Hats and rites are sometimes intimately linked to one another. The act of fully or partly covering the head – whether with a black veiled hat, a green, black, red, or pink beret etc. – could carry certain meanings. Similarly, hats (and lack thereof) could carry a desire of being integrated into a group or express dissidence; to be or not to be noticed.
These are questions that Stavros, Elia Kazan’s hero in America, America (1964) struggles with. Having left Turkey to immigrate to New York, Stavros decides to change his hat. “Stavros takes off the fez he always wore, looks at it intensely, then throws it in the water of the bay and says: the first thing I will do tomorrow morning is to buy one of those straw hats that Americans are wearing.”
