Name: Loose Canon: Phantom of the Opera (Part 1) - Before Broadway
Uploaded: 2019-03-25T15:03:02.000Z
Duration: 18 min 34 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

If you go to the auditorium of the Palais Garnier in Paris, France, you'll notice that there's this giant

chandelier hanging right over the middle of the orchestra section. So on May 20th, 1896,

during a performance a counterweight to this giant chandelier fell right through the ceiling and killed a concierge during a performance on

Some odd years later a journalist turned novelist named Gaston Leroux took this incident and went "Hey, what if there was some nefarious

being behind this whole chandelier thing. What if it wasn't a counterweight? What if it was the entire chandelier that fell?

What would motivate such a nefarious being. I'm gonna do all this research and write this ballin' mystery novel and it's gonna be great!

It's gonna be a classic of modern literature and it..."

was not at all. It's not. It's not great literature; but! it certainly merits discussion.

'Phantom of the Opera' is no 'Les Miserables'. It was not a sensation in its day and yet it has spawned countless

movies, musicals, comic books, children's books, TV shows, ice-capades,

re-imaginings including but not limited to 'Phantom of the Megaplex',

'Phantom of the Ritz', 'The Phantom of Hollywood', 'Phantom of the Mall', 'Phantom of the Paradise', Phantom on Ice'!

Stage versions that are not the Andrew Lloyd-Webber version, dozens of novel spin-offs, children's books, graphic novels...

But the character of the Phantom varies a lot from really, genuinely engaging

to the most boring thing that's ever dried your brain to a fine powder. He's evil. He's sympathetic.

He's the villain. He's the antihero. Sometimes he's even the hero and

"Phantom fandom" I could probably do a twenty-six part Ken Burns-style epic on all of the many facets of this book and its

adaptations and who influenced what and what now, but, difficult as it is for me not to go on?

or even tangents this episode is about the character of Erik,

and I'm not going to lie and say a lot of my criticisms don't stem from a nerd rage standpoint -

they totally do - but here we go; instead of a comprehensive

30 hour dissection, which I could totally do, we're going to keep it to two parts

Erik, The Phantom of the Opera before the musical

It's told from Leroux's point of view as a man who's trying to piece together this mystery that happened thirty years after the fact and

though you - the modern reader - know from cultural osmosis that, yes,

there is a Phantom, the first half of this book is basically a mystery with a tonne of red herrings that are actually pretty tedious

Is it the stagehand? Is it the rat catcher?

Is it this Persian fellow who's sneaking about all the time? And about halfway through the book we find out that yes,

there is indeed a dude who calls himself the Opera Ghost and that it's his basically full-time job.

Literally, he even extorts the opera managers to the tune of about 20,000 francs a month.

Erik is described as having the ugliest face of any person who's ever lived.

He basically looks like a death's head; sort of a living corpse. He compensates for this by being an amazing

genius at everything he's a master musician. He's a ventriloquist. He can throw his voice. He's a genius architect.

He's a master assassin, and he has the most beautiful voice of any man who's ever lived. What can't he do? Well, turns out

he's not so good to the ladies, and is a huge drama queen like "Oh my mama didn't love me,

I sleep in a casket, I have a literal torture chamber in my house for some reason. Hey, young girl

I'm gonna kidnap you and force you to live in my lair until you fall in love with me; that seems reasonable."

'The Phantom of the Opera' is a 'Beauty and the Beast' tale, but it has more in common with the myth of Hades and Persephone

Erik is frequently compared to death-like things in the novel,

and he quite literally lives in an underworld and he absconds with this innocent young girl, a novice singer in the Opera named Christine.

Speaking to her from behind her mirrors in her dressing room he tells her "Hey,

I'm a literal angel sent to you by your dead father to train you to sing,"

which she, being super religious, is like "Okay, that sounds legit."

So she's pretty disappointed to find out that

he's actually kind of like a crazy deformed person.

But Erik is also super-jealous of Christine's childhood sweetheart,

the Vicomte Raoul de Chagny, and the novel comes to a head when Raoul and the Persian descend into the Phantom's underworld to rescue Christine

only immediately to get oopsy-daisy caught in Erik's torture chamber, which he has!

And Erik thinks this is great! More to blackmail Christine with, he's like

"Hey, girl, either you marry me or I'm gonna kill these two and blow up the entire opera and both of us."

So let's talk about Erik's character arc,

which is the most important aspect of the story to me and the thing that most of the adaptations screw the pooch on.

Christine says "Okay, I'll marry you," which obviously she really does not want to do,

but will do this incredibly selfless thing if it means saving other people's lives.

But the fact that she does this kind of does him in, and

she even kisses him because she really does feel sorry for him.

And so Erik - surprised and completely done in by her selflessness - lets her Raoul and the Persian go.

She marries Raoul and Eric dies alone, and the book ends with the author contending that

person and could have been a great person if the world hadn't been so shitty to him and that he did not deserve to be

demonised but there were many circumstances,

some within his control, but many not, that made him the way he was;

that he wasn't a monster, but a flawed human.

moral for a turn-of-the-century pulp horror novel.

When you think of Universal Monsters and 'Phantom of the Opera', this is that version.

In fact as far as "monster Phantom" goes - the Lloyd-Webber musical he's misunderstood sex god

so we're not counting that - Lon Chaney's is the definitive version.

This was actually not the first film version. There was one in 1916,

but, as is the case with about 90% of all of silent films, this one was lost

and we don't really know all that much about it.

So for the purposes of this little YouTube video

Like Book Erik, Cheney's Erik is highly emotional and really just...

Oh, good that's... that's really appealing and she then immediately runs on in the casket he sleeps in and he's like:

This movie isn't just important as an adaptation of 'Phantom of the Opera',

but is also a seminal piece of pop culture and Hollywood history in the horror genre,

not to mention a landmark in makeup and effects work, and well worth checking out.

The scene where Christine first unmasks Erik

and then he comes at her - critics at the time reported hearing screams

in the screening and some patrons even fainted or left the theatre because they were so horrified by Lon Chaney's makeup.

Although that weird little cloth thing on his mask does, er, detract from his menace a bit.

I would call it the best of the movie adaptations

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Loose Canon: Phantom of the Opera (Part 1) - Before Broadway

genuinely

engage

basically

character