Reply to Help me understand the Rocky Horror Picture Show

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am super into camp and open minded, I swear, and had seen the movie itself several times. So I went to see it in the theater so I could experience the whole crowd phenomenon. I found it to be extremely dated and borderline offensive honestly. They force the “virgins” to do extremely uncomfortable sexual things in front of a jeering crowd - there were a couple of young women who looked like they were to cry. And then the whole time, people (mostly men) would yell things at the screen. Some of them were funny and all of them were well times but many of them were things that would have been funny 20 years ago and now we know better. I would have left if I had thought it was safe - we felt trapped. [/quote]

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![/quote]

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