Hedwig and the Angry Inch

by Anna Pulley

 
A viva glam rock opera that rivals the cult of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, is a glitzy, boisterous cockumentary, with John Cameron Mitchell (star, director and writer) leading viewers through an odyssey of the mind, heart and rock n’ roll. A spectacular collision of sexual identity, politics, Greek mythology and even some stick-figure animation, Hedwig’s life is comprised of a series of flashbacks punctuated by a soundtrack of stories that mimic the genderfuck stylings of David Bowie and Iggy Pop.

 
Born in East Berlin as “a slip of a girly boy” named Hansel (Ben Mayer-Goodman), who wants nothing more than to escape to the West, Hansel falls in love with a US Soldier/Sugar Daddy named Luther (Maurice Dean Wint). In order to leave Berlin, Luther and Hansel must be married, so Hansel’s mother gives him her name and passport and convinces him to get sex-reassignment surgery. The surgery goes horribly awry, however, and Hansel (now Hedwig) is left with an angry inch of mutilated flesh “with a scar running down it like a sideways grimace on an eyeless face.” A year later, the Berlin Wall has fallen and their marriage has fallen apart. Hedwig consoles herself by returning to her passion for music and jerking off a strung-out, Christian teenager named Tommy (Michael Pitt), who looks a lot like a goth Leonardo DiCaprio (but maybe I’ve been watching too much Scorsese). Supporting herself by playing in what looked like a Baskin Robbins with a band of Korean Sergeants’ wives, Hedwig and Tommy fall in love, though Tommy can never quite come to terms with Hedwig’s anatomy. He eventually steals Hedwig’s hits and becomes a superstar sensation, while Hedwig and her band shadow him on tour in an endless chain of Red Lobster-esque restaurants called Bilgewater’s.
 
Hedwig’s sexual ambiguity is one of the largely debatable components of the film. Some consider her a transsexual because she had sex-reassignment surgery, while others claim that her reasons for undergoing the surgery were more about fleeing Berlin and not because of an innate desire to become female. Other nonbinary, genderqueer elements come from Hedwig’s second husband and back up singer Yitzhak, (Miriam Shor) who is a woman playing a man who wants to be a woman. She also wants to be Hedwig, and Angel from Rent, which John Cameron Mitchell was supposed to play if he weren’t wrapped up in Hedwig.
 
The film’s ending is also ambiguous, with surreal death-like montages and a haunting musical farewell number with Tommy, where the two mirror each other physically and merge together. This is reminiscent of Aristophane’s speech on the origin of man in Plato’s Symposium, a theme that is visited several times. In Aristophane’s version, humans were once four-legged, big-headed creatures until an angry Zeus cut them in two and they were left to forever search for their missing half. Hedwig’s spiritual odyssey is very centered on this metaphor and the film’s white lights and angelic costumes certainly suggest a kind of rebirth for Hedwig at the end. S/he is stripped of her glitz, her identity, and stumbles naked through a darkened alley towards the unknown. A provocative and stunning debut as a director for Mitchell, Hedwig will leave your mind reeling for another glimpse into the glamorous, punk, rock, tranny world that he’s masterfully created.