Ink Isn’t Worth Anything To Me: Phantom of the Paradise

When Swan asks the Phantom to sign his contract in Phantom of the Paradise, he pricks Phantom’s finger with a pen, saying “ink isn’t worth anything to me”. Swan’s demonic pact needs blood. He, as he says, is “under contract too”: he’s signed a deal with the devil to stay eternally young, with an image to age in his place a là Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. After trying to commit suicide, The Phantom and Swan become tied together, and when The Phantom destroy’s Swan’s image, the Phantom goes with him.

Phantom of the Paradise, Brian De Palma’s answer to (among other things) Phantom of the Opera and Faust, is one of the most magnificent pieces of weird to come out of 1970’s cinema. As a trans woman, it took me a long time to forgive De Palma for Dressed to Kill, but now as a more mature person I can get behind, if not Dressed to Kill entirely, at least a film like Phantom of the Paradise. Where Scarface and The Untouchables remain deeply overrated films that more or less spelled the demise of De Palma as a filmmaker worth watching, Paradise is worth revisiting.

Among many things that defined the New Hollywood of the seventies, it was its brooding, individualistic male heroes, or more commonly anti-heroes: Billy and Wyatt in Easy Rider (1969), Robert Dupea in Five Easy Pieces, Michael Corleone in The Godfather: protagonists defined by their (often self-destructive) toxic masculinity. Female protagonists were few and far between (and female directors even fewer); male struggles with their own demons in what were considered male domains dominated the cinema.

The titular Phantom of the Paradise is Winslow Leach, a singer-songwriter who has his music (a take on the story of Faust) stolen by all-powerful mogul Swan. Leach is not unlike another fictional musician, Bobby Dupea, whose role in Five Easy Pieces is to get angry, abuse women, and be generally combative against imagined enemies all around him. Leach’s angry streak is tempered by De Palma’s campy, comedic, at times even slapstick, treatment of the material and Leach’s subjugation by the seemingly omnipotent Swan (he’s framed for drug possession, given life in where else but Sing Sing, and had his teeth removed), but at heart Leach is another male hero defined by his own sense of himself as hero in everyone else’s story.

After escaping from prison and being thought dead, Leach returns as The Phantom to haunt Swan’s newest endeavor, the Paradise, which is opening with the music Swan has stolen from him. The Phantom is obsessed with a woman he met once prior, Phoenix, and demands she be able to sing his music at the Paradise opening. Swan signs Phantom to a lengthy, obscure contract and prepares to betray Phantom’s vision of Faust for his own, but in the end Swan and the Phantom are destroyed together, their fortunes linked by contract and their strangely similar nature. Phoenix can only look on in horror as her captor Swan and her phantom suitor, both of whom feel entitled to her affections and her body.

As a colorfully oddball musical comedy, Phantom of the Paradise excels, but its lasting strength lies in the way it skewers the patterns of cinema of the time. Perhaps what disappoints me the most about Scarface and The Untouchables is that with those films De Palma tilted more toward a conventional masculine narrative of ambition and self-destruction. Scarface seems like it belongs in 1973, not 1983; it was a decade too late to be good.

Phantom of the Paradise does for the seventies film what Heathers did for the eighties teen comedy. Like Veronica Sawyer’s “teen angst bullshit”, De Palma gives male angst bullshit “a body count” (which admittedly it already had, but in a different way). The grotesque mutually assured destruction of Swan and the Phantom suggests an implosion of masculinity set about by the unseen consequences of its own machinations toward power. Unlike the glorious end of Billy and Wyatt, Swan and the Phantom have no one to blame but themselves.