Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Tootsie
1982 · Sydney Pollack · Tootsie on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the camera photographs Dorothy the way it photographs Julie. (camera)
Owen Roizman gives her the same lenses, the same light, the same respect in close-up. There is no leering angle and no shot that invites you to laugh at her appearance.
Payoff: Her dignity is a photographic decision before it is a written one. The camera refuses to team up with the audience against her.
Compare the cold gray New York streets with the television stage. (light)
Outside the studio Roizman shoots grainy winter Manhattan and lets faces fall into shadow. Inside Southwest General the light is bright, frontal and shadowless, the kind that flatters nobody.
Payoff: Cutting between those two looks does the film's argument without a line of dialogue. One world hides things and the other cannot.
Watch how people in the room change when Dorothy declines a nickname. (performance)
She will not be called honey. Nothing dramatic happens. Dabney Coleman's Ron plays condescension as ordinary habit, and the moment someone stops absorbing it, the whole room's arrangement becomes visible.
Payoff: The small act discloses a situation that was already there. What it exposes is everyone else, not her. In the reading: Action-image, small form (ASA'). The reading calls this the small form: an act comes first and what it does is reveal a situation nobody was naming.
Listen to Hoffman's voice as Dorothy. It is not a falsetto. (sound)
He pitches slightly above his own register with a Southern inflection, a placement that sounds like a real speaking voice under strain. Ruth Morley dresses her in blouses and blazers that read as taste, not costume.
Payoff: Once the body and the voice are not funny, everything done to this person becomes legible as what it is.
Watch the doors, corridors and dressing rooms he has to get through. (staging)
Pollack blocks the film around thresholds and cramped shared spaces: apartment doors reached just in time, the studio floor with its cable runs. The camera sits inside the room at the height of the people in it.
Payoff: The near-misses come from ordinary spatial logic rather than cartoon coincidence, which keeps the farce inside a real building.
Once you have seen it
Watch the live-broadcast scene cut between booth, floor and monitors. (cutting)
The Steinkamps edit it as suspense rather than comedy. The cutting tightens between Dorothy, the control room, a cast improvising around a monologue nobody wrote, and the signal going out to millions.
Payoff: Live television cannot be stopped. The film spends two hours making sure you understand that before it needs you to.
Track the character Dorothy plays inside the soap opera. (structure)
Emily Kimberly is not who she appears to be either. A man plays a woman playing a woman who is a man, and Hoffman refuses to let either Michael or Dorothy register as the real one.
Payoff: The soap is a mirror bolted into the film. Neither side of the reflection is allowed to be the original. In the reading: Crystal-image (hyalosign). The reading calls this a crystal-image: a thing and its double reflecting each other so tightly you cannot say which came first.
Watch Charles Durning propose and Teri Garr lose her temper. (performance)
Les offers marriage with complete decency. Sandy tells Michael she never said she loved him and that she does not care about I love you. Neither scene is given a comic exit.
Payoff: Farce usually protects its characters. Here a scene starts as a bit and ends in real injury, and the film keeps the damage on the ledger. In the reading: Index of equivocity. The reading calls these moments an index of equivocity: one gesture that fits two situations at once, with nothing to decide between them.
Carry this in: Do not watch Dorothy. Watch the room. See what happens to everyone else's posture when she walks in.