The Old Man and The Hat
We’re living in the summer of hatted heroes, or anti-heroes, or definitely conflicted heroes wearing hats as part and parcel of their persona and personality. Definitely conflicted, that’s for certain.
At least three of them have popped up on screen in the past month, and three makes a trend in journalismism circles. Make that four if you include Ryan Gosling’s Ken in the new Barbie blockbuster — although if you asked Ken why he wears any of the hats or headgear in that movie, he’d be hard-pressed to give you a reason, since his whole reason for being rests upon his lack of agency. But that’s another story. Which we may circle back to at some point.
So the summer of 2023 is the summer of Heroes in Hats.
As opposed to the summer of Men Without Hats — that was 1983, when the Canadian new wave band fronted by Ivan Doroschuk scored a Top 10 hit with “The Safety Dance.” Were they trying to warn us of the risks associated with hat-wearers? If so, then why would the singer’s sidekick shorty in the music video don a jester’s hat? And why would the townsfolk sport red hats or head scarves? Are you allowed to wear hats so long as you’re not in the band? But I’m getting behind myself here. Back on message momentarily.
Even if most likely probably most definitely Men Without Hats never meant to suggest or infer dangerousness with hat wearing, it’s nevertheless true that when we see a guy onscreen this summer in a hat, they’re taking risks and flirting with death and danger. All wearing different style hats, too.
Let’s start with our fictional conflicted heroes.
U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) returned to FX last week for the first time since 2015, and Joshua Rivera at Polygon flipped out because Givens wears a new version of his Stetson, now with a studded belt. Of course, when Justified premiered on FX back in 2010, based on Elmore Leonard’s fiction, showrunner Graham Yost admitted that the Stetson became more of a fixture than Leonard intended, telling New York magazine at the time: “Elmore didn’t like our hat much.” Olyphant told the AP he heard the complaints firsthand: “He keeps telling me to lose it.”
But he never did. Why? Olyphant in 2011: The hat “looks cool.”
Even though he’s a Kentucky guy from the coal mines who was working in Miami when the series began, his character also imagined himself as an Old West cowboy gunslinger, and there’s perhaps a hint or two that he took the Stetson we saw in the initial series from someone who tried and failed to outdraw him. As he explained in the series “finale” from 2015, about why he’s wearing Boon’s darker Stetson: “I tried it on and it fit.” That also was his explanation for his hat choice in the first season.
Similarly, yet under quite different circumstances, Dr. Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr., acquired his famous fedora from his earliest foe.
We only learn this origin story in the opening of the third film in franchise, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
But the origin of why Harrison Ford’s Indy wears a fedora dates back to another famous felt fedora on film: Humphrey Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs in 1948’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Reports on how George Lucas and Steven Spielberg fashioned Indy’s look also point to Charlton Heston in Secret of the Incas.
As costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis told Town & Country: “In the screening room with Steven, we sat alone and watched China and Secret of the Incas. He said, ‘that’s it—that’s the costume.’ [Basically] here’s Harry Steele, he’s now Indiana Jones. Bring him to life.” Landis had Ford try on several fedoras until they found one that looked good on his head, she asked hatmakers Herbert Johnson to modify one of their existing models and custom-make the brown felt fedora we all know and love.
You’d think in the case of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the reasoning behind his porkpie hat would have more practical foundations. After all, Oppenheimer was a physicist, living in an era when more men wore hats year-round, as much for dealing with weather conditions as with fashion trends. Los Alamos National Laboratory, in fact, notes that the porkpie style was “most popular through the mid-1940s.”
And yet, Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy had this to say to The Washington Post: “He created this iconography, this version of himself. It was very self-consciously done, and the hat and the pipe were key. It was very helpful to me to know that these were decisions he’d made. I think he was vain. I think he was ambitious. He liked being talked about, and he liked being identifiable, and the hat and pipe were indicators of that.”
Wait a second. Are you telling me that I spent all of these words on hats just to come to the conclusion that whenever you see someone famous in a hat, it’s either because they thought it looked cool, and whenever you see someone not famous in a hat, it’s because someone who was cool and famous also wore that hat?
Well. Yeah.
I suppose that’s the case.
Although you never really see anyone cool wearing a Stetson, a fedora or a porkpie hat in the real world, do you?
They’re more Tim Pool, never cool.
I mean, I wear caps often these days, but when I was younger, I went through all the hat phases. I own a fedora only because I wanted to be as cool as Indiana Jones. I own a cowboy hat because I dated a woman from Tulsa for two years in college, and once you start visiting Oklahoma on the regular, you come home at least once with a pair of shit-kickers and a hat to boot, so to speak. I own a homburg because I thought it’s look extra-formal whenever I needed to go black-tie in a tux, although I mostly wore it as an important part of my professional clown costume. And I own this bamboo island number which I wore at my high-school graduation, as evidenced in the yearbook.
And I have never been cool.
Nope.
Not even in the many winters when I wore my snowboarding jester hat.
Not even when Mindy Tucker took my photo wearing that hat?
You know who almost never wears a hat? Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, that’s who. Probably because of all of that running. Although Ethan Hunt does love a good mask, which is a hat for your face.
You know who does wear many hats in the Mission: Impossible movies? Luther Stickell, Ethan Hunt’s main man on the tech, played by Ving Rhames.
And he is always cool.
That’s my hat take for today.