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Film has style, needs substance

By Ashlee Clark aclark@herald-leader.com

In the documentary Good Hair, Chris Rock explores black women's relationship with their hair.

'Good Hair'

PG-13 for some language including sex and drug references, and brief partial nudity. Hamburg.

Commentary

I wanted to see Chris Rock's new documentary, Good Hair, since he began making the rounds on daytime talk shows a few weeks ago. My parents, who are hairdressers, met 27 years ago when they worked in a department store beauty salon. I wouldn't have been born had it not been for the quest for good hair.

Surprisingly, Rock seems to know his stuff.

In Good Hair, he explores the tumultuous relationship that black women have with their hair. Rock shows that black women will go to extensive and expensive lengths to make their hair fit our culture's standard of beauty.

But there's much more to a beauty salon than Rock shows viewers. He mentions only briefly the importance of the hair salon as a pillar in the black community. One person in the documentary said hairstylists are held in higher regard than lawyers and doctors because of the magic they can do with a black woman's hair.

Rock focuses mainly on the financial burden that trips to the beauty salon can mean to a working-class woman.

Yes, it is the place where black women spend hundreds, probably thousands, of dollars a year just to have what they think is good hair. But it's also my second home.

I spent many Saturday mornings perched in a black salon chair in front of my mother at J.T.'s New Attitude Beauty Salon in Louisville, the shop my dad started almost 20 years ago. I'd listen to conversations among the ladies, as my parents referred to their customers, as my mother rolled up my hair.

The ladies shared tales about menopause, men and money. They often made fun of my dad, the lone man in the shop and the butt of many jokes. But they shared something deeper than what was shown in Rock's film, a bond that only women who have put their hair through trials and suffering can comprehend.

They all understand what it's like to sit for agonizing minutes with chemical straighteners slathered across their scalps. They understand the hours that are spent sweating under the hair dryer. And they understand the strain that weekly trips to the beauty parlor can put on their pocketbooks.

At the same time, all of the pain and money is worth the conversations I heard while I got my own hair done. They are conversations that happen only among women you see on a weekly basis, women who have shared their victories and defeats with one another as they waited to get their hair styled.

For them, it's not only about attaining good hair. It's about maintaining good relationships with my parents and other ladies of the salon.