At first glance, Susan Seidelman’s 1985 screwball comedy Desperately Seeking Susan is a film about a good girl and a bad girl with murky, shifting identities. Cinematic stories of virgins and vamps who exchange personas by way of outfits, apartments, and lovers are fairly common, and, based on Desperately Seeking Susan’s comedic, digestible “trading places” plot, it’s easy to assume that the film would fall into this trope. But a closer look brings to light some incredibly nuanced questions about identity and the bad-girl/good-girl binary, asked through the interactions of two distinct characters who are cleverly differentiated through diverging aesthetics. Do good girls really want to be bad girls? Do bad girls really want to be good girls? How are the differences and similarities of identities communicated through aesthetics, particularly when a film is written and directed by women? Are identities actually interchangeable, or are they simply flexible?
Desperately Seeking Susan centers on two opposite women. There’s Roberta (Rosanna Arquette), a shy, preppy New Jersey housewife with a philandering hot tub salesman husband, Greg (Mark Blum), and a penchant for reading the newspaper’s personal column. And then there’s Susan, who is positioned as the perfect devil to Roberta’s perfect angel; she’s a New Wave punk drifter who is played by Madonna, arguably the most notorious bad girl of the 1980s. It’s Roberta’s fascination with the classifieds that brings these two leading ladies together. When Roberta stumbles upon an ad that is “desperately seeking Susan,” she dresses up in her version of punk attire and makes her way to a New York City address printed in the ad. In the city, she catches a glimpse of Susan as the It Girl meets up with her lover, Jimmy (Robert Joy). But Roberta is promptly punished for this voyeurism with a nasty fall that leaves her with amnesia and the idea that she herself is Susan. Chaos and confusion ensue, but by the film’s ending, tangled identities have been unraveled. Susan and Roberta (now free of both amnesia and her lousy husband) end the film as themselves, with separate boyfriends, aesthetics, and personas. But, while the plot forces Susan and Roberta to explore each other’s respective physical spaces and wardrobes, the women themselves never transform into each other — not really.
Intersecting feminine identities have long been a fascination of filmmakers. Critic Miriam Bale dubs the plethora of identity-bending films that exist “persona swap films,” describing them as movies “that are about the friendship between two people, usually women (often a brunette and blonde, and frequently one eccentric/dominant and the other more conventional) who swap personas.”Among other genre constraints, Bale maintains that persona swap films must center on a “distinctly feminine experience.” On her original list of 10 key persona swap films, she pairs movies directed by men — Ingmar Bergman’s dreamy, unsettling 1966 drama Persona and David Lynch’s 2001 surrealist thriller Mulholland Dr. — with women-helmed projects including Desperately Seeking Susan. But while Seidelman’s identity-blending comedy definitely has its place within the persona swap genre, Desperately Seeking Susan questions the category’s constraints more often than it obeys them.
Seidelman and the film’s production and costume designer, Santo Loquasto, crafted Susan’s and Roberta’s costumes, hairstyles, and makeup looks with thorough attention to detail, building two separate aesthetics that remain distinct throughout the film and communicate the main characters’ differences to viewers — or at least to viewers well-versed in the intricacies of feminine aesthetics. The women do not trade closets, makeup kits, or hairstyles. The only item that both main characters wear onscreen is Susan’s signature jacket — a cropped black tux with a metallic Eye of Providence design emblazoned in sequins across its back — the trading of which allows the men in Susan’s and Roberta’s lives to mistake them for one another endlessly.
We are presented with two very different stylings for the women from the very first time we see them on screen. We meet Roberta as she stares meekly at herself in a beauty parlor mirror, cloaked in a delicate, pale pink cape. Her hair hangs straight and limp as she waits on her stylist, and she’s sporting a 1980s version of no-makeup makeup: seamless matte foundation blended into her skin, understated dark brown eyeliner, and a muted, medium pink lip topped with a swipe of gloss. In contrast, Susan shows up on our screens the morning after what we assume is a one-night stand. She’s in a messy hotel room catching all her angles with a set of Polaroid selfies. She’s wearing a riff on what, in 1985, was Madonna’s real-life signature look: a low-cut black lace bodysuit, black footless tights, layers of clunky necklaces, and the Eye of Providence jacket. Her hair is wild, kept at bay with a thick, black headband. Her lips are coated in a vivid, sheen-y hot pink lipstick that’s a little smeared, and her eyes are rimmed in heavy, black eyeliner.
As the film progresses, the plot necessitates a persona swap when Roberta bumps her head and wakes up with amnesia. But the women in the film never actually choose to trade places, and they maintain tight control over their separate personal styles, even through switching environments. When Roberta prepares to follow the personal ad and drive to the city to spy on Susan, she dresses up in a personalized reinvention of New Wave punk style. She wears a fluffy pink and lavender headband, pink space boots, fitted purple jeans, and a layered button-down combo that looks almost preppy. The outfit is funky, but sweet, pastel, and decidedly Roberta. After her fall, Roberta-as-Susan finds herself at the apartment of Dez (Aidan Quinn), a handsome projectionist in the city who’s friends with Susan’s boyfriend Jimmy but has never actually met Susan, and is, thusly, just as confused about Roberta’s identity as Roberta herself.
Roberta wakes up after her fall missing not only her memories but also her usual clothes; instead of her preppy, housewifely closet, she is now in possession of Susan’s suitcase full of punk pieces. She pulls an emerald cocktail dress, black fishnet tights, and black fingerless gloves from the luggage and piles on more jewelry than she would have worn in her life as Roberta the housewife. Her makeup is slightly bolder, too. Black eyeliner replaces brown, and her lipstick color is a fuschia pink that’s closer to Susan’s vibrant pink-red lip than the pearly, bubblegum look she glosses on earlier in the film. Still, though, Roberta’s new style reads as refined party girl rather than street-smart punk. Her sequined dress has an elegant, fitted cut; her necklaces are strings of delicate beads rather than chunky ones; and her painted lips and eyes lack the smeared quality of Susan’s slept-in face. In short, when Roberta slips into the New Wave underground of New York City, she adopts a fresh style, but not one identical to Susan’s. Rather than becoming Susan, Roberta is becoming a new version of herself.
Susan’s style remains even more firmly defined throughout the film. When Susan hears of a woman who is impersonating her in the city (the amnesiac Roberta), she begins searching for the person who she believes has stolen her identity. Her search leads her to Roberta and Gary’s New Jersey McMansion, where her brash outfits present a visually jarring contrast to the house’s opulent, 1980s, pastel furnishings. Susan makes herself at home in the couple’s space, rifling through Roberta’s frilly, pink lingerie drawer and even swiping a black, sequined evening jacket from Roberta’s closet. In a later scene, we see her lounging at the edge of the couple’s backyard pool, snacking on Cheetos and wearing a pair of Gary’s white boxer shorts with oversized aviator sunglasses and her own sheer black lace bra. After thoroughly enjoying all the amenities of the Glass’ home, Madonna leaves New Jersey in another partly-stolen, androgynous look. This time, she pairs Gary’s boxers with a men’s undershirt (that we can also assume is borrowed from Gary) and white lace thigh-highs kept up with a ruffled, ivory garter belt. Instead of entering Roberta’s home and emerging dressed in subdued, soft fabrics and hues that would fit the muted energy of the suburban space, Susan retains her usual rebellious aesthetic by stealing pieces from Gary’s closet and pairing them irreverently and sensuously with her own mismatched items.
And while the filmmakers behind Desperately Seeking Susan use costumes, hair, and makeup to consistently communicate Susan’s and Roberta’s individuality, sartorially, the male characters blend into one another, intensifying the film’s persona swap subversion. After her accident, when the confused Roberta is looking for clues to her identity, she asks Dez about his friend and Susan’s boyfriend, Jimmy — a lover she should be able to remember if she is, in fact, Susan. Roberta asks Dez if Jimmy is thin and Dez answers with, “[He’s] sort of my build.” “What color eyes does he have?” Roberta asks. When Dez tells her Jimmy’s eyes are blue, she answers with another question: “Like yours?” And while Jimmy and Dez are, of course, different characters played by different actors, they both have textured, light brown hair, ice-blue eyes, and a penchant for loose, black slacks and fitted, black tanks and tees.
Near the end of the film, the murky male identities are complicated further in a scene where Susan — clad in the aforementioned boxers-and-thigh-highs look — makes her way to a newspaper office to place a personal ad “desperately seeking Roberta.” As Susan walks towards the office’s door, three men pose noticeably in the background of the shot. They are all ogling Susan and they are all clad in a uniform: light-wash blue jeans, leather belts, green Oxford shirts, watches with leather bands worn on their left wrists, and thin gold chains around their necks. The men are not only dressed identically, they are in fact identical, played by separated-at-birth triplets Robert Shafran, Eddy Galland, and David Kellman.
The similarities shared by Desperately Seeking Susan’s men and the contrasts presented by its women combine to ask which identities, if any, are actually interchangeable. The film’s vibrant, meaningful costume, makeup, and hair design result in an exploration of identity formation that not only questions the assumptions other persona swap films have made about women’s identities, but also communicates directly with specific audiences — audiences intimately acquainted with the power that dress, makeup, hair, and other aesthetic choices hold over the presentation and perception of a persona. The film invites us to wonder at the plausibility of persona swaps, both on screen and in real life. Can identities be traded back and forth, like a sequined jacket? Or, instead, are they growing, changing things — messy, expanding beings that are ready at any moment to evolve and test the limits of outside definitions and perceptions?
