[To celebrate one of our strangest holidays, Groundhog Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying that film as well as four others in the long and unique career of Bill Murray. Leading up to a crowd-sourced post featuring your takes on these and other Murray classics!]
On the
challenges and benefits of re-viewing complicated classics.
Although by 1982
Bill Murray had already transitioned from his breakout role
on Saturday Night Live to movies
and had begun to enter the comic actor A-list with films like Caddyshack (1980)
and Stripes (1981), he
has a relatively small supporting role in Sydney Pollack’s
romantic comedy Tootsie (1982),
playing Jeff Slater, a playwright and the roommate of protagonist Michael
Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman). But he has one of the film’s most famous lines (as
Murray so often does; I don’t know any actor who delivers comic lines more
pitch-perfectly than he has for more than four decades now), as well as one
that gets at the problem I’m highlighting in this post: struggling actor Dorsey
has begun cross-dressing as a woman, imaginary actress Dorothy
Michaels, in order to secure a part on a daytime soap opera; he and Slater
are trying to choose an outfit for a particularly important scene, and as
Dorsey talks about clothes and how they do or don’t flatter his “female” body, Murray’s Slater notes, “I
think we’re getting into a weird area here.”
It’s understandable
that Slater would find his roommate and friend’s newfound “female” perspective
to be weird, but it’s also clearly (and perhaps inevitably in a movie released
40 years ago) the case that the film overall presents Dorsey’s cross-dressing
as both strange and silly (as well as driven by purely professional goals,
rather than any psychological or emotional needs). The situation also leads to
some casual violent homophobia that’s largely played for laughs: Charles Durning’s Les
Nichols, the father of Dorsey’s soap opera co-star and eventual love
interest Julie Nichols (Jessica Lange), falls in love with and even proposes
marriage to Dorothy; when he finds out that Dorothy was really a man, he tells
Dorsey, “The only reason you’re still living is because I never kissed you.” While
the film doesn’t endorse that violent homophobia by any means, it also
continues to present Les as sympathetic after he expresses it; indeed, Dorsey
buys him a beer shortly thereafter and it seems that the two men will be
friends. All of that might make sense and work within this 1982 film, but it
looks very different and far more problematic on a 2022 viewing.
That doesn’t
mean we shouldn’t view Tootsie today,
however, nor that there aren’t contemporary benefits to doing so (besides
enjoying a successful romantic comedy, which it remains). For one thing, there
are few ways to engage with historical attitudes and narratives better than
seeing how they were represented in popular culture—obviously some cultural
works express
and endorse such blatantly hateful attitudes that it might be more
destructive to engage them; but many others, like this film, simply reflect
some of the problematic narratives of their era and allow us to better
understand them as a result. And for another thing, almost all cultural works
also include other perspectives, including surprisingly progressive ones—such as
one of Tootsie’s final lines, when Dorsey
apologizes to Julie by saying, “I was a better man with you as a woman than I
ever was with a woman as a man…I just gotta learn to do it without the dress.”
I’d call that a pretty thoughtful rejection of toxic masculinity, in romantic
relationships and overall, and that’s a theme that’s even more important in
2022 than it was in 1982.
Next
MurrayStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Takes on other Murray films?
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