magical transitions

some excerpts from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show": More than a Lip Service (citation below), posted here as part of our research for educational purposes . . .

"Much of this movie's humor comes from its parody of the Hollywood musical genre. The Rocky Horror floorshow scene is obviously a take-off on Busby Berkeley production numbers. However, the dancers in The Rocky Horror Picture Show make only a minimal effort to stay in step and are not above saying "shit" when they go particularly spastic. Rocky Horror's slap-dash vigor and spontaneity consciously affront the mechanical modes of dance traditionally seen in musical pictures. If song and dance did actually originate as aspects of religious ritual behavior used to differentiate the sacred from the profane moment, then Rocky Horror attempts to restore this original continuity of style and content. While in most musicals, elaborate style is used to gloss over the insignificant content of songs and dances to plots and themes, in this film the less polished numbers call attention to their artifice and to their ritual functions. Rocky Horror's songs and dances often have ceremonial functions that might be obscured if not presented in song and dance. . . .

In The Rites of Passage, Arnold Van Gennep describes the life of the individual as a series of transitions from one stage of psycho-social development to another, and from one socio-economic role to another. He notes that each of these transitions or passages is accompanied by ceremonial behavior "whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well defined."5 Later researchers expanded this concept to include the transition made by society as a whole, labelling ritual behavior that functions in this way as "rites of intensification."6 Even when there is violent conflict, social and personal evolution does not occur by total conquest and subjugation, but by stages Van Gennep labelled "separation," "transition," and "incorporation," through which compromises take place, compensations are made, wounds are healed, and equilibrium is restored.

There has been at least some interest in recent years in the nature and function of ritual symbolism in an essentially profane world - i.e., a world without overtly meaningful religious ceremony.7 As the anthropologist Solon Kimball has noted, "There is no evidence that a secularized urban world has lessened the need for ritualized expression of an individual's transition from one status to another."8 Rites of passage or intensification function to reduce the harmful effects of individual life crises and the evolutionary crises of whole cultures by ritually acting-out and dissipating hostilities and tensions, and then symbolically depicting a transition to a new pattern of behavior incorporating new elements acceptable to everyone involved. . . .

This "normal" vision is the only daylight scene in the film. [The story begins with a standard, almost comic-book conception of a Midwestern marriage, and with Brad's and Janet's betrothal in a churchyard parody of Grant Wood's classic picture, "American Gothic."] Van Gennep has noted that the sacred and profane coinhabit the same physical dimensions, and the difference between them is largely a matter of human perception. There- fore, ceremonies often occur at night, a natural, symbolic transition after the ritual death of (separation from) the old day and before the birth of (incorpora- tion into) the new. Curry, perhaps in reference to his double role, later sings "By light of day I'm not much of a man, but by night I'm one hell of a lover." There is a good deal of apparently gratuitous Christian symbolism in this scene, I believe because the film identifies "straight" sexual repressiveness with Christianity, and the "dead" sexual mores suggest a dead religion. Curry's emphasis on "hell" underscores his transsexual vitality. The lack of any kind of vitality in Christianity is parodied by Brad's proposal beginning in the graveyard and continuing into the church accompanied by a casket. . .

The second scene, Brad and Janet's rainy, nighttime car-ride down a deserted road, is a classic set-piece of horror films as well as a perfect example of the first stage of a rite of separation. Physically and symbolically, Brad and Janet are stuck at a "dead end"; they must progress to some new level of experience. The car-ride also places the film within a general cultural context we have been discussing; Janet is reading the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Nixon is protesting his innocence on the radio. Both Brad and Janet seem fairly insensitive to what is happening politically in their environment; Brad continues to ignore the unu- sual (and sacred) signs around him throughout the film, until, in the floor show scene near the end he sings, "It's beyond me. Help me, Mommy." Janet, a less hypocritical and more sensitive character, participates rather easily in the events at Frank's castle. (When she joins Frank in "I Can Make You a Man," even he is surprised). She is at least aware that the appearance of a castle on a thought-to-be-deserted midwestern US road is a bizarre thing. . . .

Their entrance onto the castle grounds is an appropriately marked transition from the profane world of daily life to the sacred world of ritual. The transitional ground of the forest, the warning sign on the gate, the Transylvanian flag, and the massive ornamental door are all normal ceremonial aspects of rites of separation and transition, emphasized in the film by Janet's singing "Over at the Frankenstein Place." Their entrance into the castle is further marked by what Van Gennep calls "purifications," rituals that mark the individual's separation from the profane world and his old life and his preparation to begin the transition. These would include at least the singing and dancing of "The Time Warp" and the removal of Brad's and Janet's clothing. Frank notes that their nakedness makes them "vulnerable," and this is precisely the act's ritual signifi- cance. (Their sharing a libation with the Transylvanians would have been a further such ritual, but Riff-Raff breaks the bottle, an additional sign of his hostility.) Frank emphasizes the sacred aspect of Brad's and Janet's new condi- tion when he notes their shivering, presumably from the rain, and says he will "remove the [profane I cause, but not the symptoms." He knows that it is his own sexuality and the highly unusual activities at the castle to which Brad and Janet are reacting. . . .

With Brad's and Janet's changes of costume, the transitional phase of the rite of passage begins. Frank's singing of "(In Just Seven Days) I Can Make You a Man" is intentionally ironic in terms of his creation of Rocky, and adds reso- nance as well to Brad's initiation. . . .

Eddie's entrance on his motorcycle from Frank's deep-freeze is a scene of remarkable vitality and energy, but Frank's pick-ax murder of Eddie marks a turning point in the film. . . .

. . . . Frank completes the seduction of both Brad and Janet, beginning their initiation in his new sexual tradition, but later he makes a horrible mockery of the eucharistic meal that is often the climax of the rite of incorporation - the participants discover they are literally eating Eddie, the bond between the races. The meal is aborted, and the film races toward its climax.

The appearance of Dr Scott, who has been mentioned throughout the film as Brad's and Janet's teacher, adds a further dimension to this analysis. Scott is paralyzed from the waist down, a classic image of impotence and incompleteness. He is, of course, Frank's mortal enemy, in every sense, for he believes that Frank has come to subvert human morality, i.e. puritanical sexual traditions. Frank's sneering "Or should I say, Dr Von Scott," also seems designed to identify Scott with the death-oriented tradition of Nazi science; it's no surprise when Dr Scott justifies Frank's murder with the phrase "Society must protect itself." . . .

. . . . When the characters are "reincarnated," they find themselves dressed for Frank's floorshow in his uniform: high-heels, black fishnet stockings, and black corsets. Even after the sonic transducer has been shut off and the medusa has been reversed, it is clear that Brad, Janet, and even Dr Scott have been irreversably charged to some degree with Frank's sexuality. Midway through the scene, Dr Scott's paralyzed legs (dressed in black stockings and heels) suddenly come alive and kick out from beneath his wheel-chair blanket. (A "transducer" is literally a device that transmits energy from one system to another.) Van Gennep notes that initiation rites frequently climax with the participants being ritually killed and resurrected, and the floor show scene certainly seems to fill these requirements of separation and incorporation . . . .

. . . as Victor Turner has pointed out, "Human social groups tend to find their openness to the future in the variety of their metaphors for what may be the good life and in the contest of their paradigms."9 The Rocky HorrorPicture Show provides a paradigm for bisexuality that smacks of psycho- logical regression - magical thinking and polymorphous perversity are considered part of very early (pre-teen) developmental stages by most psychologists. The S-F parody might also be considered juvenile by unsympathetic observers. On the other hand, this "regression" is most likely an attempt to recapture lost - not to mention repressed - elements of the personality, elements which in a healthy personality are not destroyed or replaced, but supplemented by further elements such as "logical thinking." . . . "

"The Rocky Horror Picture Show": More than a Lip Service (Le "Rocky Horror Picture Show,"
du bout des lèvres)
Author(s): Mark Siegel
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3, Science Fiction and the Non-Print Media (Nov.,
1980), pp. 305-312
Published by: SF-TH Inc
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4239358
Accessed: 14/05/2009 15:04

Maggie remarks:

In this article Rocky Horror picture show is described as a mutant form of organized religion. It begins by going through the role of the audience as participants rather than the viewers and notes that the participation from the audience details their acceptance of the films values rather than rejection or mockery. The article also goes into great detail about the transitional stages that both Brad and Janet go through. From separation from the every day norms of their lives to incorporation into this new world and a new way of living that highlights their sexual right of passage outlined by the events in the film.
This aspect of the article peaked my interest as I see a connection with this idea of transitional stages in some of the characters of Little Night Music; Anne is going through a transitional stage with her inner struggle about having sex with her husband who is much older than she is. As well I believe that each character that visits Mrs. Armfeldt's house goes through a separation from the world they existed in at the beginning of the play and then in turn each character gets reincorporated into a different kind of world in Mrs. Armfeldt's house, very similar to the transition that Brad and Janet must go through when they arrive at the castle in Rocky Horror Picture Show. The characters that I believe to through this transition are Henrik, Anne, Petra, Fredrik, Carl-Mangus, Malla and Charlotte. Desire, Fredrika, and the others that inhabit Mrs. Armfeldt's home, all seem to be playing the same game throughout the play; much like Frank-N-Furter and his crew in the castle. The whole concept of the transition from separation to reincorporation interests me and I think that it lingers throughout Little Night Music. I believe this concept could potentially be investigated more.

David suggests:

themes that have resonance for our show: the disruption of the dance back into the normal, rites of intensification, transformation/transfiguration, seduction, the power of the night canopy, the gate, arriving by motorized means, the forest, the eucharistic meal, physical paralysis (leading into rejuvenation), regression leading to recapture of the lost elements of humanity . . .