Pretty woman, walking down the street Pretty woman, the kind I like to meet Pretty woman I don't believe you, you're not the truth No one could look as good as you Mercy It has been twenty five years since Roy Orbison’s this 1964 song inspired the title for Pretty Woman, the widely acclaimed romantic classic. There has been a splurge of romantic as well as romantic comedy movies since then. Most of them had an alignment to the Cinderella complex. Cinderella is world renowned for the fantastic tale of a rags to riches girl that enamored the psyche of many. This story has inspired many movies like Ever After, A Cinderella Story, Ella Enchanted and many more. Nevertheless it is most fitting to analyze Pretty Woman placing it in the same context …show more content…
The movie was to be a realistic rendering of the grim world of the prostitutes. However, this was heavily rewritten interposing it with romance, humour and spectacle which in turn led to the loss of the perspective with which the original script was written. The film fails to show the real world of the prostitutes, brushing it lightly away, so that the knight in the shining armour can rescue the princess in distress. It neatly forgets about the women being abused physically, the drug parlours and other intoxications, the venereal diseases and finally death which erases one’s entire existence from this world. This chick flick is thus committing a grave mistake to two groups, the women community and the community of sex …show more content…
It is his story which starts with his break up with his girlfriend and ends with him having a new partner. It is his transformation that the movie is centered on. There is a slight external transformation of Vivian, but the script is Edward centric. It is the basic norm followed by every romantic movie which assigns a role of a beautiful, submissive showpiece to the women who dances to the tunes of men. Laura Kinsale in The Androgynous Reader reiterates that no viewer/reader wants to be the heroine in the romantic comedy, but wants to be in her place, along with the hero. ‘The reader is seldom the heroine in the sense meant by the term reader identification. There is always a sense of analytical distance’ (Kinsale, Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance, 31). ‘People are looking at me’ says Vivian, whom Edward corrects, ‘They’re not looking at you. They’re looking at me.’ Similarly at Rodeo Drive the salesman was greatly interested in Edward than Vivian because he is the holder of the plastic money, but Vivian can be replaced by any other woman enjoying his