Though the basic premise of On Cinema at the Cinema sounds simple enough — two inept film critics host a weekly webcast — the show is notoriously hard to describe to outsiders. No synopsis can do justice to the depth and intricacies of the comedic universe starring Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington. What started as a podcast mocking inane movie bros who engage in shallow, mindless film criticism has morphed into an ambitious and biting soap opera with bizarre plot lines and in-universe spin-off series. What connects them all is a caustic, hilarious approach to American culture and an ironic yet endearingly low-budget aesthetic.
Heidecker and Turkington play fictionalized versions of themselves on the show, poking fun at different aspects of white American patriarchy and fan culture. Henceforth any reference to Tim or Gregg is a reference to the in-universe characters, not to the actors playing them. Though the series has added invaluable cast members over its eight-year run (most notably the affable Joe Estevez and perpetual underdog Mark Proksch, also playing fictionalized versions of themselves), one of the most important characters on the show is Tim’s hair. A highlight of On Cinema’s cheap production values is the creative shorthand the show uses for its character development. Tim’s evolving hairstyles have as much to say about Tim’s — and by extension, white male America’s — narcissistic journey as any line of dialogue on the show.
Both main characters have gaping chasms inside their souls. Gregg tries to fill his with an ever-growing collection of videotapes. The show’s self-proclaimed film expert, he insists that VHS is the preferred format of all true movie buffs as he obsesses over moldy copies of Multiplicity and My Giant like the snobbiest of vinyl collectors. Gregg remains unchanging in his appearance and persona, whereas Tim cycles through identities as rapidly as a chameleon on angel dust. Each season Tim tries on one ugly American persona after another: MLM grifter, hypocritical evangelical Christian, Trump-style businessman, cringe-inducing butt rocker, seedy politician, etc. Each time Tim sheds his skin, his hair is one of the most important indicators of his personality du jour.
Early seasons of On Cinema see Tim sporting a hairstyle typical of middle class white men. It’s a default that he returns to when he seeks the comfort and respectability afforded by his identity. Each season shows him caught in a cycle of adopting a new persona, unraveling in a way that hurts those around him far more than he hurts himself, and then returning to the safety of his respectable default. His conservative politics and tendency toward conspiracy theories are hinted at in the first two seasons, but it is in season three that Tim truly begins to show the depths of his troubling pathology.
The season three opener shows Tim with a giant bandage on his head after undergoing brain surgery (which he did very reluctantly, having opted for the homeopathic approach to treating his cerebral blood clots until it became impossible to avoid surgery). The remainder of the season involves fedoras and dorky spiked hair reminiscent of a grown-out buzz cut, consistently drawing subtle attention to Tim’s tendency to injure himself by way of his own stubbornness, irrationality, carelessness, and arrogance.
Tim’s various states of medical distress become a running gag on the show, driving many of its most sardonic plot lines. When he gets involved with an alternative medicine healer named Dr. San (Zac Holtzman), On Cinema briefly moves away from movie reviews and starts to feel like a homeopathic infomercial. To complement the disgustingly infected needle marks on his face from Dr. San’s unhygienic acupuncture, Tim wears his hair swept to the side in what can only be called Megachurch Chic, a disconcertingly wholesome and cult-like style that says, “I have some pamphlets I’d like to share with you.”
The trauma Tim puts himself through usually manages to hurt those in his orbit more than it hurts him. Often, the damage revolves around Tim’s tendency to dismiss real science in favor of Dr. San’s quack remedies. In season seven, Tim names Dr. San, a staunch anti-vaxxer, his young son’s pediatrician. Shortly thereafter, in one of the darkest moments on the show (though, shockingly, there is competition for the title), Tim’s son dies. Tim also becomes addicted to a nutritional vape system developed by Dr. San, which he later finds out is less “nutritional” than it is “loaded with cocaine and LSD.” Though Tim has struggled with substance abuse throughout the show — for instance, getting belligerently drunk on each annual Oscar special — he reaches a terrifying new level of ill health with the vape system. In addition to the sores, coughing fits, and makeup that makes him look on the verge of death, his hair is usually pulled back in a greasy ponytail that he thinks evokes rock star cool but actually just speaks to his physical and psychological deterioration.
One of Tim’s favorite personas is that of rock god. After he meets a guitarist named Axiom (Alessandro Serradimigni) at Guitar Center, Tim forms a band called Dekkar. He wears his hair slicked back in a more “hardcore” gelled look and debuts painfully overmanicured facial hair that looks like the goatee equivalent of a white frat boy’s tribal tattoo. Though the real Tim Heidecker is a talented musician, On Cinema’s Tim is a hack even by the standards of a butt rock vanity project. The name of the band is a stylized and abbreviated version of his last name, and their lone song “Empty Bottle” turns out to be a poorly reworked version of a song that Axiom wrote and recorded long before he met Tim. One of the cruelest ironies of Tim’s life is that, in his incarnation as a rock star, his only song is about the void at the center of his being…and he still had to steal it from someone else.
Season eight finds Tim bandaged again, sporting grotesque burn makeup after his unguarded vape pen burns down the Victorville Film Archive, the name that Gregg has given his collection of VHS Popcorn Classics. When his skin dies after he refuses to use the prescribed burn cream, Tim volunteers his Dekkar bandmate Manuel (Manuel Giusti) to provide the skin for the graft that he needs. Throughout the VFA fire saga, Tim wears bandages and hats, proving that even his lack of a hairstyle says volumes about his shortsightedness, irresponsibility, and self-absorption.
On Cinema reflects and sometimes predicts trends in American culture, but it never descends into parody. Still, it comes closest with the masterfully incompetent Decker, another vanity project of Tim’s that finds him playing the titular government agent who must fight back against corruption in laughably low-budget fight sequences that deploy stock footage with shameless abandon. Decker is a partial send-up of the later works of Steven Seagal and an increasingly Trumpian look at illogical deep state conspiracy theories that conflate mindless anti-government violence with patriotism. Tim’s hair throughout Decker is swept from front to back with an odd bouffant quality that reflects the influence of both of these self-important men with terrible hairstyles.
Tim’s paranoid politics run throughout the series, along with the irony of his purported belief in self-sufficiency. Tim continues to skate by on the goodwill of his friends and his white male privilege, but he considers himself a self-made man who is independent in every way. In season five, he moves to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to get back to nature, ride his motorcycle, and connect to the rights he has “as a patriot.” His facial hair is casually scruffy at this point and his hair looks loose and nonchalant, though it is meticulously styled to achieve that vibe. Tim is obsessed with appearances, and his sojourn to Jackson Hole is no exception: he adopts a rebellious persona that emphasizes what he sees as his status as a free thinker escaping the liberal groupthink of Los Angeles, and he frequently diverts the show’s movie talk to discussions of his new boots and his motorcycle adventures. When Tim returns to L.A. after claiming that he discovered that his Jackson Hole buddies were white supremacists, he returns again to his default hairstyle similar to that in seasons one and two, trying to distance himself from his recent right-wing persona. Not only does Tim use his privilege as a white man to escape from a group of white supremacists unscathed, but he refuses to take any responsibility for, as he puts it, hanging out and doing business with them for several months. Though Tim uses this default hairstyle repeatedly as a refuge from accountability, nowhere is Tim’s privilege more evident than in the special that takes place between seasons nine and 10: “The Trial.”
“The Trial,” arguably the masterpiece of the show’s run, finds Tim on trial for the murder of 20 people who died after partaking of Dr. San’s vape system at the Desert Sun Music Festival, an EDM festival that Tim organized and headlined. Tim’s mugshot is one of the funniest visual gags in series history: Tim is clearly high, with glassy-eyed shock on his face and his hair going off into improbable directions as if he used the vape juice as hair gel and then didn’t shower for a few weeks. The contrast between the mugshot and his appearance at the trial is one of the sharpest criticisms yet of the way that America favors “respectable” white men. At the trial, Tim wears glasses and slicks his hair back to look professional and unassuming, and it works. Despite the fact that he is aggressive, incompetent, and prone to rage-fueled outbursts while representing himself at the trial, Tim walks away a free man. He blames the deaths on Dr. San, who committed suicide while in custody, and Tim is acquitted of one charge and a mistrial is called for the other 19 charges due to a single hold-out juror. Viewers learn in the feature film Mister America that the lone juror is a racist white woman named Toni Newman (Terri Parks) who just felt deep down that Tim couldn’t have committed a crime.
Watching Tim manipulate his appearance in order to weasel his way out of 19 or 20 murder convictions (and pin the crimes on a deceased man of color in the process), the viewer can’t help but think of the high profile cases of Brock Turner and Owen Labrie. Both are men convicted of sexual assault who did everything in their power to look like “nice boys” during their respective trials. To distance themselves from their mugshot personas, Turner cut his hair in an attempt to look more boyish and thus less threatening, and Labrie aimed for a “nerd defense” by dyeing his hair darker and putting on glasses. Though both men were convicted, Turner was given an infamously lenient sentence by a white male judge who expressed more concern for Turner’s future than he did for Turner’s victim. Toni echoes this tendency to prioritize the lives of white men over anyone else’s when she refuses to convict Tim, and in doing so On Cinema argues that there are different rules for the most privileged people in the world, no matter how frequently and colossally they screw up.
Tim begins to take a sharper turn toward his persona as an unscrupulous businessman following his “victory” in court. Season 10 (or Season X, as it’s styled) opens with Tim sporting a troubling brush broom mustache and flattened hair that makes him look like he’s about to give a TED Talk on how to hoard Wu-Tang albums. He shills “germ shield” for Rio Jenesis, marrying his love of crackpot health products with his newfound obsession with fleecing people out of their money (born out of necessity, as all his assets have been seized in a civil suit brought by the family of one of the victims of the Desert Sun Music Festival). Tim continues his more business-oriented approach the following season with the announcement of HEI Inc., a corporation saddled with debt and yet another vanity project that bears a stylized version of Tim’s last name. The mileage the show gets out of slicking Tim’s hair back is astonishing, as the season 11 opener shows Tim looking exactly like Eric Trump.
This pointed turn toward politics reflects Tim’s increasing volatility in the wake of his electoral loss in Mister America, the feature film that came out in the middle of season 11 to continue the overarching On Cinema storyline. Tim runs as District Attorney of San Bernardino County to try to unseat the man who prosecuted him in “The Trial” all while sporting a hairstyle that combines the casual “nice guy” looks of his default hairstyle with the delusional power fantasy of his slicked-back Decker bouffant. Tim’s rage is a constant throughout the series, as he believes that he is never given the respect or deference that he deserves. It is a brilliant combination, then, when the film finds a middle ground between the respectable default hairstyle intended to woo voters and the macho cosplay hairstyle as Tim yet again tries on an identity to see if it will fill the howling void in his soul.
When that ploy doesn’t work, Tim goes all in on the conspiracy theories and continues with his combination Trump/Shkreli side-swept and slicked-back hair. He espouses QAnon talking points in season 11 and occasionally turns On Cinema into a self-defense seminar (during which, of course, he accidentally shoots himself). Both Tim and Gregg tweet in character, and recent hints suggest that the next incarnation of On Cinema will see Tim adopting an OANN style commentator persona. Though his real-life quarantine hair is a thing of beauty, it remains to be seen what his season 12 hair will actually look like.
Throughout the run of On Cinema and its spin-offs, Tim desperately tries to find a version of himself that grants an iota of fulfillment, but he never finds anything but another reflection of our hideous society staring back at him. The series uses his hairstyles to satirize and expose the cruel absurdity inherent in the worst aspects of American culture: racism, misogyny, violence, distrust of science and logic, dangerous conspiracy theories, lack of artistic comprehension or appreciation, propaganda disguised as fact, unrestrained greed, and self-absorbed recklessness. Tim always escapes the consequences of his actions because he can fall back on his identity as exemplified by the default hairstyle that proves his normal respectability. When you’re a white man in America, you are the default, and that safety and power make you untouchable.
