A decade ago while visiting Paris, I noticed that most of the black men I saw bopping around the City of Lights shaved their heads. It didn't matter whether they were DJs or businessmen or street sweepers, they displayed their bald pates with a breezy insouciance I found liberating.

Since my own hair was thinning by the day, I used the occasion of being in a strange European city to contemplate something "radical." My hotel mirror agreed: It was time to leave the world of $12 haircuts and shape-ups behind.

Though I would miss the entertaining conversations at barber shops, I knew I wouldn't miss the twice-a-month hassle of waiting for a barber's chair to open up. On average, it was a 40-minute wait at barber shops in the East End.

Standing in the shower, I liberally spread shaving cream to my hair and scalp. Wielding the same razor I used to shave facial hair every morning, I proceeded to slowly cut the nappy tufts that clung stubbornly to my scalp. Though thin on top, my hair was still thick in the back. Forty minutes later, I was staring at clumps of hair on the floor of the shower. Blood from several accidental incisions circled the drain, too.

Looking at my hairless scalp in the steamy bathroom mirror was strange but satisfying. The vague fear of looking older had proven unwarranted. Much to my delight, a younger-looking man was smiling back at me from the mirror now that all evidence of graying temples was gone.

Even the shape of my newly shaved head was something I could live with. The tabs of bathroom tissue dotting the cuts on my scalp aside, I was finally free from the tyranny of the $9 billion-a-year hair-care industry. I really hadn't thought much about hair issues since, but Chris Rock's provocative film "Good Hair," which debuted in Pittsburgh over the weekend, brought it all back.

Acting as the documentary's primary narrator and chief provocateur, Chris Rock asks a series of tough and increasingly irreverent questions about the economics of the hair-care industry and the lengths to which black customers will go to approximate European ideals of beauty.

The comedian explores the role of chemical relaxers in the quest to press the kinks and curls out of black hair. We also learn that poor and working-class black women will invest as much as $1,000 a month in layaway plans at beauty parlors specializing in hair extensions. Even schoolteachers do it.

There were whole sequences that made me squirm with embarrassment. Though white women use weaves and extensions in high numbers, too, only the materialism and vanity of African-American women are displayed in this movie.

Chris Rock follows the international route of the hair that makes its way into weaves for black women. The starting point is Hindu temples in India where Indian women shave their heads by the millions in devotion to their gods. The long black silky hair of Indian women is picked up by middlemen who sell it to brokers in America and Europe.

Brokers take the cleaned and repackaged hair to upscale hair salons in Beverly Hills before "going to Compton" with the leftovers. In one sequence, Chris Rock pretends to be a hair broker selling hair shorn from the scalps of black women. Watching the (mostly) Asian boutique owners and clerks -- including one black clerk -- recoil in horror at the thought of buying black hair is one of the saddest images in a film full of them. There are all sorts of racial assumptions assigned to the value of hair as this documentary makes clear.

Throughout the documentary, ordinary people boast of paying for their "good hair" before paying the rent or their creditors. The pursuit of good hair is portrayed as an necessary indulgence even though it only alleviates the insecurity of the person paying $500 for an elaborate weave job for a few weeks. Everyone accepts the fact that it will need to be reattached a month later at the same price.

Ostensibly, Chris Rock wanted to make the film because one of his young daughters asked him why she didn't have "good hair." The documentary is his attempt to answer the question, though teasing out a coherent answer to her question will be difficult.

Though undisciplined, unfocused and unfair, "Good Hair" is a funny, often enlightening, but ultimately scattershot survey of a curious moment in time for many African-Americans.

The film is at its best when it is about economics, dependency and the disproportionately high cost of vanity. For all the money black folks spend on hair, very few of the dollars flow back into black-owned products. If enough people see and understand this point, I won't be the only one walking around with a shaved head.

Tony's Take on Comix by Tony Norman is featured exclusively in the Opinion section on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.