Point Break of the Speed Matrix

Today I bought floss and I thought of Pretty Woman.  The only thing less believable than the entire premise of the film is the fact that any Hollywood hooker would floss…further still, would floss mid-appointment.  “What’s with this screwy detail?  This doesn’t make any sense to me,” I whisper to no one in CVS aisle 7.   

 Let’s go back to the beginning, shall we?  We are first introduced to Vivian Ward as  a gal trying to pay her rent and has to hunt down her drug addled roommate to collect the money (see Blue Banana sequence).  I get it.  She’s responsible and sober.  Clearly this is no run of the mill hood rat.    But do we buy it yet?

She picks up Richard Gere and instead of having the filithiest road trip discussion on the way to his hotel, she riddles him with…wait for it… TRIVIA.  She’s got knowledge!  Nice touch, Gary.  We ,the audience, have all but forgotten that she refers to three handjobs and letting someone watch her pee as a “slow night”.

Now how ,as a film maker, do you drive this point home?  Well she does bring a “buffet of safety”  to the hotel… but this is life and condoms are not strictly hooker territory.  Gary needs something else… something that says this is the second time she’s ever done sexing for money and before that it was just her high school sweetheart who was killed in a terrible football team bus auto collision.  But what?   *LIGHTBULB*  Oral hygeine!

I can just hear Gary Marshall’s raspy Brooklyn accent at the writer’s meeting:  “Let’s give her some sawt of characta trait so that subcawntiously the awdience knows she’s clean down theh.  Yah know, if she cares about her mouth she cares about her love burger**.  How do we show this people?  Everybody brushes their teeth.  Maw specific maw specific.  Maybe a Sonic Care treatment befaw she leaves faw the night… nah.  What’s cheap?  What can a hookah affawd?  I got it!  FLAWSS!  Write it up!”  

**I like to think that Gary mixes up his euphemisms.

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