The whole spirit of Hair in one scene. Maybe the whole spirit of the 60′s right there. That’s what Hair meant to be, a musical, comical manifesto of the hippie generation. But if the 60′s was all it meant, it wouldn’t hold up very well today, and I think that it does. Not just because we’re supremely nostalgic for everything besides our own times. Because the spirit of rebellion stomping on the fine china of establishment is timeless and universal. We wanted to kick high society in the balls in 1969 and we still do. We still want a dance on the table with George Berger.
Actually has nothing to do with the Hare Krishna religion, except possibly in making mockery of religiousness generally. In this sequence from the film Hair, Claude experiences an LSD-induced dream sequence. Claude’s Midwestern fantasy of a traditional white wedding is chaotically interrupted by his shocking new hippie friends. The message is clearly; let go of your old-fashioned values and expectations. The pomposity of the church wedding is obsolete, as is your ideal of the blushing bride. Your life is about to become crazier than you could ever expect. And chanting the Hare Krishna chant is just as ridiculous as the old church rituals. Though Hare Krishna was just coming into popularity in the West during the Sixties, but it was already ripe for parody. The writers of Hair changed the chant to suit themselves, and I for one still find their line “I am high on you-know-what” hilarious. In fact the only thing that prevents this sequence from being completely perfect is the nagging fact that LSD doesn’t actually cause rolling blackout-style hallucinations like that. I don’t know hard you’d have to fry your brain to descend into a dream state that deep, but in my experiments I’ve never come even close. On the other hand, you can’t really blame the filmmakers for using an LSD trip as an excuse to produce a good old fashioned out-and-out dream sequence. Because the real effects of acid are slightly less videogenic and less conducive to choreographed social metaphors.
I may be a cold blooded cynic – not too much makes me sentimental. I don’t gravitate towards the ‘girly’ or ‘romantic’, I don’t like anything frilly, and I certainly don’t enjoy being manipulated by entertainment. I’ve always held tearjerking, weepy movies in contempt. Even lower contempt for people who watch chick flicks and blubber. I don’t watch movies and cry. I find that pathetic. But I’m not entirely made of stone either. For whatever reason, there’s one moment that’s always made me feel weepy – the finale of the movie Hair. It could be the crescendo of the music, or something about the sheer catastrophic finality of a simple mistaken identity. It might be the unexpected heft of an otherwise light spirited movie turning serious. It might even be the very fact that Milos Forman isn’t actively trying to turn on your waterworks – he’s effectively killing off his most lovable character, but he’s still keeping a hopeful tone. If it were to follow that airplane and actually show what happens to Berger in Vietnam, that would be going overboard and the effect would be ruined. But anyhow, whatever you think it is, it never fails to affect me. Taken out of context like it is here, it may be missing some of its punch, but of course I assume you’re a sophisticated film buff and you’ve seen the movie.
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