BERNICE BOBS HER HAIR 1976

Bernice Bobs Her Hair, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s satirically comic, finely-observed 1920 short story about feminine identity in the emergent jazz age, can be read in less time than it takes to watch this exceptional made-for-TV short film adaptation directed by Joan Micklin Silver (Hester Street, Crossing Delancey). A movie clocking in at a little over 48 minutes, Bernice Bobs Her Hair is a disarmingly witty little film that offers more food for thought, first-rate performances, snappy dialogue, and keen period detail than most films three times the length and ten times the budget.

Shelley Duvall as Bernice

Veronica Cartwright as Marjorie

Bud Cort as Warren

Dennis Christopher as Charley Paulson

Mark La Mura as Carpenter

Mark Newkirk as G. Reece Stoddard

The moneyed idleness of finishing school girls and prep school boys on summer holiday in Connecticut is a ritualized flurry of status-defining social activities which have about them the contradictory quality of simultaneously relieving and heightening boredom. The time is 1919; the very brink of flaming youth, flappers, jazz, and silent movie vamps. While the conventions of mannered society are stringently observed by young and old alike, those teens fumbling most uneasily on the verge of adulthood can’t resist exercising their newfound independence through small acts of social rebellion.

Among the debutante set, this means engaging in (and trying to navigate one’s way through) behaviors that walk a tightrope between popularity-enhancing daring and ostracized-by-one’s-peer-group scandalousness.

It’s August, and all-around “fun” girl and social hub Marjorie Harvey (Veronica Cartwright) is having her summer fairly ruined by visiting cousin Bernice (Shelley Duvall). In contrast to the well-liked Marjorie who has mastered and understands the seemingly endless little gambits and ploys a girl must practice in order to convey availability through the highly contrived appearance of unavailability, Bernice is dull to the point of distraction. A well-heeled socialite from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Bernice nevertheless suffers from shyness and an overabundance of the kind of genteel femininity that was swiftly becoming passé in the pre-flapper era of the early '20s.

"Bernice, girls our age divide into two groups: there's the ones like me who like to have a good time, then there's the ones like you who just love to sit around and criticize us for it!"

An eye-opening conversation overheard by Bernice (“I didn't mean to listen…at first”) between Marjorie and her mother (Polly Holliday) compels the visiting cousin to grudgingly allow herself to be taken under Marjorie’s wing for a thorough personality overhaul. What follows is a cross between Pygmalion, the third act of Grease, and the “Popular” number from Wicked as Marjorie coaches Bernice in all the finer points of being a sought-after modern woman. As the summer progresses Marjorie proves herself a master educator… but does Bernice perhaps learn her lessons all too well?

So, you think you can dance?

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The distancing effect of Bernice Bobs Her Hair’s period setting works to the film’s advantage, allowing for a kind of clear-eyed, dispassionate assessment of laughable social mores not always possible (or welcomed) when the lens of satire is trained on contemporary fads and trends. Additionally, the notion that one’s parents and grandparents might have been plagued by the same adolescent insecurities and pressures to conform that we’ve experienced provides both a historical perspective and a reinforcement of the cyclical nature of human behavior.

When Bernice Bobs Her Hair first aired in 1976 as part of the PBS The American Short Story anthology series, the film was viewed through the prism of mid-'70s second-wave feminism (those years when the initial strides of Women’s Lib began to take root, culturally). With films like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), The Stepford Wives (1975), and A Woman Under the Influence (1974) reflecting the evolving cultural prominence of women in the 70s, the duplicitous, restrictive, male-centric behavior of the young women at the center of Fitzgerald’s story appeared foolish, outmoded, and as unlikely for a comeback as the bustle.

Well, here we are in the year 2012, and the litany of silly “how to get a man interested” rules and stringent feminine “dos” and “don’ts” at the center of Bernice Bobs Her Hair (each presuming some innate female inadequacy) look positively dignified in light of the tyranny of reality shows like “The Bachelor” and how-to-catch-and-keep-a-man books like “The Rules.”

You'll be Popular...Just Not Quite as Popular as Me
Marjorie (Veronica Cartwright) and Roberta (Lane Binkley) prepare for the Country Club dance

PERFORMANCES

As earlier posts will attest, I am thoroughly besotted with Shelley Duvall. Here, as she did so artfully in Robert Altman’s 3 Women, Duvall brings an oddball stamp of pluck and silent self-regard to characters who, as written, would otherwise be pitiable or pathetic. Duvall’s Bernice may be socially withdrawn and ill-at-ease around members of the opposite sex, but it’s clear she holds an opinion of herself more solidly defined than that of her rather superficial cousin. Bernice’s willingness to undergo a personality makeover is born more of a kind of misdirected introspection (there’s a scene wherein she more or less encounters herself in male form—the reserved and judgmental ministry student, Draycott Deyo) than poor self-esteem.

Duvall's transformation from wallflower to man-trap is a delight 

I don’t believe there exists on film an uninteresting Veronica Cartwright performance. Splendid in Alien and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as the vain and spoiled socialite of Bernice Bobs Her Hair, Cartwright displays a comic timing and command of expression and inflection that lends bite to her scenes of bitchiness and real humanity to those moments that reveal the coward behind the monster. Her scenes with Duvall are marvelously engaging in their chemistry.

The character of Yale undergrad Warren McIntyre is sketchily drawn in Fitzgerald’s story, but as embodied by baby-faced Bud Cort (the victim of Shelly Duvall’s betrayal in Altman’s Brewster McCloud, but better known for Harold & Maude), Warren is a mass of post-adolescent agitation and self-seriousness. Wearing the expression of one perpetually amazed by the depth of his own emotions, Cort mines pure comic gold in fleshing out an otherwise stock Ivy League character.

Unburdening himself to Bernice, Warren longs to reveal his true self by becoming a writer. Albeit under the deliciously loony pseudonym of Charlotte Van Heusen.
"I don't want anyone to know it's me. I'm in too much pain."

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Someone once said that it’s the responsibility and privilege of the young to blaze new trails and challenge social convention, for in nonconformity lies progress. What’s fascinating to ponder is how significant a role hair and hairstyles have played in the shattering of social conventions throughout history.

As was the style of the day, the socialites in Bernice Bobs Her Hair sport mountainous piles of hair. The numerous scenes of women fussing and tending to their hair dramatize the dichotomy posed by the narrative. Long tresses may be a badge of femininity and old-world gentility, but their need for constant care inhibits female mobility and freedom. With its minimal upkeep requirements, the short bob haircut was liberation personified and branded the ideal symbol for the modern woman. Alas, its lack of social precedence and too-close association with the morally suspicious silent-screen “vampires” also branded the haircut as immodest and instantly scandalous (aka, rebellious).

Braiding is a motif repeated so often in Bernice Bobs Her Hair that the ritual begins to take on the weight of metaphor - the braids come to resemble ropes tying the women to constrictive notions of femininity.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

One of my favorite exchanges in the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story didn’t make it to the film.

Marjorie’s mother is trying to make sense of the fuss Marjorie is making over Bernice not fitting in with her social crowd. From where Marjorie’s mother sits, there’s not much to be gained in the shallow approval of people who scarcely seem interested in you in the first place.

Mrs. Harvey: “What’s a little cheap popularity?”

Marjorie: “It’s everything when you’re eighteen!”

And so it is. The world of an eighteen-year-old will undoubtedly expand, but for that brief moment in time (which can feel like an eternity) when one’s entire universe is inhabited exclusively by immediate family and the kids you go to school with, the petty concerns of popularity and peer acceptance can take on the importance of world-turning events.
There's no way to watch Bernice Bobs Her Hair without acknowledging, time and time again, how little has changed in the realm of human interaction since 1920. 
Bernice: "My philosophy is that you have to either amuse people, feed 'em, or shock 'em!"

Those words, written in 1920, could literally be Lady Gaga's mantra.

A World on the Verge of Change

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012