Muchness and Light

The strangest things seem suddenly routine.

My very favorite movie, ever, is John Cameron Mitchell's 2001 masterpiece Hedwig and the Angry Inch.  It's a really spectacular film about soul-searching and pain and love and identity.  The main character is a slightly-but-justifiably crazy blonde with an overwhelming affinity for glitter and rock 'n roll.  You can't get much muchier than that!  How could I not love her?

I started thinking about this movie toward the end of Iceapalooza 2011.  It's not kid-appropriate, so I had to wait until they weren't around to watch it for the hundred-dozenth time.  Last night, in a fit of self-indulgent moroseness, I curled up on the couch to get my glam and drag on.

The first thing I'm always struck by is how gorgeous the film is; it is deliciously beautiful, cinemagraphically, even in its grittiest moments.  It's visually clever in its economy of field; sets are often small and cramped, and Mitchell is astonishingly efficient as using the small areas to their fullest effect.  (Hedwig's play area in the oven in East Berlin is my favorite.)

The second thing that always blows me away is Mitchell's performance as Hedwig.  It's a character he created originally for the stage play of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, then translated it to screen as writer, director, and lead actor.  He is remarkably talented as both actor and singer in the film, and his performance garnered a 2001 Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor.  (He also won a Best Director award at Sundance, along with numerous other accolades.)  I remember watching the Golden Globes that year, which I rarely do, and thinking, "Wow!  That's fantastic that such a performance got the nomination, but there's no way in Hell he'll win."  I was right, of course.

The third thing that always kicks my ass is the music.  The music and lyrics were written by Stephen Trask after he and Mitchell met quite by accident on a plane.  Trask received an Obie award for the play, as well as a Grammy nomination for the film.  For the production of the film, the musicians prerecorded the music for the songs and synced along during filming.  Vocals, however, were done almost entirely live on set, to create a true feel of live performance.  I can listen to this soundtrack over and over and still get something new from it every time. 

As so commonly happens these days, I'm always on the search for Alice-y things to write about.  Watching the movie again, I was struck by how much Hedwig is like Alice.  So I started looking for other similarities between the two stories.  Turns out, there's a lot. 

The story that's told in Hedwig doesn't unfold chronologically.  A lot of what the audience sees happens somewhat in flashback, as Hedwig is telling her story during her performances.  For the purposes of comparison, I'm breaking it down into a neater timeline.  (I still suggest you go watch the movie.  Duh!) 

[The best way to view Hedwig and the Angry Inch is to watch the movie, about 90 minutes, then watch the documentary "Whether You Like It or Not: the Story of Hedwig", then watch the movie again.  It's amazing to see what they did with a $6,000,000 budget and some divine inspiration.]

SPOILER ALERT!

Hedwig is born Hansel Schmidt in pre-Wall Germany.  He's the "slip of a girly boy" son of an American GI and an overbearing German mother, who flees to East Berlin as the Wall goes up, because, she says, it's better to be forever powerless than to be corrupted by your own power.  Hansel grows up as flamboyantly as possible in this dark, austere environment. 

                "Our apartment was so small, that mother made me play in the oven. Late at night I would listen to the voices of the American masters, Tony Tennille, Debby Boone, Anne Murray who was actually a Canadian working in the American idiom. And then there were the crypto-homo rockers: Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, David Bowie who was actually an idiom working in America and Canada. These artists, they left as deep an impression on me as that oven rack did on my face. To be an American in muskrat love, soft as an easy chair not even the chair, I am I said, have I never been mellow? And the colored girls sing... doo do doo do doo do doo... but never with the melody. How could I do it better than Tony or Lou... HEY BOY, TAKE A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE!"

At the ripe age of 26, Hansel is sunbathing nude, surrounded by barbed wire and debris, when Sergeant Luther Robinson, stumbles upon Hansel and tells him that he's so pretty he must be a girl.  Sergeant Luther plies Hansel with Gummy Bears, the brightly-colored, sweeter versions of the German Gummi Bears, then with other candy.  They fall in love, and Luther wants to marry Hansel.  To be able to get him out of East Germany, Hansel will have to prove he's a woman.  Luther and Hansel's mom, Hedwig, hatch a plan to get a sex-change operation for Hansel, then to give the new her Hedwig's passport.  "To be free," Mom-Hedwig says, "one must give up a part of oneself."

The operation goes horribly wrong.  Hedwig's incision closes up, and she's left with the angry inch.  Luther takes her to Junction City, Kansas, where he leaves her for another man on their first anniversary.  Hedwig takes on odd jobs ("mostly the jobs we call blow") and babysitting to make ends meet. 

While babysitting the infant son of a General from the nearby Army base, she meets the General's 17-year-old son, Tommy Speck.  Tommy is instantly drawn to Hedwig and goes to see her perform at a local shop with her band, comprised entirely of Korean-born Army wives.  Tommy and Hedwig begin a mostly one-sided sexual affair, but they also begin writing songs together for Tommy's burgeoning music career.  Hedwig gives Tommy his new identity of Tommy Gnosis.  Just as Tommy is finally beginning to accept the reality of what Hedwig is, he panics and leaves her.  He goes on to become an internationally famous rock star, performing the songs Hedwig wrote. 

Hedwig gets a new band, the Angry Inch, made up of Eastern European immigrants.  She keeps all of their passports to keep them from leaving her.  At some point she marries Yitzhak, played by Miriam Shore.  (The juxtaposition of Shore soprano harmonies with Mitchell's tenor melodies is outstanding.)  Yitzhak wants to be a woman, wants to be Hedwig in a lot of ways.  He seems to love Hedwig even though he's scared of her, but he becomes more and more bitter about their relationship as the film progresses.  He auditions for the part of Angel in a cruise ship performance of Rent, but Hedwig tears up his passport when he confronts her and tries to leave. 

Hedwig hires a new manager, Phyllis Stein (Andrea Martin), and goes on a tour that shadows that of Tommy Gnosis.  While Tommy plays huge arenas, Hedwig and the Angry Inch play at the neighboring Bilgewater's, a chain of family restaurants whose patrons are mostly offended and disgusted by Hedwig's show.  She does develop a small following of loyal fans who surround her, wearing their own giant, yellow foam hair that mimics Hedwig's signature blond wig. 

Hedwig has simultaneously filed a lawsuit against Tommy for stealing her songs.  She tries to get close to Tommy ("You know how much I don't like that word, stalking"), to try to force him into admitting he stole her work.  She becomes more and more irrational and bitter as her journey unfolds.  One night, she reverts to working as a prostitute, and she is unexpectedly picked up in a limo by Tommy Gnosis.  He eventually relents and apologizes for stealing her songs, which it turns out he never understood anyway.  They argue and are in a car accident.  The story becomes public, and the tables are turned.

Hedwig does her last real show, at the Times Square Bilgewater's, and goes fucking nuts.  All the pressure and the drama and the strife culminate in this intense climactic performance where she violently rips off her drag while the crowd and the band are agape. 

There's a sudden cut to an all-white room, everyone dressed in white, where Hedwig sings "Midnight Radio", a song of celebration of "all the misfits and the losers" of the world who are brought together by music through their own darknesses.  Hedwig gives Yitzhak her wig, encouraging Yitzhak to go and be his dream.  In the final moments, Hedwig is brought face-to-face with Tommy, alone on a dark stage, singing his version of "Wicked Little Town".  Hedwig is now more Hansel in smeared make-up, having lost all of the female trappings.  Hansel/Hedwig walks naked down a dark alley into the night.  FADE OUT.

Okay, so back to this Alice analogy.  We're working from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, being the original work from which all other Alices derive.  The comparisons of Hedwig to Alice don't follow exactly in chronological order, either, between the movie and the book, so bear with me. 

Hansel in East Berlin is a young Alice, playing in a world that bores her.  He/she is distracted by the White Rabbit (Sergeant Luther) and follows him down the rabbit hole that is the crazy process of the sex change operation.  Hansel is brave and reluctant about being with Luther, i.e. growing and shrinking, as he takes the brightly-colored Gummy Bears and the American candy bars.  It's a total EAT ME/DRINK ME moment.   

Hansel's mother Hedwig is the Mouse that Alice first encounters after she falls to the bottom of the hole.  Alice has already been battling with the beginnings of the identity crisis, shrinking and growing to fit her round peg through the square door hole.  She is huge and cries great, giant tears, then shrinks and is trapped in the pool. 

                "O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O Mouse!" [snip] The Mouse looked at her rather inquisitively, and seemed to her to wink with one of its little eyes, but it said nothing.

The elder Hedwig responds similarly to Hansel.  She's never understood her son and why he can't just assimilate into the East German culture and relinquish his power to the forces that are greater than he.  She seems to recognize that Hansel is drowning and helps push him to the dry banks, i.e. across the Wall to America. 

The bands, both the one comprised of the Korean wives and the Angry Inch, are the birds on the bank and the other random, talking animals in the story.  Their actions may have some momentary significance, but they mostly pass through the time as extraneous decoration to Hedwig's journey.  She may interact with them, but it's often more to show dimensions of Hedwig than it is to illustrate anything about the musician.  Much like the Dodo, the Dormouse, the Eaglet, etc.

Sergeant Luther (the White Rabbit) takes Hedwig (Alice) to Junction City, Kansas, and abandons her a year later in a trailer park.  The trailer park is one of my favorite analogies in this whole comparison.  I debated whether it was like the tea party (which is really Bilgewater's in all of its incarnations) or maybe the Queen of Hearts' croquet ground.  But no!  There's a not-so-well remembered scene in Alice where the white rabbit goes looking for the Duchess' gloves.  He sees Alice and mistakes her for his maid servant, Mary Ann, and sends her into the house to get the gloves.  She goes inside, but she starts to grow and gets so big that she's stuck in the house.  A crowd outside the house throws rocks at her, which turn into little cakes that Alice eats and shrinks back to her normal size.

The trailer is the White Rabbit/Luther's house.  Luther mistakes Hansel for a woman originally, and then still expects Hedwig to be a woman, even though the operation was botched.  Hedwig gets stuck inside, trapped under the weight of her situation and her own identity.  One of the best scenes in Hedwig happens here, the "Wig in a Box" performance.  She sings about how she gets sad, not fitting in, and puts on different wigs to be different selves.  The confident energy becomes so overwhelming that the sides of the trailer burst open to let her muchness out into the night.

 

Yitzhak is the Hatter.  In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Hatter explains to Alice that he and the March Hare are always stuck in time, having tea, because it's how he escapes decapitation by the Queen of Hearts for singing.  Yitzhak often tries to sing his own song, in his own way, and is silenced by Hedwig.  He is perpetually stuck in the maddening role of Hedwig's emotional punching bag.  He is always seen wearing a bandana or a wig, never a bare head.

Phyllis Stein is the Cheshire Cat.  She appears kind of randomly to tease and advise Hedwig.  There's actually a deleted scene in which Phyllis has a cell phone switch installed into the roof of her mouth.  To make her phone work, she has to click her tongue over and over.  It's very reminiscent of the grin. 

Hedwig's public crusade and attack against Tommy's plagiarism is very much like the trial in the King's court.  The jury/public knows really very little about the actual facts and can only make judgments based on the absurdities they glimpse from time to time.  There's a very large public gathering in the final Bilgewater's scene, which erupts into utter chaos, just like the Knave's trial.

Tommy Gnosis is certainly the Knave of Hearts.  The Knave is put on trial for stealing the tarts.  Tommy is accused of stealing Hedwig's tarts: her songs.  Like the Knave, Tommy never really has a good explanation for what happens. 

That covers most of the major characters, except my favorite: the Blue Caterpillar.  Because I love the name Absolem that Tim Burton later gives the Caterpillar, I'm sticking with that for now.  Absolem is a tiny, wiggling thing that obscures Alice's vision with his smoke screen.  He taunts her and teases her, then tries to lead her toward the truth of her own identity.  He builds and destroys her confidence and challenges her sexuality with his own phallic little body. 

Do you get where I'm going with this??

Absolem, the Blue Caterpillar, is the Angry Inch.  Not the band.  The actual "one inch mound of flesh". 

Hedwig is taunted and driven by the Inch, much as Alice is by Absolem.  Both the Inch and Absolem control the relationship until the very end, when Hedwig and Alice respectively revolt against the madness surrounding them and wake from the crazy dreams they've been in.

And Hedwig certainly does wake.  She becomes Hansel, reverting almost to his original form and state, though newly confident if unsteady. 

Honestly, I was surprised by how many comparisons could be made between the two stories.  Alice has been altered and changed and derived from so many times, that it's surprising when I see a new version of her.  I have no idea if John Cameron Mitchell had any intention of having such parallels to Lewis Carroll.  (I have searched online and found no reference to it anywhere.)  Perhaps it works because Alice is so archetypical of the battle of the inner self with the outer perceptions. 

No matter, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a masterful telling of one girl's struggle to really find herself in the midst of chaos and confusion and misunderstanding, all set to a kick-ass soundtrack.  It's something every girl can relate to, as well as a few men I know.  The added glittery glam and fanciness just make it that much better.

 

S5FWBMEMF66S

It's a friend of mine--a Cheshire-Cat.

I have this friend.  I'll call them "CC".  Male or female doesn't matter for the purposes of this conversation, though I fully recognize that gender can lend a strong hand to determining how a person behaves in any given situation.  I'll stick with an inappropriate editorial "they" for now. 

So CC isn't exactly what I'd call a fair-weather friend, but they are inconsistent.  Almost transient in their friendship.  Our friendship usually plays out at CC's discretion, but not always.  I know the reasons for it, and I probably should have known them at the onset of the friendship.  That doesn't make it any less frustrating at times. 

It's all very Alice.  (What isn't, right?  Right??)  Specifically, it's very Alice and the Cheshire-Cat. 

Alice first meets the Cheshire-Cat in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland outside the home of the Duchess.  All the craziness is ensuing with the screaming baby and the smoke-filled kitchen.  Everyone is irritated and sneezing, except for the cook and the grinning cat, lying on the hearth.  Alice comments to the Duchess that she never knew that cats could grin.  The Duchess gets mad and flings the baby at Alice, then leaves to play croquet with the Queen.

[On a side note, per The Annotated Alice, "grin like a Cheshire cat" was a common expression when Lewis Carroll was writing the Alice.  There are several theories about the origin of the phrase, which I will leave to you to read on your own.  Thank you!  Goodnight!]

Alice tries to calm the baby, who turns into a pig and runs away into the woods.  Alice is surprised to see the Cheshire-Cat sitting outside the house in a tree.

                The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.

Alice asks the Cat which direction she should go and he retorts that it depends on where she wants to get to.  She doesn't care where--"then it doesn't matter which way you go"--as long as she gets somewhere.  The Cheshire-Cat explains that one direction leads to the Mad Hatter, while the other leads to the March Hare.  Either route will lead her to people who are mad. 

                "But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

                "Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

                "How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

                "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

They converse a bit more about why the Cat itself is mad, then about whether or not Alice will be playing croquet with the Queen.  The Cat vanishes but suddenly reappears to ask what happened to the baby.  Alice answers "just as if the Cat had come back in a natural way" that the baby turned into a pig.    The Cat responds that he thought it would and disappears again.  Just as Alice is deciding which way to go and why, the Cat appears again, asking if she said pig or fig.

                "I said pig," replied Alice; "and I wish you wouldn't keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy."

                "All right," said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

                "Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin," thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!"

Alice goes on to the tea party with the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse.   She journeys to the Queen's croquet ground and is invited to play the horrible game, using hedgehogs as balls and flamingoes as mallets. 

                She was looking about for some way of escape, and wondering whether she could get away without being seen, when she noticed a curious appearance in the air: it puzzled her very much at first, but, after watching it a minute or two, she made it out to be a grin, and she said to herself "It's the Cheshire Cat: now I shall have somebody to talk to."

                "How are you getting on?" said the Cat, as soon as there was mouth enough for it to speak with.

                Alice waited till the eyes appeared, and then nodded."It's no use speaking to it," she thought, "till its ears have come, or at least one of them." In another minute the whole head appeared, and then Alice put down her flamingo, and began an account of the game, feeling very glad she had someone to listen to her. The Cat seemed to think that there was enough of it now in sight, and no more of it appeared.

                "I don't think they play at all fairly," Alice began, in rather a complaining tone, "and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can't hear oneself speak--and they don't seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody attends to them--and you've no idea how confusing it is all the things being alive; for instance, there's the arch I've got to go through next walking about at the other end of the ground--and I should have croqueted the Queen's hedgehog just now, only it ran away when it saw mine coming?"

                "How do you like the Queen?" said the Cat in a low voice.

                "Not at all," said Alice: "she's so extremely--" Just then she noticed that the Queen was close behind her, listening: so she went on, "--likely to win, that it's hardly worth while finishing the game."

The King becomes enraged that Alice is talking to a Cat who refuses to submit to the King's supposed authority.  The Queen demands that the Cat's head be cut off, which triggers an argument over whether only a head can actually be beheaded.  As often happens in Wonderland, the issue is never truly resolved before another nonsensical experience presents itself.  Ultimately, Alice wakes from her dream of Wonderland and struggles to remember it before it fades into her reality. 

It's very much like me and CC.  Our relationship developed in its own nonsensical way, and it has pretty much followed suit since its inception.  We are strangely kindred spirits who met in a peppery kitchen, for sure.  CC appears when I least expect it and often when I most need it.  In all fairness, they've been known to appear when I call.  I will often ask them which way I should go, and just as often get the response of "that depends on where you're going," politely prompting me to look deeply at my own desires and drives and examine the impetus of my decisions.  I know there's no use addressing them, though, until enough of them apparates to be able to see and hear me. 

Like Alice, I can be exasperated with CC and then utterly delighted when they appear to share their impressions of the world with me.  It's nice to have CC as a distraction from the day-to-day absurdities.  They will just be there, asking how I am, as normal and incredibly caring as can be, then vanish just as quickly.  Oddly, it all seems very natural.

The thing is, I really adore CC.  Truly and completely.  I don't want CC to ever not be there, so I tend to take on the difficulty of the relationship and accept it.  I'm well aware of the strange nature of the friendship and revel in it when it's good and acceptable to my expectations.  But I am wary of its long claws and great many teeth; I try to be respectful of how CC's purring could becoming growling at any time, depending on my perception of their madness. 

Of course, there's the argument to be made that this post is a passive-aggressive attempt to garner CC's attention.  Not so much.  I would turn into a pig if I honestly thought CC ever actually read this.  I know it's just not in their realm of plausability.  It's also not an expectation I have of that relationship.  I wish it were sometimes, but I know it's just not the branch CC hangs out on.

Mostly, I wish CC would stop appearing and vanishing so quickly, leaving me giddy with nothing more than a lingering grin.

What an idea. A crazy, mad, wonderful idea.

The wonderful Jay A. Hansen posted a Jack Kerouac quote today, as his Facebook status:

                 The only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time. The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars….

This started me thinking about madness.  And if I start thinking about madness, I'm going to think of Alice in Wonderland.  And if I think of Alice, I'm going to write a blog post....

Alice deals a lot with madness in Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010).  She overhears Lord Ascot accuse her father, Charles of having lost his senses for wanting to open trade routes to the East.  When Alice recounts her recurring dream of falling down a dark hole into a world filled with strange, unexpected creatures, she asks Charles Kingsleigh if he thinks she's "gone round the bend."

                Her father felt her forehead, looking just like their family doctor when he was checking a fever.  He made the doctor's "bad news" face and said, "I'm afraid so."  Alice's eyes widened, but he went on.  "You're mad.  Bonkers.  Off your head.  But I'll tell you a secret...all the best people are."

Of course, Alice believes her own self to be mad when she first sees, and then chases after, the watch-checking White Rabbit at the garden party.  But even as she falls down the rabbit hole, surrounded by strange and curious things, she doesn't question her own madness; she simply assumes it's another dream.  Having dreamed of Wonderland/Underland for so long, much of what she perceives as being a dream state seems perfectly acceptable, almost reasonable, to Alice.  She comments only that it is "curiouser and curiouser", and not quite as familiar as she had imagined.

The concept of madness, as such, doesn't come back into the story until the Cheshire Cat takes Alice to the home of the March Hare, for the tea party with the Dormouse and the Mad Hatter.  The latter character, of course, is presumed to be "mad as a hatter" because of mercury poisoning common to his profession.  While he's off-kilter, certainly, he is predominantly lucid in his actions and his interpretations of Alice and Underland. 

When Stayne, the Knave of Hearts, intrudes on the tea party in search of Alice (conveniently shrunken and hidden on a teapot), he calls the Hare, the Dormouse, and the Hatter is favorite trio of lunatics.  In an effort to protect the possibly-right-Alice, the threesome do their best to oblige the Knave's misconceptions, throwing teapots and singing ridiculous songs.  The Knave growls at them that they're all mad and leaves.  Alice is safe thanks to the feigned lunacy of her new friends.  The Mad Hatter agrees to take tiny, apprehensive Alice to the White Queen, transporting her by way of his hat:

                She couldn't help thinking the Knave was right about these three.  They were all quite mad.

                And yet...she had no one else.  Mad or not, it seemed she was stuck with them.

The Mad Hatter is inadvertently captured by the Red Queen's minions, and Alice infiltrates the castle of Iracebeth to rescue her friend.  Twice we see the Hatter maniacal and in a tizzy of self-recrimination at the thought of creating chapeaux for the horrid woman whose Jabberwocky wiped out his entire Hightopp clan of milliners.  When he's at his seemingly maddest, it is inevitably Alice who recognizes it and pulls him back from the brink, usually to save him from a terrible fate. 

Alice escapes, but the Hatter is once again imprisoned by the Red Queen, sentenced to beheading at dawn.  The Hatter sits in his cell, unresponsive and staring "blindly into space."  When the Knave and his guards taunt the Hatter and his accomplices, the Hatter is described as having madness in his eyes as he seizes Stayne, doing his best to choke the life out of him.  The Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter hatch a plan to fake the beheading and escape to join Alice at the White Queen's castle.

Alice finally chooses to accept the role of the White Queen's champion and slay the Jabberwocky. 

                The Hatter looked bemused.  "You still believe this is a dream?  Do you?"

                "Of course.  This has all come from my own mind."

                The Hatter thought about that for a moment.  "Which would mean that I'm not real."

                "I'm afraid so," said Alice, shaking her head.  "You're just a figment of my imagination.  I would dream up someone who's half mad."

                "Yes, yes.  But you would have to be half mad to dream me up," the Hatter observed.

                "I must be, then," Alice said.

The maddest of characters in Alice in Wonderland are the ones who are most in touch with what really matters, while the truly foolish are the ones who make and enforce the rules.  The Hatter is mad because of the horrible injustices perpetrated against himself and all of Underland.  He often seems lost in lunacy when he's actually most rational, faking madness to save an ally from certain doom. 

And if they are each half mad, does that make them whole?

In the end, Alice finds a way to mesh her dreams with her own, beautiful madness.  She recognizes that there is wonder in being mad, in finding the driving force that ultimately fuels her dreams. 

Maybe Kerouac had some of the same madness in mind when he wrote On the Road.  The people he loves are the uninhibited, thoughtful risk-takers, who sublimate their own madness to create their own dreams.  Kind of like Alice. 

There's a thin line between creativity and madness, and it might just be found down the rabbit hole.