Weinstock, Jeffrey. The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Wilson, D. Harlan

Weinstock, Jeffrey. The Rocky Horror Picture Show. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. 131 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-1-905674-50-3. $15.00.

Jeffrey Weinstock's study of The Rocky Horror Picture Show appears alongside studies of Donnie Darko and This Is Spinal Tap as a debut for UK publisher Wallflower Press's Cultographies series, described by the press as a "new series of books on the weird and wonderful world of cult cinema." Combining elements of biography, history, film and cultural analysis, each installment gives readers a comprehensive introduction to and multilayered reading of a cult film; in addition, authors explore how the films informed their personal lives and helped to construct their identities.

Cult cinema exhibits clearly identifiable markers, usually in combination. Among these markers are bad acting, bad special effects, genre splicing, excessive gore, meandering or schizophrenic plotlines, irreal (inter)actions, slapstick humor, camp, intertextuality, production mythoi--generally speaking, a flagrant divergence from Hollywood paradigms. In light of their transgressiveness, cult films consistently garner large, avid, ritualistic viewerships; at the same time, they have a long history of being ignored by scholarly critics, who question their aesthetic and theoretical merit. The Cultographies series aspire to treat this seemingly disposable form of cinema seriously, illuminating how cult films function as social, political, historical, ideological, and perceptual critiques of the postmodern world. This is certainly the case in Weinstock's exceptionally cogent and provocative treatment, which examines what many have referred to as "the very definition of the term 'cult picture'" (32). Past criticism of Rocky Horror has been relatively limited in scope and centered on the film's cult following. Weinstock provides the most valuable, wide-ranging study of the film to date.

The book contains four chapters that each approach Rocky Horror from a particular standpoint. Chapter 1, "The Many Histories of Rocky Horror," contextualizes the film and discusses the various sociocultural factors that led to its production and political impetus. Chapter 2, "The Church of Nothing's Sacred: Glorious Incoherence and the Rocky Cult," focuses on the relationship between the film and its notorious viewership; by engaging with the diegesis of Rocky Horror (i.e. by dialogically bantering with its characters), audiences have deepened its implications and created new modes of spectatorship. In chapter 3, "Out of the Closet and into the Pool: Rocky Horror's Sexual Politics," Weinstock considers the role of sexuality and gender, namely how the film "enacted a playful assault upon conventional Western sexual ideologies" (52). The final chapter, "'Brico-Logics,' Serious Camp and Rocky Horror's Queering of Cinematic History," assesses the film's metanarrational texture and its (mal)formation as a multigeneric Frankensteinian monster. A pastiche of science fiction, fantasy, horror, comedy, and the musical, it resists categorization and is distinguished by an intertexual self-awareness.

Weinstock explains the evolution of how Rocky Horror has been perceived and symptomatized in a short conclusion. He reserves the introduction for a discussion of his personal involvement, which is standard procedure for all Cultographies volumes. According to the editors of the series: "This personal account, we think, will serve as an important introductory section because of the fact that cult films have a reputation for the strong attachments that they often give rise to" (Mathijs). By no means is the introduction gratuitously or needlessly biographical. Weinstock provides some background information on himself, but mainly he charts the deferral of his "experience" with Rocky Horror, which he encountered on multiple occasions (and in multiple contexts) throughout his youth, and which dependably bemused and frustrated him. It continues to do so. "[E]ach time I see the film," he admits, "it becomes increasingly sedimented and overcoded with associations that alter its meaning for me" (9). A mystique built up around the film and Weinstock couldn't decipher it. His experience is essentially Lacanian in that the film emphatically facilitates the notion that desire is the desire for desire. Like Lacan's Real, Rocky Horror tempts subjects with the promise of mediation or connection, then denies it to them. Weinstock uses a slice of his own life to foreground this dynamic.

"My Rocky Horror [...] is not your Rocky Horror. And my Rocky Horror today is not the same Rocky Horror even for me when I started this study and certainly is not the same Rocky Horror that I first saw in its entirety at midnight in a downtown Philadelphia movie theatre on a frosty evening in 1988 with a rowdy group of college friends" (108). The theme of subjectivity thus pervades Weinstock's cultography in terms of viewership and authorship as well as readership--i.e. different aspects of the cultography will resonate with different readers. As a postmodern scholar and meta-fiction writer, I especially enjoyed the portions that dealt with audience re(inter)action and Rocky Horror's metaaesthetics. Prior to writing this review, it had been nearly twenty years since I last watched Rocky Horror; I only remember being thrown out of the theater with my friends for running to the screen to do the Time Warp atop the worn wooden backs of the theater's seats. Watching the film now, on DVD, without audience participation, as an adult (sometimes), is an altogether new (un)experience, as if the film has changed. And it has changed--it continues to change, just as its viewers do. Weinstock's discussion of the interpretive and spectatorial fluidity of Rocky Horror is perhaps the book's strongest point. It foregrounds his culminating discussion of "brico-logics," a term that denotes how the film "goes beyond being a 'generic pastiche' [...] of cinematic history. Through its excessive theatricality and self-conscious gender-bending, it functions as a sort of meta-movie that parodies the film traditions from which it borrows, revealing them to be not only rigidly formulaic but campy avant la lettre" (91). In other words, Rocky Horror conflates the history of the prescription/production of gender with that of cinema and thereby critiques the rigidity of the patriarchal socioeconomic ethics that have determined them.

In this respect, Rocky Horror operates in the same vein as much postmodern science fiction according to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.: "SF [...] is not a genre of literary entertainment only, but a mode of awareness, a complex hesitation about the relationship between imaginary conceptions and historical reality unfolding into the future" (388). At the heart of Weinstock's analysis is a concern with the way in which the film cognitively maps a particular historical space in order to "enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole" (Jameson 51). Rocky Horror as a "'congealed history,' the overcoded and overdetermined materialisation of multiple lines of force and historical trajectories" (13) also brings to mind the anti-Oedipal theories of Deleuze and Guattari (e.g. the film is a rhizomatic schiz-flow, a desiring-machine inscribed by the socius, a Speed Racer on the skin of the Body without Organs). Weinstock does not explicitly employ postmodern theory to develop his arguments (although it is playfully suggested by the title of his introduction, "A Missed Encounter with the Reel"). Nevertheless he renders a portrait of Rocky Horror that is distinctly postmodern and theoretically charged.

Since its release in 1975, Rocky Horror's popularity has ebbed and flowed. Nowadays it is shown mainly in college towns and smaller, artier vicinities, although there are annual screenings (often around Halloween) that reliably draw large crowds. Seeing the film in the '70s was an act of rebellion. Now it is a matter of course, although Weinstock explains that it serves as a rite of passage for younger viewers, and older viewers return to the film for nostalgic purposes. Whatever the case, he believes Rocky Horror, which has achieved canonical status within and outside of the cult universe, will gain momentum in the future, if only because the "communal nature of fan participation [...] cannot be duplicated on home viewing formats" (114). With this claim, Weinstock may have subjected himself to the very nostalgia-induced wishful thinking that has kept oldsters coming back for more; home theater systems, after all, are increasingly becoming the norm. Then again, by the time commercial cinemas disappear, we should be able to science fictionally conjure our own holographic audience with which to dance the Time Warp and talk dirty to the screen in meaningful ways.

Works Cited

Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. "The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway." Science Fiction Studies 18.3 (November 1991): 387-404.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP 1991.

Mathijs, Ernest, and Jamie Sexton, eds. Cultographies.com. 1 April 2008. <http://www.cultographies.com>