Abstract
John Cameron Mitchell’s film Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) traces the sexual and spiritual journey of a partially transgendered rock star searching for her “other half.” Her pursuit of erotic completion is depicted explicitly in “The Origin of Love,” a song based on a creation myth told only in Plato’s Symposium. This article demonstrates that the film owes a greater ideological debt to the Platonic dialogue than has been recognized and investigates how the narrative of Hedwig’s story visually dramatizes the Symposium’s many forms of eros. Both works delineate a sphere of all-male sexuality to explore the origin and satisfaction of erotic longing while employing a female persona to show that the highest form of love transcends physicality to culminate in the pursuit of knowledge. While Mitchell transports the premise of the Symposium to the cutting edge of cinema and music, he expands its ideological range to interrogate the definition of love and its intersection with gender identity.
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