Fairy Tale Rescue/Toxic Reality

[Yehonala]

Having watched "Pretty Woman" I realized that I had just watched a reverse 'rescue' scenario. Instead of a woman redeeming a man from his inner demons, the man, Edward Lewis, redeemed the inner demons of a prostitute and scooped her up from a life of drudgery to a life of security and supposed love. Instead of the straightforward romance it is so benignly portrayed to be, it is in fact a story loaded with contradiction and irony.

In the opening sequence, Edward was escaping the stifling party atmosphere of his upper class business associates and friends, after being dumped over the phone by his socialite girlfriend.

While Edward is driving increasingly lost, Vivian wakes up getting ready for her job, as a hooker. She puts her clothes on, makeup, wig, and boots and while leaving sees her landlord harassing a tenet about rent money. On finding out that her roommate Kit spent it on a drug party, she becomes infuriated and says states that she was saving up to leave town. Kit wonders where and Vivian is portrayed as the only one who is thinking like an adult. Oddly, despite her adult demeanor, she is also endearingly childlike with Edward.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2691538/fairy_tale_rescuetoxic_reality.html?cat=41

[Warpy]

1. I imagined the next chapter of that awful movie, too

and it came close to the author's: "Time and time again Vivian will charm her with him with her 'naturalness' and he will charm her with his pampering of her until, realistically, she either changes into an over cultivated socialite and demands he start taking her life into consideration, or Edward gets tired of her 'naturalness' and marries a socialite who knows how to behave in a social situation. It'll be worse if she wants him to respect her instead of looking down on her, which will be her lot for the rest of their time together."

In other words, the differences that were so endearing at first would soon begin to grate as soon as the bloom was off the rose, usually about six months later. They'd then begin to eat each other alive.

If she was lucky and a lot better at her job than we're led to believe, she'd get what she could out of him in the way of hockable jewelry and eventually manage to get an education and her own life. If she was as naive and as much of a self regenerating virgin as the movie portrayed, she'd simply find herself back out on the street again, a year older and less attractive to cruising males looking for young tail.

I've seen the predicament of the trophy wife, the wife of the man who married "beneath him," and it's not pretty. She's lost her own friends because they're not appropriate to her new station. His friends snub her. That's really what Cinderellas have to face: isolation, and a workaholic husband is not going to compensate for that.