Just saw the movie "Being John Malkovich". Among the characters were John Malkovich, a bald man:
and John Cusack, a longhair:
The plot was that various people spent time inside the body of John Malkovich. Well, nothing was said about it, but I couldn't help but notice that, during a several month period when Cusack was in Malkovich, they had Malkovich's normally buzzed/bald hair grow out to a length of several inches all around the edges. By the end of the several month period, Malkovich had hair well below the collar, and despite his baldness on top, he looked quite the longhair!
The message was, of course, that certain aspects of oneself - those we call "identity" - rest in the mind, not in the body. And being a longhair is a state of mind. :-)
It's also a fashion choice and one way to dress a character in a movie. Your hair is gettin' in the way of your brain, Bill!
Brain here's workin' fine, dude. The brain exercise is:
Malkovich is a bald man, and it was an intentional decision by someone to go to all the trouble to equip him with a mane - and a fake mane with no top is no easy task to pull off. Why did they go to all that effort, particularly when we know how few men are longhairs, and how we longhairs are even less represented in movies than in real life?
"Fashion choices" and "ways they dress characters" are all conscious decisions, and they are made meticulously to communicate an element of the movie's plot - the mental state of the character. In the case of the character "longhair in Malkovich's body", a brain exercise for those watching the film was this: In providing this character with long hair, albeit not even that attractive a mane in the eyes of some because so much was missing, what state of mind in this character was being conveyed?
The answer lies in the one sentence of my post that you chose to quote. :-)
uh, no it's not :-)
that's because