The Problematics: ‘Risky Business’ At 40, a Movie Where Hookers, Teenage Boys, And Capitalism Collide

One of the great modern narrative conventions — and by “great” I mean hackneyed and ignorant and sentimental — is that of the “hooker with a heart of gold.” Not to say that there aren’t plenty of sex workers with admirable hearts, but the whole idea involves a bunch of category errors, which are exacerbated when a filmmaker wants to up the ante and make his hooker breathtakingly beautiful and also irresistibly attracted to the film’s male protagonist, who is almost invariably a stand-in for the filmmaker. 

This is something that tended to happen a good deal in Tarantino-adjacent films. See, for a most laughable example, Tarantino collaborator Roger Avary’s 1993 Killing Zoe, in which Eric Stoltz’s Zed lands in Paris and meets the titular gorgeous call girl (Julie Delpy!) who is destined not in fact to be killed but to (spoiler alert) by saved by Zed and become his best girl by the fadeout. See also of course, Tony Scott’s 1993 True Romance, written by Tarantino, in which Christian Slater’s comic-book-store employee Clarence instantly wins the heart of gorgeous escort Alabama (Patricia Arquette!) and then actually kills her pimp, as comic-book-store employees tend to do. 

This highly improbable male fantasy is not exclusive to the Video Archives guys. In the 1982 Ron Howard comedy Night Shift, morgue attendant Henry Winkler is convinced by gonzo pal Michael Keaton to turn the corpse icehouse into a brothel, and, yes, wins the heart of said brothel’s main draw — Shelley Long! — in the process. But I reckon that in terms of its influence on subsequent cinematic schemes, it’s Paul Brickman’s Risky Business, which turns forty this month, that was most significant. 

The movie is a milestone for several reasons. One is its male lead, Tom Cruise — this is one of the pictures that made him a star. It’s also a movie that proved the marketability of tropes that would fuel the subsequent teen comedies of John Hughes and John Hughes wannabes that flooded movie theaters in the mid-eighties. Sixteen Candles came the next year, and after that, the deluge of movies in which teens had house-wrecking booze-fueled parties on the weekends their parents were out of town. 

But we’re here to talk about the hookers, because this is a Problematic and we’re curious as to how the movie’s perspective on sex work plays out forty years later. And as it happens, it’s complicated but not bad! And it’s tied in with a subtle but pointed critique of American notions of free enterprise. Cruise’s Joel Goodsen (pronounced “good son”) is a Chicago teen wrapped up in striving — he and his well-off parents are consumed by getting him into a good school. But his SAT scores are mid, his work with his high school group “Future Enterprisers” is uninspired, and he’s eaten up by guilt over things he hasn’t even done. The movie begins with Joel recounting a sex dream that turns to a nightmare when he’s ejected from the shower he’s sharing with a fantasy girl and dropped into a scholastic test that he then fails. There’s another dream later, in which playtime with a babysitter is turned into a police siege, complete with his parents imploring him via bullhorns. Joel is neither Catholic nor Jewish as far as we can tell, and yet…

When his parents go on a lengthy trip — complete with instructions not to drive Dad’s Porsche, to make sure the house stays in order, and all that — Joel’s considerably nerdier pal Miles (Harry Nilsson maven and Revenge of the Nerds star Curtis Armstrong) advises him “Sometimes you gotta say what the fuck.” To this end, Miles phones a classified-ad escort and instructs that individual to go to Joel’s house. Joel freaks out, Miles cuts out, and Joel waits with considerable anxiety. 

The individual who shows up is Jackie. Who I take to be a Black cross-dressing prostitute rather than transgender, and not just because they’re played by Bruce A. Young, who generally plays cisgender male roles. Now, in almost any other movie from this time and milieu you could name, including John Hughes ones, the character of Jackie would be played as a cheap, transphobic, homophobic, you-name-it-phobic joke. 

But here’s the thing about Risky Business. Its writer-director Paul Brickman was a subtler, more thoughtful filmmaker than one would expect to be concocting a teen comedy of any ilk. This shows in his measured, understated filmmaking style and in his taste — its score is by electronic music pioneers Tangerine Dream, and it’s not poppy, it’s understated, seductive, insinuating. (But of course there are also a few crowd-pleasing rock songs on the soundtrack, including of course Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock And Roll,” to which Cruise dances in his tighty-whities in the film’s most iconic scene.)  

So while the initial sight of Jackie at Joel’s front door does register as a not-unfunny shock, the movie’s subsequent treatment of the character is relatively respectful. That’s down to Joel, of course, who’s a well-brought up fellow. He invites Jackie inside and tells her of the misunderstanding. They come to “an arrangement” for which Jackie will be compensated for, as they put it, “‘My time, my effort, my infinite patience and understanding.” Before they get into the cab Joel has called for her, they gives him the number for one “Lana,” assuring him “It’s what you want. It’s what every white boy off the lake wants.”

And here is where we veer off from reality most astoundingly. Joel’s dreams, as we’ve seen thus far, involve him pursuing erotic pleasure and getting somehow busted, leading to his life in ruins. So it’s provocative and apt that Brickman has the gorgeous Lana, embodied by Rebecca De Mornay, enters Joel’s house while he’s sleeping, and appears to him as IF IN A DREAM. Their subsequent sex scene unfolds in a highly stylized way, with Joel undressing her in the living room and the doors to the backyard opening of themselves, the wind blowing in leaves from the garden and the red, red roses of that garden visible; then sex on the staircase, then sex in the comfy chair. Now if you’ve seen even one episode of the adult film series Tonight’s Girlfriend, in which porn performers act out as escorts (and some of them actually do double up in real life!) you know this is of course completely unrealistic. Your escort always gets the money first. Then sometimes they ask you if you’re a cop. And if you are a cop, you have to say you are, unless you’re a corrupt cop and you don’t say you are and you then bust the escort anyway. Unless, on the other hand, you’re a cop who’s legitimately paying for an escort. Okay, let’s not get too deep into these woods here. In this movie, not only does Lana stay overnight and have breakfast the next morning, she only then tells her client: “You owe me 300 dollars…Joel.”

And hence the motor that gives the movie its title. I need not reprise the fleeing from “Guido, the killer pimp” (played with some genuine menace by Joe Pantoliano, before his schtick turned cartoonish), nor the inspired idea to turn the Goodsen house into a bawdy house for curious teens, upping Joel’s status with the Future Enterprisers, helping clean up Dad’s Porsche (in one of two bits most directly anticipating John Hughes, the car falls off a pier and into Lake Michigan at one point; the other Hughes pre-echo is Joel’s pleading with a non-compliant school nurse), and showing a Princeton recruiter a good enough time that he gets into that school. (His dad compliments him on the feat — he’s not privy to the particulars — by repeating what had been Miles’ advice, substituting “heck” for the “F” word.) 

As for Lana, does Joel indeed win her heart? In Brickman’s original version of the ending, Joel’s once moony attitude toward the sex worker turns somewhat sinister. In the ending released to the public, things are more tentative. Part of Lana’s proposition to Joel when pitching the idea of turning the Goodsen residence into a house or prostitution is that during the duration of the, um, pop-up shop, she’ll be his “girlfriend.” So she kind of invents “girlfriend experience” here. This is another factor of the movie’s nuanced critique of uniquely American corruption — the erotic and amorous relationship as a largely transactional one. By the same token, though, the movie doesn’t posit sex work as something from which Lana needs to be delivered or saved. That makes Risky Business a surprisingly progressive movie, which makes it a rather refreshing contemporary watch. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.