Posted By BillHeise on March 18, 2009

Larry and I used to sneak into the old (and now gone) Edens Movie Theater in Northbrook, IL, where we would watch movies over and over. No, we didn’t pay to see the movies if we could help it. As respectable hippies, we snuck in!

One of my favorite movies at that time was Hair. Larry and I must have snuck in through a side door to see it more than twenty times.

Apparently, when the musical first appeared on the scene no one could quite discern what it was about. I have never had any trouble following it. The plot is a basic identity reversal on two planes.

More important than the message of the silly plot, Hair introduced me to many new forms of music that had come on the musical scene in the 1960s. This movie influenced my musical taste vastly, and so I thought I’d walk you through the plot while introducing you to my weird musical tastes that I offer in “What I am Listening to This Week.”

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Introduction

The plot follows Claude Hooper Bukowski, a farm boy from the great state of Oklahoma. He has come to the Big City to join the army to fight the greatest fight that can imagined: killing gooks.

Judging by his short hair he has never met any gooks, but he soon meets the next best thing, some “hippie folk,” who get him high. Berger (played brilliantly by Treat Williams) touches Claude inappropriately as he sings about some place across the Atlantic sea. The key to the song is Berger’s challenge to Claude, who “believes in God, who believes in Claude.” “That’s ME!,” says Claude. It’s as if Berger is sarcastically challenging the entire framework upon which this greatest country on God’s green earth has been built. Who can stop this madness?

Complications

Anyway, Claude falls in love with an upper middle class twit, who is riding with her upper middle class twit friends. Berger doesn’t know her name (it is Sheila), but he gives her a name, calling her Donna (names are arbitrary, man). He begins the unravelling of identities when he puns on Donna‘s name, interchanging it with the name of Madonna, as he dances his Thyla Tharp dance.

Berger shows up and crashes a party at Donna’s house, once again singing about how he has life. The clear implication is that the upper middle class twits don’t have any life. They prove it by looking blank and bewildered as Berger sings.  Charlotte Rae (Mrs. Garrett from The Facts of Life) “gets it,” and she dances with Berger as he destroys all of Donna’s parents’ upper middle class twit dishes as they watch looking blankly. Not having been raised particularly well to the blank and passive stare befitting the upper middle class twit , Donna is apparently intrigued by Berger’s ape-like dancing, unlike her parents.

Clyde is now having fun with his new and liberating friends who dance around and have fun rather than having jobs. But all is not fun and games with Berger and his friends. This becomes apparent when a woman, credited only as Hud’s fiancé, shows up and demands he return to take care of his son, uncredited here, but who will be referred to here as “Hud’s son,” who Hud has abandoned.

This song pointed to the complications of identity that the hippies in the 1960s were attempting to avoid as they tried to replace their social identity with a more pure “cosmic consciousness.” Berger the Noble makes black Hud go back and take care of the child, while the white hippies continue to be free to roam around looking for more middle class twits to corrupt.

This song was my favorite in the movie in the 1970s, and was one of the reasons I snuck into the theater to see Hair with Larry over twenty times. This track introduced me to Gospel music.

Crisis

The plot advances when Claude take some acid. This introduces a breach in Claude’s identity, which is played out in “Hare Krishna,” my current favorite song in the movie. Perhaps this video is the only way to make you understand my patience for (and love for) Indian music’s psychedelia. Compare this video with Nimbooda and Tun Tunak Tun and you’ll see what I mean.

There are so many moments in this scene that I don’t know where to start, so I’ll walk you through it:

• It starts with a weird guy in a tux (0:01).
• The Church (0:10). You had to have a church in a movie where Donna and Madonna were confused.
• The organ and the funk bass (0:50) indicate the confusion of musical genres which will parallel the rift in identities that we will be greeted by here.
• The funky woman dancing in white who rises up from the ground like some sort of pagan goddess (1:10)
• The appearance of a horse (1:50). I can’t figure out what the symbol means here. Is it an appearance from Claude’s past? Or does it represent the upper middle class twit upbringing of Donna/Sheila?
• Anyway, the are married, which should inaugurate a joining of two minds as one, but they are in fact separated by the reappearance of the Hare Krishna non-identity music.
• The Bollywood sequence begins (2:25) as gyrating women enter the scene (2:33)
• The women who sings with an etheral voice (2:53) turns into the goddess woman. Identities are not secure.
• Sheila is crouching on the ground (3:05), but she is not she, and changes into someone else.
• The new non-Sheila dances a crazy squating dance (3:17)
• Claude in his hallucination notices a swinging chandelier (3:22). Can Berger be far behind? There he is a few seconds later.
• Sheila is carried in on a plate by an upper middle class twit butler (3:33) but she turns into the goddess woman as she defies gravity and the bonds of the earth to hover in the air (3:40).
• She dances with the silliest face I have ever seen (3:52)
• The funky women are now back looking like mannequins (4:05)
• Berger shows up and does his most ape-like dance (4:12) as Sheila’s parents express their upper middle class twit horror, which is to say that they just stand there looking blank and bewildered. (4:26)
• Sheila attempts to flap her wings (4:28) and eventually flies away from her upper middle class twit parents.
• Sheila blows kisses at the world (4:40) as (back in the real world) Claude looks indescribably happy.
• The chanting music breaks up into an individual voice (4:45) as the dancers break into a maenad dancing fury.
• Sheila and Claude fly into a cleansing fire (4:54). Okay.
• Claude, who has never experienced anything like this, rolls his eyes back into his head (5:01) and runs away, as the drug-induced hallucinations overtake him.

Living in Crisis

It’s only after he “drops acid” and “takes a trip” that breach in his “true” identity becomes manifest. But it is too late. He has made a commitment to the Army. His life as a free man comes to an end; but the Army fails to close the breach in Claude’s identity opened up by his LSD trip. Instead, Claude is fortified against the pressures being placed on his body by the breach in his mind:

My body is walking in space
My soul is in orbit with God
Face-to-face.

This song introduced me to the music of funk. Note the swinging lamp of Hare Krishna which reappears here. [There's another nude guy in this video. I'm sorry. I seem to be drawn to nude men and women. Forgive me.]

Resolution

The movie ends when Berger exchanges places with Claude so that he can be with his love one last time. Unfortunately for Berger, he has been impulsive and has not thought about his entry into the structured world of the army (Big mistakes!). He get shipped off Vietnam in place of Claude. The normally eloquent Berger is rendered mute by his circumstance in a structured environment. His wild ape dancing is replaced by his orderly march into the dark as he sings in disbelief “I believe in God, and I believe that God believes in Claude. That’s ME!” After which his lone voice is replaced, first by the chorus of his friends and then by the collective voice of thousands.

Berger, like Christ, is dead having selflessly sacrificed himself for the greater good by not thinking ahead. Claude, who showed up on the stage initially as a two-dimensional cardboard figure, has emerged through this experience a whole person who has managed to elevate himself to the more pure and more human “cosmic consciousness” as a result of the sacrifice made for him by the lowly ape-like Berger.

This movie is a masterpiece!  Thanks Milo and Twyla.

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