Celluloid Confetti

When I first heard about Hedwig and the Angry inch (2001), John Cameron Mitchell’s first feature film, I thought it sounded awful.

The tale of an East German boy who has a botched sex change (hence the Angry Inch…) so he can marry an American soldier and elope to the West, where he tries to make a living as a glam rock star, Hedwigstruck me as a contrived Priscilla Queen of the Desert wannabe, all eye-shadow and lip-synch.

Then I actually saw the damn thing, and - much like Hedwig - I was brought up short.

The film’s opening song is based on a speech by Aristophanes from Plato’s Symposium, which should be worth brownie points in anyone’s book.

And Hedwig’s account of life as a young boy in East Berlin includes the following 24-carat gem:

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)….”

And later:

I got kicked out of university after delivering a brilliant lecture on the aggressive influence of German philosophy on rock and roll entitled ‘You, Kant, Always Get What You Want’.

In short, John Cameron Mitchell (JCM heareafter) is a filmmaker of enormous talent and judicious intelligence, he has a great singing voice, and he looks good in a dress.

And, as JCM’s latest film, Shortbus reveals, he has a dirty streak a mile wide.

I was lucky enough to meet up with JCM in a hotel room before Shortbus was released in the UK.

Like many famous people, he is small and perfectly formed, and - despite his barnstorming performance in Hedwig - surprisingly softly spoken.

Shortbus made headlines around the world for weaving generous quantities of real, actual sex into its multi-stranded narrative of New Yorkers exploring love, loneliness and death in the shadow of 9/11.

I asked JCM why he decided to follow up a glam rock musical with a film many people might regard as pornography.

I do love to play around with different kinds of cinematic language - my next film is a children’s film - but before I made the film of Hedwig I was interested in using sex in a new way, and it seemed that a lot of films coming out of Europe had been using unsimulated sex - but they were all very grim. And I thought there is more to sex than just wrist slashing - and more to it than just porn.

It’s funny when even my most enlightened friends come out of Shortbus and say “It’s not what I expected, I was moved and I laughed alot,” and I say, “Well, what do you expect from sex in your own life? Bleeding and porn?”, so we just wanted to remind people that sex is connected to several parts of our lives; it’s quite funny, and it’s connected to all sorts of different emotions.

Anyone looking to Shortbus to give them their evening’s kicks is likely to be disappointed; the emotional aspects of the characters’ lives, their frustrations, their sense of humour, play as important a role during the sexual scenes as they do the dialogue.

Which, I suppose, is how things are in real life.

(at least, as far as I remember…)

Anyway, it’s difficult to make a film about sex without getting vaguely political. But with lingering, loving shots of the Statue of Liberty, and an outrageously enjoyable scene where a group of characters sing the Star Spangled Banner (in a situation that gives new meaning to the term ‘a bum note’), JCM shows that it is possible to be pro-sex and pro-American at the same time.

I was a military brat [JCM’s father was commander of US forces in West Germany] - my mother is British, and I lived all over Europe and the States - so I never was a nationalistic person, but I was still moved by the national anthem, I was moved by the Statue of Liberty. I was like wow, these original ideas where the pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the Constitution - who has ever heard of that? I mean, it seems natural to me, but to actually put the pursuit of happiness in the Constitution is pretty unprecedented, and I like that about America.

Like Hedwig, Shortbus is the kind of film where it’s best to leave your preconceptions at the door.

If you missed Shortbus at the cinema, it’s well worth checking out on the small screen (it’s released on DVD Monday June 18th).

And here’s a challenge - see if you can spot JCM’s one brief cameo in the film (He’s pictured above with Shortbus star Sook-Yin Lee).

Blink and you’ll miss it! (Stare and you’ll go blind…)

Anyway, I’ll give the final word to JCM. I asked him why so many films that used unsimulated sex were often so…. depressing, and what his approach was with Shortbus.

There is a philosophical and emotional connection between sex and death - the French call the orgasm la petit mort - the moment when you are actually out of this world for a few seconds. A character in Shortbus calls it the most lonely place - and she loves that, becauase she is alone and time has stopped. And then you are sad after the orgasm because you are not alone, and you have to deal with the world.

So you can connect it with death that way, and some of the characters do, but in our case, we wanted to connect it to life, not to shun the dark side of sex, but to remind ourselves that it is connected to joy, it is conneced to humor, and not just the nudge nudge sophomoric version of it.

People are more comfortable with sex as a double entendre than a single entendre. Our film is pretty single entendre, and there is humour within it, rather than just referring to it. Most humour about sex is because people are scared of it and they are trying to control it. In our case we use humour to try and usher it in, as a spoonful of sugar…