BEFORE: I'm going in as cold as I can to this one, though I've heard various things about it over the years - and I do have a tiny connection to the film, which I'll explain later. I'm assuming that there's a romantic angle to the storyline here, which means that my annual romance chain is still going. And if it is, I'm not sure where it will end, but probably at some point next week in the middle of a Richard Burton/Liz Taylor chain. (But, hey, you could say all romance in the 1970's died in the middle of a Burton/Taylor thing...)
Two observations - first, I think this has been the most musical February chain I ever put together, with 10 classic movie musicals (5 with Fred Astaire, 5 with Howard Keel) and then the more modern musicals: "Once", "Sing Street", "Beauty and the Beast", and "Mamma Mia!". That's just about half a month's programming for me coming from where romance and music coincide. So maybe this is the perfect time to get to "Hedwig and the Angry Inch", which later morphed into a Broadway musical itself. (EDIT: Oh, I guess it was an off-Broadway musical first, then a film, but then it became a Broadway musical. My bad.)
Secondly, it's been, rather inadvertently, the queerest February on record. That started back with "Far From Heaven" and then gay (or at least bi-curious) characters popped up in "The Overnight", "Nocturnal Animals", "Beginners", "Beauty and the Beast", "Mamma Mia!" and "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2". OK, so in some films they were more important to the plot than in others, but at least they're getting more representation these days in movies, and my programming's starting to reflect that. Jeez, if I'd known this was going to be such a running theme this month, I would have worked "Albert Nobbs" into the February chain (with Glenn Close appearing in "Le Divorce", I'm sure it must have been possible...).
Anyway, this was another (nearly) un-linkable film, but I got lucky, and Andrea Martin carries over from "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2" - however, tomorrow I'm going to need to rely on another indirect link in order to continue.
THE PLOT: A transgender punk-rock girl from East Berlin tours the U.S. with her band as she tells her life story and follows the former lover/band-mate who stole her songs.
AFTER: I really should pay more attention to each film's director, because I just realized that in addition to starring in and directing today's film, John Cameron Mitchell also directed "Rabbit Hole", the film I used to kick off this February's chain. (If only he had done a cameo in that film, my linking job could have been much, much easier...). Anyway, my tenuous connection to this film is that I was at the Sundance Festival in 2001 when it played there. An animated film I produced, "Mutant Aliens" was in the midnight section of that same festival, and we rented a small apartment in town with two bedrooms and a pull-out couch, and had about 17 or 18 people sleeping there. Three of our crew were also there to see "Hedwig", which they had also worked on, but tickets for that were difficult to get. I was the guy then who would get up early (or more accurately, stay up all night) so I could go to the ticket office at 5 am and buy whatever I could, re-selling my extras to my friends. I ended up seeing a ridiculous number of movies that week, but not "Hedwig". (This trip was repeated 3 years later in 2004 with me trying in vain to see "Super Size Me".). So I always felt a little guilty that I didn't make more of an effort to see this film that three friends worked on - I'm fixing that today.
I'm secure enough that I can admit that there are many things that I don't understand about the gay or trans experience, despite having an ex-wife who now has a wife, and living in NYC throughout the 1990's, when the gay rights movement got radicalized as ACT-UP and people in general became more open about their orientation and preferences - I know this term "sexual preference" has fallen out of favor, but I'm not up on the current lingo. I guess to some people it implies that orientation is a choice, and they would rather have everyone believe that it's ingrained - I don't have any problem with the term because hey, at least you live in a society that allows you to HAVE a preference in the first place, isn't that a positive thing? And if someone is born with an orientation, don't they make a choice over whether to follow it or not?
Here's what I don't understand about Hedwig's story (which seems like it might have been just a bit ahead of its time, or is that just me?) - when he's a teen in East Germany, and he falls in love with a U.S. soldier, that man wants to marry him and bring him out of his Communist country, back to the U.S. as his wife. But to do that, because there was no gay marriage then, Hedwig had to get a sex change operation (I guess now they call it "gender reassignment surgery") and become a transsexual woman. But if the soldier was in love with him as a gay man, how would the surgery improve on that? I don't know why the soldier would rather marry a surgically-created woman than the man he fell in love with, this seems to run counter to the gay rights movement that told people in the 1990's that they were fine the way they were born, that being a gay man wasn't wrong or in need of some correction. So either I'm not following the logic, or this is a NITPICK POINT plot problem, or I have a large lack of understanding where gay relationships are concerned. But possibly I've encountered an imbalance between the transgender rights movement and the gay rights movement. Current PC reasoning tells us that gender reassignment surgery is fine, but gay conversion therapy is not - and now I'm thinking there might be a very fine line between the two.
Anyway, Hedwig goes through with the operation, which is not a success, and after moving to America, her husband leaves her for another man, and then another ironic twist - the Berlin Wall comes down, Germany is reunited, and East Germany becomes free, meaning the rules that led to Hedwig's operation are no more. I can't decide if this timing was included just to make the story more tragic, or if there's some larger life lesson. But if there is, it's somewhat contradictory as well, because while the general gay rights advice is to go out and try to change the world, the takeaway here seems to be that if you are just patient and wait, the world may change around you. But then I guess history has not always favored the pioneers and radicals.
After forming her first band with other Army wives (mostly ones from Korea), Hedwig takes up with Tommy, the son of the Army base's commander, who's questioning his Christian morality and also trying to start a music career. Together they compose songs, and form a band and a relationship, but at some point (when Tommy discovers Hedwig's medical abnormality? It's tough to say...) Tommy leaves and takes all of their songs with him, and this leads Hedwig to file a lawsuit, form a new band, and follow the now-famous Tommy on the road.
This is another film that follows a split-timeline structure, though - and while that's easy enough to understand at the start, the audience is still thrown into the middle of the story and has to play catch-up. Flashbacks detail Hedwig's early history and (eventually) her break-up with Tommy, but for the first half of the film, we don't know WHY Hedwig is dogging Tommy, or what she's trying to accomplish. That's all well and good, I support keeping things mysterious for a time, but the non-linear storytelling leads to problems when Hedwig and Tommy meet again - I wasn't sure if this was taking place in the present, the past or some potential imagined future.
The animated sequences I mentioned before recount an ancient tale of a time when humans had two heads, four arms and four legs, and were split in half by the gods. (This goes back to Plato and Aristophanes, so my Greek connection is maintained for another day!) It was a nonsensical story even back then, about why we humans spend so much time searching for relationships, because we're all trying to find out "other halves". But this updated version of the story makes things even more complicated, by showing the three sexes that existed before the split - the Children of the Sun (who looked like two men stuck together), the Children of the Earth (like two women) and the Children of the Moon (who looked like four-armed, four-legged hermaphrodites). So after the gods split these three sexes, this supposedly explains why some men seek out women, some men seek out men, and so on. I don't know, this is a long way to go, isn't it easier in the end just to say that some dudes like to sleep with other dudes?
The film drags (sorry, no pun intended) in the middle part, and the ending was super-confusing. Like there's a final (dream sequence?) where Hedwig takes off her wig and dress, and gives the wig to another male band member, who is then transformed into a beautiful woman - or was she a woman in drag as a man the whole time? (I knew it was an actress playing a man, because, come on...) Then Hedwig walks off naked into the night. But I lost track of what was going on well before that, so it seemed more like a non-ending than anything else. Dumb it down for us straights so we can at least try to understand where you're coming from...
Also starring John Cameron Mitchell, Miriam Shor (last seen in "Bedazzled"), Stephen Trask, Michael Pitt (last seen in "Criminal"), Theodore Liscinski, Rob Campbell (last seen in "Rabbit Hole"), Michael Aronov, Alberta Watson, Ben Mayer-Goodman, Gene Pyrz, Sook-Yin Lee, Maurice Dean Wint, Karen Hines (last seen in "Man of the Year"), with a cameo from Rosie O'Donnell (last seen in "The Flintstones").
RATING: 4 out of 10 (conveniently identical looking) Bilgewater's restaurants
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