A high price toupee: The costs of baldness in Por los pelos

“This is all very well and good, but I’m still bald,” said Larry David upon winning his Emmy in 1993. This paper explores the cultural significance of baldness in contemporary screen media, arguing that hair loss exemplifies anxieties surrounding masculinities, ageing, and power. Since hair is integral to the ‘male appearance ideal’ (mesomorphic, tall, young [Jankowski et al. 2021]), articulating identity and ‘corporealiz[ing] the passage of time’ (Deluca 2021: 1), baldness is widely stigmatised as emasculating and unattractive (Razum & Hlupic 2021). Yet, while qualitative researchers have examined perceptions of baldness (Ibid, Kranz 2011), and cultural theorists have considered ‘hair politics’ as gendered and racialised (e.g. Cooper 1997, Morrison 2018), portrayals of hair loss in screen media, particularly comedic, remain underexplored. First, this paper traces evolutions in bald men – both ‘straight’ and spoofed – from heroic leaders (Picard) to hypermasculine action-men (The Rock, Jason Statham) or villains (Voldemort, Thanos), arguing that popular film harmfully frames ba(l)dness as alien, nigh-skeletal, and emotionless. Amid the paradoxical normalisation of both alopecia and its treatments/cures (Bourne & Barnes 2024), it argues that such representations medicalise baldness – despite its prevalence, and non-existent health risks (Trueb 2021) – as a disease. Following the myth of Samson, baldness is simultaneously coded as emblematic of vulnerability and strength (connoting cancer and chemotherapy), youth and age, power and decline, dirt and cleanliness (hygienic, sleek, ‘clean slate’). Second, it analyses the portrayal of body dissatisfaction and male grooming enhancement in Very Bald Trip (Nacho G. Velilla, 2022), a Spanish comedy about three balding men who undergo hair transplants in Turkey. Despite ostensible sympathy, and critique of the multibillion-dollar hair restoration industry projected to be worth £10 billion by 2026 (Jankowski 2024), it argues that the film ironically reinforces reactionary 'musculinity' (Tasker 1993) by casting full-maned, hulking actors as bald men seeking transplants. Through relentless gerascophobia and bromantic (Alberti 2013), heteropatriarchal fearmongering, it frames a natural, neutral occurrence as a disorder to be ‘cured’, portraying baldness intervention as necessary ‘aesthetic labour’ (Nickson et al. 2001). Ultimately, this paper argues that baldies remain a (the) socially-acceptable laughingstock, paradoxically privileged (predominantly affecting Caucasian men [Yildirim et al. 2022]) and disadvantaged (Schielien 2020).