I didn’t really know much about Hedwig and the Angry Inch aside from the fact the main character had some sort of botched sex change operation. Given the title, I expected there to be a lot of rage in-between songs since it was also a musical.
But, since it was leaving HBO by the end of the month, I might as well check it out while I can. That way, I know for sure how angry that inch is.
Writer/director John Cameron Mitchell adapts and stars in this cinematic version of his off-Broadway musical. In it, he plays Hansel/Hedwig, an East German rock’n’roll wannabe growing up near the end of the Cold War, constantly looking for his/her platonic half.
I’m being vague on names and pronouns for now because the character herself is as well at various parts in the movie. From here, I’ll stick to the feminine.
Hedwig was born Hansel to an East German mother and an American GI father around the time the Berlin Wall went up, and while many people were fleeing West to get out of East Berlin, Hedwig’s mother opted instead to move East to get more certainty in her life. That’s the sort of thinking Hedwig and the Angry Itch seems to be looking to get into because for most of the movie’s runtime, Hedwig isn’t sure. Early on, Hedwig and her band sing a song about the Platonic Ideal of the sexes, where everyone that ever was was split into two, and true love is when you find the literal other half of your soul. Everyone in the world, according to this idea, was once half of a whole, and the other half is the person you are meant to be with. Sometimes the original person was two men, sometimes two women, and sometimes one of each gender, hence the end result being either homosexual or heterosexual partnerships.
Hedwig, it should be noted, says she tried all kinds of combinations before finally falling in with an American GI, a man who wanted to marry her and get her out of East Berlin. Using her mother’s name and passport, Hedwig went for a sex change that, well, left behind an inch’s worth of her male genitalia, hence the name of her reoccurring band. And yes, she is angry about it…at first.
For all the movie is titled “the Angry Inch“, I don’t see a lot of anger coming off this movie. It’s more confusion as Hedwig tries to find her way through a rapidly changing world and using 80s glam rock to get there, nurturing a young man into becoming a huge rock star on his own and trying to find love before realizing that really, if Hedwig wants to be “complete,” she needs to find it inside of herself and not from another person.
Now, for all the movie worked for me and played some pretty good 80s-era tunes, I will say that it did move very fast. There didn’t seem much time to linger on what was happening as the plot moved forward, and most of the plot was covered in songs Hedwig sang. As such, I really wished the movie would slow down just a little bit and linger, but that’s a relatively mild complaint in a movie that, quite frankly, may be more relevant now than it was when it first came out.
Grade: B+
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