Word: shampooing
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...Shampoo. In the story of George (Warren Beatty) the hairdresser we get a glimpse of one path members of the drop-out generation may have taken as they grew older and realized that there was more to hair than a faddish protest, that in washing it, setting it, curling it, and cutting it there was a substantial profit to be made. Gone are the blue jeans, love beads, marijuana pipes, and Jimi Hendrix; In are velvet pants, platform shoes, sports coupes, and Jim Beam. Yet there remains the glibness of the cultural representation, be it theater or cinema, that attempts...
...screen is completely dark as Shampoo begins. We hear the always-humorous sounds of a bed creaking under the weight of a couple laboring away in their pleasure-making. In a moment there is the thud of something knocking repeatedly against wood. "Ugh...move down some, I'm hitting my head," a female voice can barely whisper between her increasingly heavy pants. The sounds of wriggling in the bed. The panting continues...
LOOKING BACK on this opening scene after having seen the whole movie, I think maybe Shampoo could have better used as its mood-setting phrase a riddle I spotted on a bathroom wall a few years back: "Why was Nixon never circumcised?" "Because there's no end to that prick." Much more accurately than the portentous statement, "Election Day: November 1968," such a gem of grafitti would have reflected the end of Shampoo's analysis of human behavior. It would have prepared us for what follows, a farce in which the wanton insatiable cocks and cunts of Los Angeles suburbanites...
...past, the gallant suitor parried with a deft sword or shot a pistol with deadly accuracy, George tucks his electric hairdryer into his belt as he jumps on his motorcycle on the way to a home appointment. Like the avenues of another decadent empire, all of the loads in Shampoo's Los Angeles lead to George's beauty salon, where George sets the hair of beautiful women and then takes them home to bed. Moving between salon and bedroom, comb and penis, shampoo and sperm, George is the denizen of a bizarre world whose plastic kaleidoscopic glitter Beatty exploits...
...curious about California, at least southern California, go see Shampoo, it won't lie to you. I went to Hollywood for the first time about a year ago with tickets to the Academy Awards. The day before the big show, I picked up a friend at a swank L.A. beauty parlor and there was this tall blonde guy named Phillippe or something leaning over her cooing, "I am going to make you beautiful, so beautiful." He believed what he was saying, and later when I saw my friend at a party after the Awards, I could tell that she believed...