It's a long, long way from communist East Germany to a Kansas trailer park, but that's only the tiniest fraction of the journey undertaken by the main character in the glam-rock extravaganza Hedwig and the Angry Inch. We're talking miles and miles of physical space traversed, enormous chunks of geography under the belt. But the more important journey our hero takes really occurs under the belt, as it were — in the no-man's land otherwise known as Hedwig's genitalia. And, deeper still, in the yearning, empty space that lies beneath our hero's pale white flesh. Hedwig, you see, has this theory. Actually, Hedwig has this theory about everything. But this particular theory is based on one of Plato's pet notions: how human beings are descended from some sort of two-faced (literally), multi-limbed, dual-gendered species that was split asunder eons ago. Consequently, we're all constantly searching for our other half, explains Plato by way of Hedwig, for that missing part that we've lost.
In Hedwig's case, what's missing is a lot more than just some theoretical soul mate. To make a long story short, so to speak, Hedwig — born Hansel in East Berlin the year the Wall went up — once wound up on the wrong end of a quack doctor's knife and suffered a botched sex change operation. It left our hero a not-quite transsexual, with the Angry Inch of the movie's title turning out to be a fair description of the former Hansel's nether regions, as well as the name of the backup band Hedwig eventually assembles in the quest for international rock stardom.
All of this is just part of the endlessly bizarre and very entertaining story of Hedwig/Hansel, related throughout Hedwig and the Angry Inch in the form of flashbacks, fantasies, extended monologues, animation sequences and zippy stylistic devices that come close to defying description. Most of all, the movie tells its story through song, since, for all its daring ideas and multileveled sexual ambiguity, Hedwig is really an old-fashioned musical at heart, albeit one that's been outfitted in rabbit fur, rhinestones, spandex and no less than 30 different wigs (and that's just for Hedwig alone), ranging from the elegantly demure to the most outrageously retro-futuristic.
Based on a popular off-Broadway production by John Cameron Mitchell (who also directs the film version and stars as the title character), Hedwig and the Angry Inch is as pure a dose of rock theater as you'll find. The primary influences here, both musical and attitudinal, are what Hedwig calls, in typically eloquent and acid-tongued fashion, the "crypto-homo rockers" of yore — Lou Reed and the Velvets, a little bit of Iggy, and, most of all, oodles of Aladdin Sane-era Bowie. (Hedwig claims The Captain and Tennille somehow figure on that list as well, but we'll let that one pass for the moment).
Bedecked in those mile-high wigs, make-up piled on thick and provocatively, and all dressed up in an endlessly amazing series of outfits (Cameron's character goes through some 41 costume changes in the film), Hedwig seizes control of the stage, confronting the audience and aggressively spitting out the words to songs that bring us up to speed on the singer's singular world view and personal history (just as in a Bollywood musical, the songs here actually serve to advance the story). The music itself, composed by Stephen Trask, is fairly generic, a derivative mish-mash of '70s punk-rock-pop, but it's also insidiously catchy and winds up growing on us (thanks, in no small measure, to Bob Mould's guitar on the soundtrack).
The songs and performances are given an extra edge of self-mocking absurdity since Hedwig and band perform exclusively in a series of nondescript chain restaurants and old folks' hangouts. It's an unlikely scenario but a very funny one. We follow the group as they travel from town to town following/stalking the tour of international rock star Tommy Gnosis, the ex-boyfriend who supposedly stole all of Hedwig's best songs.
For his part, Cameron provides a solid center for the film as Hedwig. Even though under the right light, with the right wig and make-up, he can sort of resemble a trashy, asymmetrical Pamela Lee Anderson knock-off, Cameron is definitely anything but Bowie beautiful. Even with all the glitter and big blonde hair, it's Hedwig's very ordinariness as a physical presence that makes her so watchable (and that makes it almost believable when the band performs next to the salad bar in some dumpy Bennigan's clone on the outskirts of nowhere).
Hedwig cruises along during its first hour in a manner that's so engagingly wacky that we're not quite prepared for the emotional shocks that occur during the film's far more serious last act, when Cameron's movie verges on going full-blown freak-show on us. Hansel's search for his Gretel comes full circle, and in a very strange and, frankly, not completely lucid fashion, Hedwig seems to not only find his/her other half, but actually transcends it all.
Even if the actual execution is a little fuzzy, what's almost certainly supposed to be happening during the spectacular and maddeningly elusive grand finale of Hedwig is something special. What Cameron is clearly striving for is some sort of natural (if we can use that word in this context) coming to terms with the many layers of ambiguity reveled in by the film — of characters existing in the great divide between, according to Hedwig him/herself, "East and West, freedom and slavery, celebrity and everyday, man and woman."
By the end of the movie, it's really not clear that Cameron and Hedwig have even begun to bridge the chasm between any of those opposites, but the great strength of Hedwig and the Angry Inch is that it makes us feel that something very much like that's been accomplished.
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2001.
