Double Brush #01: Daniel Day-Lewis Gets Ready for Work in Phantom Thread

Alma opens Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017), talking to a doctor who lurks in the darkness off screen. Reynolds, she explains, isn’t just a demanding man, “maybe he’s the most demanding man.” She says this proudly: he is the most demanding man in the world and in his demand for “every piece” of her, he has found the most fulfilling partner.

Then, a close-up of Daniel Day-Lewis lathering his cheeks before his morning shave, though his jawline is already perfectly hairless. He polishes a black Oxford that is already glowing. He trims a nostril hair with a pair of scissors that might have been in the operating room of a Victorian surgeon. There is no sign of a hair in that nostril, and so the blades snip at his tragus on their way out of frame. The delicate application of a white lotion with a soft pad, his face a comic mask for a moment. With each cut from close up to medium shot to close up, with each ritual, a gentle rise and then suddenly tumble across the keys of the piano before the notes run up to a new, impossible precipice just to fall once more. 

Now, the key moment of tumbling excess: a close up of the back of Day-Lewis’ portentous head and its luxurious sweep of silver hair. In each hand a boar-bristle brush works the hair relentlessly, roughly backwards. The sound –  a coarse scrape of bristle through hair, bristle on scalp – is turned up for a moment to compete with the score. I’m ecstatic.

The most demanding man demands two brushes. Do they double the efficiency of this ritual? Do they save him time? Do they style his hair more perfectly? No, of course not. They are superfluous, excessive, preening and vain and indulgent. They are the two brushes of a man who needs complete silence at breakfast. The two brushes of a boy who needed to be mother’s favourite. What more do we need to know about this man? As the next moment in his morning ritual tells us, he puts on his pants one leg at a time, like everyone else. 

What I know is that no one has brushed their hair like this before.