When You're in Drag, the Whole World's Southern Baptist

Now that criticism and advertising are becoming harder and harder to separate in American film culture—each practice striving to mask or rationalize the gradual deterioration of a social contract between an audience and an industry, an effacement which has left a gaping, blinding absence that only hyperbole and star-fucking can fill—the notion of any genuinely spontaneous movie cult becomes automatically suspect. It implies something quite counter to the mega-cinema of Cimino, Coppola and Spielberg—a cinema that can confidently write its own reviews (and reviewers) if it wants to, working with the foreknowledge of a guaranteed media-saturation coverage that will automatically recruit and program most of its audience, and which dictates a central part of its meaning in advance . (An imposed consensus is perhaps needed now in order to enlist passive audiences into ambitious myths.)

For a long time in the U.S. (as elsewhere), certain specialized audience interests that get shoved off the streets by the box-office bullies have been taking refuge in midnight screenings, most of them traditionally held on weekends. . . . It might be possible to argue that one of these interests—the midnight audience for The Rocky Horror Picture Show —rather than allow itself to be used as an empty vessel to be filled with a filmmaker's grand mythic meanings, has been learning how to use a film chiefly as a means of communicating with itself.

 . . . In certain respects, this ritual can be seen as a specifically Barthesian act of criticism and commentary on a Text, which is "that space where no language has a hold over any other, where languages circulate (keeping the circular sense of the term)" (Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, translated by Stephen Heath, Hill & Wang, 1978). This is surely not too grand a description of the circulation of meanings that passes between such antinomies as male and female, England and America, nostalgia and science fiction, sex and violence, heterosexual and homosexual, involvement and distance, worship and contempt, at every Rocky

Horror cult performance, in the audience's own set of participatory and self-defining, "make believe" responses—responses which contextualize the film in the most material way possible, through their own voices, bodies and chosen props.

 . . . Their Text, moreover, is perpetually changing. It is a complex of layers at any given performance, consisting of both a traditional catechism and a series of fresher contributions, each of which earns a different reputation and lifespan existentially, like a jazz solo, at the moment of delivery (and "democratically," in competition with all the others) . . . 

It seems important to make these distinctions at a time when so little community feeling is evident or even possible at cinemas in the U.S., given the steady rise in cable television and video equipment, and new cinemas built in privately owned shopping centers on the outskirts of towns (along with the rapid decline and disappearance of cinemas in public squares, in the centers of towns). In this respect, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Rocky Horror Picture Show cult is the extent to which it evokes and weirdly resurrects, as if in a haunted house, a form of community cinema, of cinema as community, that once flourished in the U.S., when Hollywood was still in its heyday . . . ^[*]