Identity, Self, and the Other: Lessons from The Birdcage

Introduction: How We Learn Who We Are

How do we learn who we are? This may seem an odd question, for our initial response is likely to be something like: we simply know who we are because we can connect our identity to our pasts and presents. We remember what has come before — from about the age of three or four for most of us — and we carry a working model of how everything we have experienced fits with our concept of who we are in the world. In broad outlines, this is true: we are a collection of, and a commentary on, the pasts we have endured and celebrated. The 1996 film The Birdcage, with its multivalent commentaries about identity and gender, helps us see how the past molds our present.

But who we are is at least as much the product of how other people see us and try to mold and change us as it is the product of whom we wish to see ourselves. Indeed, many models of psychology and psychotherapy would lead us to believe that whom we understand ourselves to be is far more the result of the ways in which we measure ourselves against others — and the ways in which other people react to our self-presentation — than anything created purely within the self.

The Birdcage (released in the United States in 1996) provides a comic yet illustrative representation of the ways in which we come to understand ourselves only through the lens of other people's eyes. It also depicts the considerable energy each of us expends trying to get others to see us in ways that support a self-image as consonant as possible with goals that society itself has instilled.

The film's storyline is relatively simple. It focuses on a gay cabaret owner who, together with his companion — a drag queen — agrees to pretend to be straight so that their son can introduce the pair to the conservative, straight-laced, rigidly conventional parents of the son's fiancée. In many ways the film is played for laughs, and not always the subtlest of ones. But beneath — or perhaps beside — the broad brushstrokes of this story of pretense lies a story of how we spend a great deal of our time, energy, and ego trying to fit into the categories we believe other people want us to adopt.

The Self and the Other in Psychology and Anthropology

According to Adams, in his book The Multicultural Imagination (1996), our perceptions, beliefs, and ideas about individuals from other cultures and groups are grounded in the relationship of the Self to the Other. This idea of the self owes at least as much to anthropology as it does to psychology, bearing in mind that the historical roots of these two disciplines were once closely intertwined — in the nineteenth century, psychology and sociology were far closer to each other than they are today.

Adams (1996) asks us to revisit the idea of the "Self" as an essence that each person — and each culture — constructs in terms of opposition. At its most basic, this meant that early anthropologists (and the colonial powers from which they came) saw themselves as "civilized," a concept defined in direct opposition to those peoples they regarded as primitive.

Early anthropologists seemed to go out of their way to find people who were as culturally different from themselves as possible, using those differences to define themselves as the epitome of civilization. In the work of classical anthropologists such as Bronisław Malinowski, for example, the greater the degree of difference between the "Self" (white, scholar, citizen of the First World) and the "Other" (non-white, lay person, citizen of the Third World), the more emphatically the superiority of the self was demonstrated.

Of course, we no longer believe in such stark dichotomies — or at least we like to think that is the case. But a film like The Birdcage reminds us how short the distance often is between a view of society promulgated by Victorian scholarship and our own twenty-first-century daily lives. The ways in which the different sets of characters define themselves are still clearly marked by this same oppositional process. We understand ourselves in contrast to others. All too often, we can only see ourselves as "normal" or good if we can identify another person or group that we can regard as lesser — less morally developed, less socially entitled, less normal.

Oppositional Identity in The Birdcage

The humor of the film resides in the fact that both the two lead characters — whose sexuality and sense of self are defiantly non-conventional — and the two conservative characters — the fiancée's parents, whose sense of self is defined by being as "normal" as possible — are equally inflexible and equally lacking in self-insight.

Stereotypical characters are entertaining to watch precisely because they lack insight. We can laugh at all of the characters in the film because we feel superior to them, believing ourselves in the audience to be far more aware of how we define our sense of self than the characters on screen. The fact that both conventional and unconventional characters are presented as lacking insight is precisely what allows the film's humor to flourish.

Despite the fact that the film sometimes plays more for laughs than for social commentary — and there is no reason why it should not, since this is a movie rather than a therapeutic session — The Birdcage provides a useful canvas on which to draw conclusions about how the Self is constructed, especially around questions of gender.

Conclusion: The Role of Therapy in Expanding Self-Understanding

The job of therapy is in no small part to help individuals push back against over-simplification. Behind the comedy in this film — and it is a very funny film — is the recognition that much of what makes us miserable is the fact that we find ourselves limited in our sense of Self by the categories that other people bring to bear on us. The more distant we are from what our society considers "normal," the more our lives are likely to be constrained by other people's concept of the "Other."