Rug Rats

The point I am trying to make here is that Harrelson, Quaid and Murray are not wearing absurd hairpieces so that they can seem more believable or even more amusing in their roles. No, they are engaged in a mano a mano death match to see who will emerge from the film with the most imposing hair. In a more conventional comedy, the three actors would pretend not to notice one another's dumb hair. But these guys not only know that they have dumb hair, they revel in it. This is not a film about bowling. This is not a film about redemption. And this is certainly not a film about the Amish. This is a film about dueling hairpieces.

Dueling wigs have been a staple of the motion picture industry for many years. One thinks of JFK, in which Joe Pesci sports an orange Liberace wig while Tommy Lee Jones sashays around with what appears to be a gigantic cottontail grafted to his skull. And in Steel Magnolias, perhaps the greatest dueling wig movie of them all, Dolly Parton, Olympia Dukakis, Sally Field and Daryl Hannah not only wear some of the most absurd wigs ever devised, they actually get together in a beauty salon to see if they can make each other's hair look even more ridiculous.

In discussing wig movies, it is important to distinguish between movies set in generally wigless eras and movies set in eras where wigs ruled supreme. Films such as The Man in the Iron Mask, Dangerous Liaisons and the assorted Three and even _Four Musketeers _are bursting at the seams with frivolous aristocrats sporting poncey wigs. But there are so many wigs, and they are all so ridiculous, they tend to cancel each other out. Also, it is worth bearing in mind that these films are set in France, and that France is, and has always been, a fundamentally ridiculous society, so the fact that everybody is wearing a stupid wig doesn't necessarily make things any worse.

As for films like Barry Lyndon or The Madness of King George, well, the English always did like to dress up like girlies. On the subject of historical rug flicks, I have only one thing to say: a wig worn in a period piece will only start to look unacceptably ridiculous if the person wearing the wig starts thinking about the wig. I have seen many, many absurd wigs in films set in the distant past--Jack Palance's Mongol 'do in Sign of the Pagan, Errol Flynn's dainty Peter Tork number in The Adventures of Robin Hood--but in each case the wig passes muster so long as the character ignores the wig and just tries to get through the shoot as quickly as possible. Wigs only become a problem in films like Restoration, where Robert Downey Jr. is carrying too much wig, knows that he is carrying too much wig, and cannot stop making facial gestures that draw attention to the fact that he's carrying too much wig. Perhaps the prototype of this phenomenon is Robert Wagner's "Hello, sailor!" pageboy in 1954's Prince Valiant, where a single unit of solid, effeminate plastic seems to have been nailed to his head. At no point in this film does Wagner seem comfortable with his synthetic nancy-boy hair. Neither do his Viking comrades.

Whether in period or contemporary films, it is also important to distinguish between wigs worn by actors who always wear wigs, and wigs worn by actors who sometimes or always appear under their own hair. Burt Reynolds has been doing some of the most outrageous cranial work in movies for years, but since Burt Reynolds has also been doing some of the most outrageous cranial work on talk shows for years, there is nothing especially metaphorical about his wig work. Burt Reynolds and others who practice his level of skullduggery are simply beyond the scope of the data amassed here.

An important talent that a critic develops over the years is the ability to detect which characters are most likely to die before a film is over, and one thing my research has taught me is that characters sporting aggressive wigs almost always perish before the film has run its course. Sporting an amazing Rasta blaxploitation wig in True Romance, Gary Oldman holds all Detroit in his thrall at the beginning of the film, but before long he gets shot right in the dick, ridding the Motor City of his wig forever. In Braveheart, Mel Gibson wears a matted, filthy affair left over from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (at which time it appeared to have been purloined from the cast of Cats). Though Gibson escaped with his life in Mad Max, he is drawn, quartered and beheaded in Braveheart, proving that if you wear the same horrible wig in more than one movie, you are almost certainly going to die a very painful death.

The list does not stop there. Samuel L. Jackson is decked out with an absurdly anachronistic braid in Jackie Brown, and gets blown away by Pam Grier, of all people. In Amadeus, the Playboy bunny tail that Tom Hulce has pinned to his skull is so offensive to F. Murray Abraham, playing the ill-starred composer Antonio Salieri, that he secretly plots Mozart's demise. Laurence Olivier has more bangs than a Plantagenet Tea Leoni in Richard III, and he too finally bites the dust. Again and again this phenomenon is repeated; it is as if an immutable law of the universe stipulates that people who wear really bad wigs, for whatever reason, must die. Or, at the very least, change to another wig. As Shirley MacLaine does 72 times in What a Way to Go!.

Changing a wig in midstream is not always the wisest course for an actor or for the character he is playing. For example, when Larry Fishburne is first seen in What's Love Got to Do With It, he sports a slick conk that seems to have a mesmerizing effect on Angela Bassett. For the first half of the movie that wig kicks prodigious ass, as does Fishburne. But then, in the second half of the film, Fishburne begins to lose his supernatural powers when he inexplicably switches to a Clarence Williams III Afro. The next time he tries abusing Bassett, she clocks him upside the head. He later surfaces in what appears to be his natural hair, telling Bassett that her music sucks, which it does, but by this time he has been completely emasculated.

In the context of doomed hair, we must now turn to one of the most cinematically arresting wigs of all time: the robin's nest that adorns the top of Joe Pesci's head in the unfairly forgotten 1994 film With Honors. This movie deals with a self-centered Harvard undergraduate who does not learn the meaning of life until he befriends a pathetic bum. Which, as we all know, is the reason most people go to Harvard. But what concerns us here is the symbolic role played in the film by Pesci's wig. When first seen, Pesci has already arranged to have this bird's nest surgically attached to his skull, perhaps while he was passed out drunk watching a film like With Honors. As the film progresses, this vibrant, nest-shaped mane gradually begins to take on a limp, mangy quality. Gradually, we realize that Pesci is dying. In fact, Pesci appears to be dying wig-first. Thus, as the film meanders toward its maudlin conclusion, the audience can tell how close Pesci is to death just by keeping an eye on his wig.

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