‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’ - Review
Everytime I feel the pang of loneliness I reach for him. Not literally, we haven’t been together in years, but I reach for his memory. When I feel like I can’t see two inches in front of my nose —his face, his laugh, his smell — come to me clearly. In these moments I am reminded of John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a drag show turned movie musical turned broadway musical. Since I don’t want to go bankrupt on theater tickets, the movie is what I return to and where I gain catharsis in seeing my pain reflected. In rewatching I inch (eh, eh?) towards a salvation I think Hedwig and I share.
The film follows Hedwig Robinson (John Cameron Mitchell) as she and her band, The Angry Inch, tour the Midwest. They play dingy bars, their shows overshadowed by the much larger artist Tommy Gnosis’ (Michael Pitt) stadium shows. It is no coincidence that Hedwig’s shows coincide with Tommy’s as Hedwig is following him, trying to reveal that he stole all his songs from her. This interplay between Hedwig and Tommy’s shows serves as setting to the real, emotionally led story which is revealed through Hedwig’s songs.
The song that stands out and means the most to me is The Origin of Love. Early in the film, Hedwig performs the song on stage while we, the audience, are whisked away into a cartoon sequence within Hedwig’s mind. The song chronicles a myth Aristophanes tells in Plato’s Symposium. As the story goes, long ago, “folks roamed the earth like big rolling kegs, they had two sets of arms, and two sets of legs.” These people were too powerful, and the gods took it upon themselves to tear them apart. The people were then cut down the middle, and each bipedal creature was scattered all over the world, doomed to always be looking for their other half. This is the origin of love. Hedwig’s perspective on love and what it means to be alive is reflected in The Origin of Love. She spends much of the film feeling broken, severed and believes she will find wholeness in the love of another.
Within the animation, a crudely drawn face, split down the middle represents the lost souls spread throughout the earth. This face becomes a motif throughout the film, appearing as a tattoo on Hedwig’s side. Ever since I saw the movie in my early teen years, I have felt deeply connected to the face(s): so much so that I, in a flurry of eighteen year old impulsiveness got the tattoo myself. I felt broken, half of a whole. I thought I found what would make me whole in a boy from my college. We dated for all of a month before I basically moved into his single dorm. He was my everything, he was me. When we finally broke up a year later I missed him the most when I saw him in myself: his mannerism, his worldview. I felt severed once again.
Yet, the pursuit of wholeness in another that both Hedwig and I engage in, isn’t actually the point of the animation nor the movie as a whole. Through many trials and tribulations — a botched sex change operation, a divorce, having all her music stolen — Hedwig discovers that she cannot be made whole by another. In the final moments of the film, the face from the cartoon sequence becomes whole as one. It was not two faces trying to become one, it was Hedwig’s single broken self now made whole. She made herself whole. I don’t think I’ve done that yet. I still read back through old texts with him when I feel lost to myself. One day though I hope to find wholeness in myself, because I know, when I have the strength to, that I will not find wholeness through him. Maybe I’ll even get the whole face tattoo.