Midnight movies by Jonathan Rosenbaum J. Hoberman

Author:Jonathan Rosenbaum J. Hoberman [J. Hoberman, Jonathan Rosenbaum]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 1999-03-02T21:00:00+00:00

As a consequence of such incidents, progressively fewer gays went to the Strand's Saturday midnight shows, and the hardhats eventually drifted away. The audience next became “a liberal mixture of the reformed, converted, and bored," as Walker put it, including a few curious parents who came along to see what their kids were doing. By this time, the influence of punk rock, another seemingly decadent, antiestablishment expression from England, had been felt in America, and it was inevitable that the erotic accoutrements of Frank-N-Furter would mingle with the emulations of the Frankenstein monster and other dispossessed creatures in the stylistic registers of punk. While the fads differed significantly in their class identifications — making English punk, unlike the London stage version of Rocky Horror, a self-consciously proletarian (if equally bohemian) phenomenon — it seemed in the cards that the Mixmaster impact of American assimilation would make them both equally middle class (as Rocky Horror had already done with the Theater of the Ridiculous).

In any case, Walker could see this new interest attach itself to those proto-punk symbols and fetishes that were already evident in the movie — like Frank in his black leather jacket and chains, with a number that was the name of a German cologne, 4711, tattooed like a concentration-camp identification on his leg, or Meat Loaf/Eddie in his blue jeans and white T-shirt with his throbbing rock 'n' roll. Thanks to this new emphasis, the undercurrent of violence running through Rocky Horror seemed to become more important to the rituals, more significant in the plot; in a disturbing way, it became what the movie was about. And as far as Walker was concerned, it spelled out the beginning of the end of her interest in the cult.

The punkers had the film to themselves for about six weeks before the college crowds arrived to take their rightful place amongst the ranks of radical chic. From then on, it was no fun at all to go see the film. Participation became academic and rigid, and what had started out as a social crowd of gays became anti-gay and, worst of all, indifferent when I left in the summer of 1978. The whole experience had been co-opted by straights who, in their groping to be where the action is," made it totally impossible for anyone else to feel comfortable.

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