Tootsie is a 1982 satirical comedy directed by Sydney Pollack and written by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal, from a story by Gelbart and Don McGuire. It stars Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, and Teri Garr, with Dabney Coleman, Charles Durning, Bill Murray, Pollack, Geena Davis, George Gaynes, and Doris Belack.
Partly inspired by a play McGuire wrote in the early 1970s, Tootsie was first made into a screenplay in 1979 by Dick Richards, Bob Kaufman, and Robert Evans; Richards would be made director, and he showed Hoffman the project. Hoffman gained complete creative control after signing on. Production was delayed because of screenplay revisions and the replacement of Richards with another director, Hal Ashby, then with Pollack.
The film was a critical and commercial success, grossing $177.2 million worldwide, and being nominated for ten Oscars, including Best Picture; it won Best Supporting Actress for Lange. Tootsie has been selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the complete movie.
Since Tootsie is largely about people struggling in the acting profession, it can be seen to embody the idea behind Jacques‘s famous quote from As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage,/And all the men and women merely players;/They have their exits and their entrances,/And one man in his time plays many parts…” (III, vii, lines 139-142).
Not only is Michael Dorsey (Hoffman) pretending to be a woman, “Dorothy Michaels,” to get a major money-making role out of desperation to find acting work–to raise $8,000 to produce a play by his roommate, Jeff Slater (Murray)–but so is everyone else, in a larger sense, pretending and playing roles, not just as actors and actresses, but also in ordinary life, too. Two major roles in this real-life sort are the expected masculine and feminine roles of society–something “Dorothy” is going to clash with.
Indeed, though Dorsey is a capable and respected actor in New York City, “no one will hire [him],” as his agent, George Fields (Pollack), bluntly tells him to his face, because he is too perfectionistic and difficult to work with. Dorsey is an example of the kind of person I wrote about in my blog post, How Does the Non-dupe Err? To succeed in this society, you have to learn how to be fake with people, to say what they want to hear, to be gracious and polite. If you refuse to be duped by society’s polite hypocrisies, you will err and fail to succeed. This is the problem of otherwise talented Dorsey.
So in all irony, he does the greatest act of fakery of them all: he pretends to have a completely different identity, one not even of his own sex. This leads to the central theme of Tootsie: the dialectical tension between being fake and keeping it real, something embodied not only in “Dorothy,” but also in many of the other characters in the movie.
The very name of the movie, “Tootsie,” is just a brief detail in the story, a reference to something “she” is called once by Ron Carlisle (Coleman), the womanizing, male-chauvinist-pig director of the soap opera (Southwest General) for which “she” lands the role of hospital administrator Emily Kimberly. “She” protests his referring to her by that demeaning name, for indeed, “Tootsie” is just a fake social role. No real woman in the whole wide world is a “Tootsie,” and ironically, it’s a man who tells a man this truth.
The movie begins with a shot of Dorsey’s makeup in a dressing room; he isn’t dressing up like “Dorothy” yet, of course–he’s gluing on a fake mustache. In other words, he ironically is making himself to be even ‘more’ of a man than he is.
Dorsey makes ends meet by working as a waiter in a restaurant and teaching acting classes. One of his students is Sandy Lester (Garr), who also wants a chance to play the Emily Kimberly role. Her unsuccessful audition nonetheless makes Dorsey aware of the acting opportunity, because he has tried to help her improve her acting for the audition.
Sandy is rather timid, and she isn’t good at projecting the kind of rage the Kimberly role is supposed to have. So while she is practicing a scene from the soap opera with an attempt at that rage in front of Dorsey, he deliberately provokes her, hurling harsh criticisms of her acting to get her mad enough. This here is an example of that dialectical tension between showing real feelings and pretending to have them.
(As we know, during the filming of The Shining, Stanley Kubrick used the same kind of tactics, though far nastier and more abusive, on poor Shelley Duvall, rationalizing that it was the only way he could get a convincing performance out of her, as a terrified, stressed woman. It worked, but Kubrick was still an asshole to have done it.)
Now, when Dorsey is all dressed up as “Dorothy” to try out for the Kimberly role, Carlisle deems “her” physically unfit for the part. He doesn’t even give “her” a chance to act and see if “she” can embody the assertive nature of Kimberly. Dorsey initially presents “Dorothy” as a rather genteel, lady-like persona; but when Carlisle rejects “her” out of hand, without even giving “her” a chance to play the role, the inner Dorsey comes out swinging, demonstrating just how tough and assertive “Dorothy” can be. Ironically it’s his difficult personality that gets him the part, finally.
So again, we see the dialectical tension between being who you really are, vs the persona you present to society. It’s natural for Dorsey to be belligerent and argumentative, not for “Dorothy” to do so. On the other hand, being genteel and lady-like are personae that women use in order to fit into society, because it is expected of them to behave in a properly “feminine” way; yet “Dorothy,” enraged at being rejected so unfairly, lets out real emotions that any woman should have the right to express in such a situation.
When “she” get the chance to audition after all, “she” at one point nervously drops the papers with “her” lines, and as “she” stoops down to pick them up, Julie Nichols (Lange), an actress who plays a nurse on the soap opera, helps “Dorothy” pick up the papers. She smiles at “her,” and Dorsey is instantly smitten with her. Being a woman will soon be most inconvenient for him.
Another thing that “Dorothy” does that is, on the one hand, disconcerting to the crew and production of the soap opera, yet on the other hand, a demonstration of “her” natural talent and way of keeping it real, is “her” tendency to disregard the script and to ad lib “her” own dialogue. Again, Dorsey is playing a role, as “Dorothy” and as Kimberly, but his true, rebellious nature is also coming out.
He gets the role, and since “she” has told the producer, Rita Marshall (Belack), and Carlisle that Fields is “her” agent–though he hasn’t yet told Fields that he is “Dorothy”–Marshall tells “her” that they’ll send the contracts over to Fields that very day…so “Dorothy” has to meet up with Fields as soon as possible to let him know that Dorsey and “Dorothy” are one and the same person.
“Dorothy” finds Fields in a restaurant and accosts him there. Again, “she” is presenting the usual genteel, lady-like demeanour, yet “she” also mixes into it the usual Dorsey aggressiveness when “she” insists on sitting with Fields at his table in the restaurant. “She” even has the audacity, as a presumed stranger, to impose on him to buy “her” lunch. Once again, we have that tension between playing a role and being one’s true self. Fields will be far more shocked, of course, to learn that “she” is actually Dorsey in drag.
Now, mention of a man in drag in a comedy leads me inevitably to address an issue that’s sensitive to many today, one to which people were not all that sensitive back in the 1980s. While we shouldn’t be laughing at a man in drag here, for the sake of the transgender community, we can still appreciate Tootsie for the other social issues it addresses, namely, its social critique of sex roles and the experience of women being treated disrespectfully by men. For it is Dorsey’s very dressing in drag that he comes to an understanding of what women go through; he’s like John Howard Griffin in Black Like Me. Perhaps Tootsie could have been named Female Like Me.
The very name, Tootsie, as I mentioned above, is an ironic one for the movie, since “Dorothy” is anything but a tootsie. While Dorsey has found himself falling for Julie, he’s also saddened to see her in an unhappy relationship with Carlisle, who being the philanderer that he is, is also fooling around with another pretty cast member, April Page (Davis).
“Dorothy” hits it off with Julie, who asks if “she” could help her go over a lot of lines for the show in her apartment. There, “she” gets more of an idea of how Carlisle treats her; “she” also comes to notice how much Julie drinks. Julie tells “her” that she’d like a man to be honest with her about how much he likes her, and instead of playing roles and giving her a line, he could just, in all bluntness, tell her he finds her very interesting, and that he’d like to make love with her.
Dorsey, of course, makes a mental note of what Julie has said; and later, at a party that Fields has invited him to, where Julie also is, Dorsey can approach her as himself. Remembering word for word what she said she wanted a man to say to her, he says those exact words to her, assuming he’ll succeed.
She throws her drink in his face.
In this scene, we once again see the tension between being oneself and playing a role. He has said the ‘up front, honest words’ she’s said she wants to hear from a man…yet he has also simply used a line on her. She can sense this, of course, in spite of his acting talent in delivering the line, and it’s even more obvious that she won’t accept hearing a man she’s never met before say he wants to get in bed with her.
To get back to April Page…and speaking of male lechery…”Dorothy” first meets her in the dressing room, and she’s in her bra and panties. April is totally being her unadorned self in front of Dorsey, who must find it very hard (pardon the pun) to carry on pretending to be female. Talk about the…tension…between faking it and keeping it real.
As I mentioned above, on the set, “Dorothy” tends to disregard the script when “she” feels that “her” lines don’t make Kimberly’s points strongly enough, so “she” ad libs instead. As a result of this improvising, Dorsey makes “Dorothy” into something of a feminist icon for American women, refusing to take any man’s shit and standing up for “her” rights.
An example of such ad libbing as an assertion of women’s rights is when Dr. Brewster, played by John Van Horn (Gaynes) is supposed to kiss Kimberly, supposedly out of admiration for her sense of power and authority as a woman. Dorsey won’t tolerate a man kissing him on the lips, of course, so he has “Dorothy” hit Brewster on the head with some files in “her” hands. “She” then reprimands him for treating “her” as a sex object and not respecting “her” for “her” mind.
John Van Horn, incidentally, is the polar opposite of “Dorothy.” He not only sticks to the lines religiously; he’s dependent on them, never able to memorize them and needing cue cards to read from. He’s terrified of having to do live acting on TV, for fear of screwing up–he’s that incompetent. He’s like Marlon Brando, but without the acting talent to compensate. Van Horn is an all-around fake.
Meanwhile, the ad libbed antics of “Dorothy” have made “her” a sensation among women viewers of the soap opera, for they find “her” assertiveness to be an inspiration, a form of women’s liberation. As “she” becomes a big TV star, photographers are taking promotional pictures of “her” in various outfits for magazines like Cosmopolitan, Ms., Woman’s Day, TV Guide, People, and New York. She’s gone from ad libbing from her heart to posing for cameras.
On this last example of magazines “she” poses for, “she” is seen in a bright red dress, saluting with the American flag in the background. In all of this, we can see examples of the tension between someone keeping it real as against faking it. “Her” ad libs are all Dorsey keeping it real, while “Dorothy” is of course fake. The implication of “her” as an embodiment of the experience of ‘freedom’ in the US (i.e., free to be one’s real self) is particularly ironic–and nauseating, if you have left-wing views like me–when contrasted against the ‘totalitarianism’ of life in such socialist states as the USSR, a major source of propaganda in the West in the 1980s. Again, freedom to be real is often fake, and appearances are often deceiving.
Dorsey talks to Fields about getting other acting jobs as “Dorothy.” He’s aware of what a feminist message “she” has for women, and he’d like to expand on that. He, as an actor, has experienced frustrations similar to those of career women: unemployment, waiting forever for phone calls, and working in places where he has no power or control.
While Fields is dismissing as ludicrous the idea that Dorsey can both play other female roles as “Dorothy,” and that as “her” he has important things to say to women, he lists off a number of classic female roles he could play–namely, Medea, Ophelia, and Lady Macbeth…even Eleanor Roosevelt. These choices of female roles for “Dorothy” are significant in terms of Dorsey’s wish to say something important to women, for all of them, in one sense or another, represent a kind of women’s defiance of male power.
Medea takes revenge on her husband, Jason, for abandoning her for another woman (Creusa, or Glauce), which will force Medea, a foreigner in Corinth, to go into exile. She kills Creusa as well as her father, Creon, the king of Corinth, and even the two sons of Medea and Jason! Ophelia, in her madness over Hamlet‘s perceived (or actual?) madness and his killing of her father, Polonius, sings bawdy songs in front of the Danish king and queen, shocking and outraging them. Lady Macbeth conspires with and goads her husband into killing King Duncan of Scotland so Macbeth can be the next king…and she, the next queen of Scotland. Eleanor Roosevelt was a kind of feminist icon in how she completely transformed the traditionally silent role of the First Lady into a platform for political and social activism, proving that a woman could hold immense public influence on the world stage.
Indeed, these references to Shakespeare and other classical theatre bring me back to my “All the world’s a stage” quote from As You Like It. We are all acting, in a larger sense, in real life. Yet within that fakery of acting in society, we’re also paradoxically putting in a lot of our real selves, too, that tension between faking it and keeping it real.
Dorsey tells Fields that he is “Dorothy,” and “she” is him–the role of “Dorothy” is coming out of him. He insists to skeptical Fields that he isn’t just acting, but that there’s a woman inside him, that he’s experiencing the feelings that “Dorothy” has. There’s no script he’s memorizing–not just a lack of one in his ad libs, but also in all of his interactions with others as “her.” This is true Method Acting for Dorsey: the actor tries to achieve sincere and expressive performances by identifying with, understanding, and experiencing a character’s inner motivations and emotions.
Some of the assertiveness of “Dorothy” is rubbing off onto Julie when we see the crew film a scene on the soap opera, in which she aggressively tells off Dr. Brewster. Immediately after the filming of that scene, we have Carlisle’s calling of “Dorothy” by the name of “Tootsie,” and so it is fitting at this time to see “her” telling him off, too.
Dorsey’s charade as “Dorothy” is getting more and more intense, for himself and for others. While in Sandy’s apartment, and she’s taking a shower, he’s in her bedroom and wondering how “Dorothy” will look in one of Sandy’s dresses; so he gets undressed, about to try it on. But she finishes her shower faster than expected and suddenly returns to her bedroom, finding Dorsey in his underwear.
He’s forced to think fast and improvise, so he claims that he wants to sleep with her. She’s receptive to it, and they do; this, of course, will complicate what was just supposed to be a friendship and professional relationship: Sandy is going to act in Jeff’s play.
In this moment of foolishness, we again see the dialectical tension between being oneself and pretending to be someone else. Dorsey is stripped down to his underwear (more his ‘true’ self), yet he’s pretending to want Sandy. He wants to try on her dress, to pretend to be “Dorothy” in it, but he sincerely wants to wear it, too, even when he doesn’t have to be “her,” for as he’s told Fields, “she” really is in Dorsey.
“Dorothy” is getting intense for other people, too, requiring Dorsey to get more intensely involved in the character. Julie’s widowed father, Les (Durning), has met “Dorothy,” and he falls for “her.” Now Dorsey has to keep Les from getting too close without upsetting him and, by extension, Julie.
Meanwhile, John Van Horn arrives at Dorsey’s home, and he makes sexual advances on “Dorothy.” Luckily for Dorsey, Jeff arrives and walks in on them. Soon after, Sandy arrives at the apartment, upset that Dorsey hasn’t answered any of her calls or shown any interest in carrying on his romantic relationship with her. He tries to placate her by giving her a gift of chocolates he got from Les, but she reads the card attached to the package, which has Les’s name on it, and she asks Dorsey if he’s gay. When he finally tells her the truth, that he’s in love with another woman, Sandy is infuriated and leaves the apartment. Dorsey’s excessive pretending eventually forces him to be himself with her.
While we’re developing this supposed LGBT theme, at another point in the story, when “Dorothy” is alone with Julie–after she’s ended her relationship with Carlisle–Dorsey forgets himself in his passion for her and almost kisses her on the lips. Straight, of course, but not homophobic, Julie gently rejects the advance of “Dorothy,” naturally assuming that “she” is a lesbian.
To make things even more difficult for Dorsey, the popularity of “Dorothy” on the soap opera means that the producer, Rita Marshall, wants to extend “her” contract for a year, forcing Dorsey to keep up a charade that, in its growing intensity, is getting to be too much for him. He has to figure out a way to get out of playing the role.
A technical problem forces the cast of the soap opera to perform live on camera, and Dorsey finds his opportunity to get out of playing “Dorothy.” He goes off-script yet again, to the dismay of production, and improvises some nonsense about Emily Kimberly actually being her twin brother, Edward, who took her place to avenge her. He pulls off the wig with an absurdly dead-pan face, and he shocks everyone on set and those watching the show.
Here again, we have the tension between keeping it real and pretending. Dorsey is keeping it real by revealing that he’s a man, but his improvised story about Edward is more pretending. Once the cameras stop rolling, Julie, furious with him for his deception, punches him in the gut and storms off the set.
Les, naturally, is upset about it all, too. Dorsey has returned an engagement ring Les gave him, but when the two meet in a bar, they reconcile, share a few beers, and play some pool.
With the needed money now, Dorsey and Sandy can do Jeff’s play. Dorsey meets with Julie outside the TV studio. She at first doesn’t want to talk to him, but he manages to warm her to him after he tells her he’s reconciled with her father. She admits she misses “Dorothy,” and he says “she” misses Julie, too, and that “she” is right there, inside Dorsey, for whenever Julie needs “her.” He just has to learn how to be “her” without the dress.
His whole character arc has been about learning what it’s like to be a woman, and how to sympathize with women. Such sensitivity should be ideal for Julie, so she can accept him now.
After all, he’s finally keeping it real.
Infinite Ocean 