🥀🍃Seasons Don’t Fear the Reaper🌾🍂
Time, it seems, is a flat circle wrapped in a feather boa. Fifty years after The Rocky Horror Picture Show first scandalized audiences with its sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania, the midnight movie phenomenon continues to confound parents whose twenty-something children drag them to theaters for audience participation rituals that feel less like cinema and more like ceremonial possession.
My son insists I couldn't possibly have "gotten it" when I saw Rocky Horror in the '90s. He's probably right, though not for the reasons he thinks. Back then, amid the smoke and fury of the LA riots, Rocky Horror felt like pure visual intoxication—a fever dream of Victorian gothic meets glam rock excess. The gender politics? They seemed as quaint as the castle's laboratory equipment, artifacts from a more innocent time when rebellion could be performed in sequins and stilettos.
But here's where the kid wins our imaginary argument: what felt like aesthetic rebellion in the Clinton era now reads as prophetic. Frank-N-Furter's theatrical defiance of sexual and gender norms wasn't just camp—it was a warning shot across the bow of binary thinking. My D&D-playing, soccer-watching, tea-totaling son sees this clearly, unburdened by the need to categorize the film as either "art" or "activism."
The movie's enduring power lies not in its transgressive content but in its commitment to theatrical excess as a form of truth-telling. When Riff Raff executes Columbia with cold efficiency, the violence cuts through the glitter like a blade through silk. It's a moment that reveals how quickly the carnivalesque can turn genuinely dangerous—a lesson about the proximity of performance and power that feels particularly relevant when certain political figures discover that being outrageous doesn't actually shield you from consequence.
This is where Rocky Horror's genius becomes apparent: it never promised that being outrageous would protect anyone from violence. Instead, it demonstrated that conformity offers no such protection either. The Transylvanians dance themselves to death; the "normal" couple, Brad and Janet, survive but emerge fundamentally altered. The moral isn't that transgression is safe—it's that safety was always an illusion.
The film's treatment of free speech operates on similar logic. Rocky Horror doesn't argue for consequence-free expression; it shows us a world where every utterance has the potential to reshape reality. When Dr. Scott reveals himself, when Frank confesses his appetites, when the Criminologist narrates the tale—each act of speech transforms the landscape of possibility.
My son's generation understands this intuitively. They've grown up in an era where words carry weight, where platforms collapse and rebuild overnight, where the line between performance and politics has dissolved entirely. They don't need Rocky Horror to be a perfect allegory—they need it to be a useful one.
At fifty, the film remains stubbornly, gloriously surreal—a midnight mass for the beautifully damned, a reminder that the most dangerous thing about free speech isn't what it permits, but what it demands: that we become responsible for the worlds our words create.
