The Cost of Speaking Correctly - "My Fair Lady" in 2026

A group of educated men stand around congratulating one another on their cleverness. One of them proposes a challenge. Take a woman marked by her voice, remake her, and return her improved as proof of intellectual superiority.

It is framed as intellectual play. As a test of skill. As something harmless enough to be wagered over drinks.

What’s notable is how little My Fair Lady asks us to question that framing.

From its opening moments, the film is remarkably candid about what is happening. This is not a rescue narrative. It is not even, at heart, a story about aspiration. It is an experiment conducted in public, with witnesses, rules, and agreed-upon measures of success. Eliza Doolittle is not invited into a new world. She entered a contest whose terms were set before she understood she was playing.

That clarity is why the film remains so uncomfortable when watched without nostalgia, acting as insulation. Higgins never pretends to improve Eliza for her own sake. He "improves" her to demonstrate mastery, to validate a theory, to impress peers who already share his assumptions about class, intelligence, and worth. Eliza’s consent is transactional, offered under economic pressure and emotional exhaustion. The film does not soften that consent into empowerment. It simply lets it stand.

Henry Higgins is often softened in memory into a difficult genius whose emotional limitations excuse his behavior. But that reading misses what the film actually shows. He is not impulsive. He is not cruel in dramatic bursts. He is procedural. His authority does not rely on force, but on fluency in a system that everyone else has already agreed to respect. When he speaks, others adjust automatically. He does not dominate by threat. He dominates by definition.

This distinction matters because Higgins is not an aberration. He is a prototype. He represents a form of power that presents itself as neutral and technical, immune to moral scrutiny because it claims objectivity. His corrections are framed as accuracy. His dismissals as efficiency. His indifference as rigor. Nothing he does appears exceptional. That is precisely why it works.

Eliza’s training becomes a lesson in how such power reproduces itself. At first, the changes seem superficial: posture, pronunciation, and pacing. But gradually, the demands move inward. She learns not just how to speak, but when. What to suppress. Which impulses require translation before they are safe to express. Language stops being a means of communication and becomes a minefield.

The film is exacting in its portrayal of how repetition replaces instinct. The drills are exhausting, not because they are loud, but because they allow no deviation. There is one correct sound. One acceptable cadence. Over time, Eliza internalizes this logic. She begins to monitor herself before anyone else can. Surveillance becomes self-administered. Control becomes invisible.

This is why the Ascot scene is not merely comic. It is diagnostic. Eliza performs perfectly until genuine enthusiasm breaks through. The laughter that follows is not affectionate. It is corrective. She has violated a boundary she was never shown, only expected to intuit. The lesson is clear. Passing requires constant vigilance. Belonging is conditional.

Visually, the film reinforces this with quiet discipline. Early scenes allow Eliza to spill into frames, expressive, untidy, uncontained. As she is refined, the camera rewards her compliance. She becomes centered, balanced, symmetrical. The traits that once marked her as unacceptable are removed, along with much of what made her singular. Refinement is not expansion. It is compression.

Higgins’ study embodies this worldview. Knowledge accumulates without warmth. Objects exist for use, not attachment. Eliza occupies the space as something being measured, never fully at ease. Even at her most confident, the room does not belong to her. Power here is not personal. It is architectural.

The music follows the same logic. Higgins does not sing because singing would require vulnerability, an admission of interior life that cannot be audited. He speaks rhythmically, expressively, without exposure. Eliza sings because song is the only space where her interior life can exist without immediate correction. But as she masters the system, that space contracts. Expression becomes risk. Control becomes survival.

The film’s emotional center arrives not with success, but with its aftermath. Once the wager is won, Eliza realizes she has been perfected into a state of displacement. She no longer belongs to her former life, but she has no stable place in the new one either. The system that reshaped her has no interest in sustaining her. It required proof, not permanence.

This is where the film quietly steps beyond its period and begins to speak to a recurring cultural pattern. Societies that prize refinement often frame it as an opportunity, while quietly treating those who achieve it as provisional. Advancement is permitted. Belonging is not guaranteed. Mastery earns access, not security.

That pattern did not end with Edwardian London. It persists wherever institutions claim neutrality while enforcing conformity. Professional spaces that reward “polish.” Educational systems that treat fluency as intelligence. Cultural gatekeepers who insist standards are apolitical while benefiting from those who already meet them. Eliza’s story is not about class mobility in the abstract. It is about conditional inclusion as a mechanism of control.

This is also why the film is so frequently misremembered as a romance. Romance offers absolution. It converts imbalance into destiny, power into chemistry, endurance into devotion. Reading the ending as love allows the audience to close the ledger. It resolves discomfort without requiring accountability.

The film itself never provides that resolution. Higgins does not apologize. He does not relinquish authority. Eliza does not reclaim the terms of the exchange. What the final scene offers is not harmony, but ambiguity, the unsettling quiet of a system left intact. If you read romance into it, you are supplying what the film withholds.

That withholding is deliberate. My Fair Lady does not correct its world because it understands how rarely such worlds correct themselves. Power persists precisely because it experiences no consequences. Eliza survives the system, but she does not defeat it. Higgins remains unchanged, not as an endorsement, but as a diagnosis.

This is why the film still resists comfort. Language still gates access. Taste still disguises itself as virtue. People are still taught to edit themselves to fit rooms that were never designed for them. And they are still praised for how well they disappear into acceptability.

The film does not argue against this arrangement. It stages it carefully and leaves the cost visible. Eliza pays that cost in dislocation. Higgins pays nothing at all.

In an era that treats cultural classics as reassurance, My Fair Lady remains quietly adversarial. It does not ask to be admired. It asks to be examined. It asks whether the voice you learned to use was chosen freely, and whether the room that finally welcomed you ever intended to let you remain whole.

Those questions are not historical. They are ongoing.

And that is why this film, beneath its polish, still refuses to settle into comfort.