I am a big fan of John Cameron Mitchell, and have a special love for his 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It was important to me on a personal level as a teenager, a source of inspiration for my burgeoning sense of myself as a gender and performance scholar in college, and as I recently discovered, continues to be a source of fascination and discovery.
On my most recent view, I found myself drawn to a whole new set of concerns, certainly influenced my newly discovered obsession with experimental poet and translator of ancient Greek, the wonderfully weird Anne Carson. (To give you a sense of her: Notoriously private, one of Carson’s trademark moves is to reveal nothing about herself on her book covers, writing only “Anne Carson lives in Canada.” Which as it turns out, may or may not be true.) One of Carson’s obsessions that appears again and again in books of varying form and content is the paradoxical nature of eros: the perpetual reaching and never attaining of erotic desire, the pleasure and the pain inherent in this reaching.
While it may seem bizarre to bring an elusive Canadian poet and classics scholar into conversation with a 2001 musical about the recipient of a botched sex-change operation in Communist East Berlin, multiplicity, intertextuality, and anachronism are actually at the heart of both projects. For example, in Carson’s astounding work of translation, scholarship, and philosophical inquiry, Eros the Bittersweet, Carson traces Greek understandings of eros into ever widening circles, drawing on an ever-more inclusive cast of thinkers and writers ranging from Sappho to Kafka to Emily Dickinson.
Hedwig too crosses genres (musical, road film, love story, Bildungsroman, etc.) and also references an impressive array of artists and thinkers. Immanuel Kant, David Bowie, Jesus Christ, Aristophanes: they all have a home in this film. The epic is self-consciously at play. Elements of the hero’s journey narrative and Greek mythology collide with Christian iconography throughout the film.
When Hedwig first meets Tommy, who she believes is her missing half, the piece that if she could only “reach” and possess would complete her, he asks her if she has “accepted Jesus Christ as her lord and saviour.” She replies that she has not, but that she is a “fan of his work.” While on one level a simple punchline, the statement also reveals something important about the attitude of the film. Jesus is treated as a contemporary, whose “work” is as relevant and ongoing as any other. This is a Carsonian notion, the mingling and blurring of intertexts.
In one song, “The Origin of Love” Thor, of Norse mythology is portrayed as conversing with Zeus. The pair are later joined by Osiris, Egyptian God of the Nile, and a green, multi-armed deity, likely referred to only as “some Indian God.” This spirit of extreme inclusion, of the conflating of all faiths into one universal super faith is playfully handled in the film. “Origin of Love,” itself recounting a story told by Aristophanes in Plato’s symposium, suggests that the glue that binds these traditions is love, most specifically desire, the universal sense of a missing piece. Eros.
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| Still from Emily Hubley's animation sequence that accompanies "The Origin of Love" |
Tommy Speck, so called “Jesus freak” becomes Tommy Gnosis, Greek word for knowledge. This reference to knowledge is self-consciously bouncing off of the story of Adam and Eve, which Tommy refers to again and again. The separation of Adam and Eve is in turn bounced off of Aristophanes and the notion that people were once two people in one:
Folks roamed the earth
Like big rolling kegs.
They had two sets of arms.
They had two sets of legs.
They had two faces peering
Out of one giant head
As Carson points out in Eros, even Aristophanes is being referential here, metaphorical even. She translates his Greek this way: "Each one of us is but the symbolon of a human being-- sliced in half like a flatfish, two instead of one-- and each pursues a neverending search for the symbolon of himself" (75). She goes on to explain that symbolon, from which we get the English word symbol, referred in the ancient world to "one half of a knucklebone carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning" (75).
The knucklebone strikes me as a metaphor that would move Hedwig for its sheer brutality, its acknowledgment of the blood and guts and body parts that come into play when we desire. And the unraveling layers of text and reference illustrated in this single song strike me as a delightful puzzle of just the sort that Carson tends to appreciate. This may be a friendship made in heaven.
Works Cited
Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. Print.
Mitchell, John Cameron, dir. Hedwig and the Angry Inch. New Line Cinema, 2001. Film. 2 Nov 2013.
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