SPOILERS AHEAD
Her baby son is taken away, her pet is cruelly killed, but it is a buzz cut with clippers that make her go nuts!
Getting the Britney Spears treatment 57 years before the fact, causes her to melt down! HUH?????
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As usa wrote, it was the culmination of the events. On a symbolic level the buzz cut was a rape scene.
Agreed, all the bad breaks build up to where the buzz cut & solitary confinement push her over the edge. One could say that the caring for the kitten was her last bit of humanity. Note that it's the fear of losing the cat that makes her bolt and start the riot.
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I think it needs to be viewed in the context of the times. Nowadays, there are actually some women who wear crew cut hair by choice, and people are far more tolerant of recherche fashion choices. In 1950, it was unheard of, except in recent historical contexts.
Did anyone else notice that the cats mouth moves (in a chewing motion) after it is pronounced dead? I found that amusing.
shareNever heard of the straw that broke the camel's back, I suppose...
sharesilly original post, refuted by many good replies...
along the lines of the post that said the filmmakers were trying to equate the head-shaving with rape, there's the scene after Benton fires Harper because of the haircut, and the 2 bureucrats meet with Benton to defend Harper's behavior. One of them basically says a haircut is no big deal, but Benton states, in effect, that a man can never, ever understand what doing that to a woman actually means to that woman...seems to me she's absolutey equating it with rape. (It's like when Bobby Knight said that if a woman is being raped, and she can't get away from her attacker, she should just lay back and enjoy it...truly one of the stupidest statements ever uttered since the beginning of time! It's something a man can never truly fathom, so his comments and opinions on the subject mean less than zero).
But I also believe the haircut can be taken at face value as well. Again, as one poster stated, it could've been the last straw. But it is also a gesture of dehumanization. After the haircut, Eleanor Parker's character looked not unlike an inmate at Dachau or Auschwitz...which would have been very fresh in the minds of 1950 filmmakers and audiences.
"Love has got to stop some place short of suicide."