If all the world is a stage, then the world of the Rocky Horror Picture Show is an RKO soundstage in which pieces of past movies are replayed and recast with Frank-N-Furter as their star. In the world of the castle, he can be Dr Frankenstein, creating a human-monster in Rocky. He can be Dracula, seducing and controlling Brad and Janet, even though she is the one who has “tasted blood”. He can be Fay Wray with her “delicate, satin-draped frame”, carried to the top of a tower in the arms of a monster. He can be Dorothy “going home” and leaving the “blue skies” of his self-created Oz behind. He can even stage his own Esther Williams’ musical, and be the star. In short, he lives in a world where reality itself has become a chimera, created out of the pieces of an imagined, Hollywood past. He does not need to “dream it”, because he can “be it”.

Before I discuss specific ways in which Frank-N-Furter employs simulations, however, I believe it is important to understand the motivations behind them. The only clue we have to these comes in the grand floor show where he sings a number called Wild and Untamed Thing:

I’m a wild and an untamed thing.

I’m a bee with a deadly sting.

You get a hit and your mind goes ping.

Your heart’ll thump and your blood will sing.

So let the party and the sounds rock on.

We’re going to shake it ‘till the life has gone.

Rose tint my world, keep me safe from my trouble and pain.

Although the lyrics are frankly weak, the final line illuminates Frank-N-Furter’s motives as clearly and precisely as a spotlight. Like the schizophrenic or the autist who create a fantasy world in which to retreat from reality, Frank-N-Furter has created this vaudevillian simulation in order to “rose tint” his world, and to protect himself from “trouble and pain”. If nothing is real and everything is a repeat of an old movie, then he cannot be hurt. He knows how the film ends, and, more importantly, he is able to script what role he plays in it.

Having said that, I would like to return to considering how Frank-N-Furter employs simulations in ways that cast him in the role of star. In the introductory paragraph, I listed some of the films to which the Rocky Horror Picture Show seems to make reference, as well as the parts Frank-N-Furter assumes in each of them. I will reiterate them briefly here. He is Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. He takes the same part as Fay Wray in King Kong. He is Dr Frankenstein in the film of the same title. He is also Dracula, who, although the villain of the piece, is certainly better known than von Helsing, the man who hunts him. As is obvious from this list, he always has to be the main attraction, the one with his name in lights.

This almost desperate need for stardom emerges very powerfully during his rendition of I’m Going Home. As he sings this number, the theatre’s empty seats begin to fill with elegantly-dressed, aristocratic people, who give him a standing ovation when he walks down the aisle. It is not hard to see this scene as Frank-N-Furter’s delusions coming to life. He has constructed a reality where he is universally loved and envied, where he will always get applause and admiration from his audience. Consequently, when Magenta shatters his fantasy world with a cutting “how sentimental”, he falls completely to pieces. He becomes a whimpering, scrabbling, terrified creature, running from Riff Raff’s laser.

Similarly, Frank-N-Furter employs simulations in completely selfish and egocentric ways. If he is the star of the show, then everything must be arranged for his pleasure and his purposes. The bit players are expendable. Their other emotions and other relationships do not matter, because their love and desire for him should be all consuming. The seductions of Brad and Janet, where he deceives them by appearing as their respective partner before revealing himself, are perfect examples of this.

Nonetheless, the most obvious simulation in the film has to be Rocky. Through him, Frank-N-Furter succeeds in bringing to life the Hollywood idea of a man as epitomised by people like Steve Reeves (who was Hercules in a series of films in the 50’s) and by characters like Flash Gordon. Frank-N-Furter describes this archetype for us quite successfully in the musical number I Can Make You a Man. He is “pink and quite clean” and “a strong man”. He tries “to build up his shoulders, his chest, arms and . . . legs”. He “carries the Charles Atlas seal of approval”.

With that in mind, I would like to turn for a moment to Charles Atlas, as his system forms the basis for that particular parodic song. He claimed to have developed a system that would allow “a weakling weighing ninety-eight pounds” to transform himself into “a strong man” within “just seven days” using “dynamic tension”. As it was usually run in comics, the advertisement tended to be accompanied by a cartoon strip showing a weakling getting sand kicked into his face at the beach by a bully who was after his girlfriend. Then, he would work out using the Charles Atlas’ system, develop inordinately large muscles and return to get his revenge on the bully. The advertisement always ended with a girl clinging adoringly onto his arms, much like Janet Weiss sighing “I’m a muscle fan” in the song.

Going with that series of associations, the American ideal as created by and promoted in Hollywood films and Charles Atlas’ adverts is one of strength, power and virility. He is always either the hero of the world, or the “hero of the beach”. And Rocky was seemingly created by Frank-N-Furter as a continuation of that tradition. However, he is not the hero of the piece. The credits at the beginning of the film assign that role to Brad Majors, while Rocky is simply called “a creation”. That surely aligns him with Frankenstein, who was the powerless, reviled creation in Mary Shelley’s novel and the Boris Karloff movies.

The question that arises naturally from this is what Frank-N-Furter is trying to do in this simulation by combining the classical, Hollywood hero with the classical, Hollywood monster. To answer this, it is important to define the relationship between them. Rocky can be seen as the Bride of Frank-N-Furter, to make the obvious film reference. There is a kind of macabre, wedding ceremony, after which they retreat “into the seclusion of his somber bridal suite”. Later, when Rocky rebels, he is turned into a statue by Frank-N-Furter. Neither of these are the roles that would have been played by the hero of any film. Indeed, in both phases of their relationship, Frank-N-Furter seems to be recasting himself as the hero, who gets the ‘girl’ and who stops the monster, even above the traditional figure in Rocky. Again, he has to be the star of his personal B-movie.

As importantly, Frank-N-Furter’s fantasy world is one in which all distinctions have broken down. It is a limbo where everything is possible and nothing is real. The past intrudes and is reenacted in the present through endless reruns, because “time (means) nothing, never would again.” The lines between male and female are blurred. Frank-N-Furter is “a sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania”. The floor-show dresses them all in corsets, stockings and high-heels. Even the film itself does not belong to one clear genre, shifting from romance to musical to horror to science-fiction within the space of scenes. Finally and most significantly, reality and celluloid fantasy become one and same thing.

If his present and personality are simply a pastiche of old movies, then Frank-N-Furter becomes a simulation himself. Through acting out and living his fantasies, through being his dreams, he becomes unreal. In the excerpt supplied from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the Emergence of Recreational Evil”, the author refers to him as “a second-order simulation, created out of the simulations of Hollywood”. This is a very neat and incisive description of him and his situation. If his reality is based on Hollywood films, which themselves are screenwriter’s fantasies and director’s simulations, he is twice removed from the real world. Despite all the simulations he uses, he becomes the ultimate simulation himself.

Ultimately, however, this entire, schizophrenic fantasy implodes. It is too decadent and too amoral. Frank-N-Furter with his philosophy of “give yourself over to absolute pleasure” cannot be allowed to live. As Riff Raff says, before passing judgment on and killing his former master,

Frank-N-Furter, it’s all over.

Your mission is a failure.

Your lifestyle’s too extreme.

To this justification for the death-sentence, Dr Scott adds that “society must be protected”. It would be easy to read this scene as the oppressive establishment censoring and crushing an element which challenges it. If so, our sympathy should be with Frank-N-Furter, the Other destroyed for his Otherness. However, the remainder of the film implies that his destruction was necessary, and criticises the excesses of his life. The message of the film is ultimately a very moral, almost puriticanical one.

To demonstrate how this critique permeates the film, I would firstly like to consider the presence of American Gothic in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Painted by Grant Wood, it was part of the Regionalist movement that rejected European influence and that glorified traditional, American values in art. It sought to cultivate a kind of nostalgia for passing ways of life. Stagings and reproductions of this piece of Americana appear three times in the course of the film. The painting is obviously hung in the entrance hall to Frank-N-Furter’s castle. Richard O’Brien (who plays Riff Raff) and Patricia Quinn (who takes the part of Magenta) create a tableau vivant of it in front of the church’s door. Similarly, at the end of the film, Magenta and Riff Raff stage another version of it in their spacesuits. It is no coincidence that Riff Raff’s laser looks precisely like the farmer’s pitchfork, or that they are standing in the same positions as him and his daughter. This painting, which depicts a simple, ascetic lifestyle, stands in stark contrast to the glitter and froth of Frank-N-Furter’s castle and his constant refrain to “give yourself over to absolute pleasure”.

However, The Rocky Horror Picture Show does not confine its critique of excess to Frank-N-Furter’s chimerical reality. As mentioned, the tableau vivant is also staged at the church. It must be seen as standing in contrast to the rather vulgar words written in white streamers on the bridal car: “She got hers. Now he’s going to get his” It goes against the values expressed by Brad and Janet where he remarks “why Ralph himself, he’ll be in line for a promotion in a year or two” and she exalts “(her ring is) nicer than Betty Munroe had”. Similarly, when Brad chalks a heart on the door of the church, it is the farmer and his daughter from the tableau vivant who erase it. As discussed in the previous paragraph, its inclusion recalls the older, puritanical value-system of hard work being valued for hard work’s sake, God being revered by everybody, and love being prized above lust or money. For society in general, it is being held up as an alternative to “a life . . . lived for the thrills!”

Interestingly, though, American Gothic is also presented through simulations or reproductions. The painting on the wall is a cheap reproduction, and the tableaux vivants have to be seen in the same way as Frank-N-Furter realising his fantasies. Through this, O’Brien might be suggesting that all life is fantasy, and that we simply have a choice about in which fantasy we choose to live. If that is the case, why should we not choose to live in Frank-N-Furter’s vaudeville revue? The film itself, for all its apparent decadence and amorality, tells us that that would be the wrong choice in two ways.

Ironically, even taking Riff Raff’s murder of him into account, Frank-N-Furter himself is the most powerful indictment of his lifestyle. During the course of the film, he emerges as a brittle, neurotic, pathetic figure, desperate for control and deriving little real pleasure from his “absolute pleasure”. He kills Eddie with an ice-pick for rebelling against him. He “medusas” all his visitors, then makes them take part in a strange, vaudevillian floor-show. As I have mentioned earlier in this essay, it has to be significant the last image of him we have - bar the one in which he is floating face-down in the pool in an obvious tribute to Sunset Boulevard - is of a whimpering, scrabbling, desperate creature. Once his “erotic nightmares” and “sensual daydreams” have been destroyed, nothing remains of him. There is nothing beneath the persona - even his death is a rerun of an old film - and there is no-one to mourn even the character. It is a very tragic and pathetic end, which no-one could want.

Similarly, if his death scene was not powerful enough, O’Brien has Columbia deliver a damning indictment of him:

My God! I can’t stand any more of this! First you spurn me for Eddie, and then you throw him off like an old overcoat for Rocky! You chew people up and then you spit them out again . . . I loved you . . . do you hear me? I loved you! And what did it get me? Yeah, I’ll tell you: a big nothing. You’re like a sponge. You take, take, take, and drain others of their love and emotion.

Even though he is unable to hear the truth about himself and turns her to stone, the viewers should take her words very seriously. They are a very acute and pointed criticism of the kind of man Frank-N-Furter is and the results of the lifestyle he leads. They are a clear indication that he is not to be emulated.

Moreover, a crucial line to this line of argument has to be his lament, after the scene in which he turns Columbia to stone, that: “It’s not easy having a good time . . . even smiling makes my face ache . . . .” The message of the film and of Frank-N-Furter’s life is that this kind of lifestyle can never bring pleasure or fulfillment. It is difficult. It requires an effort. It wears the person down. It causes pain. Ironically, as shocking as the film must have seemed to contemporary audiences (and, perhaps, to modern ones), the message is ultimately a puritanical one: it is better to lead a moral life.

Interestingly, O’Brien gives us the moral of the story before we enter Frank-N-Furter’s chimerical reality. In the transition between the church and Brad and Janet’s conversation, which has to be seen as a shift between value-systems in itself, we are given the message carved in stone: “Be Just and Fear Not”. In the strictest, dictionary definition of the world, just can be understood as acting in accordance with right, moral principles. We are meant to hold this in mind as we go into the castle, along with the protagonists. This dictum is meant to be the moral touchstone by which we measure the events of the film. It is meant to provoke us to ask questions. For example, if Frank-N-Furter had been “just”, would he have been reduced to the level of a terrified animal at the end? Or, if Brad and Janet had remained “just”, would they have been able to be seduced and captivated by him? Would they have had anything to fear from him? The inscription suggests the answers would be in the negative.

The ending of the film, therefore, is a witty, pointed inversion of the conventions of the science fiction film. Traditionally, the all-American, cleft-jawed hero would have been the one to expel the alien invaders, slay the monster or save the girl. His moral goodness, shining almost as brightly as his Colgate smile, would have remained intact throughout the film. His all-American, apple-pie values would have allowed him to prevail. At the beginning of the film, Brad Majors seems to have these qualities. He has the slightly stilted manner of speech that was part-and-parcel of the B-movie hero. He is protective of Janet and confident of his ability to keep her safe. As mentioned in an earlier paragraph, he is credited as “a hero”. However, by the end of the film, his character has undergone such a metamorphosis that he can cry that the situation is “beyond me: help me, Mommy!” . He is powerless to help either himself or his fiancee, surrendering to the “absolute pleasure” that Frank-N-Furter offers him. Finally, as the Usherette sings in the concluding number, “darkness has conquered\Brad and Janet”.

On the contrary, in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it is the Transylvanians, the aliens and the outsiders, who have to save human society from Frank-N-Furter’s influence. It is Riff Raff and Magenta who put an end to his “sensuous daydreams” and “erotic nightmares”. Clearly, this has to be read as an indictment on the society whose “hero” is incapable of saving it, who cannot resist his more excessive and carnal impulses and who buys into Frank-N-Furter’s world of artificial reality and cynical sexuality. It is intended as a challenge to the viewers about their own morality, and about the decadence of their own society.

Interestingly, as The Rocky Horror Picture Show has acheived cult status, Richard O’Brien’s real message has been subsumed by fans embracing its credo of “absolute pleasure” and seeing it solely as a challenge to conventional morality. Audience participation scripts exist where fans become a part of the film. They have their lines, their props, and they take part in the screenings. Through this, they become characters in the film as well. They become a part of a simulated reality. To echo the words of the critic quoted earlier, they become third-order simulations.

The allure of a fantasy world or of another identity for fans is undeniable. Like Frank-N-Furter, they can shift between personae. They can become the stars in their favourite movie. They can rewrite the script to suit themselves. They no longer need to “dream it”, because they can “be it”. However, they miss the message of the Rocky Horror Picture Show by doing so. They ignore the way it validates and reinforces the mainstream, and they become a part of the culture of artificiality and amorality that the film critiques and rejects. As the final refrain of “Super Heroes” suggests, “some insects, called the human race” cannot afford to be “lost in time, and lost in space,\ and meaning.”