Over at the Frankenstein Place

Having said that the liminal is, according to Turner, "almost everywhere held to be sacred," it is my intention now to show that RHPS is no exception. Oppenheim makes the connection:

I'm surprised theologians haven't paid more attention to Rocky. For there are, I think, religious implications in both the film and its rituals. Certainly among the reasons Rocky has endured is that beneath its surface silliness the film tells a tale about initiation into a dangerous world; about surviving lost innocence; about deviance and acceptance; about creation, forgiveness, death, and regeneration. [1988:29]

Referring to Turner's characteristics of threshold people, we find death and the womb (the wedding-funeral), darkness and sexuality, and the wilderness (Frank's castle is "in the middle of nowhere"). But the range of liminal attributes encapsulated in RHPS's star, Tim Curry as Frank N. Furter, is impressive. Like Victor Frankenstein, his literary near-namesake, Frank is a scientist who creates life in a laboratory. Lou Adler, RHPS's producer, explains the resonance of the archetype:

You need not have seen King Kong to recognize the ape in Rocky Horror's final climb. You need not have heard of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly or seen Boris Karloff's monster to know the legend of Frankenstein. Certain themes and cinematic images have become part of us. [Henkin 1979:131]

The reversals of convention in RHPS are compiled from life as they were for Shelley, but also from Shelly's story itself. O'Brien's scientist is no recluse. His castle is the site of revelry, a convention and party for his guests from home, the planet Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania. And Frank is a little strange in other ways too. The normative image of the scientist is still our most cherished projection of unblemished, inviolate, objective masculinity. Even when our scientists are female, they are caricatured as sexless and dispassionate and hence likely, because their wits are not clouded with desire, to uncover important truths. Frank is not only "a sweet transvestite" from another planet, he's bisexual, narcissistic, exhibitionistic, rapacious, rude, and hot as hell. He struts around in a black corset with fishnet stockings, sometimes covered with a green lab coat, and then he sports a pink triangle, but still wears stiletto heels and pearls. He obviously spends hours on his make-up, but isn't at all concerned when he smears it for effect. In short, he is what every repressed, sexually anxious, outcast intellectual male or female sees as a self-reflection in her or his wildest dionysiac nightmares. Frank is

...the underbelly, the dark side of creation; and it should come as no surprise to us when he suffers satanic ruin... He is the richly charactered magus who dies for our imagined sins, and redeems our fantasies as he lives out our hidden dreams. [Henkin 1979:53-55]

Bill Henkin describes the cult audience of RHPS as people who see themselves as outsiders to begin with," outré potentates like Frank or convert henchmen like Riff-Raff... but there are lots of Brads and Janets in the audience too" (1979:36).

Early critics of Tim Curry's portrayal invariably described it in terms of combined personae: "...half Auntie Mame, half Bela Lugosi," "...a cross between Greer Garson and Steve Reeves," and "...part David Bowie, part Joan Crawford, part Basil Rathbone" (Henkin 1979:133). Frank has "ambiguous and indeterminate attributes" but he is indisputably male. He succeeds in winning our hearts to such an extent that, even when he whips his "faithful handyman" until he cries for mercy, abuses Janet, shoves Brad to the ground, and kills Eddie, the audience and his on-screen groupies not only forgive him, but emulate him. More than we ever emulated Clint Eastwood or John Wayne. They never really knew us like Frank does.

Gaylyn Studlar gets it, but is obviously not a fan:

Dr. Fran-N-Furter represents a gender transformation that borrows from perverse possibilities but safely recuperates the revolutionary promise of homoerotic hedonism through the sexual politics of masculine aggression. [1989:8]

Frank, whose sexual generativity appears to reside only in the lab, makes himself a man. The reflexive is deliberate. Although he can entertain his homoeroticism with Rocky Horror, he has complete, and completely masculine, power over him. "I made you and I can break you just as easily." He accomplishes his act of creation through asexual (scientific) means, but by accident, the same route taken by Brad and Janet to reach his castle and, thereby, their own sexual awakening. Frank's creation speech may be interpreted on both levels:

...Paradise is to be mine! It was strange in the way it happened. Suddenly you get a break. All the pieces seem to fit together. What a sucker you've been! What a fool! The answer was there all the time. It took a small accident to make it happen. An accident! And that's how I discovered the secret, that elusive ingredient, that spark that is the breath of life.

Janet and Brad have already shared a song about that spark. In "Over at the Frankenstein Place," Janet tells us that it's "burning bright... in the velvet darkness of the blackest night... guiding... no matter who or what you are." But Riff-Raff's earlier invitation for redemptive light to "come streaming into my life" gained ambiguity and force when he grabbed his sister to dance "The Time Warp," summoning sexual fantasy with his memory of "how the blackness would hit me." The invitation to licentious sexuality is not straightforward nor unencumbered. Riff tells us that "It's the pelvic thrust that really drives you insane," but he's also told us that "madness takes its toll." The darkly ecstatic dance of sex implodes into the dark night of the soul, all the while keeping a wiggle in its walk and a come-hither sneer on its face.

Like the god of Abraham, in the beginning, even before Frank was, he... well... was. As the lips closed back into the central point on the screen, they were overlain by a Celtic cross on the top of a church steeple. The doors of the church open and a wedding party pours out onto the steps. Frank, in his guise as God's celebrating minister, stands in front of the church doors flanked by the custodial Riff Raff and Magenta in American Gothic mode. After a photo is taken of "just the close family," Frank is gone from the scene. Brad and Janet move from the graveyard into the church to celebrate their engagement. The custodial staff spin the wedding bouquets on the pews to reveal funereal blooms. Just as Brad suggests that he and Janet should "visit the man who began it," ostensibly meaning Dr. Everett Scott, the staff carries in a coffin. The camera moves from the coffin backgrounded by an American flag, to Brad and Janet on their knees in naive bliss, to a stained-glass cross.

The coffin, attended by the same personnel who will later attend Rocky's birth, parallels the birth vat in which the skeletal outline of Rocky's body is glimpsed before he comes to life. As Eichler points out, the confusion people experience in thinking about Victor's Doppelganger is so extreme that they give Frankenstein's name to his monster (1987:101). We're not explicitly told if Frank or Rocky is in the coffin. And it doesn't matter anyway, if we employ the Freudian model. (The most remarkable essay I encountered in the course of my research suggests that Richard O'Brien wrote RHPS "with tongue in cheek and a copy of the collected works of Freud in hand." The writer goes on to say that the film "does a superb job of unveiling the hidden dynamics of the committee of the unconscious mind," and tells us which characters represent the id, ego, superego, and conscious mind (Ruble 1986:161-63). Probably not a fan either.)

Frank presides lasciviously over a seasonal ritual, the "Annual Transylvanian Convention," draped blasphemously pieta-like over a throne, paralleling his ministerial presidence over the Happschatt wedding.

But instances of role and status reversal take us well beyond Frank's persona into the saturated plot. The "infant" playmate, Rocky, speaks immediately upon showing his face - to sing about the dread of immanent death. He runs to escape the "loving embrace" of his mother/father/lover/exploiter and seeks the kindness of strangers, the alien conventionists, who all the while meet his distress with elated dancing and choruses of "That ain't no crime!" Eddie, the presumably frozen donor of half of Rocky's cerebral tissue, comes roaring out of the walk-in freezer on a motorcycle. His saxophone-drenched rendition of "Whatever Happened to Saturday Night" is proof that you can have more fun than anybody in the movie with only half a brain. But not for very long. Janet reverses her position on muscles during the rest of Frank's tribute to his creation (and to his own genius) while Brad holds Eddie's gleaming totem, his saxophone, looking at her in moral outrage.

Frank's divinity is camp but efficient. Brad carries the emblem of Eddie's free spirit. Janet, coy with one male character after another, under the spell of Frank's unbridled lustiness, confesses her fascination aloud. The power of redemptive sexuality and its concomitant costs are implicit before Frank touches Janet or Brad. He "offers" to initiate them into their own sensuality by telling them that he'll "remove the cause, but not the symptom."

The movies cater to our secret needs, to desires we may not be aware of yet. They give us not what we say we want when we think some righteous parent-figure might be listening, but what the primitive within us really wants, in its carnivorous heart-of-hearts. The movies welcome us with open arms, just as we are, with no ulterior motives of education or improvement. [Chute 1983:12]

Having been predictably betrayed as an alien, murdering, egomaniacal user who "chews people up and spits them out," Frank declares that "it's not easy having a good time." He has utilized the utterly absurd "sonic transducer" to immobilize his ungrateful house guests and the "medusa ray" to ossify them, rendering them "art" in the manner of the Davids that ornament the lab. For the floor show, Frank decorates each character with identical make-up, corsets, fishnets, feather boas, and stiletto pumps. He, however, wears his usual costume and is not masked. Of masking, Turner says:

Rituals of status reversal... mask the weak in strength and demand of the strong that they be passive and patiently endure the symbolic and even real aggression shown against them by structural inferiors. [1969:177]

What Frank "patiently endures" is listening to his "creations" (a term used by fashion designers of their clothing) say what they really think about him and about themselves. Columbia admits she was only able to fulfill her role as "a regular Frankie fan" by using drugs. Rocky Horror tells us that he suffers from a lack of trust in anything but his own libidinous satisfaction. Brad and Janet admit, in this trance-like chorus line, that they have been transformed. Brad is still shaky about it and, paraphrasing Christ in Gethsemene, asks his Mommy to "take this dream away from me," but Janet is "released." Her "confidence has increased," her "mind has been expanded." She is unequivocally grateful to have undergone initiation.

Raymond Ruble, who might have done well to have read Turner's work in anthropology, tells us that "Brad refuses to recognize that he has dynamic sexual desires, and at the film's conclusion is a ruined person obviously in need of psychoanalytic therapy" (1986:165). If this is the case, how does he explain why young men dress up as Brad to have crowds of strangers yell "Asshole!" at them once a week? An alternative, and I think more correct interpretation of Brad's value, is offered by Henkin:

From his first appearance... it is obvious that Brad is a young fool. And every move he makes, every line he speaks, every note he sings makes his idiotic position more secure and more sincere. Brad is entirely laughable, but deep down we know that we are more like Brad than we are like Frank, and that is Brad's saving grace for us. [1979:68]

When Riff and Magenta move in to clear the way for take-off back to the galaxy of Transylvania, it is Brad who says, "You mean you're going to kill him? What's his crime?"

The final "awakening" during the floor show is confirmed in the pool. Frank invites his fiends to join him, to "swim the warm waters of sins of the flesh." We know it's all over because Frank is lying in a life-saver emblazoned "USS Titanic." (The audience response to this vision is "Come look! There's a transvestite in my toilet bowl!") But the song, "Don't Dream It. Be It," is a call to participate in Frank's pleasure, no longer a command to be dominated by it. The masks disappear into the water while the now authenticated initiands lovingly touch Frank and one another, paralleling God touching Adam on the bottom of the pool. The ritual change in status is celebrated by all five participants, now on equal footing, in a chorus-line song and dance, "Wild and Untamed Thing" (musically, the continuation of the floor show confessions, "Rose Tint My World").

Cognitively, nothing underlines regularity so well as absurdity or paradox. Emotionally, nothing satisfies as much as extravagant or temporarily permitted illicit behavior. Rituals of status reversal accommodate both aspects. By making the low high and the high low, they reaffirm the hierarchical principle. By making the low mimic (often to the point of caricature) the behavior of the high, and by restraining the initiatives of the proud, they underline the reasonableness of everyday culturally predictable behavior between the various estates of society. [Turner 1969:176]

Riff and Magenta step in to "restrain the initiatives of the proud" and to restore "predictable behavior between the various estates of society." Riff, dressed in full gold lamé space gear, tells Frank, "It's all over. Your mission is a failure, your lifestyle's too extreme." After Frank sings his Judy Garland swan song, Riff tells him he's been "presumptuous" in assuming that he will accompany Magenta and himself back to Transsexual. (The title of the original stage production of Mary Shelley's book in 1823 was Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein.) As the simpering Dr. Scott tells Brad, "Society must be protected."

Of course, even the dead-below-the-waist Scott has been influenced by Frank's generosity: his paralysis disappears and his own fish-netted legs appear from beneath his invalid's wheelchair blanket. But Dr. Scott is ultimately an establishment toady, a structure freak who will forgive anything and accept anything as long as he is promised a return to the status quo. Even when the authority he submits to is as paranoid and duplicitous as Riff Raff, "insolent in his lack of power, cruel when he holds it" (Henkin 1979:61). "Absolute pleasure" is not a maxim that society can tolerate for very long. The audience knows it. They will respond as warmly to Riff Raff and Magenta at the next showing as they did at the last one because they know that Frank will be back; he will traipse off that elevator into their lives and fill them with delightfully subversive pleasure again next week. If there is no crucifixion, there can be no resurrection. But in the meantime, order is re-established; the liminal is displaced by familiar hierarchical principles in order that it may re-emerge another day.

The film moves from a raucous celebration of sexuality, through a lament for its dangers and confusions, to a final, sporting admission of the need to control it. Far from prompting rebellious sensuality, its ultimate balance and reconciliation of opposites leads in just the opposite direction - toward psychic detachment and an amiable acceptance of the need for compromise. [Kilgore 1983:159]

Community and Communitas

Turner quotes from Martin Buber in his attempt to describe what he means by communitas. He tells us, "Community is where community happens" (Turner 1969:127). The audiences of RHPS agree. A crowd of strangers come together in an urban theater at midnight, ready to participate in a communal ritual: to express their collective outsider status together as a group. It makes them feel better. In fact, it makes them feel great. "What makes it so infectious is the feeling of family and community within the theaters..." (Piro 1980:i). Many, but not all of them, are young. Many feel constrained by what Turner calls "structure," felt to be more painful and overbearing for low-status persons like insecure teenagers, intellectual or overweight adolescent women, skinny or nearsighted adolescent men. The anti-intellectual cults of beauty and physical fitness in our culture are even more pronounced in the 1990's than when I first attended RHPS in the 1970's. The reasons for participation have not changed. Like some other forms of ritualistic expression, it's not for everybody, but some hardcore fans call it "going to church."

...like religious services, the midnight Rocky showings communally demarcate the end of a given week. There may, moreover, be an ingrained need or longing for some such gathering together: a voluntary event that reliably occurs like a pulse against time... [there is] something comforting and stabilizing about ritualized repetition. But while ritual can provide a sense of containment in lives that are chaotic, it can also or even simultaneously provide a place for scheduled chaos in lives that are otherwise constrained. The latter, for example, occurred in the mad dancing of the Shakers, or in the ecstatic movement of dervishes. In Rocky too, the wildness and play-acting may happen because the film offers itself and the structure of its showings offer a ritual-like reassurance of a beginning and an end, [Oppenheim 1991:29]

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