Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
Panic!: Hedwig and the Angry Inch
- Tuesday, March 4, 2025 / 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM (PST)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 4K digital projection (93 minutes)
- With John Cameron Mitchell (writer/director/actor)
With this trailblazing musical, writer/director/star John Cameron Mitchell and composer/lyricist Steven Trask brought their remarkable stage show to the screen for a movie as unclassifiable as its protagonist. Raised as a boy in divided East Berlin, Hedwig undergoes a dramatic transformation in order to emigrate to the U.S. as the wife of an American serviceman. Now in Junction City, Kansas, Hedwig suffers heartache after heartache, leaving her American husband the very same year the Berlin Wall comes down. She reinvents herself as an “internationally ignored” but divinely talented rock diva who tours her musical act across a chain of Midwestern seafood restaurants and serves as a muse for men who go on to achieve fame with songs they’ve stolen from her. Mitchell and Trask use Hedwig’s music, an eclectic mix of punk anthems and power ballads, to spill Hedwig’s romantic and tragic life story, punctuated with a cinematic mosaic of music video fantasies and moments of bracing emotional realism.
Over twenty years since its release, Hedwig and the Angry Inch remains as relevant as ever to the politics of the day. A child of division, Hedwig refuses to be caught between categories, instead evading gender description and embracing herself as lovingly as one can. Writer/director/actor John Cameron Mitchell will join moderator Patrice Petro (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center) for a post-screening discussion of Hedwig of the Angry Inch.
Tickets for this event will be available Tuesday, January 28 at 11:00 AM.
This event is free but a reservation is recommended in order to guarantee a seat.
Biographies
Writer/director/actor John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell wrote, directed, and starred in the stage musical and film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which earned two Tony Awards and Best Director at the Sundance Festival. His performance as Hedwig earned him a nomination for Golden Globe for Best Actor. He also wrote and directed the films Shortbus, Rabbit Hole, and How to Talk to Girls at Parties, starring Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning. His TV roles include Girls, Shrill, The Good Fight, Yellowjackets, The Sandman, City on Fire and Joe vs. Carole, and his fictional podcast series include Anthem: Homunculus starring Glenn Close, Patti Lupone, Cynthia Erivo and Laurie Anderson, as well as the upcoming Cancellation Island, starring Holly Hunter.
Moderator Patrice Petro (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center)
Patrice Petro is Professor of Film and Media Studies, Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, and Presidential Chair in Media Studies. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of fourteen books, including Uncanny Histories in Film and Media Studies (2022), The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (with Kristin Hole, Dijana Jelaca, and E. Ann Kaplan, 2017), Teaching Film (2012), Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s (2010), Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror” (2006), and Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (2002). She served two terms as President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the largest US professional organization for college and university educators, filmmakers, historians, critics, scholars, and others devoted to the study of the moving image.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
CWC Presents: Panic!
The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2024-25 feature series Panic! explores the complex relationship between media, an anxious public, and the turbulent currents of social, cultural, and moral panic. The series will examine how such panics have appeared on screen over the decades, but also consider how the screen itself—as technology, as gathering space, and as a site of fantasy and desire—becomes the object of reactionary backlash. Panic! will be a yearlong showcase of the films, discourses, and cultural practices that have tested the limits of public acceptability, and that have much to teach us about the cycles of panic that define our own political moment.
Storytelling for the Screen
Since their emergence, cinema and television have been in a state of constant technological and industrial flux. But even as our ways of distributing and accessing moving images have changed, and even as tastes and styles continue shifting with the times, our passion for compelling onscreen storytelling persists. At the Carsey-Wolf Center, we are committed to fostering a nuanced understanding of cinematic and televisual storytelling across genres, formats, styles, and historical periods. To this end, we sponsor a wide range of events, programs, and workshops designed to cultivate a new generation of media storytellers, and to help audiences better understand the evolving role of narrative across diverse media forms.