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Pretty Woman

Pretty Woman is celebrating its 25th anniversary today. While the feel-good romantic comedy about a corporate raider who falls for a hooker might be full of witty one-liners, epic fashion, and passionate romance, the one scene that everyone remembers has nothing to do with any of that. Pretty Woman‘s biggest contribution to pop culture is a scene wherein a well-dressed prostitute goes into a Rodeo Drive boutique and shames the snooty salesgirls who refused to wait on her the day before.

You know the exact scene I’m talking about. Julia Roberts (AKA Vivian Ward) has just spent a day with her rich lover’s credit card. For the first time in her life, she has been treated like a queen. She struts down Rodeo Drive in a stately and demure white dress paired with a ladylike wide-brimmed black hat. Then, she spots the store, where just the day before, a pair of snide saleswomen shamed her for trying to shop while wearing her “slutty” streetwalker garb. So, she goes in, finds the woman who was rude to her and says, “You work on commission, right?”

The salesgirl affirms this and then Vivian brandishes all the shopping bags and hat boxes dangling off her spindly arms. “Big mistake! Big! HUGE!”

The scene has nothing to do with what a “Cinderella story” like Pretty Woman is supposed to be about. It’s not about true love, it’s not about kindness, and it’s not about goodness. It’s about class.

The word “class” means many things in this instance. It’s about social class (i.e. Vivian’s standing, the salesgirls’ standing, and Edward Lewis’ standing in society) and it’s about possessing that unique social grace and poise that we sum up by calling, “class.”

When the salesgirls turn Vivian away from the shop in the first place, they are exerting their social status. They are saying that they are not only “better” than Vivian, but they are blocking her entree into a higher social sphere by making it impossible for her to purchase the uniform she would need to move up. They have more “class” in the sense of status, but they have no class in terms of politeness. They are using their privilege to be cruel.

Of course, the best revenge is living well, and Vivian knows this. In fact, she goes a step forward. Once she has been giving a social status upgrade (through Edward’s money), she returns to the shop to shove the saleswomen’s cruelty in their face. She even adds insult to injury by bringing up the fact that their livelihood is dependent upon commission. Meaning, if they had stooped to help her, she could have given them the money they need to continue in their glamorous trappings. It’s a glorious moment that plays into all sorts of class fantasies that plague any woman who has ever found herself scorned because of her perceived social position.

The scene is so important that it’s been repeatedly referenced in popular media since Pretty Woman. Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion opens with the two heroines watching Pretty Woman and mocking the scene. Later, they admit they feel bad for Vivian and are happy when “they finally let her shop.” But this scene isn’t just a cultural touchstone for women who grew up in the ’80s. It’s seeped into contemporary culture, too. Broad City referenced it this past season in an hilarious Beacon’s Closet scene. Abbi and Illana’s cocky insistence on using the scene’s famous dialogue (even though it didn’t gel with the actual situation) illustrates just how it’s insinuated itself in our culture as a moment of social triumph.

The deep irony of the scene, though, is that it’s not a class victory for Vivian. Pointing out someone’s rudeness in an effort to push them down doesn’t actually make you a classier person. It just makes you yet another tacky and horrible person. She has become as bad as the girls in the shop, using wealth and status to make other people feel terrible about themselves.

Furthermore, Vivian’s newfound higher status is hollow. I’m not here to parse the morality of prostitution, but it’s impossible to compare and contrast the two scenes (the first scored to Natalie Cole’s “Wild Women Do” and the second to Roy Orbison’s fawning classic, “Pretty Woman”) without noticing that much of the saleswomen’s snobbery came from their distaste at Vivian’s profession. Her money and her wardrobe are from Edward, a man who is paying her for sex. White dress or not, she is still the same person.

And that, really, is the heart of the scene. Class, like clothing, is something we dress ourselves up in to feel better or worse about ourselves. No matter our social status, no matter our attire, and no matter if we are polite or rude, we are all just human beings. We want respect, we want to belong, and we want love.

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[Photo: Everett Collection]