Am I the only one who's glad that Recipe Redux was replaced by Look and Riffs and all that? I now turn to Riffs right away, curious to see whose fleeting, desultory thoughts might have been successfully woven into a nice little essay. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. When it does, it's very satisfying, as is the case with Carina Chocano's revisitation of the early 90's cultural deathmatch between the gender politics of Thelma and Louise and Pretty Woman. If you read Chocano's reviews in the LA Times (before her layoff, emblematic of the editorial misguidance of our paper, left us with one fewer sharp critic), you'll have a sense of her sympathies about these two movies, but there's a nice twist in the kicker:
For the few years after the release of “Thelma and Louise,” the culture seemed unusually and (in hindsight) unbelievably receptive to the plaintive howls of a generation of girls who, as I did, felt exiled from the culture. Within a few more years, though, the whole thing would be supplanted by a far more chipper, more palatable, more profitable version of itself. It’s now nearly impossible to imagine a time, not so long ago, when popular culture was more interested in cool girls than hot girls — or a cultural moment in which girls could become iconic for airing their grievances and not simply their dirty laundry. As it turned out, it was a quick traverse from “revolution grrrl-style now” to “girl power,” as Riot Grrrls gave way to Spice Girls and the dominant pop-culture narrative about femininity went the way of “Sex and the City.” And Carrie Bradshaw (among others) stands pretty clearly as a descendant of Vivian, not of Thelma or Louise.
Ultimately, “Pretty Woman” wasn’t a love story; it was a money story. Its logic depended on a disconnect between character and narrative, between image and meaning, between money and value, and that made it not cluelessly traditional but thoroughly postmodern. Revisiting “Thelma and Louise” recently, I was struck by how dated it seemed, how much a product of its time. And “Pretty Woman,” it turns out, wasn’t a throwback at all. It was the future.
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