“You never let your hair down.”
Violet doesn’t understand why her relationship isn’t working – she’s doing everything perfectly: she’s got a great house, a strong set of friends, her career in advertising is flourishing, and she had thought until this moment that her boyfriend, who is a doctor, was going to pop the question soon. But her focus on perfection, or at least the image of perfection that so many black women are told to strive for, isn’t necessarily giving her the satisfaction she’d expected.
Cue the breakup haircut.
When the trailer for the new Netflix original, ‘Nappily Ever After’ (a play on “nappy” hair, an often derogatory term to describe afro-textured hair) was released, Twitter went wild with excitement, apprehension, and hot takes about what the film had in store.
A key question that we were all intrigued to see answered was the political stance the film would take on hair, if any.
Autonomy is important, but often within mainstream conversations around natural hair, we see prescriptive advice about having to wear your hair natural - or be a political traitor - come up time and time again.
Would ‘Nappily Ever After’ fall prey to lazy tropes like this? Or was it possible for a rom-com to bring us a more nuanced perspective on black women’s hair? Months on, we can confirm that the answer is: a bit of both.
The opening scene hit home the most – it’s the 90’s, and our protagonist is at the pool and and just trying to enjoy her young self, watching white kids, carefree, splashing in the water. But Violet can’t go in – her hair is straightened. This is a fact of life for any black woman who has engaged in the practise of straightening, and will recognise this scene with agonising familiarity.
And as the film goes on, we see so many other things that are usually omitted from black women’s on-screen daily routines – hot combs, not even GHDs, but the old kind that you have to heat up on the fire – we even catch a glimpse of the chase method. But why might this be such a big deal?
Well, the truth behind what goes into black women’s hair, both emotionally and physically, has long been a taboo or something brushed under the carpet, particularly in mainstream media. In many ways, this is what makes the movie ingenious – it’s taking everything that black women know, but have been too afraid to say out loud, and puts it all out there on the table for them to talk about.
This is notable considering the last time we remember seeing black women’s hair talked about in a mainstream comedy was in ‘Mean Girls’, back in 2004.
Black women found themselves the butt of Tina Fey’s joke when the sprinklers come on, and one of the girls dubbed an “unfriendly black hottie”, screams: “Oh crap, my hair!”
This is the way black women are used to having our hair talked about; cheap, throwaway jokes at their expense. But in the history of cinema, they have basically never seen the psychological impact that comes with being paranoid about keeping their hair straight.
Fourty five percent of black women avoid exercise because they want to maintain their hairstyle. It’s gruelling – and this is what ‘Nappily Ever After’ demonstrates so well.
We see the unspoken struggle of hair play out for Violet in each area of her life, in a way that is meme-able in its uncanniness. In her sex life – we see the oh so real, eternal struggle of her trying to keep her boyfriend’s hands out of her hair. As for her social life, she has to find out what the humidity and chances of precipitation are before she can confirm she’ll attend a patio lunch.
We also watch the culmination of her struggles, with both her hair, and her personal life, come to a head in a scene where she drunkenly returns from a nightmare of a one-night-stand and decides to shave it all off.
The shave, for her, is a way of saying “fuck it” to what people expect from her, and we see her deal with others’ reactions to her new look as the movie progresses - often centred around men, from the awful “I prefer my women natural”, to being ignored in the street.
As for the rest of the plot, it’s admittedly a little thin on the ground. During the film, which is Bechdel approved, she dithers between two relationships, one, with the “perfect” doctor, Clint, and one with Will, who runs the hair salon and has a daughter who’s trying to find her groove too.
It’s not wildly gripping and there’s a lot of focus on men for a film that could have gone in a more feminist and woman-centred direction - however, this film almost isn’t about the plot, because it is shaking things up in its own small way.
The political message of this film shows that black women can do whatever they like with their hair – they can choose to straighten, or wear wigs or weave, or they can go natural, or bald. Whilst it’s not a revolutionary sentiment, it’s also not one you’d necessarily expect the film to go for, considering the lazy “love your natural self” narratives that usually pervade personal-journey movies like this one.
While it doesn’t get into the nitty gritty of what could be a much longer, more gruelling conversation, ‘Nappily Ever After’ has managed to achieve something significant, and at least given a topic that’s close to black women’s hearts a seat at the table.