Tootsie · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Before the film existed there was a strip of test footage. Dustin Hoffman in makeup, lit the way a leading actress is lit, 35mm, no prosthetics and no burlesque padding, because the makeup department had been briefed against caricature. He watched it and reported two things. He found her unattractive. And he knew at once he would never have spoken to her at a party. Everything Tootsie understands arrived in that order: image first, shame afterward. Michael Dorsey never thinks his way to decency either. He is put in front of people, and he finds out what they do.

Start with the machinery, since the film is famous for it. Gilles Deleuze called the dominant grammar of cinema the movement-image, and its engine the sensory-motor link: a character perceives a situation, acts to change it, and the act produces a new situation. Tootsie runs that circuit at full power, in what Deleuze calls the large form — a situation presses on a man until one decisive act transforms it. Michael can't get hired because he can't subordinate himself to anyone, so he becomes Dorothy Michaels, and the world rearranges. Situation, action, new situation: the shape screenwriting classes have drawn on whiteboards ever since, using this film as the set text.

What lifts it past a clean example is the second machine running inside the first. Deleuze's small form inverts the order: the act comes first, and what it does is disclose a situation that was there all along, unseen. Dorothy declines to be called honey. It's a nothing of a gesture, and the room changes shape around it. Ron's condescension, which Dabney Coleman plays as unreflective habit rather than villainy, had been fully present the whole time, invisible because habitual. It becomes visible the moment someone stops absorbing it. What's disclosed isn't a fact about Dorothy. It's a fact about everyone else, and half the audience had lived inside it while the other half had never seen it.

Deleuze gives the small form a sharper tool, and it explains why this comedy hurts. He calls it the index of equivocity: a gesture that could belong to two entirely different situations, with nothing in the gesture to tell you which. Charles Durning's Les proposes marriage with real decency; in one situation that's a widower's courtship, in the other a detonation with a date attached. Julie's tenderness toward Dorothy runs the same double circuit: the first uncomplicated friendship she's had, and a courtship she never agreed to. Neither reading cancels the other while the wig stays on. Farce usually cashes that doubleness in as pleasure; Pollack keeps letting it land as injury, which is why Teri Garr's "I never said I love you, I don't care about I love you" has no escape hatch under it.

Then the body. Deleuze took from Brecht the idea of the gest: not a gesture expressing a feeling, but a posture that makes a social relation visible. How a person stands in a room tells you what the room permits them. Hoffman built Dorothy from the outside in, the method he used for Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, and this film puts that method on trial. The voice sits slightly above his own with a Southern inflection, and it isn't falsetto, because falsetto is a joke. Ruth Morley's blouses and blazers read as a competent professional woman's taste in 1982, not as costume. The result is a body that isn't funny, and once the body isn't funny, everything done to it becomes legible as what it is.

Owen Roizman finishes the argument optically. Outside the studio: grainy, cold winter New York, faces allowed to fall into shadow. Inside Southwest General: frontal, shadowless television light that flatters nobody. Cutting between them does the thematic work without a line of dialogue. And the camera never conspires with us against Dorothy; she gets the same lens language as Julie and Sandy. Cukor set that grammar in Sylvia Scarlett, holding on Hepburn's face at the instant the disguise costs her something and refusing the leering angle. Roizman takes it wholesale. Dorothy's dignity is a photographic decision before it's a written one.

The other debts are equally exact. Wilder and Diamond built the engine in Some Like It Hot: sustain a disguise through a romance it makes impossible, so the third act becomes a countdown of forced proximities rather than a chain of gags. Tootsie rebuilds that ladder rung for rung and puts a live broadcast where Osgood's curtain line goes. Charley's Aunt supplied the architecture: an impostor obliged to be two people in one building, doorways doing the plotting, which is the Southwest General corridor and Michael's apartment. From Hawks comes interruption used as rhythm rather than error, scenes cut on the tail of a line: the accelerating first act through the agent's office. And the audition-and-rejection montage borrows Fredric Steinkamp's derby scheme from They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, shot lengths shortening in step with the performers' deterioration. Comic surface, identical cruelty underneath.

Now the strangest thing in the film, hiding inside the soap opera. Deleuze's crystal-image describes a thing and its double reflecting each other so tightly you can't say which came first. Mirrors do it. So does theater inside cinema. Southwest General is a mirror bolted into the movie: Dorothy plays Emily Kimberly, and Emily turns out to be Edward Kimberly, her own recluse brother, in disguise. A man plays a woman playing a woman who is a man, and Hoffman won't let either Michael or Dorothy register as the real one. The closing formulation, that he was a better man with her as a woman than he ever was with a woman as a man, is that crystal restated as ethics.

Which makes Michael a forger. The powers of the false is Deleuze's name for cinema's ability to make truth and falsity undecidable and treat that as a creative power rather than a failure; the forger doesn't simply lie, he manufactures a truth not otherwise available. In Deleuze's examples the forger comes with a broken narration attached, Welles and Robbe-Grillet, films where the story stops being verifiable. Pollack does something odder: he installs a forger inside causality so clean it's pedagogical. The narration never falsifies. Only the man does. And the forgery works: Dorothy isn't a mask over Michael, she's a production of conduct he couldn't otherwise reach.

That's where the film's unresolved problem sits, too. Bazin grounded photographic realism in a bond between image and thing, the camera was there, and disguise comedy leans on that guarantee absolutely: we believe the makeup because we watched it go on. The audience gets the one thing every character is denied, which is certainty. Since the 2010s, and with focused attention in Disclosure (2020), critics have argued that a form whose pleasure requires knowing the truth beneath a presentation trains a gaze that gets turned on people who aren't in disguise. Tootsie has no trans character and no such intent. It's still foundational to that tradition, and the argument is one to answer rather than wave off.

What it did to filmmaking is simpler. It proved a broad farce could carry a moral register without a wink, and it made the disguise the instrument of the analysis rather than the punchline. Deleuze has one more word for what happens to Michael: the imprint, the bond by which a situation and a person mark each other. He goes in to take something and comes out marked. What he gains isn't femininity. It's the experience of its absence, of not being deferred to, not being believed, not being safe. The commercial descendants, Mrs. Doubtfire and its long tail, kept the premise and left the imprint behind.

So watch it again, and don't watch Dorothy. Watch the room. Watch what happens to everyone else's posture when she walks in, and watch the cut from grainy street to shadowless studio light, and ask which of those two worlds is the one wearing the disguise. Its own answer about whether Michael's knowledge survives the wig is honest and unflattering: partially, and not yet. The question left standing on that street corner is whether he learned anything at all, or whether the costume just granted him a permission he'd held the whole time and never noticed.