Oh yeah there was a lot of āHayes Code be damned, all of us making this film are queer/friends with queers and weāre going to have some fun with gender identityā in this film. Thatās why it still holds up. Itās not a story based around getting a laugh out of dressing men up as women so they can be clowns - thereās 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 isnāt 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, Osgoodās classic line at the end of the film is an affirmation that he likes Jerry as he is, even if heās Daphne. Itās a way of getting the audience to say, āthis is fine, weāre comfortableā through laughter to something socially unacceptable in its time.
Joeās masculine identity, meanwhile, is used to highlight his misogyny and force him to understand it (and the same with Jerry, but as heās less of a womanizer, thereās 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 heās 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 isnāt that heās a man in a dress, or that heās parodying womanhood, itās that as a selfish misogynist heās put in situations where heās forced to empathize with the experience of womanhood in order to convincingly enact it for his own safety.
Thereās 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 donāt.
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 āsneak things byā 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 wouldnāt pass, and he knew he wouldnāt 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 āseal of approvalā from the code folks.
This is like finding a stray journal page in a ruined city that talks of some grand festival and the date of the entry is the day before the city was destroyed
Happy 10 year anniversary Dashcon announcement I guess
Happy Dashcon Announcement Day to those who celebrate.
The cast of the Original Trilogy had cliched, boring character concepts that were executed wonderfully enough for it not to matter.
The cast of the Prequel Trilogy had interesting concepts that were executed poorly enough to make them seem utterly stupid.
The cast of the Sequel Trilogy had amazing, thought-provoking concepts that were executed in the town square and put up on pikes as a warning to others.
This is actually probably the best summary of star wars I’ve ever seen
