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the origins of love
Thursday, August 30 2001
When I was riding back to Brooklyn this evening on the Red Line subway, I found myself in a car with three young black men who were attempting to charm a reticent but good-natured young white woman. Eventually one of the the young men began to sing a contemporary ballad in the style of the Backstreet Boys (or whatever the Backstreet Boys' urban ancestor is). The singer had a beautiful voice, and when he was done with his song, people all up and down the car applauded.
I got off the subway at the Atlantic Avenue stop and found Gretchen, who had been waiting for me. From the station, we walked pas the the Williamsburgh Bank Building (the tallest, most phallic building in Brooklyn) to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Theatre. We were just in time to see a nine o'clock showing of the movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch. For over a week now Gretchen has been completely obsessed with this movie, having gone to see it three times before tonight. This was my opportunity to discover what the deal was.
I have to say I've never seen a movie anything like Hedwig and the Angry Inch. For some reason I expected it to be a somewhat campy transvestite adventure set to unusually good music (Gretchen has the soundtrack and it features Bob Mould on guitars). But no, it was a lot more deep, spiritual and complicated than that.
On the surface the movie is about the travails of a daydreaming, music-obsessed young man named Hedwig who grew up the child of a cold, abusive single mother in East Berlin. Craving life outside of East Berlin, he reluctantly submits to a sex change operation so he can marry an American GI. But the operation is botched and he (now a sort of a she) ends up abandoned in a trailer in the middle of Kansas. From there she launches her punk rock career, facing one rejection after another due to the freakish nature of what she "has to work with." Eventually all Hedwig's music is stolen by her one-time lover and protegé who goes on to play stadiums while Hedwig is left to play the greasy spoon diner circuit.
But to really understand the mythic magical-realist point of the movie, one has to pay careful attention to the song "The Origins of Love." The words in this song are complicated and presented in rapid succession, so to aid the viewer, the movie turns into something of an animated rock video during the song, and it's absolutely amazing. Simple animated stick figures show us a world before there was love, when people where shaped "like kegs" and had "two sets of arms and two sets of legs." There were three sexes: Children of the Sun, Children of the Earth, and Children of the Moon, one for each of the possible gender pairings, and these strange bihumans had no needs or cravings and knew nothing about love. But then the gods became angry with the people and decided to cut them all in half, leaving them wounded and craving their other halves. At the end of the song we're told that if we don't shape up, the gods will come and cut us in half again, leaving each of us as two individuals with single legs, arms and eyes.
Against this mythic backdrop, Hedwig is presented as someone trapped forever between two sexual states, unworthy to both genders while still craving the completion of another. On some level, of course, we're all afflicted with a form of this discontent. With this mythology, the movie successfully drills down right to the heart of the human condition in a profound, moving way. Now I knew why Gretchen had become obsessed.
Gretchen and I tried to go to two different bars on the way home, but they were both crowded, so we went home and listened to the Hedwig and the Angry Inch soundtrack album, playing some songs twice in a row. I was drinking whiskey and the experience feeling so overwhelmingly moved that tears started streaming from my eyes.
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