Growing a Beard

You don't have to hear a lick of dialogue in The Butterfly Effect to know this is the movie in which Ashton Kutcher gets serious. Because even if you've only seen the previews, you've noticed he's grown a beard.

Growing a beard is the ultimate way for a heretofore lightweight — or someone perceived as a lightweight, or who perceives himself as a lightweight — to tell the world he's not fooling around this time. Clothes don't make the man; whiskers do.

Look at Bill Murray. He tried drama with The Razor's Edge in 1984, and was universally derided for being out of his element. If he had grown a beard, he wouldn't have had that problem. Look at him now. He grew a beard for the Golden Globes (warming up with his thick goatee in The Royal Tenenbaums), and not only picked up an award for Lost in Translation, but also got himself an Oscar nomination. His beard spoke for him: "Though I did not grow a beard for Lost in Translation, and though I said funny things in it, I am a serious actor, for I have since grown a beard. So don't snub me for a nomination like you did with that baby-cheeked Jim Carrey in The Truman Show."

Comics are especially sensitive about growing a beard, because in comedy, a hirsute face is more often than not off-putting, a barrier between the audience and performer. Growing a beard connotes brooding, seriousness, a desire to think deep thoughts or rustle cattle. Steve Martin would not have been The Jerk had he grown a beard. But he wouldn't have dared taking a dramatic role in Grand Canyon without one.

Look at Dennis Miller. When he was merely funny, he was clean-shaven. But the moment he began morphing from mere comedian to rant-spewing pundit, out came the beard. The patches of white, CNBC would hope, connote an accumulated wisdom only gigs on HBO, Monday Night Football and Republican stages can give you.

You don't have to be a comic to grow a beard. Tom Cruise was rumored to have acquired a beard when he went for artistic respectibility in the early 1990s, though it had long, flowing, auburn hair and bore a startling resemblance to Nicole Kidman.

Musicians, too, have grown beards when it came time to announce they were no longer pop schlockmeisters, but capital-a Artists. Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder each grew a beard in the early 1970s when they broke out of the Motown factory to write their own, newly socially conscious music. Bob Seger did likewise around the same time, giving him a look that matched his husky voice and hauling him to stardom like a powerful Chevy pickup.

A musician needn't be from Detroit or create actual deep music to benefit from growing a beard. Cat Stevens started his career universally ignored, singing infantile pop while clean-shaven. He grew a beard in the late 1960s, and the gravitas it imparted led to universal success singing folk that was just as infantile. (Of course, Stevens grew an even larger beard when he committed to the Muslim faith and changed his name to Yusuf Islam.) Such 1970s puss rockers as Dan Fogelberg and Kenny Loggins grew beards to send a silent message that they had also grown balls, and that men needn't be embarrassed buying their albums. Billy Joel, when he wants to be taken seriously, grows a beard. When Justin Timberlake wants to prove he's no mere pop singer, you will know, because he will grow a beard.

To be fair to performers, they aren't the only ones to grow a beard when they want some respect. Just about every male between 18 and 25 grows a beard at some point, when he wants to show the world he's not a baby face anymore. Some pull it off; most abandon the beard when they get treated no differently, or can't stand the itching sensation, or in my case, when people say you look like 1970s puss rocker Kenny Loggins.

Growing a beard has its limits. Politicians have not grown beards for respect since Abraham Lincoln. Steve Jobs aside, high-powered CEOs do not grow beards. NBA commissioner David Stern, often considered to be the best pro sports leader ever, got mocked when he grew a beard during labor talks a few years back. (However, disgraced 1980s Wall Streeter Michael Milken helped to rehab his image with a lesser-known guy respect method, removing your toupee.) In these worlds, growing a beard is considered to be for blue-collar types, or the homeless.

Of course, the trick to growing a beard is that it has to be of a certain shape and size. Bill Murray's Golden Globe beard pushes the limits; normally, it must be kind of scraggly yet closely trimmed, not long and whacked-out like you're auditioning for a ZZ Top tribute band.

Kutcher's beard in The Butterfly Effect is the perfect take-me-seriously beard: it's short, but looks like a full beard, not like Don Johnson's or Kurt Warner's I-just-forgot-to- shave-the-last- three-days, Yasser Arafat model. Kutcher is paying attention to growing a beard, and shaping it, but he doesn't look like he should be working on an oil rig.

In fact, judging by the reviews of The Butterfly Effect, the beard is imparting a greater sense of pathos than the rest of Kutcher. But the movie was the No. 1 money-maker in its first weekend — proving once again that growing a beard can get a man more respect, at least for a short time, than anything else.

— Bob Cook (bobc@flakmag.com)