Title: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Author: Richard O’Brien
Date of First Performance: 19 July 1973
Venue: Royal Court Theater, London
Type: Play
Keywords: ANDROID; BYRONIC HERO; QUEER; FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER; SYMPATHETIC MONSTER; POSTHUMAN
Critical Summary: The musical was adapted into the 1975 movie of the same title, directed by Jim Sharman, the play’s director, and with star Tim Curry repising his role as Dr. Frank N. Furter. Author O’Brien plays “handyman” Riff Raff. The play was a hit and the movie is a cult sensation, still engaged in the longest running release in film history.
Engaged couple Brad Majors and Janes Weiss, leaving the wedding of friends, suffer a flat tire on a rainy night. They walk to a nearby castle to seek the use of a phone and shelter. They stumble upon a gathering of strange people who are celebrating an Annual Transylvanian convention. Dr. Frank N. Furter, a self-described “sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania,” reveals he is the owner of the castle. He insists the couple stay the night.
In Frank N. Furter’s lab, the doctor brings to life the Adonis-like Rocky. Eddie, Frank’s ex-lover and brain-donor to Rocky, crashes the celebration, woos another of Frank’s ex-lovers, Columbia, and gets the Transylvanian conventioneers and Rocky dancing. In his jealousy, Frank kills Eddie which he describes as a “mercy killing.”
After the horror in the lab, Frank’s servants Riff-Raff and Magenta forcibly lead Brad and Janet to separate rooms. Both are in turn seduced by the doctor as he pretends to be the other’s partner. Janet discovers a video monitor playing a feed of Frank and Brad post-copulation. Upset, Janet wanders the castle before finding Rocky in the tank in the lab. While tending to Rocky’s wounds suffered under Riff-Raff’s torment, Janet becomes intimate with Rocky.
Riff-Raff informs Frank that an intruder is on the castle grounds. Dr. Everett Scott, Brad and Janet’s high school science teacher and UFO investigator for the government, has come looking for his nephew Eddie. While Frank accuses Brad and Janet are working for Dr. Scott, Rocky and Janet are discovered under the covers in Rocky’s birth tank. This upsets Frank and Brad.Dr. Frank N. Further reveals Eddie’s remains to his three guests, horrifying them. Frank uses a device to restrain them. Dressing them in lingerie, he entices them to perform a cabaret show with the doctor as the lead.
Riff-Raff and Magenta, another assistant, interrupt the performance, revealing they and Frank N. Furter are space aliens. The two stage a mutiny against Frank, who they say has failed his mission, and kill him, Rocky, and Columbia in the process. Riff-Raff and Magenta release Brad, Janet, and Dr. Scott and depart in the castle which lifts-off like a rocket. The narrator concludes that humans are like insects crawling like insects on the planet’s surface, a race “lost in time, and lost in space… and meaning.”
RHPS brings a surreal experience that celebrates the nonsensical, the non-sequitur, and the subversion of hegemonic culture. While taking influence from the B-grade sci-fi movies and sincere-yet-naïve pop songs of the 1950s, the movie satirizes them in the context of its own sexualized glam rock era. The stereotypical heteronormative hegemonic couple, Brad and Janet, are treated as minority and transgressive in their “normalness” by the hedonistic and queer nature of Frank N. Furter and the other Transylvanian aliens. The movie creates a spectacle of masculinity; Frank N. Furter claims many partners and loses control over his creation and masculine ideal, Rocky, who in turn gains agency through his sexual escapades.
Administrative Notes: Gareth O’Neal, CSUF; Editor: Adriana Lora and Samuel Ortiz, CSUF