View Part 1 here.

In Part 1, I talked about Rocky Horror Picture Show creator Richard O’Brien’s late-life identity crisis and realization he felt of neither gender (I continue to use male pronouns in reference to O’Brien because he seems to himself). I then looked at several characters from the film in turn, analyzing them for potential meaning to back my theory that the film is largely about America’s fears of sexual deviancy. Let’s continue in that vein, non?

View Part 1 here.

In Part 1, I talked about Rocky Horror Picture Show creator Richard O’Brien’s late-life identity crisis and realization he felt of neither gender (I continue to use male pronouns in reference to O’Brien because he seems to himself). I then looked at several characters from the film in turn, analyzing them for potential meaning to back my theory that the film is largely about America’s fears of sexual deviancy. Let’s continue in that vein, non?

BRAD MAJORS: If Janet is openly pleased by her discoveries, Brad goes out struggling against his own. While she gained a sexual identity, the existing identity of Brad was subverted. His fate is the great terror at the heart of every homophobe: The ultimate Straight Ideal converted to homosexuality. Setting out as an innocent, patriotic young man set to be married, by the end of the film he’s roiling with angst over his encounter with Frank-N-Furter:

“It’s beyond me
Help me mommy
I’ll be good you’ll see
Take this dream away
What’s this, let’s see
I feel sexy
What’s come over me
Here it comes again.”

Brad’s lines from “Rose Tint My World” are characteristic of many people struggling with their sexual identity. He begs to become “normal” again, as he is emotionally unequipped to process the unacceptable desires and sensations Frank’s awakened. Unlike Janet, he’s failed to come to grips with this new self by the end of the film – he gives in despite his inhibitions, but the inhibitions remain.

Brad is actually the most obvious display of what O’Brien’s doing – most people pick up on the film’s spoofing of B-level sci-fi, but it’s also a mockery of “gay panic” and its effect on us all. That Richard O’Brien would spend the next three decades continuing to struggle with his own identity explains how he managed to instill his characters with so much pathos and – yes, in Rocky Horror of all things – realism. He simply wrote what he knew.

EDDIE and COLUMBIA: If Janet and Brad represent America’s fears for their children, Eddie and Columbia represent the opposite side of the coin – America’s fears of their children. They could be seen as counterparts to Brad and Janet – a fellow pair of doomed young lovers ruined by Frank-N-Furter’s “lifestyle.”

The major difference between this pair and the “Virgins” is that the former were already “no-good kids.” Eddie, obviously, is a complete trope – the leather-clad motorcycle punk with greasy hair and a switchblade. This role was actually the one O’Brien imagined for himself, originally – that he forgo the most masculine character in the story for the mean-dog-kicked-one-too-many-times that is Riff Raff is interesting. It’s hard to pick up on in the film, but Rocky’s brain is actually half of Eddie’s – hence the scar and the fact he was “on ice.” Despite his put-downs, Frank obviously saw something desirable in Eddie’s personality that he wanted to transfer to his Atlas-like creation.

Columbia is actually a role custom-made for the tap-dancing busker Little Nell – she’s not in the original stage play. Aspects of the female assistant of the play were split between Magenta and Columbia. Credited as “A Groupie,” Columbia is trapped between her obsession with Frank-N-Furter and something “very nearly” like love for the late Eddie. She’s easy to compare to Janet, who is also trapped between an appreciation of Frank and her feelings for Brad. For Brad and Janet, Eddie and Columbia are foreshadowing.

DR. SCOTT: Dr. Scott only needs a brief mention, because his role is mostly limited to moving the plot into the third act. However, it’s worth pointing out that, together with the Criminologist narrator, his is the voice of traditional moral authority in the film. I also suspect that his rivalry with Frank-n-Furter really was the primary motive behind his visit that night, since he quickly shrugged off the death of his nephew when Riff Raff brought it up. If Riff Raff embodies moral hypocrisy, it’s noteworthy the figure of authority is quick to side with him, especially to save his own skin.

DR. FRANK-N-FURTER: And now, the topic I’ve dreaded. What to say about Frank-N-Further? Where to begin? I think I can only scratch the surface here – maybe I’ll return to Frank sometime in a post dedicated solely to him, which is fitting.

The first time I saw Rocky Horror, the opening line from “Don’t Dream It” caught my attention like nothing else in the film.

“Whatever happened to Fay Wray?
That delicate satin draped frame
As it clung to her thigh, how I started to cry
‘Cause I wanted to be dressed just the same.”

This turned out to be the key to the film. What could easily be mistaken for a homophobic story about an evil transvestite immediately revealed itself to be a satire of those very fears. The pathos of Frank-N-Furter in this and the two songs that follow, “Wild and Untamed Thing” and “I’m Going Home,” is simply too strong for this to be a cut-and-dried case of transplotation.

Which isn’t to say Frank is a good guy. He murdered Eddie after stealing half his brain, turned people into statues and made them perform for his amusement. But like Rocky, he falls into the classic early 20th century concept of the sympathetic monster, doomed from the start for reasons not entirely of his own making. As I said in the entry for Riff Raff, Frank is killed by the hypocrisy of his culture, which apparently considers his lifestyle “too extreme” while condoning Riff Raff’s.

In that interview with Dominic Wells that kicked off this whole thing, O’Brien suggests some of Frank’s personality was based on his own mother, an emotionally abusive woman that disowned her working class British family to affect a posh nobility in New Zealand. While O’Brien is mostly referring to Frank’s egomania, the comparison can be carried farther. Frank-N-Further also fled his home to try to become someone else in a distant land, dragging others with him who, like O’Brien, rebelled. Actually, it is O’Brien that rebels in both cases: In real life he left school and fled back to England, while on celluloid and stage he mutinies as Riff Raff.

If only we could all emit a ray of pure anti-matter into the people that scarred us.

In 2009, in an interview with Dominic Wells, Richard O’Brien revealed undergoing an identity crisis within the last decade:

“I’ve been fighting never belonging, never being male or female, and it got to the stage where I couldn’t deal with it any longer. To feel you don’t belong . . . to feel insane . . . to feel perverted and disgusting . . . you go f***ing nuts. [sic]“

To many of the transsexual and genderqueer people I’ve known, this [...]]]>

In 2009, in an interview with Dominic Wells, Richard O’Brien revealed undergoing an identity crisis within the last decade:

“I’ve been fighting never belonging, never being male or female, and it got to the stage where I couldn’t deal with it any longer. To feel you don’t belong . . . to feel insane . . . to feel perverted and disgusting . . . you go f***ing nuts. [sic]“

To many of the transsexual and genderqueer people I’ve known, this is woefully familiar ground. What’s shocking is that this is a 67-year-old Richard O’Brien speaking, the person who penned the definitive satire of Nuclear Age sexual anxiety three decades prior. Is it possible O’Brien’s gender angst is what shaped the story of Brad and Janet’s “corruption” at the hands of an evil transvestite? It sounds likely, but that feels like too much of a write-off, and I think anyone who can only look skin-deep at the film is doomed to sit in dark theaters throwing toast.

It’s a running gag among friends that I consider The Rocky Horror Picture Show to be the pinnacle of human artistic achievement – my tongue is firmly in-cheek, but my respect and admiration for the film (and the stage play that spawned it) are nearly that great. To me, Rocky Horror has always been a satire of “straight” society’s terrors concerning the culturally deviant. Occurring the night of Nixon’s resignation (you can hear him on the radio before Brad and Janet’s car breaks down) and set in only two locations – a church and the stereotypical dark castle in the woods – we’re told a story of American youth leaving dogmatic tradition behind only to be waylaid by decadence during the collapse of America’s moral authority.

But to get at the real meat of the film, I  want to isolate a some of the characters for individual analysis.

JANET WEISS: Labeled “a heroine” in the credits, Janet assumes the role of virgin – and through her “corruption” she fulfills America’s greatest fear for its daughters – she enjoys exploring her new-found sexuality. We see both her repression and the foreshadow of it lifting in the “I Can Make You a Man” segment. When Frank-N-Furter asks her opinion of his beefcake creation, she demures: “I don’t like a man with too many muscles,” she says, looking to her fiancee Brad. But by the end of the song, she briefly takes over a line, suggesting her answer was only for Brad’s benefit. After her sexual awakening with Dr. Frank-N-Furter, she witnesses Brad also sleeping with their host. That this is what drives her to abandon her inhibitions is telling – seeing Brad’s infidelity after torturing herself with guilt for her own is akin to realizing America’s double-standard regarding sex and gender, wherein Janet would be labeled a “slut” while Brad (the queer aspect of his own encounter aside) would not.

Janet’s big moment is, of course, “Toucha-Toucha-Toucha Touch Me,” wherein she outlines a history of sexual repression and the confusion of feeling desires she’s told are wrong. Through intense innuendo, we discover Janet was never the innocent-minded maiden we thought she was. I find the ending segment of the song the most interesting, when from Janet’s point of view the thrusting Rocky becomes every inhabitant of the castle – almost as if she’s fantasizing about fucking them all.

The floor show Frank forces his perceived foes into at the end of the film is another telling moment for them all, and I’ll come back to it often. It’s my belief that their lines are their own, and Frank’s control is only that he makes them speak their minds. For Janet, the final revelation is that she is unrepentant:

“I feel released
Bad times deceased
My confidence has increased
Reality is here
The game has been disbanded
My mind has been expanded
It’s a gas that Frankie’s landed
His lust is so sincere”

ROCKY: Frank-N-Furter’s short-lived “monster” is surprising articulate about his situation – within minutes of “birth” he sings of pure existential angst and predicts his impending doom in “Sword of Damocles.” In “Rose Tint My World,” he sums up his brief life as an object of pure sexuality:

“I’m just seven hours old
Truly beautiful to behold
And somebody should be told
My libido hasn’t been controlled
Now the only thing I’ve come to trust
Is an orgasmic rush of lust
Rose tints my world keeps me
Safe from my trouble and pain.”

I almost had nothing to say about Rocky beyond this. Thankfully I’m in the process of reading John Preston’s collection of writing, My Life as a Pornographer and Other Indecent Acts. When discussing gay male pornography in the 50′s and early 60′s, Preston praises Sam Steward (who wrote as Phil Andros) for “reporting on [...] a sensual experience that contradicted the mass-market concepts of the unhappy, guilt-ridden, tragicomic homosexual.” In my mind, Rocky is a portrait of that early one-dimensional character, a man created for the sole purpose of getting off to, and yet containing all the shame and self-loathing of his author. In this case, that author may either be Frank-N-Furter or Richard O’Brien.

It must also be noted Rocky is technically the “monster” of the film, and therefore a spoof on all the cinematic terrors of Universal and RKO. The unique appeal of the classic movie monsters – the Phantom of the Opera, Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy – is that they were always sympathetic and occasionally even self-loathing (Lon Chaney’s Wolfman and Borris Karloff’s monster in Bride of Frankenstein especially). They were also doomed – the Motion Picture Production Code saw to it they had to meet an ill fate by the end of the film. It’s little wonder marginalized people often feel a closer kinship to these star-crossed creatures: They rarely chose to be what they were, they wished they were not, and yet couldn’t help but revel in what would become their downfall. Just like those early gay male protagonists, and just like Rocky.

MAGENTA AND RIFF RAFF: The “servants” are more difficult to pin down, but there are a few things worth noting. First, they both represent specific fetishes. Magenta is a voyeur – she states this explicitly in “Time Warp” and we witness it when she and Columbia spy on Janet and Rocky. Riff Raff, meanwhile, is a sadist – we witness him deriving pleasure from directly tormenting Rocky. He reveals a bit of his motivation in a hilarious and seemingly throw-away line after killing most of the cast: Magenta chides him by saying “You killed them? But I thought you liked them? They liked you.” He responses by screaming “They didn’t like me! They never liked me!” Suddenly Riff Raff’s need to exert power over others makes a lot more sense.

Together, the two represent that ultimate perversion: Incest. It’s interesting that this revelation is the final big shock of the film, and it comes from the characters that murder the other “deviants” of the film. After all, one of the claims of the homophobic is that acceptance of homosexuality will lead to greater and increasingly dangerous perversions, incest among them. These walking embodiments of extreme sexual deviance are the ultimate doom for Frank-N-Furter and those he’s sucked into his world – Brad, Janet and Dr. Scott are spared, just barely, but attest that they’re still scarred by the experience in “Superheroes.”

But in light of everything else we know about the film and who made it, it’s unlikely this sex-negative morality is to be taken at face value. For one thing, Magenta and Riff Raff’s justification for killing Frank is that his “lifestyle’s too extreme” and as Dr. Scott says, “society must be protected” from him. These are pretty strong statements coming from a pair of incestuous, sadistic voyeurs. Ultimately, it isn’t Frank-N-Furter’s “lifestyle” that dooms him – it is the hypocrisy of others.

Read Part 2