Untangling the Roots of Texturism: Review of Bad Hair (2020)

Synopsis of Bad Hair (2020)

Bad Hair (2020) is a skittish cross between satire, comedy, and horror. The movie opens with an impactful scene of young Anna Bludso (Zaria Kelley) losing her hair after a relaxer application goes wrong. This scars her and makes her afraid of the creamy crack and making her hair. Few minutes into the movie, it transports us to 1989 and we watch as an older Anna (Elle Lorraine) tries to make her way in the competitive, colorist, and the sexist world of television. Anna works at Culture, a 1989, African-American version of MTV Base, as an assistant to Edna (Judith Scott), the current head of programming. Unfortunately, Culture’s homey, little snow globe is shaken up when the station owner, Grant Madison (James Van Der Beek) replaces Edna with Zora (Vanessa Williams), a former supermodel.

With Edna gone and “Zora with the good hair” coming in with her assistant, Anna no longer has a purpose at Culture. The situation becomes especially dicier with the way Zora is going through the employees faster than a hot knife through butter. When Anna finally gets an audience with Zora and pitches her idea on how to give Culture much-needed visibility by adding a live music video countdown, Zora is impressed by how innovative Anna is and keeps her on as an assistant. There is however a singular condition: Anna has to do something about her short, kinky, 4c hair.

To realize her dreams, Anna follows Zora’s recommendations borrows money from her Aunt, and ends up at Virgie’s, an exclusive hair salon guaranteed to bring out “the Becky in every Tanisha.” Anna is denied entry as she doesn’t have an appointment. After a moving monologue on dreams and how out of reach they can be, Virgie (Laverne Cox) finally fits Anna into her timetable. The installation process was grueling. Anna gets flashbacks to the hair incident of her childhood while we get icky, POV images of the curved needle ferreting in and out of her bleeding scalp. In the end, Virgie gives Anna a pink bottle of hair cream and warns her never to get the weave wet.