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.
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.
One highly noticeable thing in wig movies is that the characters themselves are often stunned by the wigs they confront. Take Hook. The first time Robin Williams, as Peter, sees Julia Roberts as Tinker-bell, he's so terrified by her wig that he has to put on his glasses to make sure he hasn't been visited by a diminutive, airborne Richard Simmons. Armed with a disorienting pageboy in Richard III, Olivier is able to befuddle his rivals and seize control of England just by prancing around and fiddling with his bangs. And in_ Farewell to the King_, Nick Nolte, a white man alone in Borneo area 1942, is able to take over an entire aboriginal race because its leaders are too cowed to resist a man bedecked with an Allman Brothers wig almost 30 years before the band was even formed.
For my money, though, the finest example of pure wig terror is Pulp Fiction. Done up in a wig so large, so greasy, so inappropriate and so stupid that it outguns partner John Travolta's 1978 AC/DC roadie hair extensions, Samuel L. Jackson knocks on the door of an apartment housing three preppies who have ripped off his boss. When the boys open the door, they see Jackson's wig. Not his gun. Not even his facial expression. Just his wig. All three react with an expression of abject terror. They react this way because they know that a man capable of wearing a wig like that is a man capable of anything. Anything.
Not every Wig That Doesn't Even Pretend Not to Be a Wig is equally successful. For example, if you're a middle-aged man planning to assassinate the president of the United States, and you're already being played by one of the strangest-looking guys on the entire planet (John Malkovich), it's probably not a good idea to tip off the Secret Service by wearing a gigantic mane that makes you look like Ted Nugent: the Full Oingo-Boingo. For that matter, if you're married to a guy with a pronounced tendency toward hallucination and drug abuse, you shouldn't confront him on a daily basis with the red, banged, kewpie-doll mane Meg Ryan favors in The Doors. And finally, if you're an actress of limited range and find yourself out of your depth in a movie that would suck even if you were any good in it, don't try wearing a steam-ironed version of Meg Ryan's Doors wig to divert the audience's attention from your absurd Irish brogue the way Julia Roberts does in Mary Reilly.
Which brings us to the phenomenon of the serial wig--the hairpiece that keeps reappearing in different films, though not always on the same head, and not always at the same studio. As we have seen, Mel Gibson's Braveheart locks originated with Cats and did time in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The wig Julia Roberts wears in Hook miraculously resurfaces on Jane March's skull in Color of Night, then runs completely amok atop Neve Campbell's head during the last 20 minutes of Wild Things. Similarly, Lord Larry's wig in Richard III takes a decade off before reappearing on Peter Sellers's head in What's New, Pussycat?, then takes about 25 years off before putting in a surprise appearance atop Bronson Pinchot's skull in the abysmal comedy Second Sight. And, I would argue, the ball of cotton that Tom Hulce wears as Mozart in Amadeus is the same wig that later surfaces, slightly combed out, on the head of David Bowie as Warhol in Basquiat. A friend assured me that Bowie's wig in Basquiat was, in fact, borrowed from Andy Warhol's estate, which would mean that my theory was completely off base. I disagree. It is my earnest belief that Andy Warhol purchased a wig that once belonged to Mozart, loaned it out to Hulce while he was making Amadeus, reshaped it for his personal use, died, and then his estate lent it to Bowie. Of course, as is so often the case with my theories, I could be wrong.
Although I love bad wigs as much as the next person, I sometimes worry that Hollywood is slowly becoming dependent on obstreperous hair. The Fifth Element has entirely too much hair. So does Boogie Nights. Even The Saint is too wiggy. But the most wig-saturated film I have seen in recent years is surely The Jackal, in which Bruce Willis sports yuppie hair, redneck-fisherman hair, car-mechanic-on-vacation hair, tough-guy-with-mustache hair, Greg Kinnear hair, blond boater's hair, surfer boy hair, and brown cop's hair.
That's why I covered my son's eyes when we went to see the film. My son isn't old enough to know that all a man needs to assassinate the first lady of the United States is a wig and a portable cannon. I don't want him going to bed every night worrying that men with bad wigs can wield that much power. He's far too innocent to be told the truth about Howard Cossell, Marv Albert and Burt Reynolds. When I was a boy growing up on the mean streets of Philadelphia, my father tried to protect me from terrifying images. I think that if he were still here today, and he found out that I had covered my son's eyes rather than let him see Bruce Willis's wig in The Jackal, he would have felt justifiably proud. And my dad was bald.
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Joe Queenan wrote "Don't Try This At Home 3" for the July '98 issue of Movieline.