Gently Ripping Apart ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’
Photo by Justin Campbell on Unsplash
(This story was originally published on Medium).
I first saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) in high school as a closeted queer. I did so at the dead of night on the family computer. It was one of those films I would secretly watch over and over again. I loved it all — the outfits, the songs, the red lipstick. I was enamored with the villain Dr. Frank-N-Furter (played by Tim Curry) as they terrorized a suburban straight, white couple out of their heterosexuality. It was a powerful experience for me, one of many on my gradual road towards recognizing my own gender dysphoria.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is not so much a movie as it is a phenomenon. The campy science fiction musical has been a facet of queer culture since the late 1970s. The movie and the play, the latter of which is referred to as The Rocky Horror Show, have had a deep impact on pop culture. The movie has enjoyed repeated midnight showing for over forty years, and unlike a lot of cult classics, it is one surrounded by audience participation and ritual.
As LGBTQIA+ representation has increased, people have started to criticize this movie’s more problematic elements. Dr. Frank-N-Furter has started to be seen less as a figure of sexual awakening and exploration. Instead, he falls more into a larger trope of trans “deviancy” that ties directly into decades of discrimination on the Silver Screen and off.
The world of Rocky Horror clearly matters to many people, and this appreciation has much to do with its context. The original play came about in London in 1973, when there wasn’t as much acceptance for either LGBTQIA+ people or sexual empowerment. Same-sex marriage wasn’t legalized in either the US or the UK until the 2010s, and the concept of monogamy was very much the dominant cultural narrative (and remains so today).
The Rocky Horror Show cut across these tensions by boldly talking about sex and queerness — all within a fun, campy package that satirized the B-movies of the 1950s. Many of the songs were overtly sexual in a way that doesn’t blame the characters for “giving in to temptation.” Brad (Barry Bostwick) and Janet (Susan Sarandon), a straightlaced couple from the burbs, each have their own sexual awakenings that remain intact by the time the film closes. “Touch-a touch-a touch-a touch me, I wanna be dirty,” belts out Susan Sarandon in the middle of the film, advocating for an assertive form of sexuality that was by no means commonplace in 70s America.
Also, the film has a lot of subtle and not so subtle nods to queer culture. When the character Rocky (Peter Hinwood) and Dr. Frank-N-Furter go to “bed” for the first time, wedding bells ring in the background. The idea of same-sex marriage was not widely accepted in America during this time. In the 1972 case, Baker v. Nelson, Americans Mr. Baker and Mr. McConnell infamously had their application for marriage rejected by the Supreme Court in a one-sentence dismissal. It would take decades for same-sex marriage to receive political recognition, making the allusion to queer marriage in Rocky Horror a radical act for the time.
There is also Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who is first introduced to the audience as a bold, gender non-conforming individual in the song Sweet Transvestite, singing “I’m just a sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania.” Dr. Frank-N-Furter's unabashed confidence was, at the time, a rare type of representation for a trans character in mass media. Their commanding presence made them a fixture in pop culture that many people have since wanted to replicate. As trans writer Alice Collins wrote in Bloody Disgusting of their own experience with Rocky Horror:
“The first depiction of a trans person I ever saw was Frank. I never thought they were freaky or weird. They looked like fun, and I enjoyed that they didn’t care what anyone else thought and how they were unabashedly themselves. I thought it was so cool and wanted to be like that: giving zero cares as to what anyone thought of me. It gave me strength to grow a thicker skin and try more things out of the ordinary; I looked up to Frank. For the longest time before seeing the movie I’d always wished I could switch between gender at will and it was really cool to see someone who could at least on the surface do so before my eyes.”
The text was something countless queer people gravitated towards, and that sense of belonging created a safe space for some members of the LGBTQIA+ community. While the film initially flopped, it became a cult hit shared in Midnight showings across America. People regularly attended screenings where audience members spoke back to the characters on the screen. It was also common for fans to cosplay as their favorites. Rocky Horror acting troupes likewise formed with the job of repeating the dialogue of the characters' on-screen. This further facilitated a conversation between the audience and the film.
This festive veneer gave people social permission to dress up in gender-nonconforming clothing, a rarity in US culture outside of Halloween. As Larry Viezel, president of The Rocky Horror Picture Show Official Fan Club told the BBC:
“I know of a lot of people whose lives were saved by this movie. Especially for those in the LGBT community, it’s a place where they could be themselves and find people who were their family. I don’t want to give that up. I want people to still have a place to be.”
For the longest time, there were many parts of the country where this ephemeral production was one of the only queer spaces that existed. For example, I went to a college in upstate New York, where the nearest queer bar was a fifty-minute drive away. Still, every month the local movie theater would put on a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was much more accessible to me. That was in the 2010s, and this sentiment only held more true in the 80s and 90s.
I think it would be shorted-sighted to dismiss these spaces when they have been key in helping many people assert their identities. This fact is especially true when the LGBTQIA+ community has traditionally had so few non-bar-related scenes for queer people to explore.
Simultaneously, however, we must recognize that the Rocky Horror Picture Show is not a flawless text. It’s a wholly transphobic movie, and many people have felt excluded from it rather than accepted.
Rocky Horror relies on a lot of cultural touchstones that are antiquated to many of us now. Some of these still linger in the cultural memory, such as drive-in movie theaters (i.e., the song Science Fiction/Double Feature) or how Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s name is a reference to a movie theater hotdog.
Other references, though, don’t land anymore. When Dr. Frank-N-Furter unveils his creation Rocky — a muscular man he Frankensteined together through “science” — he tells his guests that Rocky has “the Charles Atlas seal of approval.” This was in reference to a real-life bodybuilder of the same name. Frank-N-Furter then sings an entire song (i.e., I Can Make You a Man) that lampoons the body-builders exercise program adverts. Although well understood to the viewers of the 70s, this reference doesn't make sense to the modern-day viewer.
Part of this slapdash of memes has to do with the fact that the movie’s writer, Richard O’Brien, really was not trying to make a serious plot. He created several of the play’s songs first and then organized a plot around them with stage director and friend Jim Sharman. O’Brien retrospectively admits he drew heavily upon pastiches of US Pop culture.
Some of these tropes, however, were far more insidious than the satirizing of old commercials. One of the biggest problematic tropes in the film has to do with consent, which at the time had just started to enter the popular lexicon. The year The Rocky Horror Picture Show aired, the concept of “date rape” entered the national conversation via Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. It would not be until 1993 that marital rape became a crime in every state in the Union. This cruel reality meant that it wasn’t considered unusual in the 1970s for consent to be murky in US pop culture and real-life (side note — most of history has been garbage).
The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a product of its time in the sense that it often lacked consent in many of its scenes. For example, Brad and Janet first come to Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s castle to use the doctor’s telephone, and instead, he has them stripped down to their undergarments. Brad “decides” to accept this situation, but only as a transactional means to an end.
Later, the mad scientist separately visits both Brad and Janet in bed under the guise of pretending to be the other’s partner. He effectively tricks each member of the couple into having sex with him, and although they do later consent, the initial engagement is quite predatory. This point is particularly troublesome as Trans people are often falsely accused of “trapping” their partners into a sexual relationship.
Frank-N-Furter’s relationship with Rocky is likewise extremely problematic. Rocky is born halfway through the film and is only 7 hours old by the movie's end. He only has “part” of a human brain and moves throughout the world in a child-like way. The power dynamic of a creator and their created makes it inappropriate for Frank-N-Furter to bed Rocky under any circumstances, but Rocky’s young mindset makes their relationship borderline pedophilic. Again, conservatives frequently conflate transgender people with pedophilia. As recently as this year, conservative political activist Angela Stanton-King tweeted about how she believes the LGBTQ community “sexualizes children.”
These tropes in Rocky Horror are hurtful because there is a long, bitter history of depicting gender-nonconforming people in pop culture (and in real life) as deviants and even murderers. Some of this legacy goes back to the Hays Codes, which was a policy that sanitized American media and, among many other things, prevented LGBTQIA+ people from being portrayed positively in films. Queer people were often cast as the villains, such as Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho (1960). Even after the code was axed in 1968, these tropes continued in texts such as Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995).
As a predatory, cannibalistic murderer, Frank-N-Furter definitely fits into this mold, and this representation did hurt people. As Caelyn Sandel wrote in The Mary Sue on their feelings of seeing Rocky Horror:
“That’s not what young-me saw when I looked at Frank and characters like him. I saw a cruel, unapologetic gender-nonconforming person, grossly over-sexualized and inconsiderate to others, and I said, I can’t try to be a woman — people will think I’m him.”
This is by no means a minority opinion, with dozens of writers making similar statements throughout the years. It’s great that so many queer Rocky Horror fans were able to carve out space for themselves with this film, but we have to recognize that the text itself was not always the shining beacon of progress that we imagined it to be.
Writer Richard O’Brien wrote Rocky Horror as someone with a fair amount of privilege. While his text has reverberated with many people with gender dysphoria, his own position is rather dismissive of gender identity. When asked in 2016 of their opinion of Germaine Greer’s anti-trans comments, they said:
“…feminists [who] say that because someone has surgery that doesn’t make them a woman…I think I agree with that. I agree with Germaine Greer and Barry Humphries. You can’t be a woman. You can be an idea of a woman.”
O’Brien, who describes themselves as third gender, then goes on to explain that binary trans people are “in the middle” of the gender spectrum. This comment was supposed to be comforting to fans, but ends up sounding detached and somewhat cruel. Again, these comments were made in 2016. In 1975 — an age far less progressive than today — it’s doubtful that a not-yet-out O’Brien put as much sensitivity into making the original Rocky Horror Show.
The film certainly created a space for LGBTQIA+ people, but I am not convinced that the original text was intended as such in all the ways it is remembered. There is a lot of ink spilled on this film’s queer subtext. Some of it seems genuine, such as Frank-N-Futer’s lab coat, which has a pink triangle on it, symbolizing the persecution of queer people during the Holocaust.
Yet, some of this imagery may have just been coincidental. The birth of the character Rocky, for example, takes place inside a vat Dr. Frank-N-Furter fills with each color of the rainbow, which has been linked by many critics and commentators to the pride flag. Rocky Horror, however, originally aired in 1975. Artist Gilbert Baker created the first Pride Flag several years later. It debuted in San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza for Gay Pride Day on June 25, 1978. It seems very doubtful that the film’s set designer, an Australian named Brian Thomson, who was versed with American culture through film tropes, was keyed in enough to American gay culture to understand a symbol three years before it debuted. It’s far more likely that the rainbow was referencing the peace movement of the 60s and earlier.
It’s also not clear that Dr. Frank-N-Furter was written from a place of empowerment. We already discussed how they fall into a problematic trope of trans villainy. Writer O’Brien described them in an interview as “a cross between Ivan the Terrible and Cruella de Ville of Walt Disney’s 101 Dalmatians.” These are two people effectively remembered in the zeitgeist as monsters.
And yet, Dr. Frank-N-Furter is not entirely hateable either. He is a fun and witty character, and that makes them a great watch. Sometimes this is done voyeuristically by straight, cis-gendered people who want to gawk at the gender-nonconformity. Still, the murder and cannibalism aside, Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s character is also constructed quite empathetically. In the song I’m going home, they describe how they were rejected from their original birthplace. They have since then been drifting aimlessly through the cosmos, singing:
Everywhere it’s been the same, feeling
Like I’m outside in the rain, wheeling
Free, to try and find a game, dealing
Cards for sorrow, cards for pain
This feeling of isolation is a very familiar feeling to queer people. Its inclusion makes sense, given that writer O’Brien probably had to grapple with a fair amount of dysphoria as a genderfluid person. It’s just not coupled with the self-acceptance we have grown to expect in modern media now that LGBTQIA+ people have become more integrated into society.
It’s a transphobic characterization written by a self-hating trans-person longing to be accepted but not finding it, even within the confines of his own imagination. This dissonance creates an interesting subtext about what the trans experience has been like for many people throughout recent history. As Cáel M. Keegan writes in Flowjournal.org:
“If we look closely, we find that what at first glance looks like a nonsensical film about an insane cannibalistic transgender scientist who tortures innocent people is simultaneously a story about a transgender alien (Dr. Frank N. Furter) who has left his home planet looking for a place where his queer desires will be accepted. He travels from planet to planet, but they are all the same, and he is consistently rejected. Finally, he lands on Earth and discovers how to create life. He uses these powers to create a human companion for himself, Rocky Horror, but this cross-species relationship offends the aliens from his home planet, who kill him.”
Dr. Frank-N-Furter is born and then dies in a world that hates him. Those emotions of self-pity and despair are buried underneath the light “fun” of the entire movie. They are feelings O’Brien was undoubtedly very familiar with when he wrote the film. He has repeatedly described himself as someone who clung to humor and flair as a defense mechanism. As he told the New Zealand Magazine Stuff about growing up as queer:
“If you were gay, you couldn’t tell anybody — you’d get prison time for getting a bit of rock and roll. And being transgender was worse because you don’t fit into anything, you couldn’t explain it to anybody. So, I lived in my head and developed my imagination, to some extent. And now, here we are.”
This sense of isolation may have been demanded in the 70s when self-hatred in queerdom was the status quo, but frankly, we do not have to accept that state of affairs anymore.
Dr. Frank-N-Furter never seems able to return home. They die when the movie’s true villain, Riff Raff (also played by Richard O’Brien), guns down not only Frank-N-Furter but also characters Columbia and Rocky. This is done because these characters never “gave” him enough attention. “They never liked me,” screams Riff Raff — as Frank-N-Furter becomes yet another gender-nonconforming person gunned down by a repressed incel’s rage.
When Fox updated the movie in 2016 under the title The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let's Do the Time Warp Again, the same thing happens — Frank-N-Furter still dies under the same circumstances. The thing I found the most strange with this mostly inferior sequel was how little was changed about the overall narrative: Brad and Janet remain a straightlaced, heterosexual couple from the burbs, the dialogue and musical scores are largely unaltered, and, again, Frank-N-Furter still dies.
It seems odd that so much reverence is paid to this text when the original creators never had it for their source material. They didn’t bother to tell a faithful story that tapped into a realistic understanding of 70s Americana. They drew upon misremembered tropes. The film was made on a shoestring budget and shot within a period of only six weeks.
Why do we have to treat this flash-in-the-pan like some sacred, unalterable text?
There are a lot of changes that could be made — both of the stage production and in any future film adaptations — that would easily make this text more inclusive: you could cast all of the characters as genderfluid (and have them played by trans actors), which would certainly alter the subtext of Brad and Janet’s journey; you could tweak the dialogue to make it more centered on consent; you could very easily make Frank-N-Furter more sympathetic by shifting the primary villain role over to Riff Raff; and finally, you could make it, so at least one of your textually trans characters finds community and acceptance at the end of the film, not just being gunned down by an incel.
Cinema has gone through a lot of changes since the 1970s, and while the acceptance of Frank-N-Furter may have been seen as an impossibility then, even among its queer creators, that certainly isn’t the case anymore. Spaces have been created for such representation, making The Rocky Horror Picture Show antiquated by comparison.
We need a story where a trans character doesn’t need to resort to villainy to find acceptance, and if we aren’t going to find it in Rocky Horror, then we need to look elsewhere on this planet filled with meaning.