The Phantom Project Forum

I have to wonder, because reading over your reviews I notice certain patterns emerging.

You claim to be a wuss who is put off by horror movies, and yet, the versions you've reviewed which emphasise the horror elements of the story tend to get a higher grade than the ones that emphasise the romantic elements of the story.

I note that in your review of the Ken Hill version, you note that the way Hill changed the character to make him even more of a dangerous maniac than before was refreshing, because there is so much published fiction produced in the wake of Andrew Lloyd-Webber's musical that emphasises the romance of the story.

Whilst versions that emphasise the violence and menace of The Phantom's character have got quite positive reviews (like the Englund version), the ones which have chosen to emphasise the romance and turn the Phantom into an entirely sympathetic character have got very negative reviews (like your review of the miniseries or the Spencer musical or the many romance novels on the theme)

"The Phantom Lover" I think is one of the few times you've raved about an adaptation which depicts the Phantom in an entirely sympathetic light. I found this a bit odd, since you criticise many other versions for doing the same things that this version does
(most notably the Kopit/Yeston version - I find it bizarre that you can criticise that version for portraying the Phantom too sympathetically, and yet praise "The Phantom Lover", which portrays him in an even more sympathetic light)

So I have to wonder if exposure to the wider fan community has influenced your views, and in what way?

In the introduction to your review of Argento's film, you talk about how much of a struggle it is to remain true to your own beliefs and not be influenced by the prevailing sentiments of the fan community. The introduction seems to imply you were willing to cut this version a bit more slack because it had already copped a huge beating from the fan community already.
(and I don't envy you having to review such a controversial version, the anti-hype surrounding it must've been overwhelming and it would be so easy to just jump on the hate bandwagon... that said, I still think Argento's film is a steaming pile of crap, and I'm not saying that just because it's trendy to do so, I'm saying it because I actually watched the damn thing...)

As for myself...

I find myself growing more cynical as I grow older and the more I found out about the history of "Phantom" in various media over the years and the fan community at large.

More specifically, I have developed a large resentment towards Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, which enthralled me so much when I was younger and used to be one of my favourite versions.
I still enjoy it, but I dislike the way it gets more attention than all the others, how two of my other faves (Ken Hill and Kopit/Yeston) are made to live in it's shadow and how people talk about it as though it's either absolute perfection or the worst thing in the world - when it's really neither to my mind.

And although I'm open to more romantic interpretations of the character in other media, I'm quite leery and rather disturbed by some of the romantic things people in the fan community have projected onto the original incarnation of the character - things that just were no there, as far as I can see.

I'm curious as to how you feel now, having devoured so much Phantom related paraphenalia - are you becoming cynical or weary of it at all? Are there certain trends and recurring themes that you have become tired of or are elevated to "pet peeves" now?

If it's not too personal a question, I'd be interested to know.

It's possible. I try really hard to stay objective, but of course there's always going to be a tiny element of that influence creeping in. The Phantom story is popular, and that makes it hard to really avoid all mention of it and its versions while still finding useful information on it.

It's no claim on the horror movies, I promise. They really do put me off. Generally, it's because I don't enjoy being scared, and horror movies (at least modern ones) are all about enjoying the rush of adrenaline; also, I have a very hyperactive imagination, and you would not believe the silly things I can work myself into a lather over. It's not exaggeration to say that I've very rarely made it through a horror film without paying for it for at least a couple of weeks to come. I don't like them--but I also recognize that you can make some very thoughtful points with horror, and just because I would never watch it for fun doesn't mean that it doesn't have merit. The reason, I think, that a lot of horror versions get high marks from me is that the Phantom story in its original form is, in my opinion, a horror story--one with many romantic elements and a certain amount of surprising sympathy, but a horror story nonetheless--and I have very seldom encountered versions that omitted that element without losing important parts of the original's ideas. Some horror versions, like the Englund film or the first Argento film, are better at retaining some of the ideas of the original because they're maintaining an aura of fear, I think, and so they tend to come off overall as better interpretations for me sometimes (though definitely not all horror versions--The Meateater, for example, is trash, and there are more than a few print versions like Wellen's short story that just don't do the horror thing well). I guess the question here is why I decided to poke my nose into a horror story when I don't like horror, and I'm not sure what the answer to that is, except that I have much less of a problem with reading horror than with seeing it (though, to be honest, I can get the willies pretty easily over a well-written scary book, too). In short, I think that a lot of horror versions can be excellent films and interpretations of the story, but that won't actually cause me to like them. I might--might--watch the Englund film again at some point, with friends. I probably won't ever watch the first Argento movie again, even though I thought it was a brilliant film.

Conversely, I do dislike a lot of romantic versions, which makes me sad because I'd much rather like them, you know? And there are ones I do like, such as The Phantom Lover or the romance novels Moonlight Masquerade and Masque of the Swan. But I think I so often find a lot of romantic versions grating because, in order to foster that romance and remove the element of horror, they omit a lot of key ideas that devalue the story for me substantially (for example, if Erik's deformity situation is softened, so are all the concomitant themes about ostracization and damnation and nature versus nurture, which are some of the most interesting parts of the novel for me). The reason that a Phantom's sympathetic portrayal may or may not annoy me stems entirely from the reasons it seems to have been done; to use your example, I disliked what I felt was over-sympathizing in the Yeston/Kopit Phantom because, for me, it seemed to minimize and devalue his more "evil" acts and thus weaken the idea of the Phantom as symptomatic of society's misdeeds or representative of an inescapable element of evil within ourselves. On the other hand, since the Phantom in the Chinese version was so far removed from those ideas, he had been assigned different representative roles--as symbolic of the oppression of modernity and freedom by the Chinese government and the dangers of cultural stagnation--he could be as much of a victim as Yu wanted to paint him without losing those ideas that gave his character oomph.

In my opinion, if you want to have a truly insightful and effective version of the story, you need to include both the romance and the horror; I think that the reason I tend to grade horror versions higher is that horror versions almost always retain more elements of romance than vice versa. The Englund film, despite all its gruesome goriness, retained some truly emotional moments; many romantic versions, while they're long on emotion, have completely whitewashed the horror and ignored the ideas it was presenting, and that leaves me very unsatisfied as a reader or viewer. I particularly enjoy the Webber musical because it does a pretty good job of walking that line between including both parts of the story, even if the romance has been developed a bit more overtly than it was in the original novel.

Pet peeves? Hmm. Well, I do have a few that bug me whenever I see them. As I said before, I don't like seeing softening of Erik's deformity, though there are versions that I like that did so; it gives him much less reason for his behavior and mental state, and I have a lot harder a time accepting his character because of it. I also hate the use of blind women to fix the Phantom's pained heart. It's a terrible cop-out, allowing the characters to ride off into the sunset without having to actually deal with the ugliness and grow because of it; additionally, it's often a kind of bandaid to provide the Phantom with a woman just because he "deserves" one, which devalues said woman to the level of prize and reinforces the idea that even psychotic murderer-stalkers deserve prizes if they've had a hard life.

I probably have other peeves--in fact, I'm sure I do--but they're escaping me at the moment. And even those peeves don't necessarily keep me from being able to like a version; The Phantom Lover somehow managed to have a blind chick without making me want to throw things, and there have been several versions of the story with toned-down deformities (including Webber's musical, in fact) that are still on my favorites list. I like to hope that even if a version does something I normally don't like much, I can still appreciate the parts it does well.

The reason, I think, that a lot of horror versions get high marks from me is that the Phantom story in its original form is, in my opinion, a horror story--one with many romantic elements and a certain amount of surprising sympathy, but a horror story nonetheless--

I've always thought of Leroux's original as being three scoops of thrilller-ice-cream, covered in horror-sauce and with a sprinkling of romance-flakes on top.

In all seriousness, I look upon the original as being a thriller with gothic undertones (both gothic-romance and gothic-horror)... The Phantom's true nature isn't revealed until halfway through the book and his origins aren't revealed until the end... it's the mystery that Leroux relies on to string the audience along...

This is one way in which the mass proliferation of adaptations have hurt the original novel, as many of it's plot twists are now all well known, so the reader has to wait a long time for the characters to catch up with their foreknowledge of the situation.

I guess the question here is why I decided to poke my nose into a horror story when I don't like horror, and I'm not sure what the answer to that is,

The answer to that is simple...

You are obviously a completist with a morbid desire to see every version ever made, no matter how crap it is.

I so often find a lot of romantic versions grating because, in order to foster that romance and remove the element of horror, they omit a lot of key ideas that devalue the story for me substantially

Long ago, I just gave up on comparing adaptations of "Phantom" to the source material.

I've just accepted that it's a foregone conclusion that the adapters will make some drastic changes to the original material (even the 1925 and 1987 versions, whilst being closer than most, make A LOT of changes to the source, and for the worse) and that most adapters just don't care about Leroux and will just do their own thing.

So, I prefer to just judge these various adaptations on their merits as a standalone piece - because if I held it against them that they took liberties with the source material, then it would be impossible to enjoy any of them... and I prefer to get the maximum level of enjoyment I can out of life...

to use your example, I disliked what I felt was over-sympathizing in the Yeston/Kopit Phantom because, for me, it seemed to minimize and devalue his more "evil" acts and thus weaken the idea of the Phantom as symptomatic of society's misdeeds or representative of an inescapable element of evil within ourselves.

Again, this is where you are completely wrong about this version.

In the miniseries, The Phantom is NOT presented as sympathetically as you state in your review. Your review is VERY misleading and inaccurate in that respect.... sure, The Phantom may kill less people, but ALL of the people he kills in that version are innocents.
The Phantom of the miniseries is actually one of the least sympathetic Phantoms out there - and yet your review makes him out to be one of the most sympathetic.

Also, The Phantom's evil is presented as being the product of society's misdeeds and the element of evil within ourselves... Belladova nearly kills herself and her child out of shame of bearing an illegitimate child, and it's the abortion drug she takes which is the cause of Erik's deformity - so the Phantom is that version is born out of society's vilification of those without a "legitimate" heritage.

Really, I do wonder if you actually bothered to watch the miniseries, you've missed so many of it's underlying themes.
Don't get me wrong, your review was entertaining, but it contains so many misleading statements... as well as quite a few statements that come across as extremely patronising and arrogant - namely your statement that the audience is bound to sympathise with The Phantom more because his acts of murder aren't shown in gory and graphic detail... this statement implies that most of the audience for this series are a bunch of morons who need everything pointed out to them with big neon signs in order to "get it", unlike your enlightened self. I realise this implication was probably unintentional, but nonetheless, I found this implication quite insulting.

Apologies in advance for the double posting, and for the harshness of my earlier post... saying "I wonder if you've bothered to watch it" was just plain out of line...

I guess my response serves to highlight where I differ from 99.9% of the fan community... I do not view The Phantom as being a sympathetic character.

And I'm not just talking about Leroux's Phantom here - none of the films/musicals/novels that I have seen/heard/read have presented me with a Phantom that I could sympathise with. NONE.

I've felt a measure of pity and sadness for each Phantom - but pity is not the same thing as sympathy.

This lack of sympathy applies even to the Phantoms that are so often labelled as being more sympathetic.

For instance, The Phantoms of the Lloyd-Webber/Hart/Stilgoe and Kopit/Yeston musicals are often labelled as being "sympathetic" and many reviews have taken these versions to task for presenting The Phantom as "likable". And yet, in both of these productions The Phantoms are still presented as being liars, thieves, murderers, stalkers, extortionists... it strikes me as absurd that anyone in their right mind could label these characters as sympathetic or likable given their actions in the story.

And yet they do... for some reason people just tune out the cruelty of these characters... granted, they both cause less carnage than the original Phantom, but they still shown killing totally innocent people who pose no threat to them whatsoever... and both the Lloyd-Webber/Hart/Stilgoe and Kopit/Yeston Phantoms have scenes where they boast about their skill and ruthlessness in killing people. Given this behaviour it baffles me that anyone can seriously label these characters "sympathetic".... but phone-book sized fanfic tomes have been written about them, which serve to illuminate all kinds of cuddliness in these characters that I never saw when I actually sat down to watch these two shows.

Similarly with the "Phantom Lover" and "Phantom Of The Paradise" - I can't sympathise with them. They aren't stone cold killers, like every other Phantom I've seen... but Mr. Song, The Phantom Lover is too egocentric and arrogant for me to sympathise with... and Winslow Leach, Phantom Of The Paradise is gullible and stupid beyond belief.
And these are the only two instances where I think that the majority of the creative team actually wanted The Phantom to come across as sympathetic in the conventional sense of the word.
In every other version I've seen (20s silent, 40s technicolor, 83 telemovie, 87 cartoon, 89 slasher flick, 91 miniseries, 98 craziness, 2006 prettification, Lloyd-Webber's behemouth, Yeston's little-musical-that-could) I'm convinced that The Phantom was designed to come across as pitiful and tragic, but not outright sympathetic.

As I said before, I think we just have to agree to disagree when it comes to the Yeston/Kopit version of the story. I don't at all think that the Phantom's actions are more excusable in that version, nor do I think that everyone who likes it is an idiot who can't tell the difference; I just think that there is real intent on the part of the writers to tone down the impact of his more violent actions. I promise you, I did watch it, top to bottom, all the way through.

When I talk about a Phantom being "sympathetic", I don't mean "excusable" or "condonable" or necessarily even "likable" at all. What I generally mean is that there is some facet of the character that an audience can understand and feel for, even if they don't appreciate his actions or don't accept his rationalizations. For example, I think that Webber's Phantom's obvious longing to be loved is very sympathetic--it's something that the audience can relate to and feel some catharsis because of--but I still think he's a lunatic who ought to be locked up. When I say that a character is sympathetic, I never mean that he's blameless or heroic or correct--if I meant those things, I'd say them.

Sympathizing with the character is never based on EVERY facet of their personality--even heroes aren't sympathetic under that umbrella, for me (how many characters are there, really, that don't have any flaws?). Webber's Phantom is vindictive and remorseless; Cheung's Phantom is an arrogant prick sometimes; and Finley's Phantom seems painfully naive at times. Those are definitely not the sympathetic points of their characters for me. But they do have sympathetic turns to their natures (for Webber, that longing and attempt, however misguided, to reach for love; for Cheung, his willingness to try to set right the things that he's damaged; and for Finley, his determination not to compromise his essential self), which is generally what makes almost any version of the Phantom interesting for me; the juxtaposition between the parts of the character that are sympathetic, and the parts that are not at all.

There's always a certain amount of personal interpretation involved, I think, when one sets out to try to define the lines between sympathy/tragedy/pity/commiseration. Hmm... it'd be interesting to sit down and rank the various versions of the Phantom in terms of how sympathetic they are... while there are very few that I thought were totally devoid of sympathy or totally devoid of blame, there are many, many shades of gray in the middle.

When I talk about a Phantom being "sympathetic", I don't mean "excusable" or "condonable" or necessarily even "likable" at all. What I generally mean is that there is some facet of the character that an audience can understand and feel for, even if they don't appreciate his actions or don't accept his rationalizations. For example, I think that Webber's Phantom's obvious longing to be loved is very sympathetic--it's something that the audience can relate to and feel some catharsis because of--but I still think he's a lunatic who ought to be locked up. When I say that a character is sympathetic, I never mean that he's blameless or heroic or correct--if I meant those things, I'd say them.

It's a matter of semantics then. I'm sorry.

When someone says that character is "sympathetic" (as opposed to "pitiable") then that to me implies more than simply being able to empathise with them and understand their motivation. The word "sympathetic" implies that the audience is on their side, is rooting for them, or at least that said character has the moral high ground of a story.

The main reason I took exception to your review is it seemed to imply that The Phantom's acts of violence were shown as being justified in that version, and the creators and fans of this version saw these as being justified.

Sympathizing with the character is never based on EVERY facet of their personality--even heroes aren't sympathetic under that umbrella, for me (how many characters are there, really, that don't have any flaws?).

I never said a character has to be perfect and without flaws in order to be sympathetic.

For me to sympathise with a character, in the sense of rooting for them and hoping they will succeed in their goals - then they have to be the most moral character in the story, or at least hold the moral high ground in the sense that they are more moral than their adversaries.

I can still feel pity, empathy and understanding for immoral or amoral characters - but I can not sympathise with them.

It seems obvious to me that Raoul is the protagonist of "The Phantom Of The Opera" and Erik is the antagonist - not only does Raoul have more pages devoted to him, but he is more moral than Erik.

Erik is a complex and multi-layered antagonist, rather than being a moustache twirling villain, but he is still an antagonist.

The only Phantom I've seen who could be a protagonist rather than an antagonist is Leslie Cheung in "The Phantom Lover" - the 20s, 40s, 80s and 90s film Phantoms I all see as antagonists, with the Raoul figure fulfilling the requirements of the hero, same with the three musical versions I know of (Hill, Lloyd-Webber, Yeston).
I haven't seen the 60s version yet, I've heard that The Phantom was written as more of a protagonist in that one because the role was originally tailored to fit Cary Grant's screen persona.

I guess what throws people is the fact that The Phantom contains so many pitiable things about him that he doesn't really fit with modern expectations of what a "villain" should be... whereas Raoul is such an ineffectual bungler at times that he doesn't fit with modern expectations of what a "hero" should be

As you have often remarked in your reviews, Leroux's original story suffers a lot from what TV-Tropes.com calls "Values Disonance" - when the prevailing values of the time in which the story was written seem so out of whack with the way that people think of things today that it becomes a barrier to total immersion in the story.

"Values dissonance" is a very good way to put it--a lot of impressions of the time period in which the story was written just don't make immediate sense to modern readers at this point, which leads to a lot of misunderstanding and alternative interpretation. That's one of the things that makes going through all these versions chronologically so fascinating for me--you can see our perception of the story evolving over time, and which ideas fall in and out of favor, etc. I may be a geek, but I think that's interesting and fun.

I'd agree with you: the Phantoms from the Chinese films--Song at Midnight, The Phantom Lover--are definitely protagonists, though they do try to confuse the issue for mystery's sake at the beginning of those films. They have clear antagonists who are much more morally corrupt (Tang, the warlords, and the traditional government in general), which lets the Phantom be more of a vigilante hero than a creepy terrorist. Cheung's Phantom is a little closer to villain than his forebears, in my opinion, because he does threaten physical violence against some of the good guys and he has a much bigger ego and forcing-people-to-do-his-bidding trip going for him; the original Song at Midnight Phantom that he's based on was basically a heroic figure who'd been tragically abused for his upstanding behavior. Again, values dissonance--the original was made in 1937, when a political war hero was incredibly popular and sympathetic, but by 1990 he's back to being a little bit of a bastard.

I'd argue that the Phantom from the 1962 film was primarily a protagonist, as well--he never hurt or threatened to hurt anyone beyond slapping Christine that one time, and the worst he did was tear up some music and steal some instruments to try to stop his stolen music from being performed. Again, they introduced another antagonist (Ivan, who actually perpetrated all the murders) to take the blame from the Phantom's shoulders. He's less clear-cut than Cheung's Phantom, though, because he did kidnap Christine, even if he let her go and helped her out afterward.

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