What have we wrought? (Part 3)
This is slightly delayed (ahem!) but I am finally getting around to it.
When I left off Part 2, I said "Next, Phantom of the Opera and the absurdity of Christine/Erik shipping."
The Phantom of the Opera
This should be subtitled "Attack of the Gerry Butler fangirls". As I have said before, Gerald Butler is just far too good looking for the role of the movie Phantom. Predictably, we now have a bunch of females fantasising about the sex-god Gerry Butler and completely forgetting about the murderous sociopath that is the Phantom. Fine, be a fangirl about Butler. He's a fine actor and rather pleasant on the eye. But fangirling Butler should have nothing to do with fangirling the Phantom and twisting the POTO story and characters beyond recognition.
Because the movie had a good looking Phantom, the fangirls want Christine to choose him over Raoul. I understand this; I often want things to happen the opposite of how they are written; I want Mimi to live at the end of La Boheme, Guinevere not to have betrayed Arthur, poor Romeo and Juliette not to have been so stupid and my most wishful thought: for Ingrid Bergman to stay with Humphrey Bogart at the end of Casablanca. But I accept the way things have been written, however much I wish they were different.
Erik/Christine shipping is incomprehensible to me personally because I just don't see a functional relationship as a possibility for these two characters. On the other hand, I do not deny that it is as valid a ship as any that has been sailed in fandoms, canonical or otherwise. After all, people have different experiences and diffferent ways of perceiving relationships. The innocent ingenue / murderous sociopath dynamic does work for some people. And I don't really have a problem with that, as long as nobody is making any claims that this is what Leroux or Lloyd Webber/Hart had in mind all along.
Where I do have a problem with Erik/Christine shipping is the (unfortunately sizeable) rabid element that is hell-bent on distorting canon and insisting that
a) of course Christine is REALLY in love with the Phantom, as she realises after she shares that soul-shattering kiss with hi,; and/or
b) what REALLY happens is that the Phantom and Christine do end up sharing a lifetime of love.
The slight problem here is getting the inconvenience which is Raoul, out of the way. At very least, Raoul's role in the book and musical as to be reinterpreted imaginatively. This has been accomplished, to varying degrees of incredulity on my part, in multiple fanfiction stories, essays, movie deconstructions and message board posts. In all these gigabytes on the Internet, Leroux himself is rarely mentioned as a reference point.
For the purposes of shipping, I suppose it is not fair to refer to Leroux as a source; many people are probably shipping E/C based purely on the movie. Well, fine. Let's not look to Leroux then (but more on that later). Let's look to the actual source material for the movie - the POTO musical (music AND libretto).
There have been different degrees of canon denial, ranging from the merely unlikely to the downright unthinkable. It's always easier to get warmed up with the stuff that at least does not make me think "WTF?", so let me begin with the milder forms of creative reimagining. The canon denial scenarios follow.
a) In which Christine marries Raoul and lives with him till her death but is secretly truly in love with the Phantom
I will say this much: at least this scenario accepts what is implied in the musical and what is explicitly spelt out in the movie. The older Raoul introduced in the Prologue has obviously had a long-standing relationship with Christine (a relationship shown in the movie specifically as marriage).
Sign #1 of E/C true love:
Christine looking back at the Phantom as she leaves with Raoul on the boat. This is supposed to be a last look, laden with a deep regret that she will feel for the rest of her life.
It's almost plausible to interpret that short glance this way. But at the same time, Christine is singing a reprise of "All I Ask of You" with Raoul. This would make her a massive hypocrite, not to mention directly contradicting her own words. And I don't buy it that she is actually singing the words to the Phantom. (One phrase she sings is "Say the word and I will follow you". I suppose it is conceivable that she is asking the Phantom to tell her to go with him on his fugitive's flee. It is conceivable but also a very tortuous and contorted reading of the book, when the simple explanation is also the obvious: she is singing with Raoul (at one point they even sing together) and the song has been established as Raoul's and Christine's love song.
Sign #2 of E/C true love:
Raoul sings to the music box monkey in the prologue that "She often spoke of you, my friend." This indicates that Christine never lets go of her experiences with the Phantom in his lair. She speaks of the monkey continuously to Raoul, a seemingly strange thing to do if she was in a truly happy marriage with a man who had rescued her from the lair. There is only one explanation: speaking of the monkey is code for pining for a lost true love.
Sigh, sigh, sigh. Stretching and scraping, anyone? The entire segment with the monkey is nothing more than a plot contrivance to segue into the introduction of the chandelier. But even if the words were more than just a throw-away line (the libretto is FILLED with these), how does Christine speaking of a monkey indicate an unhappy marriage? If anything, the fact that she could confide details of her ordeal/ experience to her husband indicates a strong relationship, not one shadowed by a secret yearning for another man.
Sign #3 of E/C true love:
She kisses the Phantom once, is overwhelmed by passion and dives in for a second kiss. True Love!
That damned double kiss has made for the worst sort of fandom fodder. I think it was Joel Schumacher trying to sex things up and completely misjudging the balance between acted gestures and the scripted libretto.
Moments before the kiss, Christine sings "Angel of Music, you deceived me, I gave my mind blindly." She goes on to call him "Pitiful creature of darkness". The point leading up to the kiss is one of Christine realising that she must make a sacrifice to save Raoul and that she can make herself do it because she has reconciled her horror of the Phantom with genuine pity. She regards him as a pathetic figure, one that she hopes to save from himself with her self-sacrifice. Hardly the stuff of heady romance.
b) In which Christine is abused by her husband Raoul and realises that it is the Phantom who truly loves her and whom she truly loves. And in which the Phantom is NOT a twisted sociopath.
Rapist! Raoul and Wife-hitter! Raoul are two fandom constructs that have absolutely no foundation in canon, whether it be Leroux or Lloyd Webber/Black. He is a bit of a fop, young and impetuous and probably shallow. How do any of these traits translate into future abusiveness?
If anything, it is the Phantom that shows the tendency for violence (well, in the musical, he murders a couple of people , so "tendency" is putting it mildly. One thing that angered me about the movie is the soft-pedalling of the Phantom's crimes, the soft option to make him more sympathetic). I think the E/C shippers realise a basic love-triangle dynamic: cruel, obsessive lover on the one hand; ardent, self-sacrificing lover on the other; and the maiden caught between them. See, canon already provided the characters for these specific roles. There was never a need to swap Raoul for the Phantom.
I think one thing that cannot be in doubt from the musical is that Raoul does love Christine. His actions and words in the final lair are proof enough of this. It doesn't make sense to turn him into some uncaring monster (at least, not without a huge amount of backstory to explain such a tremendous emotional and personality transition).
I think there can also be no doubt from the musical that the Phantom is a seriously disturbed man. Apart from the murders, he plays mind games with Firmin and Andre, is sadistically cruel to Carlotta and Piangi and invades Christine's mind! Look, the man might be a genius, but he is mentally unstable. Christine herself said, "It's in your sould that the true distortion lies". Now, that might not be entirely his fault and therefore it might not be fair to demonise him for something he could not help, but an in-character Phantom is a twisted, very scary man whom no mother would trust with her 16 year old daughter.
c) In which Christine and the Phantom has been carrying on a love affair throughout her marriage to Raoul
In the movie, there is an added epilogue scene in which Raoul visits Christine's grave and sees a ring and rose left there by a not-so-mystery person. I read a passionately argued theory that this was the Phantom's subtle way of telling Raoul about the super-secret love affair. The sadness in Raoul's eyes during this scene was not the mourning of a beloved wife (not my words, but those engraved on the headstone) but grief at discovering Christine's infidelity. There are no words.
Of course, this leads to the conclusion that Christine's children (again, a movie invention, with the headstone saying "beloved wife and mother") are in fact fathered by the Phantom. Oh well, as outlandish ideas go, this is somewhat better than the rapist! Raoul one. And don't get me started on the published sequels that assume this plot development (just because they have official ISBN's do not make them official canon).
Back to Leroux. For POTO, Leroux should be regarded as canon. The musical is based on Leroux, and despite the many changes, is fully faithful to authorial intent. The characters in the musical are clearly the characters in Leroux (although Raoul is much less developed and Christine is slightly more naive). Most importantly, the emotional relationships between the three lead characters are portrayed in the musical as they were written in the book. So, you know what? Leroux should be the point of reference for E/C shipping based on the POTO movie.
If people understood who canon Phantom and canon Christine are, I doubt E/C shipping would be as rabid as it is. I have no doubt that there are people who find the canonical Phantom and the canonical Christine to be a perfectly appealing pairing. But how many E/C shippers really ship canon Christine with canon Erik?
When I left off Part 2, I said "Next, Phantom of the Opera and the absurdity of Christine/Erik shipping."
The Phantom of the Opera
This should be subtitled "Attack of the Gerry Butler fangirls". As I have said before, Gerald Butler is just far too good looking for the role of the movie Phantom. Predictably, we now have a bunch of females fantasising about the sex-god Gerry Butler and completely forgetting about the murderous sociopath that is the Phantom. Fine, be a fangirl about Butler. He's a fine actor and rather pleasant on the eye. But fangirling Butler should have nothing to do with fangirling the Phantom and twisting the POTO story and characters beyond recognition.
Because the movie had a good looking Phantom, the fangirls want Christine to choose him over Raoul. I understand this; I often want things to happen the opposite of how they are written; I want Mimi to live at the end of La Boheme, Guinevere not to have betrayed Arthur, poor Romeo and Juliette not to have been so stupid and my most wishful thought: for Ingrid Bergman to stay with Humphrey Bogart at the end of Casablanca. But I accept the way things have been written, however much I wish they were different.
Erik/Christine shipping is incomprehensible to me personally because I just don't see a functional relationship as a possibility for these two characters. On the other hand, I do not deny that it is as valid a ship as any that has been sailed in fandoms, canonical or otherwise. After all, people have different experiences and diffferent ways of perceiving relationships. The innocent ingenue / murderous sociopath dynamic does work for some people. And I don't really have a problem with that, as long as nobody is making any claims that this is what Leroux or Lloyd Webber/Hart had in mind all along.
Where I do have a problem with Erik/Christine shipping is the (unfortunately sizeable) rabid element that is hell-bent on distorting canon and insisting that
a) of course Christine is REALLY in love with the Phantom, as she realises after she shares that soul-shattering kiss with hi,; and/or
b) what REALLY happens is that the Phantom and Christine do end up sharing a lifetime of love.
The slight problem here is getting the inconvenience which is Raoul, out of the way. At very least, Raoul's role in the book and musical as to be reinterpreted imaginatively. This has been accomplished, to varying degrees of incredulity on my part, in multiple fanfiction stories, essays, movie deconstructions and message board posts. In all these gigabytes on the Internet, Leroux himself is rarely mentioned as a reference point.
For the purposes of shipping, I suppose it is not fair to refer to Leroux as a source; many people are probably shipping E/C based purely on the movie. Well, fine. Let's not look to Leroux then (but more on that later). Let's look to the actual source material for the movie - the POTO musical (music AND libretto).
There have been different degrees of canon denial, ranging from the merely unlikely to the downright unthinkable. It's always easier to get warmed up with the stuff that at least does not make me think "WTF?", so let me begin with the milder forms of creative reimagining. The canon denial scenarios follow.
a) In which Christine marries Raoul and lives with him till her death but is secretly truly in love with the Phantom
I will say this much: at least this scenario accepts what is implied in the musical and what is explicitly spelt out in the movie. The older Raoul introduced in the Prologue has obviously had a long-standing relationship with Christine (a relationship shown in the movie specifically as marriage).
Sign #1 of E/C true love:
Christine looking back at the Phantom as she leaves with Raoul on the boat. This is supposed to be a last look, laden with a deep regret that she will feel for the rest of her life.
It's almost plausible to interpret that short glance this way. But at the same time, Christine is singing a reprise of "All I Ask of You" with Raoul. This would make her a massive hypocrite, not to mention directly contradicting her own words. And I don't buy it that she is actually singing the words to the Phantom. (One phrase she sings is "Say the word and I will follow you". I suppose it is conceivable that she is asking the Phantom to tell her to go with him on his fugitive's flee. It is conceivable but also a very tortuous and contorted reading of the book, when the simple explanation is also the obvious: she is singing with Raoul (at one point they even sing together) and the song has been established as Raoul's and Christine's love song.
Sign #2 of E/C true love:
Raoul sings to the music box monkey in the prologue that "She often spoke of you, my friend." This indicates that Christine never lets go of her experiences with the Phantom in his lair. She speaks of the monkey continuously to Raoul, a seemingly strange thing to do if she was in a truly happy marriage with a man who had rescued her from the lair. There is only one explanation: speaking of the monkey is code for pining for a lost true love.
Sigh, sigh, sigh. Stretching and scraping, anyone? The entire segment with the monkey is nothing more than a plot contrivance to segue into the introduction of the chandelier. But even if the words were more than just a throw-away line (the libretto is FILLED with these), how does Christine speaking of a monkey indicate an unhappy marriage? If anything, the fact that she could confide details of her ordeal/ experience to her husband indicates a strong relationship, not one shadowed by a secret yearning for another man.
Sign #3 of E/C true love:
She kisses the Phantom once, is overwhelmed by passion and dives in for a second kiss. True Love!
That damned double kiss has made for the worst sort of fandom fodder. I think it was Joel Schumacher trying to sex things up and completely misjudging the balance between acted gestures and the scripted libretto.
Moments before the kiss, Christine sings "Angel of Music, you deceived me, I gave my mind blindly." She goes on to call him "Pitiful creature of darkness". The point leading up to the kiss is one of Christine realising that she must make a sacrifice to save Raoul and that she can make herself do it because she has reconciled her horror of the Phantom with genuine pity. She regards him as a pathetic figure, one that she hopes to save from himself with her self-sacrifice. Hardly the stuff of heady romance.
b) In which Christine is abused by her husband Raoul and realises that it is the Phantom who truly loves her and whom she truly loves. And in which the Phantom is NOT a twisted sociopath.
Rapist! Raoul and Wife-hitter! Raoul are two fandom constructs that have absolutely no foundation in canon, whether it be Leroux or Lloyd Webber/Black. He is a bit of a fop, young and impetuous and probably shallow. How do any of these traits translate into future abusiveness?
If anything, it is the Phantom that shows the tendency for violence (well, in the musical, he murders a couple of people , so "tendency" is putting it mildly. One thing that angered me about the movie is the soft-pedalling of the Phantom's crimes, the soft option to make him more sympathetic). I think the E/C shippers realise a basic love-triangle dynamic: cruel, obsessive lover on the one hand; ardent, self-sacrificing lover on the other; and the maiden caught between them. See, canon already provided the characters for these specific roles. There was never a need to swap Raoul for the Phantom.
I think one thing that cannot be in doubt from the musical is that Raoul does love Christine. His actions and words in the final lair are proof enough of this. It doesn't make sense to turn him into some uncaring monster (at least, not without a huge amount of backstory to explain such a tremendous emotional and personality transition).
I think there can also be no doubt from the musical that the Phantom is a seriously disturbed man. Apart from the murders, he plays mind games with Firmin and Andre, is sadistically cruel to Carlotta and Piangi and invades Christine's mind! Look, the man might be a genius, but he is mentally unstable. Christine herself said, "It's in your sould that the true distortion lies". Now, that might not be entirely his fault and therefore it might not be fair to demonise him for something he could not help, but an in-character Phantom is a twisted, very scary man whom no mother would trust with her 16 year old daughter.
c) In which Christine and the Phantom has been carrying on a love affair throughout her marriage to Raoul
In the movie, there is an added epilogue scene in which Raoul visits Christine's grave and sees a ring and rose left there by a not-so-mystery person. I read a passionately argued theory that this was the Phantom's subtle way of telling Raoul about the super-secret love affair. The sadness in Raoul's eyes during this scene was not the mourning of a beloved wife (not my words, but those engraved on the headstone) but grief at discovering Christine's infidelity. There are no words.
Of course, this leads to the conclusion that Christine's children (again, a movie invention, with the headstone saying "beloved wife and mother") are in fact fathered by the Phantom. Oh well, as outlandish ideas go, this is somewhat better than the rapist! Raoul one. And don't get me started on the published sequels that assume this plot development (just because they have official ISBN's do not make them official canon).
Back to Leroux. For POTO, Leroux should be regarded as canon. The musical is based on Leroux, and despite the many changes, is fully faithful to authorial intent. The characters in the musical are clearly the characters in Leroux (although Raoul is much less developed and Christine is slightly more naive). Most importantly, the emotional relationships between the three lead characters are portrayed in the musical as they were written in the book. So, you know what? Leroux should be the point of reference for E/C shipping based on the POTO movie.
If people understood who canon Phantom and canon Christine are, I doubt E/C shipping would be as rabid as it is. I have no doubt that there are people who find the canonical Phantom and the canonical Christine to be a perfectly appealing pairing. But how many E/C shippers really ship canon Christine with canon Erik?
Labels: Fiction and Fandom
posted by gentleice the deptfordian at 8:04 PM
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