'Bad Hair' Doesn't Do Justice to Black Women's Complex Hair Stories
Whenever I go to a new hair salon, I say a little prayer. Please be gentle. Please don’t keep me sitting here all day. And please don’t fuck it up. It’s not that I have unreasonably high expectations. It’s that years of disappointment have taught me to hope for the best and expect the worst. Sadistic detangling. Heat damage. Relaxer burns. Last week at Sundance Film Festival, I found myself saying the same prayer right before the world premiere of Justin Simien’s sophomore film Bad Hair. Nothing against the creator of Dear White People, the Sundance-award-winning-film-turned-Netflix-series, but Hollywood’s scarce portrayals of Black women’s hair stories have been so one-dimensional that my expectations were subterranean. So, when Simien revealed during his opening remarks that he’d “made this movie for one group only, and that is Black women,” I braced myself.
Set in 1989 at the height of new jack swing, when Black acts like Janet Jackson made historic appearances on the predominantly white pop charts, Bad Hair follows ambitious twenty-something Anna Bludso (Elle Lorraine), who works at CULTURE, a music video-based television channel catering to Black audiences a lá BET. Anna is broke, having never been promoted from her low-paying executive assistant position of four years despite her major contributions to the network. She’s also in danger of getting laid off by her new boss Zora (Vanessa Williams) and evicted by her shady landlord, who’s demanding a fraudulent $500 rent increase.
And then there’s Anna’s hair. From family dinners to the conference room, everyone wants to know when she’s going to do something about her 4C-textured natural. Her loving aunt suggests a wig before lending her money for rent. Zora, on the other hand, threatens termination. This drives Anna to forgo her strict DIY policy (the film’s opening scene reveals a traumatizing childhood hair event) and spends the rent money on her first-ever sew-in weave. Suddenly, work and life are good! The downside? Anna’s new bone-straight bundles have an unquenchable thirst for blood.
Bad Hair is a wild horror movie that thrives in all its campy, gory glory, paying homage to its iconic B-movie predecessors: Pyscho, Rosemary’s Baby, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, and Easy Rider. Simien said he decided on a horror vehicle because of the genre’s ability to reveal the “absurdity of actually living in reality sometimes,” and I couldn’t agree more. The act of bracing, of preparing oneself for the inevitable, the difficult, and the unpleasant, is a permanent state for most Black women in America, particularly in the workplace, where our performance is often measured by subjective metrics like popularity, palatability, and, of course, appearance. This even goes for predominantly Black workplaces like CULTURE, which Zora actually revamps as CULT to appease the network’s parent company and appeal to a “whiter—I mean, wider” audience (Anna’s co-worker Sista Soul said it, not me!) That’s why the film’s most refreshing moments are also the most outrageous—they reflect the ridiculous lengths to which Black women are expected to go to achieve Western society’s standards of beauty. Simien’s signature satirical tone soars higher with each scene thanks to his clear command of cinema history and genre-specific aesthetics. Production designer Scot Kuzio, visual effects duo Dan Schmit and Ian Shulman, and stuntwomen Angela Meryl and Keisha Tucker also deserve all the accolades, along with the first-class cast including Lena Waithe, Laverne Cox, James Van Der Beek, Jay Pharoah, Nicole Byer, Robin Thede, Ashley Blaine Featherson, Yaani King Mondschein, Blair Underwood, Kelly Rowland, and Usher.
But did Black Jesus answer my prayers? Unfortunately, no. Bad Hair ultimately sabotages its satirical strength with its own weak premise: that weaves are bad. And Simien’s specific commentary on why they're bad gets lost in the script’s excessive length, an inconsistent ending, and confusing caveats (inexpensive weaves from around the way aren’t evil?) I honestly still haven’t figured out why the weave was evil other than for pretext purposes. But there are breadcrumbs—“Anyone who can sew someone’s dead energy into their hair is beyond me” (again, Sista Soul)—that lead me to assume that's the movie’s main takeaway.
If Bad Hair had premiered in the early 2000s, when the Black is Beautiful natural hair movement resurfaced on the backs of early hair bloggers and vloggers, its critique of weaves might’ve seemed novel, if only because media images rarely challenged the notion that naturally straight strands are king—most depictions either vilified, ridiculed, or disregarded natural textures or hairstyles. Bad Hair would’ve been the perfect follow-up to Something New, the 2006 rom-com where Sanaa Lathan’s character discovers love and peace after her white love interest persuades her to swap her straight weave for her natural curls (the film used another weave to portray them). However, despite Bad Hair‘s 1989 setting, we’re watching it during a time when states like California, New York, and New Jersey are acknowledging the bias Black women face in the workplace, and passing laws that ban discrimination against natural hair and styles associated with Black culture. And prominent Black women like Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley are complicating good hair-bad hair narratives by sharing their own complex hair journeys. Any commentary in 2020 or beyond that refuses to consider a Black woman’s right to leverage social capital (in this case, her appearance) to advance herself professionally—and fails to implicate the influential forces that enforce and perpetuate Western standards of beauty—is pretty basic. And Black hair is anything but.
Our natural hair curls, coils, shrinks, swells, reflects, refracts, and rises. Our pioneering styles span the tallest sculptured updos to the longest, brightest box braids. We’ve even tried to index our natural textures by curl type—2A, 3C, 4Z—but no two heads of hair are ever really the same. (Hell, I’ve got three different curl patterns myself.) The variety of our hairstyles and textures echo the similar—but never identical—intricacies of every Black woman’s hair experience. These nuances extend to a gnarled history of racial discrimination and biased beauty standards, but also one of brilliant Black pride and prevailing avant-garde trends. This is why making a masterful film about a Black woman’s hair is not easy. (Though fellow Sundance winner Mariama Diallo shows her peers how it’s done in her 2018 short film Hair Wolf.) To plait these nuances into a memorable and meaningful look requires a gentle yet extensive scrutiny, like that of a wide tooth comb, and the careful unraveling of stubborn knots that calls for patient fingertips. Instead, Simien takes a fine-tooth rat tail comb to a dense piece of work, and—similar to the triggering, cringe-y scene where Anna gets her sew-in installed—recklessly pulls it through again and again and again. I’m left sitting there, bracing myself for the next pass through, vowing never again but knowing damn well I'll keep coming back, hopeful next time will be different.
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