Hedwig and the Angry Inch: She Sings the Body Electric

But Parton has said, “I like looking like I came out of a fairy tale.” And Hedwig, too, is a fairy-tale heroine, a miracle of “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off” transformation and, ultimately, an ambassador for the idea of healing oneself by forgiving oneself and others: she’s like Bette Davis in Now, Voyager, only in a spangled miniskirt and high-tops. Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a story about keeping up appearances even in the midst of heartbreak, an homage to the “women’s weeper,” reinvented as a rock musical. This kind of idea is what is at the heart of drag: a man dressed as a woman allows himself to feel as women feel, in big, dramatic loops; he’s no longer required to keep a lid on his emotions, as men have traditionally been taught to do. And so Hedwig takes a page from Douglas Sirk melodramas and Joan Crawford suffer-fests, but it’s all filtered through the androgynous theatricality of T. Rex and David Bowie. To be man and woman at once—even just to play at being man and woman at once—only broadens our range of experience, increasing our capacity for heartbreak and pleasure, not to mention our wardrobe options.

Where did this strange, magnificent idea come from? Mitchell and Trask met on a flight from Los Angeles to New York sometime in 1989 or 1990, finding common ground as they talked about film and music. Mitchell saw, and loved, Trask’s band, Cheater, at CBGB; it would later become the band in the stage show of Hedwig. Mitchell—who by that point had established a solid acting career in theater, television, and film—told Trask stories about his own life, about growing up as the son of a U.S. Army officer in Scotland and Berlin. And he relayed to Trask a story he’d fallen in love with, the myth of Aristophanes, from Plato’s Symposium. According to the myth, there were originally three genders among humans: male, female, and androgynous beings, the last with characteristics of both male and female. Humans were, at the time, creatures of great power, each with two faces, two sets of arms, two sets of legs, and two sets of genitals. The gods were so threatened by these beings that they cut them in two lengthwise. Forever after, one half of each human—whether male, female, or a mingling of the two—would yearn and search for its missing other half. The myth gave Mitchell and Trask the framework for the story of Hedwig. They were “thinking about the origin of love,” Mitchell told Rolling Stone, “thinking about Berlin, where my parents had lived . . . It was just sort of like, yes. This is the metaphor: to walk away, you’ve got to leave something behind.” Trask turned the myth into an incandescent, haunting ballad, “The Origin of Love,” which would become an anchor first of the stage show and later of the film.

So few rock musicals genuinely work. They often try so hard to be hip that they just end up being corny. And some lyricists are guilty of cramming too many expository phrases into too few notes, so that songs don’t feel like songs—they’re more like information-delivery vehicles. (Rent is exhibit A, as Mitchell and Trask suggest in one of the movie’s sly fillips.) But the songs in Hedwig and the Angry Inch emerge organically from the story and then flow right back into it, in a kind of cosmic swirl. The numbers are beautifully staged, and as shot by cinematographer Frank G. DeMarco, they’re gorgeously vivid but never garish. One of the film’s most joyous sequences, “Wig in a Box,” begins with Hedwig lying despondent in her knickknack-filled trailer home, unable to rouse herself from bed in the aftermath of Luther’s desertion. But she finds courage in an eye-shadow palette, a tube of lip gloss, and that roller-coaster ride of a wig, transforming herself into a beauty of exquisite artificiality. As she does so, her bandmates, dressed in an array of Hawaiian shirts and tiny shorts—the one playing that most gloriously ridiculous instrument, the keytar, is Trask himself—invade her tiny trailer, imparting cooing harmonies and general good cheer. The song, and the occasion, is buoyant but also a little wistful, as if to acknowledge that the euphoric moments of our lives fade quickly: we’ve got to find a way to hang on to the perfume trail of their essence.

Mitchell’s face, in Hedwig, is the spec­ter of that perfume, a reflection of the beauty of imperfect happiness—because, after all, there’s no such thing as perfect happiness. And as exhilarating as that first onstage rendering of Hedwig was—I saw it, and it was like a rocket blasting up and away from the last days of the twentieth century—the movie Hedwig, in its extravagant intimacy, is the ultimate Hedwig. Because Mitchell’s face in close-up imparts secrets that can’t be telegraphed from the stage. His rendering of “The Origin of Love” comes early in the movie, clueing us in to Hedwig’s sense of displacement. (The story’s wistfulness is underscored by a series of gorgeously naive animation sequences by Emily Hubley, daughter of experimental animators John and Faith Hubley.) Hedwig sings the song onstage at one of those miserable fish joints, accompanied by her band, which includes her resentful Croatian ex-drag-queen lover, Yitzhak (played by the marvelous Miriam Shor)—the duo’s relationship is as complicated as you might imagine.

Made up for the stage, Hedwig is a magnificent pop-art invention: her lacquered lips are exactly the same glittery color as Judy Garland’s ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz; her eyelids are painted in iridescent seashell tones, like you’d see on mermaid royalty. But the sounds emerging from deep within her are wholly naked. This song, both melancholic and strangely optimistic, is music of pure yearning. “We wrapped our arms around each other / Tried to shove ourselves back together,” Hedwig sings, and it’s clear she’s thinking not just of a lost love but of the other half of her innermost self—the part of herself that has gone missing or, worse, been stolen.

Hedwig’s quest doesn’t end in tidy fulfillment. Yet her story has the happiest of endings, one that moves her—and us—closer to generosity and peace. Hedwig and the Angry Inch opened in movie theaters in the summer of 2001, just a couple of months before 9/11. It didn’t find a huge audience, if you judge it only by its box-office results. But the people who love Hedwig love it fiercely. The material has since been revived on Broadway (starring, most notably, Neil Patrick Harris) and by various touring companies. And Mitchell has continued to act and direct. His 2006 Shortbus is possibly the friendliest, sweetest film about group sex ever made; in 2017 he brought us How to Talk to Girls at Parties, a funny, pensive extraterrestrial love story adapted from source material by Neil Gaiman.

But Hedwig the movie will always stand apart as a lasting record of the precious alchemy between Trask and Mitchell. Hedwig and the Angry Inch isn’t an anthem of identity but a song of the self—there’s a  difference. “There are energies that we might call male and female within all of us,” Mitchell has said. “When you don’t exercise them, they tend to die, like a mouse in a wall, and they smell up the place.” Hedwig urges us to find those energies and exalt in them. Every pronoun we need is right there, within ourselves.