The Pain of Revisiting ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’
When I was a teenager, I had a habit of rewatching movies over and over again on my bulky Dell Laptop. These movies were often awful. I obsessed over Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995) or the slap schtick shenanigans of Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, and Diane Keaton in The First Wives Club (1996). I didn’t realize at the time that all of these movies were campy and often had a gay or queer subtext.
Of all the movies I watched, no film was I obsessed with more than Mrs. Doubtfire (1993). The Robin William’s comedy about a man cross-dressing as a nanny to secretly spend more time with his kids was a movie I delighted in, although, at the time, I didn’t understand why.
In retrospect, it was one of the few mainstream movies that had actual queer representation, and in the smallest of ways, I felt seen.
A lot has changed since the 90s, both for me and society-at-large. And so when I recently revisited the family comedy, I did so with apprehension. I had the sneaking suspicion that it would not hold up to the nostalgia of my youth, and sadly, I was right.
Mrs. Doubtfire was a smash hit in the early 90s. It grossed over $441 million worldwide, which would be almost $790 million today. The film’s success was the result of several simultaneous factors. There was, first and foremost, the star appeal of the late Robin Williams, who had impressed the world with his comedic chops in the Disney film Aladdin (1992) a year prior.
There was also the fact that this film normalized a contentious issue in American culture — divorce. The protagonist Daniel Hillard (Robin Williams), goes through a messy breakup with his wife Miranda Hillard (Sally Field) in the movie, and a big takeaway is that it doesn’t make that family unit inferior. As Daniel’s female persona Mrs. Euphegenia Doubtfire says at the very end of the film in response to a little girl’s letter:
“You know, some parents, when they are angry, they get along much better when they don’t live together. They don’t fight all the time, and they can become better people, and much better mummies and daddies for you….There are all sorts of different families, Katie. Some families have one mommy. Some families have one daddy or two families…But if there is love dear, those are the ties that bound. And you’ll have a family in your heart forever.”
We have retrospectively come to praise this film’s take on the modern family, but that perspective wasn’t a given. When no-fault divorce became an option for Americans, starting with California in 1970, there was this irrational fear that the family unit would implode, especially after the divorce rate rose dramatically throughout that first decade. Conservative organizations like Marriage Savers (1996) were founded in the 90s with the intended purpose of lowering the divorce rate, you know, for the children.
These fears proved to be unfounded. The divorce rate rose mainly because, well, people finally had the option to, and ever since then, it has slowly lowered. This decline is especially true for Millennials and Generation Zers. For a variety of reasons (cough, cough, wealth inequality, and changing gender norms), they have not been marrying at the same rates. Mrs. Doubtfire was a cultural touchstone pushing to normalize divorce, which at that point was a common but ridiculed trend for decades.
Another thing in this film’s favor is its large queer following. Author Tim Teeman described the film in the Daily Beast as the “opening salvo” in a pop culture war that led to LGBTQIA+ acceptance. Writer Derrick Clifton mentioned in Mic how the movie inspired them to dress in drag for the first time.
Mrs. Doubtfire would arguably be classified as camp, which is a loose term for a genre of over-the-top works that usually focus on marginalized voices laughing in the face of mainstream society. They are works full of what Susan Montag would describe as “artifice and exaggeration,” and Mrs. Doubtfire certainly has a lot of that. This film is chock-full of references to various things in queer culture. When Daniel is “transforming” into Mrs. Doubtfire for the first time, for example, he goes through a serious of impressions from Barbara Streisand singing Don’t Rain On My Parade, to the song Matchmaker from the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, to Norma Desmond’s “I’m ready for my closeup” in Sunset Boulevard.
There is also the fact that the lead’s brother Frank (played by gay icon Harvey Fierstein) is heavily implied to be gay, which was sort of that actor’s entire schtick (see Independence Day, Mulan, etc.). Frank lives with a flamboyant man named Jack (Scott Capurro), who Daniel openly refers to his children as their aunt. Frank and Jack are presented as asexual in that 90s way queer characters were portrayed back then (see also To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar), but their presence would be hard to dismiss simply as two friends living together.
It was sadly daring during the 90s to have any gay representation, let alone, a couple in a film purporting to claim how family structures should work. To give you an example of how homophobic society was back then, the year following Mrs. Doubtfire’s release, Democratic president Bill Clinton signed the policy Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which banned openly queer people from serving in the military. The closing monologue given by Mrs. Doubtfire might not mention queer families, directly, but the subtext was definitely there.
From this perspective, Mrs. Doubtfire is a progressive movie. By many respects, it still is, and yet, these relatively positive portrayals come at the expense of a text that is pretty openly transphobic.
The painful thing about Mrs. Doubtfire is that it’s a movie uplifting so much (e.g., gay people, varied family structures, etc.) at the expense of trans people. When you comb through the narrative closely, a lot of the humor is centered around how peculiar it is for Daniel to be in a dress, and that is not a perspective that honors varying gender identities but lampoons them.
When Daniel, for example, sees an image of himself in the mirror while in a dress without Mrs. Doubtfire’s facial prosthetic, he casually calls himself Norman Bates. This comment is in direct reference to the movie Psycho (1960), where the character Norman adopts the persona of his mother to kill occupants of his motel. It may seem like an off comment, but trans people have been likened to serial killers for decades (see Silence of the Lambs), and it ties into a long, bitter history.
In another example, Daniels’s wife Miranda puts out an advertisement for a nanny, and Daniel calls in as various “eccentric” voices to make his bid as Mrs. Doubtfire seem better in comparison. Amongst people advocating for corporal punishment and putting their children in cells, we have someone say: “I don’t work with the males because I use to be one.” Based on the horrified look on Miranda’s face as she ends the call, this is portrayed to the viewer as a bad thing.
When Daniel’s kids discover Mrs. Doubtfire is not a cisgendered woman, their first response is to threaten to call the police and assault her. “You are going to get it in the balls,” Daniel’s son says. Keep in mind this is before Daniel’s deception is revealed. The only they know at this point is that Mrs. Doubtfire has a penis.
That response (although common for the 90s) is still transphobic, and the text doesn’t bother to refute this position. When Daniel comes forward with the truth several moments later to his two eldest children, the response from his son is telling. Chris Hillard (Matthew Lawrence) refuses to hug his father, and Daniel shrugs it off by saying, “It’s okay. It’s a guy thing.”
None of this has aged particularly well, and that is especially true for the plot itself. One of the most common transphobic arguments is that trans people are pretending to be trans so that they can have access to “vulnerable” people. The bathroom debates of the 2010 culture wars, for example, were centered around the erroneous assertion that men would use trans identity to sneak into bathrooms to rape women and abduct children. This type of thinking was prevalent even before the 2010s (note a huge reason why the Equal Rights Amendment was killed during the 70s was that opponents such as Phyllis Schlafly argued that it would lead to the mandating of unisex bathrooms).
This characterization is false on multiple levels that have been thoroughly debunked elsewhere (see some here and here); however, within this very liberal movie, we have this same talking point reenacted uncritically. The plot of Mrs. Doubtfire is that of a cisgendered man who has been barred from the courts from parenting his children because of his gross negligence, only to use cross-dressing to circumvent that order secretly. Daniel uses the gender identity of Mrs. Doubtfire — one he is only voyeuristically attached to — to manipulate and spy on his family.
This plot is a narrative right out of the conservative imagination, and one very much rooted in 90’s culture.
When we talk about older works, and yes, 1993 was almost 30 years ago, the phrase that often gets trotted out is that you have to place the work within its proper historical context. I have always struggled with this justification because, for me, it has often seemed like an excuse. People who ask you to place something into a historical context are many times trying to sidestep discussions of discrimination that occur within a text, and by extension, the discrimination that occurred within that time period at large.
Acts of transphobia do not happen in isolation.
The 90s were extremely discriminatory toward LGBTQIA+ people, especially trans and gender non-conforming people. The right to not be fired for your gender identity was only just affirmed with the Supreme Court ruling Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, in June of 2020. In the 90s, it was very much a possibility (and for many, an ongoing reality) that you could be fired or denied housing for your gender identity.
There were also the physical acts of harassment, assault, and outright murder that occurred. We don’t have the exact number of hate crimes committed against trans people during this time. The FBI only started recording such things as recently as 2013, and even then only unreliably so, but we know it happened. The same year Mrs. Doubtfire came out in theaters, a trans man named Brandon Teena was raped and murdered in Nebraska (his story would become the basis for the 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry). We will probably never have an accurate number of such assaults because that would rely on law enforcement to gender trans people correctly, and even now, that does not always happen (see Jayne Thompson).
When I watch Mrs. Doubtfire, I cannot help but see how this context of transphobia is mostly ignored. A viewer can watch this film and walk away wholly ignorant of the outright discrimination trans people experienced during that time. Yet, the same cannot be said about the affirmation of their own transphobia.
A great example of this happens near the climax of the film. After Mrs. Doubtfire has been outed to the Hillard family, a judge solidifies Daniel’s custody arrangement because he thinks he is fundamentally unwell:
“The reality, Mr Hillard, is that your lifestyle over the past month has been very unorthodox. And I refuse to further subject three innocent children to your peculiar and potentially harmful behaviour…I am suggesting a period of psychological testing and perhaps treatment for you.”
While the judge may not say outright that he finds Daniel’s gender non-conforming behavior to be an act of mental instability, that is definitely the subtext there. If you are unaware, queer identities have often been conflated with mental illness. It was all too common during much of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century for people to send queer loved ones to conversion therapy or reparative therapy so that they could be “cured.”
It’s only been very recently that this harmful practice has been banned in many states across the country, and its legally still allowed in numerous regions throughout the US. During the 90s, the idea that queerness was a mental affliction was even more common than now, and many Mrs. Doubtfire viewers would have held it.
Daniel having his children taken away from him is depicted as a sad moment. Still, I never felt like they refuted the transphobic subtext woven into the judge’s final remarks because narratively, the judge is kind of right. Daniel’s behavior was extremely inappropriate. He was a negligent caregiver who manipulated his way back into his children’s lives through cross-dressing. This duplicitousness fulfills a lot of negative stereotypes about trans people, and it can be seen as hurtful. As a recent Change.org petition remarked on why they wanted to cancel the 2019 musical adaptation of this film:
“Violence against trans people, especially trans women of color, is on the rise, and this is due in part to our culture’s assumptions that trans people are sneaky, lying, or perverted. We can’t change the ideas that were propagated by our industry in the past, but we can keep them from existing in the future.”
By voyeuristically using the veneer of transgender identity to talk about a cisgendered relationship, the film unintentionally says some pretty offensive things in the process.
I loved this movie as a kid, and in many ways, I still do. It does so many things right: Robin Williams is a great actor, even if many of his jokes no longer land for me; I admire what is being said about all family dynamics being acceptable, and now that I am in an actual queer relationship, Frank and Scott’s dynamic is actually funnier to me. I have had many similar catty conversations with my husband.
I do not think the creators purposefully intended to lambaste trans identity in the way that I have described. I have found no evidence that suggests director Chris Columbus or writers Randi Mayem Singer or Leslie Dixon set out to be maliciously transphobic.
In fact, I don’t think it was even a consideration.
That doesn’t mean the jokes I described above sting any less. While we could say that the creators were working within the confines of their society, I think that gives them too much of a pass. Many times people make bad films and jokes not because they are carefully weighing what polite society will permit them to say, but because they agree with the prevalent norms of “polite” society. Their hatred comes out, not willfully so, but instinctually, almost like breathing, and retrospectively, we don’t need to give that subtle hatred the benefit of the doubt.
We are not required to be kind about the past’s mistakes.
While we can recognize the historical context of a work (and we should), that does not mean we need to ignore its flaws for the sake of other’s comfort. It’s true that Mrs. Doubtfire, as well as other films such as In & Out (1997) and The Birdcage (1996), went a long way in cementing queerness in popular culture. It’s also true that many of these films drew upon stereotypes that we would not find appropriate to replicate today.
Mrs. Doubtfire conformed to some norms while flaunting others, and both that good and bad deserves to be highlighted.
Rather than lament this fact, we should celebrate this film’s datedness. We are no longer in the 90s anymore — with all the hatred and hurt that came with it — and I couldn’t be happier.