It's Only A Flesh Wound Lambchop

Every now and then my self-proclaimed good nature is challenged by an old-fashioned funk. The past few weeks and months have been that and more - frustration at work, poor communications on the home front, the necessary yet devastating rupture of a longterm relationship, the anxiety of failing to complete a goal I set for myself years ago. Self-pity is a heavy load and one I carried bitterly home with me tonight, convinced that circumstances were conspiring against me and dammit "if the world wants me to be miserable then I should at least wallow in that misery and share it with my fellow man."

I didn't want to go home, I didn't want to stay out. So I ended up at the local Rogers Video, scowling at the latest releases and finding guilty pleasure in the act of elbowing other patrons who dared stand in my personal space. Certainly my behaviour was childish and churlish. And oh, so satisfying. Until I noticed a ‘for sale’ copy of the film version of Hedwig & The Angry Inch. While it hadn’t exactly seized me the first time I saw it in the theatre, considering my mood it seemed appropriate to choose a movie with Angry in the title. What I didn't expect to discover was that I'm apparently at a place in my life where I am vulnerable to the story of a German transsexual singer who has had her songs – and heart – stolen by a young rock idol.

For those unfamiliar, let me back up just a little. On the surface, Hedwig & the Angry Inch is the tale of a young gay man named Hansel living in Berlin before the fall of the wall. When an American army sergeant dangles freedom in front of him in exchange for a quickie marriage and a sex change operation, Hansel agrees to become Hedwig. The sex change operation goes wrong and Hedwig winds up living in a trailer park, abandoned by the sergeant and left with an 'angry inch.' To make matters worse, the Berlin wall has fallen and her sacrifices seem for nothing, leaving her with a trailer full of consequences.

While that may seem like plenty of plot to deal with, Hedwig is really about far more than that. Questioning the very nature of love, the show is inspired at least in part by Plato’s Symposium, upon which the shows defining song "Origin of Love" is based. John Cameron Mitchell’s incredible ear for dialogue and Stephen Trask’s heart wrenching lyrics pay homage to everything from punk to glam rock with generous nods to Queen and the androgynous stylings of Bowie and Iggy Pop.

How had I missed this before?

It’s funny how you can read the same book or see the same movie at different points in your life and while the piece itself hasn’t changed, you have – and its meaning and significance is somehow altered. The first time I saw the film, I thought I understood Hedwig for what it was – an entertaining, touching and truly bizarre story of someone searching for her other half.

When I encountered Hedwig the second time, something inside me had shifted, was instantly magnetized, drawn to the very same character in a way I hadn’t been a few years before. It was like the absolute and sudden attachment of an adolescent crush, desperately seeking solace and understanding in songs, books, film (The Smiths, Douglas Coupland, Sixteen Candles.)

What had changed for me was this: in the months before I saw Hedwig the second time my world had shifted. In some respects I had climbed higher than ever before, but I was also losing my grip on what mattered, slipping backwards even as I convinced everyone around me I was still treading water. I had suffered what felt like an absolute dearth of understanding of how broken and confused I felt. And then I found it, in Stephen Trask’s lyrics in "Origin of Love."

Hedwig sings:But I could swear by your expression
That the pain down in your soul
Was the same as the one down in mine.
That's the pain,
Cuts a straight line
Down through the heart,
We called it love.

It was as though someone had reached inside of me and touched the part of me that ached, found it, turned it over in their hands, acknowledged its existence – and done so with a beautiful swell of gut-wrenching music. The very acknowledgement, the very concept that someone could see and know the pain in another was what I’d been seeking for months

It wasn’t just the music, though. Where before I had seen a caricature, a freak show, now I truly understood Hedwig. Here I was, wanting to take her out and put my arms around her and tell her that yes, the pain was the same pain. That even if the cause was different, I still knew what it felt like to feel broken, to wonder if you could find enough love inside yourself to mend.

At the end of the show, when Hedwig reaches her own personal triumph, her own transformation and reconciliation with her demons, I didn’t feel healed. But I felt hopeful. There’s nothing lonelier than believing you are not understood. I finished the DVD not so much knowing that I was going to be alright, but able to acknowledge for the first time in months how not alright I had been. I had to acknowledge how far down I'd sunk before I could even begin to contemplate a climb out. And that was freeing in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn't been there.

Hedwig, I'm sure, would understand.