Risque' Business

"I'd appreciate it if you'd stop laying these little judgments on me while you're leaning on your daddy's $40,000 car."

Above: Lana enters.

About ten years ago I was contacted to write a piece for an anthology on 1980s high school/college-themed films, intended to be a group of essays from people who had seen the movies the year they were released and were looking back on what they meant to them. My first inclination was to write about how conflicted I had become over rapey tropes that at the time I might have laughed along with (Molly Ringwald had some wonderful commentary on this in an article subtitled “Revisting the movies of my youth in the age of #Metoo https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/what-about-the-breakfast-club-molly-ringwald-metoo-john-hughes-pretty-in-pink); it turned out someone else was doing this, so I looked into sex work in 80s films. I was requested to keep the word count under 1000. This is a draft of the essay I started but never finished. I don’t know what happened to the book project. 

The Pragmatism of Lana

I hadn’t seen Risky Business (1983) in decades when I decided to write about it. I remembered it as a story about a young man who was so irresistible that a sex worker decided to have sex with him for free, a common fantasy among young men but one that misunderstands the motivations of sex workers, who often prefer older men who are more likely to be well-mannered, clean, respectful, and generous clients than pre-college-aged boys. Upon rewatching it, I was delighted to find my memory was flawed. I fell more than a little bit in love with Lana.

Many coming-of-age movies of this era portray women solely as the just deserts of men. For instance, throughout The Breakfast Club, Bender (played by then-25-year-old Judd Nelson) verbally abuses Claire (played by then 16-year-old Molly Ringwald), but at the end she not only invites him to have sex with her, she gives him an expensive piece of jewelry. In both Revenge of the Nerds and Sixteen Candles, the reward for the boys is the light-hearted and consequence-free execution of sex crimes – commonly, in 1980s movies, prom queens and pretty girls “deserved” their comeuppance in the form of humiliation, harassment, or date rape. The behavior of these young men made the catharsis of watching young women such as Carrie White (Carrie, 1976) and Riff Randall (Rock N Roll High School, 1979) blowing up their high schools comprehensible, if still reprehensible, as expressions of teenage angst — before the horror and heartbreak of the Columbine shootings emphasized that this was not a suitable metaphor.

The working title of Risky Business was “White Boys Off the Lake,” referring to the affluent suburb of Lake Michigan where the action takes place. It is peak Reagan-era suburbia. The final title is obviously much catchier for marketing, but the working title is a reasonable description of late-blooming virgin Joel (20-year-old Tom Cruise in the role that kickstarted his career) and his circle of friends, all of whom are spending the last years of their teens trying to get into Ivy-league colleges.

The working title was also a reference to Joel’s first encounter with an escort. After his parents leave him in charge of the house while they go out of town, he dances around the house to “Old Time Rock N Roll,” then calls “Jackie” from a classified ad, who arrives in a taxi. When he opens the door, he discovers that Jackie is a black man wearing femme makeup and clothes. After a moment of pretending not to be the person who called, Joel regathers the manners his mother seems to have taught him for awkward situations such as this and manages to be somewhat accountable to Jackie, paying him (Jackie never establishes a pronoun or a gender identity) for his time and the taxi. While intensely problematic, it’s an oddly measured scene for 1980s film, considering the brutally gleeful disrespect gender fluid, queer, or BIPOC people usually elicit in this era. In turn, Jackie gives Joel a number for “Lana,” saying, “She’s what you want…. It’s what every white boy off the lake wants.”

When Joel musters the nerve to call Lana, she arrives like a dream: a young, blonde, blue-eyed, and leggy dream, in clothes that manage to appear both innocent and raunchy, who spends the night having wild sex with him; then in the morning she gives him a verbal invoice for $300 [equivalent to a bit under $1000 in 2024] -- which he doesn’t have. He goes to the bank to cash in a savings bond from his grandparents, but when he returns, she’s gone, having taken an expensive crystal egg from his parents’ mantel in lieu of payment.

Having some experience as an escort, I observe two particularly unrealistic aspects to this chain of events: 1) Escorts describe themselves as accurately as possible in their ads, give or take a reasonable amount of flattering adjectives. The odds of someone hiring a Jackie when they are looking for a Lana are slim, even given Joel’s complete lack of experience; and 2) We get the money upfront.

Overall, though, I was able to suspend my disbelief and thoroughly enjoy (then 23-year-old) Rebecca De Mornay’s portrayal of Lana. Joel’s sexual fantasies and dreams are riddled with terrible consequences before Lana shows up, but she teaches him a valuable lesson. As he and Lana scheme to get the money he owes her and then some, he watches her hustle and admiringly muses, “It was great the way her mind worked. No guilt, no doubts, no fear. None of my specialties. Just the shameless pursuit of immediate gratification. What a capitalist.”

Capitalism is what the white boys off the lake are all about. In an earlier scene when Joel asks his friends if they really want to accomplish anything or if they want to just make money, they roundly agree that money is the goal. “What about you, Joel?” one of them asks. When he says he wants to serve his fellow man, they all throw food at him. The vision of future capitalists literally throwing their excess food at someone for making a philanthropic comment couldn’t be more pointed.

This satire’s obvious alignment of the values of capitalism with the values of prostitution may be intended more to malign capitalism than to validate sex work, but because of Rebecca De Mornay’s brilliant interpretation of Lana (she was under the professional tutelage of one of the all-time acting greats, Harry Dean Stanton) it manages to do both. And, unlike the date-rapey hijinks in so many coming-of-age movies, the sex is all patently consensual.

The point of the movie seems to be that the capitalist youth are no more moral than the sex workers. The phrase “prostituting yourself” is often used as an insult toward those who are doing work solely for the money, particularly if the work contributes little to society or is below the worker’s talents and stated values, and this is one of the reasons. However, in this movie, nobody is above doing it just for the money, and Lana, with her talent, is given credit for her business ability and her goals for the future. As the movie comes to a close, the implication is that Lana, having possibly set Joel up with the man she calls her manager, likes him fine, but intends to go about her own business once he’s off at school. She doesn’t need Joel to get ahead. Furthermore, she seems sure that sex work, rather than destroying her life, has, along with her natural pragmatism, given her the skills she needs to get ahead in business, which is the definition of mainstream American success. If no one is working for any other reason than to get money, and if we’re going to admire those who go for it and get it, why shouldn’t a sex worker get the same admiration and respect as any other go-getter?

As the movie ends, when Joel has set up a pop-up brothel and made thousands of dollars in a night by having Lana’s friends meet his friends, he says he “deals in human fulfillment.” However, Lana is the one who delivers it.

Incidentally, Risky Business was originally produced for 6.2 million and has grossed over ten times that amount. Bruce A Young, who portrayed Jackie, continued to work as an actor and as a screenwriter whose credits include the television series E/R, and reportedly has a net worth of about $6 million. Rebecca De Mornay, who has continued to work in film and television and can more recently be seen playing Jessica Jones’ mother, is reportedly worth about $11 million. And Tom Cruise, the white boy by the lake, is reportedly worth about $470 million. (This information is pulled off the internet, isn’t verified by any accountants and is probably wildly inaccurate, but could be proportionate all the same.)

And that was my 1000 words or so! What do you think about Risky Business? Did you ever enjoy it? Is it more problematic than I see it being? Less? Can you imagine it getting made in 2024?

I didn’t get to mention that both Risky Business and Pretty Woman, two of the English-speaking world’s most successful films featuring sex worker characters, were both originally produced with sadder endings than the versions that were released – and both of those endings were sadder for the women, not the men. I’ve studied and analyzed the way fashion is used these and other films, and I’ll be posting more about that, as well.