Phantom and the "Usions"

Richard and I went to The Phantom of the Opera the other night. Richard saw a Calgary production years ago and fell in love with it; I read the novel many years ago and fell in love with the story. (Wouldn't it rock to wander the gaslit hallways of a labrynthine old opera house?) It was a beautiful, surreal, and romantic movie that awed us both. (Richard: "That was f***ing ACE.") Music still sucks, though. Sorry. It just does. I'm no fan of musicals. (It's odd that two of my favorite movies became musicals in the past few years: The Producers and Hairspray)

What I most love about the film version of Phantom is that layer by layer, the supernatural elements of the story are ripped away until we are left with a completely human story of denial and love. At the beginning of the movie, the massive chandelier that crashed into the audience of the Paris opera house is sold at auction as "Lot 666". This is ironic in a story that lays bare the double "usions" of supernatural evil: delusion and illusion. Christine, the phantom's protegee, deludedly believes him to be the "angel of music", sent to her from Heaven by her deceased father. The opera-goers take the phantom's legerdemain - his trapdoors, funhouse mirrors, and accoustical tricks - to be supernatural in origin. Yet the phantom is neither angel nor demon; he is an astoundingly intelligent, gifted man who has been driven underground - literally - by the public derision that his facial deformity elicits. The superstitions of everyone in the opera house allow him to extort money and terrorize performers, for they are deluded enough to believe he really is a phantom, a malicious ghost or devil. Theatre is illusion - so too is the realm of the Phantom. He is entirely of this world, however. As a child, he was deprived and battered, put on display in a sideshow, and forced to hide in the tunnels beneath the opera house. Suddenly, we are faced with an icky truth: People created the evil. The Phantom's evil deeds are facilitated not by Satanic forces, but by levers and hidden passageways. The Phantom is neither a villain nor a Caliban - he is an uneven mixture of both, as we all are in our souls.

The only big omission in Phantom, I think, was the failure to use the Phantom's real name: Erik. His name would highlight the "usions" even more. But, altogether, a fine film.

In Christine's place, I would have chosen Erik over the Vicomte. I'd be way more interested in a dark genius who lives underground, composing music and creating automatons, than I would be in some mincing dude who just spends his parents' money.