96 | Sight&Sound | April 2020
By Ben Walters
It can be hard to be in between and it can be
supple. You might be pulverised and you might
be quicksilver. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
is a deeply liminal work, a film that straddles,
dances around and stumbles against and across
thresholds of many kinds – personal, formal,
industrial, world-historical. It sings the glory of
fluidity and change, predominantly in modes
of barbed and exuberant agency, charting the
labour pains of a flailing yet defiant self struggling
toward affirmation in a world of cruelty and
failure. It’s fierce and sure and on a mission. And
then, in its closing moments, as its lead stumbles
naked down an alleyway, away from the camera,
reborn into mystery, it opens itself up to the
tender terror of mere uncharted possibility.
Hedwig had unusual origins. In the mid-
1990s, writer-director-performer John Cameron
Mitchell, who had a background in theatre,
worked with musician Stephen Trask to develop
and showcase the character and story of Hedwig
in the bars and clubs of New York’s downtown
queer scene. These appearances developed into a
rock musical that Mitchell himself adapted into a
movie. The story’s main character, played by the
director, grows up in East Berlin as Hansel, falls in
love with an American soldier, is pressured into a
botched sex change, gets married, moves to the USand is dumped, in a trailer park, on the eve of the
fall of the Berlin Wall. A romance with teenager
Tommy (Michael Pitt) leads to a passionate
musical collaboration; after a bitter split, Hedwig,
now a punk-glam sacred monster demanding
recognition and redemption, trails Tommy across
the country, band in tow, playing crummy family
restaurants near the stadiums where her ex
excels. Identities, relationships and hierarchies
slip and flip all over. This fits Hedwig’s historical
moment of radical geopolitical uncertainty,
after the crumbling of Cold War binaries and
before the toxic Othering of the war on terror.
It’s a film, then, of strange transgressions and
contingencies. For Hedwig, gender is a malleable
technology of self-fashioning and social navigation.
For Mitchell, the project was a vehicle for
expressive self-exploration outside the mainstream.
As a feature production (backed by New York-
based Killer Films), Hedwig benefited from an
industrial moment amenable to both queer
experiment and independent filmmaking. And
as a text, it swerves straightforward conventions
of genre, tone and form – not least in its ending.
The film’s last act is a 20-minute fantasia or
fugue in which narrative, dialogue and indeed
drag fall away in a tumult of blurred personae,
released resentments and dawning realisations. A
frenetic gig fragments into fractured flashbacks,Hedwig sheds her wig and dress and, in a space
outside story, faces Tommy, makes amends with
the band and finally drifts out alone into the
night, letting go of the driving hunger for external
validation and vengeance to find a kind of peace.
Hedwig’s final shot lasts a minute and a half
and follows the character as they walk, naked
and gingerly, down a wet, harshly lit Lower
Manhattan alleyway toward the street. There’s
a new register of both calm and welcomed
vulnerability on Mitchell’s face, a sense that this is
no longer Hansel or Hedwig but a new self being
born. The camera cranes up as they walk away,
long shadow lingering, teetering to lean against
a wall for support, walking through a puddle
then pausing as the alley meets the street. One
of the film’s original songs, ‘The Origin of Love’,
starts to play, mythically evoking a time when
humans were whole and happy and there was
no need for love. As Mitchell crosses the street,
people walk past, going about their business. No
one even looks. It’s New York, after all. Mitchell
reaches the far sidewalk and the top of the
frame, unclothed in any way, unencumbered by
the gaze of others, unaware of what the future
might bring, and is gone. People keep walking.
The song keeps playing. The credits roll.
A story about desperate, passionate and often
harmful projects of self-realisation and self-
determination ends with a quiet un-becoming
and an implicit faith in the kindness of strangers
and perhaps the kindness of strangeness too. Here
is a way of understanding Hedwig’s queer value.
It’s a work with a deep investment in things that
aren’t fixed, and in the impossible challenge of
finding both pride and love in a wicked world.HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH
As the lead character slips away at
the close of John Cameron Mitchell’s
genderbending musical fantasia, a
new self is quietly being bornThe film ends with an implicit
faith in the kindness of
strangers and perhaps the
kindness of strangeness too
ENDINGS...