Hair Moments in Pop Culture No. 1
What is hair but a walking moment?
Hey all and welcome to another installment of Pull out your own Hair. This week, we’re altering the format a bit to generate our first Hair Moments in Pop Culture round-up.
So let’s begin with the question:
What is a hair moment?
As I mentioned last week, HAIR CLUB persists on a healthy diet of both high and low brow reference, something we affectionately call “UNIBROW.” Hair is often asked to shoulder the burden of a story’s dramatic tension. Through these round-ups, we’d like to map out how hair is actually used to tell stories.
I come across hair moments in pop culture all the time. I’ll be watching a movie or a TV show, taking in internet content of any kind, and a character or a real person might invoke a popular hair saying, or hair change will become a major plot point, a way to signal a shift in the narrative, a way to take back control (i.e. a breakup haircut, etc.). In HAIR CLUB we call these “hair moments.” They can be loud or super subtle, and they can belong to hair on any part of the body. Defined simply: hair moments are moments when hair is used in a colloquial or metaphorical way to convey something more complex about the character or narrative, plugging the story into a broader cultural context.
I know y’all know what a hair moment is because so many of you send them my way when you find them. We’d love to use this space to gather up as many as we can find.
It feels important to pause here and acknowledge that we all have our own frame of reference. As much as we in HAIR CLUB aspire to a complete understanding of how hair achieves meaning across art, culture, literature, spirituality, etc., we are only as complete as the narratives we have access to! I am just one individual with one embodied experience. When I write, I write from my own (limited! learning!) perspective, guided by the values that make me who I am, and shaped by the culture and communities that have held and shaped me both in my lifetime and generationally. Clinging to the myth that any single person can write unassailable Truth without acknowledging their subjectivity is a dangerous and colonial mindset that tends to erase the gorgeous nuances of human experience.
This expansive, associative, and socially-engaged methodology is at the core of HAIR CLUB’s scholarly functioning. Not least of which because a discussion of hair will always be as personal as it is universal. Which is why I hope that you will chime in with your own experiences and your own references! Help us map what hair means across time and cultures.
As you move through the week, I’d love to hear about any hair moments you notice. Or perhaps reading through this newsletter you remember iconic hair moments from your favorite movies or TV shows. Go ahead and screen cap, copy/paste, link, and describe those moments in the comments!
Our goal here is to amass a growing archive of references to hair in pop culture, music, TV, film, science, art, and life in general. Through this exploration, we hope to understand a little bit more about how hair is used as a metaphor in storytelling.
Can’t wait to see what we can come up with together.
The unexpected glass hair moment of my week
This week, I watched the documentary about volcanologists Maurice and Katia Krafft called “Fire of Love” (2022). The film features their own substantial archive of volcanic footage from the 1960s through their deaths in 1991, and traces an unlikely and intense love story between two obsessed scientists.
It’s astonishing to see them walk up to a giant wall of powdery ember-rock blocking a roadway near the base of an active volcano. Or to see the skin burned off by hot mud, or to watch the theory of plate tectonics play out in one scrolling obliteration of crust under crust.
In this documentary, I learned—sitting bolt upright on the couch—that when a red volcano erupts and hot magma shoots into the sky, the wind stretches the cooling rock into instant strands of liquid glass which get tangled in trees miles away, where they web, cooled by the winds that made them.
This natural phenomenon is called “Pele’s hair” after the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes. Watching this, my jaw dropped. I nearly missed it and had to go back, rewatching the segment about Pele’s hair twice. I immediately texted every person I know about it, and posted a BeReal of the wikipedia page for “Pele’s hair,” my face opposite frozen in awe. Pele’s hair has been found in Nicaragua (Masaya), Italy (Etna), and Ethiopia (Erta’ Ale). Birds sometimes use Pele’s hair to make their nests: round orbs of delicate silicate glass for them to perch upon. Strands of volcanic glass are also found in Iceland, where they’re known as nornahár, or “witch’s hair.”
The audio of the documentary pulses, muffled by my heart beating in my ears. This is what it feels like to be truly surprised by hair, to experience a hair moment in a place you never thought you would—hair in a documentary about love and volcanoes, sure, of course!
“The unknown is not something to be feared,” the voice of Maurice Krafft breaks through the churning chatter in my head. “It is something to go toward.”
Lacework of falling embers on the screen. A sheet of liquid rock.
I am reminded again of geologic time.
I realize that if rocks can be read, so can hair.
Hair Moments in Pop Culture #1
A Round-Up:
[1] - “Love is Blind” and Hair is all we care about
The first hair moment of the round-up naturally has to come from Season 4 of “Love is Blind,” which recently aired and which is all I’ve been thinking about for weeks. My favorite hair moment from this season is a small one.
Setting the scene: we are meeting Brett’s father and brother for the first time in what looks to be some sort of hotel lobby. Brett and Tiffany hold hands across the armrest of mid-century modern armchairs. Brett’s father Herbert and brother Angus sit opposite them so we can see all of them in the shot. According to the edit, Angus doesn’t say much during this meeting. As Brett’s father speaks eloquently about love and relationships and making “that connection,” bride-to-be Tiffany nods along, casting prolonged looks of longing at Brett.
It’s the end of the conversation, and everyone is preparing to leave. Before they stand up, however, Angus turns to Tiffany as says:
“One question. Do approve of my hairdo?”
Tiffany blinks, leans toward Angus, “Huh?” He repeats the question more pointedly, “Do you approve of my hairdo?” Tiffany laughs, “I want people to be themselves!” She says and waves off the question with a manicured hand, glancing back at Brett, who laughs. They all laugh.
“Thank you,” Angus says, extending the hand of friendship to her. “I really like you now. I appreciate it.”
It feels like the final mark of approval for this season’s fan favorite couple.
[“Do you approve of my hairdo?,” Love is Blind, s4e11, ‘You are Overpriced’ aired on Netflix April 2023: 12:15-12:28]
[2] - Sex and the City: “Charlotte is married too and she isn’t growing a national forest!”
It made sense to me to bring out a hair moment from the vaults, an iconic hair moment in pop culture, and one that sits in the HAIR CLUB canon. That would be the moment from Sex and the City: The Movie (2008) when Samantha (played by Kim Cattrall) savagely berates Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) for wearing a bathing suit with her visible bush poking out at the sides. This scene occurs when they all find themselves on Carrie’s (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) honeymoon in Mexico after Big left her at the altar.
Samantha pulls down her sunglasses to see into Miranda’s crotch better, a look of horror spread over her face.
“Jesus honey, wax much?”
We could (and probably will) spend an entire newsletter (or series of newsletters) discussing the various hair moments of the SATC franchise, from Season 1 thru the second and (thank god) final movie. Carrie’s own hair journey—anyone care to map Carrie’s hair as it bounces between straightened and curly, coming to a fever pitch when she asks Big exasperatedly whether he’s noticed that she straightens her hair now and will he please make room in his bathroom for her straightener? Not to mention the Miranda going gray to (spoiler alert) switching back to her vivacious balayage of reds after she comes out as gay in the post-pandemic reboot “And just like that…” !
But for today, I will leave you with this one.
When Miranda is obliquely accused of “letting the sex go out of her marriage” as evidenced by forgetting (or “not having time”) to get her bikini waxed, a level of neglect that is leveraged against Charlotte’s (played by Kristin Davis) pristine bikini line, who, it is argued in the scene, is also extremely busy, married, and has a child of her own.
“I could be on death row and I’d have that situation covered!” Samantha replies.
This scene cements the notion of the moral imperative of waxing and hair maintenance as a woman’s duty in the early 2000s. A seed that is planted as early as Season 3 of the TV show in “Sex and Another City” (s3e14, aired September 17, 2000), when Carrie goes to Los Angeles and gets a Brazilian wax for the first time.
“I feel like walking sex,” she says with her characteristic squeal.
[“Jesus honey, wax much?,” Sex and the City: The Movie, 2008]
[3] On Wellmania, it all hinges on a hair moment
I wanted to include a hair moment that I noticed while binge-watching the raunchy comedy-drama Wellmania (2023) last week. Has anyone else watched this show?
Wellmania is based on the book Wellmania: Misadventures in the Search for Wellness (2017) by Brigid Delaney. The story follows a writer named Liv (played by comedian Celeste Barber) who is at the precipice of a truly career-defining moment, and is forced to confront some hard truths about her mental, emotional, and physical well-being before she can finally, hopefully, catch the carrot. The hair moment I’d like to focus on in this season happens toward the end of Episode 5, between Liv’s best friend Amy (JJ Kwong) and her husband Doug (Johnny Carr).
Amy has spent several episodes trying to get Doug’s attention and root out the cause of why they—a happily married and financially-comfortable middle-aged couple with kids—aren’t having any sex at all. In a previous episode she tries to spice things up by turning up at his work site completely naked and clearly having waxed for the occasion. She is rejected by way of neon orange safety vest hastily wrapped around her naked body.
Amy finally confronts Doug, asking point-blank if he’s cheating on her or if he’s depressed. “What’s going on with us?” She asks.
Doug finally sits down on the bed next to her, runs a hand through his hair and says, with a deep sigh.
“I’m going bald.”
“No you’re not!” Amy says.
“…I feel fucking old and gross,” he says, falling back onto the bed.
Amy considers this for a second, then volunteers her own existential hair drama.
In this moment, Doug admitting to his fear that “his best days are behind him” is filtered through this physical experience of losing his hair. His receding hairline becomes a marker of age, a symbol of his slippery youth. Doug’s preoccupation with losing his hair has put up a barrier between them; disappearing hair creating new and painful distance.
This vulnerable act of sharing mutual hair stories of aging—Doug’s existential hair crisis and Amy’s constant chasing after and plucking of gray hairs all over her body—becomes the key to unlocking the barrier to intimacy between the couple. What happens next is that Amy shaves Doug’s head, and then his pubes, and then they pretty much don’t stop having sex for the rest of the season.
This hair moment is a major hinge point for the couple’s storyline, and also serves as a symbolic turning point in the season, when we experience a tone shift toward more radical self-acceptance across the narrative board of the entire show.
[“I feel fucking old and gross,” Wellmania, s1e5, ‘Hall of Mirrors,’ aired on Netflix April 2023: 21:50-24:35]
[4] Mae Martin “Feeling crisp feeling shorn” in their new comedy special SAP (2023)
In Mae Martin’s newest Netflix comedy special, “SAP” (2023), which is based rather flimsily on a Buddhist allegory about enjoying the good things in life even when all around you falls to chaos, there is a story about a time they unexpectedly encountered their big traumatic ex at a bar after a show.
“I hadn’t seen my ex in like a year and a half or had any contact with her. And I was in London and I was doing a show. And I was feeling good that night, you know what I mean? Fresh haircut. I was freshly shorn. You know the feeling?…”
They set up this big encounter by explaining that they had started out the evening feeling good and crisp and fresh, in particular, “freshly shorn.” They assume through linguistic flair that everyone knows exactly what they mean. And maybe we do. We may all know what it’s like to have a fresh cut or new styling, and what that feels like, and what that innately means for our self confidence, the way we hold ourselves, the way we hold hope for the future. Common experiences of hair can unite a crowd in this way.
This newly shorn-ness seems to hold a lot for Martin: they describe a really good set, a good night, a night where they felt confident and self-assured. Through this small description of hair, we are meant to understand the full height from which they are about to fall, face-first, into all the hilarious cringe of what follows. Through hair, we can access that height of feeling, that goodness and readiness for the world and, by contrast, whatever pit of despair lies ahead. Their crisp shorn-ness signals the inevitable dreaded turn, the moment when everything definitively goes to shit.
[“Feeling shorn,” Mae Martin in SAP, Netflix Comedy Special, aired April 2023: 19:36]
What hair moments out in the world will you notice this week?
The more I look, the more I find !
A tender LIB moment!!!