Original, sincere, and melancholy

Rating: 8/10 (17 November 2008)

This has to be one of the most original musicals ever, if not the one most original. It has something to say, and a new way of saying it. For once in a rock movie, content exceeds style, so that there's something to see in every shot, but you have to pay attention to catch it. Since it is a musical, I wish that it had had some dancing in it, apart from the little the band does in its performances. But I can see that the story didn't allow for this.
Hedwig isn't totally realized. It's a stage show that has only been half converted into a movie. I recognize that if it had been opened up and broken up any further, it would no longer have been the same piece, and probably would have lost more than it gained. But it has acclimated itself so little to film that the style of the musical numbers, and the charge they must have packed on stage, aren't carried over. The numbers are photographed straight, without resort to crazy angles and flash editing. Perhaps the director saw these as clichés and deliberately avoided them.
And perhaps this movie isn't as innovative as I think. I'm not young and hip, I'm old and stodgy; and what I see as new may be old. Anyhow, by the time any piece of culture has found its way into a play, it's at least six months past its heyday (if not its expiration date) and, by the time the play becomes a film, a year farther on towards decrepitude. But within the boundaries of my old and stodgy perspective, I can aver without doubt that I've never seen a movie quite like this one.
I happened onto it by looking for something on the order of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but better done. That's a pretty exact description of it. The superiority to the earlier movie is all-encompassing: the music more original, the lyrics more literate, and replete with references to everything under the sun, the book more in touch with cultural and political realities. To be fair, there would never have been a Hedwig without a Rocky Horror to have paved the way. But something like that could be said of virtually all art.
Hedwig's most obvious resemblance to Rocky Horror is in its special pleading for an alternative, unrestrictive sexuality. Rocky Horror, in its one half-serious scene, argued on behalf of pan-sexuality (even thirty years later, the sermonish quality of the speech still comes across as a little offensive); the character of Hedwig occupies a borderland state in between male and female, a result of a bizarre surgical accident. This fantastic, or at best extreme, condition serves as a sort of distorting lens through which the movie is able to focus on his dual sexual nature. That takes it beyond camp (which I dislike) into an exploration of his sex, or sexes, which is purposely skewed but, allowing for that, essentially sincere and truthful.
The best illustration of the approach is a love-sex scene between Hedwig and his friend-enemy. Hedwig's sexuality, as noted, is ambiguous, but the scene of course is, and is played as, between two males. As such, it's the first male-male love scene I've seen in a mainstream movie (if Hedwig can be called a mainstream movie) that hasn't made me uncomfortable. I always figured my discomfort arose from an old-fashioned preference that movies remain chaste and bourgeois; now I think it wasn't that. This scene has little regard for the proprieties, but it's inoffensive regardless, because for once the people in it are really attracted to each other, want each other, need each other. In other words, it's a love scene that happens to be between men; not a GAY LOVE SCENE without love or sexual feeling, as such scenes formerly have been. (Note: Straight love scenes are the same. But they've been around so long that one accepts them as a convention without examining them closely.)
Apart from the sexual reorientation, the most striking quality of the movie is its melancholy. That isn't at all what one expects in a rock musical. It's a Swiftian melancholy, comic in the extremity of its satire, and bitter almost to the point of despair: "My guardian angel fell asleep on the watch," Hedwig sings. To the wanderers in the desert, rock music is pictured as an oasis ("Hold on to each other,...all the misfits and the losers"), and from this perspective all the attributes of the form, from its chord progressions to its musicians' convulsions during performance, fall into place. What looks from the outside like simple rejection is a process of working through life's impositions (like the "angry inch"). In the end, with luck, it leads the sufferer such as Hedwig to an affirmation of himself, his needs of the moment giving way to the deeper need. Behind its graffitied exterior, this movie has a lot of understanding, I think, for the loser, the untouchable, the odd man out.
I liked it a lot.