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The comb-over
« on: 2005-07-26 09:31:40 » |
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Divine secrets of the comb-over brotherhood
by Melena Z. Ryzik
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2005/07/26/combover/index.html
July 27, 2005 | A few weeks ago, I found myself at a party at an exclusive club [...] I was most intrigued by a paunchy guy with a graying swoop of hair curled around his head like stray mop fiber. This guy was loud and obnoxious, but still I tracked his movements around the room and followed his conversations, all the while wondering why I was so perversely interested in him. Then I realized: It was the comb-over.
[...]
It's not the aesthetic of the comb-over that's appealing. Whether it's the toupee-like tuft, or the cartoonish strands stretched and layered just so, comb-overs can only look bad, or worse. No, the comb-over deserves celebration not for its rarefied ugliness but for the insight it gives us into the wearer: You actually thought that was a good look?
Like performance anxiety or Scarlett Johansson, hair loss hits men hard, leading even the most urbane to regrettable decisions.
[...]
"I was somewhat deluded into thinking it looked more like a head of hair than it actually looked," Ames says now. "I thought I was pulling it off. [But] people were like, 'Why don't you cut that down?'" (He eventually did, though not without dismay. "I miss having options," he says sadly.)
Hair offenders like Ames "use the defense mechanism of denial to completely not think about how silly it looks," says Sandra Dawson, a therapist and radio show host in El Segundo, Calif., who specializes in self-esteem issues. "And rationalization can be used alongside it."
And comb-over-ees don't just think they're fooling people, adds Sheldon S. Walker, a psychologist based in Calgary, "They think it looks really good." (For the record, he's not speaking from personal experience: "I have a full head of hair.")
So having a comb-over goes hand in hand with massive denial and/or massive powers of (self-) persuasion. Is it any wonder so many politicians have them?
"They convince themselves it makes them look like they have sage wisdom," says Hank Sheinkopf, a New York political consultant. Yet friends, family and business associates can all be paralyzed in the face of such extreme delusion.
[...]
The men who love them often happen to be quite powerful. (According to Zdatny, hair is a class signifier.) How else to explain the fact that no one -- not Lyon's fellow puppeteers, say, or Trump's apprentices, or Caeser's minions -- had the courage to say, "Hey, boss, what's with the hair?"
[...]
When his then-fiancée Judith Nathan convinced Rudy Giuliani to give up his much-mocked splayed locks for a chrome dome, it made national headlines and proved that occasionally, there is someone who can break the comb-over spell (and, apparently, it isn't Donna Hanover). But having that kind of sway is still a rarity, because as Marino discovered, pretending to have a full head of hair is only superficially about attracting women.
"Men do it for men," he maintains.
Like arm wrestling and binge drinking, the male impulse to measure up to their brothers isn't exactly the sign of a well-developed psyche.
"You're really talking about an emotionally immature man," says Dawson, the therapist. And since hair is associated with virility ("If there ever truly was a cure for baldness, it would make Viagra look like peanuts," Walker says), when men grow their hair into a bi-level '80s do and wrap it around their skull like some kind of talismanic protector, they actually want it to be some kind of talismanic protector. "It's just one more sign of the dance to the music of time that we all engage in, that ends in death," sighs Ames. Having a comb-over isn't a fashion statement; it's a cry for help.
And it's one we don't want to hear. According to his friend Bruce Vilanch, Nathan Lane was so mortified by the comb-over he had to wear during the filming of the movie version of "The Producers" that he didn't go out for two months -- and he had his head buzzed as soon as production wrapped.
Even our politicians are moving away from the look and its retrograde image. "People find them kind of a throwback to old-style politics, to people hiding something, and when you get rid of the comb-over, you kind of look clean and clear," says Sheinkopf. "It's OK to be bald. In the politics of the 21st century, it's OK to be who you are."
Maybe. But if we lose the comb-over, we lose all the secrets it reveals, from self-esteem to social status to fear of death. In the quest to get into the heart and mind of the Other, the comb-over provides answers that Foucault (who, incidentally, shaved his off) never could.
Let's see the mullet do that.
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