In Theaters: Good Hair

Chris Rock's Good Hair, a documentary about the pernicious extra- and intra-cultural ideas that have sprung up around the care and presentation of black women's hair, has been generating chatter, lifestyle items, and last week, the crown jewel in any film's publicity campaign, an entire hour on the Oprah show. It also won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Rock and his director Jeff Stilson have clearly touched a nerve that was ready to blow; as it turns out, many of the conversations cropping up around the film are more interesting than the film that inspired them.

The copious coverage the film has received has laid its premise pretty bare: black women, from a very early age, are indoctrinated into the faith of "good hair," a belief system that espouses straight, shiny, long locks as the key to personal happiness and social acceptance. Because straight, shiny, and long is the last thing black hair naturally wants to be, drastic measures and great expense are involved in making this happen. Rock has said this film was inspired by the complaints his five-year-old daughter made about not having good hair: just what might that be, Rock wonders, and who says? He then sets out to investigate the complex, troubling answer.

Giant economies are based on the principle that everybody's got something. Something about their physical self that they hate, rationally or irrationally, and will pay large -- and in some cases any -- amount of money and undergo much suffering to remedy. Plastic surgery, weight loss, steroids, hair removal, hair growth -- in the grand scheme of insecurities, received wisdom has it that black women get off a little easier than the rest of us. Received wisdom, as usual, is jacked.

The secret of skin tone hierarchies was brought to the fore by Michael Jackson and his chronic use, for whatever reason, of bleaching agents, but the mysteries of black women and their hair seem even more fraught with political, sexual, and economic tensions. Rock has assembled several black women (too few, it seems like, or else I just have a low tolerance for Nia Long's coquetry), including actress Raven Simone and Maya Angelou, to speak frankly about their relationship to their hair. An equally random sampling of black men (with the exception of the elaborately coiffed Al Sharpton, who makes a refreshing amount of "I choose my choice" sense in his own defense), including Paul Mooney and waaaay too much Ice-T, appear to wax sexist on the subject.

Pages: 1 2