Richard O'Brien

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The "Rocky Horror Picture Show" Book

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Although the word "cult" reportedly never came up in the preparation or early marketing of Rocky Horror, the phenomenal following the movie has achieved can hardly be understood in any other terms. Partly, cult overtones developed because at least to some degree the film does speak to people who see themselves as outsiders to begin with…. (p. 36)

Of course, we're all Brads and Janets when we see Rocky Horror for the first time. But not when we walk out after the movie; perhaps that's why some of the best audience lines are directed at Brad and Janet. A lot of Rocky Horror fans do not see themselves as outsiders. They've been straight-laced, upstanding folk and feel it's time to step into another kind of world, another kind of life. Coming to see Rocky Horror is one simple, inexpensive, and safe way to take that step. It's a way to join a different kind of family. Because this phenomenon is not just a movie. For many fans, it's home.

The film's appeal may be broader than anyone outside the phenomenon realizes. The fantasy world of science fiction, do-it-yourself monsters, and the haunted house belong to all of us at some time. Richard O'Brien succeeded in writing a script, lyrics, and music that can be enjoyed by any ten-year-old, and yet retains an appeal for adults after multiple screenings. Kids and adults alike take pleasure in the classically stylized sets, costuming, and makeup, and the clearly defined heroes and heroines. (pp. 36-7)

Like God, whose minister he portrays in the wedding of Ralph and Betty Hapschatt,… Frank-N-Furter has the ability to create life itself. But the mad scientist has made his discovery by accident. His is the underbelly, the dark side of creation; and it should come as no surprise to us when he suffers satanic ruin.

Before he dies, however, Frank is the joy of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. All the film's early scenes are directed toward his entrance; every character in the movie responds to him principally; and the picture is virtually over when his life ends.

In a simple, stylized manner, Frank is a study in contrasts. He is a ruthless master who has no qualms about committing murder, whipping his supposedly "faithful handyman" for an apparently slight infraction, serving Dr. Scott's roasted nephew to him for dinner, or seducing both a male and a female virgin in a single night. Yet, it is he who engages our affections when he is triumphant, and our sympathies when he faces disaster. As a sweet transvestite with a penchant for muscle-men, he is as macho as John Wayne ever was. He is the richly charactered magus who dies for our imagined sins, and redeems our fantasies as he lives out our hidden dreams.

Like any hero-villain of mythic proportions, Frank has his blind spot: In his monumental egotism he mistakes his true enemy. Whatever their past relationship may be—and a dire, competitive one is suggested—Frank is wrongly suspicious of Dr. Scott, while his trusted servant, Riff Raff, hovers in the background, biding time until his coup can take place. His lifestyle is "too extreme" according to Riff Raff. There is no forgiveness for Frank and his fondest illusions must come to nothing. He fails not because of his ignorance, but because he is overtaken by his own talents.

But along the way he reminds us of our possibilities and leads us in the movie's anthem, exhorting us, "Don't dream it—be it." For his willingness to live out his own dreams, we love him. And it is Frank, more than any other character, that we return to the theater again and again to see and, in our hopeful way, to be. (pp. 53-4)

Among the outrageous characters in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, none is so bizarre as Riff Raff…. While everyone else in the movie works from a single set of character traits and develops in a linear fashion that can be anticipated, despite occasional lapses, the hunchbacked handyman and his sister Magenta are duplicitous. They appear to be menial servants, when in fact they are powerful undercover agents waiting for the right moment to take over the Transylvanian leadership on Earth and return to their native planet of Transexual.

Riff Raff is insolent in his lack of power, cruel when he holds it, and insanely paranoiac in its exercise. It is he who works most closely with the mad scientist in charge of the Transylvanian mission; he who releases Rocky from bondage, creating pandemonium in his master's heart; and he who wields the laser gun that kills Columbia, Rocky, and Frank at the movie's end. (p. 61)

Innocence that is not educated will surely be defiled. It is difficult to say which happens to Janet Weiss, the ingenue's ingenue in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, since she takes to her defilement with such enthusiasm.

Actually, Janet's is the true-life story of many American girls raised in towns much like Denton, where the story takes place. An innocent childhood and adolescence leave them ill-prepared for the horrors of the larger world, and the discovery of those horrors can only be traumatic. Instead of curling up and dying of anguish or embarrassment as some girls might, however, Janet uses her initiation into the darker side of life as a means of educating herself. (p. 65)

No matter how much we may love and adore the weird Transylvanians and their leader Frank, we Earthlings always find a certain amount of attraction for Rocky Horror's romantic leads, Brad and Janet. We are attached to them at the beginning of the movie; we are greeted with them by Frank in the laboratory; we live on, as they do, after Frank has died and his castle has been beamed back to the galaxy of Transylvania. In a way, they are our inspiration on this mad journey: They get our kicks for us.

At the same time, it is difficult in our sophisticated age to see these horribly innocent kids as our representatives. It is hard, after all, to imagine a greater scion of straightness than that knight in tinfoil armor, Brad Majors.

From his first appearance at the Hapschatt wedding, it is obvious that Brad—commonly dubbed "Asshole" by most audiences—is a young fool. And every move he makes, every line he speaks, every note he sings in the entire movie makes his idiotic position more secure and more sincere. Brad is entirely laughable, but deep down we know that we are more like Brad than we are like Frank, and that is Brad's saving grace for us. (p. 68)

From what reporters, newscasters, and "virgins" have viewed in newspapers, on television, and in midnight movie lines across the nation, there seems little doubt that Rocky Horror fans are indeed its slaves. Every Friday and Saturday night, as the witching hour approaches, thousands of people across the United States, Canada, and the rest of the world line up to buy their tickets for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Most of the people are young; many are hipsters of one sort or another; some are in costume and makeup resembling the movie's characters. Such devotional behavior has occurred in the past, but never in movie history have the proportions been so huge, the audience so devout, or the duration so long. Is this a genuine cult? Is it a new religion? Is it the end of the world? (pp. 95-6)

The appearance of a live cast renews the film's reality for the viewer. Yet this live theater has begun to edge the movie off to the side—not out, however, because without the film the whole sideshow would go pffft! But it is legitimate to ask, at least, whose show the whole show really is. (p. 97)

Cults, like religions, are founded on beliefs, and members take themselves seriously. But not the Rocky Horror brigades. The movie's a place to have fun, to celebrate, to shout what must be the most delightful obscenities in the land. And although members of the inner circle have seen the film an incredible number of times, membership requires no more than three or four bucks and midnight attendance. Rocky Horror is more like a Sunday afternoon barbecue or a church picnic for the night people….

Audience response to the movie is widespread and often spontaneous. Although certain elements of the audience script remain identical from one location to another, other elements are unique to specific regions, theaters, and even performances…. The point is, when Frank says "antici—" and we say, "Say it!" we are there. We have our own cues, our own lines, and our own stage (audience) presence. ("pation!") (p. 102)

There's an odd kind of camaraderie practiced here, just perfect for the seventies. Fast-food intimacy: a burger jack and a small order of whoopie, I'm wearing a garter belt! A large coke and an apple pie filled with look ma! I'm yelling and throwing stuff! Fun? You bet. I think I'll be a girl tonight. Hey, that's great! I'll be a guy! Tee hee….

The gay, straight, bi, and incestuous sexuality is so totally parodied that any "message" of sexual liberation is incidental. The film is much more a hybrid fantasy of social decadence plugged straight into the brainstem of an extroverted culture. Even cannibalism slides by as part of the package. And since the show is by no means confined to the screen, our responses are pure catharsis. (p. 126)

The audience cheers and boos as if the characters were there, and we can do so without the usually intimidating problems such adoration entails. While we can afford to be cruel to our celluloid heroes—pointing out that Columbia's breasts are "lopsided"; that Janet has "chicken legs"; that Brad is an "asshole"; that the Criminologist has "no neck"—there is never any doubt that the audience loves the characters without reserve. They are known quantities, and they are on our side—or we are on theirs. (p. 128)

It must be clear from the bald use of the ridiculous, such as having Rocky Horror, the homemade monster, climb a mini RKO tower with a dead ersatz Fay Wray on his back, that sophistication was not the goal of O'Brien and director Jim Sharman. Nor have they endeavored to fit the film neatly into any single genre. Rather, O'Brien, who makes it a habit to collect old comic books and who often drops in on the B-movie revivals, has taken the whole broad scope of pop features from his childhood days and blended their highlights into a script that both participates in and comments upon several major movie traditions.

Thus, while Frankenstein, Dracula, and King Kong are obvious resonances for anyone lightly schooled in film, you have to like to go to the movies to pick up the Edgar Lustgarten thrillers, Sam Katzman rock 'n' roll exploitation flicks, Nelson Eddy-Jeannette MacDonald operettas, [Tod Browning's] Freaks or [Roman Polanski's] The Fearless Vampire Killers…. [You] may legitimately read in overtones of Phantom of the Paradise, Lisztomania, Tommy, Hair, and Jesus Christ Superstar from a more recent era.

This movie is intended to be fun…. And its overtones can be fun even for the uneducated film goer because they are common denominators of our movie heritage. You need not have seen King Kong to recognize the ape in Rocky Horror's final climb. You need not have heard of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley or seen Boris Karloff's monster to know the legend of Frankenstein. Certain themes and cinematic images have become part of us. They are easily recognizable.

Need we point out that the oddly made-up antihero of A Clockwork Orange—Frank-N-Furter's distant antecedent—describes his pleasures as "real horrorshow?" While several critics have noted that Tim Curry's classic performance as the transvestite scientist bears some similarity to the multisexual ravings of rock 'n' roll's satanic majesty, Mick Jagger, none have attached it to Jagger's most important film, Performance. (pp. 130-31)

Not that The Rocky Horror Picture Show is as clean, slick, and pointed as either [Stanley] Kubrick's or [Nicholas] Roeg's masterpieces. But neither Clockwork Orange nor Performance intentionally set out to be B movies or parodies, while Rocky Horror set out to be both and succeeded. (p. 131)

[Heavy-handed] parody invests the movie with the genres and references it satirizes. It is immaterial whether or not the Rocky Horror fan knows American Gothic. The film is riddled with references to that painting, as we see the pitchfork in Riff Raff's hand during the wedding scene turn into his triune laser gun in the closing sequence. Yet it requires no effort at all to absorb the whole mythic context of the American Gothic theme.

Similarly, the film combines the salient elements of the science fiction, horror, monster, fantasy, surrealist, underground, and operetta genres. That one scene does not always lead convincingly to the next; that Frank's killing rage is utterly out of character; that, while the movie prepares us for Riff Raff's treason, it does not in any sense prepare us for his puerile, psychopathic motive—these holes and contradictions are part of the movie and do not detract from the movie's primary goal of parody and satire.

Rocky Horror is designed to move from one thrill to another with a minimum of imposition. If we've suspended our disbelief enough to accept that fatuous virgin as our ingenue and her turkey of a boyfriend as our hero; and if we've bought the fortuitous circumstances of a dead-end road on a rainy night with a spare tire in want of air and an eerie gothic castle whose "Enter At Your Own Risk" sign becomes illuminated with a highly effective, highly unsophisticated bolt of special effects lightning; why should we balk if we are not carried along on eddies of cinematic and literary perfection? No one said this was [Ingmar Bergman's] The Seventh Seal. Finding fault with the structure of Rocky Horror is a little like objecting to the Classic Comics version of Hamlet. It is not germane that we've lost the King's English; it is only germane that we can follow the story line. (p. 134)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show may or may not succeed according to some theory of absolutes, but does it succeed on its own terms and accomplish the purpose of its makers? Critics who have been horrified by some of the movie's absurdities have been inclined to see its thematic perversions as horrible too. But there are lots of people who have found those perversions—at least as presented here—to be entertaining, and who do not require stringent coherence between theory and form in order to enjoy a laff. These are the people for whom Rocky Horror was made, and this is the audience the film has found. (p. 136)

Bill Henkin, in his The "Rocky Horror Picture Show" Book (reprinted by permission of Hawthorn Properties (Elsevier-Dutton Publishing Co., Inc.); copyright © 1979 by Bill Henkin), Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1979, 220 p.

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Cult Films: A Handful of Offbeat Movies Have Become Ritualistic Events for Young Film Freaks