Uncovering Hollywood’s perpetual longing for a lost industrial America
“We don’t make things in America anymore”: like clockwork, this refrain resurfaces in political discourse, a reflection of yearning for a bygone era of industrial productivity. In his latest work, Grant Farred uses the 1990 film Pretty Woman to expose and critique this lingering nostalgia for late-industrial capitalism.
Situating Pretty Woman alongside Reagan-era films including Wall Street, Farred examines the congealment of such a pervasive romanticized view of the United States as a fading industrial powerhouse. Drawing on an eclectic range of thinkers—from Raymond Williams and Slavoj Žižek to Mick Jagger—The Prettiest Woman offers a unique analysis of the ways Hollywood perpetuates the myth of a lost “productive America,” highlighting the seductive power of this fantasy despite its disconnect from economic and political realities.
Table of Contents
Like Clockwork: “Bring the Jobs Back to America”
She’s a Pretty Woman
Nostalgia
A Hollywood Genealogy
Cold Calling Is a Mug’s Game
Wall Street
You Are the Suit You Wear
Raymond Williams: A Brief Word
The Patient Is on Life Support but Is Not Yet Dead
The Baseness of/in the Superstructure
Working Women
Late Industrial Capitalism 1: “Making Things in America”
Late Industrial Capitalism 2: Nostalgia and Grievance
On Morality: A Brief Žižekian Word
It’s Big in Japan
The Boro Aesthetic
Bastard 1
A New Economy of the Prostitute and Its Dangers
My Fair Lady, Beverly Hills Style
All a Pretty Prostitute Needs Is Her Own Dr. Henry Higgins
The Upside of Not Knowing Which Fork to Use
Who’s Driving Edward Lewis?
Bastard 2: The Hostility of the Takeover
Oedipal Drama, Pretty Woman Style
Making and Unmaking in the Oedipal Family Drama
To Make Something
Father’s Son, Mother’s Son: The Enduring Phantasmatic Father
The Žižekian Ethics of Mick Jagger
“It Must Be Very Difficult to Let Go of Something So Beautiful”
To Steal, to Make of Steel
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Grant Farred is author of several books, including What’s My Name: Black Vernacular Intellectuals; Martin Heidegger Saved My Life; and An Essay for Ezra: Racial Terror in America (all from Minnesota).