurance of per-manence. If one is no longer negotiating, one is no longer choosing among many possible arrangements.

For the most part, the ‘chance encounter’ that begins to move a couple towards a ‘pure relationship’ takes place in a public space. This is a way to humanize the otherwise dishearten-ingly forbidding urban landscapes of moder-nity, and suggest that even the most public and commercial ‘space’ can become ‘the place where we met’. The Hollywood romance shows people

meeting each other when they are preoccupied with something else, on their way to a destina-tion they have not yet reached: in bus stations (It Happened One Night), or while lost in a sketchy part of town (Pretty Woman). These are all ‘nodal points’ of modernity itself where people are only there because they are not yet where they are going. And then someone they bump into becomes their ‘real’ destination, though they refuse to believe it at first (and this gesture mimics Biblical interventions in the Old Testa-ment such as Saul being knocked off his horse on the way to Damascus, giving the ‘chance encounter’ a hint of divine sanction). The ide-ology of the chance encounter is a powerful ‘strategy of delimitation’ to use Simmel’s term because it has a touch of the salvational about it, though without reference to a ‘higher power’. Witnessing it as a member of the audience, we are granted a sense of a ‘beyond’ in modernity, a ‘beyond’ that is also right now and right here,


The Hollywood romance shows people meeting each other when they are preoccupied with something else…



in a crowded bus stop or a strip of sidewalk patrolled by prostitutes. The very features of modernity transcended by ‘true love’ – anonym-ity, substitutability – are also presented as what sets it up, and sets it in motion. The ‘chance encounter’ alerts us to our sense of discontent, a need to ‘retool’ – and at the same time it sug-gests a means for doing so.

Giddens singles out a particular role of inti-macy in the modern ‘pure love’ relationship:

The pure relationship depends on mutual trust between partners, which in turn is closely related to the achievement of intimacy. In most pre-modern situations, in which personal relations were stabilized by external criteria […] trust tended to be geared to established positions […] kinship obligations probably were accepted most of the time, and provided reasonably stable environments of trust with which day-to-day life was ordered […] What matters in the building of trust in the pure relationship is that each person should know the other’s personality, and be able to rely on regularly eliciting certain sorts of desired responses from the other. (Giddens 1991: 96)

What I am adding to this specifically modern notion of intimacy is that, in relation to the Hol-lywood romance, it is a sort of ‘intimacy’ that must first transcend market dynamics in order to embrace a sense of trust that forms the basis for the assumption of mutual reciprocity, a type of commercial-free interaction that is nowhere encouraged or observed in the modern market economy.

Such an intimacy has nothing to do with physical intimacy – in fact, there is very little sex in Hollywood romance – because physi-cal attraction between a man and a woman is hardly unique and is, in some ways, the essence of substitutability. As the first half of Pretty Woman makes clear, physical intimacy, unlike emotional intimacy, can be a business deal. And yet, Vivian’s refusal to kiss him, while agree-ing to do all else for a price, allows her to draw for him – and, more importantly, for the viewer – the all-important line between negotiation and the commercial-free intimacy of romance, where one no longer ‘keeps track’ of compen-sation offered, or services rendered, because a state of ‘mutual reciprocity’ has been achieved.

He offers to buy her, but this one reserve clause on her part allows her to put her body on the market, while at the same time separating what about her is for sale from what is ‘off the mar-ket’. The establishment of this particular kind of emotional intimacy is basic to the modern ‘pure relationship’ because it serves as an internally referenced source of mutual trust.

Emotional intimacy is antithetical to the economic underpinning of modernity because it requires vulnerability. In economic terms, intimacy offers something without certainty of reciprocity; intimacy does not ask for a receipt. In It Happened One Night, the banter that came to define the dialogue of so-called ‘screwball comedy’ is essentially a spirited and witty style of flirtation that perfectly melds a capacity for sharp negotiation with a yearning for emotional intimacy. ‘True love’ develops because each comes to admire the spiritedness of the other person’s negotiating technique. One of the most famous scenes in the history of Hollywood –Claudette Colbert raising her skirt and using her leg to flag down a passing car, after Clark Gable has failed to do so with his thumb – also marks the point where Gable’s pose as the mas-ter negotiator is forced to give way to Colbert’s feminine wiles. Of course, if this competition over who can out-negotiate the other were to continue too long, they would become a couple of con artists on a road trip, not a romantic couple.

For example, when Ellie secures this ride, and the man later stops for something to eat, Ellie moves to follow him into the store to con him into buying her something too. Peter replies, ‘You do and I’ll break your neck!’ The



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suddenness and vehemence of his remark seems to take both of them by surprise. Inad-vertently, Peter has revealed to himself and to her an inclination towards a level of intimacy that would be violated were she to continue to operate from a negotiating position that makes any one man the same as any other. This leads to a tense scene – the first one we might imag-ine as ‘intimate’ – where, in an abrupt departure from their earlier witty negotiating, he awk-wardly apologizes and she awkwardly concedes he may have had a point. Their business deal that he get her back to New York to her hus-band in return for exclusive rights to the story for his newspaper, has taken a different turn.

Ellie throws over negotiation for intimacy completely by coming around the blanket and throwing herself into his arms; but this moment cannot be sustained by Peter because, even though they love each other, it will be perceived as his having ‘taken advantage of her’. Instead, he decides on his own drive all night back to New York to get a thousand-dollar advance from his editor ‘because a guy can’t propose to a girl without a dime in his pocket’. Driving all night for the money established the relationship, and his motives, as ‘pure’. But by the time he returns, Ellie has been evicted by the irate hotel owners and has called her father, convinced that Peter has had enough of her and left. Merrily and obliviously on his way back to propose to Ellie, Peter encounters her father’s cavalcade, and this convinces him that she never stopped negotiating, and that her appar-ent offer of intimacy was just another ploy. Ellie, for her part, discovers Peter has called her father for an appointment, and assumes that he never had any other interest in her. The result is a scrupulous return to negotiation on both

their parts: Peter shows up at the father’s office with an itemized list of what she cost him. Sig-nificantly, however, he scorns the reward of ten thousand dollars. This gesture makes it clear he was not in it to profit, and that his attitude towards her is in no way predatory. It is also in this gesture – a refusal to ‘make a profit’ – the father sees an indication of Peter’s love for his daughter and he asks Peter directly, ‘Do you love my daughter?’

III. Hyper-complementarity and mutual reciprocity: the salvation of a ‘pure’ relationship in modernity

From its earliest origins, romantic love raises the question of intimacy. It is incompatible with lust, and with earthy sexuality, not so much because the loved one is idealized – although this is part of the story – but because it pre-sumes a psychic communication, a meeting of souls which is reparative in character. The other, by being who he or she is, answers a lack which the individual does not even necessarily recognize – until the love relation is initiated. And this lack is directly to do with self-identity: in some sense, the flawed individual is made whole. (Giddens 1992: 44–45)

In the remainder of this article, I wish to jux-tapose the two scenes illustrating the ‘chance encounter’ of Peter and Ellie and Vivian and Edward. In both cases, the setting is a highly commercial, public space, which they vigor-ously contest through spirited negotiations. In It Happened One Night, this ideology of the chance

Bottom Images from the films Pretty Woman (1990) and It Happened One Night (1934)



encounter begins with the shot designating the public space of a bus terminal: ‘Night Bus to New York’. It is the first shot after the one of Ellie div-ing off her father’s boat, away from his pam-pering and protection towards independence. Of course, her initial bid for independence has her trapped in the role of rebellious little girl: she met a man while trying to run away from her father’s ‘handlers’ and promptly accepted his offer of marriage, an offer he really made to her wealth and not to her. The second shot is a close-up of a bus conductor, on screen right, with the words ‘Miami’ in lights behind him.

As with the busy street in Pretty Woman, the emphasis is on public space, commercialism, transportation, circulation and the imagery of crowds of people, temporarily in a transi-tional space, trying to get somewhere else. This is followed by a shot of Ellie, screen left, with the vast interior of the bus station out of focus behind her. Her stature within this shot is considerably diminished compared to the medium shot in the opening scene of the film showing her gracefully arcing across the screen as she dives from her father’s yacht. The next shot is two detectives who are watching the ticket booths for a sign of her, while agreeing with each other that it’s a waste of time to do so because neither one can even imagine Ellie on a bus. Following that, we see a shot of the ticket man on the other side of a cage and an old woman thanking him for the ticket. There is a medium shot of this old woman making her way towards the camera. The very large public space of the bus station is emphasized again, and she seems to emerge from this anonym-ity to hand Ellie a ticket she has agreed to buy for her. Ellie peers warily about her as she takes the ticket, offering back to the grateful woman some of the change.

We will not see this old woman again, or the conductor who announced the immi-nent departure of the bus. These characters briefly enter the storyline and promptly disap-pear. This emphasizes the larger context of the hustle and bustle of the modern world, a restless ebb and flow, one predicated on the constant negotiating that is the basis of the modern money economy. The space is so vast that yet another stranger enters the frame and brushes past Ellie; but this time, and without apparent motivation, the camera begins to pan right with him as he moves right, keeping him centre frame, almost as if something on him ‘snagged’ on to the camera as he was passing by. He walks across the terminal and heads for a phone booth where we will see, over a crowd of men, Ellie’s future love interest, Peter War-ren.

This man whom the camera followed imme-diately takes his place in the crowd, and just as quickly is lost to the story (as will all the men in this shot be, once Peter completes his phone call and makes his way towards the bus). The shot selection emphasizes the way the camera-work bobs along on top of a relentless flux of negotiation, anonymity and substitutability. The effect is bewildering, as it often is in any public exchange point in the modern city: ‘Who are all these people? Where did they come from? Where are they going? Where will they end up tonight?’ And, most relevant to the genre of Hollywood romance: ‘Who loves them? Whom do they love? Have they met the love of their life?’ The tension between the overwhelming atmosphere of calculation and negotiation and the potential intimacy of love, and how to navi-gate safely from one to the other, is the basic tension of this genre, a tension that is here made palpable in a visual manner.

Below Julia Roberts and Richard Gere in Pretty Woman (1990)


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Ellie’s future love interest is now placed in this same space, though the composition of the shot that introduces him is quite different. The man that ‘brought the camera with him’ asks to use the phone and is hushed by the excited crowd of men who are listening to Peter verbally joust with the editor of his newspaper. All the men, slightly inebriated, seem drawn to him like moths to a flame. And it is an unusual event: a man with a job (but only for the moment) in an economic depression telling off his boss. It is this scene, perhaps, that offers a sort of ico-nography for the depression era, of which this film is a part. The men are in a public, highly commercialized space, but they seem a bit aim-less or, at least, in no hurry to catch a particu-lar train anywhere. The point of view shifts to offer us a close-up of Peter; the men now form a background, and it is a slightly high-angle shot, aligning the gaze of the viewer with Peter’s point of view. The shot-counter-shot now becomes Peter and his editor back in New York. We hear both sides of the conversation, the crowd of men behind Peter hear only his side.

When Peter gets fired, a close-up of him shows him register real concern, but, for the sake of his audience, he continues to speak, even though the counter-shot shows the editor working away, the phone hung up next to him. It is only then that Peter delivers a speech the men find delightful; he quits and ‘tells off’ the boss who has already hung up. Cries of ‘Make way for the king’ greet his exit from the phone booth. Playing with the crowd, he inquires, ‘Does my chariot await?’ as he is escorted to the bus by the gleeful men. So we meet our two future lovers against a backdrop of ceaseless circulation and exchange. The old woman, the now unemployed reporter, the crowd of aimless men, the bus conductor and the busses leaving

and arriving, all produce a veritable cacophony of modernity that cuts across all class lines. The people seem atomized and prey to the constant flux that hurries them about, first this way and then that. This disparate anonymous atmosphere of commerce and transportation sets up the backdrop against which the hyper-complementarity of Ellie and Peter will begin to emerge.

When Peter enters the bus he sees the news-papers stacked on a seat – further signs of a circulatory economy – and asks that they be removed. The bus driver ignores him. In an interesting cut to an exterior shot, we see the newspapers come flying out a bus window on their way to crashing on to the ground. Peter’s confident assumption that his right to a seat trumps any commercial interests introduces a note of personal defiance amidst all the com-mercial negotiations that the bus station, as a whole, represents. Peter’s triumph over the anonymous circulation of goods is noticed and challenged by the bus driver. He suggests Peter might need a punch on the nose and Peter invites him to try, moving the discussion from the impersonal to the personal. The driver’s repeated vague threat (‘Oh yeah?’) is ridiculed by Peter as lacking all rhetorical subtlety: ‘OK, you got me, yeah!’ The overheard comment elic-its general laughter from the anonymous crowd on the bus, clearly declaring him the winner. Of course, in the midst of this debate, held in a medium shot, Ellie herself becomes one of those ‘passing’ people we have seen so much of in this scene (though she will not, like them, continue off screen and exit from the story!) when she pushes past Peter on the aisle of the bus as he argues with the driver. Unobserved, she occupies the contested seat cleared by Peter tossing the newspapers.

Below (left) Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman (1990)(right) Jason Alexander and Richard Gere in Pretty Woman (1990)



His stand-off with the driver proactively won, he turns to claim his reward only to encounter an entirely different negotiation, one that can-not be won by mere confrontation and clever defiance. ‘That upon which you sit is mine,’ he declares. The double entendre – is it the bus seat or her bottom he claims to own? – works nicely because she is, in fact, as anonymous to him as the bus seat; only negotiation can establish ownership in this context. He loses the first round when she looks past him and says ‘Driver, are these seats reserved?’ The driver is only too glad to announce that they are ‘first come, first served’. In ignoring Peter, she is dismissing his point that the seat is his not because he used money to reserve it but because he ‘put up a stiff fight for it’. Ellie is practised in the art of property and ownership and knows how to apply rules to her advantage.

But Peter quickly adjusts to the shift in discourse that Ellie initiated and, in doing so, accepts her terms: this is a purely commercial negotiation, not decidable by individual efforts or relative merit. They both have tickets, but she got there first, so she gets to sit there. But, using her logic, and extending it, he asks the driver ‘These seats are built for two, aren’t they?’ The design of the bus seat implies the first two people who arrive have an equal claim to shar-ing a portion of the seat. The driver vacillates, due to his dislike for Peter (‘Maybe they are and maybe they’re not’), but this still allows Peter to choose which option is currently in effect; he sits next to her, explaining as he does so, ‘This is a “maybe they are”.’ She resents his creative interpretation of the degree of entitlement his ticket represents, but she is in a public zone unpoliced by her father’s wealth. This world of the semi-private is not one Ellie knows well; Peter would never be allowed to sit next to her

in her father’s private limousine. As the degree to how much one can pay increases, the rules of entitlement and ownership can become more and more exclusionary. But it is precisely this logic that ‘true love’ or the ‘pure relationship’ is intended to transcend by shifting the grounds of the relationship from negotiation to intimacy and from profit-making to mutual reciprocity.

In fact, they are now sharing a seat like a couple who are ‘together’, a fact that will be more clear after she has fallen asleep leaning against him and wakes up to discover he has placed his sweater around her for warmth. But before this evidence of an unforced gesture that is ‘free’, Peter tries to introduce some middle ground by offering to put her suitcase on the upper rack if she asks him nicely. This moves the negotiation from a strictly con-tractual one (the rights of a ticket bearer to a seat) to a more virtual one: a favour in return for thanks. Ellie looks at him disdainfully and stands up to do it herself. We cut to another exterior of the bus as the conductor waves it forward, followed by a low-angle close-up where the bus dominates the screen in a rather intimidating manner. These external shots of the station and then the close-up of the bus are not strictly necessary, but, visually, they ‘thrust’ the bus right at us as a visual incarna-tion of the cold, calculating metallic world of commercial transactions. Back inside, we see this lurch of the bus translated into a personal movement: Ellie falls backwards into Peter’s lap. ‘Next time you drop in, bring the folks,’ he quips, as she hastily disengages herself. In the medium shot that follows, there is no dialogue. Instead, just before the shot ends, we see a slight smile on Ellie’s face.

The smile is no part of a negotiation or trans-action or commercial ploy. Without being privy

Below (left) Julia Roberts and Richard Gere in Pretty Woman (1990)(right) Richard Gere in Pretty Woman (1990)


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to the specifics, we can recognize it as a ‘self’-reflective moment as a result of this chance encounter. As Giddens notes ‘the pure rela-tionship is a key environment for building the reflexive project of the self, since it both allows for and demands organised and continuous self-understanding’ (Giddens 1991: 186). Simul-taneous with the bus rolling out of the station, Ellie has begun the sort of internally referenced ‘journey’ which is an integral part of the ‘proj-ect’ of the self within the indifferent calculative world of modernity. An encounter begun in a vigorous atmosphere of negotiation has quietly ended on a subtle note of intimacy.

In some ways, and in stark contrast to Peter, the character of Edward (Richard Gere) in Pretty Woman is the romance equivalent of the char-acter of Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in the melodrama Wall Street (1987). Indeed, Richard Gere was approached for the role before it was given to Michael Douglas. There is no equiva-lent defining moment in Pretty Woman when Edward (Richard Gere) pronounces ‘greed is good’ as Gordon Gekko does in Wall Street, but Edward’s lack of philosophizing about greed does not change the degree to which he, too, is a manipulator of finances with no regard for the effect on workers. So what’s the difference? The difference is that Gekko is exactly the same at the end of the film as at the beginning, while Edward is opened up by his encounter with Vivian (Julia Roberts). The ‘mechanisms of self’ that have operated smoothly, if dispassionately, are rearranged and someone skilful at negotiat-ing, and incapable of all else, finds an intimate, commercial-free encounter with a woman who also, up until meeting him, had decided not only was the world run strictly on principles of negotiation, but her naïve romantic notions had allowed her to be exploited repeatedly. After several years of aligning herself with abusive boyfriends, each one leaving her with less than she had before, she now demands her going rate on the market as a prostitute with the mantra ‘We decide who; we decide when; we decide how much’ … the similarity is not lost on Edward who remarks at one point: ‘You and I have a lot in common. We both screw people for money.’

Like Ellie and Peter, Vivian and Edward have pluck, spirit, intelligence and charm, but also, like Ellie and Peter, something is missing.

Through the ideology of the chance encoun-ter, also conducted on a public street and also involving motor vehicles (albeit a Lotus Esprit, rather than a bus) the possibility of hyper-com-plementarity and non-substitutability result-ing in a pure (commercial-free) relationship will emerge. Only after achieving this inter-nally referenced intimacy will both be able to move on from a past they only think they have transcended. Edward breaks up companies in a repetitive protest against the father who abandoned him and his mother; Vivian contin-ues to act out, in a different form, her mother’s cruel assessment of her as ‘a bum magnet’ who can do nothing but attract men who are losers. In both cases, they have found a way to leave a painful past behind by locking into a negotiating stance that generates profit within a narrowed emotional framework. Over and over again Edward and Vivian negotiate away any pretence of intimacy in order to convert the encounter into something where they walk away with more, monetarily speaking, than they brought to the table. Such repeated actions keep at bay any sense that they might be miss-ing something in their lives.

Earlier, in the opening scene of the movie, the concern that, in modernity, everything is for sale and intimacy is an illusion, is pronounced in the opening line by, of all people, a magi-cian: ‘No matter what they say, it’s all about the money,’ he announces, then proceeds to make coins appear in the palms of the guests as they disappear from his own. In his final gesture, he converts the coins to one giant coin as he ‘finds’ it behind the ear of a guest. Edward’s lawyer Philip (Jason Alexander) hustles by behind them, pausing long enough to remark, ‘A penny for the ear. How much for the rest?’ His remark drives home further the point that love and sex are also subsumed by a calculative money-market economy; in such an equation, romance is positioned as no more than a palliative fan-tasy designed to obscure this fact. In a virtual illustration of Irigaray’s theory of ‘the woman as commodity’, the well-coiffed, thoroughly bejew-elled women at the party advertise the relative wealth of their respective men.

Again, it is Philip who insists on making it clear that his wife is an ornamentation. When someone praises the party, he is quick to strip her of the credit: ‘My wife went to a lot of



trouble. She called the caterer.’ In the following scene we listen to Edward having a hard time getting his female ornamentation to show up. The unnamed, unseen woman on the other end of the phone is done with the game, probably because the length of time she has allotted for a contract – i.e. a wedding proposal – has come and gone without Edward noticing. In other words, she might continue the role as his wife, but she’s through volunteering as his girl-friend. The wisdom of this choice is reinforced when he gets off the phone and congratulates a woman on her engagement, whereupon she replies: ‘I couldn’t wait for you forever.’ Edward’s break-up on the phone is swiftly and neatly concluded, the way one might announce the relinquishing of a stock option that is demand-ing more than its actual worth – which is, indeed, what has happened. Her investment in him has not yielded the profit she felt she had a right to expect. She suggests she might move out – a suggestion that makes it clear she lives in his place, not hers. For his part, Edward has no intention of meeting her price beyond what he is already doing – paying her rent and expenses – and so he reacts calmly to her busi-ness decision: ‘If that’s what you want, yes.’ Perhaps out of habit, she prolongs the pretence that their arrangement was something other than business by saying, ‘When you get back to New York, we’ll discuss it,’ but this is busi-ness and time is money, so he replies, ‘Now’s as good a time as any,’ indicating the arrangement she has is the only one he is willing to sustain; if she is declining their standing arrangement, then there is nothing further to discuss. It is at this point the viewer might have to remind themselves that a supposedly romantic rela-tionship was terminated, and not some convo-luted acquisitions contract.

So much for the introduction of the male romantic lead. We might pause to note, how-ever, that his situation is not so different from Ellie on her father’s boat in It Happened One Night. Both characters have been walled off and isolated by wealthy fathers – Ellie literally and Edward psychologically. It would appear that Edward makes his own money, unlike Ellie, but, as Vivian will note when he explains how he makes money as a hostile takeover expert, ‘You don’t actually make anything.’ That this is a criticism not lost on him gets confirmed when

he makes peace with the father figure who owns a boat-building company and hopes to pass it on to his grandson. After falling in love with Vivian, he will dismantle the takeover plan and agree to go into business building boats. Similarly, Ellie is surrounded by wealth, much of it at her discretion, but she doesn’t feel use-ful in relation to it. The scene in Pretty Woman that follows, that I want to look at in terms of shot analysis, continues the parallel between Edward and Ellie in the sense that Ellie arrives at a bus station never having ridden on a bus, and Edward grinds the gears of a Lotus having been chauffeured everywhere his whole life and therefore unable to drive or even find his way around.

The introduction of Vivian’s character, which briefly precedes the appearance of Edward’s Lotus, establishes her, not unlike Peter, as a capable, overqualified, sporadically unemployed freelancer. Like Peter, she has standards in an industry not really known for them. She is as resistant to having a pimp as Peter is to hav-ing an editor. Both have convinced themselves that their hard go-it-alone attitude is all one can expect of life. Undercutting that, in the case of Peter, is that he is drunk and gets fired. Undercutting it for Vivian, even more obvi-ously, is that her ‘independence’ requires her to exchange access to her body for money. But, like a good businesswoman, she is clear that her body is a product she puts on the market on her terms and sells and resells it with no emotional involvement. Her motto ‘We say who, we say when, we say how much’ makes her the CEO, it would seem of the product – respon-sible for production, advertising, distribution and pricing. As we will soon learn, the way she maintains the principle of her body as a renew-able resource capable of replenishing itself on the market, is to feel nothing for her clients and refuse them permission to kiss her on the lips. Likewise, a large part of Edward’s success is to insist that the deals are legal and impersonal and not to involve himself in anything that sug-gests otherwise.

After Edward leaves the party in his law-yer’s car, which he can’t really drive, a lengthy sequence of parallel editing follows him getting more and more lost, intercut with the intro-duction to Vivian – or rather Vivian’s body. The opening shot is her. For several shots, we see


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her arm, her leg, and so on, as she dresses, recalling Phillip’s earlier comment, ‘A penny for the ear, how much for the rest?’ Vivian her-self is finally introduced in a close-up show-ing her applying make-up. She overhears the landlord, reminding her that rent is due, and goes to where they keep the cash in the tank of the toilet, only to discover a single dollar. Her search for her roommate takes her past a crime scene where a prostitute has been found in a dumpster. Her roommate Kit has given the rent money to a man named Carlos for drugs. It doesn’t even represent all she owes him. Kit and Vivian are indistinguishable in terms of their role as prostitutes, but juxtaposing the two of them quickly shows Vivian to have shrewd business instincts, with an eye towards the bottom line, recapitalizing and moving out of a labour-intensive, low-yield environment, and on to something better.

Out on the sidewalk, they shoo away another prostitute encroaching on their turf, and Kit suggests that Carlos might become their pimp. Vivian reiterates their rules about saying who, when and how much and Kit agrees. It is dur-ing this reconfirmation we can see, in the background, Edward’s Lotus lurching into view. This scene where Edward and Vivian are about to meet is more literally commercial than the implied commercialization of the bus terminal in It Happened One Night. Earlier, a local char-acter traversed this street – and we will see him again in the final shot of the film – declar-ing: ‘This is the city of dreams. What is your dream?’ If the characters in the party of the first scene seem to be living the dream, this paral-lel scene is the place of broken dreams where people have nothing left to sell but themselves. And yet, the pervasive cynicism and calculation in the party scene suggests that both commer-cial zones lack basic humanity because they lack genuine intimacy and therefore the basis of trust that permits mutual reciprocity.

Once again a moving motor vehicle will be the key site for them to meet. Once again cir-cumstances based purely on a chance encoun-ter not only bring them together, but force them into a proximity they otherwise never would have experienced. From the start, Vivian shows that she’s a tough negotiator, albeit with far smaller sums. When Edward reveals he’s not a client, he just wants directions, she still treats

him as a client and just charges him less since he doesn’t want access to her body or much of her time. When he says ‘ridiculous’ to her offer to give him directions for five dollars, she dou-bles it (‘The price just went up to ten’) because, like him, she has a shrewd sense when some-one is in a situation where they have no better choice than to take the deal. When he tries to be legal about it by saying, ‘You can’t charge me for directions,’ she notes what he well knows; legality is very flexible and circumstantial: ‘I can do whatever I want. I ain’t lost.’ She under-stands the ‘art of the deal’: the one with less need gets to set the terms.

Of course, her being able to ‘do anything she wants’ only refers to the narrow parameters of this very specific deal (if she could really do anything she wants, she’d pay the rent and ‘get away’ as she has told Kit earlier). They negotiate the fee for directions through a series of ‘shot counter shot’, up to a final shot where she turns her back on him and we see him out of focus, screen right. The effect of this, momentarily, is to make him appear to be watching a movie – the frame of the car window as the screen – showing a close-up of her highly sexualized body. This is followed by a long shot where we see what she sees: Carlos, her would-be pimp, noticing what she is doing, moves towards her shouting: ‘I thought I told you not to take any dates tonight.’ Now her status in the negotiat-ing has shifted, though Edward doesn’t notice. But she stays in negotiating mode. He offers a twenty, asking for change, she takes it, hops in, and amends their agreement: ‘For twenty I’ll show you personal.’ Edward doesn’t react to her changing the terms – he had agreed to ten dollars for directions, not twenty for an escort – and a series of rapid cuts shows him turning on the wipers, followed by another close-up of his hand on the clutch, and finally a close-up of the licence plate on the Lotus which, in turn, sets up a medium shot of the Lotus moving away from the camera, down the street. As we watch the car receding into the distance down the street, we hear Vivian’s voice: ‘Lights! Lights would be good here.’

The five-minute drive in the Lotus from Hol-lywood and Vine to the Beverly Hills Wilshire will traverse a no-man’s land between the crass offering of compensations for the deprivations of modernity – drugs and anonymous sex – to



the highly regulated world of high capitalism where that same modern money economy can be seen operating in a social atmosphere that is only superficially more polite and genteel. The neon, the harsh lights, the hookers, the drug dealers, the pimps and hustlers, the cops, the sidewalk homages to stars of the silver screen, all combine to offer a semiotically dense and highly spectacular picture of temporary and therefore highly renewable compensations for the chronic emotional deprivations of the modern money economy focused solely on negotiation at the expense of intimacy. Every-one is trying to make a profit off of anyone else. Any weakness, however slight or carefully hid-den, will be sussed out by a clever negotiator looking for an edge in order to convert it into a profit. That Vivian and Edward both know this is established when he glances at her and asks: ‘What’s your name?’

In a counter shot, held for an extra second or two, Vivian sizes him up, before replying seduc-tively: ‘What do you want it to be?’ He responds with a look and a frown that says ‘Don’t con me,’ and she, with a shrug that breaks the role-playing she was about to employ, replies matter-of-factly: ‘Vivian. My name is Vivian.’ This is the first move away from substitutabil-ity – from Vivian being ‘whatever he wants’ – for a price – to her being someone in her own right. The modern money economy not only reduces everything to calculation and nego-tiation, it also makes everything fungible, like money itself. The Lotus, for example, which Vivian correctly identifies in terms of model and make, looks like something else to Kit: ‘No, that’s rent!’ But Edward’s insistence on her real name drops them into the register of two people discussing business practices. Both Edward and Vivian are cynical about others and presume all relationships are, if not kill or be killed, certainly ‘profit or be profited from’. Both knew a time when they thought differently; Edward before his father abandoned the home and his mother, and Vivian before a string of boyfriends left her stranded and penniless. And both are presented as doing relatively well within their very different spheres. Both watch the bottom line and plan for future possibili-ties. The parallel is made explicit after Vivian drops Edward off and he asks her if she’s going ‘back to the office’.

In this context, only the ‘true love’ carefully constructed by the Hollywood romance can hope to reconfigure a relationship from one of frank commercial jockeying to one of trusting mutual reciprocity where each person takes as a given that the other person has their wel-fare in mind as much as their own. Respective vulnerabilities, the very source of either profit or debit in a negotiation, will be respected and nurtured, rather than detected in order to be exploited. It is not zero sum. Neither part-ner has to lose in order for the other to gain. It embodies a spirit of mutual reciprocity and hyper-complementarity. A gain for one is a gain for both, and losses are absorbed by shar-ing, rather than passing them off to someone, somewhere else. After Edward has fallen in love with Vivian, he decides to not break apart the shipping company, but help it continue to build ships – to make something. In an aside to the owner, though, he notes: ‘There’s still a lot to do. You’re still vulnerable.’ With this exchange, we see the discovery of intimacy in the pri-vate sphere has shown him a different way to approach vulnerability in the public one. Of course, in the real world of commerce outside the film, this is an unlikely scenario. If a ship-yard is past its prime, producing something no longer needed, and it sits on land that might be developed for condos, it stands no chance of remaining an unprofitable shipyard. But in an exchange such as this, we can see how the Hollywood romance reverses the priorities: love becomes the essential emotion, and business continues to exist, but it is reassigned to a more satisfactory and humane secondary role. The demonization of Edward’s lawyer who tries to rape Vivian before getting thrown out by Edward makes it more clear that untempered profit-seeking must not be allowed to be the domi-nant force in modernity – although, of course, it often is.

So the short car ride from Hollywood and Vine to the Beverly Wilshire is enough for Edward and Vivian to run the gamut from a wary sizing up of each other’s business acumen to a mutual appreciation of each other as individuals. Vivian responds to Edward’s remark, ‘Tough time to be a hooker,’ – an oblique reference to AIDS – by reciting all the ways she has minimized risk and maximized performance: ‘Not only am I better in the sack than an amateur, I’m probably


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safer.’ When he replies: ‘That’s good, you should put it on your business card,’ she switches reg-ister back to the personal and says: ‘If you’re making fun of me, I don’t like it.’ He assures her that he isn’t, and that he wouldn’t, but with each exchange you can see, through the camerawork, he is seeing her more and more as a person. When Vivian responds to Edward’s question about her rates, his surprise at how much seems rather naïve. She says: ‘A hundred dollars an hour,’ and he says: ‘You get that, and you hold your boots up with a safety pin?’ But he’s comparing what she does to a corpo-rate account. Vivian sells her body, not abstract expertise. Every hour encounter takes at least two, from beginning to end, and takes more of a toll on her, physically and emotionally, than sit-ting behind a desk.

He confesses he can’t drive because ‘my first car was a limousine’, and then they liter-ally switch positions and Vivian gets in the driver’s seat, though it is done in a way that indicates he is still in charge: ‘It’s the only way I could get you off my coat.’ Once out of the car at the Wilshire, they stand apart again on a broad, evenly lit sidewalk, no neon, no pedes-trians, and no overt selling or exchanges of goods of any kind. At this point, the camera-work includes a young door guard, positioned through the shot counter shot as an audience. He seems to be there to indicate that Vivian is stunning, and that she and Edward strike him, against all evidence to the contrary, as a cute couple who go well together, whether or not they know it yet. Edward says goodbye to Viv-ian asking if she’ll be all right and she says she will be and will use her twenty bucks for a taxi. When he looks back again, she is sitting on the top of a bench waiting for a bus. It is interest-ing to contemplate why this is the detail that prompts him to approach her again, asking as he does so, ‘Bus?’ First, he sees she is not in a hurry to get back to her ‘office’, and her willing-ness to save money by taking the bus indicates she does not want to sell herself anymore than she has to, and she really is conserving funds to move on to something.

Two Hollywood romances. One bus ride and one car ride. Depression-era America and a later era of unfettered corporate greed. In both cases a chance encounter in a public space, situ-ated in a moving vehicle, opens a negotiation, a discovery of hyper-complementarity, a move towards the establishment of the mutual reci-procity of intimacy within the commercial-free zone, and finally the establishment of the ‘pure’ relationship. The beauty of the Hollywood genre – why it formed the way it did, why it endures – is recognizable in its dynamics, yet flexible in its particulars – just like the modern self. It is repetition with a difference. Economic sexual and commercial realities may shift, but the need to make an internally referential commer-cial-free zone of ‘pure relationship’ prevails and the mutual reciprocity that ensues permits the further development of the ‘mechanism of the self’ in an environment walled off from exploi-tive profit-seeking. ‘So what happened after he climbed up the tower and rescued her?’ Edward asks Vivian. And she replies: ‘She rescues him right back.’ •

Contributors' details

Garry Leonard is Professor of Literature and Film at the University of Toronto.

References

Giddens, Anthony (1990), The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

—— (1991), Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

—— (1992), The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Pope, Alexander (1994), Essay on Man and Other Poems, New York, NY: Dover Thrift Editions.

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let's get fiscal: hollywood romance and the construction of the self in modernity

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