35 Jim Sharman's the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
‘G IVE YOURSELVES OVER TO ABSOLUTE PLEASURE ’: THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW ’S QUEERING OF COUNTERCULTURE FILM Monica MICHLIN Université Paris IV - Sorbonne Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), the filmic adaptation of the Richard O’Brien musical, stands out among other musical films of the counter-culture. It is remarkable for its excess, its energy, its humor, its mocking of traditional gender codes and its pronounced taste for the “visually abysmal” both in the meaning of camp and its mise en abyme of icons of both high and low visual culture—from Michelangelo’s David to Charles Atlas ads, and from Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) to King Kong (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1933) to The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)—in a pastiche and parody of genre films. While it is, itself, a hodge-podge of musical 1 and horror story, a warped romantic comedy and a science fiction farce, it deploys its unique countercultural energy in its Dionysian celebration of its queer main character, Dr. Frank’n’Furter, a transvestite avatar of Dr. Frankenstein, played by Tim Curry. In highlighting how its queering of genres is meshed with the queering of gender, and the hedonistic celebration of “performance,” I will stress how the film’s deliberately provocative visual and narrative techniques, as well as its constant celebration of excess and chaos prompt the audience to warp it in turn and, in a mise en abyme of the carnivalesque, to break down the fourth wall in the way fan communities started to do one year after the film’s release, in midnight performances, arguably making it to this day the ultimate cult film of the mid-seventies.
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