For many years, I have made the same bold statement to any person with whom conversation has turned in an any way relevant direction: 'The greatest creation of mankind is The Rocky Horror Show.' Now, I know...but Luna, what about all the fantastic scientific and technological breakthroughs that have allowed us to live free, healthy lives, and able to watch such classic motion pictures?! Your comments do not go unheeded, friends, but you know how I love me an essence, a time capsule, a window, a feeling, when it's captured in art so fantastically. And you also surely know that I love me an inspirational figure. Who doesn't? And on the (in no particular order) list of great Guthrie Inspirers are Roger Ebert, Stephen King, Wes Craven, Ira Levin, and Richard O'Brien.In the cute Cambridgeshire village which plays glorious home to many of my childhood memories, we had an annual early-December party in the Village Hall entitled The Festival of Frolics, in which villagers would perform, entertain, get drunk, smoke indoors (remember those days?) and have a fucking good time - kids, adults, pensioners, all there, having real fun together. When I was about six, my mother and teenage brother were due to perform with a few of our friends, a song and dance routine. They had been busy getting wigs and makeup and feather boas together, and my sister and I were very excited. As my friend James' dad Stephen got up onstage that night in red tights and space-clown maquillage, he invited everyone to give him an R... as we spelled out the four remaining letters with him, my mother and brother and their friends strutted up onstage in long black coats, before throwing them off with the opening bass beats of the Time Warp, to reveal corsets, stockings, suspender belts and stilettos. Yes, my 17 year old brother too!
My sister and I thought nothing of it, except what fun! The next day, Mum played the show soundtrack for us at home (which quickly migrated to my bedroom), and not long later introduced us to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Now, Mum had strict rules: You girls can only watch up until Eddie dies. Now I type that, it seems like a funny thing for a lawyer to be telling her six and four year old daughters. But we had found something special even in the music, and having born witness to the first half of the movie, we had to see the rest. So, being resourceful kids in what turned out to be a village full of Rocky fans, we spotted a friend whose parents had the VHS on the shelf, and snuck in a midnight screening. Badasses!A phenomenon I'm sure many film fans can relate to is the one in which you watch subtly 'adult' movies as children, which you appreciate aesthetically, and then each time you watch it again as you mature, you understand another joke, the plot takes on a different dimension, you feel sympathies for characters you formerly detested. Noticing your own maturation of perspective is something really cool that favourite films can offer you. Especially when you're a six year old watching Rocky Horror. So I loved the songs, and I loved each wacky, totally individual character, but I was totally unfazed by Rocky and Frank's homoerotic relationship, or Magenta and Riff Raff's incestuous one, or Brad and Janet's sexually repressed one. Most of the humour I didn't understand for many years. But even then, there was something truly fun and magical about this crazy musical my family had introduced me to. It got to the point where our stepmother hid her copy of the video, she was so sick of hearing it. (Would it be cynical of me to suggest that one upside to having two sides of the family was having two VHS copies of Rocky?!)
Of course, the movie at home by yourself is one thing, but Rocky The Experience had yet to happen. When I was 13, a Sing Along Rocky came to a local theatre, so we had the Diet experience, whilst still getting to feel like badasses for wearing short skirts and high heels. But when I was 15, the real thing happened. I went with my mum, her partner, my friend and boyfriend (who came away with his entire torso signed by our theatre-going contemporaries), and my friend and I went all out on our costumes. We were 15, so our response to everything was a swift 'Fuck You', and we wore our shortest skirts, black lace bras and open leather jackets, teamed with fishnets and platform heels. As we headed through a car park of perplexed-looking businessmen heading home for the day, the slightest creep of anxiety hit me. But we had to only turn the corner to be swept up in a hoard of glittery, lacey, silky, stilettoey goodness to guide us in a bold path to the theatre.I was the frizzy, dorky kind at school, and so in the midst of my rebellious streak, I stood in the grand foyer of that theatre buzzing. Never had I been in such rich company, surrounded by people who in one stark way or another were just like me. Whatever other shit was going on in each of our lives, we felt liberated and really alive when we were all together, in the theatre, in our craziest costumes, to share in this one musical-theatrical product written by a 30-year-old unemployed actor to pass the time. But even the feeling I had in the foyer was eclipsed by the first three keyboard notes that opened the show inside the auditorium. As those notes dropped, the room just erupted with cheers and cries, my ears screaming and my throat along with them. It was like a pressure change, or more an energy change. It felt like all the ecstasy and antici...pation we collectively felt as this show began manifested in some psychic wave and washed around us. It's odd how many of those life-defining highs and blissful calms I have experienced in a theatre, and they've often felt like spiritual experiences. And this is what I believe is so special about The Rocky Horror Show. Not just for me, but for millions of others all over the world, sharing in this show is the most profound, communal, and liberating high we could ever ask for.
And what's so amazing, is the origins of it all. My mum once told me that Richard O'Brien (who, it is certain, played in Jesus Christ Superstar back in the early '70s) was told he would never again work in theatre after being caught sniffing coke in a dressing room by Andrew Lloyd Webber. I have never found any source to back this story up (although Mum may have been told it by her actor brother who worked in the West End - but this doesn't exactly validate it either), but O'Brien has often told the tale of how, in a humble televisionless existence, he passed cold winter nights of unemployment by penning his sci-fi B-movie parody rock'n'roll musical. It opened on a theatre's spare stage, which seated an audience of less than 100, scheduled for a week's run. But something special happened, and word spread, as my dad's nostalgic tales of '60s and '70s life for young men and women often concur, and the show pretty much never stopped.
Now, I realise that the first almost 1400 words of this lengthy more-essay-than-review have barely touched upon the actual Rocky Horror Picture Show, ie. the 1975 movie. But as such a dedicated lover of the work, I felt it of vital importance to share an account of Rocky's true effect. And I set to writing it having just watched the Rocky Horror Show Live broadcast, which was an absolute scream. Not only did Stephen fucking Fry make a guest appearance as Narrator, but the legend himself, Mr Richard O'Brien did too, and sang out those final, fantastic, chilling lyrics that just floor me every time: And crawling on the planet's face, Some insects called the human race, Lost in time and Lost in Space, and Meaning. Christ, that's weird. I actually got the chills just typing those out. Watch this Live show recording if you get the chance. It is one in a million!
Anyhow, since back in my beloved old '70s, some buggers at 20th Century Fox fancied milking the show's cult success, they a movie of it. And thankfully, they green-lighted keeping the gems of the original show's cast: creator O'Brien as Riff Raff, the handyman, the charismatic Patricia Quinn as Magenta and the iconic lips, Little Nell as Columbia and...and...*serious drum roll* the legendary Mr Tim Curry as the insatiably seductive Dr Frank N Furter. Time may change me, my celluloid freezes time. Gods bless it.
To be honest, this is one of those movies where I really don't feel like explaining the plot, mostly because everyone knows it, and if you don't, just take what passion you had endured from me thus far and get your ass to see the movie!! So, I'm just going to approach this as 'among friends', as if you all know what I'm talking about.The Rocky Horror Picture Show is just perfection. In my opinion, the best arrangements and vocals and actors to ever come together to perform it. Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick are onboard as, as Patricia Quinn once put it, the 'token Americans' to keep Fox happy, and they're both fantastic, with Bostwick bringing a surprisingly strong singing voice and nice faux-masculinity and Sarandon serving up some of the most delightful comic timing and characterisation she's ever done. And the crazy thing is... although Brad's solo song is deleted, Susan Sarandon is not as good a singer as she is an actress, and most of the cast had no screen acting experience, it is still perfect. How is it that often, it's the younger, professionally yet-unpolished, uncalloused groups who tend to happen upon these game-changers? Despite all these deficiencies, it is just brilliant. It is funny, it is exciting, it is engaging, it is at times heart-wrenching, and ultimately, somewhat chilling. It takes us through a spectrum of emotions, all of which lead back to absolute pleasure.
And perhaps the most poignant element of Rocky is summarised in one line of lyric from one of its songs: 'Don't dream it, be it.' Rocky represents liberation and inspiration and aspiration, it urges us to do what we really want and need, and to feel free of repression. The movie continually breaks the fourth wall, inviting us in to share its philosophy, addressing us as its unconventional conventionists. It's good, cheeky, innocent fun, in which we can be who we really feel like, no matter who we have to be elsewhere. This, my learned friends, is why Rocky Horror is the greatest creation of mankind.
