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The title sequence of Tootsie (1982) opens with the camera panning across an array of cosmetics and accessories on an actor’s vanity table before arriving at a close-up of Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman), who is applying make-up to transform into character for an audition. If you break down this opening scene, there are several layers at work: Hoffman, an actor, is pretending to be an actor preparing for a role. He is presenting an outward appearance that is part of a performance-within-a-performance and making up his face to appear different than who he is in both real and “reel” life. It’s enough to make your head spin.

Through outlandish comedy, Tootsie exposes Hollywood’s and, by extension, our own complicated relationship between the superficial image that we project to the world and our inner selves. Make-up serves as the actual, and metaphorical, tool in the film that enables Dorsey to mask his appearance in order to fit in and achieve his professional goals of getting an acting job. Dorsey can’t get hired as himself, so he dons the wig, cosmetics, and apparel of a woman to get a role on a soap opera. The director wants a forceful woman character, which, traditionally, suggests a woman with more masculine qualities. Dorsey obviously fits the bill - except he is initially perceived, ironically, as too feminine. Ron Carlisle (Dabney Colema) tells him, “It’s just that you’re just not threatening enough.” Was he presenting too much like a female, or does he really have a genuine feminine side buried underneath that surfaces once in the role of a woman?

In pretending to be a woman, Dorsey ends up discovering certain internal qualities he did not know he had and appreciating the inner beauty of his authentic self. At the farm owned by Wes (Charles Durning), Dorothy-Dorsey has to share a bed with Julie (Jessica Lange). He turns his head on the pillow, but his wig gets stuck on the fake hairnet and faces backwards, illustrating the reverse universe of the film. As Dorsey begins to realize how much money and time women spend on wardrobe and makeup, he gains a new understanding of how society values a woman’s appearance often over many other important characteristics like honesty, intelligence and strength (as well as how he, as the pre-Dorothy Dorsey, was guilty of the same).

Michael hopes to apply what he’s learned as a woman when he goes back to living as a man. He tells Julie, ‘I was a better man with you as a woman … than I ever was with a woman, as a man … I just gotta learn how to do it without the dress.” Tootsie suggests all people, not just actors, play roles when they dress up as doctors, teachers, office workers, firemen, policemen, or whoever they are in their outward lives. Through these performances, we may bring forth our inward qualities, but we may also see our inward selves shaped by the insights we gain through performing our outward personas in the world.