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.

"You Still Can't Sit With Us" (Mean Girls Extended Edition)

So I figured I might as well pop back around and do the second half of the post I started like a million years ago about Mean Girls, now that several weeks have passed, and nobody is Googling it anymore. I have a person problem with not wanting to write about things that are topically relevant, so this should be way more comfortable for me now, I'm guessing.

So toward the end of Mean Girls, there's a scene where Tina Fey stands at the front of a gym full of female students, Betty Buckley style, and delivers a series of regurgitated culture-of-female-aggression critiques about how adolescent women are backstabbing, two-faced, and manipulative, and the solutions to their (our) problems is to start banding together and supporting each other more instead of being so flaky. Lots of these points are probably salient, but the way they're presented within the larger context of the narrative made me really think about the way female gender identity specifically is often presented in media like this.

As in the real world, male gender identity in Mean Girls pretty much doesn't exist. Though the egotism and stupidity of male characters is occasionally lampooned, the actively predatory characters are all women. The movie is concerned only with the action of being female. The female characters are actively female; the male characters are neutral. In fact, one of the things I didn't like about Mean Girls, from a purely formal perspective, was how dramatically unsatisfying the neutrality of the male characters was. Aaron, for example -- the movie's dumb jock love interest, who constantly waffles back and forth between Cady and her Satanic arch nemesis Regina -- was a really, really boring character. This wasn't just unsatisfying -- it became, at a certain point, problematic. I kept waiting for the movie to take Aaron to task for shifting his alliances so casually, but he just stayed bland and innocuous throughout the whole movie, despite how inherently provocative his character arc was.

Mean Girls acts like it's interested in destroying the concept of constructed, "false" gender. It sees young women's performance of femininity as a shallow way of volleying for social power and distinction, not as a "real" expression of anything. Through its condemnatory dissection of female culture, Mean Girls seemed to be suggesting that traditional gender expression is a dangerous and ugly thing, and that the way women act, think, and see the world as a result of being socialized as women, is the best example of how horrible traditional gender identification can be. This is something that a lot of movies, books, and TV shows are guilty of, even (and sometimes especially) when they are made for a female audience. The concept of "female culture" is almost exclusively negative, something to be feared and avoided, or at least approached with caution (or occasionally, in more affectionate treatments, to be laughed at). When it's not horrible or farcical, it's usually because the "culture" the film or TV show describes is highly non-traditional, or is the result of some sort of self-conscious reclamation.

I'm not suggesting the passive aggressive posturing that Mean Girls depicts isn't real, or that it shouldn't be examined or critiqued. What I am suggesting, though, is that explorations of these problems are almost never as multi-faceted as they deserve to be. Because they're not more comprehensive, more studied, or more sincere, they almost always reveal things they didn't mean to reveal, and unintentionally obscure other facets of their subject matter that could have easily been treated with more resonance and insight.

"You Can't Sit With Us"

Wednesday was the ten-year anniversary of the Tina Fey-scripted movie Mean Girls, a film I had heard a lot about, but never actually saw. Though I had long acknowledged it as a significant gap in my viewing history, I never really understood how hugely important this movie is to other people until I went online Wednesday morning. My social media feeds were inundated, both by film nerds and by plain, regular folk. This was clearly a milestone that people really cared about, far more so than I would have ever expected.

I’ve been watching a lot of coming-of-age movies lately about female characters in high school, and although I hadn’t quite gotten around to Mean Girls yet, it had been nestled snugly in my Netflix queue for probably about three weeks prior to viewing. I can’t exactly say why I’ve been hitting this subgenre so hard lately. I’m at an enduring personal crossroads lately, the exact nature and dimensions of which seem constantly in the process of reshaping themselves. Seemingly frivolous movies like Mean Girls, about the formative struggle between personal and social identity, are unsettling, but also, strangely, bolstering. The fucked upness, doubt, hypocrisy and unfairness of the world are acknowledged with inflated accuracy. Growth and maturity are illustrated as awkward and painful processes. But in the end, reassuringly, everything works out just fine.

Having finally seen Mean Girls in its entirety, I guess I can understand its appeal. It’s is part of a lineage of films that dissect the hypocrisies of social existence for young women on the verge of becoming adults. These films purport to describe only a narrow segment of the population, but like most things supposedly relevant only to “female” interests, they are often eerie and penetrating snapshots of the cultural moment. No film summarizes the surrealistic nihilism of Gen-Xers as comprehensively as Heathers, and what juxtaposition could more poetically define the attitudes of the late ‘90s than the plucky, cartoonish opulence of Clueless contrasted against the Pure Moods-infused, revenge-fantasy nightmare universe of The Craft?

Mean Girls’ most direct antecedent is probably Heathers, but while Heathers uses female social cliques much more casually as a microcosm of a vaster and more profound dysfunctional social landscape, Mean Girls is concerned more directly with dissecting ways that women interact with each other. If Mean Girls is a mascot for its generation along the same lines as its older relatives, it’s both flawed and prescient. It blames women too readily for problems it recognizes as endemic without really exploring their sources.

On the plus side, it does address some re-emerging, (and rapidly mutating) ideas about what being a woman even means – especially the idea that gender is essentially a put-on, and that its only lifeblood is constant and rigid self-enforcement. Although it passes the Bechdel test with flying colors, it's not really a Feminist movie. Its ruthless takedown of women is perhaps, at its heart, really intended as a takedown of binaries – and more importantly, of the possibility of losing oneself in the performance of them.

TO BE CONTINUED!...tomorrow, probably.