The audience and ‘I’: in the image of The Rocky Horror Picture Show
By: Adi Alroy
I too had receiv’d identity by my body,
That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew should be of my body.
—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
One moment. Let me erect my image, in miniature. It all begins with the signature-letter, ‘I’. (Fraught are relations between the author and ‘I’; the maker and man; the face and the painted mask).
Audience: Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, God said ‘Let there be lips’.
That’s my first line. It went ok, I think. (But the first one always gets decent laughs—we’ll see how I manage the rest). I’m the one sitting up straight in my seat in the centre of the cinema. I guess I might be blocking your view. I really don’t mean to, it’s just that I’m head over heels in love. Man, I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll tell it again, from the beginning this time. Maybe I’ll even let the movie do the talking.
I first saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show the winter I was fifteen. The Dendy Cinema in Newtown, Sydney, Australia ran Rocky Horror at 9pm on the second Friday of every month, for $9 AUD, student concession. To account for particulars, (which is important, because some of this is a story): it was on the 12th of August 2022 that I went to the late-night picture show, with my fishnets, my father, and my thoroughly intimate knowledge of the song lyrics. I didn’t know any of the audience callouts I didn’t know the vulgar and grand tradition of audience partici-
Audience: Say it!! This movie would suck without audience partici-
-pation.
But I did sing (quiet and obnoxious) along to every song.
Fig. 1. Yours truly and father, all gussied up for their night out.
Audience: A night in!
The Criminologist: On a night out—
Audience: It was a night in!
The Criminologist: It was a night out—
Audience: It was a night of in and out.
Now we are introduced. Now we are ripe for a song and dance. That’s important, because, really, this is a love letter.
Rocky Horror starts with a black screen and a disembodied pair of rouged lips, which float towards you and grow screen-sized. They’re fairly anatomical, as far as disembodied bits go. You get tastebuds, teeth grooves, the little fluffy hairs around the edges of female mouths (although the voice singing through this mouth is male)—in short, it is intimate, ergo grotesque. It is a question of size, of scale. Scale, it must be said, is somewhat nebulous here, given the absence on screen of any other relevant body parts. But we also wear red lips. En masse, in costume, we are parodies of the screen; mostly, we are parodies of ourselves. If the Old Comedic costume revels in ugliness and excess, in painted masks and ‘grotesque padding’, our costume perhaps bears more relation to the red nose of Lecoq’s strange, open clown: we too wear ‘the smallest mask in the world’, in the form of lipstick and strings.
Fig 2. The Old Comedic costume: Brown, p. 35. — Fig 3. Lecoq’s strange, open clown: Lecoq, p. 153.
And isn’t it uniquely humiliating? Our painted faces and fishnet stockings, like the clown’s red nose, work absurdly inadequate performances of concealment. Nominally covering the body, all three in truth constitute wearable ceremonies of un-masking/dressing—and thus expose a latent pathos in the organs of expression and the flesh. To draw a contemporary comparison, Comic Con fursuiters, although certainly masked and costumed, no doubt feel—
Audience: Less naked?
Frank-N-Furter: … less vulnerable.
Audience: Same thing!
But the decadent humiliation of dressing for Rocky Horror transcends one’s personal inclinations towards exhibitionism and anonymity. Wearing Frank-N-Furter’s fishnets (like Brad, Janet, Columbia, and Rocky in the burlesque part-cabaret-part-aquamusical ‘floorshow’ scene), what we ultimately lay bare is a cinematic desire to make ourselves in the image of Rocky Horror.
Fig 4. Rocky, Janet, Brad, and Columbia, flanking Frank-N-Furter and fashioned in his image.
Have you seen Rocky Horror? Familiarised yourself (like Rocky!) with the holes in its plot? Don’t be shy if you haven’t. The introductory lips lick, freeze, blow spit bubbles, and sing a song in homage to sci-fi and horror B movies, the chorus of which helpfully provides a partially accurate plot summary of the movie you are about to watch:
Lips: Science fiction / double feature
Doctor X will build a creature
See androids fighting Brad and Janet
Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet
Our mad scientist is in fact named Dr Frank-N-Furter, and he is also an axe-wielding murder clown, a vampiric sex symbol, and a panto dame.4 He is something like the 20th century theatre’s generic answer to the Renaissance man. He is moreover the owner of a castle, and therefore Brad and Janet’s only hope of a working telephone when they bust a tyre in the middle of nowhere on a dark and stormy night while en route to share the news of their brand-new engagement with their ex-science tutor, Dr Scott (a rival mad scientist). Got all that?
Janet: I’m going with you.
Brad: Oh no darling, there’s no sense in both of us getting wet.
Audience: Janet already is!
Janet: I’m coming with you!
Audience: That’d be a first.
Janet: Besides darling, the owner of that phone might be a beautiful woman--
Audience: He is!
Janet: --and you might never come back again!
The movie you are about to watch is not Forbidden Planet, and Anne Francis will be making no appearance. Neither will androids. Siblings Riff-Raff and Magenta, like their master Dr Frank-N-Furter, are certified organic extra-terrestrials (from the planet Transsexual in the galaxy Transylvania), and their intentions with Brad and Janet are peaceful (their intentions with Frank are mutinous; their intentions with each other, incestuous).
On the night that Brad and Janet’s car breaks down, Frank is hosting a scientific conference of Transylvanians. He has indeed built a creature—a blond muscleman wrapped head-to-foot in bandages, suspended in a tank reminiscent of the womb and/or the sideshow aquarium. He is Rocky Horror, and the Transylvanians have convened for what is both his birth(day party) and his wedding (night). But shortly following Rocky’s ‘birth’, the (ex)delivery boy Eddie (Columbia’s lover, and, it is later revealed, Dr Scott’s nephew) busts out of cryogenic deep-freeze with motorcycle, tenor sax, and banging musical number to boot. We never learn exactly how Frank made his miraculous progeny/sex-toy, but we do learn how Frank made his brain: by harvesting half of Eddie’s. Eddie’s musical act makes the new-born Rocky (flesh of his flesh) nod along; naturally, out of jealousy, Frank takes an axe in hand and chops up Eddie for good. The birth/marriage celebrations recommence with a procession up the aisle and straight into the bridal suite.
Brad and Janet stay the night, in separate bedrooms. A general tasting of—
Audience: Frank’s furter!
The Criminologist: … forbidden fruit.
Audience: Same thing!
— follows. And I haven’t even mentioned the cannibalism!
Frank: That’s a rather tender subject.
Audience: That’s a rather tasteless joke!
(It is important to remember that this is a film about science; it therefore appropriately comprises something of a taxonomy of the taboo). At an undisclosed hour, apparently in the middle of the night, Brad, Janet, Frank, Rocky, Columbia, and the unexpectedly-arrived Dr Scott assemble for a frosty birthday dinner, served by Riff-Raff and Magenta. One gets the impression that no one really does the groceries in this castle. Certainly, the extraterrestrials know how to make do with whatever material they find at their disposal. And who would say no to a few hundred pounds of Meat Loaf in the cryogenic freezer?
Audience: Rocky doesn’t mind! Rocky likes Eddie!
If ‘[c]arnal knowledge is the infernal knowledge of the flesh as meat’, then Rocky Horror performs an Aristophanic literalisation of the Fall.5 It shows the body unbound and grotesque—spawned from a galvanic intercourse between humour and horror.
But I want to talk about the floorshow. I want to talk about Fay Wray, and fishnet stockings, and the vast song and dance of selfhood. This is the climax of the movie, right before Riff-Raff and Magenta mutiny, murdering Columbia, Frank, and Rocky with the least convincing VFX lasers of the 1970s. They let Brad, Janet, and Dr Scott go, shell-shocked and free, before beaming the entire castle back to Transsexual, Transylvania.
Frank: Whatever happened to Fay Wray?
That delicate satin-draped frame
As it clung to her thigh
How I started to cry
Cos I wanted to be dressed just the same
This just might be the most solemn limerick in the literary canon. When are we ever fully fashioned? If we are stardust, why? And how do we fashion ourselves? But Frank keeps singing, and something interesting happens:
Frank: Give yourself over to absolute pleasure
Swim the warm waters of sins of the flesh […]
The body is the base unit of ‘I’. Carnal knowledge can be the knowledge—divine—of flesh as the frank stuff of selfhood.
I came back in September. And again, in October, and then November… I was a Rocky Horror ‘regular’, one of two at the Dendy cinema. Rick was middle aged and never wore a costume. Well, that’s not fair; he did wear band t-shirts and jeans. It’s possible he was channelling Eddie.
Fig 5. Eddie (plus Rocky, Columbia, and Frank in the background), in jeans and almost definitely a shirt.
I suppose Rick was ambivalent towards the ‘ideal bounds’ of his face and body, and the explosive potential of lipstick and strings. Dressed just the same as Frank, he was not. But he was my only legitimate rival when it came to doing the callouts. I can’t speak for Rick, but what I really wanted, every second Friday of every month, was to win Rocky Horror. Just absolutely kill it, every call-out. I didn’t come because I loved the movie (although I did, with abundance). I didn’t come to swim in my people (although Rocky Horror gave that to me, too). I came to—
Audience: Fuck the screen?
— reproduce the movie itself, this time in my own image. Rick and I, and sundry ‘occasional cultists’, forced our shadow script into the empty spaces in the fixed script. Often, badly. ‘Between the idea / And the reality […] Falls the Shadow.’ I never finished Rocky Horror.