Charles Atlas Shrugged

One of the films which best captures all the ideological tensions, all the conflicting fantasies and desires of the early Seventies is Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show. Across the three movies he was most heavily involved in during the Seventies and Eighties, Rocky Horror, the neglected follow up Shock Treatment and as a songwriter in the Return of Captain Invincible, few people so acutely focused on the necessary levels of mythic rebirth and reconstruction, along with its lacunae and discontents, in forging the new America.

In The Rocky Horror Show, a young, soon-to-be-married couple of small town squares Brad Majors and Janet Weiss break down on their way to meet a professor, Doctor Everett Scott, and are forced to seek shelter in the mansion of trans-sexual alien Frank N Furter and his coterie of freakish guests and servants. Frank has embarked on the project of making a man, the titular Rocky, for his own sexual gratification. The heady atmosphere in the house disrupts all involved until Frank’s servant Riff-Raff decides Frank’s lifestyle is too exaggerated, assumes command of the mission and decides the whole house (which is in reality a rocket) should return to Transylvania. Rocky and Frank are killed in the ensuing panic, Brad, Janet and Dr Scott are dumped back on earth in the confusion and turmoil.

Within the movie there is a clash, even a bleeding over/across temporal markers: the film takes place in a kind of no-man’s land in which identities are as porous as temporal barriers. The two most famous tracks are “Sweet Transvestite” (the “sweet” a mocking re-purposing of the down-home use of sweet in American rock) and “Time warp”, and the two songs are associated with the dissolute Frank and the conservative undercover master/servant Riff Raff who longs to return to Transylvania. The central couple Brad and Janet are an archetypal Fifties couple, he bespectacled and buttoned up, she bobbed and big-knickered, yet they are clearly living in the post-Watergate world. As they drive to Dr Everett Scott’s place Nixon can be heard on the radio performing a mea culpa.

Frank and crew represent the end of the Sixties experiment, the free love and anything goes culture, the gradual deconstruction of gender roles, the emphasis on pleasure and self-creation, bohemianism. The Mansion is a kind of dumping ground for pop-culture signifiers but the two Golden Ages most obviously foregrounded are the 1930s and the 1950s. In the film a certain limit has been reached, transgressing and deconstructing have lost their libidinal charge and Frank is looking round for a new object of desire. This takes the form of a “real man”, a return to buff Fifties bodybuilders (at one point Frank invites Brad and Janet to “take in an old Steve Reeves movie"). An earlier experiment in making a man, “Eddie”, who is accidentally released from cold storage, is the typical Fifties rebel-rocker also beginning to make a comeback in the culture via Happy Days, The Sha Na Nas, and so on, who must be permanently destroyed in favour of the buff, blonde and tanned Rocky.

The problem of the Seventies then is partly a crisis in masculinity, with patriarchal authority shredded by the debacles of the Vietnam War, Watergate and the sexual revolution some new model must be built and it’s only through borrowing from the counter-culture that a new vitality can be infused into the system. The Sixties must somehow be neutralised and internalised within the frame of the Fifties, from now on Revolution will in effect become the language of restoration, or the language of shifts within capitalism, even the language of new products or lines of products.

 Rocky Horror, in expressing its boredom with the Sixties and its nostalgia for a real man and a real woman, for a clear distinction between the two, has to return to the Pre Vietnam era of American Innocence (as exemplified in Milius' Big Wednesday (above)), or even back to the Thirties.

 “Whatever happened to Faye Wray / that elegant, satin-draped frame?” Frank asks, mournfully in “Don’t Dream It Be It”. The Rocky Horror Show rides a wave of gay reinvention in the figure of the queen in the 70s, a figure whose erotic appeal will become central to American self-conception and Neoliberal fantasy over the next decade. There is a sequence in Stay Hungry when the body-builders emerge from the gym and begin posing for passers-by: this is both body building emerging and a within-itself-retro element of gay culture going mainstream, a queer eye for the corporate guy. The body becomes the ultimate expression of masculinity authority and an open erotics of the male body is introduced, becoming the object of a more polymorphous gaze. Rocky as the sweet and sensitive, naive hunk, the object of Frank’s jaded desire finds its ultimate expression in the famous hybridising of the two forms: the man-boy and the body-builder will meet in the famous Eighties’ poster of the muscle-bound young hunk cradling a child.

The male body will increasingly be broken up by advertising, becoming a series of sites of anxiety only partially relieved by the pleasure of a newly liberated gaze, the pleasure of marvelling at the new Neoliberal body, the homoerotic, hierarchical and Oedipal appeal of the ethos of the Superman will be writ large, re-inscribed into the culture after the parade of losers that the early Seventies has turned up. We might compare the lyrics from  "In Just Seven Days (I can make you a man)” from Rocky Horror, “well a deltoid, and a tricep, a hot groin, and a bicep” with the repeated focus on different muscle groups in Eighties action cinema, including the famous montage in Commando, when Arnold straps on weapons and the camera focuses on different parts of his anatomy, or the moment of comically po-faced homoeroticism in Predator, when he clasps hands with Carl Weathers and their biceps flex together in lustful harmony.

Here we might be tempted to think rather than of Dr Freidmanstein, of Dr Frank ‘n’ Friedman growing his perfect specimen in a tank, and we might be tempted on to even further excesses and displays of exuberance by suggesting that the two great returns of the 70s are Hayek and Charles Atlas. America wants, in the manner of the adverts for Atlas’s body building course, to stop having the sand kicked in its face. Atlas, previously the resource of the desperately insecure and weedy, now becomes the figure of desire rather than the figure of fun. What Frank wants is a real man, not, in one of Arnold's famous coinages, a “girly man”. This is what America needs, a shot of testosterone, to get its vigour back after the exhausting debauch/debacle of the Sixties. America must learn to overcome its own fear of impotence and failure and start waving the flag again.