“Holy Phanking Shit. Terrible.
Every so often I’ll get into a classic. I guess because I feel like writing a really nasty review.
Classics are great fodder for nasty reviews because
1. The people who made them are LONG dead. This dude died in 1927. His daughter died when I was one. Once it gets to grandkids, I feel like you can’t get all pissy. If someone was mad at my grandfather for something, I’d probably be like, “Yeah, does sound like a real dick move.” Saying bad stuff about a classic novel doesn’t hurt the creator’s feelings. Unless he’s reading this in hell. Which is where I assume he is because he wrote Phantom of the Opera, which I had to read.
2. Classics have such a pedestal in the literary world already that the opinion of one lone weirdo (who is ugly but not fat and talks about comic books a lot. Just covering the bases regarding what’s bad about me) is pretty irrelevant. It’s not like bashing on this book is suddenly going to render it a Not A Classic or affect its sales. Frankly, I think that about everything I read, but with classics, it’s a pretty rock solid premise.
So, without further ado, spoilers, I guess? If you want to read this novel and haven’t gotten around to it in the last 100 of years, and you haven’t seen the play or the movie or whatever, then spoilers. Do we give spoilers for something like this? Isn’t this like “spoiling” that the north won the Civil War?
Tangent: In middle school we did a Civil War reenactment. This company provided uniforms and fake guns and shit, and we went to a park and pretended we were in the Civil War. The teachers did not tell us which side won because they figured, correctly, that all 6th graders would want to be on the winning side. I wasn’t super smart, but even I was like, “Well…we don’t have slaves anymore, right? Seems likely that the north was successful.” Also, just a little snapshot of my education, we wouldn’t want to tell kids the outcome of a war because it might fuck up our reenactment video.
End tangent.
First Thing I Hated About This Book:
Perhaps other editions are different, but mine used these shortenings:
MME. = Mademoiselle
M. = Monsieur
MM. = Monsieur (plural)
And so on.
You don’t realize, until you try it, how programmed you are by shortenings like “Mr.” and “Ms.” When you see them, you instantly recognize them for what they are, which is shorthand for common titles.
So why, if this is translated from French, would you not either
A) Translate these terms as well into Mr/Ms/Mrs? This would make it a lot easier to read.
B) Write them out in full rather than shortening them, therefore making it a word I recognize instead of the initialization, which I’m not familiar with?
Either of these solutions is better than just leaving the shortenings as-is, which was pretty goddamn annoying.
Second Thing I Hated About This Book:
There was a sequence where Raoul, the hero, was with a character known as The Persian. They both have pistols, and they’re walking through these darkened corridors, and The Persian has to argue with Raoul. See, Raoul doesn’t want to hold his pistol up in a position ready to shoot someone. He’s complaining that it makes his arm tired.
His arm tired? We’re assaulting the fortress of this bastard ghost man, and you’re complaining about your arm being tired? Gee, never thought about it that way. You’re right. We should just turn back. Nevermind that your girlfriend is tied to a chair and this evil bastard intends to blow up the entire opera house and everyone in it. Some things just aren’t worth making your arm tired for.
3rd Thing
This book retraces itself WAY too much. I don’t need to see the same sequence from multiple angles and shit. Save it for Pulp Fiction. Not interested.
4th Thing
The Phantom turns out to be named Erik. Erik? Erik. And not like Erik Bloodhaven or something. Just, you know, Erik. Some dude named fucking Erik.
5th Thing
Erik is the only interesting character in the entire thing. Frankly, I was hoping he’d blow up the opera. THAT’s an event. You know what’s not an event? Pretty much everything else that happens. And at least he’s fucked-up-looking. Everyone else is pretty generic and boring. You’ve got these two guys who bought the opera, a couple singers who seem like jerks, and Raoul, who is a wuss.
6th Thing
Everyone in this book is stupid. These two dudes are foiled by a sleight of hand trick. Twice. It takes them weeks to consider whether there might be secret passages in this giant opera house where people somehow keep vanishing from within rooms and other people hear clearly-human voices coming from the walls almost constantly. A fucking horse goes missing and everyone is like, “Wait. We have horses?” It takes them a ridiculously long time to figure out that a really ugly dude is not, in fact, a paranormal creature? Get your shit together.
7th Thing
I get a very mixed message from this book. On one hand, I think you’re supposed to feel bad for Erik, and perhaps that his path was not of his choosing. Because he looks all fucked-up, he couldn’t live the normal life he wanted. On the other hand, he ends up pretending he’s a ghost, extorting money from people, and kidnapping some lady so she’ll marry him, threatening to blow a buncha shit up if she says no. There’s a message about books and their covers and so on, but then I feel like Erik isn’t terribly sympathetic either. Because as fucked-up as he might look, damn, you’re just going to blow up a few hundred people who came to the opera? He’s going to 9/11 that whole fucking place just because he’s ugly? I mean, if that’s how this works, based on my looks, I should at least be able to rear end someone in traffic without consequence.
8th Thing
I don’t get why The Persian is all of a sudden cocking a shotgun and saying, “Let’s get this son of a bitch!” Why didn’t he do this sooner? Don’t get me wrong, this is probably the only effective character opposing the ghost. He’s figuring out a trap door while Raoul is laying on the ground and soiling himself because they’re in a toasty room. I just don’t understand why he’s all invested in this shit now instead of, you know, like 5 years ago. It’s like we’re watching his Spider-Man moment, where he lets the robber by and then the robber kills Uncle Ben. Maybe the ghost killed The Persian’s kindly uncle the previous day, and The Persian now realizes what he must do at a very convenient time?
This sounds small, but this sort of thing is what takes away from the world of a story. Because things just happen to coincide this way, it makes it seem like this world exists only within the story and for the story’s duration.
9th Thing
How did we not get better comedy from these two dorks buying an opera house and then the previous owners being like, “By the way, there’s a fucking ghost who is going to occupy box 5, and also you have to pay him a shitload of protection money and basically let him kidnap and kill the occasional person. Sorry we didn’t mention that earlier, lol”?
10th Thing
Is it just me, or is it not well-explained how the ghost ruined Carlotta? Now, I looked it up, and I guess it’s implied that the ghost, using his opera powers, was able to throw his voice down to the stage, make it sound like Carlotta was croaking instead of singing, and therefore destroy her performance. So she wasn’t ACTUALLY destroyed, and if she performed anywhere else she’d be fine? Weak.
11th Thing
The chandelier falls, killing the woman who is going to replace the box keeper for box 5, which is where the Phantom likes to hang out. Erik claims that he had nothing to do with it. I’m not sure if you’re supposed to think this is bullshit or not. Because on one hand, he admits to all kinds of heinous shit, so why would this ONE thing be the thing he’s like, “Naw, man”? On the other hand, it seems convenient that it happened when it did and crushed who it did. But then am I supposed to believe that Erik dropped the chandelier AND somehow caused this one person, the ONLY person killed by the chandelier, to sit directly beneath it during the performance? I was just listening to this podcast where an author was talking about the difficulties of writing fiction versus non-fiction. In a way, he said, fiction has to be more plausible than non-fiction. Because if something crazy ACTUALLY happened, you can always back up your story with “Hey, man, that’s how it went down.” There is really no obligation of non-fiction to SEEM true so long as it IS true. Fiction, on the other hand, has a plausibility requirement. A very strange coincidence that happens in real life, which might seem random and very unlikely, is acceptable in non-fiction. But in fiction, a character acting out of character, a random, senseless event, or a thing that just sort of happens is harder to make fly. Which brings us back to Phantom. On the one hand, it’s SO implausible that the chandelier would fall when it did on who it did that it’s an “Oh, come on” moment if we read it as coincidence. Thus, we’re meant to read it as intentional. However, when Erik claims it was not his doing, we’re left in a problematic situation. We really have no reason to think he’s lying about this after telling so many awful truths.
This fucking chandelier, man…
12th Thing
This half-mask shit is shit. In the Lon Cheney version, the Phantom was pretty gruesome. Gerard Butler? Only like a quarter of his face is hidden behind the mask, and I’m telling you right now, 3/4 of a Gerard Butler face is WAY more than any of us can hope for. I’m not buying that one couldn’t get by on being 3/4 Gerard Butler in the looks department.”