Follicle wars, conformity follies

by David Benjamin

“Get a haircut and get a real job/ Clean your act up and don’t be a slob/ Get it together like your big brother Bob … ”

—George Thorogood and the Destoyers

 

MADISON, Wis.—My favorite vignette in America’s endlessly recycling follicle wars appears in Robert Zemeckis’ little-noted but remarkably significant—and fun!—film, I Wanna Hold Your Hand. The 1978 movie chronicles, whimsically, one of the most important dates in U.S. cultural history, the Beatles’ American debut, on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” February 9, 1964. 

A turning point in the film features a boy named Peter, so enraptured with the Fab Four that he has styled his hair in a Beatles shag. Peter’s father, raving that he looks like a girl, has stolen the boy’s tickets and is blackmailing him into a haircut. The movie’s solitary intellectual, an anti-Beatles crusader named Janis, has a taste-altering epiphany when she recognizes Peter’s hair as a civil-rights issue. The scene climaxes in an all-night barber shop where a one-eyed slasher, cigarette smoldering in the corner of his mouth, closes in on the kid, wielding an electric razor that evokes sheep-shearing in the outback and boot camp at Parris Island. 

That was 1964. 

This year, a kid named Darryl George was thrown out of school in the hamlet of Mont Belvieu, Texas (pop., 8,300), for wearing locs, a currently popular fashion in the black community, especially among young males who have the hours of spare time necessary to maintain a labor-intensive hairstyle. 

The case against Darryl is, of course, nakedly racist. Greg Poole, the white guy who runs the Barbers Hill Independent School District, justified the district’s overkill by announcing: “Being an American requires conformity.” 

Darryl’s defenders argue that the boy’s hairdo bespeaks a tradition of tonsorial self-expression in the black community. This time-honored and complicated facet of African-American culture was dramatized in three Barbershop films and in Queen Latifah’s 2005 spinoff, Beauty Shop. Big Maybelle put the theme to music in “Hair-Dressin’ Women. One verse goes like this: “Those wig-fryin’ women, those girls are hard to beat/ They’ll let you tell your story, then put your business in the street … ”

However, the focus on black culture in the persecution of Darryl George gives short shrift to the vast scope of the follicle wars, historically and socially. Indeed, humankind, black and white, Hebrew, Gentile and Muslim, have been fighting the power struggle over hairdos since Delilah lulled Samson to sleep on her lap. And then “… she called a man, and had him shave off the seven locks of his head. Then she began to torment him and his strength left him.”

Hair hassles haven’t changed in the millenia since Judges:16. One pictures Mont Belvieu’s Philistines offering Delilah a seat on the school board. If we overlook the business with hijabs, burkas and beards among orthodox Muslims, few societies compare to an America obsession with hair-grooming and dress codes as the means of imposing “conformity” on our fractious offspring. 

About two years after the Beatles appeared on “Ed Sullivan,” one of my high-school friends, Gaylord, faced a hair crisis that foreshadowed Darryl George. The school’s foremost dress-code nazi, Coach Olson, told Gaylord he could kiss the hockey team goodbye unless he got a haircut. Mixing high principle and adolescent defiance, Gaylord refused. He was saved from banishment, however, by his hockey coach, Mr. Chvala, a humorous grownup, who advised Coach Olson that Gaylord’s hair could no harm unless it grew so long that it got tangled in his skates. 

Authorities like Coach Olson regarded Gaylord and the Beatles as harbingers of social collapse. In fact, they were simply early adopters of a fashion eventually favored by outlaw bikers and rednecks with mullets. Coach Olson’s virtually nude skull also had its moment in vogue. Think Yul Brynner, Isaac Hayes, Michael Jordan, Lex Luthor, Felonius Gru.

Hair fashion, in any period or within any ethnic community, has always been a passing fancy among the stylish, and a moving target for the arbiters of social acceptability. For example, our first five presidents and our last nineteen have been clean-shaven. But between 1861 (Abe Lincoln) and 1913 (William Howard Taft), America has had five bearded presidents, four more with mustaches and two in the 19th century, John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren, who featured the sort of comic sideburns that became unfortunately trendy all over again in the 1970s.

Donald Trump’s bottle-blonde, Kenra-platinum, side-swept, cantilevered comb-over, of course, is unprecedented.

My own high-school navigation of the follicle wars mainly consisted of lurking beneath the radar. By the time hirsuteness became an actionable taboo, I’d developed a policy of letting my hair grow, willy-nilly and ill-combed, as long as possible. I wasn’t consciously trying to make a social statement as much as I was husbanding my resources. A trim in those days cost 75 cents, a major outlay for a kid on public assistance—and no money from Mom—who, when I could snag a part-time job, earned a minimum wage of $1.10 (reduced to less than a buck by tax withholding). 

So, I waited ’til, by and by, walking down the hall with my hair floating in the breeze, I got the fish-eye from Otto, my gym teacher. This was my cue to pony up my six bits to the barber and slip back, duly shorn, into the background. Still, as I’m reminded by Darryl’s ordeal, being a teenager is a labyrinth of politics, prejudice and prudery in which a kid can be suddenly ambushed by a grownup in a suit with clipboard or a militant Christian mom with a crucifix to grind.

The dilemma of being naturally eager to fit in and look cool, is that each kid depends on grownups, his or her parents, for almost everything, food, board, money, wheels. The same teenager is subordinate to every adult in authority over kids’ lives—teachers, principals, coaches, pastors, bosses at Burger King. At every turn, kids encounter a barrage of rules, restrictions, sanctions, inspections, schedules, curfews, tests, hall passes, permission slips, grades and expectations—issued by the adults in charge—all without the option to object or refuse.

The only power kids have to oppose this quotidian tyranny is symbolism. How kids choose to present themselves composes the primary symbol of their quest for autonomy. Gaylord had no master plan to raise an extra inch of hair as a razzberry to the Establishment. But when he was told he had to cut it, he understood his hair’s incongruous power to just lie there passively on his head and piss off Coach Olson. It became, by default and the censure of the grownup world, Gaylord’s badge of honor. It was his civil right.

All the adolescent affectations that aggravate petty authorities like Supt. Poole in Mont Belvieu—skirts, pants, hats, hair, lipstick, eye shadow, tattoos, piercings, smoking, vaping, drinking, weed, leather jackets and boots, rock ’n’ roll—all can be deemed violations of some code or another. But none of these fleeting offenses, or the overwrought effort to punish them, moves the battle lines or lessens grownups’ fear of their own children. Nor do any of these rules have any power to improve any kid’s academic performance or build any sort of “character.” 

Since long before my first day in ninth grade, when I walked right in, sat right down and let my hair hang down, nothing has has changed. Then, now and forever, the only discernible function of a “dress and grooming code” is to clarify what all hip kids figure out sometime before we’re old enough to vote. 

Until they prove themselves innocent, grownups are the enemy.