John Cameron Mitchell’s Aristophanic Cinema: Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)

Abstract

John Cameron Mitchell’s film Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) tells the story of Hansel, an East German youth; his transformation into Hedwig, a transsexed¹ performer of punk rock music; and her² attempts to achieve love and self-acceptance. According to Stephen Trask, the composer and songwriter of Hedwig, Plato’s Symposium provided the source material:

When John and I started working together, the first thing that we did was we walked to a bookstore and he bought me Plato’s Symposium… and he gave it to me and said, “Read this—there’s a story in there I want you to adapt.”³