hair

July 20 movie: Hair. "Let it fly in the breeze, and get caught in the trees, give a home to the fleas in my hair." Oh, lordie! What a blast from the past. The world's cleanest dirty hippies beg, steal, take drugs, trespass, disrupt a private party and start a prison riot, while taking on racism, the sexual revolution and the Vietnam war. Those lovable scamps!

I didn't see the movie until I was in college but before the movie was even made my parents had the Broadway cast album. As a kid I listened to it enough to know the songs by heart forever -- I remember over a decade later finding out who Fellini, Antonioni, "and also his countryman Roman Polanski" are and being like, hey! Those guys from that song, they're actual people!

Warning, the songs are fiendishly catchy. I've got several of them bouncing around in my head right now. Good morning, starshine! The earth says hello! As far as the movie itself, what surprised me was how earnest and sincere it all was. It seems to me that if this movie were made today, it would be dripping with irony. Everything is dripping with ironic detachment, and an anti-war movie about youth culture would be especially so. This movie was totally without irony. As Georg pointed out, though the movie was made in 79, the play opened in 1968. It can't comment on the 60s counterculture because it was so much a part of it.

Embarrassing personal memory: I didn't know what the words in "Sodomy" meant so I looked them all up in the dictionary. Which was a laborious and ultimately unhelpful process. First of all, it took a while to figure out how to spell the words. And none of them were in my dictionary so I had to go for the grownup dictionary with tiny print. Then the definitions were circular and meaningless to youthful me (9? 10? Somewhere thereabouts). For instance, the definition of pederasty was "of a pederast." I'm still puzzled by that.