ALW!Erik: *twirls cape* let me show you my humble abode, my sweet *unravels millions of candles, showers her with expensive presents, shows her a michael angelo painting of her* all for you, my angel
Leroux!Erik:
*trips on boxes of presents* *slithers into a sea of flowers* *sweats and quivers* *wheezes nervously like a cat* *trying hard not to cry* hai
I think its so interesting how, in almost every adaption of Phantom I can thin of the ~Lair~ is always dark and mysterious. I’m especially thinking of the 2004 movie, with the Sex Grotto decor, but the ALW musical is that way too, with all the floating candles. Charles Dance/Y-K has the magical ~world~ complete with a giant forest for some reason (MASSIVE DOWNGRADE from the less literal torture forest) etc etc
Because like– what Christine finds so bizarre and off-putting about the little house on the lake in Leroux is how normal it is. She’s traveled through her mirror, through the strange, jumbled world of the cellars, past the furnaces fed by demons (I think you are more than en peu myope girl), been rowed across a Stygian lake by her own grim Charon, and winds up in this perfectly normal little house, complete with a matching set of ugly furniture (which is hilarious because I’m sure the Louis-Philippe room is full of gorgeous antiques, but by Christine’s “contemporary” tastes…)
But anyway, the normality– maybe even the banality– of Erik’s house is such a crucial part of the story. So many strange and terrible things happen in what might otherwise be a very sweet little house, if it wasn’t bizarrely located under an Opera house and didn’t have a torture chamber. The contrast between this very conventional space in a ~world of dreams~ is one of many extreme contrasts in the story, especially regarding Erik– his beautiful voice coupled with his repulsive face, his cruelty compared to his real potential for kindness, etc. It also says a lot about the nature of the horror of the story– its not the realm of the fantastical, but the real world that’s full of monsters.
But most importantly, the house on the lake says the most about what Erik wants. He’s built literal palaces and temples to music, but what he builds for himself is a very normal, quaint house– even modeling it (at least furniture wise) on his childhood home which, though desperately unhappy, was the only one he ever knew.
TL;DR I don’t know why directors don’t take advantage of this in their adaptions, its easy visual shorthand for the Big Ideas that power the story. Ugly furniture adaption 2k16
I think one of the reasons I love The Phantom of the Opera so much (let’s specifically point this at Leroux and ALW), is that it fulfills the Gothic ideal of “pure innocent young woman meets and is influenced by dark, mysterious stranger,” but SHE IS NOT RUINED BY HIM. it’s so incredibly important to me, because Christine emerges intact. Christine is the strength and compassion and heart of the whole thing, dressed up like the fragile ingenue. the fear and manipulation she endures does not warp her heart or undermine her resolution. most of the time, those arcs consume the heroine in some way, but not Christine. she may shed some of her innocence, but she serves as the salvation of the story through her forgiveness and her sympathetic heart, and it’s so valuable that she exists.
(I hope you don’t mind me adding to this!)
YES I agree with the above!
ALSO: Unlike many other Gothic tales, it’s not your usual “purity vs corruption, good vs evil etc” trope (as in Dracula). Christine, in all her goodness, does contrast Erik’s darkness and insanity, but she doesn’t save the day by rejecting or overpowering him in the traditional sense, but by showing him kindness, by offering to stay with him. That’s the absolute beauty of this character, that she is able to feel compassion even for the one who least deserves it (because while I pity Erik, he was beyond forgiveness at the point tbh).
This could so easily have been a story in which Christine whimpers and cries, Erik is a boring Gothic-villain stereotype and Raoul saves the day, but what it is is just so much better.
God I love this book.
This is such a perfect addition (and more intellectually rooted in the text, which I thank you for, because I was honestly just bursting with love for her when I scribbled this out last night, but that overwhelmed my ability to really construct what I wanted to say, and you hit it exactly). It isn’t about defeat. It isn’t about destroying Erik (who, yes, is pitiable and tragic, but most assuredly beyond forgiveness), it’s about Christine having such a capacity for compassion and empathy that she draws back out the humanity in him, enough that he can let her go, even when she gives him what he desires by offering to stay. He expects her to cry, to protest and collapse, so that he may use it as an excuse to punish everyone, but instead, she astonishes him, she selflessly consents, in order to save everyone else from a terrible fate. It changes everything (Erik actually ADMITS that he goes from seeing her as dead to seeing her as living, as sincere and good). She treats him like a person (”I tore off my mask…and she did not run away!”), something he does not anticipate, and it allows him to extend some measure of grace back to her, not only through freeing she and Raoul, but in acknowledging her agency and her right to live. She remains resolute, and gentle, and walks in the light. Her kindness is the salvation of them all. “saved by the sublime devotion of Christine Daae.”
I’m not crying you are
daroga: I’m erik’s emergency contact
nurse: so you’re here to pick him up?
daroga: i’m here to be removed as his emergency contact
it is i
*tries to twirl cape seductively but trips and falls down the stairs*
the ghost man
The Phantom’s story works…due to one simple fact: Christine doesn’t love the Phantom. Throughout both the novel and the musical, she sees the Phantom as a guardian spirit, her “Angel of Music”, more akin to a mentor and father figure than a romantic interest. Her romantic feelings are only awakened by the return of her childhood sweetheart, Raoul, and the ensuing conflict stems from their inability to reciprocate their affections due to the Phantom’s influence. Whether Raoul is an appealing or interesting character is beside the point–she loves him, and not Erik. Despite his obsession with her, he’s a father figure at best, an abusive psychological tormentor at worst. Christine admires the man for his musical genius, pities the tragedy that forced him to such violent desperation, but fears the lengths he’ll undergo to win her.
While she does appear somewhat open to his seductions in “Music of the Night”, there’s never a doubt she’ll choose Raoul over him. Her attraction to him is not romantic or sexual, but rather admiration of his musical ability, and pity for the disfigurement that ruined his life and distorted his character. Erik, again, is a mentor, a father figure (albeit in a twisted sort of way, using her love for her father to manipulate her), Raoul her childhood sweetheart, a man her own age who proves he loves and cares for her on multiple occasions, not the least in risking death to free her from the Phantom’s clutches. Considering Erik has lied to her, impersonated her father in order to seduce her, murdered innocent people and kidnapped her twice, it’s no real surprise that in the end she refuses to succumb to him, instead stepping out from his shadow and regaining her own agency.
Phantom of the Opera and the Problem of “Shipping” by Allie Dawson [x]
This article isn’t without its flaws (and of course people are going to ship what they want regardless of canon), but I loved seeing this stated in plain, unequivocal black-and-white since everyone and their brother (ALW included) romanticizes the heck out of Erik and his behavior and pretends like Christine, the young woman whom he manipulates, terrorizes, and victimizes regularly for years, somehow “belongs” with him romantically. tl;dr I think this article makes some solid arguments about Phantom as a story, particularly the nature of love and both Christine and Erik’s arcs in said story.
(via peremadeleine)
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the Leroux novel and canonically we need to recognize both Christine and the Daroga as saintly heroes for resisting the urge to just . …… repeatedly deck Erik in the face
Repeatedly
ruin him
*Raoul in a Mortal Kombat voice* Finish Him
Jesus Phantom is what happens when someone decides ALW PotO ~isn’t Christian enough~, so they write their own musical in which Philippe is God and Raoul is Jesus and the Phantom is Satan and there’s some really uncomfortable subtext about submitting to what your boyfriend thinks is best even if it means giving up the music that you love so much. And also there’s an opera of Goldilocks & the Three Bears.
That, my dear anon, is one of the great unsolved mysteries of ALW Phantom.
I mean, assuming that you’re asking why there’s a monkey music box *at all*.
If you’re just wondering why it’s in the Prologue, it’s because it belonged to the Phantom and was found in his lair by the mob, to eventually end up in the auction of old stuff from the Opera’s storage rooms. And then old!Raoul bought it because he remembered Christine talking about it in one of her stories of the Phantom.
But, as for the actual *presence in the Phantom’s lair* of a music box in the shape of a barrel organ with an attached figure of a monkey playing the cymbals–your guess is pretty much as good as mine.
If we’re talking about the 2004 movie, it’s really straightforward: in the movie, the Phantom had a stuffed toy of a monkey with cymbals while he was imprisoned/exhibited as a child (probably an item that he got by chance after it was discarded by someone else), and seems to have upgraded to a more deluxe model after moving into the Opera house. But this applies only to the movie, as there is no mention of the Phantom in the stage musical having had any such toy, and he was imprisoned *as an adult*.
Some people think that the music box is meant to symbolize the character of the Persian Daroga, who was extremely important in the original book but deleted from the musical/combined with Madame Giry. This is mainly due to the description of the monkey as wearing ‘Persian robes’, and the fact that it’s apparently a ‘friend’ to the Phantom. I’m not a fan of this theory because it seems like an extremely arbitrary way to reference a character that ALW doesn’t seem to have given a second thought for.
I have a ~kind of/sort of~ theory of my own, the basis of it being that perhaps ‘Masquerade’ could be a bit more diegetic than we tend to think of it as. In this scenario, then, the Phantom has heard and is familiar with this song about masks and hiding ones face, and has latched onto it in an ironic sort of way (like how Leroux!Erik internalizes the whole ‘living corpse’ thing, to the point that he sleeps in a coffin). So then he finds this music box that plays his ‘favourite’ song (and happens to have a monkey on it–cymbal-playing monkeys being a cliche sort of automaton), and takes it home to his lair so he can listen to it whenever he wants to. (Yeah, there’s still holes in this theory, but it makes as much sense as anything else I’ve been able to come up with about the music box.)
I would really like to know what ALW/Hal Prince/Maria Bjornson/whoever’s idea it was actually *intended* with the music box/monkey, but as far as I know no one has ever said anything about it?
There’s also the mystery of why it starts playing by itself at opportune moments, apparently of its own volition (unless the Phantom *wanted* Christine to wake up and unmask him while he was busy composing). I wonder how many times that thing went off by itself and almost gave old!Raoul a heart attack. Maybe the REAL Opera Ghost is *inside* the music box: perhaps it’s possessed by the disgruntled spirit of the Daroga, angrily clinking his tiny cymbals and demanding that people stop cutting his role from the story. The world may never know.
i’ve got a number of Opinions regarding the ALW musical as an adaptation of the novel but tbh for me like 85% of raoul’s charm in the book comes from the fact that he’s so unabashedly Caring and earnest in trying to help christine *despite the fact* that honestly he’s completely incompetent.
like homeboy’s kind of a hot mess, emotions all over the place. never really knows what he’s doing/what’s going on but that never detracts from the fact that he’s always putting in 100% effort to help the people he cares about
and i mean i could write a dissertation on the oversimplification and character flattening from book to stage, but yeah i’m eternally pissed that SOMEONE made the executive decision to reduce this wonderful, loving, emotional, complex, inept, lovable dork into Generic Love Interest Man Who Mostly Exists as a Plot Device and is Heroic Despite Never Actually Doing Anything
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 