Sixteen Continued Screams For Halloween: Day 8 (Phantom Of The Paradise)

And so the wild week of weird snacks and light posts comes to an end. I am fully settled back into my routine, and no longer need to dabble with distractionary fare due to being in a basement or just recovering from being in a basement. I'm at home, I have all day here, and so I could sit down and watch some goddamn cinema again. What a piece of cinema chosen. My immediate remark, and one I'll repeat here: If I had a nickel for every mid-70's queer-coded rock opera musical distributed by 20th Century Fox, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice. I swear there was something in the water 50 years ago, because on vibes this really made me think of Rocky Horror. Mostly because of the singing and queer stuff. If you really want some grim synchronicity between the films, consider that we lost each of the actors who played queer-coded performers in them: Tim Curry in Rocky Horror and Gerrit Graham in this. Christ, that's morbid and a little eerie. Let's talk about something more fun.

Like Faust! Joy of joys. It's not being covered on the marathon, but just for fun before my trip I went back and reread the original Frankenstein. Delightful book. Mary Shelley subtitled that "The Modern Prometheus", and Phantom Of The Paradise is in many ways The Modern Faust. With healthy dashes of Phantom Of The Opera and The Picture Of Dorian Grey. It's very on the nose about what it is, but this is hardly a bad thing by any means. For fuck's sakes, the poor composer writes a cantata based on Faust and is then himself embroiled in Faustian machinations. Life imitating art, but as an updated reflection of the 1970s rather than ancient German text. This is the Modern Faust, after all, and it trades both in metacommentary on the music industry (that sadly remains evergreen) and a healthy dose of using media as a new bargaining chip. The latter is used to update the Dorian Grey aspect, eternal youth tethered to videotape instead of a painting. The heart of Swan's secret to power is a panopticon of images and there's much watching from monitors and the use of multiple TV screens. Even the film itself gets in on this, with more than a few split screen effects that are a Brian De Palma calling card (For my money, I remember them from the iconic climax to Carrie, but this came first).

Also it's queer as hell. Maybe not as overt as Rocky Horror, but come on. If Tim Curry can be a queer icon thanks to Frank N Furter, problematic elements and all, surely we can let Beef in. Beef did nothing wrong. Well, okay, he shouldn't have played after the Phantom plunged his face with a plunger in that Psycho riff, but other than that Beef did nothing wrong. It's not like this movie has aged as gracefully either: consider that Paul Williams's first line of the movie is calling the protagonist a bundle of sticks. But he's the baddie, so. (Paul, what would your pal Kermit The Frog think of all of this stealing people's souls and attempted murder and stuff?) Prickly bits like that aside, wowza what a film. I know I promised I would stop with the light snacks, but I don't have too much more to say about the movie. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes an updated Faust for the modern 1970s is just a rockin' good time with some good gay-ass vibes. This was one hell of a good time, even if it had a downer end.

Oh, and I posted this on a Thursday. Like the meme! What a concept!