THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW

by Kevin Koehler

There's something unsettling about church weddings. Perhaps it's the organ music, officiates dressed in black, the crying, or even the ejaculatory rice throwing. The whole thing is bizarrely paradoxical in its combination of the sexual and asexual, birth and death, black and white, austerity and prurience.

Kind of like life.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show features two weddings - each demonstrates the intrinsic absurdity of the Puritan's sexual rite of passage. The first one opens the film. It's a scene we've witnessed before: happy couple drives off before a crowd of joyous onlookers. This time, however, the figurative is made literal as their car is decorated with the words "Wait til tonite. She got hers now. He'll get his." Quid pro quo. "An hour ago, she was plain old Betty Monroe. Now she's Mrs. Ralph Hapschat." Marriage as transaction and ownership (or even consensual rape) could not be clearer.

The plot of Rocky Horror, or what there is of one, centers on All-American squares Brad (Barry Bostwick) and fiancée Janet (Susan Sarandon) after they make a wrong turn into a time warp and find themselves the playthings of the maniacal transvestite Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) and his merry band of weirdoes. It's not really important. The second wedding occurs halfway through the film, a rush job between Frank-N-Furter and his creation, the titular Rocky Horror, a perfect physical specimen birthed to be the mad scientist's sex slave. There is an element of incest to it and we pity poor Rocky, who really has little say in the matter (singing "Oh, can't you see, that I'm at the start of a pretty big downer"). Once again, subtext becomes text. When we infantilize sex (and further, our wives, and even further, women in general), we marry our children. Like Mrs. Ralph Hapschat, Rocky Horror (shared initials, natch) has been given life, but at the service of another.

While drawing upon the other 1970s androgynous space alien of glam Ziggy Stardust, Rocky Horror also invites immediate comparison to Grease (it's worth noting that Barry Bostwick originated the role of Danny Zuko on Broadway - the yin to Brad Major's yang), with all its 1950s kitsch, themes of sexual liberation (Sandy sings "You're the One That I Want," Janet sings "Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch Me" - potato, po-ta-to), and of course, the music. When Danny Zuko succeeds in making his own spandex-clad and cigarette-smoking Frankenstein monster out of Olivia Newton John, would it have been that out of place to see Frank-N-Furter belt out from the Funhouse "Don't Dream It, Be It?"

Perhaps, but not because the sentiment is misplaced. Janet's transformation into a fully-realized sexual being is the more honest, and further, more empowering of the two. Her central motivation is to please herself, not some guy in a leather jacket (indeed, she cuckolds her own Danny) whose attempts to woo her at a drive-in movie theatre border worryingly on date rape. Grease wants to have its Eisenhower Era nostalgia both ways – at turns revering the decade and rejecting it. Rocky Horror simply rejects.

Near the end of the picture, a wheel-chair bound Strangelove-esque character (read: impotence) shows up to save Brad and Janet. But from what? Where were you when you were really needed: the Rydell High graduation carnival, 1959?

Interesting footnote: Rocky Horror Picture Show creator Richard O'Brien (who plays Riff Raff) wrote a sequel, Rocky Horror Shows His Heels, in which a pregnant Janet gives birth to a child of questionable paternity. When O'Brien and director Jim Sharman ran into problems convincing the original cast to sign on, the plot and characters were changed (though Brad and Janet remain), and the film was eventually produced as 1981's Shock Treatment.

© Pretentious Musings. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.