Whether You Like It or Not

My significant other and myself recently purchased a couple of roulette slots for that Groupon thing where you are entered to win a date with Neil Patrick Harris, plus tickets to the recently revived (and recently Tony-winning) stage production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in New York City. I had heard a little bit about the stage revival and how well it's been received, but with the advent of the whole Groupon thing, I figured it would be an apt moment to discuss some thoughts I've recently had about John Cameron Mitchell's film adaptation from 2001, which is how most people first got to know the character and her story.

At the time of its release, Hedwig was promoted (lauded, by some) as a sympathetic portrayal of a punked-out, glam rock transvestite trying to get revenge on her rockstar ex-boyfriend, who has abandoned her and stolen all of her music after being uncomfortably confronted with the details of Hedwig's botched sex-change surgery. (Possibly somewhat transphobically, the film was also immediately earmarked as a prefab, out-of-the-box successor to the similarly genderbent midnight staple The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and screenings summarily augmented with shadow casts and sing-alongs.)

I've never had a chance to personally experience the original stage production of Hedwig, but the moment for its revival seems apt, mainly because of the way that the climate surrounding gender identity has massively and publicly evolved during the past thirteen years since the film's initial release. If anything, John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig was characterized originally in the press surrounding the film as a kind of bizarre, fringe gay icon -- meaning, essentially, a gay male icon. The pressing ambiguities of the character's true gender identity are a central focus of the movie, and I guess you could argue it's understandable that the critical dialogue about Hedwig's gender was therefore so reductive, given how pitifully limited the available language at that time truly was. This is also symptomatic of a broader issue, though -- the same one I touched on earlier when I was writing about Mean Girls and other films that demonize femininity, ostensibly to deconstruct or denounce "gender" as an entire ideology.

As a child in East Berlin during the 1960s, Hansel/Hedwig is drawn to rock 'n' roll music as much for its visual aesthetics as for its actual sound. Hansel exists in a drab and confined place, literally and figuratively devoid of color. The allure of glam rock is its frivolity and superficiality -- Hansel interprets its carefree, bubblegum messages about personal freedom and beauty as profound truth, and the irony of his misconstrual sets the stage thematically for everything else the movie is about. Excitement and personal freedom are such elusively hot commodities in Hansel's suffocating, claustrophobic universe that he fails to understand how easily disposable they can be in faraway worlds less constrained. The wrongness of his naive assumptions will be both a tragedy and a salvation for him.

Glam rock is often made fun of for its vapidity, despite the hard core of pop rebellion that seems to characterize its appeal for devotees. Within the context of the film, it becomes a symbolic parallel for the fluid ethereality of being a man, a woman, or anything else in between. Glam is a musical subgenre defined by men dressing and acting "like women" for purposes which often appear obscurely revolutionary, yet dissolve easily into thin air upon impact with virtually any real, solid object. Its meaning and boundaries may appear fixed and even didactic, but in reality they are constantly shifting, and their surface meaning is only shorthand for deeper currents of roiling conflict often too awkward to genuinely be confronted.

To escape from Fascist East Berlin, Hansel must convincingly impersonate a woman and marry an American GI. The choice to transition is not only compulsory, but barely considered in its full dimension at all, especially since it's done out of love. If anything, it's a tidy and relieving solution to the uncomfortable reality of Hansel's relationship with his beloved, Luther. "To be free," Hansel's mother tells him, "You must give up a little part of yourself." To move forward as a "real" person, instead of a "freak" -- a homosexual, something Hansel barely dares to fleetingly imagine himself as -- he must sacrifice not just his penis, but the full gendered aspect of his identity. He must become an entirely different person who is capable of having a heterosexual relationship with the person he loves.

Rejected, Hansel -- now Hedwig, having appropriated his mother's name for immigration purposes -- soon finds herself divorced and barely sustaining herself in a rurally isolated part of the U.S. scarcely better than the dingy Berlin apartment she recently escaped (though at least her new environment is a little more warmly lit). Only at this moment does the decision to live as a woman become a source of empowerment and dedicated act of will, albeit a perhaps incomplete or misdirected one.

It becomes easy to see, at this point, how Hedwig's character has become so rudely lumped in with some particularly odious stereotypes about gay male identity vs. transgender identity. The viewer is tricked into interpreting Hedwig as a gay man who has been manipulated into becoming a woman, and must now gradually rediscover his "true" identity as a man. In fact, however, the wholeness of this character is far more complicated, as will be revealed. Hedwig wants to find her "other half," which romantic preconceptions dictate must be another person, lost somewhere in the undiscovered vastness of the world around her. Until that person can be located, however, Hedwig must languish listlessly, unable to commit to a definition of herself for fear that the one she chooses will be inadequate -- that, like her body, her identity itself might solidify into something permanently broken and misshapen, incapable of interlocking correctly with its predestined counterpart.

Driven by conflicting urges to both rebel against and avoid the pervasiveness of these conclusions, Hedwig retreates into the hyperglamour of an invented vision of womanhood which she herself has created out of whole cloth, and whose power is specifically its abstract alienness. It's a stage persona worn 24/7. It affirms, mocks, and transcends the existence of Hedwig herself. Hansel no longer exists and Hedwig is a conveniently sculpted figment, and those two facts are all that this person understands any longer about herself. Rather than fold and break, she does what an artist does: she surrenders herself completely to the performance of this paradox, to both her liberation and detriment.

Eventually, through Tommy, Hedwig discovers an apparent opportunity to rebuild the lost parts of herself in someone else, with whom it will then be possible for her to merge. Hedwig and Tommy are both avatars, compartments housing incomplete parts of the same larger being. Only when the promise of reconstitution is thwarted does the anaesthetic power of the illusion dissipate, and the pain of Hedwig's deeper schizm begin to be really felt.

The strength of Hedwig, despite myriad imperfections, is its foresight and willful ambiguity. At the end of the film, though much of Hedwig's inner and outer conflict has been resolved, the oft-teased question of her "real" gender remains persistently obscure, possibly because it's a question that can't be answered in words that yet exist, and that answer in and of itself constitutes its own resolution.

It's impossible for me to watch this movie now without noticing how much my own ideas about what I wanted to look like as a teenager, and what I wanted my physical appearance to convey and represent, came from Hedwig. I'm still completely transfixed by the red glitter-infused lipstick and eyeshadow she wears during the opening sequences. I watched this film for the first time the same year I read Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw and the same year I first watched Female Trouble, and this became a really important combination of influences for me as I started to grow up.

Manifesto

So after reviewing my post about Salinger from a few weeks ago, I've been trying to think about what specific ideas are really motivating me to do a blog like this in the first place. The central, binding theology is still vague to me and I don't know if I could really articulate exactly what the common threads are that seem to be pulling together into something I want to pursue.

I don't want to do a Feminist blog in the regular sense because I don't honestly feel like my views are driven only by Feminist theory. For many years I was not a Feminist at all, and although I identify as one now, my real reason for wanting to hone my skills as a writer, and a human being, in this particular way is that I have such a personal lack of resolution about the subject.

I am a cisgendered female raised mainly by cisgendered females, and for a long time, due partly to my rocky relationships with the other women in my life, I felt really enraged and alienated by the entire concept of femininity. The idea now of trying to explore and absorb Feminist theory is just beginning to make some sense, and it's been a tumultuous shift. Rather than apologizing for my perspective, what I want to do is use this blog to explore the ideas I'm encountering as they're happening to me in real time. My posts will conflict a lot and will be extremely vulnerable to criticism, which is the only reason why I think the project is really worth doing in the first place.

The issue at the heart of the Salinger post is the issue of narrative. Whatever literature may exist about "narrative" in relationships between human beings, or in gender relationships specifically, I'm not familiar with. But what was meaningful to me about Salinger was that a lot of people apologize for him, and that the reason for those apologies appears to be reverence for Salinger's ability to create narrative. To his defenders, Salinger wasn't sexually exploitative, or even careless -- he was "obsessed with purity" or "haunted by the specter of lost innocence," and his projection of those values onto the women he interacted with means more than whatever actually happened between them as people.

This is also true of Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, et al. These men represent something conceptually important to people because they have the ability to create narratives, and the narratives transcend collaborative reality.

Narrative can be an extremely powerful weapon, and although it's important in all histories of oppression, I think it has particular importance with relation to gender discrimination, because instead of one giant historical narrative, there are a million small narratives happening every day which support the larger narrative of gendered inferiority. The narrative of gender is hypertextual, mysterious. Sometimes it is very alluring.