A Gnostic Prophet for Our Age

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001): a classic film about transgender ideology, American Protestantism, and East German punk rock

In an act of desperation, rock n’ rolling East German drag queen Hedwig is playing every town which hosts the ‘Bilgewater’ seafood restaurant franchise, to an audience of barely-interested diners. Backstage, transmasculine band member and attention-rival vocalist Yitzhak tries on a blonde wig. Hedwig has wigs like Imelda Marcos had shoes.

Hedwig is stalking rock star Tommy Gnosis, playing the same towns on his tour schedule, sometimes right next door to his venues, and gatecrashing a photo opportunity. The justification offered for this obsession is that Gnosis stole Hedwig’s song, but we don’t find out if this allegation is true or not until much later in the film.

Flashbacks to Hedwig’s childhood as Hansel imply paternal abuse, following a scene in which his American GI father is banished from the cramped East Berlin apartment he shares with his mother. It is not explained why an American soldier would be living as a family man on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.

The young Hansel fantasises about conjoined children of the sun, moon, and earth, split by ancient gods to create modern humans. ‘Deny me and be doomed’, says the deity. As Hansel grows up, philosophical musings on Jesus and Hitler are soundtracked by the transgressive trio of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie on the American forces radio station that he picks up on the family’s receiver.

Supposedly to contain the noise from the radio set, Hansel is forced by his mother to listen with his head in the family kitchen’s oven, in an unsubtle reference to rock n’ roll as the vector of self-destruction.

For recreation, the teenage Hansel sunbathes naked atop the ruins of a bombed-out church, left in pieces by the relatively short-lived communist regime of the German ‘Democratic’ Republic. The symbolism of queer triumph over orthodox Christianity is all too obvious in this scene.

An improbable encounter with another American soldier, Luther, in this East Berlin bomb crater leads to a marriage proposal. It is hard to credit a GI cruising freely, in uniform and in broad daylight, under the watchful eye of the Stasi. We only have Hansel’s side of the story, and he is a fantasist.

Nevertheless, a boy seduced with a packet of American gummy bears suggests Hansel is rather younger than portrayed on screen. There’s a catch: In order to marry the American, Hansel must undergo ‘sex reassignment surgery’, as it was then known, and become Hedwig.

To be free, one must give a little, and Hansel’s mother knows just the doctor to enable this sacrifice. A one-inch mound of flesh is left where Hansel’s penis used to be, and “vagina never was”.

In fact, this outcome is not entirely the result of surgical incompetence implied in the film. As Rex Landy has noted, the complete removal of erectile tissue can leave a man incontinent. The men of the mad Skoptsy cult, named after the Russian word for ‘castrated’, pioneered the one-inch look.

Returning to present-day America, Hedwig’s explanatory ‘Angry Inch’ song is played as a food fight starts, bringing Iggy Pop energy to the seafood restaurant chain where the band of the same name rocks out nightly.

Unfortunately for our protagonist, the course of transsexual love is no smoother nor calmer than Hedwig’s refashioned genitals. After Luther abandons the matrimonial trailer park, suitcase in hand, Hedwig learns from American television that the Berlin Wall has fallen. And so a self-identified musical star is born, putting on the makeup and pulling the wig down from the shelf. Channelling the hyperfeminine real-life 1970’s star Farrah Fawcett, Hedwig struts as the trailer park home’s wall opens to become a stage.

Hedwig continues to stalk Tommy Gnosis, still claiming to have written the actual star’s hit song. The timeline jumps back once again to enable exposition of this claim of authorship. After his divorce from Luther, Hedwig meets the 17-year-old Tommy Speck while babysitting.

Mocked for being a Christian with a fish sign on the back of his truck, Tommy is apparently too youthful and naive to be allowed to look after his baby sibling. The bathtub masturbation scene, the antithesis of a screenwriter’s meet-cute, should probably have resulted in a call to local child protection services had this film not been a work of fiction based on an off-Broadway musical.

A homoerotic creative duo is formed after Tommy asks to eat the fruit proffered by Hedwig from the tree of anti-natural knowledge. Gnostic lore posits that the ordinary mortal has their divine spark hidden by demonic possession, causing their ‘essence’ to go unnoticed.

Gender transition is therefore a Gnostic exorcism of the singular, natural evil known as ‘cisheteronormativity’. The Gnostic adept considers they/themself a superior being in every sense. As the updated text of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5-TR) succinctly puts it, “Grandiose delusions may have a religious content.”

Hedwig literally grooms Tommy as he seduces the teenager, shaving his eyebrows, styling his hair, and drawing a signature crucifix on his forehead, but in the silver grease paint of glam rock rather than the black ash of the orthodox Church at Easter. And thus, the egg is cracked.

As Tommy Gnosis is catapulted to fame, performing the song on the supernatural ‘origin of love’ learned from Hedwig, the Teutonic transsexual is left behind in showbiz obscurity. Life on the road isn’t easy for Hedwig’s ‘Angry Inch’ band, playing on despite their leader’s obsession with Gnosis. An earlier quip about keeping the band’s passports to prevent them from leaving Hedwig turns out not to be a joke when Yitzhak’s passport is torn up, and with it, the band.

Three weeks later, as Hedwig solicits for prostitution in a back alley, Tommy arrives in his rock star limo. Tommy concedes privately that his hit song was in fact written by Hedwig, but an erotic encounter on the front seat of the limo while Hedwig is driving results in a road accident. The secret of Gnosis is now out.

Hedwig milks the resulting media controversy to find a new audience, but the public is ultimately unimpressed and unsatisfied. After a punk climax which I did not anticipate, a naked Hedwig walks alone along an alley into the street to conclude the film.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is romantic, in its own dysfunctional way. While notionally about an East Berlin punk rocker with a sensitive, philosophical side, attuned to the 1970’s gender-bending gay and bisexual scene indulging its fantasies on the opposite side of the Wall, Hedwig is really all-American.

Saint Hedwig is not only the name of a miraculous medieval Christian, but a small town east of San Antonio, Texas, founded by German and Polish settlers in the 19th century. The improbable presence of American soldiers living and loving queerly in East Berlin during the Cold War is another clue that the movie is a Texan fantasy, much like Hedwig’s Gnostic teachings on the origin of love. This is not a documentary of the transgender life, after all.

The ending of the movie has a contemporary resonance, suggesting this conclusion would not be allowed to be produced today without a rewrite imposed by the actors’ union threatening a strike. Viewed a quarter-century after its original release, the value of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, other than as pure entertainment, is the insight it provides into the incursion of transgender ideology into American Protestantism. In this latter sense, Hedwig is the prophet of our age.

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