I am mildly concerned to say the least about the cast of Glee performing songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the latest episode that premieres tonight. Mildly concerned doesn’t really cut it exactly. More apropos would be horrified, but not in the way that I think Fox wants me to be.
I am quite worried that what I will see tonight will represent the white-washing, cultural neutering, suburban mainstreamifying of an institution that for me and for so many others, has been a last bastion of protected outsiderness. One of those venerable institutions that has stood on the outskirts and both defied mass appropriation and withstood the test of time. Glee taking up Rocky Horror feels like the Culture Industry has steam rolled their way through my heart, and which left me in it’s wake feeling defiled and smelling like Teen Spirit.
To date I’ve been at peace with Glee’s selections of musical material, which the cast has recycled, reinvented, and reinvigorated at alternate turns and with varying degrees of success. Sometimes it’s been reinvigorating classics like Don’t Stop Believin’ and broadened its audience. At other times its lovingly embraced pop mega stars like Britney, Madonna, and Lady Gaga by honoring them with a take on their top hits. At still other times, and they’ve energized 80’s alternative classics that have already migrated to kitsch like Safety Dance for a new generation. But they’ve resisted taking musical works that are on the edge of mainstream, like Sex Pistols or Bikini Kill or Phish. Until now.
It’s probably not for me to say what the writers should get to pick as their subject matter – that’s tantamount to censorship - but I sure wish they’d refrained from this. So rather than issue a litany of why they shouldn’ts, I'll instead just talk about why it is I feel so violated by Glee’s revamping of Rocky Horror. I think it's because for me and for so many others, the cult appeal of this film is that it’s a cultural sanctuary for outsiders. As a teenager growing up in a tame suburb in north Texas in the 90s, I readily admit I didn’t get it at first. I knew Rocky Horror was this thing my sister and her friends went to every Saturday night, but I didn’t really know much about it other than it was late at night and had an element of audience participation that involved rice and some sort of hand and forearm sex. The enigmatic nature of it enticed me. Cut to my fifteenth birthday. Upon leaving the theater at 2:30am after seeing it for the first time, I was kind of in shell shock. I didn’t get the film and I certainly didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.
It took several years for me and an embracing of my inner dork to cultivate my appreciation for this film, and several more years for me to articulate that appeal is. Other than the obvious attraction to B-movie spoof-i-ness, the fact that the songs are catchy and well written, and that it features a young Susan Sarandon as an ingénue in her underwear, I think the appeal lies in the sexually liminality the films presents. Not only is what one might call “aberrant” behavior – transvestitism, promiscuity, and homosexuality – portrayed in the film, it’s embraced, and put forth as a kind of sensual alternate universe. And this is not hedonism for the beautiful (like Bertolucci’s The Dreamers) but for the attractive and unattractive alike, and all who are in-between. Even for those not having sex. There’s space for all in this mad-cap realm.
Rocky Horror then as a movie and as an interactive phenomenon provided (and continues to provide) a mass cultural experience which metaphorically and literally created a space for the geeks, dorks, and other outsiders to inhabit (as themselves or in various forms of masquerade) and feel free to just be themselves, with no one to impress. Sort of a progenitor to other alt-phenomena like Comic Con.
I’m not necessarily resentful that Fox is mainstreaming it up (though that the cheerleader character is playing Frank-N-Furter and they have changed the word “transsexual” to “sensational” do make me throw up a little), and I understand that on the 35th anniversary Rocky could well benefit from a renewed interest made manifest in iTunes sales and increased box office attendance that will help keep the tradition going. But I do feel a certain sense of sanctity has been violated. Rocky Horror has been a sort of refuge for those on the outside (the nerds, the Ren fair folks, the musical theatre dorks) where we could and still can unwind and hang on. If the cool kids are wandering around doing the time warp, it just makes it a little less special.
Yes I will tune in tonight. Yes I will probably ache a little as I witness the peppy cast destroying a sacred piece of my cultural past. And yes I will go to the mall tomorrow and listen out for conversations among the younger set in which they talk about the show and say “I just don’t get it.” And if I hear that, yes I will smile a smug smile of self satisfaction. Rose tint that.
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