Director: Jim Sharman (UK, USA). Year of release: 1975
A screen which is entirely black, apart from a huge pair of red lips. As the lips open, and start to sing, we see gleaming white teeth. A female voice sings nostalgically: “Michael Rennie was ill The day the Earth stood still But he told us where we stand And Flash Gordon was there In silver underwear Claude Rains was The Invisible Man”. Before the song is over, a tongue pops out to lasciviously lick the lips.
The song – Science Figure Double Feature – continues to namecheck 1950s B movies, where aliens and oversized gorillas stood in for the Russians in a staged reenactment of the Cold War. Some parodies don’t work because they don’t respect the genre they are parodying. The Rocky Horror Picture Show sets its stall before the opening credits roll. It doesn’t just understand science fiction 1950s B movies – it is also a great fan. It knows exactly what it’s talking about.
But much of that is still to come. Cut to a traditional wedding at an Episcopelian church. A couple, Brad and Janet, are attending as guests. Soon after Janet catches the bouquet thrown by the bride, Brad proposes. At the back, in front of a church door, a man and a woman look suspiciously like the couple from Grant Wood’s American Gothic, often taken to symbolise the conservatism of the USA’s rural community. This is not the last time the painting will appear in the film.
Brad and Janet drive off to meet up with Dr. Everett Scott, an old tutor. As they are driving along, Nixon’s resignation speech plays on the radio, but Brad seems to be more interested in the bikers who keep coming in the opposite direction. It is the bikers, not Nixon, who Brad sees as being responsible for the degeneration of society. When the car has a blowout and the spare is already flat, Brad and Janet walk in the rain in the same direction as the bikers – towards a Gothic castle.
At the castle, Brad and Janet are welcomed with suspicion by a hunchbacked butler, who looks like a straggly haired Brian Eno. They are escorted to a room, and surrounded by rattle waving party revellers who look like normal people (apparently they were hired from an agency called Ugly), except perhaps for the ubiquitous Christopher Biggins. The butler, a maid, and a third woman who is listed in the cast list as a groupie, divest the pair of their clothes leaving them in their underwear.
An old lift descends, and Tim Curry steps out, introducing himself as Frank N Furter. He explains to Brad and Janet in song form that he is a Sweet transexual transvestite from Transylvania. He is wearing what looks like a green operating gown with a red triangle – an inverted version of the ones handed out at Concentration Camps. Under the gown he is wearing a leather bondage vest (I’m sure there’s a technical term), stockings and suspenders.
It was at this point that the older couple sat in front of me who’d been talking all the way through the film and looking at photos on their phones upped and left. Maybe they were going nearer the front for a better look? Whatever, they did have sort of a point. No film would be able to keep up the level of intensity contained in Rocky Horror’s opening quarter hour or so, and the next couple of scenes, with Meat Loaf and non-acting model Peter Hinwood are definitely less exciting.
Rocky Horror Picture show is quite possibly the film I’ve seen more than any other. I’ve written articles about it, own at least 5 different soundtrack albums, and someone, somewhere must still have photos of me in black lipstick, stockings and suspenders on my way to a stage performance in Royal Leamington Spa. More than any other film, this is not soimething I go to to follow the plot. Which is just as well, because the plot – such as it is – is risible.
And you know what? That doesn’t matter one jot. Rocky Horror Picture Show is an expression of many things – of the Gay and Women’s movements which sprang up post-1968, of Glam Rock and incipient punk, of an idea who’d time had come – that people who had the right to sleep with whoever they wanted to, however much the State, the Church or interfering neighbours might try to interfere. It isn’t what it says, it’s what it represents.
I never felt fully on board with the audience participation. Partly because some of it had quite nasty undertones (continually shouting “slut” at Janet was never a good look), partly because I was never a great fan of enforced fun, but also because what was once a movement from below has increasingly been part of the film’s corporate packaging. Thankfully, after a couple of initial attempts to hold mobile phone torches in the air, tonight’s audience felt no need to impose itself.
To an extent, Rocky Horror is a film of its time. I’m not sure that it still has the same ability to shock that it did on release, just one year after the Nixon resignation, when his Republican successor Gerald Ford was still in office. Though looking at the US Right’s current battle against Trans rights, maybe I’m being optimistic. There is also a fair argument that Tim Curry is not trans, nor does his character act like most trans people, but this is still not a character that bigots are going to love.
But for all the politics, for all that Rocky Horror represents (which is deeply important), the film, and the stage play, wouldn’t have worked if the songs hadn’t been transcendentally brilliant. It wouldn’t have worked if Tim Curry hadn’t pulled off the performance of his life, and if Susan Sarandon hadn’t shown she would deliver much more. It’s interesting watching this shortly after Thelma & Louise – another film where Sarandon turns from repressed mouse to kick-ass heroine.
Rocky Horror Picture show showed us what we could become, if we didn’t just do it, just be it. It’s main contribution was maybe to tell us that just sitting back and watching it was nothing compared to what we could do ourselves. Well, maybe, but let us just sit back and revel in the phenomenal music before we get started.
CinePhil 