Tootsie and Six Degrees of Separation
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This paper compares and contrasts the aesthetic aspects of Sydney Pollack's 1982 film, Tootsie, and John Guare's 1990 play, Six Degrees of Separation. Both are contemporary comedies, dealing in part with the nature of reality and the importance (or lack thereof) of truth. Both offer duplicitous characters who, by pretending to be someone they are not, change the lives of those around them. One becomes a better man as a result of the experience of pretending to be a woman; the other is not himself changed but instead forces the wealthy matron he encounters to try to make sense of her life and to expand her imagination. Each is an example of a distinct aesthetic object, Tootsie as a film and Six Degrees as a written play, a literary work that can be staged as a dramatic performance. Each is intended by the creating artist to provide an aesthetic experience for the audience that clarifies, completes, and confronts reality in an entertaining and satisfying way. Tootsie recounts the tale of an actor, Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman), who is fiercely talented but usually unemployed, the result of his obsessive perfectionism. While playing a tomato in a commercial, he is asked to sit down; he refuses, arguing that a tomato, especially one as ripe and juicy as the beefsteak variety he is portraying, could not sit. Accompanying a neurotic friend to a soap opera audition, he decides to read for the role himself. He transforms himself into Dorothy Michaels, a soft-spoken South
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o someone else; vignettes of the acting class he teaches, in which he exhorts his worshipping students to stretch beyond their limits; various auditions at which, ultimately, the producers are simply looking for "someone else"; and a rehearsal, at which his perfectionism is plainly evident and infuriating to the director. By the time the opening credits are complete, Pollack has painted a full picture of his protagonist. Boggs writes, "Film . . . surpasses drama in its unique capacity for revealing various points of view, portraying action, manipulating time, and conveying a boundless sense of space" (2). Pollack is a master of the film aesthetic.
Boggs observes that the director's style is an important element in analyzing a film, "the manner in which the director's unique personality is expressed through the language of the medium" (268). Pollack's personality is especially evident in Tootsie, since he also plays the role of Michael's much-harassed agent. This allows him to play out on the screen some of the kinds of clashes he and Hoffman experienced in actually working together; the dramatic completion of some of those arguments (not to mention the opportunity to work out the dialogue in advance, giving himself some of
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Approximate Word count = 1642
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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