Hypnosis in Rocky Horror Picture Show Chapter 2 Part 5 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975)
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[Highly amplified rock music] acts directly upon the body and creates a feeling of participation that many people never attain even during the sexual act. There is no resisting it except by flight. Amplified to this extent, the human voice affects the larynx.... The sounds of the electric bass (infra-sounds) produce vibrations localized in internal erogenous zones of the abdomen.... The repetitive melodies and perpetual thrumming instantly produce a light hypnosis. –Alain Roux, “La musique pop” |
Not surprisingly, a meeting of the American Academy of Religions
(November 20, 1993) chose that movie for a featured presentation, since it has much
in common with other phenomena studied by that august body. As in tribal masking,
for the costumed, mimicking spectators of Rocky Horror Picture Show, personal
identity and sense of responsibility, temporarily fade into the ceremony. Its bisexual
protagonist, Dr. Frank-N-Furter seeks “absolute pleasure.” Since ordinary consciousness
does not provide the “absolute,” he seeks an altered state from dream- (or nightmare-)
like activities. For these, Rocky Horror Picture Show draws on imagery of
horror and science-fiction movies, Satanism, and the notion (common in some oriental
religions) that “Life is an illusion”–like the hallucinations of deep hypnosis.
Time Warp
The movie’s most conspicuous ritual is the “Time Warp,” a dance occurring more than
once. Naturally, the audience participates each time. One on-screen dancer receives
a wafer on his tongue in parody of Christian Communion. With a mixture of psychopathology
and blasphemy, the lyrics include references to insanity and the devil.
The “Time Warp” establishes the film’s interpretation of repetition.
The lyrics proclaim, “You’re into the time slip and nothing again can be the same.”
Yet they continue “Let’s do the time warp again,” as if there is something that can
come “again,” something that can “be the same”–the time warp itself, wrenching, permutating
religious images into hedonistic chaos. In Fiction and Repetition, J. Hillis
Miller contrasts “‘Platonic’ repetition ... grounded in a solid … model” and Nietzschean
repetition, which rejects such an ideal (Miller1982, 6). The first (associated with
Graves’s stage four) expects miraculous renewal, exact repetition of whatever has
been lost or improvement: the dead resurrected as spiritual bodies, Eden restored
forever, Christ returned in triumph, etcetera. The second, a jazzy syncopation (associated
with stage five, e.g., Rocky Horror Picture Show) relishes irony and dissociation,
reactions to twisted repetitions. What in the movie comes closest to being the same
is disorienting, iterated vertigo: a dizzying sense of how things have slipped and
changed in future shock.
American Gothic
Rocky Horror overflows with stereotypes repeated, not just unthinkingly but
preposterously, wrenching one from the foundations of the past. At the very beginning,
disembodied lips sing a tribute to the clichés of science-fiction films. Then
comes a wedding performed by a preacher played by the actor Tim Curry (son of a Methodist
Minister). He also serves as the film’s main character, the diabolical Dr. Frank-N-Furter.
Behind the nuptial party, the church and two rustics mimic Grant Wood’s painting
“American Gothic,” itself a parody. Its title and composition contrast provincial
American Protestantism with the great cathedral art of Catholic Europe.
A copy of that painting later appears, hanging on the wall of a castle. On seeing it, the character Brad pauses with déjà vu. Presumably, he wonders how the church caretakers have been transformed into a picture and perhaps also suspects correctly that the castle’s butler, Riff Raff, played the male caretaker. There are other translations as well. By hanging in a horror-movie-like set, the “Gothic” religion and medieval art (transformed in the painting into rural America) have been again subtly skewed, this time into “Gothic” fiction. Similarly, salacious gestures near them transform into pornographic statuary and other art with figures from Ancient Greek paganism.
Two major images of the opening scene echo later within the castle. First, the nuptial party exits to the strains of an out-of-tune organ playing a hackneyed wedding march. (Thereafter, a rock version sounds as Dr. Frank-N-Furter goes with his male creation Rocky Horror to the “nuptial” bed.) Second, by the church, Brad and Janet walk through a graveyard, then attend the preparations for a funeral. Amid the many death images in the castle occur coffins. With a skeleton inside, one stands against the wall like a grandfather’s clock. Displaying what remains of a murder victim, another is revealed beneath a tablecloth holding a cannibalistic meal.
Foreshadowings, false and real, add to the emphasis on repetition.
After catching the wedding bouquet, Janet expects to be the next bride. Seemingly
preparing such a recurrence, Brad proposes. In the number “Dammit, Janet,” everyone
sings, even the Grant Wood characters, who deliver the chorus, “Janet,” hoarsely,
over and over, defamiliarizing it, sounding more graceless each time. After a cut
to the narrator, a “criminologist,” who predicts disaster, the engaged couple drives
off into a rainstorm. Auto trouble leaves them by the castle.
Transsexuals from Transylvania
After singing naively about the “guiding star” that predestines everyone’s life,
Brad and Janet enter a castle to find an “Annual Transylvanian Convention” rocking
with the first occurrence of the “Time Warp.” This “Transylvanian” refers not to
a region in Europe but to a distant galaxy, containing the planet “Transsexual.”
Thus, although the guests are “bisexual” rather than “transsexual” in the ordinary
sense of that word, they are “Transsexuals,” because they come from that planet.
The regular referentiality of the words has slipped–trans-ferred, trans-valuated.
At the end of the “Time Warp” the music runs down, one of various points where entropy undermines exact repetition. The dancers collapse on the floor. The house is isolated by the storm; the guests are now a closed set: “The entropy concept ... describes the most probable configuration of particles in a closed physical system.... [T]he elements of such a system tend toward.... maximum ‘disorder’ (or more appropriately, variety)” (Nijkamp and Reggiani17).
Rocky Horror presents chaos as polymorphous play. Asked for help for their car by Brad and Janet, Frank-N-Furter promises ironically a “Satanic mechanic,” while the servants strip the engaged couple. Nervously, Brad gives “Weis,” the last name of his fiancée, its German pronunciation of vice–a Freudian slip prefiguring the moral slips to come.
In a parody of the 1939 Frankenstein and of several other horror classics, Frank-N-Furter brings to life the mummy-cloth-swathed character, Rocky Horror. Stripped to a swimsuit, Rocky receives weight-lifting equipment from Frank-N-Furter, who sings, “In just seven days I can make you a man.”
The line sloppily alludes to God’s creation of man on the sixth day–which, of course, is not just a Jewish or Christian allusion but a basic psychological pattern reflected in so many mythologies that it has become an almost universal presupposition. In his The Myth of the Eternal Return, the historian of religions Mircea Eliade summarizes it thus: “If the act of the Creation realizes the passage from the nonmanifest to the manifest or, to speak cosmologically, from chaos to cosmos; if the Creation took place from a center; if, consequently, all the varieties of being, from the inanimate to the living, can attain existence only in an area dominantly sacred....[e]very creation repeats the preeminent cosmologonic act, the Creation of the world.... Consequently, whatever is founded has its foundation at the center of the world (since ... the Creation itself took place from a center)” (Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, 5-6). That is a lot of ifs. For deliberate disorientation, Rocky Horror Picture Show accepts none of them. The Transsexuals do not come from some common, terrestrial ancestor but from an un-Earthly planet. No place is the Center of the Universe. The course of the film is from a rustic church to an even more remote castle, which transforms into a space ship, traveling into the void. Far from being a reenactment of an orienting Creation, the making of Rocky is imaged in terms of body-building. While Creation gave meaning to the world once for all time, the iron-pumping re-creation/recreation constantly rebuilds and changes, preparatory to Frank-N-Furter’s making Rocky in yet another sense.
Before that consummation, Frank-N-Furter’s previous lover, Eddie, a Rocker-Motorcyclist, redolent of the 1950s, emerges from a deep freeze, singing “I thought/I was divine.” Frank-N-Furter finds this recrudescence intolerable. He kills Eddie and takes Rocky to the bridal suite.
Next arrive two parallel scenes. Janet makes love to someone resembling Brad, but he turns out to be their host; Brad makes love to someone resembling Janet, but (s)he turns out to be the same host. The beds are almost identical as are the erotic gestures. Both times the virginal characters continue having sex even after learning the identity of the bedmates. Frank-N-Furter’s switching from male to female roles, however, provides a significant change of tone, as he enlivens his dull partners, serving as their Anima/Animus. The energy spreads: Rocky escapes his chains and has sex with Janet. All the erotic scenes rerun on black-and-white television monitors, where servants imitate the movements in incestuous or lesbian encounters.
Dr. Everet Scott, Brad’s and Janet’s high-school teacher, arrives in his wheel chair as part of his search for his nephew, Eddie. After some farcical scenes, including one in the “Zen room,” the slightly less decadent characters–Brad, Janet, Scott, Rocky, and the groupie Columbia –are turned to stone by Frank-N-Furter. When he resurrects them to life, he dresses them in little but women’s corsets, reflections of his own attire. They have an orgy in a pool that blasphemously sports at its tiled bottom Michelangelo’s Creation of Man. They sing, “Don’t dream it, be it!” John Kilgore interprets thus, “The passionate melting of bodies and egos carries a threat of metamorphosis; its price is a loss of identity, or at least of dignity and autonomy” (Kilgore 157). By a giant replica of the logo of RKO (the company that made such horror movies as King Kong), Frank-N-Furter sings, identifying himself with Fay Wray, the star of that movie, and advocating “absolute pleasure.” As Fay Wray was by King Kong, it requires being swept away by the more or less than human consciousness
Riff Raff armed with a pitchfork-shaped ray gun, arrests Frank-N-Furter. The pitchfork recalls the one in the painting American Gothic as well as the traditional ascription of that implement to Satan. Kilgore adds, “[a] Last Supper tableau briefly forecasts [Riff Raff] as Judas to Frank’s Christ...” (Kilgore 158). Frank-N-Furter tries to escape but as a curtain collapses (symbolic of illusion being stripped away), he succumbs to an antimatter ray. Rocky carries his body up the RKO tower (à la King Kong). The structure collapses. The whole mansion flies away to Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania.
Held together precariously by inexact repetitions, the loose structure of the movie, a concatenation of production numbers, narrative interruptions, and pastiches of other films, constantly approaches collapse, before the final disintegration. Umberto Eco writes of a cult movie: “[It] is ... a palimpsest for students of twentieth-century religiosity....In order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of the whole.... [It] became a cult movie because it is not one movie. It is ‘movies’” (Eco 446-53). Eco was actually writing about Casablanca, but his words even more aptly apply to Rocky Horror Picture Show, which, albeit in a very frivolous way, synthesizes film’s capacity to suggest unlimited personal change. Its using this capacity for polymorphous sensuality suits the transition from stage four to five when the individual needs to overcome any obsession with chaste neatness. Not surprisingly, it has generated considerably more memorabilia and commemorative conventions than the average movie and productions of it have been numerous, including one with an all-new celebrity cast made for television by Twentieth Century Fox (2003).
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