Shock Treatment: The Rocky Horror Follow-Up

Every film about a failure has a fact at the centre of it that explains everything, and Shock Treatment’s is this: there was a strike.

Jim Sharman and Richard O’Brien had a follow-up to The Rocky Horror Picture Show in development, and it was going to be shot on location in an American town. Then the 1980 Screen Actors Guild strike arrived, location work in the United States became impossible, and the production was pushed onto a sound stage at Elstree with a script that needed a town it could no longer film. Faced with that, O’Brien and Sharman made the decision the film is entirely built from. If they could only shoot inside a television studio, then the town would be a television studio. Denton, USA — the home of happiness, Brad and Janet’s home town — would be relocated wholesale inside a broadcast facility, with its population as the studio audience, its shops as sets, and its residents as contestants on a network called DTV.

That is a constraint converted into a premise, which is the oldest good story in low-budget cinema. What makes Shock Treatment remarkable is what the constraint accidentally produced. In 1981, a musical forced indoors by an industrial dispute invented reality television, a full seventeen years before The Truman Show and nineteen before Big Brother.

The shape of the thing

O’Brien resisted calling it a sequel, describing it instead as an equal, and the distinction is fair. Brad and Janet Majors are back, played by Cliff De Young and Jessica Harper, because Barry Bostwick, Susan Sarandon and Tim Curry did not return. Several of the Rocky Horror company do — Richard O’Brien and Patricia Quinn as Cosmo and Nation McKinley, a pair of siblings running the studio’s medical wing; Nell Campbell as Nurse Ansalong; Charles Gray, magnificently, as Judge Oliver Wright. Barry Humphries plays Bert Schnick, DTV’s blind German game-show host. Ruby Wax turns up as Betty Hapschatt.

Brad and Janet’s marriage has gone stale, and the network’s solution is to admit Brad to Dentonvale, the hospital game show, as a patient, while Janet is groomed for stardom by the station’s sponsor — a fast-food magnate named Farley Flavors, also played by De Young. The town watches. The town is always watching, because the town is the audience, and the audience is the town, and Sharman never once cuts to an exterior to relieve you of the idea.

Why it works: the room has no outside

The craft achievement is spatial, and it is genuinely radical for a 1981 studio musical.

There is no establishing shot of Denton. There is no street, no sky, no doorway to anywhere. Sharman shoots the entire picture inside a single continuous constructed environment where sets abut other sets, and a character walking out of a kitchen walks directly into a game-show floor with a live audience in it. The camera moves laterally between these zones without a cut, so you are never permitted the relief of a scene change. The effect accumulates. About twenty minutes in you stop waiting for the film to go outside, and about forty minutes in you understand there is no outside, and the film has told you this without a single line of exposition.

Compare what a competent version of this film would have done. It would have shown us Denton, then revealed the studio — a twist, a rug-pull, a moment. Sharman declines the reveal entirely. The condition is the opening state, permanent and unremarked, and the residents of Denton have no more concept of a life outside broadcast than a fish has of dry land. That is a far more frightening proposition than a twist, and it is why the film has aged into prophecy while its contemporaries aged into camp.

The songs support it. O’Brien’s score here is tighter and more varied than Rocky Horror’s, which is a claim that annoys people and which I will defend: “Bitchin’ in the Kitchen” is a domestic argument staged as a kitchen-appliance number, “Denton USA” is a civic anthem performed with the glazed enthusiasm of a jingle, and “Look What I Did to My Id” is a genuinely clever piece of writing about the language of therapy being sold back to you as entertainment. The melodies are stronger. What they lack is a “Time Warp”, and that absence turns out to be fatal for reasons that have nothing to do with quality.

The one piece of casting that pays off completely is De Young in two parts, and the film uses it structurally. Brad and Farley are never on screen together for most of the picture, which in 1981 was a technical necessity as much as a choice, and Sharman turns the necessity into dread: the town is run by a man who looks exactly like the patient it has locked up, and nobody in Denton remarks on it. The resemblance is invisible to everyone except the audience. That is a properly unsettling idea about television — the face is interchangeable, the slot is what matters, and a population that consumes people as content has stopped being able to tell them apart.

The real ancestor

The Rocky Horror comparison is a trap. Shock Treatment descends from Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, from 1957, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

Kazan’s film takes a drifter, puts him on the radio, discovers that the American public will follow a folksy voice anywhere, and watches him metastasise into a demagogue with a sponsor. It is the founding text of the argument that broadcast media manufactures the society it claims to be reporting on, and that the manufacturing is paid for by advertisers. Shock Treatment takes that thesis and skips to the end state. Kazan’s film asks what happens when a man captures television. O’Brien and Sharman answer it: eventually there is no town left outside the studio, no citizen who is not either performing or in the audience, and the sponsor owns the whole of civic life, including the hospital and the marriages.

The sibling, meanwhile, is Phantom of the Paradise, and the connection is not speculative — Jessica Harper is in both. She played Phoenix for De Palma in 1974, the singer swallowed by a media machine that turns her into product, and seven years later she plays Janet, the housewife groomed into a star by a network that owns her town. It is the same role at a different point on the curve, and Harper is superb in both. Run them as a double bill and you have the most complete account of the entertainment industry as a digestive system that American cinema produced in the 1970s and 80s.

There is a third relative worth naming for the completists, and it is Network, from 1976, which supplies the missing middle term. Chayefsky’s film is about the moment a broadcaster works out that a man’s breakdown rates better than the news, and it stops just short of the conclusion Shock Treatment reaches five years later — that once the breakdown rates, the network will start commissioning them. Dentonvale is a hospital run as a game show. That is Network’s discovery turned into a scheduling department.

The case against

The film does not work as an experience, and the reason is structural rather than qualitative.

Rocky Horror survives because it built a ritual — the audience has a part, the film has gaps for the audience to fill, and the midnight movie requires a crowd to complete it. Shock Treatment forecloses that completely. Its audience is already in the film. Denton’s population sits in the stands watching Brad and Janet, which means a cinema audience watching Shock Treatment is watching an audience, and there is no seat left for them to occupy. The film is a closed loop. It cannot be participated in, because participation is its subject.

That is an interesting failure and it is still a failure. Nobody throws rice at Shock Treatment because the film has already thrown it.

The lesser complaints are real too. De Young is not strong enough to make Brad matter, which unbalances a film that needs its ordinary man to be an anchor. The plot is thin and knows it, coasting for a stretch of the middle on production design and songs. And the tone is oddly cold — Rocky Horror was a warm film about liberation wearing a horror costume, and this is a chilly film about capture, which is precisely why the same audience did not follow it.

The verdict

It is the most underrated musical of the 1980s and one of the few genuinely prophetic films of the decade, and it is also not much fun, and both things are true simultaneously. Everything it says about television, sponsorship and the manufacture of ordinary people into content arrived twenty years early and has since become the ordinary condition of life. That is worth a great deal more than the affection it never got.

Go in expecting the argument rather than the party. Chase it with A Face in the Crowd for the origin, or with Forbidden Zone if what you want is the other 1980-vintage musical made by people who did not care whether you followed. It is on disc, and the score is worth the volume.

Spoilers below

Farley Flavors is Brad’s twin brother, separated at birth, and De Young has been playing both halves of a single grievance the entire film. The takeover of Denton is a family matter — a man buying an entire town’s reality in order to dismantle the brother who got the life he was denied, with the machinery of broadcast simply the tool nearest to hand.

Janet’s arc is the sharper knife. She is made a star, and the film lets her enjoy it, and the enjoyment is genuine — she is better at being a product than being a wife, and the film has the nerve to admit that the transformation delivers something the marriage never did. The critique is aimed at the machine that offers her only these two positions.

The escape at the end is muted by design. Brad, Janet and the handful of characters who have retained a self get out of the studio, and Farley keeps Denton. There is no triumph and no restoration. The town stays on air with a new star, the audience stays in its seats, and the people who leave lose the only world they have ever had in exchange for the privilege of being unobserved.

Watching that in 1981 you would call it satire. Watching it now it plays as documentary with better songs, and the film’s real distinction is that it never once treats the studio as an aberration. Denton was always a set. The only thing Farley changed was the sponsor.