Fish Out of Water

- "What's with all the rubber ducks?" - "Well, it's sort of a secret, but we can tell the story."

he has so many opinions to give

So, I ride a motorcycle and I know at least the theory of doing a power slide (still cool but you don’t slide nearly so much and you need a pretty light bike to do it most of the time). You have to lock the back wheel until your back wheel looses grip on the road and then turn sharply to the left. Rear wheel slides and the front wheel turns.

But how do you lock the back wheel you might ask? Well with your rear break of course.

Hey, neighbor!

They work together in the science labs. They work together on the bridge. They work together on away missions. Off duty, they both spend time with Jim. And at the end of the day, maybe they walk together to their quarters, and talk about the philosophical root of their differences. Life, death, life, things of that nature. Or maybe they don’t talk. Maybe they just walk in silence, understanding what they don’t say. Then they stop at their doors, with a nod and an eyebrow raised.

Goodnight, Spock.

Goodnight, Doctor.

Oh yeah there was a lot of "Hayes Code be damned, all of us making this film are queer/friends with queers and we're going to have some fun with gender identity" in this film. That's why it still holds up. It's not a story based around getting a laugh out of dressing men up as women so they can be clowns - there's an integrity to the cross-dressing. Daphne is an identity Jerry realized he had when he put on a dress. Every time he chooses to keep his wig and outfit on and maintain his feminine mannerisms while alone with Joe, it shows his comfort in this identity, and it elicits laughter from the audience through the dialogue, ie. the audience isn't laughing at the fact that a man is in a dress, but at the characters as fleshed out characters and human beings. The laughter comes from the situations the characters are put in and their reactions to them, not from a parody of womanhood presented through a male perspective. Similarly, Osgood's classic line at the end of the film is an affirmation that he likes Jerry as he is, even if he's Daphne. It's a way of getting the audience to say, "this is fine, we're comfortable" through laughter to something socially unacceptable in its time.

Joe's masculine identity, meanwhile, is used to highlight his misogyny and force him to understand it (and the same with Jerry, but as he's less of a womanizer, there's less of a point to be made with him). In a world where men and women often had separate social circles that overlapped only when romance was on the table, putting a man like Joe in a female space where he's privy to the conversations and emotions that his actions elicit gives him a lot to contend with and understand because he can see the consequences of his actions as raw pain and secondhand, instead of as anger being spewed directly at him. Again, the joke isn't that he's a man in a dress, or that he's parodying womanhood, it's that as a selfish misogynist he's put in situations where he's forced to empathize with the experience of womanhood in order to convincingly enact it for his own safety.

Now I am not going to spew out a wall of text on the subject or anything, but I did want to point out that he did not just "sneak things by" the code, he actually deliberately REFUSED to abide by it at all for this film, he willfully refused to even apply for the certification, he knew it wouldn't pass, and he knew he wouldn't bend to let it pass.

He and the studio took a gamble that a Wilder-Curtis-Lemmon-Monroe flick would do box office and get play without the "seal of approval" from the code folks.

fic is a gift. comments are a gift. gifts are exchanged between friends, out of love, not out of obligation.

SMOL CREATUREEEEE 🤏😭

This captures something I don't think I'll ever be able to put in to words.