Hair pulling in the movies: Young Adult

On TV this week I caught a movie called Young Adult, starring Charlize Theron.  Mostly, movies and psychological realism do not go well together which is why I was suprised (blown away in fact) that hair pulling featured.

Theron plays the character of a rather disturbed woman called Mavis Gary, who moves back to her hometown to win back an ex-boyfriend.  The trouble is he and everyone else in the town have moved on in their lives, whereas her development is stuck in the past and like an angry teenager she spends most of her time berating others and putting them down. 

Hair pulling appears when she is sitting in bed, watching TV (see the previous post on pulling cues).

We watch as Mavis toys with her hair, searching for something until she eventually finds a suitable hair and plucks it.  She then studies the strand and root befor laying it on the table next to the bed where there are a collection of other hairs pulled earlier.  The camera pans to reveal a small bald spot on the back of her head.

In another scene Mavis visits her parents and whilst sitting at the table she goes to pull at her hair.  Her father asks, “Are you still doing that?” before her mother chimes in with, “It’s just that your hair is so beautiful…”

 

Trichotillomania doesn’t make another appearance in Young Adult, and it never features as anything more than an add-on behaviour to Mavis' complex personality.  But the fact that it was included in the movie is worth recording.  I know some bloggers have expressed dismay that hair pulling should be associated with a character (played brilliantly by Theron) bearing such serious personality issues but I do not.  I think Mavis' borderline personality problems, her extreme perfectionism and social isolation in adulthood reveal that these were her issues as a teen too. If so, her desire to escape her hometown and her extreme dissatisfaction with her own status in life reveal adaptive failures that might well lead to body directed behaviours. 

Mavis is caught in two minds throughout the film - she hates her hometown, but returns there; she wants to be viewed as a success by the world, but doesn't feel like one; she dreams of perfection, but her life is flawed.  At the very end she completes a narrative in which the protagonist achieves a happy ending - but her identification with such an ending jars with the film's own ending which sees Mavis scrutinizing her damaged car in a roadside carpark.  This dislocation towards one's environment is important to understanding hair pulling in my opinion. Hair pulling is what emerges when a prolonged environmentally rooted contradiction can find no resolution.