In the wake of Robin Williams’ death I decided to remind myself of some seminal Williams films – in the first instance, Good Will Hunting, Mrs Doubtfire, Hook, and Dead Poets Society. Last night I treated myself to Mrs Doubtfire. The idea was to have it on in the background whilst I got on with other, more useful things, but a couple of minutes in I found myself agog, scribbling down notes involving heavy usage of ‘WTF’ and ‘hahahahahah Mrs Doubtfire is a hipster’ (seriously. Just look at what s/he wears. Straight out of Dalston). As it happens, Good Will Hunting is the only other of the four that I’ve rewatched as yet, and it is also rife with problems, just slightly more subtle ones that didn’t send me immediately lunging for my notepad. I’m going to have to watch it again to pull out the many issues I took with it, but for now, Mrs Doubtfire…
I’m going to start with the caveat that yes, I know it’s a children’s film and yes, I know that our willing suspension of disbelief is stretched to breaking point by the fact that it’s clearly not credible that Robin Williams could become a convincing enough woman, or in fact wear any kind of diguise, that would render his wife of 14 years and three children unable to recognise him. But the fact that we as viewers know that this is a film and not reality, and that as a children’s film it is still more likely to stray into the realms of fantasy and isn’t supposed to be taken seriously, in no way undermines the various problematic messages and attitudes the film sends and reveals. Almost more so, actually; the veneer of infantile silliness in many ways disguises the troubling ideologies underpinning Mrs Doubtfire precisely because it invites passive consumption and dismissal rather than active engagement. I think this works both ways though – one of the arguments I had with my partner about Good Will Hunting, which he could see no problem with, was that its status as a ‘serious’ film, its conventional realism (by which I mean it reflects standard Hollywood/US indie film ‘reality’, not that it belongs in the realist genre), the fact that we are supposed to view it as a representation/reflection of the real world, is what, again, encourages passive and uncritical absorption of the moral and ideological basis on which the narrative is built. He argued that no-one watching a film thinks it’s actually real, so whether it’s comedy, like Friends, or drama, like Good Will Hunting, the messages encoded in each will be received the same way and viewed as the fictions that they are. I still disagree – I think the cultural narratives constructed by films (or books, TV, etc.) are incredibly powerful and reality-shaping even though we know they’re fiction. Stories are part of how we learn about the world, what we take our cues from, and where we establish our repository of ideas about ‘the way things are’ from. We begin to talk about ourselves, our own lives, and our own stories in the same way as those we’ve read, heard, watched – in many ways, our own lives are no more ‘real’, no less a matter of interpretation and editing.
Anyway. Mrs Doubtfire. The film opens with Robin Williams – Daniel – recording the vocal track for a cartoon bird. Ahh. Nice man does silly voices for cartoons. Already every kid in the audience wants Robin Williams to be their dad (N.B. this is not an attack on Robin Williams or indeed a comment on the actor at all). We know this guy is the central character and the one we’re supposed to sympathise with because we are introduced to him first. Standard. We’re already on his side. Which means that when he starts ad-libbing, pissing the director off, wasting studio money, and being threatened with being fired, we’re still on his side – and in case we were in danger of our loyalties wavering, it’s made clear to us that Daniel is eminently moral: he will not record the scripted dialogue because the bird he’s providing a voice for is currently toking on a fuckoff great cigarette.
Daniel appeals to the sound guys for support – do you think we should be adveritising smoking to kids? – but as they’re all puffing away so violently on fags of their own that they can barely see across the room, he fails to raise a response. Look. Look how moral he is in this sea of degradation, surrounded by men who only care about money or giving themselves lung cancer. Of course he should walk out. Of course he should quit his job. It is certaintly the morally-responsible and correct course of action. Well done, Daniel.
We are so proud of Daniel’s Great Stand that when he turns up unexpectedly early to pick his kids of from school and his son asks ‘did you get fired again?’ it still doesn’t quite register that maybe this display of moral outrage isn’t quite the exceptional and commendable act we initially thought. We now know that he has kids and difficulty holding down a job, in light of which, you’d think, we might be muttering ‘suck it up and take responsibility, Daniel, three real children need your support whilst you’re fretting about the nicotine intake of a bunch of abstract ones’. But we aren’t, because Daniel is just so good with his kids. He just loves them so very much and they love him so very much – in fact, he loves them so very much that he undermines their mother’s authority and throws a massively disruptive and entirely irreponsible birthday party for his son, pissing off the neighbours, the police, his wife, and destroying his house (although not, obviously, because this is a film, so despite the fact there were actual horses in their living room everything still looks like a showroom after a few minutes of light tidying). And we still think he’s awesome. And we still want him to be our dad because, hello, he brought a PETTING ZOO to their house, and also got up on a table making a fool of himself to hip-hop so is officially the coolest person ever.
Meanwhile, we meet Daniel’s wife, Miranda (Sally Field), a successful interior designer whose working day is interrupted by a phone call from an angry lady neighbour complaining about the ruckus back at the house. Miranda, much like the lady neighbour and every other woman in this film, is stern and humourless. She leaves work earlier than usual to smooth over the situation at home, apologising to the police, telling off a goat that’s eating her begonias, putting down the cake she’s bought her son only to have it eaten by a horse, unplugging the blaring music, requesting that her husband stop dancing on the table, and generally ruining the fun. What a bitch.
So. Where are we? Daniel is talented at doing funny voices but can’t sustain a job as an actor because he’s difficult and either quits or gets sacked. He has a lot of love for his children and a great fondness for fun, but isn’t so great at the being a good example or enforcing rules. This leads him to throw an absurd party for his son, even though his wife has said he can’t have one due to the fact he’s not doing very well at school. The party pisses everyone except himself and the kids off and ostensibly (if not in actuality) destroys their ‘beautiful’ (OMG it’s so revolting but, you know, it’s supposed to be nice) house. Everyone is pretty hacked off with Miranda because she spoils all the fun and makes all the rules. She also brings in all the money. It’s pretty reasonable that she looks like flames are about to come out of her nose when she returns home to this mayhem, has her own birthday gestures ruined in the process (and made to look paltry and boring in the face of the miscellaneous wildlife covering every surface), and is left with the task of sorting everything out, but we still think she’s a total cow because she turned off the music.
Daniel seems genuinely surprised to discover that his antics have his wife spitting nails, climbing slowly down from the dining room table wearing a backwards cap and shades, sporting a look of disbelief. I mean, how can she possibly be angry? He just wanted to show the kids a good time. He was just being a nice guy. Where is her sense of fun? Rather less surprisingly, this causes a row, in which Daniel tells Miranda she works too much and has become a corporate drone like all the people she used to hate and this has turned her into a sour, boring, uptight monster who has no time for her kids. Subtext: this is the inevitable consequence of mothers going out to work. Clearly if they are busy having board meetings instead of devoting every moment of their day to their spawn, this kind of thing is bound to happen. It’s almost definitely her fault that her son is failing in school, too.
Miranda tells Daniel that he’s irresponsible and it isn’t fun any more and she doesn’t love him and she wants a divorce. She also flags up the fact that Daniel puts her in the boring stricty uptight box unfairly, that she has to become that to counter his lackadaisical approach to parenting, and how much she hates being forced into a position by his behaviour and then criticised for it to boot. This is actually a very good point and I’m glad it’s made, although given that we’re still supposed to think Daniel has the sun shining out of his arse and that Miranda is about to sprout horns at any second, the significance of it is probably lost.
The divorce itself is skirted around – no-one really seems that upset, but the next thing we know we’re in court observing a custody battle. I confess I don’t know how these things work in the US, but I find it hard to believe that custody hearings are routine in the case of divorce. Almost as hard as it is to believe that Daniel and Miranda were married in the first place, let alone for 14 years, having all the chemistry of a wet loo roll. Obviously we would have no film without this, and obviously it’s a film and not reality, and obviously Robin Williams convincing his children he’s an English woman (and let’s not even GO THERE with the fact she’s constantly described as being from England yet has an accent that resembles Scottish far more than any other regional cadence, and fuck knows why she had to be from anywhere in the UK come to that – maybe the British are superlative nannies? Either Mary Poppins made a name for us or we’re just supposed to be naturally adapted to servility) is fairly difficult to swallow but still. There is a serious incongruity here between the calm, amicable agreement to divorce and the fact that they go to court to battle for legal custody of the children. More on that later, as there are a number of contradictory messages in this film, but as much as I understand willing suspension of disbelief it can only be stretched so far before it breaks, and it’s especially infuriating when the entire premise of a film is based on something that seems so unlikely. Anyway. Such as it is, they go to court to determine how the parenting will be divided.
Miranda is represented by a lady lawyer who is there, as far as I can see, only to reinforce the idea that women are evil crones who keep fathers from their children, being as she doesn’t actually speak. The judge is a dude of course, because we can’t give women too much authority, but he’s kindly and sympathetic to Daniel’s emotive plea that he ‘has to be with his children’. There is a lot of talk here of what he needs and how distraught he will be without his children, but not much from him regarding his kids needing a dad. Which is what makes me suspicious, because actually arguing the case for his children needing his fatherly presence, particularly at a time of trauma and instability, is not only a more valid reason for him to get what he wants but a more convincing argument. Because, THINK OF THE CHILDREN. Presumably this is actually what the court are trying to decide, too – what’s in the best interests of the kids, not the preferences of the parents. You’d hope that the two would intersect and overlap of course, but eh. Here, this heartfelt speech with standard Howard Shore heart-tug score seems mostly in the service of bolstering support for Daniel and creating a well of pity in us that means we will overlook the not only serious but actually illegal transgressions he’s about to make. Poor Daniel. Poor poor Daniel, kicked out by his wife, distanced from his children, unemployed, and distraught because he misses his kids. Nothing, you note, about him missing his wife or in fact seeming in any way put out that his 14-year marriage has ended.
Anyway, despite the judge’s relative softness in comparison to other authority figures in this film, Daniel is still not given joint custody on account of not having a job or anywhere to live. Shocker. BUT, he’s got 90 days to turn it around. Most people would probably take this as the wake-up call they needed, take responsibility, find a job, enjoy the weekly visits with their kids as much as possible, and take the time to sort their life out so that by the time the three months were up there could be no excuse not to be granted joint custody. It’s three months. I’m not saying it’s not hard, what with going through a divorce and all, but it’s also not a long time in the grand scheme of things. (Having said that, Daniel has, apparently, never spent a single night away from his kids since they were born, which I find not lovely but creepy – do his kids not have friends? Sleepovers? Do he and his wife never go away without the nippers? No wonder they got a divorce.)
So the judge says ok Daniel, get a flat, get a job, and we’ll review in 90 days. We’ll send a court liaison round to your house twice a week, which is totally unnecessary and absurd but would make it difficult to exploit the comedic properties of pretending to be someone else in order to manipulate your way into your ex-wife’s life, and if they’re happy with your progress we’ll let you have equal rights to your kids.
Of course the liaison is a woman. Another stern, middle-aged woman coming between Daniel and his children. Thus far, we have met five female characters – the stern neighbour, stern Miranda, stern lawyer lady (I’m inferring this from her fierce up-do), Daniel’s caricatured, overbearing mum (on the phone), and stern court liaison lady. Awesome. Such diversity. In one way it makes a change to actually see women in successful positions, or women with authority, but given that none of these are especially positive representations and that the women in question have a vague air of masculinity about them, I don’t get the impression this success or authority is presented as something to be celebrated – it is, in fact, what is wrong with the situation: it is what has caused this rift between Daniel and his children. If women weren’t going off being successful and independent and having careers and were at home looking after their children and cleaning things like they should be, then men like Daniel wouldn’t have to throw irresponsible parties for their kids to make up for their absent-yet-strict mothers – indeed would not have opportunity to do such a thing as they would never find themselves alone in charge of the nippers in the first place.
However, even Sterny McStern herself, Miranda, is liable to be undone the second a dishy bloke appears on the scene. The first time we are introduced to Miranda, just before complainy neighbour calls, she is given a message that some guy called Stuart somethingorother wants to her to redesign his house. Cue much delight. We don’t know who this dude is but he must be important and prestigious to cause such a ripple of glee. Thus it’s pretty disappointing when he turns out to be both of these things – as far as I can tell, purely on account of being rich – but seemingly only interested in Miranda as an old flame and not in a professional sense at all. He keeps banging on about old times and how great she looks, she gets more and more flustered and continues talking about the designs she’s done for his house. So basically, high-profile rich men do not want successful women for their professional skill but in order to bone them, and successful women struggle to maintain their professionalism as soon as a handsome rich man shows them some attention. In fact, she’s totally undermined in this scene, failing even to speak to old Stu head on, merely avoiding his advances by wittering about curtains or somesuch. Which creates a strange tension between the fact that she doesn’t seem entirely willing to pursue things with Stu, and has apparently no voice with which to articulate her desires or lack thereof, so ends up just kind of slipping into seeing him, yet one of Stu’s main functions is to make us even more sympathetic to poor jilted Daniel.
Dear Daniel has now found himself a place to live. It’s a dump, apparently, judging by his kids’ reactions and Miranda’s disdain, although it’s about three times the size of my place in London and looks entirely clean and free of infestation. It’s a bit untidy, but he’s just moved house so that’s hardly indicative of a slovenly lifestyle in the eyes of most people, I wager. He can’t cook, though, and feeds his kids takeaway, which is clearly the height of child abuse. To further ram the working-mothers-are-evil-witches point home, Miranda robs him of two precious hours with the children by dropping them off late and picking them up early due to being busy. You could argue that she isn’t actually under any obligation to ferry them anywhere and Daniel should perhaps arrange their transportation, but this is not a view we’re encouraged to take. Plainly she is just a massive douchebag out to make Daniel’s life as difficult as possible and isn’t at all a woman with any responsibilities trying to cope with balancing working and looking after children. Admittedly Daniel would be all too pleased to take a bigger role in caring for the kids, thus alleviating Miranda’s burden, which is another of the glaring problems with the plot of this film – well, it’s either a problem or a device to further support the ‘Miranda is a total cow’ angle: she’s such a bloody-minded bitch that she makes life more difficult for herself just to get one over on Daniel.
Daniel also now has a job. He thought it was going to be acting, but it turns out to just be preparing films for shipment. Poor Daniel. He’s such an underdog. And because he loves his kids so much, he takes the job anyway! What a selfless creature, selling himself short and taking a demeaning menial role just to regain access to his children. A touchingly noble sacrifice. It’s a shame he didn’t have this newfound sense of responsibility a few weeks previous, really, isn’t it? Well, kind of, but I’m still making sense of why it was so VERY important that Daniel have a job when the family are clearly in no way lacking in money, have a fuckoff big house, and even on her own Miranda can afford to support herself and three children and pay a nanny $300 per week for three hours’ work per day.
By the time we hear about the fact that Miranda has plans to employ a nanny we are so far on Daniel’s side that we think it’s merely humorous that he doctors Miranda’s advertisement, altering the telephone number before she places the ad in the paper. How dare she employ a whole person to care for her kids when Daniel, their father, would happily do it himself? Well, quite. It does seem pretty ridiculous and I can’t see her doing it in a million years were her actions in any way consistent with her character because, contrary to the Daniel propaganda, she’s actually pretty sensible and responsible and good at being a parent. Later she will say she prevented Daniel from doing it because she was angry, but she doesn’t seem angry at this point, and doesn’t really have a reason to be so livid as to never want to see him again, or to want to punish him – and her children in the process. This is lame. And stupid.
But anyway, she places the ad, having not looked at it again, apparently, and noticed that her telephone number is two digits wrong. That must be because she’s so busy. Because she’s a career woman. Who is VERY BUSY. We know this because every time Daniel prank calls her pretending to be a truly awful example of womanhood she is out and about, or working, or on her mobile phone (in 1993!). Which means she must not be with her children, which means her children are neglected, which means she is a bad mother. Obviously. Daniel, meanwhile, has been perfecting his drag outfit so that he can dress up as a female nanny and pretend to be someone else in order to deceive his ex-wife into paying him to look after his own children. Of course he has to dress as a woman because there isn’t such a thing as a male nanny. Everyone knows that. It would also result in the film losing the glorious transphobic edge it so sparklingly wields, which would be a terrible shame. And we wouldn’t get to see all the hilarious looks he tries before settling on Mrs Doubtfire, which would seriously decrease the incidence of race and gender stereotypes wheeled out in the name of comedy.
To make his own application seem stronger, Daniel calls Miranda pretending to be a wide array of hideous women from different countries. There is nothing racist or misogynist about this whatsoever. Not one iota. It’s just funny. Make sure you remember that if you rewatch this and vomit into your mouth. After he’s worked his way through the most obvious stereotypes, he goes in for the kill with gentle-but-firm ‘English’ Mrs Doubtfire, whose regional accent is soft, if confusingly Scottish, and who says all the right things about disciplining children and what they should eat. We could question again at this point what may have happened had Daniel found these resources within himself before inviting a farmyard into the house, but where would the japes be then?
Mrs D is a hit. Miranda loves her. The kids, after a small wobble, love her. She’s awesome. She has them doing rigorous housework, and their homework, but still they love her. She bribes them with food that she ordered in but pretends she cooked herself, and they love her. Miranda especially finds a ludicrously unlikely confidant in this bastion of all that is good, speaking with more candour than seems usual for a children’s film about her sex life. And not for the last time. Not that I think we need to sanitise everything kids watch to a crazy degree, but there are four occasions in this film where talk turns to genital- or sex-related topics and not a single one of them isn’t weird.
Things continue thusly for a while. Mrs D is firmly ensconced in the family. They’re all happy and the kids are doing well at school. Miranda is seeing Stu, who I feel like we’re supposed to dislike but his only crime seems to be having more money than he knows what to do with, and he’s nice to her, and the kids like him. Which is probably the most unlikely aspect of this whole film of unlikelinesses – what child ever EVER liked the man their mum first went out with after their dad? But this is the movies, and things are great. Daniel got into some hilarious japes with the court liaison, trying to be both Daniel and Mrs D at the same time so as not to give the game away, but he got away with it and no-one was any the wiser that he’s actually an impostor probing his family for information about himself whilst wearing a false identity.
That is, until his son walks in on him peeing standing up. Because bathrooms in America don’t have locks. And the only true way to tell a man from a woman is whether they squat to take a slash. This of course prompts an enormous freak-out, only partially ameliorated by the true identity of this deceitful liar. You might think that this fact itself would be the biggest problem – jeez dad, you pretended to be someone else, earnt our trust, and lied your way into our house? But no. The pressing question on everyone’s lips is in fact, ‘you don’t really like wearing that stuff, do you?’ The crux of the matter. It’s fine. Put on a diguise, take $300 a week from your ex-wife, give her some revolting moralistic diatribe about how she shouldn’t sleep with anyone else EVER because you’re jilted and jealous and resent her finding the happiness you couldn’t offer, use your position of trust to sway her decisions, and attempt to manipulate her into doing things that don’t upset you. That’s ALL FINE as long as you don’t actually like wearing a fucking dress.
So now the two oldest kids know that Mrs D is a massive fraud and their dad has no morals, and his son won’t touch him because he might catch some kind of horrible disease – after all, his dad is wearing A DRESS, remember – but they can’t tell anyone else because then the film would be over. The kids feel weird about this for approximately three seconds before agreeing that yes, the youngest daughter would give the game away and yes, that would be awful. Because despite the fact their mum has always been the main provider and more responsible parent, they have more loyalty to their ethically-bankrupt father. They love him so much, and so blindly, that they are totally cool with this situation and the worst possible outcome would be that they go back to seeing him only once a week. I don’t want to seem like I’m underestimating the importance of fathers to children, and vice versa, but I’m struggling not to find this whole scenario romanticised and idealised to a point where it’s almost creepy. Especially as the older kids are definitely closer to teenagers than children and should by rights be having all kinds of parental issues right now. The stiflingly saccharine characterisation of the relationship between Daniel and his kids seems, to me, pure fantasy – in the world of the film this is apparently just normal, and charming, and it’s totally natural to have a bond this intense and uncomplicated with your spawn/creator, but, and this may just be my own father issues talking, it weirds me out.
So anyway, the kids agree to keep schtum and Mrs D continues to use her position of trust with Miranda to get the information s/he wants and attempt to influence her actions. This involves saying dangerously irresponsible things such as ‘a flawed husband is better than no husband at all’ and encouraging her to wear a frowsy dress instead of a sexy black one because it’s ‘far too short, dear’ and she should go for ‘something more your own age’. What. The. Fuck. Yes, please live a life of misery because heaven forbid you find yourself unmarried, and please make sure you wear a sack at all times from now on because you are in your forties and therefore may as well be dead. You should probably sew up your vagina while you’re at it, too, because women who divorce their husbands are never allowed to have sex with anyone ever again. Thank fuck Miranda goes with the LBD regardless – although, sadly, not the red one also mooted, because, as Mrs D points out, red is ‘the traditional colour for streetwalkers’ and how – JUST HOW, I ask you – will anyone, least of all Richy McRich himself, Stu, be able to tell the difference between upper-middle-class-ultra-demure-mother-of-three Sally Field and a common prostitute if she’s wearing a red dress? And what could be worse – WHAT, I ask you – than being mistaken for such a woman?
Of course, Mrs D is the perfect vehicle for this nonsense because she’s old and British and therefore couldn’t be expected to be anything other than a prude, obviously, and the family are so sold on believing this identity that her conservative and misogynist comments are taken simply as a rather sweet and old-fashioned sort of caring rather than ageist, sexist, at times plain offensive, judgements. And because we’re on Daniel’s side, even though we know it’s Daniel and not a quaint old English lady, we are encouraged to swallow this bullshit with the same sentiment even though we know he has a vested interest in fucking up Miranda’s relationship with Stu. And the way he goes about that are apparently still great japes. I mean, when is mocking the size of a man’s penis ever not funny, am I right? Also totally appropriate for a film aimed at children. And totally relevant, too. Obviously Stu is a terrible choice of partner because when he gets out of a swimming pool his dick shrivels up like an old balloon. I mean, he’s just been overheard telling another guy how he really likes Miranda and the kids and they’ve changed his whole perspective on life and all his priorities, but we STILL think it’s hi-fucking-LARIOUS when Mrs D throws a lime at his head and takes a pop at his miniscule todger.
So where are we? Miranda is happy and embarking on a relationship with Stu, who as far as I can tell is a perfectly decent guy who Daniel hates because his ex being with someone else is an affront to his pride and therefore he is perfectly justified in attempting to ruin it. Miranda has become far more relaxed and we feel more sympathetic towards her now, which weirdly makes us kind of want her to get back together with Daniel, because’s we’re positioned to be on Daniel’s side, even though she said herself, and all the evidence supports it, ‘when I’m not with Daniel I’m better’. Daniel has his hands full trying to be two people without arousing anyone’s suspicions but has somehow learnt to master the feminine arts of cooking and home-making at the same time as making a good impression of some senior TV guy who, in time-honoured tradition, walks in on Daniel doing some of his goofy voices and invites him to a dinner meeting on – whaddayaknow – the very same evening as Miranda’s birthday meal, which Mrs D must of course be at because how else would Daniel be around to drive as many spanners as possible in the works and prevent Stu bedding Miranda by telling him she has crabs?
If there’s one thing this film loves, it’s a comedic montage set to some cannily appropriate pop tune such as ‘Walk Like a Man’, which obviously has us falling about in hysterics when it soundtracks Mrs D strutting down the street doing those all-too-familiar guy things of rooting around with her genitalia and punching people who bump her shoulder. I don’t know about you, but I can barely leave the house for guys hitting each other and rummaging about in their boxer shorts. But you see? You see how this is a man, but a man dressed as a woman, who is now doing man things, thus pointing up the fundamental differences between men and women and reinforcing binary stereotypes? The hilarity is almost too much. And if you didn’t quite get that the first time, don’t worry, because there’ll be at least three more sequences just like this one, with another ironic musical overlay for a few cheap laughs.
Still, there’s only so many times this hackneyed theme can be peddled out so finally, finally, we reach the climax of the film. The Great Dinner. Daniel tries to rearrange with TV Man, but of course he is so important he doesn’t have another appointment for months and months and months, so – heaven forbid he miss a chance to screw Miranda over – Daniel must attend both dinners, one as himself and one as Mrs D. Did I mention that both dinners are in the same restaurant? What a bloody coincidence. It will come as a surprise to precisely no-one that this doesn’t go according to plan.
Daniel arrives with the family, as Mrs D. He requests that they sit in the smoking section, presumably so as to be situated as far away from TV Man as possible, which is curious given that the trigger for his divorce from Miranda came from his oh-so-moral refusal to provide the voice for a cigarette-smoking cartoon animal. But as we all know, cartoon smoke is far more dangerous to theoretical children than real smoke is to real children, and protecting one’s own self from a more-than-slightly troubling situation of your own making is far more important than protecting the children you apparently care about so deeply that you’re even prepared to go through the horror of pretending to be a woman for from those evil smokesticks.
Anyway. They sit in the smoking section. Then Mrs D goes off to become Daniel and keeps the family waiting to order, having already pissed off TV Man by being late. Some tedious to-ing and fro-ing between tables happens, during which time Daniel gets drunk, tells Stu that Miranda has crabs and therefore he should by no account have sex with her, purposefully poisons Stu by pretending to be a chef and putting cayenne pepper, to which Stu is allergic, on his dinner, and gets very confused about which disguise he should wear where. Arriving at TV Man’s table dressed as Mrs D, TV Man looks like he is about to vomit his whisky everywhere until Daniel reassures him that it’s a character! For the TV! Oh thank god, he’s not REALLY a man who likes wearing dresses, that would be THE WORST, he’s just a man who wears dresses for televisual entertainment. Or out of love for his children. That’s different. Apparently. But just in case TV Man has any doubts, Daniel affirms his normal-guy masculine status by telling TV Man that he just shagged a waitress – cue lots of whisky-glass-clinking and an appreciative roar of ‘you dog!’ – so we’re all clear that there is nothing to be concerned about here, no sir. Because exactly what you want in a children’s TV presenter is to be certain that they are a sexual ‘dog’.
Unfortunately, the unmasking of Mrs D as Daniel does not achieve quite the same positive response from his family, although by no means should you take this to mean that they are utterly and thoroughly aghast and refuse to ever speak to him again. Actually all that happens is they go home and moan about how much they miss Mrs Doubtfire, because that’s a far more likely response than feelings of betrayal and anger.
So Daniel has his 90-day hearing thing, at which he makes a vomitworthy plea to the judge about how he is ‘addicted to his children’ and living without them drives him to ‘insanity’ because ‘I’ve been crazy since the first moment I saw them’. Here we go gain. Poor Daniel! Poor poor Daniel! And just so we’re clear, it’s only because he’s such a crazy addict that he was driven to don a dress. Once again, IT’S NOT BECAUSE HE LIKES IT. It’s ok to be on Daniel’s side, because he’s not a pervert who enjoys dressing in women’s clothes. But just so we know it’s not ok to dress in women’s clothes, and that anyone who does so is suspicious, even those as unequivocally sound of character and full of love for his children as Daniel, the judge won’t let him see the kids unsupervised. You see, Daniel’s ‘lifestyle has been irregular’ and the judge ‘refuses to subject children’ to him until he has undergone full psychological testing and treatment. Not, as I understand it, to address the many many worrying aspects of Daniel’s conduct that I keep banging on about – such as what basically amounts to stalking, and the lying, and the deception, and the abuse of trust, and all the other fucked-up shit that’s involved with assuming a false identity to con your way into your ex-wife’s house – but to address this ‘irregular lifestyle’. Which I take to mean ‘sometimes dressing as a woman’.
So Daniel is stripped of Mrs D in daily life and only gets to see his kids once a week with supervision, BUT her memory lives on – he’s got himself a TV slot. As Mrs D. And Miranda and the kids watch him every day! And they laugh! Oh how they laugh! And by the power of comedy, Daniel is restored to his children. For a few disgusting moments I thought Daniel and Miranda were going to actually get back together, but thankfully the film stops one step short of this revolting conclusion and ends instead with Miranda allowing Daniel to pick the kids up from school and all the jazz, and Mrs D giving a heartfelt TV signoff directed at kids whose parents are splitting up. Basically, chaps, if this happens, it’s not your fault, and your family might end up looking very different but that’s ok. And here are all the examples of the ways your new family might be configured, except the possibility of having same-sex parents, because that is NOT A FAMILY, so we won’t mention that just in case you start thinking that’s a normal and valid way to bring up children, or in fact that it’s a thing that happens ever. It doesn’t. Ok? If it doesn’t appear in the litany of family arrangements Mrs Doubtfire has just told you of, it’s not an option.
There we go. Happy ending. Daniel gets to spend time with his kids again. No reconciliation with Miranda, but no-one seemed especially upset about them splitting up in the first place – even Daniel himself appeared only to care about the intrusion on his old territory by another man and, you know, the all-important, insanity-inducing children – and it would undermine what I assume to be the point of the film: to send its final message to the kids of divorced or divorcing parents that it isn’t their fault. Well ok. There are some ideas we can take away from Mrs Doubtfire that are worth taking – divorce happens, divorce is hard for fathers, who are most often the ones with reduced access to the children, divorce is not the fault of the children, and even though it’s hard it will be ok eventually even if what you call ‘family’ looks a little different. Great. I’ve no beef with any of that. But there’s also a lot of just really shitty stuff bound up in there too, and certain aspects of the messages that are being sent contradict each other wildly.
Like, to convey the idea that parents separating doesn’t have to mean the end of all happiness, the ‘bitter divorce’ (as it’s described on IMDB and probably all other synopses of this film) can’t be presented as too traumatic or too bitter so as not to undermine that message. But then it makes it ludicrous that Miranda would prevent Daniel from looking after the kids in the first place, or that Daniel would be such a dick to Stu, or that he would resent Miranda’s happiness so much. I mean, there’s one rather tepid argument, no crying, and it all seems pretty amicable. So where does all this apparent vitriol come from?
We’re also supposed to take away the fact that sometimes people are happier and better people when they aren’t married any more. But we’re also positioned in sympathy with Daniel, who wants to sabotage Miranda’s newfound happiness, and like him we judge her for finding a new partner and we hate Stu (again, IMDB describes him as a ‘jerk’ – really? On what basis?). However, Stu can’t be made out as an unequivocally awful guy because then it’d be confusing the message that if you end up with a step-parent they aren’t going to be a fairytale wicked person. Which I suppose explains why Stu is presented as something of a buffoon and I get the definite impression we aren’t supposed to like him one iota, so as to be in support of Daniel, but can’t find any actual evidence that there’s anything wrong with him at all.
We’re supposed to get that dads care deeply about their children and to be sympathetic to the cause of fathers who find themselves estranged from their families, but in the course of supporting Daniel’s cause, the representation of Miranda goes some steps towards villifying mothers – especially working mothers. Men are constructed as the victims of women, who demand divorces and refuse fathers access to their children. I would say that it’s not even especially subtly insinuated that mothers are responsible for divorces.
I’m still struggling to get my head around the implications of the fact that Daniel, as Daniel, could not pull his finger out and hold down a job, could not make himself useful around the house by cooking or cleaning, could not discipline his children or impose boundaries, could not take responsibility, could not do any of the things that would have saved his marriage. But as Mrs Doubtfire he could. But having said that I can’t get my head around it, I also find it perhaps the most true aspect of this film. Daniel is not unable to do those things. He is not deficient. He was simply unwilling and, using my own anecdotal knowledge of relationships and human psychology, I’d say that he’s unwilling precisely because he knows Miranda wants him to do these things. His actions confirm that he doesn’t have much respect for her – in fact a lot of rage and resentment towards her, perhaps feelings of being emasculated by her successful career. Yet he works against himself; ostensibly he doesn’t want to lose Miranda or the children, but even though he knows Miranda is getting to the end of her tether, even though he knows what she needs from him, what is required of him as a father and partner, he won’t do it. Until he can do it on his own terms, and until he can do it whilst getting one over on Miranda. And the cooking and cleaning he can only do, can only learn to do, in guise of a woman. He will do it in service of his own agenda and when dressed in the right costume, but not when doing it is a matter of supporting someone else or when it involves transgressing apparent gender roles. This is particularly noticeable on Mrs Doubtfire’s first visit to the house, where she almost betrays her true identity by finding her way around the kitchen so easily but distracts Miranda by complimenting the labels she’s put on the cupboards to show where things go. Miranda responds that Daniel would never notice or appreciate something like that, which seems to me to highlight a key point: that Miranda has misinterpreted Daniel – clearly he has, unbeknownst to her, both noticed and appreciated the labels, but has refused to express his appreciation to her. Again, it’s not that he doesn’t know what the right things to say or do are, or that he can’t say or do them, just that he has hitherto declined to. (As an aside, it also drives me bonkers that in the scene where Mrs D makes the tea the kettle is on the stove for about five seconds and doesn’t whistle, so the water plainly never boils, and in fact the water is non-existent because nothing actually comes out when she pours it into the cups.)
Overall, the morals and messages of this film are very mixed and massively problematic. I won’t harp on and on but, really, what? There are a few gestures towards making some sort of comment on the difficulties of being a woman, but they’re insultingly casual and so trivialised that they seem more like some guy went ‘oh we’d better put something in about how high heels are really uncomfortable and use that “pain is beauty” line too so that it seems like we haven’t overlooked the trials of being a woman’. Because yeah, the painful removal of body hair and sore feet from heels are definitely the biggest and most difficult problems women encounter. I just wonder why the makers of this film bothered highlighting Daniel’s experience of gender at all considering that the only two references to the difference between his experience as a man and as a woman are easy stereotypes that make it seem like the only real difficulty with living as a woman compared to as a man is that there are some uncomfortable appearance-related behaviours that are expected. I mean, that IS an aspect of ideal femininity and it ISN’T a trivial aspect by any stretch in terms of what it says about wider ideologies, but it’s presented here as being trivial, as being inserted for a cheap laugh, which is yet another reason I think this film presents a hostile view of women. Daniel’s dressing as a woman isn’t a way to explore gender, but that begs the question of why then he should dress as a woman at all, if not to uphold certain conventions, reinforce stereotypes, and be the perfect vessel for transmitting a bunch of misogynist bullshit. The fact that we’re supposed to see it merely as a comedic turn and not as a comment or discussion of gender, the fact that gender issues are largely ignored on the face of it, is what makes the comments and discussions carried heavily in the subtext more easily obscured and readily, uncritically consumed.
Ok I’ll shut up now. Apologies if there are any errors in quotation or chronology – I’ve only watched the film once and although the first half of this was written the day after I saw it, the rest of it was finished today, two weeks later. I should also add that I haven’t read any other articles on the film – these are just the things that struck me when I watched it, and do not represent a studied analysis or anything more academic than my immediate opinions.
Sequinned Mannequin 