The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

directed by Jim Sharman

Arden Columbia

My Rocky-Horror-bedroom-scenes-as-dreams theory comforts me as much as it destroys me to think about.

The bedroom scenes are probably the most controversial in Rocky Horror, and for good reason. I remember talking about it with my sister one afternoon in the soup aisle at Target. Just normal sibling things.

The topic came up because I'd recently invited some friends to watch Rocky Horror at my dorm/apartment for my birthday. My roommate at the time loathed the film, and unabashedly so. When asked why, it was always the same answer: There are literally two rape scenes.

I'm not defensive, because I know this analysis can be rooted loosely in canon material. The ghost-shadow of Frank-N-Furter looms hungrily over the restless Brad and Janet in disguise, fashioned as their "safe and gentle" lover of the "opposite sex," which can definitely be seen as a manipulative tactic. Then he seduces them further by pushing—another lure to bring them out of the boundaries that constrain them. What keeps me strong in my own opinion, ironically, has to do with the "weakness" of the scenes.

When I say this, I mean that the scenes are purposefully concealed. We see swathes of pink and blue fabric drifting lazily over silhouettes of fantasy. Dreams edge us—quite literally. They allow us to delve into the subconscious, the soft curiosity, to handle the truths and desires we're too shallow to swallow in their entirety.

The last thing I want to do is get Freudian up in here, so I'll spare you the chaotic neutral lectures my advisor would give me when I gushed about Rocky Horror in his office. I’ll just say most people have semi-successfully "taken the good stuff and left the rest" with Freud, and I guess that's what I did, too, delving into dreams, the death drive, the present absence, etc.

I immersed myself in my study, as one does when they’re a nerd and a Scorpio, and the result was a heaping pile of subconscious shit that inevitably bled deep into the pages of nearly everything I had written to earn my Bachelor’s degree.

It's not as easy as black and white. But I've always been too afraid to confront my gray areas, so I suppose I'm doing it now.

*

Before I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show proper, I wrote a ten-page paper in which one of the articles I used was a comparison of Dr. Frank-N-Furter to the god of madness himself, Dionysus. About a year later, I was stoned off my ass in my friend Dex's dorm as I pulled up the paper and read what Pre-Rocky Arden wrote about the character who has now given me a lifetime of comfort, catharsis, and trans liberation through queer villainy.

In August of 2020, I latched onto the mechanics of Rocky immediately after watching. It was that night I began dreaming up my own scenes, mumbling obscenities to myself, envisioning that elusive ghost-shadow, pushing me, pulling me tenderly, out of another dream.

This would be the first time I dreamed it, instead of being it, much to the spirit of Frank-N-Furter’s dismay.

In the first dream, I was Janet.

*

Another supporting argument for my opinion of the bedroom scenes: the promises. We see it when Janet overcomes her anxiety and asks Frank before they sleep together: Promise you won’t tell Brad? This tells me the last thing keeping her from what she so desperately wanted was an agreement she had made with someone else.

(The sex itself is too good to be true. Frank reads her mind; he knows what Janet needs, what she craves. And Janet craves everything.)

The shame I feel about sex tries to create a new me every now and then, tries to forget what it wanted. To talk about it, I step outside of myself, watch the animal Me touch myself in bed, spread my legs under the faucet behind the shower curtain. Loving their body is always a singular act, no matter who they might share it with. It’s easier to project, to play pretend.

As much as I joke about being a slut, my standards have always been high.The future looked bleak for someone like me with only a half-sense of self and a treasure trove of dormant generational trauma. I was so scared. And it seemed nothing would ever break through that fear until I broke myself.

*

I didn’t have sex with another person until I was twenty-three.

During the pandemic, I sparked up a quarantine fling with an ex-best friend who was living with us in what has been reestablished as our guest room. The room holds so many antiques, and I guess my girlhood is one of them, now.

I breezed over my thoughts about it while it was happening. Frankly (ha), I just wanted to get it over with. It had been maddening, spending my life terrified to even ask somebody out. My regrets about the situation have nothing to do with my choice to overcome my fear, and everything to do with the bond this friend had with my sister and me.

Apparently, this friend had promised my sister he would never sleep with me. And lo and behold, we did it anyway—two stupid boys weaning ourselves off tequila shots at 3 a.m., giggling over things we understood were forbidden. Barely awake, we made bad decisions because it seemed everything was leading to this anyway. We might as well. So fuck it.

After Janet has the dream, she has Rocky. I say this because she emerges from the bedroom in a panic and recognizes exactly what she’s been missing.

I project my last shreds of girlhood onto Janet in that instant, the shot of her body disappearing as the creaky elevator in the castle carries her up and away into Frank’s lab, where she will make her next mistake.

Her first mistake was imagining that she could be loved so completely, so devastatingly. It’s clear enough in its lack of clarity, in how the dream-world around her shimmers and floats in gauze as Frank takes her somewhere she never could have gone if she never left Denton, Ohio.

A faint alarm pulses in my skull, an alien hand muffling the sound by smoothing curls the color of dark honey behind my ear: There’s nowhere left to run. Helpless, they are allowed to have what they want. It is reciprocated. It is free.

Shame makes me feel broken, but it mostly makes me angry. Like why the hell is this here anymore, there’s no reason left. So now I’m here with it, and the new me is a blank slate, blinking open eyes in the dark, and just as confused.

*

My platonic soulmate is a Taurus who is too gay to function. Last April we lived on Hot Pockets and soft drinks and spent most of our evenings grabbing dinner at the commons before going back to their dorm, getting high and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Dex has always been one of the funniest people I know. They’re a self-proclaimed pessimist, and yet they give me so much hope for the future. I officially met them in January of 2020, right around the time I came out as nonbinary.

Dex would book appointments with me at the writing center, and I would help them with their English 1102 assignments in exchange for getting to ramble endlessly about things like the history of 2000s pop punk bands. In this way, I was in a relaxed role of mentor, and that continued when I introduced them to Buffy.

I kicked off 2021 strong by making “brad majors gender envy” my display name on Twitter and telling everyone I was comfortable with that I used any pronouns. During my final semester, I unearthed an old character for my fiction class—Rowan, who is genderfluid (he/she pronouns) and plays Columbia in my mind’s version of Rocky Horror. In other words, I was close to the truth, but not the full truth for me, personally. Not yet.

(One thing that has imprinted itself in my mind forever: When I told Dex, with full confidence, that if I were a Rocky Horror character, I would be Janet. This was the moment they looked me dead in the eye and said, I see you more as a Columbia or a Magenta.

And like, not to be dramatic, but I felt something that had been trapped in my ribcage for almost twenty-four years fluttering loose.)

*

I think back: When was the first time you realized you could be anything you wanted?

The answer: I was seventeen, in the basement of an old friend, pretending to be a different character of mine—an initiate from the Dauntless faction in the Divergent series. The story was that I’d been found by my trainer, trashed beyond human capability and stumbling near a dark cavern, lost in drunkenness and dangerous half-dreams.

The night was warm and inviting. I settled into listening to my “supervisor” scold me, call me the biggest fucking idiot in the world, and then slowly croak through an admission of his own when I asked why he cared so damn much about my safety. It was a Wattpad fever dream.

The mood shifts—it was fake, but what I felt wasn’t. And as I was sinking further into the feeling of his teeth teasing the skin near my collarbone and the sound of the voice my friend assumed just for me, I didn’t recognize fantasy or reality for what it was.

(In that dream, I was a boy named Andrew.)

*

My new dream isn’t even a year old yet, unless you count the period of time during which I’d turn on Rocky at the drop of a hat or sing every line on the drive back to visit family. It’s new unless you count the period after that, when I’d slip strangely between she and they and he and suddenly get stuck on that last one, pinned against the wall by another gay friend of mine, a Cancerian boy-succubus, who was tall and pretty and insufferable.

The closet was glass, and it took all but an actual bloody ax for the new people in my life to deliver the first blow, to crack the illusion of myself as Girl, as Creature, as Mirror.

*

The bedroom-scenes-as-dreams theory is comforting because of its ability to reflect. It hurts as much as it holds me, knowing that sometimes a soul must be taken so far away—back to the false memory of being rocked delicately in soothing ocean waves—to recognize how badly it strains to reach the surface. Rocky Horror can be anything it wants, so it’s interesting to analyze what it wishes to be. That’s what completes the transformation.

I complete my own transformation, assume responsibility for the versions of me I leave behind in the pool, floating and finished, without the chance to consider their own endings, that ultimate next step into unknown states of being.

Slip into a fever dream—you’ll feel more comfortable. Then wade into the water and watch it dissect and separate reality. What version of yourself do you see, now? When it ripples, does it turn to wine? To blood? And would you like to feel your body change, even when it steals your breath and promises pain? What do you see in the fractures? Who would you be if you could step into the fantasy and fall?

Arden Columbia is constantly exploring the intersections between sexuality and gender through writing. They're here for the next Rocky Horror renaissance, which they will lead themselves if they have to. This is their first published piece of creative nonfiction.