The Phantom of the Opera
Or, How To Review an Archetypal Movie: A Primer
by John Lobell
One approach to reviewing a movie might include a discussion of not only how good it is but also of what it is ABOUT. Movies, like all of the arts, embody and enhance the possibilities of human experience. In doing so, they take a position on the human condition with which the reviewer can agree or disagree.
Genre
What a movie is about is often embedded in its genre. Movie genres are therefore not just categories of expression, but also positions on the human condition. The film noir, for example, posits that the ordinary person can be crushed by circumstances; the realistic movie holds that we reveal our character in how we respond to circumstance; the archetypal coming of age movie suggests that we have to pass certain thresholds to become mature people.
The Disney animated movies are typically archetypal coming of age movies. (1) Beauty and the Beast addresses how a young man overcomes being a jerk, while The Little Mermaid examines how a girl moves out of adolescence into womanhood. The models presented in these movies are often strenuously objected to by some feminists, but their source in traditional fairy tales and their popularity among children suggests that they reverberate with something in the human psyche. This process of reverberation implies that the human psyche is characterized by archetypal patterns, rather than being the “tabula rasa†proposed by contemporary sociologists and Freudian psychologists. (2)
Archetypes
The concept of archetypes suggests that there are in the unconscious patterns within which we play out our lives. In modern thought, this notion is associated with Carl Jung. (3) However, Jung’s theory of archetypes is in many ways vague, and was perhaps more clearly presented by Edinger in Ego and Archetype. (4) The concept is even more strongly developed in the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell who elucidates archetypal patterns throughout wide ranges of myth, art and literature.
From an archetypal point of view, we might see Phantom of the Opera as addressing the archetype of a woman’s coming of age, specifically how she separates from her father, the primary male figure in her early years, and vacillates between two other male figures, the demon-lover/mentor and the lover-husband.
There are of course other figures in a woman’s coming of age, including her mother, and her coming of age might involve other problems. But Phantom addresses how a woman negotiates between these three male, or animus, figures. It also addresses the process whereby, in becoming a mature and complete human being, a person must integrate the unconscious with the conscious, and artistic creativity with a biological and social role. (5)
Here is what makes an archetypal movie different from a realistic movie: A realistic movie creates a story by following the chance incidents in a life, and reveals the character’s psychology through how they react to those incidents. In the process, no inherent meanings or patterns in the character’s psyche, such as becoming complete as a person, are revealed. Indeed the realistic movie posits that there are no such meanings or patterns. In contrast, the archetypal movie posits that there are patterns: in the psyche, in the processes of the course of life, in the courses of the life of nations and empires, and even in the cosmos itself.
Phantom is an archetypal coming of age movie in that it addresses how a girl moves into womanhood by negotiating her relationships with the three male figures identified above, and by integrating her unconscious and conscious. Let’s look at Phantom before returning to a discussion of archetypes.
Plot of Phantom
In Phantom, the heroine, Christine, faces two challenges in becoming a mature woman. The first is to balance her relationships with three male or animus figures. The second is to integrate her unconscious self, the source of her creativity and her eroticism, with her conscious self, the source of her social and family relationships and her career.
In these efforts Christine faces dangers that become the source of tensions in the plot. If she mishandles the three men, she can create disasters, including the death of one or the other of these men, or even herself. She can lose her mentor and her access to her creativity. She can lose the love of her life and the chance for a happy family. Given that men can be egotistical and infantile, avoiding these dangers can require sensitivity, skill and a pure heart. In Phantom, Christine has the additional problem that her father has died when she was quite young. Additionally, if Christine fails to successfully integrate her conscious and unconscious, she could become stuck in one of them. She could be caught up in creativity and its potential dark side (the theme of The Red Shoes (6)), she could lose her creativity and become an unfulfilled housewife, or she could refuse to mature. (Daphne, who refuses the advances of Apollo, does not enter into womanhood and eternally keeps her preadolescent beauty, in the form of a laurel tree. (7)) (Note: The Phantom of the Opera could have been about the Phantom, but in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rendition it is about Christine.)
How are these archetypal themes played out in the movie? The story is as follows: Christine’s father, a great musician, has died, telling her that he will send the Angel of Music to look over her. She is being raised by the ballet mistress at the Opera, and tutored in singing by the mysterious Phantom, a genius with a disfigured face who resides in the Opera’s bowels, whom she takes to be the Angel of Music promised by her father. The star soprano walks out, Christine steps in, an immediate hit, and is rediscovered by Raoul, her childhood friend, now a nobleman and the patron of the Opera. Now she must choose between Raoul and the Phantom. She chooses Raoul, but kisses the Phantom before leaving, thus healing him. The story should end there, but since it is told by flashback, we get to see that Christine goes on to have a long, happy marriage to Raoul, and have children. At her death in old age the Phantom leaves a memento of their relationship on her grave, so we know that she remained important to him. Her widowed husband leaves a memento of the Phantom on her grave, so we know that the Phantom remained important to her, and that her husband had respected that.
Archetypal Structure of Phantom
Christine, her father, the Phantom, and Raoul all have to be compelling characters for the story to be successful, but the real success of the movie comes from the fact that the three men have their primary existence as projections of Christine’s psyche.
Her father is just that, not a person in his own right, but the loving father who protects and guides her, and to whom she is eternally attached until she must break away to make her own life and her own family.
The Phantom has his own story, but we know little of it. We know him through Christine’s eyes, first as the Angel of Music sent by her father who introduces her to her creativity, then as the figure who introduces her to the erotic powers of her unconscious, and finally as the figure who gives her the opportunity to experience her own purity of heart, her generosity, and her power to heal.
And Raoul is equally archetypal as the romantic lover. He strides through scenes with his long hair flowing like Fabio’s on the cover of a romance novel. He is the perfect lover – rich, handsome, dedicated, courageous, willing to fight for her, and generous enough to spare the Phantom when Christine implores her to do so.
If we were reviewing a realistic movie, we would complain about the stereotyped nature of these characters and their lack of development. But in this archetypal movie we accept that they are all projections of Christine’s psyche.
The perfect father, the perfect demon-lover/mentor and the perfect lover-husband. No wonder tens of millions of women have dragged their men to the theater in hopes something will rub off. Eighty million people have spent $3 billion to see the stage production of The Phantom of the Opera.
How do Andrew Lloyd Webber and Joel Schumacher tell their story? (8) After a flashback and an introduction of the main characters, we are presented with Christine. She is young, immature, not yet formed, but she quickly emerges as the new ingénue of the Opera with great potential.
We discover that she has been coached by the Phantom, a mysterious disfigured mad genius who lives in the bowels of the Opera, who appears to her through a two-way mirror, and whom she believes is the Angel of Music promised by her departed father. Thus she is still in the childhood realm of her loving father. This is the stage of the Little Mermaid before committing to the cycle of life.
After Christine’s successful debut, things develop quickly. Her childhood playmate, Raoul, now a nobleman and patron of the Opera, insists she go out to dinner with him, thus inviting her into the play of romance. But she is not ready. She is still in the magical realm of the little girl whose primary relationship is with her father through the angel he has sent.
The Phantom now comes out from behind the mirror and leads Christine down into the sub-basements of the Opera, across an underground lake, and into his lair. Christine has entered the realm of the unconscious, the wellspring of creativity and erotic potential, but also a place of danger. She has crossed the River Styx to the place of the dead, a source of great wisdom for those few who can enter and leave again. (9)
There she comes face to face with the Phantom, still the Angel of Music, but now also an erotic potential for her. And in an act of boldness she pulls off his mask, revealing his disfigured face. She does not recoil.
The story quickly progresses. Christine is now the new star of the Opera. She becomes engaged to Raoul. The Phantom is angry with her, declaring her music training not finished, and wanting her for himself. Raoul wants her to break off with the Phantom. These dynamics culminate in a scene absent from the theatrical production, at the graveyard. While Christine is visiting her father’s grave, the Phantom and Raoul fight with swords. Christine now fully awakes from her childhood. She accepts that her father is dead and that the Phantom is not his ghost or an angel sent by him. She must enter into adulthood. She must choose the Phantom or Raoul. What is the nature of this choice?
The Phantom with whom she meets in the bowels of the Opera represents the unconscious with all of its dark mysteries of eroticism and artistic creativity. Raoul, whom she meets at one point on the roof of the Opera, represents conscious, worldly engagement in life; romance leading to marriage, family and children; and necessarily as a consequence of that engagement in life, eventual old age and death. Christine is torn, and wavers back and forth through twists of plot.
The climax comes in the Phantom’s lair. All three of them are together. The Phantom’s mask is off and his disfigured face is exposed. With perfect purity of heart, totally without fear, Christine takes the Phantom’s face in her hands and kisses him, gives him a gift of her engagement ring from Raoul, and informs him that she must go with Raoul. Her acceptance of him as a man clears the Phantom’s soul and he allows Christine and Raoul to escape.
The story should end there, but through the device of the flashback, we are told that Christine and Raoul had a long marriage and children before she died in old age, to be survived by Raoul. Raoul goes to an auction at the now abandoned Opera to bid on a favorite toy of the Phantom to leave on Christine’s grave, acknowledging that he accepts that Christine and the Phantom have been soul mates throughout their marriage. At her grave he sees the Phantom’s signature rose with the ring Christine had given the Phantom, indicating that the Phantom had never forgotten her.
Evaluation
We can, of course, judge an archetypal movie by its story and its production, but we should first judge it by its presentation of the archetypes of the human psyche. Thus the archetypal movie (and archetypal art and literature in general) picks up the role that has been abandoned by the social sciences in addressing the fundamentals of the human condition. All of the social sciences today tell us that we are socially determined, and that all relationships are manifestations of power, gender, race, and identity. People study these ideas in college, and then pay to see movies that say otherwise. While Jung and Jungians like Edinger provided guides for our understanding of the arts in these terms, the great interpreter of this approach to the arts was Joseph Campbell. (10) Campbell is associated with movies because of the extensive use of the “hero journey†as described in his Hero With a Thousand Faces as the basis for numerous guides to writing screenplays. But Campbell’s work goes far beyond Hero.
Campbell sees mythology as comprising not only myth and religion, but all of the arts, and views mythology as a supra-psychology, a depiction not only of the mind, but also (as I have noted earlier, and Campbell is a source of my view on this) of the human life cycle, of the structures of our relationships with one another, of the developments of nations and cultures, and of the cycles of the cosmos itself. Campbell sees our biology as the ultimate source of archetypes, but he does not see them as universal, for they are dependant on the play of our biology with our physical and cultural environments. For example, the notion of the coming of age of a woman as a fully developed person is unique to the culture of the European Enlightenment and its successors, so the archetypes of that coming of age could only come to play in the arts of those periods. Before the Enlightenment, the archetype of a woman coming of age was to be overtaken by her biology and to be a means of exchange in the creations of bonds between families and nations.
Now. . .
Now that we know what the movie is ABOUT, we can begin to discuss all of the issues we have been seeing in the reviews (11). Comparisons with the stage production, analysis of the casting choices, the singing, the look and feel, the costumes, comparisons to Lon Chaney’s 1925 version and the book, etc. But now we can discuss these things with regard to how they do or do not support what Phantom is about.
Other Approaches
So that is the archetypal structure of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. There are, however, any number of contemporary academics, feminists, and materialists who reject the notion of archetypes (currently labeled “essentialismâ€). Some feminists might, for example, reject the idea that there is anything innate about Christine as a woman that would lead her on the path she follows in Phantom, allowing only responses to social forces and power relationships as the drivers of a story. But I have presented an archetypal discussion of Phantom; it is up to others to present discussions of equal depth from other points of view.
NOTES
1. For an in depth discussion of a Disney coming of age movie, see the New York Times on Tarzan, although this article focuses more on the “outsider†more than “coming of age.â€
From Darwinian To Disneyesque; In Tarzan’s Evolution, a New Theory: The Survival of Nearly Everything
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN (NYT) 1592 words
Published: July 15, 1999
2. For a discussion of “tabula rasa,†see Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa
In John Locke’s philosophy, tabula rasa was the theory that the (human) mind is at birth a “blank slate” without rules for processing data, and that data is added and rules for processing it formed solely by our sensory experiences. The notion is central to Lockean empiricism. It is also featured in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. As understood by Locke, tabula rasa meant that the mind of the individual was born “blank”, and it also emphasized the individual’s freedom to author his or her own soul. Each individual was free to define the content of his or her character – but his or her basic identity as a member of the human species cannot be so altered. It is this presumption of a free, self-authored mind combined with an immutable human nature, from which the Lockean doctrine of “natural” rights derives.
In recent times, however, tabula rasa has come to be understood fundamentally differently. While the idea that the individual can be changed remains, the power to effect that change is now ascribed to society, not the self – and that power extends to the whole of human nature. Under this view, one can almost without restriction shape the individual by changing the individual’s environment, and thus sensory experiences.
3. For a discussion of Carl Jung in Wikipedia, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung
Carl Gustav Jung (July 26, 1875 – June 6, 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and founder of the neopsychoanalytic school of psychology. At university, he was a student of Krafft-Ebing. For a time, Jung was Freud’s heir-apparent in the psychoanalytic school. After the publication of Jung’s Symbols of Transformation (1912), Jung and Freud endured a painful parting of ways: Jung seemed to feel confined by what he believed was Freud’s narrow, reductionistic, and rigid view of libido. Freud held that all libido was at base sexual, while Jung’s psychological work continued to explore libido as multiple and often synthetic….
… Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious is often misunderstood as some kind of race memory, with the archetypal symbols being somehow transmitted, perhaps genetically. In fact, what Jung meant by the term is that we share a common psychological heritage, just as we share a common physical one. Symbols have a certain similarity and fall into similar patterns in different places and times, simply because all human minds are basically similar….
4. Ego and Archetype by Edward Edinger from Amazon.com:
An excellent analysis of Jung’s theory of individuation., May 18, 1999
Reviewer: Manuel Alvarez (Miami Lakes, FL United States) – …
Dr. Edinger explains the Jungian concept of individuation as both a psychological and spiritual phenomenon. Although the author does not explicitly acknowledge the underlying spirituality of Jung’s concept of the self/ego relationship, it is apparent that he feels there is a metaphysical and spiritual basis to human development. Edinger, it seems to me, posits that the ego is a temporal construct rooted in a trascendental, timeless Self (soul). The text is filled with insightful accounts of many hermetic and esoteric concepts which appear in the Jungian corpus. Those who have read Jung’s works on alchemy will find Edinger’s interpretations illuminating. This is a wonderful secondary work on Jungian theory.
5. Many of Joseph Campbell’s works address the making of a self. The most recent posthumous work is Pathways to Bliss.
From Amazon.com:
Pathways to Bliss by Joseph Campbell, David Kudler: “Traditionally, the first function of a living mythology is to reconcile consciousness to the preconditions of its own existence; that is to say, to the…” (more)
6. The Red Shoes from IMDb:
Plot Summary for The Red Shoes (1948)
Under the authoritarian rule of charismatic ballet impressario Boris Lermontov, his proteges realize the full promise of their talents, but at a price: utter devotion to their art and complete loyalty to Lermontov himself. Under his near-obsessive guidance, young ballerina Victoria Page is poised for superstardom, but earns Lermontov’s scorn when she falls in love with Julian Craster, composer of “The Red Shoes,” the ballet Lermontov is staging to showcase her talents. Vicky leaves the company and marries Craster, but still finds herself torn between Lermontov’s demands and those of her heart. Summary written by Paul Penna {tterrace@wco.com}
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040725/plotsummary
7. From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo#Daphne
Apollo chased the nymph Daphne, daughter of Ladon, who had scorned him. His infatuation was caused by an arrow from Eros, who was jealous because Apollo had made fun of his archery skills. Eros also claimed to be irritated by Apollo’s singing. Daphne prayed to the river god Peneus to help her and he changed her into a laurel tree, which became sacred to Apollo.
8. For all of the credits of Phantom of the Opera, see IMDb:
The Phantom of the Opera (2004)
Directed by Joel Schumacher
Writing credits (WGA)
Gaston Leroux (novel)
Andrew Lloyd Webber (stage musical)
9. Orpheus enters the underworld and returns but is not able to bring Eurydice back. Odysseus successfully enters the underworld and returns.
10. For more on Joseph Campbell, see the Joseph Campbell Foundation at:
11. For a list of reviews of Phantom of the Opera, see:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0293508/externalreviews
Leave a Reply