Help me understand the Rocky Horror Picture Show
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Anonymous
Agree. Same with Monty Python. Nowhere near as good as people claim. |
Anonymous
Hey now 😂 I’m an earlier poster and Monty Python diehard. But that aside, the movie itself is glorious if you like that sort of thing. The experience of seeing it in the theater was shockingly horrendous. |
Anonymous
| I went to see it a few times back in the 80s. I can't believe people are still doing this! |
Anonymous
| Its not understood. |
Anonymous
Oh it's all incredibly offensive! Rocky being created to be a s** slave - but he's also basically a newborn baby. Eating Meatloaf. I mean there's nothing about this movie that isn't transgressive and wrong. I've probably been to 30 screenings of RH in my life - most recently at a theater where they had performers acting it out as the movie was playing - and I've never seen anyone "forced" to do anything for hte crowd, though. I don't even know how you'd force someone to do anything. It's just fun, though. As bad a movie as it is, as offensive as parts of it are, the experience of it is fun. If you don't find it fun, I'm not sure you can be talked into it. |
Anonymous
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A PP. RHPS probably falls into the category of "more fun if you are drunk/high" along with Pink Floyd's "The Wall" and lots of 1970's David Bowie entertainment product. Did not find Young Frankenstein funny either.
I've never seen all of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" but I saw about 20 minutes of it when I was a kid, and I still find the concept of ladies operating a "grail beacon" over their castle to be incredibly funny. It was weird being an Xer and watching afterschool AIDS specials, primetime dramas about nuclear war, and Nancy Reagan "Just Say No" (to drugs) content while simultaneously being recommended all the Boomer cultural detritus from the unlimited sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll era. |
Anonymous
How old are you? |
Anonymous
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Where I lived, they had a Saturday midnight showing for years. I went with some college friends once (early 90s).
Although there were a lot of audience members dressed up, the core “performers” were down front, and reenacted the film while it was playing on the screen. Apparently these core performers had a monopoly on these roles and had done it for years. Talked to a few fellow audience members and they were so sore about it, because they never got a chance to be down front. That stuck with me more than the actual movie all these years, that there was this Rocky Horror hierarchy of performers that had a stranglehold on the juicy roles, and some of the regular audience just seethed about it. |
Anonymous
| It’s the epitome of IYKYK. Can’t really explain it. I haven’t gone in years, and the movie as a stand-alone movie is dreadful (as is Shock Treatment, the sequel). At this point it’s a shared nostalgic cultural experience, and I’m not sure that someone just showing up would get it. |
Anonymous
The “virgins” is for people new to the movie, not sexual virgins. I don’t really remember what they did at the show in my town but I don’t think it was awful or humiliating. There may have been a chant. I think the whole experience was very dependent on the particular crowd—I can see it gojng bad if there were some particular a-holes driving the dynamic. I posted above that I saw it in two different college towns—it was great in one and awful in the other. I’m sure that some of the jokes/comments from the 80s would be meaningless today … my impression of the whole thing is that the audience commentary evolved to fit the moment, but that there was some tension there with maintaining the “tradition” and continuity across locations. That’s probably true with any cultural institution, and I think there was an effort to sort of main stream it more some years ago that may have effectively killed the organic component to it. It was, I think, unique in being a movie that had been essentially rewritten by the audience through an evolving crowd-sourcing. Sort of a throw back to the way entertainment was prior to widespread literacy, where crowds would change and adapt a play as it moved through the geography and time. Someone had probably written a PhD thesis on this! |
Anonymous
| You don’t have to “understand” art that other people enjoy, and we don’t have to “help you understand” anything, sweetie. |
Anonymous
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When I attended RHPS as a "virgin" 35+ years ago they brought us to the front of the theater and "auctioned" us off somehow (crowd cheers?) to go sit with people other than who we came with. No biggie. If you didn't want to do it, you didn't have to identify yourself as such.
The front performers at the show I went to (probably about 4-5 times as a college freshman) were drama students from a neighboring college. |
Anonymous
I think that's it. Some of us think all that is stupid and not fun. Others don't and return to do it over and over again. That's really the only thing OP needs to understand. |
Anonymous
Not OP, but can you "understand" someone being curious? |
Anonymous
Your condescension is over the top for a movie that many would argue is not art. And is pretty terrible and in some ways very offensive. |