Review of Good Hair (2009) by Collette D — 24 Mar 2010

It's been a long time since I wrote a movie review and that's partly because my life has been a bit tumultuous lately. But part of it is honestly that I haven't really been watching movies that have provoked too many interesting thoughts in me. So I find it appropriate that I'm returning to cataloguing my movie thoughts with Chris Rock's documentary, Good Hair, which is the first movie I've seen in a long time that has really stuck with me.

I've been pretty conscious about civil rights and prejudice issues over the course of my life. As an Asian American, sometimes it's easy to categorize myself in the ruling classes, somewhere around the majority, but I've always felt close connections with stories of prejudice against minorities, and over the course of my life I've always tended toward seeking out prejudice where it's not recognized. My feeling has always been that the most important prejudices to attach are the prejudices that are so ingrained in our heads and our culture that we never even saw them as prejudice. That's why it's a bit shocking to me that Good Hair manages to show me an deeply culturally ingrained prejudice that I never really knew much about.

I knew of the use of hair relaxers from the opening portions of Malcolm X, where these same issues are explicitly addressed, but as Chris Rock explores that practice here in a documentary context, it's a good bit more chilling. As a demonstration, they take the active chemical in hair relaxers and soak a coke can in it. Within a few hours the coke can has literally disintegrated. After seeing this, Chris Rock says to his white scientist interviewee, "You know black people like to put this stuff in their hair?" And the scientist responds, honestly, "Why would anyone want to do that?" This is one of the movie's central questions.

I also knew of the basic concept of what a weave was. But I never knew that it takes 5 to 8 hours and thousands of dollars to apply. And I never really knew that it wasn't just a joke that millions of low-income black women around the country go into 4 figure debt in order to maintain their straightened, weaved hairstyles.

The central tenet of the movie is that black people in America have within them such a deeply ingrained self image problem that there is a billion dollar industry built around giving them a facade. As one interviewee in the film says, "Allowing my hair to grow just the way it grows normally is actually a revolutionary act.".

On my own personal level, I have always tended way from the unnatural weave look. I will take this opportunity to say that I believe the chief offender in this realm is Beyonce, who has done more to glorify the image of this type of fakeness than anyone else I can think of. This is not really directly addressed in Good Hair, but I do have to say that the movie does pretty strongly reinforce my belief that Beyonce is the devil. Or if not the devil incarnate, at least doing the devil's work.

One of the more viscerally moving sequences to me is where Rock interviews average black men and women who discuss how the practice of weaves affects their relationships. The sequence catalogues several very simple ways in which the pursuit of "Good Hair" can actually drive black couples apart. It's one of several arguments made in the film which would seem like an exaggeration of a joke if it weren't being presented in a documentary context.

The movie also uses an old tried and true documentary method of using a competition for structure. There is apparently a huge hair show in Atlanta where hair stylists who specialize in black hair compete for Stylist of the Year honors. The movie follows the contestants in this competition and this competition gives the film structure. The basic drama here is that the favorite to win the contest is the sole white competitor. And over the course of the movie, that white hair dresser becomes symbolic of the oppression of the black people, and in the final competition your hope is that somehow the black people can reclaim their own self-image by defeating this white hair dresser.

Of course, I won't give away the ending, but it's a wonderfully effective structure and it kept me on the edge of my seat with that added sense of suspense that pulled me through the whole film, which would otherwise have been a whole lot of politicized, Michael Moore soap-box lecturing stuff. I would probably have been fine with that too, but honestly the competition structure added just enough natural drama that I felt it worked better than the more direct approach.

I think the reason that's true for me is that Chris Rock and the filmmakers don't pretend to have the answers to these problems. Of course, we all find Nia Long hot and sexy in her $5000 fake hairdo. And nobody's really arguing with that. But they do have the courage to ask why that's true. And that's what this movie is really about. The filmmakers simply want to put forward the questions to people who have yet to consider them. And in doing that, perhaps we solve the problem. I know I always liked the natural look on black women before, but now, I think I'm much more sure of that preference.