Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Rocky Horror Picture Show
1975 · Jim Sharman · The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Sightlines
The slab tilts up. Gauze, a shape under it, and behind everything Kenneth Strickfaden's electrical rig — the actual Tesla coils and Van de Graaff towers that crackled in James Whale's laboratory in 1931. You know this shot. You knew it before you ever saw this film. You know the beat that follows: the thing sits up, and the room screams.
The room does not scream. The room applauds. And the man who built it walks over in a corset and looks at his creation the way you look at someone across a bar.
Hold onto that reversal. It is the film's whole method, and it has a precise name.
Deleuze, sorting out the ways images make meaning, keeps a small pair of terms worth stealing. A mark is an object that means something only because of the chain it usually sits in. Slab plus coils plus gauze equals dread. Genres are banks of marks; that is most of what a genre is. A demark is one coming loose. The object turns up outside its habit, your reflexes misfire, and now you have to think instead of react.
Rocky Horror is unusual in that it stocks the bank itself, out loud, before spending it. The opening song is an inventory: Michael Rennie, Claude Rains, Fay Wray, Anne Francis in Forbidden Planet, the RKO tower winked at in the melody. Four minutes of pure mark. O'Brien tunes your reflexes on purpose so the next ninety can misfire them one at a time. The visitation from another world arrives, as in The Day the Earth Stood Still, except this visitor wants a party. The decadent host in his isolated domain, straight out of Forbidden Planet, turns out to be the most self-possessed person in the building. The monster gets made, and then gets adored.
That last one is not O'Brien's invention, and he'd tell you so. It's Whale's. Bride of Frankenstein already fetishized the creature as the object of its maker's longing, arch and queer and half a step from saying it. The lineage debt is exact: O'Brien takes Whale's subtext and stops whispering.
Which brings up a harder concept, and a useful one. Deleuze has a category he calls the impulse-image, where an ordinary setting turns out to be a thin crust over what he names an originary world: a place of raw appetite and possession, where people are driven rather than deciding. The mansion qualifies. It is a borrowed old-dark-house, and Sharman shot it at Bray Studios, Hammer's actual home, so the parody is haunting a genuinely haunted set. Under the wallpaper: drives. Rocky is a fetish in the strict sense, a part-object charged with compulsion, built to a specification of desire rather than met and loved. "A perfect, muscular man." Ordered like a suit.
But naturalism usually slopes downward into exhaustion, and this film never feels like that, because Sharman keeps overruling it with spectacle. Almost nothing in Rocky Horror is done. It is performed. Frank does not seduce anyone through a scheme; he does a number at them. Creating life is a reveal with a cape. The climax is a floor show, literally, on a stage, in front of chairs. Deleuze took from Eisenstein the idea of the attraction-image: a scene built as staged effects aimed straight at the audience rather than as links in a causal chain. He puts it at a hinge in his system, the point where action stops being action and becomes figure. Rocky Horror lives on that hinge permanently. It's why plot summary is useless here, and why nobody walks out of it talking about what happened.
It's also why the colour carries so much. Lurid red, laboratory silver. Deleuze's affective colour doesn't describe a space, it absorbs one. The red isn't the colour of a room. It's the temperature of the film.
Now Tim Curry, standing in a corset, imperious, entirely unbothered. Deleuze takes the gest from Brecht: the posture that exposes a social arrangement instead of arguing about it. Curry never plays the costume as a joke about the costume. He plays it as sovereignty. The unbothered part is the gest. Nothing is being pleaded for, because a body that has already stopped asking has answered the question. Generations of queer viewers didn't take this film as entertainment. They took it as permission, and permission is not something an argument can hand you. A posture can.
Then the thing that makes it more than a superb camp artifact.
The film flopped in 1975. A year later it found midnight in Greenwich Village, and audiences began talking back, dressing up, throwing rice. Shadow casts formed, performing beneath the screen in costume. It has run continuously since: the longest theatrical run in film history. It invented, more or less, participatory cinema, and every sing-along and quote-along screening in the fifty years after is downstream of it.
Deleuze, writing on modern political cinema, keeps returning to a phrase: the people are missing. His point isn't that audiences are absent. It's that a filmmaker can no longer address a people that already exists as a settled thing. What's left is fabulation — catching people in the act of legending themselves, making a people instead of depicting one. He had Perrault and Third Cinema in mind, documentary subjects inventing themselves on camera. He was not thinking about rice in the aisles of a New York theatre. He should have been. This is the cleanest case in commercial cinema of a film that didn't find an audience but manufactured one, and the audience it made was precisely the one it needed and the one 1975 had no room for. Every weekend since, that crowd performs itself into existence in front of the screen, moving as a single body: what Deleuze calls a dividual, a collective registering as one affective unit rather than a room of separate people.
That is the significance, and it's structural, not sentimental. Nearly every film is finished at the mix. This one is finished on the floor of the theatre, differently every week, by people who paid for the privilege of completing it. Sharman and O'Brien had no idea they were building that. They built a West End show inside a Hammer house and let the pastiche worship before it camped, which is the order that matters. Most parody stands above its source. This one adores Fay Wray first.
So the question it leaves open is a real one, and half a century hasn't closed it: who authored the version you saw? Watch it again and time the demark. Watch for the second the room is supposed to scream and applauds instead. That beat is where the film hands itself over.
Concepts in play
- mark — 'Science Fiction/Double Feature' front-loads the film with a curated inventory of Universal/RKO iconography (Michael Rennie, Claude Rains, Fay Wray, Anne Francis in Forbidden Planet, the RKO logo winked at in song), installing the customary chains the film will then spend.
- demark — The creation tableau restages Whale's 1931 sequence exactly — elevated slab, gauze-wrapped body, Strickfaden's Tesla/Van de Graaff rig — and then breaks the habit: the made creature is 'a perfect, muscular man' greeted with desire and applause rather than dread.
- attraction-image — Nothing is acted out causally; everything is staged as a number. Frank unveils Rocky as a cabaret reveal, and the film's culmination is an actual floor show — staging that figures rather than acts, in Eisenstein's 'montage of attractions' sense.
- the-gest — Tim Curry's Frank-N-Furter — 'corseted, imperious, and wholly unbothered' — makes the posture itself the argument, exposing gender as a theatrical/social arrangement; for queer viewers the film functioned as permission rather than entertainment.
- originary-world — The mansion is a borrowed old-dark-house shot at Bray Studios, Hammer horror's actual home, so the pastiche haunts a real haunted set — a derived milieu whose surface gives way to a world of appetite, possession and made bodies.
- fetish — Rocky is a part-object built to a specification of desire — the Bride of Frankenstein template of 'fetishizing the monster as an object of the maker's desire,' pushed from subtext into text.
- affective colour — Sharman shoots in lurid reds and laboratory silvers; the colour absorbs the scene and its feeling rather than describing a location.
- people-are-missing — A 1975 flop that had no constituted audience; it found one only at Greenwich Village midnights a year later, summoning into being the public the film needed and its moment had no room for.
- story-telling / legending — Shadow casts performing beneath the screen in costume, audiences talking back and throwing rice, 'completing a film that was never quite finished without them' — subjects caught weekly in the act of legending themselves.
- dividual — The Transylvanians' elaborate ensemble dance onscreen, mirrored in the auditorium by a shadow-cast crowd moving and speaking as one affective body rather than as separate spectators.