The film uses a carefully orchestrated series of interviews to track the history of the barber, illustrating the evolution of the tools of the trade, the barbershop environment, the social culture of the patrons, and the fading art of the perfect cut (or the perfect shave). Living as I do in a small city, I have from time to time visited the local barber. The film thus tends to ring true: there's the owner of the shop who's been cutting hair for more than forty years on the same street corner; the steady stream of customers (all male); the occasional dirty joke; the constant stream of banter between barbers, as if they're performing at a local comedy club; and the riffs about how few stylists today actually know how to cut hair at all. (They can style it, but they can't cut it, a distinction which may escape many patrons.) And then there's the straight razor they use for trimming sideburns and the hair on the back of your neck. The first time they whip out the straight razor is an eerie sensation, to say the least.
The low-key, conversational environment can be contrasted with another place I've been, where television sets have largely replaced the conversation, where patrons can essentially plug into the boob tube while having their hair cut rather than establish an ongoing relationship with the stylist or other patrons. The barbers interviewed for the film (almost all of them are senior citizens, or close to it) all decried the ongoing erosion in social cohesion between people and the rise in television viewing at the expense of actual face-to-face communication.
Such concerns are not limited to the barbershop, of course: cars generally mean less opportunity for interaction with others than if you were on a train, and the embrace of portable DVD players and iPods frequently means that less conversation is to be heard on airplanes or even on family car trips. There is indeed a cultural shift in terms of interaction, and yet interaction exists, whether in the iPod faithful who share each other's tunes to get a snapshot of the other's personality, or within the online gaming communities or the instant messenger services which seem to have overtaken the phone as a mechanism of communication. Change is inevitable, but as this documentary shows it is possible to ponder what we have surrendered for the sake of something new.
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