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.
At the outset, Angelou says something that seems typically overblown and creaky -- a woman's hair is her crowning glory, something her family and community can take pride in and celebrate -- that actually gains depth and credence as the film moves along. The most interesting scenes, which cover ground from Atlanta to Birmingham to LA and Brooklyn and then over to India (where the majority of the black hair industry's supply for weaves and wigs is shorn from the heads of devout Hindu women), take place in local barbershops and salons. As Rock makes clear, the salon -- and the grooming rituals performed there -- are very often the heart of black communities and black culture. That's not a choice that anyone but the members of that community can make, and yet inherent in that choice is an evolution whose roots are firmly lodged in oppression. It's not a coincidence that "European" is the word the interviewees usually end up on in their brief descriptions of what makes good hair; even the women themselves declare that "relaxed" hair (it relaxes white people, see) looks more "natural" and put-together.
A fascinating argument crops up around the sexual politics of a black woman's hair (the men say they are never allowed to touch their woman's hair, and that creates barriers; one woman says that taking a shower with her man would be far more intimate than having sex) and the staggering amounts of money working class women will shell out for hair care is discussed -- issues seem to crop and get combed over with the amiable topical sprawl of a visit to the salon.
The most problematic element is the decision to use the "Hair Battle" that takes place annually at the Bronner Brothers hair show in Atlanta as the film's main structuring device. Every time Rock hits on an angle -- such as the Anglo and Asian monopoly of the multi-billion dollar black hair care market -- that begs for more attention, the film cuts back to contestants preparing for this truly bizarre contest, the purpose of which seems to be to cut hair live, onstage, under the most ridiculous circumstances possible. These interruptions seem pointless, and they chop up the momentum and the coherence of an otherwise engaging look at what is not simply a phenomenon of vanity but the notion of how easily and early many of us cede what we should hold most dear: our self-respect, self-conception, and the standard by which we judge ourselves to be a worthy member of society.