Hedwig and the Angry Inch remains a testament to… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Hed­wig and the Angry Inch remains a tes­ta­ment to self-acceptance

12 Sep 2021

Words by Gina Tonic

Crowd of people holding umbrellas, with a woman in the centre wearing sunglasses and a bright pink umbrella.
Crowd of people holding umbrellas, with a woman in the centre wearing sunglasses and a bright pink umbrella.
John Cameron Mitchell’s cult 2001 musi­cal dra­ma is a poignant reminder of the pow­er of being yourself.

There was a peri­od in my life not so long ago where I watched John Cameron Mitchell’s Hed­wig and the Angry Inch once a day. The grasp the film had on me felt exact­ly like a teenage obses­sion – the kind where you can rat­tle off the mid­dle names, birth­days and pets of all the mem­bers of your favourite band on request, often when not actu­al­ly asked to divulge said infor­ma­tion at all.

At 24, I was past the point of car­ing about any­thing as much as I used to care about My Chem­i­cal Romance, but fol­low­ing a series of unfor­tu­nate men­tal health events, I was suck­ered into watch­ing Hedwig’s rock per­for­mances over and over and over. My mantra became this: If Hed­wig can get through a botched gen­der affir­ma­tion surgery, a stolen discog­ra­phy, repeat­ed heart­break since her child­hood and being mis­un­der­stood by the mass­es, sure­ly I can get through the low­est months of my life.

Four years lat­er, I still hold a can­dle for Ms Hed­wig Robin­son. Being a gen­derqueer East Ger­man singer in a fail­ing rock n’ roll band, her sto­ry may not seem out­ward­ly relat­able. But it has made every­one I’ve shown the film to feel seen. This is not your typ­i­cal rise-and-fall nar­ra­tive arc but rather a rise, fall, rise, fall, fall and rise again that is much more rep­re­sen­ta­tive of real life. Espe­cial­ly for any­one who has ever felt like an outsider.

Miri­am Shor, who played Yitzhak, Hedwig’s assis­tant, back­ing singer and hus­band in both Mitchell’s film and the orig­i­nal stage pro­duc­tion, agrees that Hed­wig is a sto­ry for any­one who has ever felt oth­ered. It’s the strug­gle that this per­son is going through to fig­ure out who they are in this bro­ken world. When they’ve been so hurt and so mis­used. It’s about answer­ing the ques­tion: How can you come to a place where you love yourself?”

Two women singing into a microphone on stage, one with dark hair and the other with blonde hair.

The musi­cal, Shor adds, came to life through work­shops, “​sit­ting in some aban­doned office where Stephen Trask [Hed­wig com­pos­er and on-screen band mem­ber Skszp] was just sit­ting on the floor with his gui­tar, mak­ing up har­monies and the songs while Mitchell [writer, direc­tor and Hed­wig her­self] fin­ished the sto­ry.” Hed­wig and the Angry Inch even­tu­al­ly opened 0ff-Broad­way in 1998, which led to the film’s pro­duc­tion and sub­se­quent release on 12 Sep­tem­ber, 2001.

This date, notable for its prox­im­i­ty to 911, to some extent helped to cement Hed­wig and the Angry Inch as a cult movie. Shor sug­gests that part of the rea­son the film has such a loy­al fan­base is because every­one loves an under­dog”. This cer­tain­ly rings true when you con­sid­er the film’s poor box office return, which Mitchell attrib­uted part­ly to its inaus­pi­cious release date.

Of course, the tit­u­lar char­ac­ter is not the sole under­dog in this sto­ry. With the excep­tion of Luther – whose back­sto­ry as a queer Black Amer­i­can lieu­tenant in Berlin is not explored – every­one in the film has their own issues. Yitzhak is strug­gling with his desire to be a drag queen while mar­ried to Hed­wig, who is obsessed with her ex. Hed­wig Schmidt, who gave Hed­wig her name, is a sin­gle moth­er liv­ing under com­mu­nist rule in East Berlin. Even Tom­my Gno­sis, the de fac­to vil­lain from a strict Chris­t­ian fam­i­ly, is wrestling with his sex­u­al iden­ti­ty when we are first intro­duced to him.

The com­plex iden­ti­ties rep­re­sent­ed through­out the film solid­i­fy its core mes­sage: Accept­ing your­self is a long, stress­ful and often har­row­ing jour­ney, par­tic­u­lar­ly when your gen­der or sex­u­al­i­ty have a his­to­ry of being mar­gin­alised in main­stream soci­ety. What makes this film spe­cial to me, a plus size queer woman who has strug­gled with body image, depres­sion and anx­i­ety repeat­ed­ly over the years, is that Hed­wig and her peers’ sto­ries are not try­ing to brush away our strug­gles with the stereo­typ­i­cal it gets bet­ter” mes­sage that is fre­quent­ly tout­ed to the LGBTQ+ community.

Instead, the acknowl­edge­ment that often life gets shit, then bet­ter, then shit again, is a much more real­is­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the ebbs and flows of liv­ing in a mar­gin­alised body.

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