Some Like It Hot · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch Jack Lemmon when he comes back from the date. Eyes shining, maracas in hand, he announces he's engaged. Joe asks who the lucky girl is. "I am," he says, and shakes the maracas — chka-chka-chka — into the silence where his good sense used to be. That rattle is the whole film in one sound. Daphne has stopped pretending to be a woman and started enjoying being one, and the maracas are there to paper over the place where a man's judgment should have kicked in and didn't. Wilder hands you the gag and the diagnosis at the same time.

Deleuze has a name for what Lemmon is doing, and it isn't "acting." He calls it a gest — a posture or attitude that, instead of moving the plot along, suddenly exposes the social and theatrical machinery underneath a relationship. When Lemmon teeters on heels, clutches a stole, lets his voice climb, he isn't disappearing into Daphne. He's discovering, gleefully, that "woman" is a role you can put on like a wig — and once you see that, "man" looks like a role too. The drag never quite convinces us, and it isn't supposed to. Charles Lang's soft black-and-white (chosen because color makeup turned the men a ghastly green) keeps the disguise plausible enough to run on, while the body underneath stays legible. We read the discomfort and the delight at once. That doubled reading is the joke, and it's pure gest: the film makes the construction of gender visible by letting it wobble.

Which is why this farce, of all things, is built on what Deleuze files under Thirdness — the relation-image, the mental-image. Comedy here is a matter of relations only the viewer holds. We always know who Josephine and Daphne really are; Spats Colombo and his men do not. Every laugh is the gap between our knowledge and theirs, and dramatic irony is just the technical name for the audience installed as the knowing third party. Watch how an ordinary object turns dangerous along this circuit: a toothpick, a coin-flip, a face from the garage — each a mark, meaningful because of the habits it trails, and each capable of becoming a demark the instant a gangster's glance lands too long on Josephine and the whole disguise threatens to read the wrong way. Suspense in this film is epistemological. Nobody's in physical danger from a misread; they're in danger of being correctly read.

Wilder is, at bottom, a movement-image filmmaker of the highest order — the sensory-motor machine humming, situation forcing action, action thickening the situation. A single catastrophe (two musicians watch a massacre modeled on St. Valentine's Day) triggers a flight that generates every later complication. And in the late stretch he reaches for the oldest tool in the American kit: montage-organic-american, convergent parallel cutting with a last-minute rescue. Schmidt's editing braids Joe seducing Sugar on the borrowed yacht against Jerry tangoing with Osgood, rose in teeth, the cross-cutting wringing comedy from the symmetry of two impossible courtships — then snaps the strands together for the dash from Spats's guns. Griffith used this grammar to save a heroine tied to the tracks. Wilder uses it to save two men from being found out, which tells you what the film thinks the real peril is.

And here the farce does something a farce shouldn't be able to do: it touches the powers of the false. Joe is a forger of selves. He stacks them — Josephine over Joe, Junior the Shell Oil heir over Josephine, and Cary Grant's breathy lockjaw over Junior. A man impersonating a woman impersonating a millionaire impersonating a movie star. Deleuze's forger is the figure for whom identity is a series of masks with no settled face beneath, and Curtis plays him so smoothly that the question of who Joe "really" is starts to feel naive. The film closes by detonating it. Osgood, told flatly that Daphne is a man, shrugs: "Well, nobody's perfect." The ground of true identity, which the entire chase depended on protecting, simply gives way — cheerfully, with a smile. The classical Hollywood contract assumed the image told you the truth about a person. Wilder ends on the warmest possible refusal of it.

The lineage is exact. From Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, under whom Wilder apprenticed, comes innuendo carried by ellipsis and the suggestive cutaway — the very technique that let this picture run its perversities past a Production Code it never got a seal from. From Ninotchka, which Wilder co-wrote, comes the transformation engine: a self undone by a disguise that melts into real feeling. From His Girl Friday, the overlapping rat-a-tat patter Lemmon punctuates with maracas. From Bringing Up Baby, the long-take farce-blocking that lets bodies collide in continuous space. The premise itself Wilder traced back through a German film to a French one.

Its significance is the prank it plays on its own form. Some Like It Hot is the most precise sensory-motor comedy Hollywood ever engineered, and its subject is the falseness of the very self that the sensory-motor machine takes for granted. Its box office helped expose the Code as a dead letter. And it left every later comedy of identity a working model: keep the audience the knowing third, let the body betray the disguise, and trust the laugh to land on the place where the self comes loose. Nobody's perfect. That's the punchline and the philosophy.