Just Like Jello on Springs
Celebrating Pride and gender-bending in Some Like it Hot!
Debates have raged for years about what defines a Christmas movie. Home Alone goes without saying, It’s a Wonderful Life too, even Die Hard makes the cut. My favourite Christmas movie has always been Some Like It Hot! It played for years every Christmas at midday on Irish terrestrial television. So while most of my fellow country people were at Mass, I was in my PJs watching Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis get their drag on.
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How this passed the infamously conservative Irish censor is a Christmas miracle that could be attributed to Marilyn Monroe’s charm, the PG certificate and the perception that a black and white movie could not possibly contain anything salacious or, dare I say it, homosexual, could it? But why, you might ask, am I talking about a Christmas movie in June? Well because it’s Pride silly, and Some Like it Hot is as gay as Christmas and twice as merry!
Some Like it Hot is a 1959 comedy calssic directed by Billy Wilder set in prohibition era 1929. When two broke and out-of-work jazz musicians Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemon) witness the St. Valentines Day Massacre carried out by mob boss Spats Colombo (George Raft), they flee Chicago with an all-female jazz band: Big Sue and her Society Syncopators. On the train to Florida they meet blonde-bombshell Sugar Cane (Marilyn Monroe) who is also on the run from a string of bad relationships with washed-up jazz musicians. As they adapt to a life in skirts, Joe pursues Sugar in the guise of millionaire heir, Shell Oil, and Daphne is wooed by an actual millionaire, Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown). Josephine and Daphne are just starting to feel comfortable in their new personas when the Chicago mob arrives in Florida and realise quickly that ‘maybe those dames ain’t dames!’
I’m a girl, I’m a girl, I’m a girl…
The pretext of Some Like it Hot is whether Daphne and Josephine can pass for girls and, in doing so, save their asses from the mob. They are, for the most part, incredibly successful in fooling everyone around them into thinking they’re women, including the crew. Some Like it Hot lore says that on their first day of filming Tony and Jack toured the studio in character to see whether they could pass for women. And, except for their five o’clock shadows, they did. The latter is the reason the movie was filmed in black and white.
Though Josephine’s pouts would be the envy of the most practiced Instagram influencer, she never loses sight of the pragmatism behind their gender-bending. Daphne, despite more vocal protestations, is almost instantly at home in the world of women. She’s flirty and naughty and quickly accepted as one of the other girls. She even begins to forget the limitations of law and convention as Osgood woos her. It’s refreshing, for a movie of the time, to see how even though their struggles to adapt to their new identities are central to the comedy, femininity in itself is never the butt of any jokes.
As a teenager I was all too quick to scorn anything approximating femininity. Much of this was born out of a sense that I never quite understood how to be a girl and my persistent desire for autonomy (more commonly known as pathological demand avoidance - PDA) meant that I had a tendency to rebel against anything which felt like an imposition. And gender norms, established from the first sonogram where the ‘sex’ of the baby is assigned, are among society’s most rigid impositions.
As a child I could get away with the androgyny of shapeless t-shirts and jeans without comment but, as a teenager it became harder and harder to negotiate feminine expectations. My changing body became an object of public commentary (weight, breasts, body hair, menstruation) from family and strangers alike. It was battleground between what was expected from me as a teenage girl, what was permitted or prohibited by my parents, what I wanted to try for myself and how all this was perceived and commented on by my peers. When my forays into make-up, mini-skirts and heels ended in, sometimes literal, flops I retreated back to Docs, baggy jeans, t-shirts and cut my hair off.
I wanted to hide, disappear even, but this only seemed to make me more visible in my difference. I was frequently misgendered (sometimes by accident, sometimes as an insult) or the subject of speculation over my sexuality (often from within my family) long before I was ready to contemplate the implications of these questions for myself.
While I’ve never considered myself anything but a cis woman, I’ve rarely felt comfortable with the expectations of my gender. Sara Ahmed writes that ‘gender becomes more work for those who feel less at home in their original assignments.’ I was, like Ahmed, a tom-boy, an label which ‘teaches us how restrictive girl can be as a category of personhood.’ And like Ahmed, I felt that ‘gender seemed like a key to a lock which I did not have, or which I did not fit.’ I went through a conscious process of self-girling in my twenties and into my early thirties - letting my hair grow out, filling my closet with dresses, dabbling with make-up, chasing after men - but, as I mentioned last time, this neither worked nor made me happy.
I realise now that my discomfort with gender norms, my desire to live my gender not as an imposition, but though the ebb and flow of daily whims and experimentation, has everything to do with my neurodivergence. Autigender or neuroqueer are terms which have helped me put shape on how my neurodivergence influences my perception of gender. This is not so much a failure to understand gender norms (though that has some baring), but a deep suspicion of the imposition of any behavioural norm on the basis of arbitrary and accidental biological characteristics.
Watching Some Like it Hot as a lost, little, neuroqueer living in suburban nowhere-land allowed me, on one hand, a rare insight into what it is to perform femininity through Josephine and Daphne’s mishaps and missteps. And, on the other, it seemed to be telling me that the rules were there to be broken!
Mostly I just slap it
If the pretext of Some Like it Hot is Daphne and Josephine’s success in drag, then the tension rests in how this pair of cross-dressers can reconcile their identities with their blossoming love affairs. Josephine cannot maintain her identity if she wants to woo Sugar as this would essentially make them lesbians. Whereas, if Daphne reveals her identity there is seemingly no future for two male lovers and the security she longs for will be gone.
Some Like it Hot’s provocations span decades. In the 1920s crossdressing was a crime and this alone would have been enough to put our runaway protagonists behind bars had anyone thought to report them. On the other hand, in 1959 the Hays Code had been in force nearly 30 years, imposing a strict Christian morality on Hollywood cinema which led to a de-facto censorship of most scenes of a sexual nature, interracial relationships, divorce and any content that might be interpreted as celebrating homosexuality. The Hays Code did not leave room for moral ambiguities of any kind, least of all gender ambiguity.
If cross dressing wasn’t enough, Some Like it Hot offers two extremely salacious scenes between Sugar and Joe/Josephine. Aboard the yacht Sugar harnesses the full force of her sensuality to seduce Shell Oil Junior out of his supposed “incapacity” to enjoy physical pleasure. When Sugar sings ‘I’m through with love’, Joe/Josephine sees, perhaps for the first time, Sugar as a real person, not just an object of conquest. Forgetting all about how s/he is dressed, Joe/Josephine surprise kisses Sugar in front of the whole crowd, causing uproar because everyone believes her to be a woman. Though Sugar is shocked by the advance she is not repulsed, returning the kiss even before she realises it is her beloved Shell Oil. You could go so far to say that it’s a rare moment of lesbian representation that Wilder gets away with it because the audience knows Josephine is really Joe.
Some Like it Hot sounded the death nell of the Hays Code, its popularity a sign that film makers and audiences alike were ready for something new and spicy. Where Some Like it Hot triumphs on queerness, however, it fails on race.
For a 1920s jazz movie, Some Like it Hot is very white. The absence of any black musicians or characters, brought to mind the final scene of a much more recent production set in 1920s Chicago around the legendary blues singer Ma Rainey. Played by the spellbinding Viola Davis and co-staring an equally compelling Chadwick Boseman, MaRainey’s Black Bottom depicts how Black jazz musicians were pushed to the margins of their own culture by sanitising white musicians, producers and distributors. From the white chorus line, to the white band at Spats Colombo’s speakeasy to the all-white line up of Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators, Some Like it Hot is hardly representative of the racial diversity of the jazz scene of its time. The world of jazz and, speakeasies in particular, were a haven for queer love and gender bending throughout the 1920s with people such as Jimmie Daniels and Gladys Bently among the biggest names in this underground scene.
I always get the fuzzy end of the lollypop
Jack and Tony may pass for women on and off-screen but, it’s Marilyn who steals the show. As Sugar, she’s ditsy, but self-aware, confident in her body and sexuality, sensual and determined to find love — and security — despite successive heart breaks. While the camera’s gaze is uncomfortably male, the lighting adding to an illusion of nudity where Marilyn’s ‘bossom buddies’ (so the publicity goes — insert face palm here)’ are the main feature of those scenes. The black and white sheer sequinned numbers Sugar sports for her two iconic solos would not be amiss on a Drag Race runway. She is undeniably beautiful, oozing sensuality and camps it up to the max.
Sugar, may in fact be the most complicated character in this whole movie. Marilyn’s struggles with mental health, substance abuse and fraught relationships with exploitative men and an even more exploitative film industry are the stuff of Hollywood legend and simmer beneath the sparkle of Sugar’s sequins. She would be dead within three years and while Some Like It Hot is among her most iconic roles, it marked her in the public’s imagination as little more than a Bimbo.
As GenZ lead the movement to reclaim the figure of the Bimbo, Himbo and Thembo, I’d like to take this moment to crown Sugar and Marilyn as Queen Bimbos. Sugar deserved more than deadbeat Joe and squeezed out tubes of toothpaste and Marylin deserved so much more than Hollywood ever allowed her.
Nobody’s Perfect
When it comes to Joe’s conquest and seduction of Sugar through lies and manipulation Some Like it Hot is very much of it’s time and may even have set the standard for romantic comedies to the present. Nevertheless, in its trampling of gender and sexual binaries, Some Like it Hot makes a direct leap from the gender transgressions of 1920s Hollywood to the sexual revolutions of the following decades as if the Hays Code had never existed.
Daphne and Osgood’s unlikely pairing, based on genuine mutual affection remains a powerful statement on the potential of desire to transgresses acceptable parameters of gender, class and age. Daphne’s declarations in the final scene, that she’s been cohabiting with a man, that she smokes, that she can never have children, speak to the moral exigencies of what it meant (and sometimes still means) to be a respectable, desirable, functional woman (read wife-mother). The fact that Osgood is determined to find a way around all these apparent obstacles in order to be with her – for however long this ninth marriage might last – is a rare triumph for those of us who have never possessed the key nor fit the lock to the feminine ideal.
Let’s face it, living beyond the binary can make life so much more fun and, as movie endings go, it’s a cracker!
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"Osgood, I'm a MAN!" (me, coming out of the closet as trans in my late 40s)
"Nobody's perfect!" (my great "straight" husband)
I guess that is why I watched this movie 4 times as a kid...
One of my favs (and I love the premise of your newsletter btw!) Big fan of this movie and I adore Daphne's double take RIGHT at the end, what a look. Got to see The Apartment near Christmas in my local repertory and it was just lovely.