The Talkies/Popular Cults

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...The most important words of the movie are delivered by our cute couple, both clad in garb similar to Frank N. Furter's, who sing "Don't dream it, be i t , " over and over again, as the audience joins in and the t h e a t e r rocks...

...When Brad and Janet discover Frank N. F u r t e r in t h e i r respective beds, each protests at first Souther Partisan Q u a r t e r l y R,.,v ] ~ w SOUTHERNERS, COME HOME...

...Yet a crucial option always remained open: What would happen if socialists came to despise liberalism...

...Yet in t h i s case t h e i r concerns are amply justified...

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...It is lastly a celebration of degradation...

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...So do Sovietpropagandists today...

...Asshole[" the audience cries...

...In the last case we have as our best example a movie called The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a movie shown only on Fridays and Saturdays-at midnight, but which numbers tens of thousands among its devotees all across the country...

...His Frankenstein monster is a blond, tanned, and enmuscled California-type named Rocky, whose sole purpose in his new life is to provide the Doctor with bedtime company...

...Rocky Horror proselytizers are not unlike marijuana lovers whose sole aim in life, it seems, is to get everyone s t o n e d . ) The rudiments of the cult are these: The Rocky Horror devotees costume up in the garb of the c h a r a c t e r s ; they reply in unison at various points in the movie to what the characters are saying on screen by John Podhoretz ("I knew I should have checked the spare tire," Brad says...

...They are more radically " i n " when they become part of the cult in a lc'ss " s o p h i s t i c a t e d " city like Chicago, where a smaller but equally virulent cult does indeed exist...

...g e n i t a l i a are removed from t h e i r bodies and women are raped at 30and 45-second intervals...

...They revel in their weirdness, are orgiastic in their ugliness, delight in their unpleasantness...

...Only a few years ago it was widely believed that, by taking up the idea of scarcity, the Left was simply being opportunistic, hoping to find in scarcity the basis for a new anti-establishment fervor (the causes of the sixties having passed) or, at the very least, an expeditious way of furthering the government's regulatory powers...

...The reasons given were "neighborhood comp l a i n t s . " But given the neighbnrhood's l a y o u t , t h e only neighbors who might have complained were in Little Italy, the small community at tile south of Greenwith Village which is said to be a center of Mafia activity...

...Ideal for Nixon supporters and Nixon haters alike...

...But there they are, standing on the s t r e e t s in front of the t h e a t e r s , dressed like the characters, wearing fangs, introducing themselves to one another, "making new friends...

...As socialism's official position, the "New World" (with its denial of scarcity) has usually won out, because it melded more easily with the powerful, progressive spirit of western liberalism...

...they briqg paraphernalia to the theater to help them react further to the action (when the wedding is over, the audience throws rice at the screen...

...The Path6 case is remarkable for another reason: It comes right out of the pages of The Spike, the bestselling novel by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss...

...At its showings people can be heard proudly declaring that this is, in fact, the hundred and fiftieth time they have come t o see it, and during the movie the audience as a whole participates in what is happening on the screen in ways which do not change from week to week, and which are, I am told, roughly similar in every t h e a t e r across the country...

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...The competition between these two casts of mind--one denying scarcity and the other affirming it--parallels another old debate on the Left, over whether socialism's primary goal should be the "New World" or the "New Man...

...To those who have seen the movie one hundred times, the movie itself can no longer hold any fascination...

...Indeed, a g r e a t p a r t of the Rocky Horror audience seems to b e composed of adolescents who have come in order to play with grown-ups, a shady caste of grown-ups in fact, whose decadence makes them all the more appealing...

...However, the revolutionary fervor seems to have died slightly...

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...NOTHING FOR EVERYONE There is no question that the concept of "scarcity" is now exerting a profound and unprecedented influence on the American Left, the best evidence being the Left's energetic association with almost any political issue involving an alleged "scarcity" of resources...

...If it were not, what else could the Left use to justify its need for esoteric forms of political authority...

...Why will no one write of these things in the United States...

...Rocky Horror's impropriety is, instead, of a truly evil nature...

...It consumes too much, grows too big, runs too fast, makes us travel too far, involves too much complexity, and gives us too much power...

...Marx followed suit...

...Second, when they become social phenomena, winning such fantastic popularity that entire subsidiary industries are built up around them, as was the case with Star Wars...

...They want to belong, in part, because Rocky Horror offers elements of religion, hedonism, and outright immorality With a tinge of revolution to it...

...It is now clear, however, that, whatever their original intentions, many on the Left have come to embrace the concept of"scarcity" in a more fundamental sense, have *Simon & Schus,er, $11.95...

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...Paris Green on White...

...El Topo, a Zen Western in which men's John Podhoretz is a member of the editorial staff of The American Spectator...

...Unofficially, however, the premise of enduring natural scarcity has always been a necessary cornerstone in the Left's social theory and practice...

...I do not wish to suggest that these people ' I t is interesting to note that the film had to be moved from the Greenwich ~Zillage theater, theWavcrly, where it had its first midnight showing, i n l a t e 1978...

...One would have to amend his words today merely in light of the existence of The Rocky Horror Picture Show: "We are living now in an age of moral disease...

...At one point one of the characters insists that it is dark outside...

...It is, in short, not just a movie but a cult movie, not merely to be seen but to be experienced, and experienced religiously...

...Although it is not as immediately Shocking as these movies, Rocky Horror has been the great success of the midnight-movie industry in part because it manages to mix their elements, while adding a campy sense of humor which begs for the kind of active audience participation the film does, in fact, receive...

...We associated socialism with cybernetics, with Futurist painting, with endless rows of tractors and tanks, with vast bureaucracies figuring out GNP statistics to the tenth decimal place, with the hissing and thumping steam pistons of the battleship Kropatkin...

...The real pleasure comes only in the performance of the ritual which can, without too much facetiousness, be described as a kind of Midnight Mass...

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...the movie no longer commands the audience it did in its heyday a year or two ago...

...Is any one home...

...In fact, it is the movie's turpitude that c o n t r i b u t e s to the impression that the audience is enjoying someTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1980 27 thing more: the giggly p l e a s u r e of participating in a "naughty" thing, a pleasure which plays a crucial part in the misbehavior of adolescents...

...Frank N. Furter, whose lips, we discover, were the ones of the...

...First, when they become "films," functioning under the strict philosophical principles of both director and audience, as was the case with Days of Heaven...

...Should we not desist and accept some sort of socialized austerity regime, the penalty will be far worse than a proletarian revolution: Nature herself will strike back with tempests, famines, poisons, and conflagration--in short, with the Four Horsemen...

...And outrageousness itself is not so easy to achieve anymore, considering the extent to which what was deemed outrageous thirty years ago has today become part of our everyday lives...

...Nell Howe is a program officer with the Smith Richardson Foundation in New York...

...Our real and perceived declining economic performance during the seventies, of course, made clear what the consequences would be: submitting, perhaps forever, to material dirth...

...A real visceral charge can come only when all the rules are violated...

...Frank N. Furter, " a transvestite from transsexual Transylvania," and his entourage of likeminded individuals, who have gathered to celebrate the Doctor's success at creating life in his laboratory...

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...The key idea here originally found its most eloquent expression in Rousseau, and has been maintained by romantics and humanists (often outside the Left) ever since...

...The subsidiary characters are all deformed in some way - - a r e hunchbacks, dwarfs, etc., o f uncertain sex--and are, to their very core, "weird...

...Med.ium...

...Particular scarcities of this or that kind may persist for a while, they say, but our final challenge will be to cope with affluence...

...For many of us, this ideological shift on the Left is baffling...

...Those to whom the movie does not speak d i r e c t l y - - t h o s e who are not transv e s t i t e s , homosexuals, or violent h e d o n i s t s - - a r e the c u l t ' s " f e l l o w uavelers," so to speak, and derive t h e i r p l e a s u r e - f r o m being a-t the wmguard of yet another Greenwich Village" "rewllutionary" movement...

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...come to believe that it describes an essential and timeless relationship between man and Nature...

...It would be astonishing if there were none in this country...

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...Even many liberals have found in this rather "progressive" strain in socialist aspirations little with which to disagree...

...This holds true even if the object of devotion is morally reprehensible...

...and they jump up on stage and dance the movie's production number, the "Time Warp," alongside the characters on screen...

...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTElVlBER 1980 go to the movie as a revolutionary act...

...Rocky Horror is a twisted musical version of a classic Hollywood horror movie: In it, a young unmarried couple, Brad and Janet, find themselves with a flat tire in an out-of-theway forest...

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...So did his Party apostles...

...I l l ~ l D i n n . I I. I I I I I I I I I ! I I I I I I I I . I I 1 I I I I . - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - J But the disapproval of p a r e n t s , most especially of the upper middleclass variety, is a hard thing to win anymore, what with the lessons a g r e a t many .such p a r e n t s learned during the 1960s...

...As the movie progresses, both Brad and Janet are seduced by the Doctor, a fifties rock-n-roll type comes out o f the laboratory's "Deep Freeze" compartment on his motorcycle and spirits Rock), away, and the Doctor is forced to return to his home planet, Transsexual, taking his castle with him...

...We are living now in an age of moral mediocrity," Emile Durkheim wrote in reference to the West's loss of religious passion over 60 years ago...

...Enclosed is $7.per shirt, three f o r $18...

...l,.wome~ on, we have to get a seat in front," I heard a girl cry when I saw the movie two years ago, "this is Billy's f i r s t t i m e ! " And she was indeed escorting into the auditorium a wide-eyed, extremely excited kid of sixteen who had already, by the look of his face, been initiated into the cult without even having seen the movie...

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...these are the audiences, a f t e r all, upon whom the most graphic displays of violence and of sex seem to have relatively little effect...

...when Brad and Janet get caught in the rain and cover t h e i r heads with newspaper, the audience does the same...

...l o * ~ ~176 ~ ~ o**o~ ooo~176 ~ ~ ooQ~ ~ ~ I*****o~ ~ e** THE TALKIES POPULAR CULTS Movies cease to be movies in only three cases...

...The previous triumphs on this circuit have included Night of the Living Dead, in its time an almost unspeakably gory and unpleasant little horror film...

...Or has the f e a r of defending o n e ' s own country become so strong t h a t a spectacular story from Paris is totally "unnewsworthy" for our leading newspapers and magazines...

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...Third, when they become centers of cults, objects of devotion akin to-the transubstantiated wafer or the cross...

...A socialist economy "succeeds" when the state has managed to institutionalize scarcity indefinitely, when it can decree...

...And~finally, there is the sight of the Doctor going into paroxysms of desire when Rocky rises from the laboratory table and throws off thewhite sheet which was covering him, almost, fully revealing the glories of his body...

...The Rocky Horror Picture Show is not the f i r s t movie to find life, and financial success, only from being shown late at night on weekends...

...film's opening, wears a black negligee and assorted leather garments all over his person...

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...Immediately the hundreds in the audience open their tote bags and light little white candles, holding them aloft...

...The audience's responsive declarations both in word and deed, codified over the five years since the movie was first shown, resemble the ritual of a religious service...

...Congressional committees have published thousands of pages dealing with this question, hundreds of editorials have warned about the dangers of overly-close relationships between the press and the American intelligence community...

...The Director of Central I n t e l l i g e n c e has recently been attacked for even considering the use of journalists in intelligence missions...

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...Scientific socialism makes this point also, albeit implicitly: Since man's needs and by Neil Howe powers are directly shaped by Nature, his only choice is to define objectively the relation between these needs and powers (i.e., natural scarcity), and then to remake himself in accordance with the definition...

...It is what makes it still important to those who by now must take the movie entirely for granted, telling them what they need to hear, confirming as it does their basest tendencies...

...As the presidential campaign gets underway, our "Nixon's The One--In 1980" buttons are becoming more popular than ever...

...It begins with a sequence in which a disembodied pair of l i p s , covered with purple lip-gloss, opens, revealing tobacco-stained t e e t h . A male voice then proceeds to sing the movie's opening number, ample use being made of tongue, lips, and teeth throughout the song...

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...A sense of community in impropriety--this is also a major element of the Rocky Horror e x p e r i e n c e . A sense that you are doing something your parents would disapprove of...

...What if they no longer cared to direct their message to the poor, creative, and striving dispossessed...

...S a y , w a s n ' t t h e r e a castle down the road a few miles...

...We remember a time not so very long ago when t h e L e f t ' s enthusiasm for technology, growth, and abundance knew no bounds...

...In these profoundly atheistic times, it can really come as no surprise that the need for religious r i t u a l - - w h i c h Emile Durkheim, among others, has told us is an essential part of human existence--will find its expression in the arena of popular culture...

...and Pink Flamingos, a homosexual extravaganza advertised as "the most disgusting movie ever made," featuring a .three'hundred-p~ transvestite named Divine who, at the film's end, partakes of defecation...

...For movies which gain the kind of surreptitious and more than slightly suspicious following The Robky Horror Picture Show has must possess something remarkably different which they can then offer their audiences...

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...This last option was in fact taken by our own New Left of the late sixties, and it abruptly changed socialism's official position...

...It is rew)lutionary in its celebration of values which strike at the very heart of our culture--a movement which would, in a less permissive time, have been considered dangerous.* They are " i n " with .the shiftless sexual ' s w ' n g e r s " o f a n o t h e r d a y who still hang around Greenwich Village...

...It is this kind of outrageousness that informs Rocky Horror (as it has all of the os successes on the l a t e - n i g h t circuit...

...Contributors likeM.E...

...As such, "scarcity" has now become for THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1980 29...

...Does no one care...

...I t is, f i r s t of all, a celebration of homosexual fantasy...

...That now, in America at least, so much of the Left's fervor seems to be pointed in the opposite-direction should prompt us to wonder what the real c,,gins of the new popularity of " s c a r c i t y " are and, more importantl where it will lead the Left from here...

...To answer the f i r s t question we have to step back a bit and recall that, t r a d i t i o n a l l y , t h e Left has always maintained a highly ambiguous attitude toward "scarcity...

...Bradford, RusselIKirk, Marion Montgomery, Clyde Wilson, Robert Whitaker &Thomas Fleming provide lively writing on the South's conservative traditions...

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...For example, socialists found Malthus's contention that food supply could not keep pace with burgeoning populations reactionary, since it tended to avert man's attention from solving his woes in This World rather than in Another...

...The "New Man" (or "new consciousness") became the primary goal, no matter what the consequences...

...Hostility toward private economic activity is of course manifest in nearly all the proposed solutions for scarcity as well: zoning and land-use statutes at the local level, legislation and resource boards at the s t a t e level, agencies, taxes, and subsidies at the federal level, and UN resolutions for the world...

...What is modestly memorable about this childish travesty is the power and strength of its homosexual imagery...

...There most certainly are Soviet disinformation agents in the West...

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...This wallowing in degradation is the real sensation experienced by the movie's audience...

...been a g r e a t hue and cry in this country and elsewhere about t h e nefarious role of the CIA in recruiting American journalists for clandestine activities...

...Yet the activities of the " o t h e r s i d e " do not a t t r a c t attention...

...Brad says, and off they go, finding at the castle Dr...

...for example, that in ten years it will make exactly 2.5 million shoes while suppressing the desire for any other quantity by deeming it illegitimate and unnatural...

...The animus is directed not so much against the ways capitalism violates social justice or provokes class war as against the ways it violates certain quantitative boundaries of the material world...

...Capitalism is still held in as much contempt as it was during the sixties, but ~'or new reasons...

...Thus, Rocky Horror cultists enjoy a sense of community which is of a far more serious and fundamental nature than the sensation of being " i n " on some.thing the value of which is appre dated by a select few...

...Indeed, those whose writings provided the origins of leftist ideology, especially utopian socialists such as Condorcet, William Godwin, and Robert Ower~, saw in man's destiny a world of Cornucopian plenty...

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...rather, they go primarily to belong...

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...Bradley...

...The sort of cute impropriety with which The Blues Brothers (who destroy cars) and The Blue Lagoon (in which two beautiful t e e n a g e r s sleep with one another repeatedly) are imbued is not sufficient...

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...Officially, the Left has consistently heaped scorn on the notion t h a t " s c a r c i t y " is somehow inseparable from the human condition...

...Individualism, according to Rousseau and his descendants, inculcates desires far too extravagant and innovations far too wasteful for civilized man ever to be satisfied within the limits of Nature...

...John Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes, and (most recently) John Kenneth Galbraith have all written of a forthcoming " e n d of economic s c a r c i t y " which will heraid the dawn of new forms of social organization...

...These two gentlemen are often accused of "Cold Warism" and extreme political paranoia...

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...29458 Name Address City State Zip but then succumbs to what we are to understand is the best sexual experience either will ever have...

...Indeed, the religious side to the Rocky Horror cult can be seen in its fascination with ritual...

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...It is also a celebration of hedonism...

...But, one must distressingly conclude, it is just a movie, and a bad one at that, and that there is a kind of social madness in the air which has led these people down the street late at night to these theaters so they can humiliate and degrade themselves in the company of others who are doing the same...

...They are active p a r t i c i p a n t s in a tiny movement which is, at its heart, revolutionary...

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...Land, air, water, fuel, food, or even (in the more sophisticated accounts) leisure, time, labor, and s p a c e - - a l l , we are told, are growing " s c a r c e " because of the irrationality of our capitalist institutions...

...As Brad and Janet croon to one another outside a church where they have just been to a wedding, a wizened couple right out of "American Gothic" sings the background vocals, making it all too clear just what this cute young pair will become in the future...

...The same hostility informs the best-known general books on the subject (The Costs o f Economic Growth, Limits to Growth, Small is Beautiful, The End of Affluence, among others) and the many political and economic tracts that h'ave followed from them, including, now, Richard Barnet's The Lean Years: Politics in the Age of Scardty...

...In this sense the practice of socialism-whether the ritualized economy of the artists' commune or the input-output matrix of the Soviet ."Gosplan"--is predicated upon the anticipation of, and submission to, scarcity...

...This is not as odd as it might seem...

...Roone Arledge...