CROSS-DRESSING comedy is a genre that will never get left on the shelf. The
top two comedies of all time, according to the American Film Institute, are
both gender-benders — Some Like it Hot and Tootsie. But the
genre is definitely in need of some new lipstick and a new frock.
White Chicks, in which FBI officers go under cover as “celebutants”, is
the third film this year to mine transvestism for laughs, after the
women-in-drag Connie and Carla, which reworks the Victor/ Victoria
formula of woman-as-man-as-woman, and My Wife Maurice, a French farce
in which a bearded man impersonates another man’s wife to fend off his angry
mistress. The latter has the best premise, but wheels out the cross-dressing
far too soon, instead of making it a last resort, as in La Cage aux Folles.
That scraping sound you hear is both a) the ungainly wobble of high heels and
b) the bottom of the barrel being reached. What is going on? Cross-dressing
is supposed to be one of history’s guaranteed laugh-getters: As You
Like It; Charley’s Aunt; Bringing Up Baby.
The quality of these new films is admittedly not high, but is the problem
that, in the era of Eddie Izzard and Dennis Rodman, gender taboos are now
too minimal to convulse audiences with shocked laughter? How can a Wayan
brother in drag look more ridiculous than Rodman, a 7ft male basketball
star, with a nose-ring, in a wedding dress? The answer in the case of White
Chicks is Caucasian make-up (hopelessly unconvincing, but anyway).
Revealingly, the film finds more of a frisson playing off racial
stereotypes than sexual ones.
Plotting the evolution of the genre shows the peril of liberal progress for
comedy. What was once a daring, titillating charade is now a perfunctory spa
rinse delivering a light sheen of chauvinistic enlightenment.
In White Chicks, the men duly return from their cross-dressing
adventure with renewed appreciation for women, even though their insights
are fairly antediluvian. High heels are hard. Some men won’t take no for an
answer. Women wearing perfume want to be touched. And — sob — even rich,
thin, beautiful white girls have self-esteem issues about their weight.
Perfunctory didacticism became enshrined in the genre thanks to Tootsie,
where the “armature” of the film, as the director, Sydney Pollack, called
it, was how dressing as a woman helped Dustin Hoffman to become a better
man.
The difference is that Tootsie made this improvement a massive, central
character growth for its hero. Hoffman begins the film as a driven selfish
male pig who chats up women indiscriminately, regardless of his girlfriend.
He meets even worse examples of his fellow sex once he dons his disguise —
most amusingly, a vain old co-star — whereupon he gradually realises that he
has to change.
Tootsie, though, avoids being an earnest lecture on chauvinism with a
smattering of clever ironies about the sexes. It’s not a one-way critique by
any means. While in drag, Hoffman listens to Jessica Lange pine for a
honest, direct man who will simply come up and pay her compliments and ask
her to go to bed. When Hoffman, back in his male clothes at a party, does
just that, she throws a glass of wine in his face.
In Some Like It Hot, the pinnacle of the genre, Tony Curtis has a moral
growth similar to Hoffman’s. Before meeting Marilyn Monroe, he was a
musician who usually left his women “with nothing but a kick in the teeth”.
By the end he’s doing the decent thing.
But this is a pre-feminist film, so Curtis doesn’t become a more decent man by
virtue of being a woman. His change is still the standard moment of
redeeming honesty in any good comedy of disguise and deception. And the
film’s final arbiter of benign acceptance is not a woman but a man — Joe E.
Brown’s smiling millionaire — who is unfazed even by his true love,
Josephine, turning out to be Jack Lemmon.
Some Like It Hot is a pioneering classic because most early
cross-dressing films were simply ruses to assail the male hero’s dignity,
such as I Was a Male War Bride, made in 1948, where Cary Grant has to
dress up as a female officer in order to get home and consecrate his new
marriage.
Apart from the obvious visual gags of a man trying to be ladylike, the better
drag films did show the man developing more female characteristics. Grant,
for example, gets offended when he is whistled at by men, then gets more
offended when he is not. It is almost a given that drag comedy will feature
the hitherto carefree male suddenly panicked by having nothing to wear. Just
as a man will almost always unwittingly pursue a woman who is really a man.
By the time of Mrs Doubtfire, though, in the political correct 1990s,
the sexual element was all but removed — although the moral growth was still
there. Robin Williams learns to be a better father by being a responsible
woman.
It took gimmicky drama like The Crying Game and cross-dressing in the
other direction, such as Boys Don’t Cry, to put the sting back
in the genre. But women-as-men are nowhere near as popular, certainly not
for comedy. A woman who dresses as a man tends to gain power rather than
lose dignity.
The next step could well be a man who dresses like a woman and enjoys it so
much he wants to make it permanent.
