voxpoptart's Full Review: Hedwig and the Angry Inch
I assume -- and i promise this will relate to Hedwig and the Angry Inch in a paragraph or two -- that on September 11th, 2001, roughly fifty or so Americans died in car wrecks. A typical day's auto-wreck death-count would be a hundred Americans, mind you, but there was a lot of news about this plane-wreck thing going on at the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon. A lot of people went home early and stayed there, so i'd guess (without knowing how to find the data) that maybe fifty people are alive today who would normally have been killed 9/11 in a car wreck. Which if true would be interesting in its own right, but: let's say fifty Americans died in a car wreck that day. Let's say another twenty were murdered (again, i imagine some murders were put off for later), and another handful fell in the shower, cracked their skull, and died.
Having someone you love die is always incredibly painful; i've only *knocks wood* lost my Dad among people i love, and he'd only lived with me during two years since 1977, and even his death still hurts sometimes, two years later. But ponder this: how much WORSE must it be for the people who lost a lover or a spouse or a child to murder, car wreck, etc on 9/11/01? To be so close -- just a tiny accident of timing, or viewed another way, just a tiny accident of the Grim Reaper's methodology choice -- to having anyone in the world actually give a flying fig about what you'd lost? To have millions of dollars and man-millenia of prayer (but especially millions of dollars) lavished on someone else's loved ones, who'd won a nation's hearts by getting blown up in a properly telegenic way? As far as we know, death may be something each of us gets to try only once. A little accident of timing, and it's a sacrifice that gains us absolutely nothing, not even the small reward of sympathetic attention.
John Cameron Mitchell, in writing Hedwig and playing Hedwig, considers his own little tragedy of timing: what happens if you make a unique, one-time sacrifice to get across the Berlin Wall to freedom, just a year before the freedom would've been handed to you as the wall, to everyone's surprise, was peacefully knocked down? Some real Berliners surely died making the premature trek in 1988/89, but that's a grim plot for a movie. Hansel Schmidt, Mitchell's East German boy, merely sacrifices his name and his penis, so he can marry the American man of his dreams (with his beautiful Western gummi bears and Almond Joys). Or most of it, at least, as the divorced, feminized Hedwig Robinson comes to explain in one of his band's more raucous songs. "Six inches forward, five inches back!", goes the refrain, and the spoken bridge of the song tells how he woke up bleeding down-there on the East German medical table: "My first day as a woman, and already it's that time of the month!"
That Hedwig, in long blonde wig and unsatisfactory makeup and apple-enhanced bra, should be a minor traveling rock star is a lovely answer to the usual dilemma of the stage and screen musical: "How come everyone's suddenly bursting into cleverly-rhymed songs about their feelings?". That Hedwig is Angry -- about his remaining penile inch, about fleeing to a new country with a loved one who found another boy as casually as we see his candied seduction of Hansel; about being raised mere miles from happiness, about summoning the courage to seek that happiness at the wrong goshdarn moment -- seems to put him in good company. We discover within minutes of the movie's opening that the Inch, a glam-makeupped but unhappy-looking band of immigrants, are tracking the movements of a cute boyish Rolling Stone Artist Of The Year, Tommy Gnosis, whom they accuse of stealing Hedwig's entire original song repertoire. They play to puzzled middle-aged customers at a chain called Bilgewater's as close as possible to the major venues where Gnosis is playing simultaneously, and Hedwig tells his stories, and his publicist tries to assure him that he just needs to be calm until they can get a picture of Hedwig and Tommy together, to give their lawsuit credibility.
The story, which i won't detail further, is told in ways that mirror the workings of human memory better than they mirror traditional demands for plot-spinning. Specific dialogues and kisses, and indentation marks from East German oven racks, live richly while they make their point. Then they spin off into dissolves, narration, or (this being a musical) song performances. (If you know Jim Henson's Labyrinth, the dissolves seem to track that movie's style) The earliest appearance of his band as seen in his autobiographical flashbacks is years before they actually meet and become his band; their presence, helping him sing "Wig in a Box", just works with the memory. One crucial story is told in words while Hedwig sits on a junkyard-ready assemblage of tires, until we start seeing the act-out of the specific memory, which is enhanced with surreal sound effects and a self-aware but crucial use of a Whitney Houston hit. For another key story, the telling itself has become the kind of implausibly exaggerated story that we enhance repeatedly to strangers until we forget where the original nugget of truth was. Hedwig and the band sit on the "9th Stage" of "Menses Fair: a celebration of women in music", inviting their audience of one to sit onstage with them. She accepts, having laughed warmly at Hedwig's rejected philosophy dissertation on the aggressive influence of German philosophy on rock'n'roll: "You, Kant, always get what you want".
Story-wise, you can safely assume that Hedwig's remaining inch has not smoothed his romantic path. In some ways, true, we live in a newly, miraculously open-minded time, when sexuality comes to play: it is amazing that a basically serious (though funny) all-male love story centered on a transsexual could be such a hit. But cripes, check out Salon's weekly feature in which women (mostly) who've used the online personals tell the "Heaven" or "Hell" stories of their personal-ad experiences. Enough "Hell" dates turn on nothing worse than the guy having no right eyebrow, or having really ugly toenails, that we should not expect Hedwig to get everything he ever wanted right away.
As for the music? I'll say this: the story has become deeply affecting for me, yes. And by my just-completed 3rd viewing i'm ready to give Mitchell an award for directing. But after one watch i just liked, not loved, the story. I watched again to hear the music again. Whether swaggering or crooning, it's glam-rock: as theatrical as early-1970's David Bowie or Queen, as confrontational now and then as late-1970's punk. A couple of the songs are complex, and "Origin of Love" could in theory be track-indexed with little "a"/"b"/"c"/"d" subtitles, but the complexity is in deference to the story.
If you insist that everything in a movie be explained, every conflict resolution mapped out in detail, Hedwig may disappoint you. But maybe you figure albums and people don't give you that, so why should movies and characters? Welcome aboard.
This Is The Story Of Hedwig, An Ambitious Glam-rocker Who Comes, To America Determined To Find Fame, Fortune And His Other Half.More at HotMovieSale.com
This is the story of Hedwig, an ambitious glam-rocker who comes to America determined to find fame, fortune, and his other half . Based on the smash h...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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