When we walked out of the theater after seeing Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, my friend turned to me and said: “I can’t believe how normal Scarlett Johansson looks in this movie.” Her hair is chopped into a pixie cut, overgrown in a sort of careless way, dyed a reddish shade of brown. She looks almost like a real-life version of sex icon Scarlett Johansson––beautiful, but a beauty that hums like static behind the demands of life, of a woman’s life, particularly of a mother and a wife. Throughout the movie she is put together, not at all ragged but also never explicitly vain; just a woman who looks like a woman. Like a normal person. Vulnerabilities tender, like exposed nerves, yes––a normal person. When she moves to California, she dyes her hair blonde: a normal person!
In Marriage Story, the New York theater success of actress Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and company director Charlie (Adam Driver) feels shared until it doesn’t. Nicole feels diminished, like she has lost her sense of self, lending far too much of her creative life to Charlie’s MacArthur-worthy genius. It is fitting that in her mother’s house hangs a newspaper clipping of a production they put on of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973), which is, largely, also about a married woman whose sense of self gets stepped on, turning from flame to amber; to say nothing of the iconic life-and-art partnership between Bergman and actress Liv Ullmann, which Nicole and Charlie mirror. In Scenes, Marianne (Ullmann) also looks normal. In the miniseries version of six episodes, part of that normalcy lends itself to the fact that she wears her hair in an ugly bun through the first two episodes. Ugly, but extremely normal for a woman whose despair roots itself in a lifeless, though comfortable, routine with an equally lifeless husband––Johan, played to perfection by Erland Josephson. Her hairstyle is constrained and calculated, like her marriage. Ugly, lifeless, but reliable enough. Practical in that repeatedly doing it up and putting it down achieves a kind of questionable perfection; the illusion of the immaculate.
Nicole’s overgrown pixie cut is emblematic of her marriage to Charlie in that it reads like an extension of an aesthetic commitment to a life of theater acting. Its brown shade looks best when emphasized by stage lights, her eyes a deep bluish green that stand starkly against the darkness of the shadows. Though in her day-to-day clothes—her wife and mother clothes—it looks just a little off; like she made a hair decision years ago, in a fit of enthusiasm, and never gave it another thought. Nicole’s dark hair is most fitting when considered alongside her theater life, the life she has devoted to collaboration with Charlie—whose own hair, incidentally, looks more or less like a male version of his wife’s.
Gathered widely at the nape of her neck, with a shy hint of volume at the top, Marianne’s bun is in turn so meticulous that there is no indication of where it is pinned and how—no indication that this isn’t just how her hair naturally falls when she wakes up in the morning. It’s like a chignon, but sad. It renders her face extremely vulnerable to sight: all angles are visible from any given point. Marianne sits there, perfectly, not a single hair out of place, for anyone who cares to look; and if something were to go wrong, if tears were to start welling in her eyes, or a sudden blush to rise to her cheeks, in anger, embarrassment, or both, it would all be there for anyone to notice. Watching her face, full of emotion, but unflatteringly framed by that hairstyle, made me want to reach across the screen and take down, mess up that bun; to set her free of the artifice of perfection her marriage has made her hostage to; to tell her she had a right to wear her long, strawberry blonde hair hiding her face if she would want it to; to wear it loose, messy, and free in the breeze of the Swedish countryside; to open up two buttons in her modest plaid shirt.
In her bun, Marianne is sensible but emotional. Johan, absolutely styleless, is suffocatingly pragmatic and straightforward. As their marriage collapses, they enter into a gendered battle to claim victory to the best way of loving—we watch a crack in the smooth glass of their artificial comfort widen and shatter. Marianne rushes to please Johan with sandwiches and eagerness when he comes home one night sooner than expected. She sits across from him at the family table in the kind of unaware, spontaneous braid you twist your hair into when no one is really looking. Still attached to the sobriety of her marriage, Marianne’s braid connotes an indifference to the structure of her day-to-day life (marked, of course, by the fateful bun), though it hangs on to practicality: getting her hair out of her face so she can make sandwiches, put the kids to bed. It is in this state of spontaneity that Johan tells Marianne that he has fallen in love with another woman, and that he is leaving with her the next day for Paris, where they will spend eight passionate months together. In the morning, as Johan leaves, Marianne brushes her hair in front of the mirror and lets it hang down, frizzy, desperate, unworthy of a second thought.
It is deeply unsettling to see Marianne so caught up in humiliation—yet now her hair is permanently let down, disburdened of the artificiality of her marriage. Tight structures have failed her; I like to imagine Marianne throwing all reason out of the window, along with bobby pins that held up her sad chignon. The next time we see her, about a year after Johan’s betrayal, she has traded the bun for a ponytail. The idea is similar, but the execution is reformed; higher along the back of her head, with a few perfectly loose curls escaping to frame the face, one thick wave brushing the nape of her neck, free of the implication that wearing your hair like this would give you a headache. Fortunately, in this hairstyle she has committed to volume: if before her back-brushing technique was shy, now it has been done with intent. I get the feeling she is trying variations of a person she might be, though it’s impossible to be sure just yet. A ponytail, not a bun. Johan compliments her blouse. “I’m afraid it’s too girlish for me,” she replies, entirely unaware of how it makes her look like a person rather than a concept.
Maybe changing your hair after marital collapse is a thing. When we see Nicole opening the door to her mother’s Los Angeles home, her pixie is cut reformed, though like Marianne’s ponytail, not entirely revolutionized: she wears it shorter, which is a massive relief, and blonder. The change takes a minute to register for Charlie, and when he asks about it, she replies: “this is just me,” implying that this is what she has always looked like, even if before she really just looked like Charlie. Being away from her husband gives her an opportunity to ponder what the aesthetic unity of her family means for her: to still be a Brooklyn mom, sure, but also one who is obviously from L.A.; who gets her hair cut at a hip place on Fairfax Ave. instead of doing it herself; who wears a pixie cut for style, not conformity. Nicole keeps her hair like this for the rest of the movie, which is a bummer to me. I wondered if she might not come up with her own aesthetic identity, as a woman newly freed from having to look a pair with her husband. The opportunity for a makeover seems almost wasted. I kept wishing she would take it one step further into the unpredictable, maybe dye it a shade of blue.
Before we go any further into Marianne’s hair redemption, I feel as though I have to put my hands up: I understand that Scenes from a Marriage is largely about how relationships are dynamic and unstable, and how after years they take on a life of their own, regardless of how desperately we might want to keep them together. It sets out, like Baumbach does in Marriage Story, to discourage the viewer from picking a side, and in both instances we understand that these marriages fall apart not because of the individual flaws in each character but because of the fragility of a love that is based above all on routine and performance. Alas, I am a girl after all—and I decided from the first episode of Bergman’s series, in a certainty perhaps pointless but surely compelling, that I would side with Marianne in this battle. If love can turn into a personal war—as Bergman seems to imply for much of these six episodes—then I felt as though I had to take a stand.
When Marianne walks into frame in episode five, I was sure we had been victorious. Exceeding all expectations, she has pinned her hair up into a faux bob cut, which she styles with a silk hair scarf tied as a headband. Over a shirt she hasn’t buttoned all the way up, she loosely drapes a belt—presumably buckled in the first hole, devoid of its purpose to clench. Belts have often escaped their constrictive fate in fashion, but the adoption of the style points us to the kind of person who is willing to bend unspoken rules: to wear rouge as eyeshadow; to wear a belt for impact; long hair in a bob. Marianne has, at last, bent the rules—she has let go of constraints that kept her tied to her former, married disposition. There is no allusion to the preceding bun, to the rules of a woman she used to be, certainly the kind who would wear a belt for its primary function. The bouncy hairstyle reflects Marianne’s newfound lightness. For the first time, she looks like she could have been having drinks with friends, doing something fun and pleasing. In the middle of fierce combat with Johan, wearing a post-coital ponytail she ties with the scarf, Marianne leans in across his work desk and declares: “I think I am breaking free at last.”
The couple has, at this point, exhausted all modes of destruction—they have brought their love to the ground and stomped on it, and in so doing, they have created fertile ground for reconstruction. By the time they arrive at the summer cottage for the last time, Marianne is wearing her hair up in a bun again, though not the same one as before. This one is pretty: it encompasses much of the back of her head, a few loose curls frame her face. With her arms around Johan in the cottage, her hair up in a bun, this is almost the same Marianne of episode two—only she is not. The attachment to the sad chignon has been buried for good, thankfully, but its specter hovers as a reminder of the yearning for things to go back to the way they were; only better, and different. In the world of Scenes from a Marriage, it has been ten years since Johan’s betrayal accelerated the end of their relationship, and for the first time in all those years they seem to be genuinely in love. It is an apt way to describe this new bun: it’s romantic, and hopeful. I have a suspicion it was carefully made in front of the mirror so that it would unravel easily if the right fingers were to try.
Marianne’s bun weighs and falls perfectly, precariously, in the manner of a woman who is too busy walking along the street to look at herself in the reflection of a window. Having reconstructed their intimacy, Marianne finds control in the acceptance and embrace of her emotional quality—“common sense and gut feeling; they tread together,” she says, finding her rationale. Johan, like a teenager in love for the first time, strides in the opposite direction: for him, value lies in loss of reason; he longs for emotion, softened by heartbreak, disillusioned by artifice. A new power balance emerges. Johan and Marianne, finally true to themselves, get to know each other for the first time. The weight of newfound love and truth bear on Marianne’s bun, which by the end of the night is just a vestige. As the miniseries comes to a close, Johan says, “we love each other in our earthly and imperfect way,” holding his wife. Marianne, with her hair loose and hanging down her face, and the baby-blue, sparkly eyeshadow she has chosen to wear for this special occasion, beams with a smile. She is most alive in these moments, when she trades her conception of weakness for a commitment to being human. Giddy, girlish, Marianne has never been truer.
We can take away from the narrative, of course, the idea that there is no right way of loving, after all; that loving is in itself earthly and imperfect. But refusing to grasp the lesson Ullmann has taught us would be foolish. I try but fail to not interpret these six episodes as a narrative, too, about a woman reborn; reformed; reconstructed. From the outside, it’s easy to tell a woman what she needs, who she is, or what she needs in order to become the person she is. In Marriage Story, Charlie tells Nicole that he prefers her hair longer; she scoffs, “it’s just so absurd.” It is absurd: a vital absurdity that washes over us when we’re in front of the mirror, bobby pins in hand, trying hairstyles in desperate need of some indication that we know who we are; hoping that one day the reflection will come back as a truthful depiction of us, women who look like women, like normal people, like our own normal person. I’m much too young to know if we ever do. All I can do is revisit that image of Marianne over and over again, in front of the mirror, brushing her hair, putting it up and putting it down ad infinitum.
