~WARNING: Hints at a few details, but only a few~
Well, folks, it's just not often that I beg everybody I know to go see a movie. In fact, this is it. I don't review movies; I hate movies. I try to view film as a mirror of the culture, blah blah blah, yet life itself has its own tide that carries away any chance of really giving a shit about all that, and all the props and the drama school, movie stars, love stories, dialogue, gunplay, criminals trying for one last job before retirement, all gets bleached white and blends back into the waves, and I find I have more important things to worry about. And yes it's sad, but that's the life I live sometimes. So when I finally pull the words together I review events, I write about failures, I review sinkholes and catastrophes and the aggravation I'm left with when another list of credits roll and we all go back where we came from, I know I missed something and I feel stupid, suckered, alone and unrecognizable in the costume that has never felt like who I am. So, that's why I don't write much about movies.
I'd seen HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH twice off-Broadway; it was a snide, glorious little musical about an East German rock singer with a botched sex change operation, a trailer in Kansas, and her obsession with the success she almost had. Hedwig tells her sad story in weary monologues and lounge jokes; she stampedes and tiptoes through the songs that illustrate her plight; she invites the audience through the absurd turns that took her from her home and divided her from the more distant inches of her penis. Hedwig is in between, not man or woman, not German or American; struggling to free herself, she is left with nothing.
There is a story but no plot, no question "what happens next?" Hedwig is what happens next. We meet Hedwig; we learn who and what she is, from the outside in.
John Cameron Mitchell wrote and starred in the stage version; the songs were by bandleader Steven Trask. By the time I saw the show, Mitchell had left New York and Ally Sheedy was mangling the role five nights a week. The music was so good I went back anyway, to see yet another performer play Hedwig, at least well enough to avoid embarassing the audience.
Turns out John Cameron Mitchell was in Los Angeles, planning a film version. It's just been released. You must see it.
By an astonishing coincidence, all rock 'n' roll movies are stupid. At best, they're enjoyably so. In most rock 'n' roll movies - fiction movies *about* musicians, that is, expecting on some level to be taken seriously - the musicians are muscular; they're committed, but not comfortable or convincing; they're energetic but never focused, always retreating into a meandering frenzy. Mostly, rock musicians on film are successful, rewarded by a cheering audience for being stiff and awkward. (See "Velvet Goldmine" for examples of terrible concert footage.) The stakes are always high and the result is always disappointing. Film is expensive, so a feature must be directed at the masses, presenting the loser's art in the popular kids' art form; it's never acknowledged that nightmarish passion for music grows in inverse proportion to social prowess. Rock 'n' roll does not speak to the successful. It's only where each of us is vulnerable that music can offer any real meaning at all.
The film version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch places Hedwig's bitter monologues exactly where they belong - in the salad-bar diners and tile-floored restaurants where Hedwig greets her unnoticing public. There is no pretension that the audience is enthralled; the audience on the screen could care less. Hedwig frightens and nauseates people. What energy is onscreen comes from the performers, not the mysteriously wowed audience; and for the most part, the music is recorded live and rough, not pasted in from a slick recording studio in another state. With the stakes so lowered, the music is born without being smothered, the character alive within it. Only an actor who performed the role onstage for three years could pull it off.
Roger Waters wrote the screenplay for "Pink Floyd The Wall" and was disappointed with the result because "it wasn't funny." Pink Floyd's album told a morose story of epic self-absorption the only way it could successfully be told: through absurd, comic images that survived their very seriousness only through their lunacy. Bruce Springsteen has said a good song must have an element of sadness, so the listener will know it's real. The film version of Pink Floyd The Wall, magnificently creative though it was, just about overdid it.
Hedwig is funny. In her angst, she's become an acid-tongued lounge act, playing to a world of oblivious small-town diner customers; in a Baltimore chain restaurant she sings about her lost man and her lost manhood, her severed penis and her Farrah Fawcett wigs. It's a riot - no joke is repeated - and yet every frame of the film is distantly sad. Hedwig's every loss is intact on the screen. It's a gradual, haunting seduction: a joke come hilariously to life and exposed as all humanity, all loss and loneliness, the lifetime lived after the punch line has come and gone.
That's it, the whole review. Greatest rock 'n' roll movie ever made. Spinal Tap meets Pink Floyd meets Rocky Horror. You owe it to yourself. Why am I writing this?
I'm writing this because Hedwig and the Angry Inch digs up something new and important that's been there all along, buried inside a tragically mediocre film genre. Hedwig combines modern pop-culture fairy tales with snippets of Plato and comes up with a myth that digs past the bullshit of mythology. Hedwig doesn't die, get famous or find the ache of true love; that disqualifies her for transcendant wisdom of the standard rock 'n' roll variety. Her life of trailer park asceticism isn't intentional, so she's no Siddartha. The pleasure of sex isn't found in a superhuman body or a mysterious technique; human sexuality is revealed to be the simplest, most elusive haven...ultimately the home not of masculine competition, but of welcome and acceptance. The real mystery - the real *satisfaction* - is revealed to be much more than what happens between two people. It is wholly present in the unbound, open-eyed life of one.
Many tribal cultures find their shaman in the would-be transsexual, the genderfuck, the one who gained a special sight in exchange for any possibility of leading a normal life. David Lee Roth congratulates rock musicians - mostly himself - as being "the shamans of the tribe", but he conveniently fails to question why rock stars are disposable...as if the role hadn't been thrust upon them only to be yanked back and passed on to someone else when the mask no longer fit. Could it be that the job of a rock star is to accept and wear the costume, to distract the crowd to look away from themselves and consider something higher? Most such performances end a few steps from where they began, leaving fond, embarassing memories of childhood idol worship, the stinging awareness of how far we've come since then, and a lingering suspicion that we're still missing something.
Hedwig, of all rock 'n' roll characters, completes the circle, all dignifying costumes left behind in her quest for wholeness. With no pretentions of idol worship or responsibilities to play the role ourselves, we are invited to complete the journey with her. Such a personal journey beyond the limitations of self and back is best taken with a group. Don't wait for the video.
Copyright 2001 Betsy Shebang