hey wait! i know you! we used to be chained next to each other in the cave! wow, so good to see you, how are ya? man. remember how we used to talk about the shadows on the wall together. gosh that was a long time ago. but hey. sure is one heck of a sun out here, right? it’s good to see you.
i wrote this post with happy tears in my eyes sitting in a parking lot after getting coffee for 3 hours with someone i did youth shakespeare with when we were teenagers and hadn’t seen in 15 years, in which time we both transitioned, got into nerd shit, found a job that feels good, found people to spend our gay little lives with, and coincidentally moved to the same city. this is exactly how it felt. never ever ever kill yourself
Oh yeah there was a lot of “Hayes Code be damned, all of us making this film are queer/friends with queers and we’re going to have some fun with gender identity” in this film. That’s why it still holds up. It’s not a story based around getting a laugh out of dressing men up as women so they can be clowns - there’s an integrity to the cross-dressing. Daphne is an identity Jerry realized he had when he put on a dress. Every time he chooses to keep his wig and outfit on and maintain his feminine mannerisms while alone with Joe, it shows his comfort in this identity, and it elicits laughter from the audience through the dialogue, ie. the audience isn’t laughing at the fact that a man is in a dress, but at the characters as fleshed out characters and human beings. The laughter comes from the situations the characters are put in and their reactions to them, not from a parody of womanhood presented through a male perspective. Similarly, Osgood’s classic line at the end of the film is an affirmation that he likes Jerry as he is, even if he’s Daphne. It’s a way of getting the audience to say, “this is fine, we’re comfortable” through laughter to something socially unacceptable in its time.
Joe’s masculine identity, meanwhile, is used to highlight his misogyny and force him to understand it (and the same with Jerry, but as he’s less of a womanizer, there’s less of a point to be made with him). In a world where men and women often had separate social circles that overlapped only when romance was on the table, putting a man like Joe in a female space where he’s privy to the conversations and emotions that his actions elicit gives him a lot to contend with and understand because he can see the consequences of his actions as raw pain and secondhand, instead of as anger being spewed directly at him. Again, the joke isn’t that he’s a man in a dress, or that he’s parodying womanhood, it’s that as a selfish misogynist he’s put in situations where he’s forced to empathize with the experience of womanhood in order to convincingly enact it for his own safety.
There’s a whole lot more to unpack in the metaphor of these two men having to pass as women because their lives are at stake if they don’t.
Okay so for one of my screenwriting and film studies sections I wrote a paper comparing the language of clothing and feminism from Wilder in two of his films, The Apartment and Some Like it Hot.
Now I am not going to spew out a wall of text on the subject or anything, but I did want to point out that he did not just “sneak things by” the code, he actually deliberately REFUSED to abide by it at all for this film, he willfully refused to even apply for the certification, he knew it wouldn’t pass, and he knew he wouldn’t bend to let it pass.
He and the studio took a gamble that a Wilder-Curtis-Lemmon-Monroe flick would do box office and get play without the “seal of approval” from the code folks.
