is the same question a now famous “scientific and experimental film about perception” inspires. You may have seen it: Three people in white shirts and three in black pass a basketball back and forth. Viewers are asked to count how many times the players wearing white pass the ball. When the short film is over, audience members argue amicably over the number. Fourteen? Thirteen? Fifteen? Not one of them, however, comments on the man, dressed in an absurd gorilla costume, who strolls back and forth through the frame, even pausing to pound his fake gorilla chest. They are all “victims” of what psychologists call “inattentional blindness.” Asked to count basketball passes, basketball passes are all they perceive. Asked whether Doug Henning is really tearing the newspaper, seeing and tearing the newspaper is all they perceive. As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.3
The hair of Mad Men’s Don Draper was reality from the late 1920s though at least half of the 1960s. If you watched cable television anytime between 2007 and 2015, you are intimately familiar with the thick, slick, shoe-polish black hair of actor Jon Hamm as the 1950s-1960s Madison Avenue ad man: unbearably handsome, impeccably stylish, and so thoroughly put together that not a single follicle or shaft was ever out of place. Never mind Don’s tortured, alcohol-soaked psyche, that hair was the apotheosis of Euro-American manhood—and had been since the third decade of the twentieth century. For at least two or three overlapping generations, this tonsorial state was not only reality, but a very desirable form of the status quo.
In truth, human hair does not naturally assume such a sleek, shiny, and shellacked shape on the human skull. From the hairline up, the reality of the Don Draper look was real, but unnatural—and for good reason. It was manufactured at the County Chemicals Chemico Works, Bradford Street, Birmingham, England. The plant was owned and operated by Beecham, Ltd.—establishing its place in the world by turning out, beginning in 1842, Beecham’s Pills, a concoction of aloe, ginger, and soap advertised to “Dislodge Bile, Stir up the Liver, Cure Sick-Headache, Female Ailments, Remove Disease and Promote Good Health.” It almost certainly did none of these, but the undeniable reality was that Beecham’s Pills were one hell of a laxative, managing to keep British bowels in motion until 1998 when the successor to Beecham, SmithKline Beecham, shut down production after a run (as it were) of 156 years.
In all fairness to County Chemicals’ hair product—introduced in 1928 and called Brylcreem—it did not issue from the same assembly line as the laxative. It was a pomade consisting mostly of water and mineral oil held together by beeswax and dispensed from a jar—or “tub,” as the cosmetics industry calls such vessels—that fit comfortably in the palm of the adult male hand. (Today, as manufactured by Unilever, it comes in a tube.) If you are fortunate enough to be too young to recall the 1950s and 1960s television commercials for the product, several are available for your viewing pleasure on YouTube and Dailymotion.com. By the television era, Brylcreem was promoted with the jingle-borne injunction, “A little dab will do ya.” At least one TV spot earnestly cautioned that “Brylcreem has a most extraordinary effect on women. (Young, pretty girls are especially susceptible.) So once again, as a public service, we’d like to caution all serious men to use just a little dab.” This ad depicted a young fellow enduring the caresses of a mildly assaultive woman who just cannot keep her exploring hands out of his hair.
“This man dared to use two dabs. Now he’s in trouble!”
The thing is, anyone who has seen Tyrone Power or Cary Grant in films of the 1940s—a time when dashing pilots flying for the Royal Air Force (RAF) were called the “Brylcreem Boys”—knows that old-school users could not confine themselves to a little dab or even two little dabs. Just look at photos of our last old-school president, Ronald Wilson Reagan, a lifelong user of the product.
Advance to 1962, the year Bristol-Myers gave Vitalis to the world. This product challenged the hegemony of the Brylcreem status quo and thereby changed reality. Vitalis was radically different from Brylcreem. It came neither in a tub nor tube, but in a bottle. It was not a “hair pomade” or even a “hair dressing,” but a liquid “Hair Tonic,” charged with an essence denominated V7, which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office identified as “Polyglycol for use in a hair tonic.”
We can reveal here that the current Vitalis formulation consists of SD Alcohol 40, PPG 40 Butyl Ether, water, benzyl benzoate, fragrance, dihydroabietyl alcohol, D&C Yellow 10 (CI 74005), and FD&C Yellow 6 Aluminum Lake. Whatever this formula does or does not do for human hair on the cellular or molecular level, what it did to Brylcreem is what Kryptonite does to Superman. In truth, we don’t believe it’s the SD Alcohol 40 or the FD&C Yellow 6 Aluminum Lake or any other chemical constituent of Vitalis that undermined the reign of the earlier reigning hair product. We are convinced the decline began as soon as Bristol-Myers decided to call out its incumbent rival neither by its brand name (Brylcreem) nor its generic name (pomade), but rather to redefine, revile, and dismantle it utterly by slurring it as “greasy kid stuff.”
Here’s how it worked. Both in print and on TV, the typical Vitalis ad was set in a locker room and depicted one pro athlete staring slack-jawed at the hair of a teammate. Barely suppressing a tone of contempt and nausea, athlete A demands of athlete B: “You still using that greasy kid stuff?”
Like Hamlet’s “To be or not to be,” the question struck a sustained chord with the public. In bars, at work, on the very streets of America, men asked one another, “You still using that greasy kid stuff?” Through the analog Web of predigital pop culture, Vitalis advanced against Brylcreem with the speed of Patton against Rundstedt. In 1962, honky-tonk song-writer Cy Coben wrote a tune called “Greasy Kid Stuff,” giving one-hit wonder Janie Grant her single Top 40 hit, with lyrics invoking Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, Stanley and Livingston, Sampson and Delilah, and Nikita Khrushchev and JFK—all of whom, the song complained, used “greasy kid stuff.”
The following year, greasy kid stuff found its way into comedy stand-up routines and culture and became an even more embedded part of our popular consciousness.
Forget Reality, Focus on Perception
It would be fair to say that reality changed in 1962 when Vitalis transformed Brylcreem into “greasy kid stuff.” It would be fair to say, that is, if you look at the world from the magician’s perspective—reflected here in a three-word sentence: Perception is reality.
This in and of itself is hardly a fresh insight. “Perception is reality” is at least as old as Plato’s Republic, a product of the fourth century BC. In a dialogue between Plato’s brother Glaucon and Plato’s mentor Socrates, Plato (through Socrates) describes people who have lived lifelong as prisoners chained to the wall of a cave. They observe shadows projected on the wall from objects that pass in front of an unseen fire that burns behind the prisoners. The chained cave dwellers name each shadow, thereby identifying these mere shades as reality.
Now, Plato’s Socrates is trying to sell Glaucon on the benefit of becoming a philosopher. His point in presenting the cave allegory is to demonstrate that prisoners in a cave mistake shadows for reality, whereas the philosopher understands the shadows for what they are because his mind has made him the freest of all men. This has enabled him to see the world of sun and substance outside the cave.
So now we arrive at the difference between the philosopher and the magician. The philosopher scorns and rejects the shadows and what the prisoners make of them, but the magician, while he is not deceived by them, doubles down on the shadows. Philosophers reject as false a “reality” that chains prisoners to impressions received via the senses. Magicians embrace and exploit these impressions because they regard them as something more than Plato believed them to be. They are not shadow impressions passively received, but shadow impressions actively endowed with reality by the human mind.
This brings us to the reason Gustav Kuhn, senior lecturer in
