Pretty Woman is a modern take on the classic Cinderella story where a poor misguided girl meets her prince and her life is dramatically changed. This film has fairy tale elements, but the biggest element in the movie is the use of sex; Vivian, the main character, is a prostitute. She meets her “prince” and is swept off of her feet, but what this really means is that she is bought for an entire week by a handsome, wealthy business man. One would assume that he was buying her for sex, but this is not your average prostitute transaction. This movie has a lot of third wave feminism ideals. Third wave feminism deals with using the female gender and sexuality to further the cause and portray their views. The ultimate goal of this paper is to show that Vivian Ward (portrayed by Julia Roberts), is the poster girl for third wave feminism.
Twenty one minutes into the movie we see a slightly awkward scene where Vivian is talking to her “prince” and holds up a plethora of condoms; she states “I got red, I got yellow, I got green and blue, and for the special man Silver and Gold coins-- the condoms of champions.” He looks at her slightly dumbfounded, because he feels so strange that he has hired a hooker. They have a couple more exchanges and they get less awkward as the movie progresses. The attitude towards women has changed dramatically since 1990, the year that this film came out; you will however, find a few men who still have the attitude that women were put on this earth for their enjoyment.
In the early nineties, women were hyper-sexualized and viewed as pawns in a game. MTV showed music videos with scantily clad women which were seen as extremely scandalous at the time. The nineties was also an era of growth, liberalization and sex...
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...escrewed: Pretty Woman's Co-opted Feminism." Journal of Popular Film and Television 195605th ser. 19.1 (1991): 1-8. EBSCO HOST. Web. 17 Feb. 2014.
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Pretty Woman. Dir. Garry Marshall. Perf. Richard Gere, Julia Roberts, and Ralph Bellamy. Buena Vista Pictures., 1990.
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In Brenda Cooper’s article “Chick Flicks,” she argues, the film, Thelma and Louise employs mockery as a narrative tool, and functions to produce a defiant narrative which fiercely confronts and denounces patriarchy. Societal norms are able to create a kind unconscious compliance, resulting in self-imposed coercion and oppression. A film like Thelma and Louise brings consciousness to women’s own complicity in social norms like patriarchy, so they can no longer blindly follow these norms. This leaves women in either a state of denial and resistance or a state of evolution and change. Through mockery this film sheds light on accepted norms, and in some, causes a defensive response, as it
The movie Pretty Woman takes place in Los Angeles where one of the main characters, Edward Lewis, leaves a party he was attending, finding himself on Hollywood Boulevard having to stop for directions when he is approached by a prostitute. The prostitute, Vivian Ward, offers him directions to his hotel and ends up driving him there. About to go to into the hotel, Edward decides to hire Vivian for the night and invites her inside to his room. The next day Edward asks Vivian if he could hire her for the rest of the week to which Vivian replies that it will cost him. Edward hires Vivian as an “employee” for the entirety of the week for $3,000 dollars. Giving Vivian access to his credit cards, Edward tells Vivian to purchase some new clothes so that she can change out of her street clothes. Vivian is unsuccessfu...
Despite the fact that the character of Phyllis as the “tough as nails” perpetual, intentional aggressor is a valid attempt to obliterate the image of women as the oppressed, one interpretation of this role is that she ultimately seems to misrepresent herself, and females in cinema, anyway. Janet Todd, author of Women and Film, states that, “Women do not exist in American film. Instead we find another creation, made by men, growing out of their ideological imperatives”(130). Though these “power girl”characters are strong examples of anything but submissive and sexual females,the...
As a result actresses have empowered young women to become something more than just the average girl. According to the article, Feminists call Katharine Hepburn...
At first glance, what makes a fairy tale a fairy tale may seem obvious—some kind of magic, hidden symbols, repetition, and of course it’s evident it’s fiction—but fables are more than that. As Arthur Schelesinger puts it, it’s about “[expanding] imagination” and gaining understanding of mysterious places (618). While doing this, it also helps children to escape this world, yet teach a lesson that the reader may not be conscious of. A wonderful story that achieves all of this is Cinderella, but not the traditional tale many American’s have heard. Oochigeaskw, or The Rough-Faced Girl, and Ashputtle would be fitting for a seven-year-old because they get the gears of the mind turning, allowing for an escape on the surface, with an underlying enlightenment for children of the ways of the world.
Wesley, Marilyn C. "Reverence, Rape, Resistance: Joyce Carol Oates and Feminist Film Theory." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 32.3 (1999): 75-85. Literature Online. 13 July 2002 .
What is Feminism? How does feminism affect the world we live in today? Was feminism always present in history, and if so why was it such a struggle for women to gain the respect they rightly deserve? Many authors are able to express their feelings and passions about this subject within their writing. When reading literary works, one can sense the different feminist stages depending on the timeframe that the writing takes place. Two such works are ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by, Charlotte Gilman and ‘Everyday Use’ by, Alice Walker; the feminist views within each story are very apparent by the era each author lives in. It is evident that a matter of fifty years can change the stance of an author’s writing; in one story the main character is a confident and strong willed young woman looking to voice her feminist views on the world, while the other story’s main character is a woman trying to hold on to her voice in a man’s world which is driving her insane.
Gender and the portrayal of gender roles in a film is an intriguing topic. It is interesting to uncover the way women have been idealized in our films, which mirrors the sentiments of the society of that period in time. Consequently, the thesis of this essay is a feminist approach that seeks to compare and contrast the gender roles of two films. The selected films are A few Good Men and Some Like it Hot.
During the course of the spring semester, as a class, we read and watched movies about fallen women and femme fatale in American Literature. Throughout each piece that we studied, I have chosen a book and a movie that I believe will compare and contrast effectively. We watched a movie in class written by J.F. Lawton called Pretty Woman, a movie that made a tragedy into a love story. This story exposed the life of a prostitute in Los Angeles, California. The prostitute, Vivian, happened to give directions to a rich man because he was lost, which led to her staying the night in his hotel room. The man needed Vivian to be his date on a social outing, which later led to more. On the other hand, during the semester we read a book by James M. Cain titled The Postman Always Rings Twice, a book that verbalized a forceful story. The story was about a girl named Cora, a prostitute who lives in a hash house. Then along the way she meets a man named Nick, whom she eventually marries. However Cora has a discomfort of being around her husband that provided her with a pretty virtuous lifestyle. Her solution to her discomfort creates problems that lead to more threatening problems. The movie and the book were both about women being saved from a place they felt undesirable. One fell in love after prostitution while the other never felt love. Now, with that in mind, The Postman Always Rings Twice is more realistic because Cora’s life explains the outcome of a prostitute that readers can relate to unlike Vivian from the movie Pretty Woman whose life is not a realistic outcome that readers can relate to.
Led by Laura Mulvey, feminist film critics have discussed the difficulty presented to female spectators by the controlling male gaze and narrative generally found in mainstream film, creating for female spectators a position that forces them into limited choices: "bisexual" identification with active male characters; identification with the passive, often victimized, female characters; or on occasion, identification with a "masculinized" active female character, who is generally punished for her unhealthy behavior. Before discussing recent improvements, it is important to note that a group of Classic Hollywood films regularly offered female spectators positive, female characters who were active in controlling narrative, gazing and desiring: the screwball comedy.
This paper will examine several studies that investigate the control of prostitutes with regards to their own safety and wellbeing, the stigmatization that they face as well as the inaccuracies the film depicts regarding the daily life of prostitution. This paper will ultimately prove that Pretty Woman glamorizes prostitution giving viewers a false sense of what this occupation truly entails, and creating a dangerous
Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) in Pretty Woman comes from a small town in Georgia, and works as a prostitute on the streets of Hollywood to support herself. Although Vivian's social position is very low, she has a strong sense of personal dignity and independence. Even though sometimes she have to stand by the street with empty stomach to wait for clients, Vivian and her friend Kit still keep themselves from the control of pimps, and "act as their own agents". Later, at the end of Vivian's one-week business arrangement with wealthy Edward Lewis (the Prince to her dream), which culminates in love and growing mutual respect, he offers her an apartment, a car and a credit card to get her off the streets, but she refuses. For Vivian, however, this arrangement is only different in terms of "geography" and terms of payment for the "business”; between them.
...on how they have overcome this demeaning concept, it is still present in many of the films created today. Laura Mulvey, a feminist of the Second Wave, observed the evolution of female representations in films. She concludes that films still display dominant ideologies that prevent social equality between men and women. Mulvey came up with three common themes that mainstream films continuously promote within their films. These three common themes reinforce that women are always going to be seen as nothing more but objects. They do not serve any symbolic purposes except to help advance the story by motivating the objectives of the male characters. As evident, Happy Endings is one particular film that embodies all of these traits and as a result, the female characters are perceived as sexual objects in both the perspectives of the male character(s) and the spectators.