When I saw that The Loft Cinema would be showing it for a week, I knew I had to go, and I knew I had to persuade my daughter to join me.
I explained to her what makes the film so compelling.
It tells the story of Hansel, a boy who grows up in East Berlin with a single mother, obsessed with the popular music of the West that he can pick up on his radio.
One day, while sunbathing face down near the Wall, he catches the eye of Luther, an African-American solider who claims to mistake him for a girl. Responding enthusiastically to Luther’s advances, Hansel soon finds himself in what was a common scenario for German women in the years following World War II, in a relationship with someone capable of giving him coveted American citizenship.
The only problem is that Hansel is a boy.
At the urging of both Luther and his mother, Hansel consents to a sex-change operation. But he is living in the Communist Bloc during the 1980s. The procedure goes awry, leaving him with a genital area that resists classification according to biological sex.
Hansel becomes Hedwig. But instead of ending up with a simulated vagina, he is left with a gash that soon heals shut, leaving a scar. He also loses most of the penis he was born with, but not all of it, retaining the “angry inch” of the title, a sensitive mound of flesh that defies categorisation.
One year later, Hedwig is living in Junction City, Kansas, preparing to celebrate her first wedding anniversary with Luther. The date is 9 November 1989. Unfortunately, as she watches footage of her former countrymen and women taking hammers to the Berlin Wall, Luther announces that he is leaving her for a male lover.
Abandoned in a still-unfamiliar land whose freedoms now seem a lot less enticing than they did when Communism still held sway in her homeland, Hedwig takes to sex work and babysitting to scrape by.
She begins performing music in drag, with other soldiers’ Korean wives as her backing group. Later, once her act has become more polished, she puts together a real band and begins touring the States, confronting incredulous and sometimes outright hostile audiences with the spectacle of her radical otherness, turning her improbable story into the subject of her show.
Although I knew this summary would probably be enough to pique my daughter’s interest, I also played her the video for the song “The Origin of Love”, the centrepiece of Stephen Trask’s superb score, which seamlessly integrates glam, punk, and 1970s-style power ballads into a musical aesthetic worthy of David Bowie. That was more than enough to convince her.
As we settled into our seats for the 22:30-hour screening, I realised that this would be the first time I had watched the whole film since my first viewing in another Tucson theatre.
It struck me how strange this was. The soundtrack had been hugely popular in our household in the wake of seeing Hedwig. We’d even had a poster for the film on the wall of our master bedroom for decades.
I’m sure there are people who are content to see a film they love once and be done with it. The opposite is true for me, though.
It’s in my blood. My father eagerly looked forward to new productions of his beloved Verdi operas, even though he had seen them dozens of times. He and my mother would go see Gone With the Wind on the big screen every time it returned to theatres. And they took my sister and I along in the 1970s whenever Disney would re-release one of its classic animated films.
My daughter, who grew up in the era of practically limitless home video options, is even more inclined towards repetitive consumption. After she discovered Singin’ in the Rain as a three-year-old, she insisted on watching it 75 times in the following year. And she has continued that approach ever since, seeing favourites like David Fincher’ Zodiac and Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue over and over, often with me happily by her side.
So why had Hedwig been different?
Before the film started playing, the only answer I had come up with was vicarious castration anxiety. Perhaps the bodily mutilation that leaves Hedwig with that angry mound of flesh upset me more than I realised at the time.
Fifteen minutes in, the reason hit me. It wasn’t what happens to Hedwig that had unsettled me, but what happened to my world shortly after seeing the film the first time.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch came out in the summer of 2001. By the time I saw it, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11th were only weeks away.
In fact, because my movie-mad wife and I were struggling with our daughter’s recovery from a year of painful ear infections, the surgery that she had had earlier in the summer, and the temporary hearing loss that helped make her particularly resistant to being babysat, Hedwig was the penultimate film that I had been able to see in a theatre when the twin towers fell and therefore an experience still fresh in my mind.
Compounding my sense that the film was identified with a crucial turning point in history was the way it depicts the end of the Cold War.
I met my future wife on 30 October, 1989.
Back then I was living in a communal house well-known on the international anarchist circuit. At the time, two German university students connected with the squatting movement were sleeping on our living-room floor.
When my future wife and her friend missed the last convenient transportation back to their respective homes, I offered to let them crash at our house. That’s how she met those two Germans, who were drawn to her sharp-edged punk sensibility and refusal to conform to the rules of polite society.
She ended up buying the 1976 Chevy Malibu they had driven across the United States and delighted them by creating a makeshift mural on the wall of the living room.
She was visiting me again when the Germans were glued to the shaky image of our household television set, watching the same clip featured in Hedwig.
Because I’d had the opportunity to visit East Berlin in February, 1987 during my post-high school year as an exchange student in West Germany and had then became a German major once I started attending UC-Berkeley, the fact that my new relationship was bound up with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc felt profound.
In retrospect, I recognise that part of the reason Hedwig moved me so deeply when I saw it in the summer of 2001 was that her journey unfolded on the same historical timeline as mine.
While the divide between Hedwig’s “before” and “after” is obviously much more extreme than my own was, I still identified with her predicament, having to make her way in an unfamiliar environment for which her past life wasn’t much help.
That also explains why I didn’t return to Hedwig and the Angry Inch after September 11th.
The film takes place in the same temporal container, between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror, when my world seemed full of possibility and being happy seemed easy.
Back then, it felt like we were moving into a brave new reality, where immense pressure to tear down the walls dividing us—that was also the heyday of the pre-monetisation internet—could turn the coal of existence into diamonds.
After September 11th, though, this prospect faded from view. Ever since then, the hopes kindled during the 1990s have been extinguished one by one.
Not long ago, one exception to this narrative of decline was a greater awareness of the diverse ways in which human identity intersects with sexual preference and bodily perception.
Capitalism might be making things worse for all but the most privileged. Climate change might be trending toward a point of no return. But at least the world was a little more accepting of people who resist the idea that biological sex is destiny.
Yet as the ruthless assault on the LGBTQ+ community by authoritarian populists throughout the developed world is demonstrating, invoking “diversity” is now a way to weaponise hate.
The hope for a “third way” forward in the wake of the East German government’s collapse in 1989 soon turned into despair for many of its former citizens, doomed to second-class status within reunited Germany.
Today, something similar is happening for people who find themselves on the wrong side of the wall dividing “normal” from everyone who is deemed to fall short of that standard.
At a time when the world seems to be rushing headlong into a dark age of intolerance and cruelty, revisiting Hedwig and the Angry Inch was a painful experience. But one that felt all the more necessary as a consequence.
As we find ourselves retreating to a “before”, remembering that it was once possible to live “after” could save our lives.
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Screenshot courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers. All rights reserved.
