tootsie

A couple of nights ago I watched a movie that both baffled and dazzled me at the same time. Its name is Tootsie and I darely recommend you to watch it.

It was filmed in 1982 by S. Pollack and on no account deserves any bad criticism. It is a very progressive movie for its time considering it deals with a man that, in his pursuit of getting a job as an actor, dresses up in a woman’s outfit trying to pass for a woman also in his real life. Doing so alows him to realice how badly women were treaten (and still are) in society and at the labor market, as well as how more difficult is it for them to deal with everyday life issues.

While showing this side of reality, the movie confronys the viewer also with the basic truth, or i would rather say question, about genre: to which point are we (wo)men naturally as we behave? Dorothy, the main character, cannot always avoid to show her more “masculine” side- the movie suggests- being active, strong, rude, and direct. However, although some male coworkers find it strange, they don’t find it awkward enough to discover her real sex, others find it perfectly normal. Some of them, both men and women,  consider it even so praseworthy and modellic that they start to feel a strong atraction towards her, which subverts, as anyone can easily understand, any traditional system of sexual attraction.

Nonetheless, it seems rather disturbing for me the fact that it is precisely a man the one that achieves to make such a step for the femenine social group. As if only a man, an heterosexual man on top of everything else, could eventually succeed in changing the state of things because of all the treats he has also been showing throughout the movie: his intelligence, his strenght and newly discovered sensitivity. Moreover, the romance that closes the movie with a typical american closure is an heterosexual one and  for it to succeed Dorothy needs to go back to his original appearance, to his “normal” state of being, because, as her beloved states “I love you but I cannot love you”.

Nevertheless, I am also aware of the fact that, on the one hand, each piece of work must be located in its context in order to be fairly analyzed. We can probably ask Tootsie to show us another never-before-presented perspective, another point of view, but in order for that one more step ahead to be (maybe just uncosciously) accepted and internalized, it can be just slightly daring; on the other had, if we all accept that patriarchal society, the one in which we all still live, has always left and honour men with power and responsibility to do things, to change the state of being, it is quite verisimilar that it was a man indeed the one that could raise his voice and promote some kind of change, a modification that could lead to a point (are we alreadythere I wonder) in which women would also be able to make their own movements, to show they are more than the poor victim that needs to be speaken of.

But thats just a random though, expressed in a poorly and not very thorough english way. My apologies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ArHo_YD_J8