‘Cinderella II’: The Gender Identity Romcom of ‘Some Like It Hot’

Jerry never leads with Joe or Sugar. This suggestion, that the character might be made more assertive and empowered by a female role, effectively challenges the patriarchal concept of femininity as necessarily submissive and disempowering; femininity in ‘Some Like It Hot’ is portrayed as empowering and liberating when it better expresses the individual’s natural impulses and identity.

This is a guest post by Brigit McCone.

Some Like It Hot topped the AFI poll as funniest film of all time, almost always ranking high in similar surveys. It is, beyond doubt, the most popular choice for the greatest cross-dressing farce of all time. While we regularly debate whether political correctness is killing comedy, it is worth remembering that the greatest cross-dressing farce is also the most humanizing (and, rather depressingly, unequaled since 1959). Where most cross-dressing comedies (except possibly those by Alice Guy) rely on the humor of insecure masculinity in a one-joke premise (“it’s funny because they think we’re gay/women, but we’re actually not gay/women, which is embarrassing because being gay/women is inferior”), Some Like It Hot expertly raises these anxieties, but has the courage to interrogate them by exploring the possible attractions of a female role. The film is still among the only cross-dressing comedies to feature a genuine gender identity crisis by a sympathetic protagonist; the human depths that this adds to the flimsy set-up are the key to its comedy. Jack Lemmon’s Daphne/Jerry is not the butt of the joke; Daphne/Jerry is an acid-tongued wit in hir own right and the film casually assumes our maturity to follow hir on hir gender journey, laughing along with its contradictions and pressures.

According to Wilder, he was unsure himself whether the legendary “nobody’s perfect” was strong enough to be the final line of the film. This suggests that Wilder was unaware of the extent to which he had crafted perfect romantic comedy between Daphne/Jerry and Osgood, along the lines of Jane Austen’s genre-defining Pride and Prejudice, which uses romance as a catalyst for confronting the self. Where Tony Curtis’ Joe and Marilyn Monroe’s Sugar Kane have a relatively flimsy romance, begun in lies and concluded with inertia as each reverts to their established type, the romance between Osgood and Daphne/Jerry is the catalyst for a psychosexual crisis as profoundly subversive as it is hilariously expressed. Although Daphne’s relationship with Osgood has been interpreted as a “low comedy flip” of the primary relationship between Curtis’s Joe and Monroe’s Sugar, I suggest that the brilliance of I. A. L. Diamond’s final line is how satisfyingly it flips that interpretation, revealing Daphne’s relationship with Osgood as the major love plot. I have explored how Austen’s template structures the psychological struggles of Fight Club; I’d now like to explore the way that it deepens and illuminates the gender identity struggle at the heart of Some Like It Hot.

Cinderella the Second: The Meet-Cute
Cinderella the Second: The Meet-Cute

 

The classic Pride and Prejudice meet-cute occurs when the judgmental Elizabeth Bennet is herself judgmentally dismissed by Darcy as “not handsome enough to tempt me” – its cuteness lies in the irony of the similarity at the root of the mutual hostility. The meet-cute of Some Like it Hot occurs when Osgood chivalrously leaps to restore Daphne’s lost stiletto, provoking her to comment  that she is “Cinderella the Second.” The irony is double: Jerry feels the ironic absurdity of being treated as a princess when he is really a man, yet the character’s story will genuinely serve as a comic twist on the Cinderella archetype. Jerry is the downtrodden servant, constantly bullied by Tony Curtis’ alpha Joe, the wicked stepbro of macho peer pressure; Daphne is the mysterious stranger who captivates the prince. Jerry loses the coat off his back because Joe demands it; Daphne is showered with diamonds. Jerry must watch Joe get all the girls (it is significant that hir attraction to Sugar never makes Daphne/Jerry consider attempting to woo her in male form, as Joe instantly does); Daphne is a sexually irresistible “firecracker.” Daphne is swept off her feet for a night of glamorous dancing, then bullied into becoming Joe’s “Jerry” again in the morning.

The stiletto heels play a significant symbolic role in this transition. When we first see Jerry in drag, he is complaining that he doesn’t understand how women can “walk in these things.” Despite his theoretical attraction to cross-dressing (Jerry suggests cross-dressing for cash even before the pair are forced to flee the mafia, and appears titillated by the idea), he is the one who panics and feels threatened by taking on a female identity – “it’s a whole different sex!” – which for Joe is only a meaningless disguise. Where Daphne wants to choose her own name, Joe apathetically takes the feminine form of his male name. The Cinderella meet-cute with Osgood turns Daphne’s clumsy inability to walk in heels into the beginning of her fairy-tale romance, rather than a betrayal of masculinity. It is therefore a stroke of genius that the mafia recognize Daphne, at the end of the movie, because she’s still wearing her heels even when fleeing in a male disguise. Jerry is not betrayed as “really a man” while attempting to be Daphne; rather, Daphne’s true nature is revealed by her heels as she attempts unsuccessfully to pass as male. Jerry’s transition into accepting Daphne’s heels as second-nature suggests Daphne may likewise accept Osgood’s love, a conclusion as taboo in the 1950s as it was satisfying to leave to the viewer’s imagination. If the shoe fits…

I'm a Boy. I Wish I Were Dead: Protagonist Rejects Love Interest
I’m a Boy. I Wish I Were Dead: Protagonist Rejects Love Interest

 

In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s initial aversion to Darcy’s arrogance is compounded by a series of misunderstandings that peak in her explosive rejection of him in the famous proposal scene. In Some Like It Hot, Daphne’s loudly stated aversion to the “dirty, old man” Osgood is, from the very beginning, comically insufficient to prevent her from repeatedly flirting with him. The climax of their relationship is also a proposal scene: the sweeping of Daphne off her feet in the film’s delirious tango sequence. Daphne can’t stop leading during the dance; that might be seen as a joke reflecting her actual maleness, but it is equally a sign of her growing confidence, spark and fire. Jerry never leads with Joe or Sugar. This suggestion, that the character might be made more assertive and empowered by a female role, effectively challenges the patriarchal concept of femininity as necessarily submissive and disempowering; femininity in Some Like It Hot is portrayed as empowering and liberating when it better expresses the individual’s natural impulses and identity.

After a night of zinging banter, heady admiration and dance, Daphne is seduced and agrees to marry Osgood. In the morning, Joe forces the male role back onto her: “You’re a guy! Why would a guy want to marry a guy?” and Daphne agrees to renounce her plan. It is true that Daphne’s claim to be marrying Osgood for “security!” ironically reflects Joe and Sugar’s relationship, where Sugar believes she is chasing money and Joe believes he is chasing sex. However, rather than simply parodying their shallowness, Daphne’s shining eyes and glee after the tango scene reveal that her own attraction to Osgood is more than mercenary, just as Osgood will later reveal that his attraction to Daphne goes far deeper than a comically blind urge to chase anything in a skirt. The key to Daphne’s decision to reject Osgood’s proposal is the unquestioned assumption that Osgood would reject Jerry if he discovered his true nature; this is the underlying misunderstanding that keeps the lovers apart, forcing Daphne to define her seduction as an impractical dream. Like Cinderella’s ball, it is magical but incompatible with her real self. Where she formerly chanted “I’m a girl! I’m a girl!” to resist her sexual attraction to women, now she must chant “I’m a boy! Boy, oh boy, am I a boy!” before sighing “I wish I were dead” as she renounces her fantasy self. The use of gender identity as romantic obstacle complicates the usual dynamic of love interests rejecting each other. It is more accurate to say that Daphne rejects herself on Osgood’s behalf.

The Omelet's About To Hit the Fan: Fate Intervenes
The Omelet’s About To Hit the Fan: Fate Intervenes

 

The psychological dynamics of acceptance and rejection in Pride and Prejudice are interrupted in the book’s final third by the dramatic elopement of Lydia, which brings relationships to crisis-point and a more dramatic conclusion; at first appearing to separate the lovers, it ultimately unites them. It is at roughly this same point in the plot of Some Like It Hot that the mafia re-enter. The mafia function throughout the film as a device to express transphobic anxieties without confronting them. By providing an urgent motivation for the characters’ cross-dressing, they allow the audience to avoid confronting the issue of any internal motivation. The intense, scrutinizing pressure and threat of violence which the openly transfeminine are subjected to, even today, is expressed through the extreme anxiety of the need to “pass” under mafia scrutiny, but it is not confronted: the characters of Some Like It Hot are never threatened with transphobic violence, only with murder as witnesses to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (although it could be regarded as symbolic that the mafia become murderous after flirting with the girls, then stripping Daphne’s curvaceous double bass to reveal her true identity – “there’s your valentine!”). Although the mafia threat appears to be a force that will drive Daphne away from Osgood, her fear of the sinister and shaming “ladies’ morgue” is ultimately the only catalyst strong enough to make her defy society’s conventions and to push her into his arms. Both the mafia and the ladies’ morgue represent exposure anxiety; they also represent an inevitable mortality before which a person’s greatest regrets are usually the things they have left undone.

Nobody's Perfect: Sacrificing The Ego
Nobody’s Perfect: Sacrificing The Ego

 

The final reconciliation of Pride and Prejudice is made possible when Elizabeth Bennet sacrifices her ego to make a humiliating admission of her feelings for Darcy to Lady Catherine de Bourgh. In an even more major sacrifice, Daphne risks murder by mafia as well as humiliation by confessing her true identity to Osgood. After a series of comically escalating confessions, she finally tears away her wig and announces “I’m a man.” Osgood replies, shrugging, “nobody’s perfect.” This might be an easy laugh at Jerry’s awkward entrapment, but we have already seen his glowing eyes after their night of tango. Rather, the line “nobody’s perfect” flips our assumption that we are watching a farcical romantic parody on its head, to become supremely romantic. In a trademark Wilderism, Some Like It Hot reveals cynicism to be a facade for romance rather than the reverse: Joe and Sugar’s “real” goals of sex and money give way to their “pretended” love; Daphne and Osgood’s “real” identities as fraud and womanizer give way to their human connection. A night of chemistry at Cinderella’s ball is as real as the enforced roles of our daytime reality. The oddball coupling of a cross-dresser and a wrinkled millionaire can seem more lovable than the photogenic pairing of Monroe and Curtis. It is the genius of Lemmon’s performance that he is able to make Daphne’s personality more vivid, enticing and three-dimensional than Jerry’s, so that Daphne seems seductively like the true self that Osgood appreciated all along. Finally, a character defined for the entire film by comically escalating discomfort with their own identity meets absolute and unconditional acceptance. Our image of what happens next is a Rorschach test of each viewer’s own assumptions, of their varying levels of ageism, transphobia and romantic cynicism. But in my own interpretation, Cinderella the Second has a ball.

 


Brigit McCone is a shameless Wilder groupie, writes and directs short films, radio dramas and The Erotic Adventures of Vivica (as Voluptua von Temptitillatrix). Her hobbies include doodling and making weird Pride and Prejudice analogies.

 

 

Another Side of Marilyn Monroe

Her return to Hollywood in the film version of William Inge’s play ‘Bus Stop’ was again a chance to shun the glamorous armour of her gold-digger characters, to explore the role of a downtrodden saloon singer with ambitions above her abilities. Not only did her performance stun the film’s director, Joshua Logan, who called her the greatest actress he ever worked with, but it also left critics in no doubt as to her ability.

Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe

 

This guest post by Gabriella Apicella appears as part of our theme week on The Great Actresses.

“I seem to be a whole superstructure with no foundation. But I’m working on the foundation.” So said Marilyn Monroe to a reporter just weeks before she died at the age of 36 in 1962.

For the superstructure of Marilyn Monroe to have remained standing over 50 years after her death, the foundations have turned out to be stronger than anyone realised or appreciated during her lifetime. Many reappraisals of her extraordinary talent and appeal have been undertaken since then, and none so vital as the book Fragments, and the documentary Love, Marilyn, in which the woman speaks for herself.

As a fan from the moment I first saw her sheathed in magenta on a 17-inch TV screen when I was just 8 years old, it is difficult to deliver an unbiased account of her appeal, so I won’t try. Nor can I offer the in-depth analysis of Carl Rollyson’s excellent book Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress.

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However, as a simple introduction to those yet to understand the fanaticism and devotion Marilyn Monroe continues to provoke from her fans, below are some examples of her less well-known appearances. These prove the woman should be remembered as much for being the fine screen actor she was, just as much as the icon she has become.

Unfortunately, Marilyn Monroe was seldom cast in a truly excellent role.* There was no Casablanca, Vertigo, Anna Christie, or Breakfast at Tiffany’s, though she performed scenes from Anna Christie to great acclaim on stage at the Actors’ Studio, and Truman Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s for her.  Rather it is her presence that lifts otherwise mediocre fare into essential viewing.  Her leading men were frequently unable to match her charisma onscreen, so the dynamism of pairings such as Eva Marie St and Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn with Gregory Peck, or Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman was also unrealised.

Despite this, even from her earliest roles in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, she delivers nuanced and sensitive performances of rather bland parts, making a forgettable supporting role into a highlight of both iconic films. Most interesting at this point of her career however, are two lesser known B-movies that showcase a very different Marilyn Monroe, and demonstrate how versatile she was. In a small role as a fish-cannery worker in Clash By Night, brawling with her fiancé, drinking beer and talking back, she is the antithesis of what we expect to see from the ultimate Queen of Hollywood. She is also entirely believable with a feisty strength that is downright thrilling to watch her embody, free from glamorous evening gowns and makeup.  Holding her own alongside Barbara Stanwyck is no easy feat, yet she accomplishes this with apparent ease, and displayed the potential to one day match her co-star’s critical acclaim.

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Months later she appeared as a psychologically disturbed young woman in low-budget thriller Don’t Bother to Knock. Her fragility and desperation throughout is unbearably moving, culminating in a virtually silent yet astonishingly affecting final sequence. Free again from the glamour of her usual roles, her acting and not her physical beauty has the greater importance. Despite the film’s predictability, and the rather clunky pacing, this leading role gives Monroe the opportunity to move from demure to threatening to suicidal via seductive and psychotic. It got favourable reviews, but was not a great hit with the public; it was the studio’s balance sheet that would prevent her tackling such a complex role again.

In the days of the studio system, stars did not pick and choose their parts, and with audiences going in droves to see Marilyn in frothy inconsequential comedies as a dumb blonde, she quickly became typecast. It would be several years before she would take control of her career by walking out on her contract and forming her own production company in an attempt to gain some creative satisfaction. Prompted by the studio’s attempts to cast her in a film called The Girl in the Pink Tights there’s little reason to wonder why she had become so intolerant of the image she had now become constrained by.

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Her return to Hollywood in the film version of William Inge’s play Bus Stop was again a chance to shun the glamorous armour of her gold-digger characters, to explore the role of a downtrodden saloon singer with ambitions above her abilities.  Not only did her performance stun the film’s director, Joshua Logan, who called her the greatest actress he ever worked with, but it also left critics in no doubt as to her ability. While there is much in the film that dates it terribly, I would urge anyone with doubts about Marilyn Monroe’s extraordinary talent to watch this performance for one of the finest given by any actor.  In this role, the potential she had to shape acting history in the same way her contemporary Marlon Brando did for male actors is captured and preserved and sadly serves as a glimmer of what could have been achieved had she remained alive a while longer.  As in several of her other roles, it is often when she is not even delivering a line that her performance is most powerful, accessing deep emotions and allowing her facial expressions to convey the character’s innermost feelings, presenting an entirely truthful and believable rendition.

Perhaps because they show a lesser-known side to Marilyn Monroe, these performances are among my favourites, yet there are two more that cannot be missed.

Wearing her sexiness with a sort of naïve unawareness became something of a trademark in her film roles – her characters never seemed to notice how unbelievably gorgeous she was, so at the point when she uses it as a weapon, the result is sensational. As a murderous wife in Niagara, she does just that to stunning effect. Again, it is frustratingly unsatisfying as a film, but contains a thrilling and jaw-droppingly hypnotic performance from Monroe as she sashays, manipulates, seduces, and schemes. This “dangerous” Marilyn shows the stuff of Hitchcock fantasy.  While he is to have remarked she was “too obvious” a choice to cast in one of his films, and given his methodical directing methods would likely have made it a horrendous experience for both of them, I have rarely watched Vertigo or Psycho without wishing the blonde was THE Blonde!

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Which of course brings us to the most important and successful of all her roles, and the one she will always be remembered for: even today, and undoubtedly for years to come, analysis continues of what aspects of the performance were “real,” and what were not.  This was not Lorelei Lee, Sugar Kane, or The Girl, but Marilyn Monroe herself, played by one of the greatest screen actors of all time, named Norma Jeane.

*Some Like it Hot being an obvious exception of a great classic film, the part of Sugar Kane didn’t give her opportunity to show the range of her ability, and she was depressed to be playing a “dumb blonde” once again.

 


Gabriella Apicella is a feminist writer and tutor living in London, England. She has a degree in Film and Media from Birkbeck College, University of London, is on the board of Script Development organisation Euroscript, and in 2010 co-founded the UnderWire Festival that aims to recognise the raw filmmaking talent of women. Her writing features women in the central roles, and she has been commissioned to write short films, experimental theatre and prose for independent directors and artists.