A Better Kind of Good

TOOTSIE, the 1982 Dustin Hoffman comedy in which a failing actor cross-dresses to win a part on a soap opera, is a lovely, problematic film (and just released in an excellent home edition from www.criterion.com). It’s controversial in some quarters for playing the idea of a man dressing as a woman for laughs: The joke is on any male-bodied person who challenges macho stereotypes. As when The Da Vinci Code attracted criticism for portraying a character with albinism as an insane assassin, like almost every other comparable movie has treated albinism, Tootsie represents a time when the extent of mainstream cinema’s engagement with what it thought constituted “trans” was to portray cross-dressing for laughs. But a cisgender straight character dressing up has little or nothing to do with the real stories of the “T” in LGBTQ.

Cinematic LGBTQ characters seem to evolve one step forward and a half back—beginning with their invisibility, then moving through psychopathy (the “evil queer” of Hitchcock’s Rope still shows up in The Lion King and The Avengers); martyrdom (Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Philadelphia, Brokeback Mountain); safe best friends (The Prince of Tides and My Best Friend’s Wedding); and eventually redemption (Milk, the wonderful recent Pride). The evolution continues: George Carlin’s gay best friend caricature in The Prince of Tides was in good faith, but would not pass muster today. We’re shaking off the idea that LGBTQ characters can only be suffering or sassy.

One of those shakes is the remarkable series TRANSPARENT, in which Jeffrey Tambor reinvents himself as a transgender woman coming out. There’s gorgeous writing and performances and engagement with the community whose story is being explored. (In another sign that no longer can LGBTQ stories only be told by straight people, the transgender actor Alexandra Billings co-stars as an emotionally integrated person rather than comic foil or suicidal drama queen.)

The problem with Tootsie is obvious—it’s a story in which anything that challenges traditional masculinity is treated as a joke. But at least Hoffman’s character experiences one gift of queer theology: How to become a better person through imagining the experience of people subject to gender or sexual prejudice.

Tootsie is still hugely entertaining (Charles Durning’s good-hearted suitor and Teri Garr’s long-suffering crony stand out in particular), just as Brokeback Mountain is an artfully realized drama that surely helped change public attitudes. The perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good. But a better kind of good is when people get to participate in telling their own stories and bearing their own gifts, rather than relying on (or being co-opted by) the well-meaning or Oscar-hungry.