I was a regular Rocky fan.
The
Rocky Horror Picture Show, that is. I’m not the first person to
write about this, not by a long shot. I won’t be the last. But it’s
Halloween and I have an annual ritual of playing the soundtrack in my
car and loudly singing all the parts this time of year, something I
did this past weekend. I also watched a BBC stage production of this
on Saturday, so it’s on my mind.
My
first exposure to RHPS was back around 1980 or so. I was in college
and working as a volunteer teaching assistant for the secondary
gifted program in Greene County. One of the students had a copy of
the Official Rocky Horror Picture Show Movie Novel and the record of
the soundtrack.
A
janitor found the Movie Novel left in the classroom and lost his
shit. He turned it in to the principal, believing it to be little
more than pornography and what the Hell was being taught in that
gifted class anyway. The teacher was forced to sit through a no doubt
uncomfortable meeting about this, and to her credit, went to bat for
the students, eventually convincing the administration of the value
of discussing these kinds of topics. I don’t know how she managed
it, but kudos. The book was returned to the student and we all got
the stinkeye from that janitor from that point on.
Being
out in a rural setting we had no access to actually seeing the film,
so my experience with it was exclusively through these artifacts. It
would be a couple of years before I actually saw the movie at a
midnight showing at the GeeBee’s shopping plaza in Washington, PA.
It was the full-fledged audience participation event I expected. All
of the props, all of the chaos. I vaguely remember someone tearing a
toilet out of the floor in the men’s room, so there was a level of
vandalism not usually associated with this as well, probably
explaining why it was never screened there again.
I
loved it. How could I not? The film was, and forgive my obvious
metaphor here, a Frankensteinian collage of my favorite things:
science fiction, horror, rock and roll, comic books, and sex.
Which
probably says way too much about my priorities.
What
I didn’t recognize at the time is the extent of the Pop Culture
nexus RHPS really is for these elements. There are lots of
connections I want to explore, so bear with me while I work this out.
RHPS
is pretty specifically a product of the time and place in which it
was created. It was first staged in London in 1973, firmly at the
height of the Glam Rock movement. Glitter, costumes, camp, and sexual
ambiguity were the order of the day. T Rex, The Sweet, Roxy Music and
David Bowie, among many others, were scandalizing the stodgy keepers
of the status quo on record and on TV with overtly sexualized,
gender-bending performances. Glam was a short-lived phenomenon in the
music world (though I could make the case that it
never went away, just reformatted). It’s lifestyle was too extreme.
It served as a short transition from what rock music had been up to
that point and what it was going to become.
In
the midst of all of the Glam indicators in RHPS it is Columbia who
most clearly represents it. Her costume is all glitter and sequins,
with character references to Betty Boop and Sally Bowles from Cabaret
(another influential film in the Glam Rock canon).
 |
| Little Nell |
 |
| Liza Minelli |
 |
| Betty Boop |
Columbia
is torn between the past and the future, as represented by her love
for both Eddie and her obsession with Frank. It makes complete sense
to me that Columbia was in love with Eddie. Glam was in love with the
music of the 50s. A tremendous amount of the genre (the artistic
achievements of Bowie and a couple of other artists excepted), was a
return to the aesthetic of the past. The social consciousness of the
60s, the experimentation of the Beatles, the jazz-influenced jam band
sound of the Grateful Dead, and many other signifiers of the hippy
generation were eschewed in favor of the three-minute pop song
single. Both Gary Glitter and Alvin Stardust had been 50s era
crooners who reinvented themselves as Glam stars. A lot of the music
itself sounds like it could have been written a decade earlier. Roy
Wood of Wizzard tricked himself out in more makeup and gaudiness than
most, but his songs were direct sonic throwbacks to old time rock n’
roll.
Glam
wasn’t alone in its love of the past. A full blown 50s revival was
in the air. Grease premiered on stage in 1971. AmericanGraffiti hit the big screen in 1973 and Happy Days was
just around the corner on the small screen in 1974.
For
all of its subversion, RHPS is drenched in nostalgia. The most
obvious examples of this are the film references. The late night,
science fiction picture show was part of 50s culture as much as doo
wop. Frank was a mix of the horror movie icons of Dr. Frankenstein
and Dracula, with Riff Raff as his Igor/Renfield. The reference to
Fay Wray, followed by Rocky climbing a tower and getting shot down is
less than subtle. Rocky himself is a parody of the Charles Atlas ads
that ran in every comic book ever for decades (an exaggeration, but
not by much). Body building, and the magazines dedicated to it in the
first half of the 20th century are one of the direct
influences on comic books and the superhero genre.
But
Columbia fell in love with the future as well. Eddie only had half a
brain after all, and Brad and Janet are the cliched archetypes of the
1950s teen. Nostalgia is at its heart, conservative. The belief that
things were better in the good old days prevents growth and progress
into new ways of thinking. These images of a somehow more innocent
past are subverted not only by the clothing and sexuality of the film, but by actual history itself. By this time we were wounded by Viet Nam, and
assassinations, and the death of the love and peace ideal of the 60s.
In the middle of this moment we had Kent State and Watergate (Nixon’s
resignation speech can be heard on the radio in the RHPS movie). To
go back to the metaphor, ‟Darkness conquered Brad and Janet.” No
wonder we were clamoring for some innocent nostalgia. But, once we
remove the lens of sentimentality and acknowledge the darkness it’s
impossible not to see it. ‟Still the beast is feeding.”
But
as scary as the past may be, the future is more so. It is the great
unknown. David Bowie’s Major Tom was alone in his capsule, the
ultimate in alienation, while Ziggy Stardust was ‟a Starman,
waiting in the sky,” who would, ‟like to come and meet us, but
he’s afraid he’d blow our mind.” Frank N Furter exhorts us,
‟Don’t get strung out, by the way I look.” He knows he’s
blown our minds.
And
in the end both Ziggy and Frank had to die at the hands of their
admirers. It was too much, too soon. The lifestyle is too extreme to
carry into day to day living, but the encounter with it changes
people.
In 1973 50s
rock n’ roll was nostalgia, Glam was dying of its own excess, but
RHPS anticipated what was coming. The leather and ripped clothes and
makeup and anti-authoritarian mindset anticipated Punk, and in its
use of horror imagery, more specifically Goth (Riff Raff and Magenta
appear in the early scenes in Denton posed as the American Gothic
painting). Not that this was the first appearance or only influence
in music. Screamin Jay Hawkins, Arthur Brown, and Alice Cooper were
openly utilizing these motifs in ways that probably influenced RHPS
as much as it influenced what came after. It’s certainly debatable,
but I can see direct lines from Glam to Punk to Goth (which I might
talk about in a different post). To quote myself from one of my
novels, ‟Goth is just Glam with the lights turned down.” Count
the number of Glam songs covered by Bauhaus if you doubt me.
All
of these elements come to together, and to tease out specific
connections and influences can be difficult. To explore one example,
as an aside (because we need one of those in a post that’s already
tl;dr), I want to talk, briefly I promise, about the Runaways. There
is an anecdote where their Svengali Kim Fowley took the girls out to
see RHPS. This was significant enough that it was mentioned in at
least two books that I’ve read, and possibly three (I don’t have
them in front of me). Cherie Currie and Joan Jett are both on record
as being heavily influenced by Glam acts (Bowie and Suzi Quatro,
respectively, among others). Because of the timing they were lumped
in with the burgeoning punk movement. You can see this clearly in
their fashion. Cherie famously scandalized the rock press by wearing
a bustier and thigh highs on stage when she was sixteen. Was this
directly inspired by RHPS? Hard to say, but the imagery speaks for
itself. Years later Joan Jett was cast as Columbia in a Broadway
revival of RHPS and in the floorshow section of the play can be seen
wearing an outfit remarkably similar to Cherie’s. Full circle.
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| Columbia |
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| Cherie Currie |
 |
| Joan Jett as Columbia |
RHPS
was a failure when it was first released, but over the years
developed a cult following in repeated midnight showings around the
globe. It is perhaps the most viewed movie in history. Hundreds of
thousands of people (millions? Is that possible?), have gathered in
the dark to not just watch, but to participate in this cultural
phenomenon.
My
friend Dr. Michael Chemers has written about this (source cited
below). He talks at length about the RHPS Performance Cult. The movie
has transformed into a participatory experience as opposed to
something that is simply watched. It has become a mystery cult, where
virgins, those who have not seen the movie, are initiated into the
shared group experience. There is a call and response, where the
congregation shouts out specific lines in response to what is
happening on screen. Props are brought to the theater to simulate the
experience.
In
many theaters there were performance troupes who dressed in costumes
and acted out the entire film. You can see this in the movie Perks
of Being a Wallflower, filmed here in Pittsburgh at the Hollywood Theater, which had a long history of showing the film (in 2008, when
Chemers article appeared, Pittsburgh had only one of three theaters
in the country that still did this). While I have certainly danced
the Time Warp I never officially participated in these performances,
though I know several people who did.
This
level of identification with something is the essence of religious
experience, and if I may go out on a limb, of intense fandom of
anything. We identify with something larger than ourselves and wish
to emulate it. Fans go to concerts dressed as Ziggy Stardust, Alice
Cooper, and KISS. We wear the sports jerseys of our favorite players.
Comics conventions are filled with cosplayers with dozens of
Deadpools, Harley Quinns and Doctor Whos. We pull on the sacred
raiments of our obsession and engage in Participation Mystique.
But,
as Dr. Chemers points out, watching RHPS on DVD in the comfort of
your home changes your interaction with it. Fewer and fewer people
are having the shared communal experience. The mystery cult has no
place to congregate. It’s a shame because it is in the shared
experience that the lessons of the sacrament become embodied in the
real world, and I think there are many lessons to be learned from
RHPS.
The
first is the obvious mantra of ‟Don’t dream it. Be it.” It is a
statement that speaks for itself. It is Joseph Campbell’s ‟Follow
your bliss.” But, as important as this may be, I don’t think it
is the main lesson we can learn. While there are many factors in any
major social change I can’t help but wonder about just how much of
a cultural impact RHPS has had on our perception and acceptance of
sexuality. For thirty years thousands of people participated in a world that
embraced transvestites, transexuals, transgendered, queer, bi, and
straight characters.
In
1973 these were topics that very few people discussed openly. Bowie casually hugged his guitarist Mick Ronson on TV and Great Britain lost its mind at the
perceived overt homosexuality of the act. We now live in a world
where these issues are being dealt with in a much more open fashion.
We still have light years to go for full acceptance, I understand
that, and in no way do I want to diminish the very real struggles
many people still endure. But, I know that for myself, this movie was
an open door into a world I had not encountered, one that changed my
perceptions. In these over-the-top caricatured characters I was able
to recognize truths that went beyond the campiness of the film. Under
the glitter and the makeup and the thigh highs there was the
possibility of very real people trying to find their identity, trying
to connect with other people.
There
was the possibility, for everyone, of finding a light in the darkness
of their lives.
Chemers, Dr. Michael. ‟Wild
and Untamed Thing: The Exotic, Erotic, and Neurotic Rocky Horror
Performance Cult.” in Reading Rocky Horror: The Rocky Horror
Picture Show and Popular Culture. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ed
(Palgrave MacMillan: New York, 2008)
