Rocky Horror is something special.
It’s not because it’s a send-up of B-movies. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, Hardware Wars, and Kung Fury are all send-ups of B-movies and they haven’t become cultural forces. Plus, while it might have begun life in O’Brien’s head as a send-up, parody is secondary to its centering of sexuality and queerness and flouting of every taboo it thought it could get away with. Those themes were absolutely not part of 1950s creature features or sci-fi, so it’s a parody of B-films in the way Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is about laundromats, which is to say, not really at all.
It’s not the ensemble. Sarandon, Bostwick, and Adams are all overearnest parody. O’Brien and Quinn are doing niche performance art. The rest of the cast plays their roles “straight”, except for Curry, who didn’t adopt a stance as much as conjure Frank-N-Furter from the cosmos into being as some camp primal trickster god, like a Loki in punk drag and magical fishnets. All the actors are all on screen together, but they’re almost in different movies.
I wouldn’t even say it’s the audience participation, because that was more of an effect it had on people (and Louis Farese) after having become a cult hit, rather than the other way around. The counterpoint dialogue just transubstantiated it.
It’s also…not the interfaces.
Sci F 0 of 4How believable are the interfaces?
The interfaces could not work the way they do without some serious apologetics and backworlding that would make it the most technologically prescient film in all of history. To a one, they are narrative, and mostly serve design discussions through the illustration of terrible patterns and gee-whiz retrofuturism.
Maybe the handwheel is the closest thing to being believable, and…you know what…it’s still not.
But—and this is important—the film does not care. It never did. It’s not trying to depict some internally consistent, believable diegesis. It is exuberant queer art, and trying to harness it in a framework of believability is foolish. It’s 无. It’s the reason I ordinarily wouldn’t have even tried to review this film before Curry’s passing.
Fi A 4 of 4How well do the interfaces inform the narrative of the story?
The vivification interfaces do this the best. We have no idea what either the sonic oscillator or the reactor power input does, but they help convey that things are intensifying. The handwheel sells the misdirection of Riff as a domestic servant.
The rest are little more than crayon-marked cardboard boxes: things that change the rules of the story by narrative fiat.
Yes, to pull the wheelchair through a wall the triple contact electromagnet would have melted the castle, but to fret about that is to miss the point entirely. So it is absolutely ridiculous and as such informs the narrative perfectly.
Interfaces F 0 of 4How well do the interfaces equip the characters to achieve their goals?
We’re not sure what either the sonic oscillator or reactor power input do, but we can infer some things, and they are not fit for the task.
The sonic transducer, medusa, and de-medusa are error-prone and ill-suited controls to their purpose.
The monitor, sonic transducer, medusa, and triple contact electro magnet are all clearly missing controls to do what it is they do on screen.
The handwheel does, in fact, allow Riff to lower the condiment chandelier, but it cannot, alas, make up for the rest.
Overall C- 4 of 12Matinée
No, the film is not about these interfaces. It’s something else. And that something else has made it into a worldwide classic.
I’m a little saddened to have it be categorized “matinée” alongside the likes of Barbarella and Logan’s Run, but then again, given a choice, that’s exactly what I think it would want to be.
R.I.P., Tim, and thanks to everyone who brought this funky magical…thing…into the world.
Full series, in order: The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073629/Currently streaming on: 
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