In 1950’s science fiction and horror movies, Hollywood used a formula called The Old Dark House as a tool for reinforcing the Cold War fear of Russians and communists. The formula goes: a pair or group of normal audience surrogates would stumble onto a house full of people eventually “othered” as outsiders – e.g. mad scientists, aliens – who need to be destroyed for the good of humanity. The formula was named after James Whale’s 1932 horror comedy about a disparate group of drivers stranded in a thunderstorm who take shelter in a gothic mansion owned by a dysfunctional family. By the 1950s, the formula had become codified in the science fiction and horror genres. In 1955’s This Island Earth, a milquetoast scientist stumbled onto a house full of Earth’s greatest minds…who were actually working for a group of aliens intent on mining Earth’s uranium deposits and then taking over the Earth with their nuclear weaponry. The aliens had to be destroyed.

By 1975, the Vietnam war, the student protesters, the LGBT movement (with its annual protest movements), the civil rights movement, and the sexual revolution had seriously corroded the white hetero milquetoast culture that formed the base of entertainment from the 1950s. In turn, two separate movies were created that reworked the The Old Dark House formula into a love for marginalized Americans. One of those films, Thundercrack!, imagined the weirdos to be a sad alcoholic woman and her monstrously oversexed son who inspired rampant deviant sexuality in its many many visitors. The other, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, imagined the weirdos to be a group of genderbent polysexual aliens from Transsexual, Transylvania, who inspired rampant deviant sexuality a virginal heterosexual whitebread couple.

In the original release, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a cultural critique on America’s history. Brad and Janet were the formula’s whitebread heterosexual couple, newly engaged in the opening scene. The house’s inhabitant, Dr. Frank-N-Furter, was a mad scientist AND alien, and also a genderbent bisexual pervert who just invented a muscle boy to be his sex toy. Instead of merely proving himself to be worthy of destruction, Frank-N-Furter seduced Brad and Janet into his lifestyle by turning the virginal Janet Weiss into a slut and Brad into a cross-dressing bisexual. Frank-N-Furter was the embodiment of society’s hyperbolic Stranger Danger stories about queer sexuality as a recruiter of children. By the end, when Dr. Frank-N-Furter is destroyed, the return to normalcy comes as a bittersweet pill. Though it can be framed as a nostalgic re-imagining of the formula, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was simultaneously a conversation using the past to interrogate the present, and the present to interrogate the past.

Though it was originally a flop, the movie found an extended life as a midnight movie that simultaneously revered and denigrated the experience. People went back week after week to lovingly interact with the film. They would throw things at the screen, make call backs in the dialogue, dress up as the characters, and even re-enact the movie as a shadow cast while the movie was actually playing behind them. The best of the experiences were both loving to the outsider portion of the experience and critical of the movie itself. After all, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a relatively flawed film that still impresses with its cultural complexity and embracing of the outsider.

By the 1990s, the midnight movie experience became legend. In October of 1993, the movie made its television premiere on Fox, complete with its own audience participation shadow cast. This television experience was repeated for a few years on VH1, where the movie would occasionally drop back into the stage performance. Also in the 1990s, the fan club released an audience participation soundtrack dual CD (which didn’t sync up with my VHS copy). Websites sprung up solidifying the participation cues. The whole experience became an intellectual ritual for the weirdos. Though the audience participation was later included on the DVD and enhanced on the blu-ray, the number of theaters participating in The Rocky Horror Picture Show dwindled down.

Last night, Fox aired The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do The Time Warp Again!, a reworking of the original movie (which was based on a stage musical) that acted as nostalgia for the 1990s nostalgia about the 1975 movie that was about the manipulation of our cultural past. Rather than being an original remake of the movie, LDTTWA overamplifies the film to make its points hammerhead obvious. Where the acting in RHPS was stilted, campy, and full of pauses so deep they make William Shatner pregnant with jealousy, the acting in LDDTWA self-consciously overemphasizes both the pauses and the camp. Director Kenny Ortega and his choreographer borrow stagings and dance moves directly from the original film. If Barry Bostwick felt up his leg in Rose Tint My World, so did Ryan McCartan. If Richard O’Brien paused in the middle of a line delivery, Reeve Carney stopped the movie cold.

Not content with merely updating the film, Kenny Ortega haphazardly adds in a meta-context by making the movie a movie-within-a-movie played to an audience in a movie theater. Whenever there’s a notable callback, Ortega cuts back to the audience to deliver the well known…line. Last night’s film is so in debt to both the movie and the nostalgia that it forgets to have a point beyond “Remember The Rocky Horror Picture Show? Remember that it had stage callbacks? Wasn’t that fun?” In other words, LDTTWA misses the point of the original movie on a basic conceptual level.

Simultaneously, last night, I saw a 15th anniversary screening of Third Antenna: A Documentary About The Radical Nature of Drag. Though filmed on a national tour with drag queens from all around American, Third Antenna had a large portion of drag queens in Seattle, many of whom – e.g. Ursula Android, Sylvia O’Stayformore – are still performing today. Seeing the movie 15 years later (with a Q&A featuring the director and several of the stars) is like watching a reunion. It seems almost like an act of nostalgia, but it is also about learning drag history. It’s a sociological document about where drag was in the modern consciousness at the time of its creation (1999-2001).

Seeing these two creations back to back made me wonder about the difference between nostalgia and learning history. What is the difference between “Remember The Goonies? Wasn’t it awesome?” and “You should watch The Lost Boys because it was a cultural landmark for many outsiders at the time”? Learning about history isn’t nostalgia in and of itself, but nostalgia happens when learning the past becomes mindless consumption. Is an empty cultural reference an act of nostalgia? Is nostalgia for its own sake necessarily a bad thing?