Hair Horrors

Lara Williams on messy hair as a visual metaphor.

There’s a bit from the sixth season of Seinfeld I’ve recently been thinking about. It’s about hair. “You will actually kiss another human being, right on the head,” Jerry observes. “But, if one of those hairs should somehow be able to get out of that skull, and go off on its own, it is now the vilest, most disgusting thing that you can encounter.” I’ve freaked out over loose hair before, but I am also troubled by hair attached to the scalp—living hair, so to speak.

Last month, I was rewatching Possession (1981) by Andrzej Żuławski, which is about a couple in West Berlin going through a divorce. The film contains many lurid images, including mutilation by electric knife, a subway miscarriage, and plenty of blood and pus oozing from various orifices. However, the image that most disturbed me was Isabelle Adjani’s gently disheveled hair. There is something about the way it is coming away from her—both as part of the body and separate from it—that makes my skin crawl.

I noticed myself having a similar reaction to Miu Miu’s 2023 Fall/Winter campaign models, all of whom sported lightly mussed up hair. The effect was created by rubbing an inflated party balloon against their hair before sending them down the runway. I suppose I felt abjected by their hair—a response that is not exactly disgust or repulsion. The feeling is akin to becoming suddenly conscious of one’s own corporeal reality. There have been a few other examples of rumpled hair on the runways as of late. Issey Miyake’s SS24 runway featured models with windswept and gently tangled hair. Blumarine’s SS23 models sported wispy, flyaway styles Even Chanel’s AW23 featured ruffled (albeit tamer) locks.

I am talking about a very specific kind of hairstyle. Not quite sex hair, which is sultry in its messiness, but something like nap hair, as if the person had just awoken from a short, nightmarish slumber. There’s a bumbling femininity to it, and a brazenness too. The word that comes to mind is “undone.” Hair stylist Jane Matthews describes it as “kind of ugly-beautiful, but it also feels unique and it’s just a relief after perfectly curled, waved, shiny hair and filtered faces.”

The more I thought about it, I realized this theatrical style is almost a trope. It is standard in the films I adore, where the female characters—women, not girls—are emotionally, even physically coming undone. There’s Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman, Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher, Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive, Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist. These women have not yet embodied the monstrous feminine (they are not literal witches, or any other mythical female horror archetype), nor are they full Weird Barbie in their characteristic strangeness. They are skirting the edges of a full psychosexual breakdown, barely trying to conceal their repressed, violent mania.

In The Piano Teacher, Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) is an unmarried woman in her late-thirties living with her domineering mother. She is struggling to tame her desires towards her pupil, Walter. Control is the film’s central theme—Erika’s (in)ability to control herself and of her yielding control in the sadomasochistic relationship she enters with Walter. Throughout the film’s first half, Erika wears her hair in a claw clip or bun, with large additional clips around the side of her head, but a few errant strands still escape. One can interpret this as a visual metaphor for Erika’s inability to contain her desires, despite her suffocatingly disciplined and controlled life.

Erika’s hair progresses according to her mental state. It first appears undone, hanging at her shoulder, in a scene where she mutilates her genitals with a razor while her mother tells her dinner is ready from the next room. Her hair becomes gradually bedraggled as she tries to control her affair with Walter. Something inside her seems to be worming out, breaking the body’s boundaries.

In Siri Hustvedt’s essay Notes Towards A History Of Hair, she argues that “the liminal status of hair is crucial to its meanings,” citing the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s book Purity and Danger, which seeks to understand the cultural meanings of dirt, taboo and pollutants: Hair is a skin appendage, like nails and sweat, shed from a person’s epidermis that “grows on the borders between person and world.”

I’m reminded of what the critic Ivone Marguiles writes about Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Its ending “represents the link between containment and excess, between sexual repression and violence.” The roughly three-hour film consists of long, still shots of Jeanne going about three seemingly ordinary days. It is a film about banality, about the drudgery of woman’s work, but beneath the surface, something is unraveling. Jeanne begins the film with perfectly coiffed hair, and we see her tend to her curls, brushing them meticulously. But as she moves through her days, she allows it to become gradually disheveled.

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Never crazed or untamed, her hair is just slightly rumpled in the film’s final moments. After having had a seemingly unexpected orgasm with a client, Jeanne buttons her blouse, retrieves a pair of scissors from her dresser, and stabs him through the heart. She sits at the dinner table, contemplating her crime. Jeanne’s stony posture in the scene reminds me of Medusa, with the snakes worming from her skull, her hair transgressing the borders of her body.

We’re arguably living through a culturally dominant moment of girlhood—girl dinners, hot girl walks etc—and so characters like Jeanne Dielman and Erika Kohut with their disorderly hair makes for an indisputable portrait of womanhood, uncannily out of step with the current visual culture. The antithesis of a fraying woman can be found in the girlish archetypes and aesthetics of TikTok, a young person’s platform. There’s Clean Girl, That Girl, Berry Girl: girls whose hair is always tamed in a snatched bun or ponytail. Not a strand is ever out of place lest it betray the fundamental grotesquerie of having a body out of one’s control.

Womanhood and its messy, harried and hairy reality is not an attractive comparative state. There are also crucial differences in how messy hair can be perceived. Messy hair on a white, catwalk model is ugly-beautiful, but “unkempt” hair has a history of being weaponized against Black women, such that it’s become a horror trope. In Hulu’s The Other Black Girl, hair becomes the object of satire, as a hair gel is presented as the solution to workplace inequality. “Hair product becomes an easy fix for a problem that is hundreds of years in the making, ultimately saying that to be successful all you need is to change who you are, straighten your hair, or smile,” Jess Lee wrote for PopSugar, on the series.

Ultimately, hair is wild, and it can betray your own wildness—your secrets. (To quote Mean Girls: “That’s why her hair is so big. It’s full of secrets.”) I am haunted by a scene in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), in which the young wife begs her philandering husband to wash his hair after straying, to eliminate the lingering vulvic scent of his mistress. When my son was a newborn, it was not unusual for me to find vomit—and sometimes shit—dried into the tips of my hair. But the repulsive can also be intriguing. I gravitated towards movies that featured women with mussed up hair: Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion! Hayley Bennet in Swallow! Garance Marillier in Raw! These may well be some of my favorite films.

I think of a scene towards the end of Possession, Isabelle Adjani having birthed and fucked a tentacled creature with a likeness to her husband; the hair from her ponytail just a little mussed up, while she loses her fucking mind. “You must restore order,” her husband screams at her. I watch these women and their sexual derangement, their violent outbursts and abject psychosis; their hair loosening, undoing, becoming disheveled, bodily and animal; half as the husband screaming for a return to order, and half-enjoying the vicarious thrill in the witnessing. There is something unnerving and almost cautionary to behold in these scenes, a realization that I may be just a hair grip away from my own nervous breakdown. Aren’t we all?

The Dirt: Coming undone in more ways than one.

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