Soggy Suds

IN THE '60s, it was Hair, More than any other cultural production of the decade, it summed up in a nest, consumable package the morality of a generation; the experimentation with sense and mind-expanding drugs, the filing with commune living, the brush with hippie hedonism, the swing with the sexual pulsation of rock music, the espousal of free love, the protest against the military-industrial complex, the let-it-all-hang-out of the be-in. The cult of hair.

Now, in the '70s. it is Shampoo. In the story of George (Warren Beatty) the hairdresser we get a glimpse of one path members of the drop-out generation may have taken as they grew older and realized that there was more to hair than a faddish protest, that in washing it, setting it, curling it, and cutting it there was a substantial profit to be made. Gone are the blue jeans, love beads, marijuana pipes, and Jimi Hendrix; In are velvet pants, platform shoes, sports coupes, and Jim Beam. Yet there remains the glibness of the cultural representation, be it theater or cinema, that attempts to sum up in a concise, marketable statement the spirit of the times.

The screen is completely dark as Shampoo begins. We hear the always-humorous sounds of a bed creaking under the weight of a couple laboring away in their pleasure-making. In a moment there is the thud of something knocking repeatedly against wood. "Ugh...move down some, I'm hitting my head," a female voice can barely whisper between her increasingly heavy pants. The sounds of wriggling in the bed. The panting continues.

The screen remains black. Suddenly, from out of the blue, there flashes a phrase, a sentence--some concatenation of words on the screen that abruptly intrudes on this bedroom scene. What can it announce, appearing as it does so unexpectedly and with such strident urgency? "Election Day: November 1968," it blurts, and in the process hints to us that this is no mere sexual elbow-ribbing we are about to witness, but a story, an episode, an adventure that promises to make some comment on the more serious, more profound events that transgress in executive corridors and legislative cloakrooms.

LOOKING BACK on this opening scene after having seen the whole movie, I think maybe Shampoo could have better used as its mood-setting phrase a riddle I spotted on a bathroom wall a few years back: "Why was Nixon never circumcised?" "Because there's no end to that prick." Much more accurately than the portentous statement, "Election Day: November 1968," such a gem of grafitti would have reflected the end of Shampoo's analysis of human behavior. It would have prepared us for what follows, a farce in which the wanton insatiable cocks and cunts of Los Angeles suburbanites become an overextended, tiresome metaphor for the political machinations of the pricks in Washington. It seems that every time two beautiful people are in close enough proximity to become aroused, Nixon's face appears on the screen, either on a wall poster, beaming with that entreating, deceitful smile, or on a television, unctuously articulating the campaign pledges to "bring the nation together."

No viewer can miss such parallels as the one between this seemingly innocuous face and George the hairdresser's zipper: both are respectable facades covering much more menacing organs. But beyond such breathtakingly contemporary and decidedly hip statements, the movie does little more than pay homage to Hollywood's God, Tinsel, who beneficently provides Beatty, who wrote the script, with enough ribbons and bows to wrap up this relic from some moviemakers' junkyard and offer it as something new. The context is modern but the story is old, so that the viewer is left feeling like someone who goes to bed with an array of new partners, all of whom insist on using the same old position.

Jackie (Julie Christie), George's ex-girlfriend, is a sexy blonde who rides the Mercedes-Benz sportscar and wears the resplendent rings she receives from Lester (Jack Warden), an elderly, buffoon-like corporate executive, her beau of the moment. Lenny's aging wife Felicia (Lee Grant) is trying to fight off the years and deny her wrinkles by sleeping with George. Meanwhile, George becomes friendly with Lenny through Felicia, who introduces the two in the hope that her husband will give her lover a business loan. All the while George's steady girlfriend Jill (Goldie Hawn) slumps around with her pale hangdog face and her always-mussed, dirty-blonde hair, waiting with glazed eyes for George to propose marriage to her.

And so the stage is set for a traditional web of romantic and erotic involvements that was spun out as long ago as Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangeureuses and as recently as Bob and Carol & Ted and Alice. But Beatty has added a new twist: by making a hairdresser his central character, he has come up with a man whose vigor is representative of the virtues of the times. While in romance of the past, the gallant suitor parried with a deft sword or shot a pistol with deadly accuracy, George tucks his electric hairdryer into his belt as he jumps on his motorcycle on the way to a home appointment. Like the avenues of another decadent empire, all of the loads in Shampoo's Los Angeles lead to George's beauty salon, where George sets the hair of beautiful women and then takes them home to bed. Moving between salon and bedroom, comb and penis, shampoo and sperm, George is the denizen of a bizarre world whose plastic kaleidoscopic glitter Beatty exploits in his farcical look into the sex scene of the L.A. beautiful people.

Beatty and director Hal Ashby have given us the merest outlines of their characters, whom we see whirl through a single day in their lives, fitting about in a timeless vacuum. Combined with the constant striving for absurd humor. This one-dimensionality results in a statement about as profound as a movie of the Marx Brothers let loose in a beauty parlor. We encounter characters as self-centered as the businessman in Paper Tiger, who sets his clothing warehouse on fire to receive insurance benefits, characters as scheming as the young entrepreneur in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, who ignores the human suffering produced by his financial dealing. But whereas in those portrayals the characters become aware of the consequences of their actions, in Shampoo we encounter people like Lenny, who is concerned only with giving Jackie enough presents to guarantee her love, or Felicia, who drags George into a woman's restroom on a lustful impulse--people who will drop everything at the passing of a pair of pretty legs or the flash of a hairy chest.

AND THEN there is George. George is the one character Beatty tries to make believable. When Jill, irate at his sexual habits, calls him a good-for-nothing, George sits down and begins to sob in despairing agreement. When Lenny blows up at him for moving in on Jackie, George tries to calm the executive with the sincere assurance that Jackie truly loves him. But such scenes are unconvincing, for George's overall personality has been made abundantly clear: he is nothing but a dumb stud, whose only responsibility is to make sure he wipes his groin clean before going from one woman to the next (which, incidentally, he fails to do when he beds down with Felicia minutes after making her daughter). His dailogue runs from such phrases as "Uh...Well...Uh...Geee, I didn't mean that..." to statements like "I don't know, you might be right." With such a seeming refugee from a Woody Allen film, moral dilemmas are sacrificed for laughs and pathos turns into bathos.

But Beatty has a purpose beyond merely mocking the life of an L.A. hairdresser, as he lets us know at the outset with the flashing of "Election Day" on the dark screen, and as he reminds us every time we see the face that is becoming the most comic mug since Tom Dewey. Ah, yes, we think, as we watch George's tumescence, very similar to the swelling of CREEP's campaign funds. A pair of legs spreading apart, we realize, is quite analogous to the hairy palm of a politician opening up to receive a bribe. As we watch George lose Jackie at just the moment he recognizes his love for her, the lesson of the movie becomes clear: HE WHO FUCKS OVER OTHERS EVENTUALLY FUCKS OVER HIMSELF, whether it be a mindless hairdresser with a scheming penis or a balls-less politician with a scheming mind.

To make such a facile equation, as Beatty does, is like collapsing the seven rings of hell into one, and subjecting the child shoplifter to the same tortures as the bloodthirsty murderer. If Nixon were to play George, he wouldn't simply neglect his girlfriend, his customers, and his associates for the transient pleasure of a good lay; he would place a tape recorder under the bed, to record the groans as evidence for possible blackmail. The reality of Orange County is not simply the flashy cars, the bright lights, the shiny mirrors of George's Los Angeles. It is the Orange County of economic privilege and social elitism that make possible the ascendancy of men like Richard Nixon to the Presidency. That life-style, that environment certainly merit cinematic investigation, but Shampoo hardly does the job. A message is hinted at, but its presentation is so smooth, it is done up in such a slick package, that the attempt to grasp it is about as satisfying as having coitus interrupts with someone covered with suntan lotion.