Shock treatment

“Faggots are maggots/Thank God I’m a man.”

In The Rocky Horror Show Denton, Brad and Janet’s wholesome hometown, is a real place, whereas in Shock Treatment it is entirely a confection of the media. For Jensen in Network the world is a business, for Shock Treatment the world is a TV studio (and a business). In this respect Shock Treatment is substantially ahead of later 90s reflections on enclosure by media like the The Truman Show and Ed TV, just as Network, Rollerball and Tavernier’s Deathwatch anticipate the trajectory of reality TV.

Shock Treatment is a superbly appropriate title for a film whose basic theme is the imposition of a Fifties normativity on a post-Sixties society. The film-poster’s focus is on quack psychopharmacologist Cosmo McKinley, implying that there will be a violent, institutionalised normalising of dissent and difference. Indeed, one of the film's central synergies is that between religion and pharmacology, two arenas about to transform the life of Americans in the Eighties. The square and pompous Fifties Brad of Rocky Horror Show is transformed in Shock Treatment into a dysfunctional, straggly haired nerd, much more a symbol of the early Seventies than the first film's uptight, patriarchal prig. His nemesis, twin brother Farley Flavours, whose double-F name positions him as fulfilling the same role as Frank from the earlier film, the monster/master who is out to entrap and ensnare the innocent couple, is the Brad of the earlier movie neo-liberalised, or Frank with his energies poured now into business rather than the pursuit of pleasure. If the Brad and Janet of the Rocky Horror Picture Show (just a couple of small town kids) are snared by sex, then the trap in Shock Treatment is celebrity, the hyper-medialisation and medicalisation of everyday life.

Brad is the deviant figure in Shock Treatment, a residue of un-American scepticism and apathy, a loser whose brother covets his wife and tries, as Frank does, to bring out her hidden impulses. In a sense Farley Flavours is a combination of Frank and Rocky, a clean-cut pervert, a scopophile, a sadist, psychopathically manipulative and obsessed with his god-like power. Frank creates life in his laboratory and Farley writes people in and out of the story of Denton, peopling his world along the way. The first shot of Shock Treatment is Farley in silhouette, up in his eyrie above the studio/town exhaling a cloud of cigar smoke. The cigar, symbol of the businessman and the soldier will become totemic again in the Eighties. Schwarzenegger, as businessman warrior, is repeatedly seen with one, both on and off screen. In this sense Farley is more monstrous than Frank, who at least actually wants to have sex, engage in some kind of proximity and exchange, be in some kind of shared existential moment with his “guests”, whereas Farley, for all his trappings of respectability, is the real pervert.

In a way Frank and Farley are two different modalities of the spectator him/herself. Frank, for instance, has banks of closed-circuit TVs that allow him access to every room in the house, in The Rocky Horror Picture Show there is still some sense of a private domain (which we might also take to mean a kind of private interior space, or an arena of life into which certain forms of control have not yet reached), but rather than an intrusive but partial snooping on others, in Shock Treatment Farley is in the position of the panopticon, there is nothing secretive in his manipulations or his intrusions, quite the opposite: they are overt, and his attentions become the aspirations of the main characters. In a sense both films are filtered through Frank and Farley’s gazes; if Frank’s gaze deconstructs then Farley’s is constructive, the freeing up of repressed desires in the Rocky Horror Picture Show becomes the sequined straightjacket of Shock Treatment's media-saturated, aspirational new Fifties, with its new behaviour-modifying drugs. Farely wants you outside and in.

Frank’s penultimate song in Rocky Horror is “Wild and untamed thing”, a song of Dionysian, death-driven sexual excess, a song cut short by Riff Raff’s demand that they return to Transylvania. The crazed experiment of the Sixties has reached its end.

The lyrics are;

“I’m a wild and untamed thing/ a bee with a deadly sting/ you get hit and your mind goes ping/your heart will pump and your blood will sing/so let the party and the sounds rock on/we're gonna shake it till the life has gone”.

This, a song of commitment to pushing out beyond the pleasure principle, runs up against the same barrier, the same quandary that Danny articulates a decade later in Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I when he wonders how much longer, as a culture, they can hang on to the rising balloon of Sixties excess after Marwood makes the unfortunate “political decision” not to smoke any more of his Camberwell carrot.

Farley’s first, signature song in Shock Treatment echoes Frank’s;

“Were gonna shoot for the moon/we’re gonna play High Noon/ we’re gonna take on the entire human race/you’re not looking a king you’re looking at an ace”.

If one articulates a Romantic commitment to disorientation, the other is driven by ego and achievement, a conquering of reality.