August 2–9, 2001

movie shorts

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

by Cindy Fuchs

recommended

Hedwig Schmidt (John Cameron Mitchell, also writer and director) feels out of place. While this experience is no doubt familiar to many, few have the particular baggage she carries. A transsexual rock singer who likes to wear miniskirts and a big, yellow Farrah Fawcett-wingy wig, Hedwig lives between worlds, between genders, selves and desires, "spinning like a 45."

Born in communist East Berlin (the divided city and the Wall are obvious metaphors for Hedwig’s experience), Hedwig comes to the States with her first husband, a U.S. serviceman (Maurice Dean Wint). He seduces her with gummy bears and pays for her sex-change operation, which is unfortunately botched so as to leave her with a smidge of her male genitals left intact — her "angry inch." To express her pain and also find herself, Hedwig has put together a band, also called the Angry Inch. But as she belts out her life story — "I rose from off of the doctor’s slab/ I lost a piece of my heart/ Now everyone gets to take a stab/ They cut me up into parts" — Hedwig becomes increasingly estranged from her collaborators, including her second husband Yitzhak (played as a man by Miriam Shor, as part of the film’s ongoing genderfuck).

The strain comes from Hedwig’s insistence that the band’s tour dates and locations — at a series of chain restaurants named Bilgewater’s — correspond with those of her one true love, rock star Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt). As Hedwig recalls in her songs and helpful voiceover (often accompanied by illustrative flashbacks), she and Tommy were once in desperate, endless love. You watch them gaze adoringly at one another, write songs together, and perform for delirious teenage girls. "In three months," Hedwig remembers, "we were out-grossing monster trucks in Wichita."

This kind of class-based humor is part of Tommy and Hedwig’s dream of escape from their low-rent existence. And then the other shoe drops: Tommy makes the alarming discovery that Hedwig isn’t precisely a girl (a moment introduced by Maggie Moore’s huge Whitney-like vocals on "I Will Always Love You," overheard from a neighboring trailer), and Tommy panics all the way to the bank. Claiming their co-written songs as his own, Tommy becomes an androgynous "rock icon." Determined to make her case known, Hedwig wants to get Tommy’s attention, to declare her love and, if all else fails, get her vengeance and righteous writing credit.

These bare bones of Hedwig’s plot don’t really do it justice, mainly because it’s less interested in story and character than in spectacle. Pulling together rock- and drag-show excess (much like Rocky Horror or Bowie’s Ziggy shows), the movie presents number after number, interspersed with animation sequences by Emily Hubley. Jumping back and forth in time, stepping in and out of Hedwig’s consciousness, the film’s unconventional organization is in part a result of its origins as a drag show, then off-Broadway musical, conveying Hedwig’s story as a series of autobiographical songs performed in grandly hybrid rock-operatic style: sprawling vocals, spangles and disco lights, Who-style orchestrations (performed on the soundtrack by Bob Mould and members of Girls Against Boys). The film is also structured around Hedwig’s philosophical bent, part Platonic and part gnostic Christian, that grounds her investment in the myth of the "Origin of Love." Feeling incomplete (and embodying this very feeling in her ambiguous gendering), she’s searching for her other half.

Hedwig’s determination to set her world right is complicated by the fact that Tommy is a young and beautiful boy who doesn’t really know what he wants, easily distracted by the trappings of fame and wealth, and that speaks to another of the film’s interests, in contemporary confusions concerning identity and celebrity. Where Hedwig’s performances twist disco-queen super-style around all sorts of beloved pop-cultural detritus (Little Richard, Farrah, acid-washed jeans, McDonald’s), Tommy’s more like a tragic character out of Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine, haunted by the living ghosts of Jagger, Lou Reed, Paul Stanley and Placebo’s Brian Molko. These performances, particularly by the enormously charismatic Mitchell, propel the film. The surrounding scenes, as in most musicals, are less compelling, despite solid performances by Andrea Martin as Hedwig’s sympathetic manager and Pitt as the sulky, mostly unformed Tommy.

The film doesn’t really interrogate the musical genre (as did, say, Dancer in the Dark), but it does remind us that rock has a long history of celebrating alienation and ambiguity, even if it’s recently been inclined to dote on aggressive heterosexuality, leaving pop as the primary vehicle for working through sex-gender identity uncertainties (think of ’N Sync’s girlish boys). While Hedwig occasionally lapses into a kind of pop sappiness, it’s also upfront about all that, declaring its faith in the mythology of love, its capacity to "create something that wasn’t there before."