Lost Horizon

In a sense, if taken as a single narrative entity, The Rocky Horror Show through to the end of Shock Treatment maps a passage through the Fifties and Sixties into the Seventies and Eighties and on into an ambiguous, unknowable outside, unlike The Rocky Horror Show taken in isolation, where the exit is into a traumatic, empty world, a world between configurations. It is a dark, downbeat conclusion cut from the American print of the film, though the narrator's final, powerfully nihilistic lines remain: "and crawling on the planet’s face / some insects called the human race / lost in time and lost in space / and meaning”. In Shock Treatment Brad and Janet exit dancing to the sugary Anyhow, Anyhow, which itself echoes the closing number of that most influential of Seventies Blockbusters Grease. The studio remains, Farley remains, a few dissenters have passed through Denton but really, where are they going?

 

We never see an outside in Shock Treatment, as we do in The Truman Show, nor do Brad and Janet have to face Truman’s Mythic-heroic moment of leaping into the unknown, driven by the urge to know. The Truman Show echoes the Wizard of Oz, there is someone behind the scenes, who can be found, confronted, made to acknowledge the deception the construction of reality revealed through the incongruities in the fabric of daily life, there is a god, but in Shock Treatment god is also trapped in the world he has created, is also bound into its economy, and there is no real outside, only further ingresses are possible, deeper levels of politicking within a world already scripted and sealed off. The only possibility remains wresting control of the control room itself.