Review of Hair (2012) by Jake C — 25 Jun 2018

As messy as the eponymous hippy hair. The movie undercuts the revolutionary material of the original stage show-the obscenity, the sexuality, the originality, the feminist and pacifist politics-and boils away all that was daring, weird, and new for a mix of nostalgia and simple merrymaking.

Rather than the unstructured psychedelic raving antics of an odd ad hoc band of outcasts invested in radical anti-war, anti-patriarchy politics, the movie waters down the fire (and the smoke), transforming the hippies into merely a too-clean bunch of street urchins just out for a good laugh.

This is regressive, even if it is entertaining; take, for instance, how the movie feels the need to force upon the show a typical Hollywood narrative, turning Claude into an outsider to the outsiders, making of him an ordinary protagonist with an ordinary love story to an ordinary girl-a debutant in the movie, a radical feminist in the musical-at the expense of the nonhierarchical, unstructured chaos of the stage.

The result, even if more or less fun, is ultimately campy, nostalgic, and much more a product of the late 70s, of hyperreal simulacrum and post-stagnation malaise, then the turbulent 60s.