My God, John Cameron Mitchell is cute. I’m not sure that I want to jump his bones exactly, but I love just looking at him. I’ve had a thing for blondes with beaks for some time now. When Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche were together and the hot topic among the entertainment press, I was ecstatic. We were getting two blondes with beaks for the price of one! And while ignoring her musical career entirely, I was just becoming a fan of Ashlee Simpson when she first dyed her hair, and then she got a nose job! Pretty much all that she left me is a bit part in The Hot Chick and her brief stint on “7th Heaven” as Simon’s girlfriend.

I think what I find attractive about the blonde with a beak is that she’s the odd duck out in a category that otherwise defines conventional beauty. As a result, she makes both being odd and being beautiful a little bit easier to take. Ashlee Simpson is certainly more “attractive” after her nosejob, but she’s more anonymous also and less interesting. In relation to the DeGeneres/Heche relationship, the beak represented in microcosm the oddity of being gay in a straight world. The more concretely homosexual DeGeneres is more embracing of being strange in general. Her persona is openly derivative of early Woody Allen, which is kind of interesting for a comedienne. While it shows that she’s definitely not trying to be the World’s Most Desirable Female, she isn’t afraid to come off as vulnerable. So many comediennes design themselves as rock hard prototypical feminists, i.e. Janeane Garofalo, Rosie O’Donnell, Roseanne, Wanda Sykes, et cetera. DeGeneres is the rare one to make herself the object of the audience’s (albeit somewhat light) derision.

According to myth anyway, the sorta bisexual Heche used her lesbian relationship with DeGeneres to jumpstart her career. Heche had arrived by 1998, starring in Psycho, Return to Paradise and Six Days and Seven Nights. In the last two films, a relatively conventional drama and comedy, she played the love interest and this had a likely unintentional subversive quality. In Psycho however, where distancing artifice is the entire point, Gus Van Sant exploited the subversiveness of using Heche as a sex symbol, her beak of course cementing the bird motif in Hitchcock’s original. Less comfortable with being odd, Heche is also less comfortable with being gay. It’s interesting to me that both women were sexually abused as children. But while DeGeneres’s clear recollection of the molestation contextualizes it as simply a painful memory, with Heche, it manifests itself into a multiple personality disorder. By denying being “damaged,” the extra burden of maintaining a facade results in a particularly explosive breakdown either in the form of Heche’s desert episode or the popular and critical failure of Van Sant’s bizarre Psycho remake.

The beak distinguishes John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig, a blonde East German partially transsexual rock star (a botched sex change operation left her with a useless one-inch mound of flesh). Drag queens usually have their tell with the nose, as do Jews, and part of the appeal of the Hedwig iconology is in seeing this Aryan archetype perverted by these homosexual and Semitic associations. Onto herself, Hedwig does Cabaret better than Cabaret does. As an East German partially transsexual rock star, particularly as a blonde with a beak, Mitchell transforms Hedwig into a consummate sexual icon. She is simultaneously straight and gay, masculine and feminine, a conventional sex symbol while being entirely unconventional. None of these traits are polar opposites of one another; they are all dually embodied, neither one compromised.

I admit being quite suspicious going into Hedwig and the Angry Inch. What I knew was that writer/director/star Mitchell adapted the film from his stage musical of the same name and used the fame he earned from the film’s success to become a spokesperson for the Independent Film Channel. I also remember seeing him on “Politically Incorrect” with Bill Maher where he once embarrassingly insisted to an indignant Johnny Rotten that Rotten “loved” bandmate Sid Vicious and would have gotten him off drugs if he could. Despite the fact that he went on to write and direct an acclaimed buzzworthy follow-up with Shortbus, apparently proving that he’s the real deal, I smelled something faddish about the whole Hedwig phenomenon. Mitchell seemed to me to be a hipper Nia Vardalos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame. Indeed, the first ten minutes or so of the film suggested a skit on “The Ben Stiller Show.” I was fully prepared to call “gimmick.” Alas, Mitchell is a lot smarter, braver, and more sophisticated than these superficial impressions suggest. The idea of using an East German partially transsexual rock star to satirize the pretension of ‘70s glam rock is certainly very clever, and Mitchell squeezes plenty of humor out of the concept, but his aspirations go beyond the merely comedic.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is essentially heartfelt and sincere. On a very real level, Mitchell sees Hedwig as a tragic figure ennobled and empowered through the magic of rock and roll. As Hedwig herself is the consummate sexual icon, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is the consummate movie, often hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time. This is never better illustrated than in a scene where Hedwig’s first sexual experience (with a U.S. master sergeant) is delicately implied through the mastication of gummy bears, surely the funniest substitution for oral sex since Vanilla Ice fed Kristin Minter an ice cube in Cool as Ice.

Initially, I groaned a bit when Hedwig revealed in flashback that her father raped her. This seems to invite such worn-to-the-stump simplicities as “Child molestation leads to homosexuality” or the overly reactive counterpart “Child molestation doesn’t lead to homosexuality.” But as I suggested in my comments about the DeGeneres/Heche relationship (treating it like a work of fiction of course), the bond between molestation and homosexuality may be more metaphorical than literal. A garden-variety homosexual may share with a molestation victim the feeling of being inherently “damaged” and alienated from the rest of society. They may also feel that there is a part of themselves that they must constantly keep secret and can never really fully acknowledge.

The association of a gay sexual orientation with a gay identity typically occurs during adolescence, when an individual is particularly vulnerable to self-mythology. Saddled with a conventionally unpopular sexual identity, persecution fantasies and Christ parables are especially appealing to gay teenagers. It’s impossible to write, direct, and star in a film like Hedwig and the Angry Inch without coming off as at least mildly narcissistic. Watching the “Wig in a Box” musical number, I couldn’t help but being bowled over when Mitchell intercuts close-ups of himself. Could you imagine the balls on this guy? I think that one of the principal motivations for giving Hedwig a history of sexual abuse is simply to give her a history. Child psychologist David Elkind’s specific term for teenage narcissism is “personal fable.” Teens like to think their lives are special and they will one day have an “E! True Hollywood Story” made about them. An early incidence of sexual abuse automatically establishes Hedwig as a tragic figure and a survivor. Without it, her meteoric rise to fame and failed romantic relationships appear considerably less significant.

Still, it’s fascinating how well Hedwig’s story fits into the predominant psychosocial models for the causes of homosexuality. Freud theorized that homosexuality was the result of a failure to resolve the Oedipal complex. In a normal two-parent family, the son falls in love with his mother and, identifying with the predominant male figure, sees his father as competition. But when the father is physically or emotionally unavailable or the mother is the dominant figure of the relationship, the son’s adoration of his mother transforms into identification, which in turn transforms into rivalry for the father’s love. Freud’s theories seem to be supported by studies showing that male homosexuals often grew up with cold and distant fathers. (I should add that these studies are not universally accepted. Many academics suggest that such studies misattribute causality to a simple correlation. Fathers may reject their sons after sensing that they are homosexual and as such, undesirable.)

In Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Mom kicks Dad out when she finds out that he has been having his way with her son. Dad barely makes an appearance in the film and that’s sort of the point. Hedwig mentions that his father was an American G.I. and what do you know, the first real love of his life was an American master sergeant! The “absent father” theory doesn’t have a lot of currency when you read it as causing homosexuality through a lack of proper gender socialization. If masculinity is defined as rugged individualism, the homosexual male actually has greater potential for being masculine than the heterosexual male. He never has to succumb to the pro-social collectivism of family formation. But the idea has some meat to it if you regard male-on-male intimacy as being a natural need typically fulfilled through fatherhood and the homosexual orientation as being a (potentially maladaptive?) means to compensate for this lack of intimacy. Which would explain why Hedwig’s first love shares the same nationality and career field as his missing father. The implication is that the molestation itself is not the cause of Hedwig’s homosexuality, it’s his mother’s reaction to it.

Hedwig is not the character’s real name. She was born Hansel. Hedwig is her mother’s name, adopted at the time of the sex change operation. This very explicitly supports Freud’s notion of the homosexual child identifying with the mother figure. He took his name from her, how much more direct to you have to get? What’s interesting, though, is that Mitchell doesn’t idealize the mother. She doesn’t particularly encourage little Hedwig’s musical interests and pushes him into getting the failed sex change operation so that he can marry the master sergeant. Hedwig and the Angry Inch is faithful to a certain strain of gay mythology, but by refusing to idealize the mother figure Mitchell gives it a certain darkness and complexity. Hedwig comes off as an Adam figure borne from a polluted God.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch utilizes a remarkably popular plot among GLBT cinema-- the tale of “Beauty and the Beast.” This involves the older, rather exclusively homosexual protagonist, the less gay but more attractive (or at least more confident) object of his affection and the heartbreak that inevitably results. Hedwig’s love interest in the film is Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt), a precociously beautiful 17-year-old Jesus freak obsessed with rock music. Hedwig takes Tommy under her wing only to have him leave her and become a wildly popular rock star using Hedwig’s songs. This kind of relationship is inherently poignant and darkly funny. The joke of Lolita is that youth is a double-edged sword; it’s romantic and innocent while being self-absorbed and vapid. We value youth for its simplicity, but that simplicity is ultimately what causes it to lose its luster. Tommy doesn’t seem to understand how he hurt Hedwig by leaving her or that using their material in his act is wrong. He understands, vaguely I think, that being associated with her could hurt his career, but this could likely only be credited to the foresight of his handlers. Tommy is dumb. Really dumb. The pain that he causes Hedwig seems to be largely inflicted naively; he just doesn’t have the insight to understand the parameters and meaning of the relationship.

Near the end of the film, Tommy picks Hedwig up in his limousine and offers her credit for the songs she wrote. They sing along to Tommy’s rendition of “The Origin of Love,” an epic ballad inspired by the comedian Aristophanes’s sarcastic eulogy to love in Plato’s Symposium. The song suggests that in ancient times humans were all four-armed, four-legged creatures. Frightened at their power, the gods decided to cut them in half. These half-people have since struggled to become complete again, hence the concept of “love” was born. They are having fun until Hedwig notices Tommy singing about “the Cyrus” when the proper lyric is “Osiris.” Tommy doesn’t see the difference, but Hedwig is adamant that it has to be Osiris, the Egyptian god of life. “Cyrus” isn’t the god of anything. Remember? They read that book?

The “Cyrus” incident reveals the adolescent Tommy as a bit of a poser. Their relationship was built on false pretenses. Tommy isn’t really “gay,” or rather, he’s not particularly epicene like Hedwig. He’s not dealing with this 24/7. Similarly, he’s not a real rock star. His perversion of the name Osiris sounds like one of the Transformers. While he bitches about his father, we detect that his problems are of the conventional whiny white-boy variety, nothing to the extent of Hedwig’s tragic life. The injustice of what Tommy has done is that he hasn’t suffered like Hedwig has and thus he cannot truly appreciate the transcendent mythology of “The Origin of Love.” It seems that they never really did write the song together and as thus it wasn’t his to sing.

There is another telling moment when Hedwig and Tommy overhear the neighbor singing Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.” Tommy says that he wishes that he could hit her notes and asks Hedwig if she believes that love lasts forever. “No,” Hedwig replies, “but this song does.” Tommy not only appreciates Dolly Parton on a soulless technical level; he’s impressed with the banal sentiments of the song. Hedwig follows up his wisecrack with, “But seriously, Tommy. Yes. I believe that love lasts forever.” She’s still a romantic, mind you, but she has already embraced and built upon the notion of eternal love while Tommy is still in the preliminary stages of accepting it. Ultimately, their May-December relationship is doomed to fail because Hedwig already has a good fifteen to twenty years of additional life experience. They see their collaboration and relationship in different terms. For Tommy, it’s a life event that he will outgrow. For Hedwig, it’s fate. (Aside: perhaps even more than any apocryphal information we may gain about Mitchell’s childhood in Germany, this riff on Dolly Parton very lucidly removes any barrier between Mitchell and Hedwig, helping to make the film something more substantial than a Ben Stiller skit.)

Here’s what Tommy says to conclusively seduce Hedwig:

You know, what [Christ] was saving us from, was his fucking father. I mean, what kind of God creates Adam, in his image, and then pulls Eve out of him to keep him company. And then tells him not to eat from the tree of knowledge. I mean, he was so micromanaging. So was Adam. But Eve…Eve just wanted to know shit. She took a bite of the apple. She found out what was good and what was evil. Then she gave it to Adam so he would know. Because they were in love. And it was good. They now knew…. Hedwig? Would you give me the apple?

Hedwig mistakenly sees Tommy as her soulmate. Tommy seems to cement it by producing this impromptu monologue which suggests that he shares Hedwig’s belief in a pre-existence where two people existed within the same body. The problem here is that in the original Aristophanes monologue, as well as Hedwig’s “The Origin of Love,” the four-legged, four-armed people globs sometimes had two males, sometimes had two females, and sometimes had one of each. Aristophanes made little distinction between male-male, female-female, and male-female couplings. However, the Adam and Eve myth explicitly limits itself to heterosexuality. If homosexual couplings were to exist at all, it would have to be as a perversion as opposed to simply another species in the human menagerie. You know; it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. In this monologue, Tommy explicitly states that he views Hedwig as a woman, as an Eve figure that he hopes will teach him how to love. But Hedwig is not a woman. She is not a man either. She’s a failed transsexual with an angry inch, and while this doesn’t particularly disgust Tommy, it’s enough to disorient him—knock him off his feet a bit—and this starts the disintegration of the relationship.

Hedwig ponders:

It is clear that I must find my other half. But is it a he or a she? What does this person look like? Identical to me? Or somehow complimentary? Does my other half have what I don't? Did he get the looks? The luck? The love? Were we really separated forcibly or did he just run off with the good stuff? Or did I? Will this person embarrass me? What about sex? Is that how we put ourselves back together again? Or can two people actually become one again?

Hedwig is confused because she is actually already complete. There is no soulmate or other half. Everything she needs is right there. She is simultaneously male and female and as thus is no longer seeking spiritual completion. Mitchell seems to find it very important that the film ends with Hedwig removing her wig. When he performed “Tear Me Down” on “Late Night with David Letterman,” he was gently informed that he couldn’t remove his wig during the song. He decided that he would remove it afterwards and this was edited out of the final tape. Tearing the wig off is a bluntly confrontational act, not as much about rejecting Hedwig’s feminine side as forcing us to accept her masculine side. Seeing Hedwig only as a woman, or even only as a man in drag, we aren’t getting the whole story. Ultimately, our perception of the character must accommodate Hedwig-as-a-man. It’s about not being angry about that extra inch anymore.

The film’s ending shows Hedwig’s two-face tattoo, representing the Aristophanes myth, morphing into a single face. The last shot shows a now completely naked Hedwig boldly and unabashedly walking down a dark alley. She has been reborn and is now presumably finally complete and at peace with herself. It’s a triumphant ending, but kind of melancholy too. The film’s final musical number is “Midnight Radio,” where Hedwig does a shoutout to “Patti,” “Tina,” “Yoko,” “Aretha,” “Nona,” and “Nico.” On some level, particularly with the mentions of “Tina” and “Aretha,” the idea seems to be to position Hedwig as a diva goddess, burnt by love until she decides that she doesn’t need a man to complete her. The film’s last image completely embodies this idea of feminist empowerment, while exposing it as overly simplistic and reactionary. There is something frightening and lonely about the idea of being complete. To be truly complete ultimately means that you have no use for love and by implication, no use for human contact. I’m reminded of the Doctor Manhattan character in Alan Moore’s life-changing Watchmen, who after becoming a God, finds that he has no use for normal human relationships as they fulfill needs that are far below his frame of reference. Kubrick’s 2001 ended with Dave Bowman becoming the Star Child. In Hedwig and the Angry Inch we see the Star Child about to re-enter conventional human society.

I appreciate Hedwig and the Angry Inch on a number of levels, but somehow I find myself watching it from the outside. Somewhere along the line, it leaves me a little cold. I have some minor complaints here and there. At times, I think that Mitchell moves a little too close to “Ben Stiller skit.” (Hedwig was kicked out of college after writing a dissertation on the influence of German philosophy in rock and roll. It was called “You Kant Always Get What You Want.” In the film’s worst gag, he performs at a pseudo-Lilith Fair event called “Menses Fair”.) I think this helps isolate the film from becoming too “pretentious” and inaccessible; on a certain level Mitchell wants it to be kind of a joke. And even with that said, I found myself disappointed that he doesn’t go all out with the sing-along gimmick during the “Wig in a Box” number.

But I think my biggest problem with the film is that there is just no mystery to it. I realized that I have no real reason to ever watch it again. Mitchell’s use of voiceover and flashbacks kind of expunges everything out for us, where paradoxically a straightforward linear approach might make the audience work more or leave something to chance. Some truly Great films like Taxi Driver and A Clockwork Orange are told through a singular subjective perspective, but even then objective reality seems to intrude every once in a while and the films let us dream a little. But Hedwig and the Angry Inch is purely subjective. There is never an instance where we are able to distance ourselves and see Hedwig as an object. She seems to be just as smart if not smarter than we are, and that fossilizes the film more than the misanthropic and icy Kubrick approach ever could.

All the same though, John Cameron Mitchell has definitively proven that he is no fuckin’ Nia Vardalos. Bring on Shortbus, say I!