Filmvisning: Hedwig and the Angry Inch

It’s been a decade since I first wrote about John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I was just a baby at 22, casually failing a number of my university classes due to a mix of laziness, day-job exhaustion (which has gotten worse since), and a greater interest in scrolling down iCheckMovies. At this age, I still thought of myself as cis, not so far removed from my high school days, when I thought leaning into masculinity would make me “not like those other gays” and more appealing and accessible to those around me.

Revisiting that essay, I see the seeds of whom I’d become down the road, not just in the writing but also in the feeling behind the writing. Like Hedwig never imagined having to truly reflect on the cards life had dealt them, wandering aimlessly or purposefully (depending on your reading of the ending), I never imagined that my perspectives on queerness and cinema would one day be so challenged. Every queer film I encounter today is a new chance for me to reassess what queerness can look like in cinema. With such a malleable term as “queer cinema,” we have to create our own definition and understanding: for me, it is not to fall in line with the status quo, trying to blandly mimic convention, but to dive into what it means to exist as the “other” in any given situation.
But Hedwig is why I’m here.

In Hedwig, transition is less about gender and more about how these myriad identities are all part of a whole. The film reminds me that each discovery in our lives allows us to transition to the next stage, to again and again reshape our engagement with everything from gender to art. 

In “Wig in a Box,” Hedwig may sing that she turns back to herself as soon as she wakes up, but her dreams are part of her waking reality. I once referred to film and character alike as “an over-the-top mess,” but never took the time to reflect on why that “mess” was a feature, not a bug. To be queer is to be a mess, to be strange, to be an oddity in the face of normalcy, to be the abject in a populace that seeks exaltation. Every perfectly manicured personality is a piece of her.

If “The Origin of Love” posits that each of us is two individuals, I challenge that by suggesting that maybe our identities are a lot more like some grotesque mound of flesh out of a Clive Barker novel: each person, or piece of art, or life experience we ingest becomes an indispensable part of us, for better or worse. It may look like a mess, but it sure is a lot more fun. Hedwig is so much more complicated than the “scarred person” I once dismissed her as; she deserves more than the simple labels prescribed to her. (And I Turn Back to Myself. Juan Barquin Revisits Hedwig and the Angry Inch. REVERSE SHOT | SYMPOSIUM)

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