The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1974)

Meat Loaf (real name: Marvin Lee Aday) has died; let's hope he has gone to a luscious, sensual afterlife of exotic, giant lips floating against the void. This is how the famous Rocky Horror Picture Show begins, and it is why the film is a dream-like, archetypal cinematic experience, borne out of an ecstasy of fun.

It opens with a song, a tired, resigned love ballad, celebrating all that which was best in popular matinee cinema: superheroes, monsters, The Day the Earth Stood Still, beautiful dames and bold, brash and brilliant heroes. In "silver underwear," no less. It proceeds to the phony "City of Denton," where Brad (Barry Bostwick) and Janet (Susan Sarandon) are at a wedding out of American Gothic. Someone else's wedding.

The characters are picture-perfect bourgeois cut-outs from an old romance comic book. Brad laments that it is not he and Janet that were married that day, instead they are there to see the wedding of friends. The first musical number intimates that "damn it, Janet, I love you!" Also, they are going to see their old professor or tutor, or something, Dr. Everett Scott.

The people in the wedding chapel all play dual roles, and we'll be meeting them all again. The movie stops for some crime documentary narration from a stiff, English parody in a darkened study (Charles Gray).

Brad and Janet get broken down on a deserted road in the rain. Brad asks, "Didn't we pass a castle back away?" Very absurd, but the movie is a musical comedy.

Janet sings the lead on the song about being "Over at the Frankenstein Place," a place where "there's a light, burning in the fireplace." Right away, the viewer is informed that darkness, monsters, and the night (ultimately, surrender to the repressed id) are where the illumination of being is hidden. Something warm, comfortable, and real.

From the darkened window of the castle's tower, the ghostly Riff-Raff (writer-director Richard O'Brien), croons that "darkness must flow down the river of night's dreaming." The tones are icy and chilling. Lightning flashes.

Brad and Janet go to the door. Riff-Raff answers. The music picks up like clockwork. It's the famous "Time Warp," and the ballroom is full of dancing celebrants at an ungodly hour, countercultural, proto-gothic "freaks", eating and drinking and making merry. The staid, conservative Brad and Janet seem as if they are going to faint. The lyrics of the song explain they must do the "time warp" for the blackness to "have them," and a voice to call. Transgression is where the comically perfect, all-American Brad and Janet have arrived.

Soon, Dr. Frank N. Furter (Tim Curry) comes down a cage-like elevator; it's Curry in a fabulous, glamourous famous role that hearkens to Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson, Bette Davis and other famous Hollywood divas of the Thirties and Forties. He sings that he's a sweet transvestite. Brad just wants to "use the telephone goddamn it! A reasonable request which you have chosen to ignore."

Frank N. Furter, like a very good mad scientist, is creating a man, a muscle-bound hunk floating in a tank he calls "Rocky." Rocky (Peter Hinwood) is blonde, buff, and rather infantile. There are more musical numbers, lyrical themes abounding around bodybuilding ("I can make you a...man!"), and homoerotic love for perfect physical specimens of manliness. As celebrated by superheroes and comic books, bad movies, Flash Gordon, etc.

Brad and Janet are stripped down to their underwear. Frank seduces both of them by dressing as the other. The Narrator breaks in here and there with meaningless and inscrutable observations, underscoring the comic action with weirdly grave pronouncements. Riff-Raff, and his sister Magenta (Patricia Quinn), torment Rocky 'ala Frankenstein, who then breaks free from his chains and goes running about, chased by dogs. Colombia (the quite adorable Little Nell, who has a put-on Brooklyn accent that is flat, nasal, and so like the B movie actresses from old poverty row pictures from the Thirties, who seem to be her model) pines over Eddie (Meat Loaf), whom she loved (Frank has killed him with an ice pick earlier). Dr. Scott (Jonathan Adams) shows up (he's an expert on UFOs and aliens) in his wheelchair, with a magnifying glass, a parody of Van Helsing or any other " monster buster" from an ancient movie. They all have dinner, which is revealed by a sudden pull-away of a tablecloth to be Eddie. There's a music number centered around the short, tragic life of Eddie.

Comic gags, such as reactions where the actors shout each other's names repeatedly, with close-ups and surprised if identical reactions, are oddly interjected. Frank N. Furter turns everyone into a perfect marble statue (the film has an obsession with physical beauty that is becoming or in the stages of development: Brad and Janet want the beauty of marriage, the revelers at the castle party do the "time warp" to achieve the perfection of transgressive renewal; Frank wants to develop Rocky as his paramour and partner. Rocky is physically perfect ["I can make you a man!"]).

They are "unfrozen" for the sake of the "floor show," which sees them all dressed in drag, with heavy makeup, singing and referencing their respective roles. Frank comes on and it becomes a sort of Busby Berkley musical. They must give themselves over, say the lyrics, to "absolute pleasure." They must swim in the waters of fleshly sin, to be released. To transform. To Become. And this will be their salvation.

Suddenly, Riff-Raff and his sister break in, now no longer dressed as gothic servants. They are dressed in "silver underwear," flying saucer getups from some old space movie. They announce that Frank N. Furter is to be taken back to Planet Transsexual, in the galaxy of Transylvania. The last musical number, where Frank bemoans his existence as an outsider ("Like I'm outside...in the rain!") is sung, and Frank seems happy that he is going home (where, presumably, he can finally be himself, after an attempted sojourn of Becoming). Riff-Raff shoots him with a laser anyway, and the distraught Rocky crawls the RKO Pictures backdrop, weeping inconsolably while holding Frank. The whole thing topples into the pool below.

The castle takes off like a rocket, into outer space, leaving Brad, Janet, and Dr. Scott groveling in confusion below. They sing a final number, "Superheroes," lamenting that their transformation into beautiful, sensual alter-egos of themselves left them still empty inside; unfulfilled, ultimately. But what would fulfill them? The party is over, the castle has gone back to a distant planet. The "light" has been put out. They are merely themselves again.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show, conceived, written, directed, and scored by Richard O'Brien, is a paean to all that he loves, science fiction, gothic tropes, old movies, rock n' roll, and beautiful unisexual androgynes, transexual liberation and breaking of taboos and barriers. The film is a spell of infectious fun, with excellent and incomparable music, plotting, absorbing visual flair, and perfect pacing. It invites and celebrates transgression, and also transformation, inviting the audience to come and "be part of the party."

It celebrates the popular culture of the past: comic books, rock n' roll, monster flicks, and science fiction pulps, but gives them a new twist for the sexualized cultural revolution of the mid-seventies. It invites the literal film audience to "become," along with the characters, the characters themselves. It was the first great "audience participation" film, with a nightly midnight screening of costumed celebrants who performed and partied right alongside the movie--throwing toilet paper, rice, and cards, singing the lyrics (and their own bawdy versions of them), treating the whole thing like a maximum transformation of drab, boring self into FUN. Becoming something different for an hour and a half, two hours, the True North of why we love Halloween.

The movie is so classic it has transcended being merely a movie. Now it is a cultural artifact par excellence, an ubiquitous aspect of the societal landscape; maybe it has, like other films, descended into our collective unconscious.

It ends with a refrain of the opening title theme, a song that celebrates science fiction and monster films, space opera,, and silver-suited handsome hunks of yore in a mellow, loving, yet exhausted manner. We didn't find what we were searching for, it seems to say, in all that stuff that came before, though we tried. Here's a recap, an homage; perhaps a new investigation. THAT is the meaning of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, to this Writer.

Wherever Meat Loaf is, let's pray to God he's smiling again.