Rug Rats

The biggest threat from Hollywood to the sanctity of red-blooded American men's virility is not the murderous rampages from the likes of Glenn Close or Sharon Stone, but from the horrible wigs that are festooning the pates of far too many men in the movies (according to Joe Queenan).

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When I was a young boy growing up on the mean streets of Philadelphia, I was never allowed to go to the movies without first consulting the Catholic Church's National Legion of Decency film ratings. This encyclopedic list included such categories as "Morally Unobjectionable for Adults," "Morally Objectionable in Part" and "Condemned." Despite my family's adherence to these strictures, there were times when my father, an otherwise devout Catholic, wanted to see a picture so badly that he would take me to a morally objectionable film and simply cover my eyes with his hands during the steamy parts.

Sometimes, his hands would be over my eyes for a good long time. If I protested, he would merely say: "You're not old enough to see what's happening on the screen. Your mother would never forgive me if I let you see this."

Until last summer, I had completely forgotten about these formative experiences. For one thing, I hadn't seen a motion picture with my father since The Godfather back in 1972. For another, I no longer consulted the Legion of Decency's ratings before going to a movie, in part because I am no longer a practicing Catholic, in part because all contemporary films are morally objectionable in part for all. But one summer afternoon, all those memories came rushing back. That was the day I decided to take my 10-year-old son to see The Jackal.

The Jackal was the usual Bruce Willis hocus-pocus--not as entertaining as a vintage Clint Eastwood movie, but a whole lot better than anything starring Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Seagal or that Belgian nitwit. Things were going along swell until the moment when Willis, a bloodthirsty assassin--and therefore straight--turned up in a gay bar. Suddenly, involuntarily, I felt my hand jerking out to cover my son's eyes. "Hey, yo!" my son objected, but my grasp was steady.

What I was seeing up there on the screen was not the sort of thing my 10-year-old boy was mature enough to be exposed to. Like my father and my father's father before him, I was taking steps to shield my son from terrifyingly inappropriate material. No, I was not worried about letting my son see Bruce Willis pretend to be gay. No, I was not concerned about my son's reaction to Willis's kissing another man. No, I was not worried that one of the actors was going to whip out his bazooka and start hammering the other guy. What I did not want my son to see was the terrifying auburn wig that Willis wore throughout this entire scene.

Barely 10, my son was far too young to be exposed to a hairpiece so aggressively inappropriate, so militantly obtrusive. My son was old enough to know that men meet each other in bars and then go home and ream each other out. But he was not old enough to know that there are men or women out there who are so desperate for companionship that they'd go home with a man wearing such a bad wig. I wanted him to maintain his innocence as long as he could.

This is not the first time I've discussed the phenomenon of ludicrous, disruptive or attention-grabbing hair in the movies. Four years ago, I wrote a piece for this magazine entitled "Hair Force" in which I paid homage to some of the most mutinous hairstyles in cinema history. However, in that article I chose to concentrate on the sheer absurdity of the 'dos in question, arguing that hairstyles as seditious and rambunctious as, say, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's Pam Grier Afro in Scarface, could stop a movie dead in its tracks. My study encompassed bad hair, but not necessarily bad wigs.

After that story appeared, I realized I'd made a crucial miscalculation. Somehow I had persuaded myself that the preposterous hairstyles were purely an accident, the result of an overzealous, seriously misguided or pathologically bored hairstylist. But wigs are more deliberate cosmetic devices than mere hairstyles. When they are deployed to eye-popping effect, one must consider the possibility that they are serving a specific function in the movie. So in this essay I seek to correct my oversight by discussing the different purposes to which wigs can be put in motion pictures. Rather than simply making fun of zany hairpieces, I intend to demonstrate that in many cases the very ludicrousness of the wig actually strengthens the motion picture. And in many cases, terrible, fake hair actually helps to advance the plot.

I will begin by discussing something I completely neglected in my previous study: the fact that in some cases it is not just the audience who knows that the character is wearing a wig. Often the other characters in the film realize they are faced with an extreme anomaly, and, armed with this information, they must deal with the wig accordingly. The Long Ships, a 1964 British-Yugoslavian film, is a case in point. In the film, Richard Widmark plays the shortest, blandest, least intimidating Viking plunderer in history, while Sidney Poitier plays an archetypal brooding Moor obsessed with recovering a golden bell stolen from his homeland by the Crusaders. Throughout the film, Poitier is festooned with a luminous, jet-black bouffant wig that seems to have been filched from James Brown's Serious Saracen Tour of Jerusalem in 1093. And throughout the film, men of all races and creeds quake in fear at the sight of the fiendish potentate. Yet, at the end of The Long Ships, the seemingly invincible tyrant perishes while fighting the shorter, older, scrawnier and less intelligent Widmark.

Why? Because Widmark knows something no one else in the film does: that just because Poitier is the only 11th century warrior not afraid to go into battle looking exactly like Ike Turner, he isn't necessarily invincible. In the world of the pitiless infidel, it was the person with the scariest hair who generally got to be sultan. But an underweight, vapid Scandinavian thug could not be counted on to understand this career-advancing concept. In other words, Poitier's laughable hairpiece was not a clumsy oversight on the part of the director, but rather the lynchpin of his narrative strategy.

A more recent example of a film dominated by wigs that one or more of the characters recognize as wigs is Kingpin. In this 1996 offering, which actually features a troika of dueling wigs, Woody Harrelson is cast as a professional bowler just starting out on his career during the Disco Era. When first seen, Harrelson is wearing a ludicrous blond shag not unlike the garish but appropriate retro 'dos that enliven Boogie Nights. Though in its historical accuracy, Harrelson's rug is on a par with the 1977 Dr. J.-Phi-Slamma-Jamma-Right-in-Your-Face-Gimme-the-Rock-So-I-Can-TakeTt-to-the-Hole-Am-I-an-Ethnic-Stereotype-or-What? Afro that Denzel Washington wears in Spike Lee's peerless He Got Mane, it is still no match for the boisterous 1974 Electric Light Orchestra perm costar Bill Murray shows up in. Obviously for that reason, Harrelson soon stops wearing it. For a time it appears that Murray has achieved total coiffurial control of the film. But then Randy Quaid surfaces as a dimwit Amish plowboy with untapped kegling potential and a massive, blond Dutchboy perched on his head. From the moment Quaid makes his entry, Murray quickly recedes from the film, and when he resurfaces almost one hour later, he no longer has hair that rules. He has hair that does things--it causes a stir, it gets a rise out of the audience--but not hair that kicks ass.

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