Songbook

“It Might Be You” Brings Tootsie’s Queer Potential to the Surface

Features—

Nov 22, 2021

Tootsie is a film about love and desire. Audiences are prone to forgetting this amid the controversies that have arisen around its gender-crossing conceit. Back in 1982, the film emerged as one of the decade’s prestige comedies: it was a commercial and critical darling, and was nominated for ten Academy Awards. But when Tootsie was adapted into a musical in 2018, its creaky gender politics collapsed under Broadway’s bright lights. As Christian Lewis noted in his review of the show for Out magazine, “The musical relies on the terribly dated ‘man in a dress’ comedic trope, which is deeply rooted in transmisogyny.” Yet, despite being in Lewis’s words “hella problematic,” Tootsie is still appreciated by queer Gen-X-ers like myself, whose coming of age in the eighties was influenced by it and a wave of other films that explored sexual politics in the workplace (like 1980’s 9 to 5 and Private Benjamin) and gender-crossing as a means to professional and educational access (like 1982’s Victor/Victoria and 1983’s Yentl).

Among these movies, Tootsie stands out because it’s the only one that centers a cis-heterosexual white man as its hero(ine). Dustin Hoffman stars as Michael Dorsey, a struggling New York actor whose narcissism and reputation for being difficult to work with have rendered him unemployable. In order to catch a break, he tries to shed his “underappreciated” artistic temperament—i.e., his toxic masculinity. With high-necked blouses, dense layers of makeup, and some ill-advised leg and torso depilation using a cheap disposable razor, he transforms himself into Dorothy Michaels. Becoming Dorothy is Michael’s last chance to score enough cash to produce Return to Love Canal, an “important play” written by his roommate, Jeff (Bill Murray), that he also plans to direct and star in. To fund his artistic endeavors, Michael, as Dorothy, lands a role in the crass world of daytime soaps, the most effeminized and disrespected of TV genres.

Who’s in love with whom, and who desires whom, propels much of the Restoration-comedy-tinged humor of Tootsie. But the deep and (I would also argue) queer earnestness of its love story—of the rom to its com—is betrayed by the smooth soundtrack, replete with bright piano riffs and urbane saxophones. The score, meant to capture the cool bustle of New York City, was written and arranged by Dave Grusin, a longtime collaborator of the director, Sydney Pollack. Pollack admired Grusin’s chameleonic abilities as a composer: “he can do anything. He really can do jazz; he can do classical, he can do extremely melodic stuff; he can do stuff that’s ethnic.” It’s unclear what exactly Pollack meant by “ethnic,” though in that interview he refers several times to the “Japanese-ness” of Grusin’s score for their first film together, 1974’s The Yakuza.

To my Filipino ear, what sounds “ethnic” about the Tootsie soundtrack is its cheery smooth jazz. Along with quiet storm and what we now call yacht rock—genres encompassed by Grusin’s noncinematic work—smooth jazz has been among the most popular musical styles in the Philippines from the mid-1970s onward. “It Might Be You,” the film’s theme song and signature love ballad, is considered a classic by Filipinos, as Magic Sing home-system karaoke songbooks attest. It’s one of the reasons I remember Tootsie with such fondness, despite what I know to be its woefully dated if aspirational effort to present a progressive story about gender politics, empathy, and feminism in the workplace.

Written by Grusin, with lyrics by the first couple of power balladry, Alan and Marilyn Bergman, and performed by the mellow-voiced Stephen Bishop, “It Might Be You” enters smack in the middle of Tootsie. It softens the jaunty feel of the rest of the soundtrack, which is perfectly suited to walking purposefully through crowded cityscapes, as Dorothy is wont to do. The song’s shimmering instrumental refrains signal a change of scenery from the city to the country, as Dorothy accompanies one of her costars and her developing love interest, the single mom Julie Nichols (Jessica Lange), upstate to a farmhouse owned by Julie’s family. Dorothy’s anxiety about concealing her true identity intensifies in the close quarters of their shared sleeping arrangements, especially with Julie’s widower father, Les (played brilliantly by Charles Durning), lurking eagerly around every corner.

The version of the song used in this pivotal moment is fittingly dubbed “Montage Pastorale (It Might Be You)” on the original soundtrack album. Though the film is rife with montage sequences, this is arguably the most consequential—even more than the one in which Michael transitions into Dorothy, or the one that shows Dorothy’s meteoric rise as a pseudofeminist icon. The song fades in just as we see Dorothy riding on the back of Les’s tractor with her hands reluctantly slung over his shoulders. Les is charmed by Dorothy’s physical awkwardness as he shows her around the farm, at one point giving her a suggestive lesson in milking cows. He misreads Dorothy’s clumsiness as a kind of coquettishness, a feminine helplessness he takes pleasure in tending to with chivalrous niceties, like draping a cardigan over her shoulders when it gets too cold out at night.

Meanwhile, resplendent in the golden sunlight that heightens Les’s devotion to her, Dorothy leers besottedly at Julie as she gallops by, looking dewy and radiant on horseback. Before the vocal track begins, we see Dorothy left by herself with Julie’s baby, uncertain of what to do, until Stephen Bishop’s mellifluous voice and Dorothy’s parental instincts kick in right at the same time. Who’s to say if these instincts are maternal or paternal as we see Dorothy tenderly kissing and cradling the baby as if the child were her own? This mother-and-child tableaux also suggests another option for the kind of “you” who might be addressed by a love song. Is a child what Dorothy’s “been waiting for all of [her] life?” Is the song actually not an ode to romantic love but a gentle lullaby to a new being?

Lyrically, the rest of the song is about the passage of time and our propensity to waste it alone “watching trains go by” or “watching seagulls fly” without a significant other to share in the enjoyment. Like so many love songs, “It Might Be You” sets up the possibility that the answer to our loneliness has always been at hand in the person right in front of or beside us. Tootsie wrenches both humor and sentimentality out of the misdirected glances, looks, and physical proximities in the pastoral idyll shared by Les, Dorothy, and Julie as they each search, knowingly or not, for the “you” who might be among them. The moment when “It Might Be You” swells to its climax over dinner in this montage-à-trois anticipates another scene of triangulated, gender-bending desire: a candlelit dinner in Yentl, which came out a year later, in the winter of 1983. (The lyrics to “No Wonder,” the song that scores that scene, were also cowritten by the Bergmans.)

What Tootsie and “It Might Be You” stage for us in their domestic theater of desire, in their play with pining glances in wayward directions, is the idea that love is sometimes challenged not by scarcity but by a plentitude of options across genders, and by the guises we all assume in different relationships. Just as the protagonist has developed a dual identity, Julie becomes someone else when she’s out in the country, stripped of the pretentions and complications of her life as a soap star. Les has been transformed from a glum widower into a man with renewed purpose, and Dorothy, in the soft, unfiltered light of an upstate autumn, can finally imagine herself as something other than an actor devoted to craft alone. Maybe she’s a lover, even a mother; at the same time, in Les’s eyes, she bears the potential to be his next wife. The “you” in the song’s title not only multiplies the possibilities of who to love but also begs questions about which “I” is singing their desires aloud. Maybe it’s not Michael but Dorothy who’s been waiting all of her life to find a woman to love?

“I’m just not well adjusted enough,” Julie tells Dorothy after she rejects her pass once they return to the city. Dorothy leans in for a kiss only after Julie laments that the limitations of their friendship leave her feeling a sense of lack: “It’s as if I want something that I know I just can’t have.” More heartache, misrecognition, and rejection for all ensue as the film winds to its comedic climax. But when I watch the film, those moments marked as “mistakes,” as scenes of misunderstanding, present themselves to me as openings: as cracks in the veneer of normalcy through which my own queer desires might be echoed. Through this promise of plentitude in what is meant to be a comedy of errors, I, a proto-queer kid confused about where to direct my desires, heard and saw something true about love, about the many “who”s my “you” had the potential to be.

Where some may find the film’s happy ending in the fact that Michael finally “gets to be himself” when he wins Julie, I find it in Julie’s stubborn insistence that she misses Dorothy most of all. Even after Michael delivers an extended monologue in which he plays up the lessons of his convoluted gender journey, Julie asks to borrow his cute yellow Halston outfit, gesturing momentarily to living the lesbian dream of borrowing your partner’s clothes. When “It Might Be You” makes its final reprise to herald the closing credits, we see the lovers, captured forever in a freeze-frame, slinging their arms casually around each other like pals, like girlfriends who know “so much more, no one’s ever heard before.” The moment echoes the “Montage Pastorale” that seeded this pairing when the two were out in the quiet countryside, when Dorothy and Julie first shared a bed as friends, and when the slow burn of an acoustic guitar, sparked by a flicker of sunlight, bloomed into a love song.

“It Might Be You” Brings Tootsie’s Queer Potential to the Surface

More: Features

The Psychosocial Dread at the Heart of Japanese Horror

Lionel Rogosin, Between Empathy and Outrage

Misogyny Incarnate: The Unspeakable Truth of The Entity

Writing Women in the 1930s

Search