The streets may still be lined with garish pumpkins, cobwebs and orange trash bags, but Halloween is over. And a new episode of Glee is on tonight.
Yet last week's disquieting tribute to Rocky Horror Picture Show - the longest running (35 years and counting) motion picture release in the history of film - still gives one pause, in the manner of "a very special Blossom."
What was very special about Glee's take on Rocky Horror?
Primarily, it was a rehearsal, as Glee's creator, Ryan Murphy, is said to be the director of a rumoured remake of Rocky Horror. But the rehearsal revealed why this aesthetic curiosity resists interpretation, modernization and even heartfelt mimicry.
Released in 1975, Australian director Jim Sharman's parody of cult horror and sci-fi films is based on an English stage play, and its libertarianism and gruesome bleakness nicely parallel the state of cinema in America at the time. In 1975, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dog Day Afternoon and The Stepford Wives were released, sinister films about outsiders and the abuse of power
In England, Tommy - the Who's decadent nightmare film set after the Second World War - also appeared in 1975, exhibiting a different, still-grotesque, slant on the after-effects of Vietnam, Watergate and the Sexual Revolution that was both liberating and exceedingly hectic.
Rocky Horror's Riff Raff seems to be addressing the latter state of the revolution when he informs the fallen "sweet transvestite," Frank-N-Furter: "Your mission is a failure, your lifestyle's too extreme."
The musical almost immediately gained its own cult status in North America. Ingeniously marketed as a Midnight Movie, the kind which guarantees an alternative, even appalling audience, it would only be a short time before the film began its dialogue with the audience, a dialogue that continues to this day.
Those of you familiar with the film, with having seen it in a theatre, are aware of the ritualized call-and-response that goes on - of the umbrellas opening, the toast and confetti chucking, and the general mayhem of costumed observers performing below the screen.
I first saw the movie at the Seville in Montreal, and while I had no idea what was going on, I was overwhelmed.
I would see it again at Toronto's Eaton Centre in the 1980s. I took my little sister and her friend to a matinee where a handful of people haphazardly mumbled dialogue and a man in fatigues and an army-issue haircut screamed, throughout, at the hapless Janet: "Disgusting whore! Bad whore! Whorish whore!"
What had gone wrong?
The new Glee explains somewhat.
Roundly criticized on The Huffington Post for being an attempt to "send America back to the pre-1970s era mores that Rocky Horror critiqued," the episode did defang the often sexy, positively wanton-in-its-day, hotly LBGT original.
And it was odd, given how earnestly the TV show defends otherness.
But does it? What is defended, through the wheelchair Gleek, the mentally challenged cheerleader and the speech-making jock-dad (whose son is gay) is a democratic world view that, in the 1970s, would have been relegated to PSAs and episodes of The Electric Company.
Keep in mind that one of Glee's central characters is an attractive, styling gay teen who has never been kissed. How is this possible?
It is possible because the show, for satirical purposes or otherwise, is about feel-good transgression, not the kind of "dirty and sweet" (to cite the true Lady Stardust, Marc Bolan) civil and sexual disobedience that ushered in the 1970s - namely, through a horde of enraged, gorgeous rioting queers in Greenwich Village.
And Rocky Horror, like Jaws (also released in '75), only made straight (in every sense) people scared to venture into the waters of sexual diversity.
This homage to American iconography is a mess. The lyrics to the title song - to most of them - are obtuse ("Dana Andrews said prunes gave him the runes/And passing them used lots of skills"); the iconic singing lips merely borrow from Mick Jagger's/The Stones', as if announcing the inverted tribute that shall unfold.
If Glee's neutering of Rocky speaks to a newly conservative culture, it speaks just as clearly to the film's specific place in another time.
Transsexual Transylvania - just another name for the wild frontier that was the 1970s - was inhabiting this decade, sometimes in riotous movie houses, sometimes as a woman or a man, as neither or as both.