Although some movies treat fashion as mere spectacle or window dressing, film scholars have long noted the key role clothing and costume play in defining and communicating a character’s identity and in connecting character to narrative. In our own day-to-day lives, the way we dress can, consciously or not, communicate a sense of who we are or wish to be and where we fit into “tribes” or subsets as well as society as a whole. The same is true for movies, bringing us to conclusions or assumptions about characters when we first see them, even before they say a word.
If clothing can fix a character’s hopes, desires, expectations and position in the world, then a change in how they look and what image they present can signify emotional, psychological or societal changes they’re going through. That’s the case with the two films in this spotlight program, which in diverse ways and toward different purposes give audiences insight into the personal transformations that are the very heart of the stories.
Now, Voyager (1942)
Bette Davis had one of her greatest triumphs in this drama about a repressed woman who blossoms into a new life with the help of a supportive psychiatrist, a newfound love and an unexpected sense of purpose. It’s a captivating performance in a near perfect example of the popular “women’s” melodramas of the period, standing far above that pack by having its central female character come to an inner strength and self-awareness atypical for its time.
Few films illustrate the theme of character transformation through clothing better than this one. The film opens in a stately Bostonian mansion, and before we see Davis’ Charlotte Vale, we meet several other characters, most notably her domineering, unsympathetic mother (Gladys Cooper). When we first meet her, she is in a dress that could be described as Victorian in style, something from the turn of the 20th century despite the contemporary (to 1942) setting of the story. She is completely covered from high on her neck to down below her ankles, only her face and hands showing, an expression of the character’s conservative severity and outmoded values.
She’s visited by her daughter-in-law, Lisa (Ilka Chase), in her stylish but not overly glamorous daywear. Lisa has brought with her a prominent psychiatrist, Dr. Jaquith, to assess the fragile mental state of Mrs. Vale’s unmarried daughter. We immediately trust him, not just because he’s played by Claude Rains at his most avuncular; his tweedy, slightly rumpled suit and overcoat mark him as a warm and unpretentious person.
As the trio discusses the possibility of Charlotte headed for a nervous breakdown, we get our first glimpse of Bette Davis, starting with a close-up of her feet descending the grand staircase, hesitantly, in heavy stockings and thick Oxford shoes that can most generously be called “sensible.” She emerges through a doorframe, overweight and frumpy in an ill-fitting dark foulard dress, nearly as covered up as her mother, wearing owlish glasses under thick, unshaped eyebrows, her hair tightly pulled back from her pale, unmade-up face.
Charlotte, who has been living under the oppressive thumb of her mother all her life, is indeed in a highly fragile emotional state. She relates a story to the doctor of the single time she experienced love and sexual desire, on an ocean cruise with her mother years before. In a flashback, the young woman we see is more girlishly but still quite plainly dressed, her hair in pinned-up pigtails, as she kisses a handsome sailor. She’s not wearing glasses, and when she comes upon her mother, the older woman insists she puts them on, despite Charlotte’s weak pleas that “they’re so unattractive.” Later when her mother catches her with the sailor, Charlotte is defiantly dressed more for her age and hoped-for appeal in a frilly frock.
The defiance, of course, didn’t last, as we see when the story returns to present day. Amid fears for her mental health, she is sent off to Cascade, Jaquith’s sanitorium, even as her mother remains bitterly opposed and in complete denial. After a few weeks in therapy, she’s apparently more stable but still unsure of herself. She has lost weight but remains dowdy in a tweed suit that appears a bit too large for her reduced figure. Jaquith removes her glasses, breaks them in two, telling her, “The oculist says you don’t need these anymore.” “But I feel so undressed without them,” she replies with some panic. “It’s good for you to feel that way,” he says. When she stands, we see her skirt is now slightly shorter than the one in the opening scene, and she seems to be wearing sheerer stockings, if any. Jaquith declares her able to leave treatment, stirring up fears of her former home life with her mother. Help comes once again from Lisa, who has arranged for Charlotte to take a long cruise to South America.
The stage is then set for the transformation reveal. On board the ship, we get a replay of the first scene as passengers and crew talk about her before she comes on screen. The camera (in a move that will be mirrored again later in the movie) pans up to reveal a casual yet stylish suit, accessorized with white opera-length gloves, a chic handbag and a white Panama hat. She is made up in fashionable contemporary style, eyebrows shapely and trimmed, her hair now lustrous, richer, swept into a chic pompadour updo.
It’s important to note here that, unlike many movies where “mousy” women immediately change their personalities in the course of cheesy makeover montages, the new clothes we see Charlotte wearing throughout the rest of the film don’t instantly bestow confidence upon her. (Compare this to Tootsie, 1982, below.) In this first shot of her on the boat, her face is in shadow, partially obscured by the wide-brimmed veiled hat, an indication (along with her use of an assumed name) that she is still not quite ready to face the world. Her ocean voyage clothes come with instructional notes attached, letting her know when and with what to wear each piece. When one of these notes is discovered by the male passenger who has aroused her romantic interest (after a comment he makes that indicates he knows more about women’s fashion than she does), she rushes out of the room, tearfully confessing to him that she’s not as self-possessed and sophisticated as she appears to be.
The work Charlotte does to change her life, to become the independent, self-aware woman we see at the end of the film, comes from within and from the relationships she forms and the difficult choices she makes to empower herself. One of those choices is to take under her wing Tina, the frail, distraught daughter of her love interest, an unhappily married man whose wife, like Charlotte’s mother, never wanted her child.
When she meets Tina, the young girl has stringy hair and dowdy clothes, with braces on her teeth and ugly eyeglasses (the same as Charlotte wore as a young woman on the cruise with her mother). By the end of the film, restored to happiness under Charlotte’s affection and care, she wears a frilly party dress, her hair done up, no longer wearing braces or glasses. (Apparently, eyewear, in the world of this movie, is merely something to hide behind and not truly medically necessary.)
Now, Voyager revolves around fashion and outward appearances, almost fetishistically so, constantly observing and commenting on them visually and verbally. The gowns and ensembles (by resident Warner Bros. designer Orry-Kelly with significant direction and input by Davis) are not merely for the sake of a cinematic fashion show, the way they were, for instance, in Davis’ early picture Fashions of 1934 (1934). They are major signifiers of the changing psychological and emotional state of the troubled heroine. They carry much of the weight of some of the film’s major themes: identity, self-esteem and empowerment, self-assertion and emancipation. As fashion and lifestyle blogger “chanelesque” puts it: “More than just costumes, fashion has its own narrative voice in Now, Voyager.”
Tootsie (1982)
Programming these two movies together makes for an interesting contrast. The central character of Now, Voyager has to grow into her fashion makeover, learning how to use it as just one element in her emancipation. In Tootsie, the main character is an actor posing as a female to get a role on a soap opera, almost instantly self-transforming by taking on a radically different wardrobe.
Tootsie was one of the most popular and acclaimed movies of the early 80s, combining elements of farce, rom-com and social commentary. On that latter point, it’s not always as insightful about gender and sexuality as it thinks it is, resorting in a few places to instances of mild homosexual panic, and today, the notion of a man in drag showing women a path to liberation has a bit of an ick factor. But at least it didn’t take the idea of a man posing as a woman to be a cheap joke, and the drag aspect wasn’t used for winking references to sexuality but instead as a way to help a self-absorbed male learn to walk in someone else’s shoes and experience at least a fraction of what women may get from colleagues, bosses, strangers and even romantic partners.
This was not the first film to show a man dressing as a woman for social, legal or other advantage. Cary Grant in I Was a Male War Bride (1949) adopted women’s clothing to circumvent regulations that prevented him as a Frenchman from living with his new wife in the U.S. In Charley’s Aunt (1941), two Oxford undergrads force a fellow student to pose as one of their aunts in order to chaperone alone time with two young women. Some Like It Hot (1959) has Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon pose as members of an all-female jazz band to avoid gangsters on their tail. In the first two movies, there is very little convincing about either of the men in drag, particularly Grant, pushing the comic absurdity even farther than it needs to be. Curtis and Lemmon come off a little better, although their female “act” veers more toward exaggerated gender stereotypes. And, with the arguable exception of Lemmon, the switch to women’s clothing does not transform their characters. The progress made by Tootsie is the assumption that a man dressing as a woman is not automatically absurd. Or as Roger Ebert put it: “Tootsie works as a story, not as a gimmick.”
When we first meet Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman), he is an argumentative, usually unemployed actor who treats the women at his birthday party as potential sex partners; he has no boundaries against touching them without permission and feeding them pick-up lines about their looks. Yet rather than enlightenment gradually dawning on him, very soon after he transforms himself into Dorothy Michaels, he immediately notices and objects to sexist male attitudes, lecturing the soap’s female producer about being complicit in their behavior. Soon she’s inspiring other women on the set, notably co-star Julie (Jessica Lange), to stand up for themselves. They have to do the work to liberate themselves that magically comes to her simply by dressing in women’s clothing.
Ironically, the appearance Michael/Dorothy crafts is a throwback to another era. Julie is seen as a woman of her time, dressing in pants and loose, pastel clothing that doesn’t necessarily show off her figure. Her hair is worn in a variety of unfussy, casual styles. Another cast member, April (Geena Davis), is seen in soft, minimal underwear. Dorothy, on the other hand, is always in dresses or skirts with high necklines and long sleeves, in stockings and restrictive foundation garments, with heavy make-up and a tight, heavily sprayed hairstyle. When she has a sleepover with Julie, she changes into a neck-to-toe flannel nightgown with a wig preset in curlers.
Michael is painfully aware of Dorothy’s looks, almost obsessed in an old-fashioned stereotypical way, as in this exchange with his roommate, Jeff (Bill Murray), as Dorothy prepares to have dinner with Julie for the first time:
Jeff: What do you mean you don’t have a thing to wear?
Michael: She’s seen me in all of these.
Jeff: Well, she hasn’t seen you in the white thing.
Michael: What this? You cannot wear white to a casual dinner. It’s too dressy.
Jeff: You can’t wear pants?
Michael indicates his padded butt is too big for pants. When Jeff shows him another piece, he refuses it because the horizontal lines make him look too hippy, “and it cuts me across the bust.”
How does he know so much about women’s fashion, so early into his new persona? In Now, Voyager, Bette Davis’ transition was accompanied by notes instructing her on appropriate clothing choices. Michael’s instant fashion sense is either a fairy tale element, like Cinderella’s magical makeover, or a narrative flaw. But because it seems to arise from his growing love and respect for Dorothy, from wanting the best for her, and because the film is so winningly written and performed, we tend to accept it and move on.
The one woman Michael does not extend his newfound awareness to (because he’s never with her in his “magic” Dorothy clothes?) is his erstwhile “girlfriend,” Sandy (Teri Garr), whose insecurities and neediness are played for broad humor. Even as Dorothy injects feminist attitudes into the soap’s dialogue, Michael continues to lie to Sandy and repeatedly stand her up. The excuse he gives for his actions almost exactly mirrors what Julie’s boyfriend says of his poor treatment of Julie. Dorothy quite rightly calls “bullshit” on that, and Michael’s line (“I understand you a lot better than you think I do.”) indicates maybe he’s starting to catch on.
But has he really learned enough to practice what he preaches? When Julie returns from breaking up with Ron (Dabney Coleman) and pours her heart out, instead of just listening and exploring what Julie is feeling, Dorothy leans in for a kiss, ready to exploit the moment for his own benefit. Later, when Sandy shows up unexpectedly at his apartment, demanding to know the truth about what’s going on with him, it’s only when he’s backed against the wall and caught in multiple lies that Michael finally gives her some shred of truth.
After spending nearly two hours with these contradictions, content to play them for humor and romance, the film finally gives us – and Michael – a germ of understanding when he says to Julie, in the final scene, “I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man. I just gotta learn to do it without the dress.” It’s an acknowledgement that fashion can be transformative but that true transformation requires more than just a change of clothes.
