For fifty years, The Rocky Horror Picture Show has endured as a midnight ritual. The first thing any fan or critic wants to talk about is the cult following and audience participation elements: the costumes, callbacks, inside jokes, the flying props. And that’s all good fun. But the carnivalesque cult following around the film often impedes the more interesting critical questions we can ask. After all, what is the text of Rocky Horror actually about? And how does that relate to its cult elements or the cultural situation we live in today?
My new video essay argues that underneath the fishnets and the floor show, Rocky Horror is a timeless story about sexual politics; specifically, about the cycle of radicalism and reaction that drives so much cultural history.
Rocky Horror is about liberation. But it’s also about the price of that “absolute pleasure: the backlash, the violence, the collapse. It’s like a microcosm of the sociopolitical pattern we keep living through, even as we navigate the present transition from the high woke era to the so-called vibe shift.
