The glorious woolly mass of grey on David Letterman’s face has prompted breathless headlines over the past week, even as it neatly corresponds with the trend of late-night icons feting their release from buttoned-down conformity of network television with a lapse in manscaping (see: Jon Stewart).
Yet for all the hand-wringing over fashionability and whether we’re approaching or have already passed “peak beard”, the choice to let it grow makes perfect sense – certainly for entertainers like Letterman and Stewart with legacies in comedy intended to provoke and disrupt.
As we get older we run out of ways to reject what society expects of us. The beard – a look preferred and well worn by adult men from Jesus to James Harden to Karl Marx to Stallone in Nighthawks to Rick Rubin et many al – is cheaper than a convertible and healthier than hard drugs.
For some it is an emblem of male empowerment. For others a rejection of our culture’s insistence we be groomed, a socially acceptable expression of defiance. Science suggests men do it to attract women. Still others just think it looks cool.
Every beard has a story, whether the wearer realizes it or not.
For my first five months at the Guardian I kept my face as smooth as an infant’s backside, an aspirational grasp for professionalism. Then I spent nine days in Las Vegas for the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, a spine-tingling look into the heart of America from which you don’t come back.
The days and nights before, of and after the fight itself were like 72 straight hours of New Year’s Eve, with all the excess and nihilistic splendor that suggests. Flesh was peddled, decadence and depravity underwritten by a leviathan commercial enterprise and a new American Dream was fulfilled. We were all witnesses.
Vegas changed me. I’ve spent the months since trying figure out how, but the closest I can come is the realization we are in a world of shit. And I’m not talking a garden-variety adolescent eye-opener like my best friend’s dad is having an affair, or that the lunch lady is into BDSM – but the full-scale awakening that we are a culture mainlining on bread and circuses and spellbound by the mundane and breathtakingly insipid at the expense of what should count.
What matters is not what matters.
All I have to make sense of that existential crisis is the beard. Which, for me, like Nicholas Cage’s snakeskin jacket in Wild at Heart, is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
It’s a thing I can control even as control reveals itself as a illusion belying the the chaos underpinning a society increasingly defined by random spasms of violence.
I relate to Letterman and Stewart because, at last, we have unburdened ourselves of the expectations of a culture that values the superficial over the material. That’s a bell you can’t unring. Our eyes are wide open.
So you do you, Dave. Let Page Six and the cubicle-bound pearl-clutchers snark away to one another in comments sections and surreptitious Gchat windows. And let the words of Camus be your charter: I rebel, therefore I exist.
