TROUBL

MTV is planning on remaking The Rocky Horror Picture Show. MTV? Has the world gone mad? The beauty of Rocky Horror, and most cult classics like it, is it was so far off the beaten path that it was years before anyone saw the beauty in its campy, sequined, sci-fi sensibility. Despite its growing popularity over the years, Rocky Horror is a film still played at midnight in sleazy old theaters to crowds of drunken misfits in drag, screaming obscenities at the actors who pantomime the movie on stage. The movie and the underground culture that it represents are a celebration of all things weird and taboo, from transvestitism to belief in aliens to indoor pool orgies. Its fans wouldn’t have their obsessions presented any other way. It’s a movie about freaks, for freaks who love who they are.

MTV, a juggernaut of mainstream media, seems like the last network on earth that should have any interest, let alone any right, to get its perfectly manicured, expensive-jewelry wearing hands dirty in the makeup-smeared depths of depravity that Rocky Horror represents. At one point in its past, MTV may have represented a counter-culture, rock-and-roll presence, but over its lifetime the network has morphed into a “Great Normalizer,” turning everything it touches from into a confirmed sellout. And now, for some reason, it has decided that Rocky Horror and its cast of miscreants should join the ranks of its overplayed productions, march arm in arm with the cast of The Real World and The Hills. This is simply, fundamentally, all wrong. Rocky Horror has been around longer than MTV and has managed to keep itself firmly entrenched in the shadows as a counter-culture institution, not because it didn’t get enough exposure, but because that’s how its fans like it: creepy and sleazy and glittering from the darkest corners of the American psyche.

Nobody wants to see Hilary Duff grin her way through Susan Sarandon’s role as Janet Weiss, or to watch Zac Efron massacre Tim Curry’s platform-heeled strut, because Rocky Horror’s performers took their roles and did something truly original with them. And originality, it would seem, is a tough thing to pull off these days. In the past few years, the term “original” has become almost the exclusive domain of independent film sector, while mainstream moviemakers have turned more to remakes, re-tellings, and re-releases. Everything from Indiana Jones, Willy Wonka and classic Disney fairy tales have been turned into sequels, remade with more special effects, or written to follow a guaranteed moneymaking formula. Any original film that comes across the mainstream radar on its own merit, like Juno this past year is heralded as a miracle of creativity.

Whatever happened to creativity as the standard? Rocky Horror has been seen as a triumph because it is so outlandish, so tacky, and so weird. Weirdness deserves to be celebrated in today’s climate, where art is measured not by the invention and execution of an original idea, but rather by the ability to take someone else’s idea and squeeze more money out of it. Something that has already made tons of money and holds some sort of sentimental value in the hearts of Americans, and cannot fail to make more money on its next, tired, overplayed outing.

What’s saddest about the remake situation in Hollywood today is not everything seems to be on repeat. It is that the movie-going public continues to eat up the regurgitated, overly computer-enhanced excuses for films that the industry throws our way. We are picking at bones and paying inflated prices to do so. Our favorite stories deserve better from us. They deserve places of respect and nostalgia on the mantles of our memories, not being picked apart by money-hungry Hollywood executives and recast with the hottest actors and latest CG effects. Rocky Horror, one of the lowest budget and most nostalgic films in history, deserves a higher place on our shelves for keeping true to its original, bizarre self for thirty years without losing its originality or its legions of lewd, besotted, late-night followers. It deserves to see someone give MTV a swift kick in the ass for even considering remaking it. I swear, if I even hear rumors of Hannah Montana, Lindsay Lohan, Lauren Conrad, Heidi Montag or any of their teeny bopping entourage coming within miles of this already stinky undertaking, I’m protesting outside TRL. Naked. Rocky Horror deserves nothing less.