As with many documentaries, the production values of Barberland are a bit on the low side. But in its snapshot of a vanishing form of cultural existence, it proves worthy. The film's suggestion that we mourn the loss of the all-male bastion of the barbershop as a place where men can escape from the challenges of everyday life for a moment (presumably, those challenges including the opposite sex) is perhaps a touch overwrought. But inasmuch as it likewise captures the passage of a social institution, in an age in which far fewer people seem inclined to interact with one another in the context of such institutions (whether it be a church, a civic organization, or simply a barbershop), the film provides an incisive portrait of a form of face-to-face communication which we ought to be sorry to see vanish. There may well be something to the interactive quality of the human touch associated with the barbershop; there may well be a reason to consider the free and easy conversation that exists within such places. It reminds me of a scene in the film in which one barber remarked upon a young man who entered his shop and said, "Wow, what a concept . . . guys cutting guys' hair, talking about sports and politics and women . . . ever thought about franchising this?"
It was intriguing that so many of the barbers interviewed pinpointed the Beatles as representative of the sea change in barbershops, when people started asking for "Beatles haircuts" and then quickly progressed into the long hair revolution (as one barber put it, everybody used to have short hair, and then people weren't cutting their hair for months or years at a time, which really cut into the barber trade). The cultural revolution of the counterculture, with its rejection of traditional social institutions, may well have been associated with the decline in barbershops. Indeed, watching Barberland also reminded me of the frequency with which these establishments played a part in the Hollywood western, and the Beatles emerged on the scene at about the same time as the spaghetti western. By the time Henry Fonda starred in My Name is Nobody with Terrence Hill in the early 1970s (a film which features a barbershop fight scene, as so many westerns did), the spaghetti western had largely run its course, and in the process killed the western as a genre.
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