Determined to enhance my culture quotient, I recently watched Pollock on cable for about the hundredth time. Once again, I tried to figure out why the movie mesmerizes me. Surely it couldn’t be just the drip of the paint or the whine of Marcia Gay Harden. No, it had to be something else, some elusive element about Ed Harris in the title role.
And then I realized. It was the hair. Or rather, the lack of it. As balletic as Harris was flicking his oils, his performance was superbly heightened by his polished skull. That intensely focused, well-rounded expanse perfectly capped a singular artist. Constantly bent forward, it loomed ever present, signifying the fervid thoughts that kept spilling onto the canvas, literally bringing Harris’s performance to a head. No wonder the man got an Oscar nomination.
Bald, as the cliché goes, is beautiful. But I’ve also come to realize that it can be downright powerful. We’re not talking here about the sensual bald of Telly Savalas or Yul Brynner, nor do I refer to the painstakingly polished, carefully scraped bald of Moby and metrosexuals. Neither is this bald for the sake of aesthetics, aerodynamics, or easy maintenance. Rather, the idea here is bald as raw force, as a projection of self-assurance and strength, both inner and outer. You can’t even apply a feckless term like “bald” to such a bold concept. Refer to it, instead, as Brow. Brow differs from bald in that it is so visually stark, so stunningly spare, that those who disport it are utterly confident in their persona. No wonder Bruce Willis finally adopted the look for Live Free Or Die Hard. By the fourth time around, he knew that even though he was going to get banged up plenty, he was still going to completely crunch the bad guys.
It’s on celluloid, in fact, that Brow has been most memorably enshrined. One of the earliest examples was the Wizard of Oz—or at least the projection of him that made Dorothy and her friends tremble. Equally memorable was Orson Welles in Citizen Kane. As newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane grows more ruthless, so too does his Brow grow in stature. When he tells his second wife, Susan, to shut her yap lest their guests overhear her, he bows forward, intoning his commandment from under an imposing Brow. Later, while he tears her room apart in a fit of revenge, his bulging Brow underscores his rage.
Rage is the hallmark of another great cinematic Brow, that of George C. Scott in Patton. When Tim Considine confesses that he can’t stand the shelling anymore, and Scott thunders to the hapless solider’s face that he’s a coward, Scott’s Brow bores relentlessly in on him. His final explosion—“Send him back to the front, d’you hear me?!’”—floods his entire head red with anger. It’s a veritable blood blister of a Brow. Also in a military vein is the Brow of Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) in Apocalypse Now. This is Brow as all-seeing, all-dominating totem. Here, the look emphasizes an equally hulking, Buddha-like body that is master of a hellish landscape deep in the heart of a Southeast Asian darkness. And although the movie’s costar, Robert “Colonel Kilgore” Duvall, doesn’t take his cavalry Stetson off, his is another impressive Brow. In Network, upon learning that Peter Finch is sabotaging a major business deal, an exasperated Duvall continually runs his hand over his fretting Brow, as if somehow trying to contain his disbelief.
Brow can be a force for good. Take Michael Chiklis as The Thing in both Fantastic Four movies. Rocky and orange though his Brow is, it merits inclusion in the pantheon. Chiklis himself was fine as the crime-busting, eponymous hero of The Commish. But because his Brow competed with hair, the show made little lasting impression. By contrast, Chiklis’s role-defining Brow in The Shield helped ensure that the show had a more-than-healthy run. And yet his character, Vic Mackey, is a corrupt cop, stealing drugs from dealers, torturing suspects, even murdering when he needs to.
Brow seems unable to escape overtones of evil. James Bond’s arch nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld of SPECTRE, is forever contemplating world domination from within the twisted recesses of his Brow. (When Charles Gray portrayed Blofeld as a fey fop with a combover in Diamonds Are Forever, he lost most of his punch.) One of Dick Tracy’s most hideous opponents was a Nazi spy literally named The Brow; Captain Marvel’s very first enemy was the archetypal mad scientist Dr. Sivana, complete with Brow. Then, too, there is Egghead of Batman fame.
All this talk of evil geniuses brings up the most sublime incarnation of Brow: namely, as an expression of sheer mental prowess. In the Star Trek universe, so smart were the inhabitants of Talos IV that they could conjure illusions out of their own thoughts. Naturally, their hydrocephalic Brows were among the biggest in the galaxy. So, too, was the Brow of David McCallum in the classic Outer Limits episode “The Sixth Finger.” Playing a simple coal miner whose personal evolution is accelerated millions of years, he develops extra fingers to improve dexterity, pointed ears to hear better—and a huge Brow to accommodate his superior cranium.
But Brow isn’t merely a phenomenon of the arts; it can be found in the political arena, too. Years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lenin’s revolutionary Brow still leads the way for his fellow Bolsheviks to follow, on endless red banners and posters. Nehru’s major mistake as India’s prime minister was wearing a white garrison cap that obscured his erudite Brow. Mussolini relied mainly on his jutting jaw to project authority, but without an arrogant Brow to back it up, his swaggering balcony oratories would have been just so much chin wagging. (Another follicularly challenged Italian duce, Silvio Berlusconi, has famously bragged that his brain is so big that it simply pushes the hair out of his head.) Curiously, Brow is not a major presence in Washington. Dwight Eisenhower and Gerald Ford were Brows incarnate, but we associate them in the popular culture more with playing golf than exercising authority. As for Adlai Stevenson, he never lived down his reputation as an egghead: His Princetonian Brow was more suited to a college campus than the nation’s capital.
The examples go on. When Henry Luce—whose bushy eyebrows perfectly set off his own impressive dome—contemplated a magazine for intellectuals, his Time-Life minions dubbed it Brow. James Carville commands our attention not for what he says but for his resemblance to the embryonic alien in Blade Runner. Nothing can withstand the onslaught of Mr. Clean.
Whither Brow? Truth be told, in a world of hair transplants, toupées, and vanity in general, the prospects aren’t great. But just because Brow has always been a minority taste doesn’t mean it can’t flourish in its own limited sphere. All it takes is an avatar—a Ving Rhames, a Patrick Stewart, even a Dr. Evil—to set the standard. So bravo, Brow, and may your reflected shine enlighten us all.
Thomas Vinciguerra is the editor of a forthcoming anthology of the writings of Wolcott Gibbs.
