The end of this article includes spoilers for The Undoing episode five (but no spoilers for the finale).
If it hadn’t been released in 2020, I think it’s fair to say that The Undoing might not have been such a hit. Having a locked-down captive audience has surely helped the psychological thriller’s viewing figures – one friend told me recently that she enjoys the series because watching it each Monday helps her remember which day of the week it is. In lockdown 2, the bar is low. Of course, that’s not to say that The Undoing is without appeal – it is enormous fun to see Hugh Grant’s usual bumbling-charm schtick turned on its head and Nicole Kidman is always a joy. And yet, even the most ardent Undoing fan would admit that it’s all a little ludicrous.
The final-five-minutes-of-each-episode twists are ridiculous. The Donald Sutherland character is preposterous. And the hair – well, it’s the hair that really gets me… As Grace Fraser, Nicole Kidman’s hair has been styled into long tumbling curls, and even as the character has endured infidelity, humiliation, ostracisation, countless pre-dawn walks and a murder trial, those long tumbling curls have stayed defined and springy. Even as she has stood in the freezing cold (so drying for curly hair) by the Hudson River (that wind would wreak havoc with curls), her hair has remained shiny and neatly coiled.
As a curly-haired person, I can tell you that this is simply not realistic. It’s even more unrealistic than, say, your mother-in-law Zooming you to let you know that your husband is a sociopath.
If The Undoing were to portray curly hair accurately, Grace Fraser’s hair would have been in a frizzy clump on top of her head from the beginning of episode two. There are some curly-haired people – those with tight corkscrew curls – who would perhaps have been able to withstand the turmoil Grace has been through but Grace’s waves would simply never have made it. By episode three, she would have been struggling to get a brush through the knotted mess, despite the fact that she can easily afford the best sulfate-free leave-in conditioner money can buy.
Even before Grace’s life started to unravel, her pre Raphaelite hair set her apart. On TV, curly hair is often shorthand for kooky and chaotic. Think of Broad City’s Illana Glazer, whose curls are so good that one episode portrayed her being approached to be a hair model for the iconic DevaCurl brand. Think of Russian Doll’s Nadia, whose curly fringe sets the bar for curly fringes everywhere. Those ladies aren’t sending their kids to Reardon or heading up charity galas. On TV, curly hair often means messy, as if the coiled strands signify a disordered life. It is, of course, a serious and loaded issue for Black actors – although there has, over the past five years, been an increase in Black and biracial characters wearing natural hair in TV and film, with women like Issa Rae and Tracee Ellis Ross leading the way.
The standard hair for rich-white-lady characters has become a blow-dry with soft tousled waves. Even actresses who were known for their curls and played famously curly-haired characters earlier in their careers – Julianna Margulies, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Sarah Jessica Parker – now routinely wear their hair in sleek blow-dries, both onscreen and in real life. Nicole Kidman actually has naturally curly hair but until this year, her curls hadn’t been seen in decades. Grace Fraser’s hair in The Undoing signifies that she’s a little different than the other rich white ladies. (As well as the hair, there’s her clothes: she doesn’t wear puffer jackets and Lululemon leggings, she wears Enya-style robes.)
But here’s the thing about curly hair: it’s as hard, if not harder, to maintain than that swishy blow-dried style. If you were as rich as Grace Fraser, you could easily have sleek, straight hair with twice-weekly blow-dries but keeping loose curls shiny, frizz-free and perfectly defined, that involves constant, almost-hourly vigilance. It’s something money can’t buy. Perhaps that’s what we’ll discover in the finale: Grace failed to notice that her husband was unfaithful, that her father was really creepy, that her son was hiding a murder weapon because she was simply too concerned with the upkeep of her perfect curls. Perhaps we’ll discover that, in the end, it was all the curls’ fault.