Liminality, marginality, and structural inferiority are conditions in which are generated myths, symbols, rituals, philosophical systems, and works of art. These cultural forms provide men with a set of templates or models which are, at one level, periodical reclassifications of reality and man's relationship to society, nature, and culture. But they are more than classifications, since they incite men to action as well as to thought.
Victor Turner
[1969:128]

As a popular form of religious life, movies do what we have always asked of popular religion, namely, that they provide us with archetypal forms of humanity - heroic figures - and instruct us in the basic values and myths of our society. As we watch the characters and follow the drama on the screen, we are instructed in the values and myths of our culture and given models on which to pattern our lives.
Darrol Bryant
[1982:106]

Preface

Milton Singer's phrase, "cultural performance," adopted by anthropologists and folklorists to refer to a unit of analysis to circumscribe "Plays, concerts, and lectures ... but also prayers, ritual readings and recitations, rites and ceremonies, festivals, and all those things we usually classify under religion and ritual rather than with the cultural and artistic" (Singer 1972:71), can be productively applied to many of the quasi-cultic creations and re-creations enjoyed by young Americans here at the end of the 20th century.

From skate-boarding to eroticized trust games, from goth costuming to on-line gaming, from Myst to Doom, the current generation of adolescents and post-adolescents have devised/discovered myriad forms of performative self-expression and group identification that have left their elders wondering, and now more than ever, worrying. Many parents--rather than swooning in appreciation that their almost-adult charges are not strung out on black tar heroin, not incarcerated under a three strikes law, not suffering from HIV disease--are worried about ... the effects of cartoon violence on TV.

Time and Newsweek, just to mention two sources of current parenting inspiration, have put out the call: "Talk to your kids before it's too late! Find out who they are!" But the advice they offer mostly rings hollow when you think of your kids as cultural agents in their own milieu. It's time to realize that our own kids--maturing in the age e of AIDS, heroic survivors of '90's American high schools, street-savvy or not--understand a great deal more about being in the world than we give them credit for.

Singer's search for a unit of analysis ended when his Indian friends suggested that if he wanted to understand them, to know "who we are," he should attend performative events, ones in which "who we are" is on display for all to see, participants, spectators, and anthropologists alike (Bauman 1991). When I used the performative event The Rocky Horror Picture Show (RHPS hereafter) to illustrate Singer's notion of cultural performance for a class of undergraduate college students in 1995,however, I met two distinct reactions. The more surprising to me was a kind of puritan refusal to allow that sexuality has any existence and/or value whatever outside of heterosexual marriage. In other words, the majority of my students made my own concerned rock 'n'-roll-hating parents look like Hunter Thompson in league with Neon Flux. But for the minority, for those who spent every other weekend playing dress-up in Midwestern s&m parlors or at bass-and-drum raves experimenting with various designer combinations of ergotamines and methamphetamines, RHPS was passe`, too tame even to mention, an artifact left by a generation of mere wanna-be subversives.

However, like many strategies providing evidence of "who we are," RHPS viewed as a cultural performance affords us a bridge connecting the success of Woodstock 1969 with the failure of Littleton, a vantage of continuity from which we can adequately recall that each generation must express itself anew, and that each generation must define itself not only by "who we are," but always by instantiating the liminal category "who we are not."

Rocky Horror Picture Show

By 1991 RHPS, was sixteen years old and had spawned a participatory cult involving about 30,000 people (Piro 1991). Even now, on a weekly basis, in theaters across the United States and Europe (Khan 1985: 77; http://www.rockyhorror.com), people gather up their props, put on stage make-up, outfit themselves (often in drag) and attend a film at which they shout instructions, comments, requests, mockeries, rhetorical questions, and appreciative catcalls. Some of these people have seen the film more than 1,000 times (Piro 1990; Sharman 1990). Many of the showings are prefaced by "pre-shows," usually involving the initiation of "virgins," and frequently involving costume competitions, trivia bowls, parodies of beauty contests, or skits incorporating material from other movie cults.

When the evening is over, the heightened sense of community provoked by the event and the intensity of the audience's unabashed confidence and joy in themselves and in the vivid world of Rocky Horror will dissipate. Most of the participants will re-enter their ordinary contexts and assume their conventional roles as high school students, librarians, shopkeepers, accountants, and countless others in mundane professions. They have experienced a temporary transformation but will show no outward signs of any permanent change in their lives. They've simply, in the words of RHPS's narrator, had a "night out they will remember for a long, long time." But for others the event will become a weekly ritual; the pre-shows, weekly ceremonials; the movie, a platform for long-lasting personal and social transformation.

RHPS performances are characterized by individual and collective transformation and embodiment and are marked by a high degree of reflexivity on all levels of the event, from the content of the film to the weekly creation of the participatory theater event. The phenomenon is especially well accounted for by Victor Turner's work on liminality and communitas. In fact, Richard Schechner, a leading performance theorist, describes a performer's transformative process as "strictly analogous to what Arnold van Gennep and Turner describe as the ritual process" (1982:66).

Following a brief anecdotal introduction and a sketch of Turner's contribution, I will draw upon Julia Kristeva's term, "intertextuality" (Kristeva 1969) and discuss the relevant eight (of eleven) elements constituting what Lee Haring, borrowing from Kristeva, calls "interperformance" (Haring 1988). Haring's checklist, written for application to folkloric performance events, will serve as a frame for discussion of the intertextual content of RHPS and the interperformances created by its audiences and audience-casts ("floor shows") who duplicate the film's action line-for-line and gesture-for-gesture in front of the movie screen. Following an interpretive analysis of RHPS with an emphasis on its religious themes and motifs, I will return to Turner's work on communitas, amplified by the words of participants in the RHPS phenomenon as I taped them speaking on the phone and at the Prospect Theater in Mount Prospect, Illinois on March 30, 1991.

Liminality and the Liminoid

Following van Gennep, Victor Turner notes three stages in what have come to be known as rites of passage, those "rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position, and age" (Turner 1969:94) that occur in any given society. It was Turner's particular contribution to anthropology to closely investigate what van Gennep identified as the middle phase of these processes, the liminal or threshold stage. Liminality may not be productively divorced from the structural phases which precede and follow it, namely separation and reintegration (or schism), however, the intervening "anti-structural" period in which "the characteristics of the ritual subject ... are ambiguous" (1969:94) will serve as the initial route for understanding the cultural value of RHPS.

Communitas ("moments in and out of time" (Turner 1969:96)) is Turner's term for the collective spatial and temporal dimension occupied by liminal personae. His characterization of communitas fits well with reports of what people experience at RHPS performances, and his description of liminal entities holds for virtually every agent typically or necessarily associated with them

... since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of clas-sifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. ...[T]heir ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols... [L]iminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, ... [N]eophytes in initiation or puberty rites... may be disguised as monsters, wear only a strip of clothing, or even go naked... [they may posses] nothing that may distin-guish them from their fellow neophytes or initiands. Their behavior is normally passive or humble; they may obey their instructors implicitly, and accept arbitrary punishment without comment. [1969:95]

Turner writes, "The kind of communitas desired... is a transformative experience that goes to the root of each person's being and finds in that root something profoundly communal and shared" (1969:138) and "communitas emerges where social structure is not" (126). What Turner calls "normative communitas... which falls within the domain of structure" (132) will figure tentatively in this analysis, and then decisively, both for the film and for RHPS performances, however, it is "existential or spontaneous communitas" (132) that will concern us at the outset.

Although Turner's focus as an anthropologist was on traditional societies, he wrote that "the collective dimensions, communitas and structure, are found at all stages and levels of culture and society" (113).

Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferior-ity. It is almost everywhere held to be sacred or "holy," possibly because it transgresses or dissolves the norms that govern structured and institutionalized relationships and is accompanied by experiences of unprecedented potency. [128]

After writing that "[T]he distinction between structure and communitas is not simply the familiar one between 'secular' and 'sacred'," Turner attempts to make a special case for liminality and its collective dimension, communitas, in secular societies. He introduces the adjective "liminoid" to handle the fuzzy area posed to analysis when the liminal is voluntary rather than enforced, entertaining rather than purely obligatory. Schechner

uses the term to indicate Turner's typification of "the arts and some other leisures of modern society..." (1982:66). Ronald Grimes helps to clarify the distinction in Turner's terminology between "liminal" and "liminoid," but, like me, seems unpersuaded that this subtle distinction is necessary.

He knew that there were important distinctions between preindustrial, small-scale societies and complex large-scale ones. One of the most important ones, he noted, is that whereas liminality is focused in the former, it is diffused (and thus renamed the "liminoid") in the latter. Thus Turner almost inverted Durkheim. No longer is liminality contained, rather it is scattered; its remnants are everywhere - in the arts, politics, advertising and so on. Turner admitted that liminoid phenomena can be quite secularized, but his character-izations of the liminoid often sounded like descrip-tions of the sacred: intense feeling, a dismantling of hierarchy, etc. In other words, the liminoid is sacred to members of a secular society. Religious, [then]... means something like... "evocative of communitas, provocative of change, and nurturant of transition and transformation." [Grimes 1990:145]

The Rocky Horror Picture Show phenomenon is a manifestation of collective liminality in late 20th-century western society. It embodies textual and performative elements that can, given Grimes' definition, only be called religious. It is "diffused" insofar as it has the potential to arise wherever and whenever the film is viewed; however, it is also "contained." Viewing of the film and the audience participation that accompanies it is bounded physically and temporally. The communitas that arises in the carnival atmosphere of the theater is maintained on the street at a lower pitch by certain audience members, but the groups that form outside the theater to talk or go out for breakfast afterwards are small. We have here another case, despite what we've been told, in which, non-traditional post-industrial societies use what they've learned from those home grown culture bearers who walked, talked, and ritualized in groups before them.

The Late-Night Double-Feature Picture Show

In 1979, my friend Richard Moorman insisted that I attend The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It had been playing in Boulder, Colorado since 1977 but I has thus far kept well clear of it. The long lines of teenagers dressed in corsets and fishnets, fright wigs and sequined jackets that I'd seen waiting for the Friday and Saturday midnight shows at The Flick on Pearl Street had been mildly amusing, but mildly intimidating as well. I was 21, employed full time at a publishing house, and liked my movies quiet and preferably foreign. This display of childish street theatrics left me righteously cold.

But Richard agreed to bring the "props" and assured me that my usual all-black-and-bereted attire would be acceptable. I finally took a seat on the aisle near the rear of the theater. I sat uncomprehending through the Master of Ceremonies' speech about using flashlights instead of cigarette lighters and not touching the screen or throwing hot dogs at it. There had been complaints from the management. There were people older than me in the near-capacity crowd, but they were giggling and dancing in the aisles to the theater sound system along with the rest and did nothing to assuage my feelings of being utterly out of place. The couple next to me had a large paper bag on the floor between them out of which jutted today's edition of the Daily Camera and a spray bottle.

I sat with my arms tightly folded across my breasts and a scowl on my face - too sophisticated and serious for all this juvenile nonsense and too hip to admit to my curiosity about what was going on around me. The crowd stating yelling "Lips! Lips!" and "Let there be Lips!" Apparently, now that it was after midnight, what Richard had insufficiently prepared me for (and then failed to arrive for himself!) was finally about to get under way.

Inter-, Meta-, and Hyper-Performance

A huge pair of heavily lipsticked red lips zooms from a central point on the darkened screen and finally fills it. The audience goes wild. Its performative utterance, its command for the creation of red lips out of the void, had been obeyed. The enormous mouth (Susan Sarandon's) sings (with Richard O'Brien's voice):

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
Then something went wrong
For Fay Wray and King Kong
(the audience yells: "She went apeshit!")
They got caught in a celluloid jam
Then at a deadly pace
It came from outer space
And this is how the message ran...

The first of Haring's elements of interperformance to lend itself to this analysis is "transmodalization," his term for the form of variation which denotes a shift in genre from one performer to another (1988:371). The audience and cast members have shifted the performances of the on-screen actors to themselves and the generic frame of the event from cinema to drama, and from film-as-object to film-as-relationship. Haring discusses "transvalorization" - a "change in the value explicitly or implicitly attributed to an action or set of action" - as one of its forms. The most readily noticeable shift of value is in the speech of the audience: experientially, it provokes the lips to appear; it engages in dialogue with a filmed image; it evokes the creators of that image by calling their names; and most importantly, the convention that keeps theater-goers together in passivity and silence is smashed by it. These two interwoven elements of Haring's model are the pivot for the RHPS experience.

Intertextuality, in the strictest sense of the word, serves as RHPS's primary framing device on all levels of the experience. Originally, the initial sequence was scripted not with lips but with a montage of scenes from the ten classic science fiction films mentioned in the opening song (Henkin 1979:194). What is it that is going on here? What kind of rampant intertextuality is this?

Umberto Eco makes a case for Casablanca, arguably one of the most enduring cult films of all time, that "it is not one movie. It is movies" (Eco 1984:208). He posits that a cult film "must display certain textual features, in the sense that, [...] it becomes a sort of textual syllabus, a living example of living textuality" (199), i.e., cannibalistically intertextual in the extreme. Like Casablanca, RHPS swallows everything its makers could lay their cognition on, borrowing not only from the science fiction and horror genres, but enlisting motifs and conventions from Mae West and Elvis Presley movies, Roger Corman's biker flicks, gothic romances, Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, strip-tease and cabaret shows, the Roman myth of Psyche and Amor, 1960's-style happenings, and daytime soap operas. In tacit agreement with Eco's understanding of Casablanca as briccolage, Irene Oppenheim writes:

Taken in disparate parts, it's all too contrived and too familiar; but stuck together, Rocky, while not altogether different, emerges with something of its own. There's a clumsy good-natured innocence about this stew that (in the right circumstances) can seem redeeming. [1991:28]

Rolf Eichler discusses the intertextual elements in Shelly's Frankenstein, which he identifies as the template for all subsequent literary and cinematic treatments of the Promethean theme of "man's desire to perfect himself through others" (1987:99). But he goes further than most critics to point out "the effect of intertextuality on a work's reception." In the case of Frankenstein, Shelly's contemporary readers were in an excellent position to understand the social and moral conventions that held sway in the novel's narrative present. Hence they were also in an excellent position to grasp why and when these norms were being challenged and undermined.

The more time that elapses between creation and reading, the more texts will have interposed themselves between work and reader - a fact that becomes the more significant for RHPS since so many texts, plays, and films have now erected a background that is bound to give a new appearance to the author's subject matter. [1987:99-100]

This interposition of texts is not limited to those directly concerned in a comparative discussion of RHPS and Shelly's monster, nor even to those genres mentioned above. The makers of RHPS extended "intertextual space" {Kristeva 1969:225) to include a wide variety of icons from "elite" culture. They give us Wood's American Gothic, first reproduced in tableau (in the wedding scene), then as a reproduction of the painting (next to the mummy case), and finally parodied in tableau (Riff Raff beside Magenta with a three-pronged laser gun). The Criminologist's scrapbook contains a "Whistler's Mother" signed by Meatloaf and a reproduction of Da Vinci's Last Supper. The Mona Lisa and David appear, first facing right and then left, making us hyper-aware of their reproducibility (Eichler 1987:112) and hence their incorporability into mainstream culture. The Awakening of Adam, signed by Michelangelo, is painted on the bottom of Frank N. Furter's swimming pool.

But the audience has taken all this yet further. Having no fear of transgressing even the shattered generic conventions exploited by its creators, RHPS fans drag in literally everything they can think of. If a remark is covered by "Grice's four maxims of conversation: be relevant, informative, brief, and truthful," and Day's fifth: "Be witty" (Day 1983:217-218), a remark will work; it will probably be repeated; it may even be incorporated into RHPS liturgy (see Piro 1990; Henkin 1979; Day 1983; Duranti 1986). Obviously, the creators were fully conscious of their own intertextual manipulations, but they could not have anticipated what their audiences would do with the result. In the eight-minute preface to the 1990 video edition, Richard O'Brien, who wrote the play, music, and lyrics, says to the camera:

People come over and say to me, "Hey, have you seen what they're doing with your movie?" Well, I finally went to see it. It was the best piece of theater I've ever seen. It encapsulated live action with filmed image with audience participation. And three out of three... ain't bad. (Sharman 1990)

Furthermore, Haring's element of interperformance identified as "allusion" is in play. Citing Susan Stewart (1979), he writes:

In folktale as in literature, an allusion is a brief reference to something the interpretive community will recognize from its existing knowledge. Few situations in life, in fact, do not make use of allusion in that sense. (Haring 1988:366)

Regarding only the preparations for Frank's "last supper," the audience responses I remember hearing in 1979 are, for the most part, still formulaic:

Magenta stands holding a huge gong and says, in an exaggerated southern accent, "Dinnah is served!" The audience, alluding to a 1970's commercial for Shake-'n-Bake, yells, "And I helped!"

When Riff Raff hurls the roast onto the dining table, the audience groans, "Oh, no, Meatloaf again?", referring to the actor/rock star who played Eddie until Frank mercy-butchered him in the freezer with an ice pick. ("You sure know how to pick your friends!")

When Frank reaches for an electric knife to carve the roast at dinner, the audience cheerfully supplies, "Always reach for a Hamilton Beech!"

In these few examples the audience utilizes intertextuality to create interperformance. However in the process of remarking on audience responses and behaviors, it also creates "meta-performances," performances that comment on earlier performances, and ensure a high standard for responses in much the same way as folklore storytellers "ensure excellence in folktales" (Haring 1988:368) by using the operation Alan Dundes called "metafolklore" - "folkloristic statements about folklore" (Dundes 1966). For example, when overenthusiastic audience members use their spray bottles before the on-screen Brad and Janet actually step into the rain, veterans shout, "It doesn't rain in cars, assholes!"

Haring's element of "tradition" is also relevant in this regard. He writes:

What is most relevant to the notion of interperformance is that the rules for narrative performance are "traditionalized." Thus if a narrator is perceived as conforming to the rules, he can imitate or even parody a predecessor. [1988:366]

RHPS casts, practiced performance groups, fully made-up and costumed, comprised of fans who parallel the action of the film in front of it, have taken the participatory aspect of the event further than any midnight movie cult has ever gone (Hoberman 1991:19). The concept of "hypertextuality" as developed by Gerard Genette refers to "the transformations which changes one story into another, for instance when a prose narrative is versified" (Haring 1988:369). Haring suggests that "[F]olklorists will want to give to literary hypertextuality the folkloristic name of variation" (369), however I will extend the term to include the concept of "hyperperformance" to describe what is happening at an RHPS event. Over the years, Double Feature, San Francisco's Strand Theater cast, The Celluloid Jam of the Oriental Theater in Milwaukee, Voyeuristic Intention of the Rialto in South Pasadena, the Eighth Street Players of the Eighth Street Playhouse in New York and countless other casts (see Piro 1990) formally and informally constituted, have transformed a film into a live performance event, a movie into a celebratory festival, film buffs into drag queens, theater aisles into dance floors, and cinema houses into unrestrained (and messy), yet safe and (usually) sober, late-night parties. In other words, "hyperperformance" as executed by the audience and casts of RHPS parallels Haring's interrelated notions of "situation" and "tradition." Citing Richard Bauman's (1977) and Dell Hymes' (1975) work in folklore studies, Haring writes:

...the specific conditions in which stories are told actually constitute the event as the meaningful context for artistic communication... When societies adopt borrowed plots and characters, they bring to them certain "pre-existing cultural emphases" which determine how the borrowed stories are adapted into a new setting. Responding to specific situations, storytellers demonstrate their creativity. [1988:366]

The fact that an audience for a film demonstrates any creativity is in itself noteworthy, but that an audience would go to such lengths to actively bring its "pre-existing cultural emphases" into the open and into dialogue with a film is virtually fantastic.

The last element of Haring's interperformance model I will consider here is what he calls "quotation." This is obviously related to what I have called RHPS's primary framing device, intertextuality; it is also connected to the notion of meta-performance insofar as the audience is repeatedly engaged in quotation of its own previous response lines. I have already noted the Mona Lisa and David as examples of intersemiotic quotation, however, the most famous visual quotation occurs when Rocky carries Frank, dead without having satisfied his wish to be dressed like Fay Wray, draped across his tanned, muscled back up a model of the RKO Radio Tower, shaking his fists and growling over his shoulder at his attacker. But it is also possible to discuss recognizable entextualized quotations from spoken discourse.

Frank N. Furter has told us that he's "making a man with blonde hair and a tan." Thrilled with his creation, he sings, "In just seven days, I can make you a man." The paraphrase is too famous to warrant citation.

A lesser known and more direct quotation is spoken as the ultimate call to "absolute pleasure" and serves as the cathartic mainspring of the movie. "Don't dream it. Be it," was an advertising slogan for Frederick's of Hollywood lingerie (Corliss 1985:23).

On the other hand, RHPS performance is the source of one-liners that occasionally crop up in conversations far removed from the original context of utterance. I've heard more than one fan express a divergent opinion by saying, "I didn't make him for you!" "And what charming underclothes you both have," is a remark I heard from a friend watching MTV. Oppenheim cites several examples:

This week, for instance, I received a potpourri catalogue from the Midwest that featured loungewear emblazoned with "Creature of the Night," a memorable phrase in the Rocky song, "Touch-a Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me." The line, "Don't Dream It. Be It," has rhythmically entered the language in places as far afield as the sign language text Survival Sign, with its cover quote: "Don't say it. Sign it." ...[I] created a T-shirt with my own favorite Rocky quote: "Madness takes its toll." I still like that one. [1991:29]

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