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Notes -
The play isn’t “blue pill” or woke, it’s just telling a different story with completely different motivations for the protagonist.
The film genericizes the plot into the generic Pretty Woman romcom where the charming and suave man saves the humble and overlooked girl from a miserable life and elevates her. It’s the classic ‘I can fix her’ narrative which appeals - as all the best romantic comedies do - to both sexes. It’s not even necessarily gendered, since it’s a fantasy for both sexes to get a “great deal” on the dating/marriage/sex marketplace by taking someone of lower status and elevating them above what they could get in their own class / status / looks range to start with. See jokes about dating a fat girl and taking her to the gym etc.
The original story is darker and involves actual satire, the rest of the cast are much more fleshed out, and the ending retains a glorious ambiguity. My Fair Lady is merely the default romcom with some limited aesthetic influence from Pygmalion, if even that. In addition, Higgins has a lot of Shaw in him, and Shaw seems to have had a strange disinterest in sex that would make elevating a pretty peasant girl to society for himself to fuck incongruent with the narrative as presented.
Part of the humor of the story is that he really is doing it as a bet, not to sleep with Eliza.
I don’t know that the film portrays Higgins as suave or charming; maybe as a straight guy I’m just not picking up on what women would see in him, but to me Higgins comes off as a turbo-autistic and self-absorbed Confirmed Old Bachelor. The song “A Hymn To Him” implies that he’s at best an ardent misogynist (and not in the “believes in restrictions on female sexuality” feminist sense, but rather the purer “can’t stand to be around women, prefers the exclusive company of men” sense), at worst a self-closeted homosexual narcissist who is only capable of interacting respectfully with people who share his precise personality. However, I do agree that the ending of the film lets him off the hook.
That being said, maybe @FiveHourMarathon’s redpilled reading of the film is correct and that in real life Eliza would return to Higgins, whether because his domineering attitude and aloofness toward her are genuinely attractive, or because a woman from her background would recognize the obvious practical/financial downsides to a long-term relationship with Freddy and would decide instead on the pragmatic hard-headed choice to hitch her wagon to Higgins, as flawed and difficult as he may be.
Probably the best synthesis is simply to accept that straight plays and musicals have inherently different purposes. While there are examples of musicals with unambiguously tragic/unhappy endings, generally speaking (and this is especially true of Golden Age musicals like My Fair Lady) audiences are just never going to accept a bleak and emotionally-unsatisfying ending to a musical. Plays can get away with that because the genre conventions are far less hard-coded. My tastes lean toward preferring the bleak and unsparing ending - I’ve joked in the past that I never want to see another movie with a happy ending ever again - but I accept the realities of what it took to get the film made.
(Such as casting a lead actress who couldn’t sing and dubbing virtually every line of her singing in the film, and then not crediting the splendid Marni Nixon for her overdubbing. I love Audrey Hepburn as much as any straight man with eyes does, but the part should have gone to Julie Andrews, and thank god someone took a chance on her soon after and her full career was launched by The Sound Of Music.)
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There's whole sequences in both plays devoted to showing this, I'd argue it was much more effectively achieved in the musical where the disinterest is easier to show in blocking and attitude, along with two whole ass songs about it, where the play shows it by character walks into room and gives dissertation on the topic. The romance isn't remotely similar to Pretty Woman, as you say Higgins isn't seeking to "make a good deal" which is where the humorous character of the father comes into view. The humor and romance is precisely finding love at a time when you aren't looking for it, about closeness and intimacy melting neuroticism and narcissism.
I see what you’re saying, but I just don’t think it comes across that way. Call me a cynic but I think there’s an underlying suggestiveness to Higgins’ behavior in My Fair Lady around the prurient motive. And Shaw goes a great distance to remove that from the play, and then the musical puts it back and expects the song to remove the muddiness.
And it’s like you kind of suggest in your first post, My Fair Lady is a sexier story. Men dream of finding the diamond in the rough, the beautiful girl who doesn’t know how beautiful she is. Women dream of being plucked from mundanity and raised to a better life. But if we buy that, and we buy the new ending, then is it really likely that the thought wasn’t in the back of Higgins’ mind the whole time?
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Just to interject: I’ve never seen either play, but this is a big theme in the original myth as told by Ovid. Notably, the sculptor Pygmalion decides that women are all immoral sluts, essentially, and as such resolves to never take a wife. But he can’t help but fall in love with the statue: he starts to give it gifts, and dress it up, and, well, get intimate with it. By the end, Pygmalion himself transforms from a grumpy man averse to love into a perfect exemplum of the Roman “lover” archetype (the kind of character that Ovid presents in his other love poetry). There’s a neat parallel where the statue’s transformation into a real woman is described with the metaphor of cosmetic wax melting in the sun, which parallels the “fires of love” (the plural Latin word for fire tends to have this connotation) melting the sculptor’s hardened heart. As such, to the extent that any of the modern reimaginings also deal with this theme, they’re exhibiting fidelity to the original intention of Ovid.
(Sorry for the tangent. I just wanted to monologue a bit about this topic.)
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