‘Whore’: Ken Russell’s X-rated answer to ‘Pretty Woman’ and the problem with sex work on screen
Hollywood has a sex work problem. For decades, the film industry has been both obsessed and completely incapable of adequately portraying the oldest profession in the world, falling back on the tired clichés of the hooker with a heart of gold, the abuse victim, and the voracious nymphomaniac living the dream.
Early attempts at authenticity, such as Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, Alan J Pakula’s Klute, and Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, all fell into one of these traps even as they valiantly attempted to demystify and destigmatise sex work. More recently, Sean Baker has led the charge in presenting even more realistic and humanised portraits of the people in the profession in Tangerine and Anora, the latter of which borrows heavily from Fellini’s Nights Cabiria.
But if there’s one movie about sex work that everyone thinks of first, it’s Garry Marshall’s 1990 rom-com Pretty Woman. Starring Julia Roberts as a prostitute who falls in love with a wealthy businessman, played by Richard Gere, it’s a feel-good fairytale that touches on the stigma of sex work while leaving out the realities of the job entirely. Roberts is so blindingly charismatic that the film is more of a vehicle for her beguiling screen presence than an exploration of a polarising topic. British provocateur Ken Russell decided to put things straight.
Russell made a name for himself in the 1960s and ‘70s with movies like Women in Love, which was nominated for four Oscars, and The Devils, which was so controversial in its blending of graphic sex and religious iconography that it was banned in several countries and slapped with an ‘X’ rating. In 1980, he made Altered States, a movie about a psychiatry professor who tries to uncover the “Ultimate Truth” through experimental substances and finds himself wandering around with a seven-eyed ram and transforming into a primordial ape.
His track record of putting sex on screen in the most provocative ways made Russell an ideal candidate to challenge Pretty Woman, and he teamed up with an actor who had a similarly fearless reputation. Theresa Russell (no relation), who Roger Ebert called “the actress you call when you need great skill combined with great courage,” had starred in several controversial erotic dramas before 1991, including Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing and Sondra Locke’s Impulse. She was perfect for the role of the sex worker Liz and was on the same page with Russell when it came to blasting Julia Roberts’ movie to smithereens.
Based on a play by a London cab driver who apparently drew on personal experience driving sex workers to and from jobs, Whore follows a day in the life of Liz, a Los Angeles call girl who does not get picked up by Richard Gere. Instead, she stands on the side of a busy road, getting propositioned for anal sex and narrowly escaping murder. The film is shot in an almost documentary style, with Liz speaking directly into the camera to talk about her life as a sex worker. In one scene, she reminisces about the time she was picked up in a van, gang raped, and left for dead. In Whore, sex work is shown to be a grimy, debasing profession that Liz is trapped in.
Although there is no nudity in the film, it received an ‘X’ rating in the UK for its graphic language and “cumulative effect”. The director was furious, saying that Whore was much less problematic than Pretty Woman because it showed the realities of sex work, while Julia Roberts’ movie turned it into a fantasy. “This is a film about a prostitute, told in a prostitute’s language,” Russell said before the film was released. “You know, they’ve got a limited vocabulary. They tend to be graphic.”
As this comment suggests, the director was sincere in his attempt to de-glamourise prostitution, but in doing so, he fell right back into the old trope of casting sex workers as pitiful victims. Liz might be brimming with wisecracks, but she is, at the end of the day, a victim of the brutality of men whose only hope of survival – a friendship with a woman who isn’t a sex worker – is dashed by her violent pimp. In attempting to right the wrongs of Pretty Woman, Russell made what is, despite the ‘X’ rating, an even more conservative film about prostitution – one that maddeningly lacks depth or nuance and which simply perpetuates a condescending cliché.
