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Hedwig and the Angry Inch
directed by John Cameron Mitchell
with John Cameron Mitchell and John Trask
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A clash of chords begins the film, and suddenly we're faced with a towering, insanely coifed, manic, transsexual, glam-rock diva-- Hedwig-- who dominates the screen. This is not so different from the stage version of John Cameron Mitchell's and John Trask's hit off-Broadway show Hedwig and the Angry Inch except the eponymous Hedwig is, more literally, in our faces.

The original production was a powerhouse-- 90 minutes of hard rock and seductive monologues that were razor-sharp, funny, and moving. Trask wrote the music and lyrics, and Mitchell wrote the book, as well as starred in the original production. Now Mitchell and Trask have adopted their show to film-- with Mitchell directing and again playing the lead. The effect is a little different, but still wonderful.

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On stage, Hedwig and the Angry Inch was a compact, tightly-wrought theatrical beauty that assaulted and seduced with wit and emotional generosity. It needed all that to get audiences to buy its absurd and provocative premise. The plot's simple: we are at the opening night of glam-rocker Hedwig and her band The Angry Inch. To say that Hedwig is down on her luck is to miss the point: luck was never Hedwig's forte. Much to Hedwig's dismay, her modest opening night is coinciding with that of her ex-lover, once-protégé, now world-famous rock star Tommy Gnosis. (The last time Hedwig and Tommy saw each other was when they were coked up and she was blowing him as he was driving his limo, and they crashed into a busload of deaf school children; the scandal followed her, not him.) As the evening's show progresses-- with songs ranging from hard-rock, punk, and drag-queen glosses on country-western themes to plaintive ballads-- Hedwig tells her story.

Born Hansel in West Berlin, she grew up lonely and entranced by dreams of American pop-music and fame. After meeting a willing American GI, she decided that the only way out of her prison of unwanted nationhood, gender, and isolation was to undergo a sex-change and marry. But the operation was only half-successful: the vagina for which she traded-in her penis healed into a one-inch mound of angry flesh. And then, within a year, she found herself divorced and living in a trailer camp in the American South. To make matters ironically worse, the Berlin wall came down soon after she left.

It was in this small Southern town that Hedwig met-- and began an affair with-- 15-year-old Tommy Speck (son of the general at the local army base). This is also where she began writing and performing, starting the career that has ended up here tonight. She is plagued by the raucous sounds of Tommy Gnosis's success flooding in through the stage door, and the undermining activities of band member and show MC Yitzak (the Jewish drag queen, whom she married so he could escape Serbia). Hedwig does her best, once again, to survive.

Mitchell and Trask have plundered popular and high culture to piece together a show that panders to the lowest of lowbrow expectations while never losing its grasp on sophisticated discourse. There are cues from Brecht and Borscht-belt comedians, drag shows, Plato's Symposium, I-will-survive Hollywood melodramas, and Ranier Werner Fassbinder's films (which are really Hollywood melodramas anyway). Mitchell and Trask assemble a majestic work of art (and artifice) that Susan Sontag, in her Notes on Camp, might call "serious camp"-- the appropriation and reorientation of diverse cultural artifacts to fabricate a stinging commentary on existing culture. Like the unlikely heroines of Charles Ludlam and Fassbinder-- the two artists most responsible for elevating serious camp-- Hedwig embodies the complications of life today.

Binaries transcended

On the way to the screen, Hedwig has been kept moderately intact. All of the songs and most of the script remain. There are a few changes-- the deaf schoolchildren have disappeared, as has a great joke about Yitzak's drag name being Crystal Nacht. The timeframe of the show has been readjusted so that it no longer takes place in one evening; we now actually see Tommy Gnosis and his affair with Hedwig. But what remains the same is Hedwig's unwavering intelligence. The current craze for gender-bending in popular culture-- beginning with La Cage aux Folles in 1978-- is now entering its third decade. But its various incarnations-- from Tootsie and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert to Mulan-- never drill down to Hedwig's philosophical depths.

In her second number, "The Origins of Love," Hedwig gives a punk recap of Plato's Symposium, explaining that she's now in search of her other, severed half. But in Mitchell and Trask's book and lyrics, she is not only the unhappy urning looking for her complimentary other; she is also the divided body politic as symbolized by the Berlin wall and un-united Germany. As the opening song states: "Hedwig is like that wall./ standing before you in that divide/ between East and West, Slavery and Freedom,/ Man and Woman,/ Top and Bottom." Mitchell grabs widely and wildly at high and pop culture for his references-- LaVern Baker coexists here with gummy bears and Immanuel Kant (one of the show's best one-liners is the title of Hedwig's school thesis: "You, Kant, Always Get What you Want")-- but they are never random and always in the service of his theme, the political, emotional, psychic, and sexual disconnect we all experience in a postmodern world that makes less and less sense.

In the end, Hedwig is less about gender-bending than a meditation on the endless, and unending, task of self-completion in a world based on binaries. Hedwig is searching for her better half and nothing works. At the end of the show, Hedwig transforms before our eyes into Tommy, who finally gives his mentor the apology and credit she's been seeking: "Forgive me/ For I did not know./ 'cause I was just a boy/ And you were so much more." The film is more ambiguous-- the shock of the original stage transformation is lessened because we have already seen the "real" Tommy-- but the message is similar: there are no better, other halves, only ourselves.

After the star's epiphany and redemption, we see Hedwig walking naked out of an inner-city alley. Perhaps she's liberated from her quest, but she's still walking out, alone, into the night. The end is drenched in ambiguity. It is Hedwig-- neither man or woman, east nor west, victim or survivor-- who has the last word: "Listen/ There ain't much of a difference/ between a bridge and a wall/ without me in the middle, babe/ you would be nothing at all."

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com