marquetta1975

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"I am dying of love. That’s how it is. I loved her so! And I love her still. And I am dying of love for her, I tell you! If you knew how beautiful she was when she let me kiss her. It was the first time, the first time I ever kissed a woman. Yes, alive. I kissed her alive. And she looked as beautiful as if she had been dead!”

― Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

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So I want to try to articulate something I find fascinating (and deeply tragic) regarding Erik from The Phantom of the Opera and Éponine from Les Misérables (I’m specifically talking about the novels here).

While Erik can be quite arrogant and boastful, he also seems to be consumed with a heavy burden of self-loathing and shame (this is a very common human contradiction). And he claims to want a normal life like anybody else, while making choices that just seem to actively sabotage that. He knew, surely, that it wasn’t going to go over well when he told Christine to go look at his creepy, morbid, funeral-themed bedroom with the coffin bed. I cannot help but read this perverse delight in shocking her, even as he wants to put her at ease with how normal everything else about his house is. It’s bizarre and understandable and human and wondrous, and I could go on and on about it.

It’s like, he wants a normal life like anybody else, but because he has been denied that due to his appearance, he has thrown himself into the role of the monster. It is better, surely, to intentionally shock and terrify people by behaving as a ghost, showing up to the managers’ dinner and making a comment about Buquet’s death, sleeping in a coffin, etc. etc., than to have people react with horror and jeering when he’s just being himself and happening to look the way he does.

If everyone is going to view him as a monster, why not have it be a monster of his own creation?

So, reading this agonising passage regarding Éponine in Marius’s room, I can’t help but think something very similar is at play here.

“Nevertheless, while Marius stared at her in pained surprise, the young girl was moving all about the garret with the audacity of a ghost. She darted to and fro, not bothered about her nakedness. Occasionally her unfastened, torn chemise dropped almost down to her waist. She shifted the chairs, she moved the wash basin and jug on the chest of drawers, she touched Marius’s clothes, she poked about in the corners. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘You’ve got a mirror!’ And as if she were alone she hummed snatches of satirical songs, frivolous refrains that in her hoarse, throaty voice sounded doleful. Beneath this brazenness a suggestion of something forced, uneasy, abashed was detectable. Effrontery is a display of shame. Nothing was more dismal than the sight of her cavorting and, as it were, flitting about the room like a bird frightened by daylight or affected with a broken wing. You felt that under other circumstances, had she been brought up to lead a different life, the playful and uninhibited behaviour of this young girl might have been something sweet and charming. In the animal world, never does the creature born to be a dove turn into a bird of prey. That is something you see only among humans.”

(Donougher translation p. 667)

By behaving insolently on purpose, by playing into what people already think of her based on her situation and appearance, she can cover over her real shame. Like it’s not really her, it’s the role she’s enacting, in a way.

I could rant (and I have done, more than once!) about the similarities and the differences between Éponine and Erik in this regard. The deep sense of shame they carry, what caused it, how they respond to it. How the world stole what they might have been, warping them into these “monstrous” roles. The ghosts of their potential and the ugliness of reality. How they embody, exaggerate, and yet contradict the way the world sees them. How Éponine accepts and internalises society’s view of her, while Erik maintains that he is not really a wicked man… There’s just a lot there and I think it’s pretty fascinating.

Anyway. Just some messy thoughts.

[marquetta1975]

@important-animal-images

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I have never wanted anything so badly as I want Erik to come and steal me away, down to his lair where I can be his queen of night. I want nothing more than to let him take me, let him steal my heart and soul, keep me, savour me.

I want a dangerous love, a love that blinds me from everything else. I fear I will never be satisfied if I don't have that kind of love.

[marquetta1975]

Part 4 : The end of the ghost’s love story, last chapter of the Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

Adaptation by Klaus Scrimshaw (me)

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

[marquetta1975]

Part 3 : The end of the ghost’s love story, last chapter of The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (reupload)

Adaptation by Klaus Scrimshaw (me)

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 4

[marquetta1975]

Part 2 : The end of the Ghost’s love story, last chapter of The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (reupload)

Adapted by Klaus Scrimshaw (me)

Part 1 - Part 3 - Part 4

[marquetta1975]

Part 1 : The end of the Ghost’s love story, last chapter of The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (reupload)

Adapted by Klaus Scrimshaw (me)

Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

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I'm trying to win this competition where I win $25,000 in a hunting trip to arizona. All votes daily are free I need as many votes as I can get. If anybody wants to donate on two for one days every dollar donated to conservation gets me two votes. I would just be overjoyed if I could get a huge group of people casting free votes for me every single day until the end of january. I almost won last year... out of hundreds and thousands of people I came in third. It's been an incredibly rough year from being forced to take early retirement to going into the mental ward working on my day to day healing. This would really be a boost for me

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You see you see I am made up of nothing but death you shall never be free why oh why Christine did you have to see the face?

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Upon the moors

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the THING about the phantom of the opera is, and this is something i’m spitballing at least a little bit about because the amount of phantom adaptions ive perused is relatively small compared to what’s out there, but the thing is that it is so very tempting to portray the phantom as more than he is. a common criticism at the time of the novel’s release was that it was kinda lame that you had this supernatural mystery and then the culprit turned out to be just a dude, and many adaptions appear to agree with that sentiment and make him more mysterious, more charming, more magic, more handsome, his ugliness first contained to only half his face and then the disfigurement itself made less and less outlandish. people WANT the phantom to be cool, they want him to Be Someone.

but the THING, i daresay the POINT, is that the phantom indeed is a mysterious figure with irresistible charm, striking fear and awe into everyone in the opera house, but the man behind that reputation is a pathetic nobody. christine tells raoul at length about how scared she is of the phantom but when raoul promises to kill the guy if he tries anything else she urges him not to, when he tells her they could run away right now and never think about him again she says she has to at least perform for him one more time or it would be too cruel. the daroga, too, is intimately familiar with all of erik’s crimes both in and outside the opera house but doesn’t have it in him to make him face justice for it because he also knows of the crimes that were committed to erik first. they cannot bring themselves to truly hate erik for anything he’s done when he is so clearly desperate, and lonely, and pathetic, and so very pitiable, and it is only through his reputation, through the mask of opera ghost, that he commands anything other than pity, and anything close to respect. that malnourished stray dog may bare its fangs at you, but isn’t kicking it way too cruel?

in his theater, on the stage, with his mask on the phantom is a figure comprised entirely of the aesthetic statements he makes and because his sense of aesthetics is impeccable he can make himself into a man of infinite mystery and allure, which is why it’s so important that on a personal level he just looks like shit in every way. the phantom of the opera is not a story about personal growth or healing or whatever, it’s about aesthetic statements, and erik performs his role masterfully until christine removes his mask and his image collapses like a souffle. he’s ugly beyond measure, he’s pathetic, he gets on his knees and cries on her dress and begs her to please not leave him alone and tries to entice her with the aesthetics of his lavishly furnished house now that his own have been torn apart. 

erik is endlessly skilled in matters of showbiz and barely functional as a human being because from birth he was blessed with endless artistic talent and cursed in all other ways, and the only way he could find acknowledgement at all is through aesthetic statements. the phantom of the opera is someone who cannot exist, cannot relate to the others in his world, without being cloaked in aesthetics to the point where once christine shows him the affection of one person to another rather than an artist for her art, a kiss on the forehead rather than a performance on the stage, he straight up dies. he can’t handle it! he stumbles to the daroga’s apartment to cry all over his furniture and tell him someone treated him as a person so he’s going to die now and then he stumbles back to his house across the lake underneath the opera and he dies. the phantom of the opera is about aesthetic statements, and once the phantom lost the need for his aesthetics the story ends. erik dies, tragic and pitiable because he believed being acknowledged as a person was the end point, and christine lives happily ever after with raoul, free to finally heal and grow as a person.

and the THING with the adaptions, and the people disappointed that the phantom is just a dude, is, they appear to be so taken by the phantom’s aesthetics that they cannot reconcile them with the person behind the mask, and thus they try to make erik cooler, more competent, more charming, more mysterious even without the crutch of his mask. maybe he really is a ghost, maybe he used to be a regular person and something happened to him. it’s a very on-brand kind of irony so I find it amusing more than anything but the point, the whole point was that the phantom’s aesthetics are so impeccable because they were compensating for how much of a pathetic nobody erik is. the point was that erik was such a pathetic nobody because from birth he was only ever accepted or dismissed based on his aesthetics rather than his person. there wasn’t any one turning point, for the entirety of his life erik is endlessly dehumanised, by his mother that left him at the circus to grow up as a freakshow exhibit, by the persian courts that cared only for the mechanisms that came from his hands, by his own carefully crafted reputation as fearsome ghost. we get his history but not his origins, he has no roots, no place he came from or can return to, even his name is likely one he gave himself, like a ghost he simply passed from place to place. but gaston leroux in the epilogue to his story tells us that the phantom was not a ghost, he was a real person, and we should pity him for being born into a world that would rather cast him as monster than ever let him be a real person. and the story, the aesthetic statement of it all, would not be as strong if the person behind the mask was anyone at all.

[marquetta1975]

I always love the fact that Erik swiped a horse from the Opera stables.

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His embrace

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Christine didn't deserve you... #Christinewasafool

Christine didn't deserve you...💔