The Rocky Horror Picture Showas Quintessential Fantasy Story

'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' (RHPS), a cult-classic film best known for blowing audience's minds with its enthusiastic celebration of sexual extravagance, is actually quite traditional in some ways. It succeeds as a film because it contains all the characteristics of a model fantasy.

First, it grounds us by supplying heroes that we can identify with. In the midst of all the oddity of a fantasy, the viewer needs some people that he or she can understand and sympathize with. Hence the protagonists Brad and Janet (Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon, respectively), who are just as nonplused as we would be if we discovered a swarm of paraphiliacs...and just as thrilled as we might be if we got introduced to sex in such a razzmatazz way. Hence also the antagonist Frank (Tim Curry). 

He acts as flamboyant and uninhibited as a lot of us would like to (though not necessarily with the same accouterments), and he's entirely happy with the way he is. I'm not saying that everyone wants to be a dead cross-dressing alien, but I think that people can understand even him because they've got something squashed inside them that would like to be that self-expressive and happy about it.

Second, the film expertly portrays an invasion of the bizarre, as represented by the sexually omnivorous Frank N. Furter and his alien minions, into the realm of the normal, our uninteresting heroes Brad and Janet. Fantasy is about the shattering of reality. The reality can be this world, as it is in 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show,' or even an imaginary one. 

Either way, this reality must be completely ordinary and unexceptional. In the extreme, it is as laughably dull as Brad and Janet. When the unreal elements explode onto the screen, the viewer and the characters are caught up in them because they are so different.