Further, the words "Damn it, Janet" are seen as an immortal part of cinematic history.
#Damn it or dammit movie#
The song is considered to be one of the top "heartfelt" movie moments. They spin the white flower arrangements around to show that they are black on the other side, and a casket is carried in and placed in front of them just as Brad and Janet kiss. As the number progresses, we follow the couple into the church while the caretaker and staff begin to prepare for a funeral. The back-up throughout the stage play was a cast of "chorus" singers credited as "Phantoms". He professes his love with metaphors of deep rivers and the future, all accompanied by the church staff dressed exactly as characters from the classic painting American Gothic by Grant Wood. In musical rhythm, he tells Janet that he really loves "the skillful way" she beat the other girls to the bride's bouquet. Janet awaits, clutching the bridal bouquet she just caught. Brad and Janet stand on opposite sides of the screen with the cemetery in the background and the billboard far in the back, but directly between each character as the song begins.īeginning in an awkward and uncertain proclamation by Brad that he "Has something to say". It depicts a large heart with an arrow through it with the words, "Denton, the Home of Happiness". The original film script refers to it as the Denton Catholic Church, but as seen in the final film, it is the Denton Episcopal Church.Ī notable aspect of the film production for this number is the cemetery next to the church with a billboard in the distance for comical effect.
For the film, the exterior location was an American-style small-town church. Act One, Scene 1 opens directly on Brad and Janet as they are waving goodbye to newly wedded friends Ralph and Betty Hapschatt. "Dammit Janet" is the second number in the stage production following the prologue, and is performed as a duet. JSTOR ( June 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message).
Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. The music for the song exaggerates the Rock-N-Roll tendency to repeat simple chord progressions. The song is an awkward musical marriage proposal by Brad to Janet, after both have attended the wedding of two high school friends, just before setting off to visit their high school science teacher. Costumes for the two characters in this scene are nearly identical to those of the two main characters from the film What's Up, Doc? (1972). Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum in the book, Midnight Movies. Pearson and Philip Simpson in their book, Critical Dictionary of Film and Television Theory, as well as J. Several comparisons of Rocky Horror with Night of the Living Dead have been made by authors such as Roberta E. The scene is reminiscent of the opening scene of the horror classic Night of the Living Dead (1968). The song is performed in this deliberate awkwardness, setting up the characters as naive and innocent. Brad and Janet are portrayed as sexually uptight. In the motion picture, a repressive Gothic setting, backs up the young couple in their chorus with the American Gothic characters themselves. The opposite effect is shown with goddamn, which is correspondingly more common than goddam.The first scene of both the stage production and film open to a wedding scene with the two main characters, Brad Majors and Janet Weiss, in attendance. To avoid this, people have dropped the -n from the spelling, resulting in dammit.
As one word, damnit looks like the /n/ should be pronounced. (If contemnation is a word, then it also has the /n/ pronounced.)Īs two words, damn it has -n in the spelling but not in the pronunciation. Although the -n is silent in the basic English words, it reappears (or re-sounds) in autumnal, columnar, damnation, condemnation, hymnal and solemnise. They are all derived from longer Latin words: autumnus, columna, damnare/ damnum, hymnus and solemnis (and contemnere and illuminare), in all of which the /n/ is pronounced. (There is also the rare contemn and limn and the very rare dislimn.)īy themselves, they all have in common a silent /n/. I have no idea why I investigated this.ĭamn is one of six common words ending with – mn: a utumn, column, damn, condemn, hymn and solemn. Of the relative occurrence of damnit and dammit. While I was reviewing old files, I found this screen shot