Pretty Woman

To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.

--Harold Pinter

It's a funny phrase, 'feel-good film', isn't it? It's a massive genre. They must make up a large proportion of the yearly Hollywood output. I don't have the figures, but show me a major movie that ends on a downer and I'll show you a flop. And yet, after watching, say, Ten things I hate about you as a teen about to go through the rituals that make up the film I was filled with a profound sadness. Not just because I'm a grumpy arsehole, but also because the deeply aspirational content of the these films pimps dissatisfaction and satisfaction in equal measure - every symmetry inevitably shows you your own asymmetries. Their successes illuminate your failures. And so on. I find feel-good films so enormously depressing that I stick to parables of loss and loathing and feel inversely cheered at the end of each one.

But of course, that very dexterity brings me right back down to earth. Because, as we all know, people don't change. Relationships are for self-affirmation alone. And most importantly, there is never any meaningful escape from the nothingness within ourselves, as any viewer rising from a feel-good film like Pretty Woman will attest.