#71: The Phantom of the Opera
This review was originally posted to Twitter on March 18, 2019
Initial publication: 23 September 1909 to 8 January 1910 (as a serial)/1911 (English translation)
Author: Gaston Leroux
In a genre mostly populated by fuckboys, from an era of literature mostly written by, for, and about fuckboys, in a society run by fuckboys, The Phantom of the Opera stands out as the ultimate in pre-Batman fuckboy power fantasy.
Gaston Leroux, at the time a reporter who had gambled his wealth away, was fascinated by the long-standing rumor of a lake beneath the Palais Garnier opera house (in reality a large cistern designed to draw water away from the superstructure) to the point that he incorporated it into a novel, including more rounded historical events such as the then-unfinished building’s use by the Paris Commune, and the fateful fall of a chandelier one night. As such the building is nearly a character in itself. And in all honesty, with all its various passages and deep, multi-layered cellars, it’s a more interesting character than most of the actual characters, especially the titular Phantom himself, who is revealed to be a disfigured man with a taste for opera and no idea how to talk to women.
And therein is the width and breadth of the plot: fuckboy who hides behind walls is a creepy possessive jerk. That’s it. That’s the whole book. The entire story revolves around the protagonists investigating the Phantom and trying to stop him from making off with the singer he’d been surreptitiously coaching. I found the phantom himself to be tiresome, the way he seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once, moving about unseen and constantly watching people from out of sight, making threats to get his way. It’s like if Batman was an incel.
While he’s clearly presented as a villain, the book also tries to treat him with pity, as if it’s not really his fault he’s a creepy weirdo who lives in a flooded basement and likes to use murder and mayhem to get what he wants. He has the full run of the building, extorts the managers into paying him rent and letting him have an entire box to himself, has enough gunpowder to turn half of Paris into a crater, and insists on marrying a woman who’s clearly afraid of him… but we’re supposed to pity him.
It’s weird, reading this just after watching The Elephant Man. In this, the phantom (real name Erik) isn’t nearly as disfigured, but becomes nothing short of a monster, a kind of ghoulish murderer who through trickery and violence exerts control over an entire opera house. It’s a sharp contrast between the meek, gentle, abused hero of that film and this asshole. Sure, there’s an object lesson about not treating deformed people badly or whatever, but that’s not something you can really glean from the text because so little of his history is revealed that isn’t self-aggrandizing. Which means that we can only assume that he got on alright despite not having much of a face, given that he was able to entertain courts and even got a job as a contractor during the construction of the opera house. And yet he still chose to do… this.
In the end, while the book was an easy read (lacking much of the density-over-depth that marks most gothic fiction) that doesn’t mean it was a terribly good book, and after having read a bunch of gothic lit lately i guess I’m just tired of 19th-century fuckboys.
