Hills way of life (which magnetizes the whole world), but it doesn’t point
any comic fingers. It’s too balanced and Mozartean for that” (“Shampoo”
605). Its main character, George, for all his frenzied activity, comes to share
the film’s final tone—a sobriety gained from the disillusionment over a life
lived without a thought to consequence. The last sequence illustrates
George’s epiphany; he has just broken up with Jill, the woman who truly
loves him, and he now proposes to Jackie on a hilltop overlooking Lester’s
Beverly Hills estate. Before Jackie can give George an answer, she leaves
him to meet Lester, who had proposed to her earlier. In a series of shot/
reverse shots, the film visualizes Jackie’s decision—she and Lester are in a
two-shot in his driveway and George is a lone figure on the horizon of the
hill in a long, low-angle shot. The final shots privilege George’s perspective
to underline his realization of Jackie’s choice and the folly of his ways—a
long, high-angle panning shot of Lester’s limousine driving away with the
newly engaged couple inside cuts to an over-the-shoulder shot of the aban-
doned George, his back in the foreground and Lester’s limo opposite, reced-
ing into the far background of the deep-focus composition.
Another of Shampoo’s achievements is its wonderful, witty script laced
with memorable lines and double entendres. When Lester asks Jackie if she
knows George, she says, “He’s a terrific hairdresser.” Later, when Lester asks
Felicia if George is a fairy, Felicia answers, “He’s a hairdresser.” In an argu-
ment with George, Jill tells him, “You never stop moving; you never go
anywhere!” And he replies, “I can’t get out of my own way.” When Lester
and Jill catch George having sex with Jackie, Jill begins to run away, and
George shouts from his prone position, “Jill, there you are. I’ve been look-
ing all over for you!” In their final confrontation, Jill asks George about all
the other girls, and his reply is an anthem and a lament: “I fuck them all;
that’s what I do; makes me feel that I’m going to live forever. I know I
should have accomplished more, but I got no regrets; maybe it means I
don’t love ’em; maybe it means I don’t love you.” When George finally asks
Jackie to marry him, she says, “It’s too late,” and he replies, “What do you
mean it’s too late? We’re not dead yet; that’s the only thing that’s too late.”
Shampoo references the optimism of the sixties and the counterculture
lifestyle in George’s unstructured live-for-the-moment hedonism, but also
the beginning of the end of that optimism, which would turn to the pes-
simism of the Nixon years (Lev 68). The movie sears this impression into its
audience’s mind through the irony of two TV broadcasts. In the one, Spiro
Agnew tells a reporter how the new administration will set a new moral
tone for the country, while in the other, Nixon vows to “bring the country
together” and to have an “open administration.” George’s final feelings of
140 GLENN MAN