Camp, Power, “Rocky Horror”

Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” and Michel Foucault’s “The Deployment of Sexuality” (from his History of Sexuality Volume 1) are both essential works for developing a further understanding of how queer theory intersects with society and culture. Sontag’s essay — though she renders it and considers it more a series of notes rather than a proper essay — seeks to define the quality known as “camp” and how it manifests as an aesthetic across mediums. Foucault’s piece deals with the concept of the repressive hypothesis, that power is wielded by the law to subjugate human sexuality; the psychoanalytic response to this hypothesis which holds that desire and law are one and the same; and that both are inadequate (though not wholly wrong) explanations for what power is and how it manifests itself particularly in modern society. Together, this post seeks to illustrate the concepts within these two pieces by applying their insights to the 1975 film The Rocky Horror Picture Show — how the film itself embodies camp as described by Sontag, and how the film illustrates the more complex conception of power as laid out by Foucault.

If the concept of camp could be boiled down into a distinct definition, one could say that camp is the aesthetic quality that prizes artifice above the natural, sincerity and seriousness over irony, and which aims, with passion, towards making some great point and ultimately fails. As Sontag notes, “Camp taste has an affinity for certain arts rather than others. Clothes, furniture, all the elements of visual décor, for instance, make up a large part of Camp. For Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content.” To give one example, Sontag cites Art Nouveau as “fully developed Camp,” in its aspirations to “convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto.” Camp extends this sensibility as well to people, where “the androgyne is … one of the great images of Camp sensibility,” and where the most idealistic forms of attractiveness and idealistic sources of pleasure run “against the grain,” as Sontag puts it, of one’s own sex: the most manly of men find beauty in feminine women, and the most feminine women find beauty in the most manly of men. Of note here is how Sontag cites film star Steve Reeves as an example of the latter, referring to him with the term “exaggerated he-man-est” — a man who is himself referred to in the lyrics of “Sweet Transvestite,” sung by the decidedly feminine yet ostensibly still male Dr. Frank-N-Furter:

“Let me show you around, maybe play you a sound
You look like you’re both pretty groovy
Or if you want something visual that’s not too abysmal
We could take in an old Steve Reeves movie”

It likely should not be taken as coincidence either that Frank-N-Furter proceeds after this number to craft an artificial man, spoofing the likes of Frankenstein, but creating instead the ultimate male figure in Rocky, who is nearly naked throughout the film in order to show off his developed musculature. Frank-N-Furter proceeds to sing about how, “in just seven days, I will make you a man,” further playing up Rocky’s virility in contrast to Frank-N-Furter’s androgyny and femininity.

Sontag also writes how “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’” Essentially, objects and persons in being perceived as camp are more performative in nature than not, “the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” Also noted by Sontag, and especially relevant to Rocky Horror’s own camp sensibility, is how the camp canon changes with time. As Sontag states, “Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don’t perceive.” Many of the things which are perceived as camp often wind up being those that are outdated and old-fashioned, not because they are old, but because age “provides the necessary detachment — or arouses a necessary sympathy.” This quality also can be found readily within Rocky Horror and its lifting and quoting of old science-fiction and horror film tropes — in a time where lurid violence and convincing special effects were elevating such genres in the public eye, Rocky Horror trades instead in dated effects and old-fashioned, obviously artificial sets.

Sontag often makes a distinction between what she terms genuine camp and self-aware camp, and she feels that the former is more enjoyable than the latter. She also notes that a given work need not be camp through-and-through in order to exhibit qualities of camp sensibility. For camp to be genuine, it must be naive as well as serious in its aspirations, yet never mediocre and always extravagant even as it fails. If taken in these terms, Rocky Horror is not quite genuine camp — it has a deliberate self-awareness that genuine camp lacks in how it aims to recreate the corny genre conventions of yesteryear. But the film certainly exhibits qualities of camp to its own advantage, using them in part as a means to examine how its queerer characters upset the heteronormative couple who serve as the ostensible protagonists of the film, Brad Majors and Janet Weiss. The two are essentially hapless boobs who get caught up in the camping that Frank-N-Furter and his company engage in. The film itself may not be genuine camp, but it certainly aims to celebrate it in the face of the dull normalcy, the squareness that Brad and Janet exemplify.

Foucault’s conception of power, then, can be used to identify how Rocky Horror upends the historical notion of the repressive hypothesis. According to Foucault, Western culture seeks to make sex talk, to enter discourse, in order to further our knowledge of and the pleasure we partake in sexuality. Within sexuality we may be able to find our true selves. He writes, “We are compelled to know how things are with it, while it is suspected of knowing how things are with us.” Foucault is also interested in how repression is the means through which sexuality and sex is examined. The repressive hypothesis, to put it simply, is the hypothesis that sexuality was utterly suppressed by capitalistic and bourgeois forces for many centuries leading into the nineteenth century — Foucault meanwhile disagrees with this hypothesis and notes that a great deal of interest in sexuality and secular investigations into sexuality began to occur in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. But Foucault is also aware, as he puts it in “The Deployment of Sexuality,” that he isn’t the first to question this hypothesis, citing how psychoanalysis has argued that the notion of desire as distinct from repression is false, that desire stems from repression. “One should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated.” Essentially, desire implies lack — the lack of fulfilled sexuality — and so desire is born from the power of repression over individuals. Foucault argues that both the original repression hypothesis and the psychoanalytic response to it both are founded on what he terms a “juridico-discursive” conception of power — essentially, that power works in negative terms only, functioning through the law (such as the church or monarchy) in order to prohibit and silence sexuality, which is rebellious energy that seeks to shed the power that acts upon it to be free. Foucault states that “where sex and pleasure are concerned, power can ‘do’ nothing but say no to them,” that “power is essentially what dictates its law to sex,” that “power over sex is exercised in the same way at all levels.”

Yet Foucault conceives of power in more terms than just the juridico-discursive conception that has been held prior, placing in it both repression and creation, and that the dynamics of power are more than just institutions exerting their dominance over the subject. Systems of power are rather something that fluctuates over time, and when examined in the context of sexuality, sexuality is neither repressed or discovered, but rather constructed by society. Several of the ways power and sex have been related are identified by Foucault: the “hysterization of women’s bodies,” wherein the female body is conceived as “thoroughly saturated with sexuality” and which is publicly scrutinized as to its reproductive potential; the “pedagogization of children’s sex,” which conceives of children as naturally sexually naive and seeks to quash the actually-sexually active behaviors of children; the “socialization of procreative behavior,” which polices non-procreative sex; and the “psychiatrization of perverse pleasure,” which identifies divergences from perceived normal sexuality — as identified through medicine and psychiatry — as signs of illness that needs to be corrected. These concepts frame our understanding of sexuality, and come from society’s foundations on family relations and the need to maintain laws and taboos related to them.

Foucault’s insights into how sexuality and power have been conceived historically, then, can prove useful in examining Rocky Horror and its use of camp. Rocky Horror begins, after its opening titles, with Brad Majors and Janet Weiss attending a wedding and then spontaneously deciding to marry themselves before announcing the good news to their old professor, Dr. Scott. However, a storm and a downed tree bring them to the castle where Frank-N-Furter resides and into the overt campiness that ensues. The camp qualities exhibited by the Transylvanians, embodied most explicitly in Frank-N-Furter, work as an assault on the square, rigid sexuality embodied by Brad and Janet, who ultimately succumb to and are devastated by their own deviations from “normalcy.” Subscribing to Foucault’s concept of juridico-discursive notions of sexuality, which identifies power as repressive and emanating from the law (in the context of the film, embodied by its narrator, called The Criminologist, who seeks to edify the audience of what transpires and yet at best states the obvious), Brad and Janet encounter instead a fluctuating system of power relations to which they cannot adapt. Not only does Frank-N-Furter callously use and discard them to satiate his own pleasure, his own house servants, tired of waiting to return to their homeworld of Transexual Transylvania, take matters into their own hands and execute both Frank-N-Furter and Rocky before the castle rockets into space and abandons our heroes. The camp characters that inhabit the castle are literally from another planet, unworldly and, as Brad snobbishly states, “foreigners, with ways different than our own.” Whereas Brad and Janet adhere to a strict system under which they are subjugated by the institutions of the church and the police, the Transylvanians embrace artifice and exuberance.

Through its use of Sontag’s conception of camp, then, The Rocky Horror Picture Show upends the conventions of sexuality as laid out by Foucault by actively engaging in the more nuanced dynamics of power which he laid out in his work. Though mangled by their encounter with the Transylvanians, Brad, Janet, and Dr. Scott find themselves in such a state because of their adherence to the juridico-discursive conception of power and its relationship to sexuality, because of their unrelenting blandness when faced with camp. However, as Frank-N-Furter puts it, “It’s not easy having a good time. Even smiling makes my face ache.”