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June 3, 2005
wigged
i've been a tireless zealot for this movie for years; bought it as a gift, made people sit through it, secretly fantasised about performing it with a crack rock ensemble somewhere with me in steven trask's role. i'm not gay, you know. but this film nearly makes me wish i was at least a transvestite ... no, the fabulousness is incidental. this film is yet another rearticulation of yeats: "there's more enterprise in walking naked". the context is relationships, and it is the truth. again, this one's a few years old, but i'm being picky...
Hedwig & The Angry Inch
Directed by John Cameron Mitchell
Starring John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Pitt, Miriam Shor
Adapted from the highly successful off-Broadway production of the same name, Hedwig is a riotous and moving treatise on the nature of finding and losing love, and the masks we wear and performances, both literal and metaphorical, we put on to hide the scars of betrayal, told through the eyes of the tortured/fabulous transsexual of the title.
If it all sounds a bit much, that's because it is, and that's partly the point: love and rock are about not doing things by halves. Love is (by its very nature, many might argue) extreme, excessive, and Hedwig - who sports [one] angry inch of penile potential due to botched gender reassignment surgery - is the personification of this approach: to loving, life, music, whatever.
We open with the deliciously sardonic Hedwig holding forth at a Sizzler-esque "Bilgewater" chain buffet, as he travels nationwide in the shadow of his ex-lover and all-round mainstream goth-rock twat/superstar Tommy Gnosis (played by a frighteningly Billy Corganesque Michael Pitt) who is making millions playing in packed stadia everywhere. With songs he stole from Hedwig.
A series of excellently edited and constructed flashbacks and animation sequences courtesy of Emily Hubley (sister of Yo La Tengo's Georgia) and set to some stunning rock songs/live performances provides further exposition. Born a young boy in East Berlin in 1961 - the year the wall went up - the then-named Hansel falls in love with rock and roll after his American GI father is thrown out by his mother. He gravitates towards the crypto-homo icons - Bowie, Iggy, Lou Reed. But it is only later, after an affair with an American GI, that Hansel - in order to be able to leave Berlin and travel to the golden west - opts for a sex change, becoming Hedwig. Of course, upon arriving in the states, Hedwig's GI abandons him for the next toyboy off the rank, and suddenly our hero finds herself adrift. So where does (s)he turn?
To rock, naturally, recruiting the Angry Inch - a wild, kickarse, vaguely East German five piece backing section. It's via a brief detour into Hedwig's first meeting with Tommy Gnosis (nee Speck) - a talentless, socially inept teen malcontent and fundamentalist Christian sociopath in-the-making with whom Hedwig falls in love - that we regroup in the present and understand the 'whys' of the band's present journey.
What makes this film so utterly beautiful is the deft directorial juggling between humour, gravity, wickedly funny costumes and one-liners (not to mention some truly excellent original rock tunes) to constitute a greater whole that explores the themes of separation and attachment, simultaneous loyalty to one's fellows or lovers and one's own goals, and the very nature of the all-consuming, perspective-distorting power of love, the very basic motives behind every human heart - gay, straight or otherwise.
In a manner vastly superior to say, Priscilla, the film manages to bypass the somehow irrelevant issue of sexual identity (which concerns itself with questions of how/who we fuck and 'why') in favour of looking at the more intriguing, and *universally* relevant, question of how and why we love.
One of the best punk-rock queer love-story comedy-musicals you'll ever see (um, maybe the only film to fit that particular permutation ... ) as poignant as it is hysterically funny. You will never look at a car wash in the same way again, honey ...
Posted by reuben at June 3, 2005 2:49 PM
Comments
big ups, rubes... i've slugged out the course-work for this semester, & am taking some time off... so expect a call from me shortly, a'ight?
okay,
m
Posted by: marty at June 27, 2005 7:46 PM
marty,
sorry, man - all comments go through a moderator process, thus not appearing immediately. just trying to keep away twats selling me viagara i don't need ...
life has been hard and hectic; just moved house and all the dramas that go with that. will call you this weekend.
Posted by: ruby at June 29, 2005 1:06 PM