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It was great when it all began
Sat, Apr. 11th, 2015 07:45 amSo we've all heard about this, right? Fox is planning to remake Rocky Horror Picture Show for TV, directed by the man who gave us the squeaky-clean Xanadu and High School Musical. The article goes on to say, "The film’s sexual content shouldn’t be too difficult to navigate with a few trims. Though full of innuendo, it’s unlikely Rocky Horror would receive its original R rating by today’s standards." (Emphasis mine.)
Wow. Talk about missing the point.
::sigh::
I've written about Rocky Horror here before. I'm pretty passionate about it. It was a turning point, an education, an awakening, a shaping for me in ways I never could have predicted. And it was a cultural touchstone at a time when barriers were being broken all over the place. Kids see it today and view it as a camp send-up--and while it is certainly that, it's so much more. I said it in 2011:
What was, for us, a transgressive experience that broke rules and social barriers that had been becoming more brittle in the wake of Stonewall (not yet 10 years in the past when Rocky broke out as a cultural phenomenon), the rebellion of the '60s, the women's movement of the 1970s and so forth, is something entirely different to a generation that grew up with gender identity awareness and women's equality. What's transgressive for them is entirely different than what was transgressive for us.
What I think these guys are going to miss is the grand transgression that Rocky represented at the time. By baldly stating that "The film’s sexual content shouldn’t be too difficult to navigate with a few trims," it's clear they're planning to cut off its balls and make it even more of a cloud of cotton candy than the film (which I adore) did to material that can be presented as edgy and dangerous and still magnificently relevant. I don't get the impression, based on this little blurb from Entertainment Weekly anyway, that anything like this is in their plans, and it just, well, enrages me.
I remember being filled with fear when Tim Burton announced that he was adapting Sweeney Todd for the screen. My reaction to the Rocky Horror announcement is so much more than that. I don't think I'll be able to bear watching it when it airs. I fear castration of the material. I fear stunt casting. And I fear a complete and total missing of the point of the material, start to finish. Rocky Horror will, at its core, always be transgressive, dangerous, campy and awesome; it will survive what's sure to be a fiasco. But, well, like this year's Hugo Awards, we'll have to live through the fiasco first.
Wow. Talk about missing the point.
::sigh::
I've written about Rocky Horror here before. I'm pretty passionate about it. It was a turning point, an education, an awakening, a shaping for me in ways I never could have predicted. And it was a cultural touchstone at a time when barriers were being broken all over the place. Kids see it today and view it as a camp send-up--and while it is certainly that, it's so much more. I said it in 2011:
What was, for us, a transgressive experience that broke rules and social barriers that had been becoming more brittle in the wake of Stonewall (not yet 10 years in the past when Rocky broke out as a cultural phenomenon), the rebellion of the '60s, the women's movement of the 1970s and so forth, is something entirely different to a generation that grew up with gender identity awareness and women's equality. What's transgressive for them is entirely different than what was transgressive for us.
What I think these guys are going to miss is the grand transgression that Rocky represented at the time. By baldly stating that "The film’s sexual content shouldn’t be too difficult to navigate with a few trims," it's clear they're planning to cut off its balls and make it even more of a cloud of cotton candy than the film (which I adore) did to material that can be presented as edgy and dangerous and still magnificently relevant. I don't get the impression, based on this little blurb from Entertainment Weekly anyway, that anything like this is in their plans, and it just, well, enrages me.
I remember being filled with fear when Tim Burton announced that he was adapting Sweeney Todd for the screen. My reaction to the Rocky Horror announcement is so much more than that. I don't think I'll be able to bear watching it when it airs. I fear castration of the material. I fear stunt casting. And I fear a complete and total missing of the point of the material, start to finish. Rocky Horror will, at its core, always be transgressive, dangerous, campy and awesome; it will survive what's sure to be a fiasco. But, well, like this year's Hugo Awards, we'll have to live through the fiasco first.