Tune In, Turn On, Wig Out!

Got your mother in a whirl
She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl -- David Bowie

At some time in your life, you may have "walked on the wild side" - or perhaps you live on the wild side. Or maybe you've always played it safe, always proper & tasteful, never coloring outside the lines. Till now, that is. Ooo, baby, have I got a movie for you.

Hedwig is more than the sum of her labels, as are we all. Labels both define us and confine us. By following Hedwig's sad/hilarious drag-punk shamanic odyssey in search of her "other half", you may just catch a glimpse of your deepest, truest self.

Like a concept album, the story is within the songs composed by Stephen Trask and performed by John Cameron Mitchell, the writer, director, and star of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" (2001). So it makes sense, I think, to examine the songs and link them to the film narrative. Two birds, y'know?

"Tear Me Down"
This defiant, hard-driving glam-rock anthem, sung at Bilgewater's seafood restaurant in Kansas City, serves as an intro to Hedwig's background and hints at the film's theme.

"I'm the new Berlin Wall! Try and tear me down!"

As her husband & backup singer Yitzhak (Miriam Shor) says, Hedwig is like that despised wall, dividing East & West, slavery & freedom, man & woman, top & bottom. Hedwig elaborates on her paradoxical role as divider & definer:

Ain't much of a difference
Between a bridge and a wall
Without me right in the middle, baby
You would be nothing at all!

"Origin of Love"
Trask's masterpiece, accompanied by Emily Hubley's hand-drawn animation, is based on the myth by Aristophanes from Plato's "Symposium": the very root of our romantic longing is exposed with tenderness & pathos. This song brings me to tears every time I hear it. Not bad for a story someone made up at a party in ancient Greece.

Whether or not you believe your other half is out there, aching for reunion just like you, this song leads us to Hedwig's central conundrum: Who is her other half? Yitzhak? Or is it Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt), who dumped her and became a rock idol by stealing her songs? If it's someone else, will it be a boy or a girl?

Flashbacks show Hedwig's childhood as gray Eastern Bloc squalor relieved only by dazzling rock music from the West. Ben Mayer-Goodman as 6-year old Hansel has an absolutely priceless scene: dancing wildly on the bed to "Freaks": "One of us! One of us!"

"Sugar Daddy"
This cheeky country-western ditty, performed at Bilgewater's Miami Beach (the band's on tour), refers obliquely to Hedwig's first love-disaster with Sgt. Luther Robinson (Maurice Dean Wint), shown later in a flashback scene from the '80s, when Hedwig was still Hansel, a girly-boy in East Berlin.

Berlin is where the Gummi Bears play a pivotal role. (Would you like some candy, little boy?) Since I find those rubbery confections as repulsive as hard-boiled eggs, I endure Hansel's Gummi-eating as my concession to art - I remember how in art school we used to try to out-gross each other all the time. Eeeuw, put it away!

Remarkably, Hansel is willing to undergo a sex-change in order to marry Luther and move to America. Both Luther and Hansel's single mother (Alberta Watson) support the idea. Incredible, yes, but not impossible.

"Angry Inch"
You'd be angry, too, if your sex-change operation went horribly wrong and left you neither male nor female (with a "Barbie doll crotch"). To add insult to injury, Luther ditches Hedwig in Kansas. That same day, the Berlin Wall comes down, thus rendering Hedwig's sacrifice of his manhood for freedom utterly unnecessary. Yeah, I think this calls for a hard, thrashing punk song with stage-dives and fist-fights.

"Wig In A Box"
Flash back to Hedwig, a lonely transsexual stuck in a Kansas trailer park. Talk about feeling low. What to do, in this dark night of the soul? How about a drag makeover? Of all the songs, this number is the most "Broadway", hook-filled and irresistibly upbeat. This song also brings me to tears, but they're the happy kind. Sing along & follow the bouncing wig!

I put on some makeup
Turn on the eight-track
I'm pulling the wig down from the shelf
Suddenly I'm Miss Farrah Fawcett from TV
Until I wake up, and I turn back to myself

Who do you want to be today? Deep down, we are not our labels or our personas. The common identifier, "I am this, not that" is the myth that rules our lives. Culture is the collection of roles and habits given to us, but we can choose to break these habits. Today's trickster-shaman is the drag queen; her identity is fluid, not fixed. I think we could use a holiday like "International Drag Day" - when we all dress up as the opposites of our everyday "selves". It might do us a world of good.

[Something to consider: After you die and shuffle off this mortal coil, will you still be referring to yourself as male or female, black or white, short or tall, straight or gay? Somehow I doubt it.]

"Wicked Little Town"
Yet another flashback: A ballad of separation by Hedwig, the flamboyant new singer-songwriter of Junction City, KS. At the same time she processes her loss of Luther, Hedwig meets Tommy - and a new cycle of love and loss begins. Inevitably this song will be sung again, with even greater insight, by Tommy.

Hedwig's creative persona brings her love & a musical collaboration with Tommy that ends in abandonment, betrayal, and bitterness. Later, as Hedwig's chain-restaurant tour shadows Tommy's stadium concerts, the ghost of that broken relationship haunts the tense marriage between Hedwig & Yitzhak, who harbors his own secret longing for identity-mutation & freedom.

"I know you are, but what am I?" -- Pee-Wee Herman

"Hedwig's Lament / Exquisite Corpse"
A plaintive ballad, this time for the loss of Tommy, segues into a punk nervous breakdown. Or is it a breakthrough? At Bilgewater's Times Square, Hedwig undergoes her final transformation: the stripping away of her drag-queen persona is like a traumatic death on stage. All the pent-up anguish of her life explodes in a storm of hardcore punk fury. AAAAHHH!!! Sweet.

"Midnight Radio"
Resurrection. In a glam rock style like Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, the "new Hedwig" awakens as a whole person: no longer a wall, but a bridge. S/he is beyond all pairs of opposites, being "neither/nor" and "both/and". S/he is you and me. His/her "passing of the wig" to Yitzhak & the events that follow may seem cryptic to first-time viewers, but you'll figure it out. Every ending is a new beginning. Who do you want to be today?

******************

In the far distant future, alien archaeologists will pick over the relics of our once-mighty civilization. With any luck, they'll unearth a DVD of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch". It'll be like the end of "A.I." when the aliens discover Haley Joel Osment and grok his robot memories of us long-gone humans. When their thin gummi fingers close around the disc, Our Funk will become Their Funk. The circle will be complete. In that moment, the entire sweaty farce of human existence will be vindicated.

Bilgewater's will be replicated right down to the sneeze-guard on the salad bar. The aliens will slip into zebra-print spandex & black leather and plug in their electric guitars…

Do it, Space Brothers. Put on the wigs. You know you want to!