Beardedness In The Big Shave

The growth of facial hair over the course of a story can be used to outwardly express and reflect the inner emotions and turmoil of a character. It is often used as a tool to indicate that a character is spiralling into depression. This usage is rooted largely in reality, as people who have become depressed often stop caring about their appearance and hygiene, and so this has become an easy way for filmmakers to represent depression in a way that audiences will recognise. Beardedness has been acknowledged as a symptom of depression and mental health issues for such a long time that even Hippocrates described individuals suffering from melancholia as sporting ‘flaggy beards’ and it is still used as an identifier today. Often, when someone is
Just as the growth of facial hair can represent a character’s descent into depression, shaving is used to show them making a change and attempting to pull themselves out of the depths of their illness. One example that shows this very clearly is Martin Scorsese’s short film The Big Shave. The Big Shave depicts a man shaving off his facial hair, but he continues shaving after all traces of hair are gone from his chin, and as the piece progresses he cuts more and more of his skin until he ultimately slices his own throat. The idea came to Scorsese after he had lived through a period of depression, during which time he experienced difficulty with shaving. The piece was intended as a representation of America’s actions during the Vietnam War, but Scorsese himself has admitted that it also held a more personal meaning. He said that ‘consciously it was an angry outcry against the war. But in reality something else was going on inside me, I think, which really had nothing to do with the war. It was just a very bad period, a very bad period.’ Shaving is an important part of a character with depression attempting to become normal again, and Scorsese’s film highlights how difficult of a task something so simple can be. In a lot of media where the beard is shown as a symbol for depression, shaving is used to show that the depression period is over and the character has made a recovery, even if the piece fails to show the character actually working through that recovery. In many cases, ‘movie protagonists shake off their blues, shave their beards and throw away their whiskey,’ and that is the extent of the on-screen recovery process. Although this holds some basis in reality, depicting recovery in such a simple manner can be problematic, and can even be seen as being insulting to people who suffer from