In the land of Spanish moss and wrought iron, the Garden District of New Orleans is home to some of the finest mansions money can buy. Our class walked along Prytania Street, escaping the heat of the sun beneath the canopies of live oaks, admiring the lavish homes. But beneath our amazement was an undercurrent of disgust—just who the hell could afford to live here?
A Garden District mansion on the corner of Prytania and Fourth. Aunt Emily lives on Prytania Street in the novel.
Our promenade around the Garden District introduced us to the contemporary genteel lifestyle presented in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. The novel follows Binx Bolling, a stockbroker living in the humdrum suburb of Gentilly, as he navigates life, love, and movies while on “the search” for greater significance. More concerned with making money and his pursuit of the “big happiness” found in film than with the day-to-day moments that make up a life, Binx struggles to stave off his ever-present malaise. He alienates himself from the people around him, including his Aunt Emily, a wealthy woman living in the Garden District and the last line of defense for an old set of white upper-class values. As part of our Bookpacking experience, we drove through Binx’s neighborhood in Gentilly and ambled along Aunt Emily’s street in the Garden District. But never did I feel closer to Binx than when I engaged in his favorite, titular activity—moviegoing.
A poster for The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
Late Saturday night, we attended a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, complete with a full shadow cast and a complementary prop kit. Dressed up in the best costumes we could improvise out of our suitcases, we waited outside the Prytania Theater, a historic single-screen movie theater in the Garden District, amidst the stately gated manors and magnolias. The line went down the block, and the excitement of the crowd was unignorable—the theater received a noise complaint before the midnight show even began from an unhappy neighbor (possibly Aunt Emily, but I can’t be certain).
This theater is not only located on the same street as Aunt Emily’s uptown mansion in The Moviegoer, it is also one of Ignatius’s frequent haunts in A Confederacy of Dunces, where he eagerly goes to heckle each and every film. As our show began with a troupe of ambiguously-gendered strippers dancing to the opening credits, it was impossible not to imagine Ignatius sitting with us, sputtering his offense at the crossdressing and erotic theatrics he paid to see.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show offered a perfect case study in the difference between license and licentiousness. Here we were, in a famous movie theater in the middle of the wealthiest Old Money 'burb in New Orleans, watching a well-organized community theater performance; all of this is perfectly conventional. Simultaneously, perhaps the very reason Rocky Horror remains such a pop culture staple is because of its licentiousness, the bawdy, campy ways it sprints beyond the boundaries of what is “allowed” in society—especially for the time the film was made.
Released in 1975, Rocky Horror came out smack-dab in the middle of the Gay Liberation Movement, when “homosexual activity” was still illegal in most states. Its depiction of Dr. Frank N. Furter, the “transsexual” mad scientist, and his gang of weirdos singing along to a musical soundtrack and having various bisexual dalliances was, and continues to be, mind-blowing. Even in 2023, I’ve never seen anything quite like Rocky Horror in terms of its unapologetically perverse, rip-roaring representation of queerness; I can’t even begin to imagine how it felt to experience this film for the first time in 1975.
Sitting in that theater, exhilarated and vindicated, even amid my emotional experience Binx’s voice crept back into my mind. I couldn’t help but question myself: am I waiting to see myself on screen to give me permission to be myself? What an insecure way to live. How disloyal to myself, how removed from the flesh-and-blood reality of life. The Moviegoer pinpoints this “phenomenon of moviegoing” which Binx calls certification:
“Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.
”
Binx refers to certification of place, but his theory applies to many of the ways in which people seek validation of their significance through film. Without seeing yourself on the big screen—whether that “self” means a character living in your neighborhood, a character in your community, or a character who looks and acts like you—you are unable to fully embrace the romantic potential of your life. Certification relies on film to be the arbiter of personal meaning; if your story is not told in the movies, your story is not a story at all, but a mundane afterthought. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy of alienation from community, from other people, from the significance of day-to-day real life.
The lead actor playing Dr. Frank N. Furter introduces the shadow cast, from the theater company “The Well Hung Speakers.”
However, Binx’s critique of “certification” is not as universal as it may seem; for marginalized people, seeing themselves represented in media is impactful far beyond the sense of distinction Binx describes. For underrepresented groups like the queer community, “certification” begins on the basic level of validating our very existence. It is more than just a matter of elevating one’s neighborhood to the status of “Somewhere,” a setting where great narratives can take place. Rather, film representation becomes a profound recognition that queerness simply exists alongside straightness, part of the diverse fabric of reality that informs the stories we tell. Queer representation must first establish existence before it can begin to combat negative representation, let alone certify that one’s life experiences are romanticizable and movie-worthy. For marginalized groups, “certification” responds to preexisting alienation rather than perpetuating it.
The power of queer art is demonstrated in Rocky Horror’s sheer longevity, as it is now considered the longest-running theatrical release in history. In any era, to see one’s own community represented without apology is emotionally impactful—let alone such an unabashedly raunchy, sexual, un-sanitized portrayal during a time like the 1970s when anti-sodomy laws still criminalized gay sex. Rocky Horror depicts queer people as full of life and magic, as transgressively powerful, as desirous and desirable and desired. And that’s even before you get to the shadow cast—a group of visibly queer performers having the time of their lives! Watching it I felt a connection to those first moviegoers in the 1970s, the intervening decades melting away. But even beyond what I imagined to be shared feelings of excitement and healing, the 21st century is still not so dissimilar from the 1970s as we’d like to think.
A map tracking the relative severity of anti-trans legislation across the United States as of May 20th, 2023. Created by independent journalist Erin Reed. At the time of the performance, we cheered for the fact that Louisiana narrowly voted down a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, thanks to Republican Senator Fred Mills breaking party lines and voting against the bill. However, as of June 1st, the bill has been resurrected in a different Senate committee—a rare move that gives this already-defeated bill a second chance.
A map tracking bans on drag performance specifically, as of May 30th, 2023. Created by independent journalist Erin Reed. These laws criminalize Rocky Horror shadow cast performances like the one we saw.
Before the show began, the director stepped on stage to inform us that the performance we were about to see would now be considered illegal in several states. Due to a wave of transphobia and anti-drag fearmongering, over the past year discriminatory laws targeting transgender people and drag performance seek to criminalize “male or female impersonators” across the country. Bigots conflate transgender identity with drag performance and consider both a “threat” to the children, and the resulting culture war catastrophe means that the longstanding tradition of the Rocky Horror shadow cast—a ticketed performance without nudity—is illegal just nextdoor to Louisiana (whereas heterosexual strip clubs remain perfectly legal). The line between license and licentiousness is never fixed, and we are witnessing a movement to redraw that line to further demonize an already deeply marginalized community.
No matter the social and emotional importance of representation, political solidarity requires more than consuming entertainment. This was the crux of the director’s message, even as we were encouraged to celebrate and revel in the performance’s queerness. It echoes The Moviegoer by expressing the limitations of seeking liberation through “certification.” Binx does not escape his malaise through the validation of the movies, and in fact his search for personal significance to rival fiction draws him further away from the most fulfilling aspects of real life. The Moviegoer tells us that daily life can’t be a constant sequence of “big moments,” of sweeping cinematic climaxes set to a swelling orchestral score. Just as Binx must invest in “the Little Way,” so too must we as an audience divert our attention back to the true human connection that underpins it all, forming the basis for the beauty and the progress of the queer community.
“It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.
”
A haphazard mirror selfie with friends, just before leaving for the show.
Nonetheless, the line between “moviegoing”—the mediated, alienated mode of experience Walker Percy describes—and “real life” is not so cut-and-dry. When we stepped foot into the Prytania Theater to watch Rocky Horror, that was real life. I enjoyed it not just because of the complex feelings of validation and certification it inspired, but in “the Little Way” too. The show was titillating and funny and entertaining, goddammit. I was sitting amongst my friends and classmates, dressed to the nines and brimming with laughter, engaged in the present moment. It reminded me of the people I love.
When the newlyweds arrived on screen, on cue, the entire audience started flinging rice across the theater. It got in my hair and my clothes and my shoes and I was still shaking it out by the time I left the Garden District and returned to my hotel room, exhausted and content.
The feeling of those little grains of rice—that is “the Little Way.” That is a simple thing worth living for.