Reality TV feeds off itself
As controversial sextuplet mother (her sextuplets are not controversial; the mother is) Kate Gosselin and most recent Bachelor Jake Pavelka graduate from their respective shows to appearances on the newest “Dancing With the Stars,” (are you still with me, guys and gals?) premiering next Monday, TLC announces the Gosselin’s replacement: “Quintuplet Surprise,” featuring the Jones’, parents of (you guessed it) quintuplets.
That was a mouthful, wasn’t it?
Makes Richard O’Brian (author of Rocky Horror Picture show & Shock Treatment) prescient…
actually his stories tell the tale of the long walk through the culture
your blinded by romance (sexualization)
your blinded by science (scientific socialism)
your condition is cryptically grave (crisis)
even the title is about dialoging to consensus
however, the part that is relevent is that in the early days, covered by rocky horror, they had to break the moral backs of that generation by unleashing sex and the social problems.
shock treatement reflects the later efforts after such things are normalized, and predicts that TV becomes reality… brad who represents MALE society, is drugged up, bound up, and made a helpless “mental cripple”. while Janet who represents FEMALE society, abandons her mate, gets hip with sex, and completly re does female sensibility into the ME OF ME…
and all this happens as REALITY TV plays out…
The idea of a town as one large TV studio was far more unusual in 1981, when reality TV had not yet hit the ascendancy it found in later years.
rocky was about what they did to your parents
shock treatment was what they were doing to you
for those who want to know what would happen later in the installment that would cover now… well, one can only pick up the hints in the original movie that behind all this are other forces at play…
by the way…
for fun…
in the movie 1984, Richard Burton plays Party leader O’brien.
Richard O’brien
[and before you say that his name, his name is Richard Timothy Smith]
there are LOTS of other word games in the movies, but 99% of fans have no idea of that stuff outside their resonanic experiences.
but Frank N Furter… was the Frankfurt school
and it shows that who is in front, are not the leaders but front men being used. behind the scenes where the famous are and such, are a lot of other string pullers.
however Mr Obrien denies having any willful hand in any of it (despite tons of stuff you can point to, including: could they really get franken furter from frankenstein, and not frankfurt school?)
What I think happened there was: yes, I set out to write amusing entertainment, so I think what I did was touch buttons that were deeper rooted. I think Mr. Carl Jung might have had something to say about Rocky and get into the scenario of that, and pull it apart, and deconstruct it and look at the symbolism and look at the psychological motives that were within the piece.
Of course, none of that was intended. So I think what happened was that my subconscious wrote a starchy show and I invested in it so that it’s also other peoples’ (collective) subconscious. I locked into the kind of bigger consciousness somehow and touched areas that people have thought about and kept hidden and hadn’t really expressed. Rocky somehow or other releases that. But any good fairy tale of sorts of does that, truthfully.
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I think perhaps because I didn’t know what I was doing explains some of the success. I’ve seen and met so many people who want to write and what not to do this kind of manipulative work.
thecelebritycafe.com/interviews/richard_obrien.html
and as soon as one progressive thing gets quashed, they start on another.
who knows…
but one thing is certain, like charlie chaplains closed circuit tv in his movies, obrien put things into his work, whether purposeful or not.
what a great title for the period after the 60s
“Look what i did to my Id”
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