Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2006-03-19 10:49 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2006-03-19 10:49 pm
(no subject)
So I was in the car, listening to a bootleg of Anthony Warlow in PotO sent to me by the lovely ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
puddleduck3, and I got to thinking about Phantom again. It's slightly odd, revisiting it after a good long period in various other fandoms, but not having it constantly on the brain does make it seem fresher when you come back to it, and I like to think I have more of a sense of perspective on it by now. And so, having not produced a long and caffeinated ramble in quite some time, I think it's time for a bit of meta.
Plz to be noting that I have abandoned my Leroux purism for the moment, and this post is based on the ALW musical except where stated otherwise. Mostly because it was relistening to the musical that brought this on, but also partly because for all my book fangirliness, ALW is my original frame of reference, so it's easier to think in those terms.
Abstractly, I think Christine's feelings towards Erik can be summarized pretty well in Twisted Every Way: there are essentially two reasons why she doesn't want to take part in Raoul's plan. She wants to avoid Erik, and she also wants to protect him. Why does she want to avoid him? Well, quite simply, she's terrified of him. She knows he's obsessed with her, that he's unstable, that he places very little value on human life. She doesn't want to be responsible for another disaster, and she most definitely does not want to give him the chance to kidnap her. Underlying this is the subtext that she doesn't want to be in close proximity to him because of the effect he has on her. By day, when she's not in his presence and she's in full possession of her faculties, she knows rationally that he's a psycho stalker and she shouldn't be involved with him at all. But she tends to, ah, forget that when he's singing in her ear and doing the much-fangirled Sexy Hand Thing. And once she's away from him, she knows she shouldn't let herself fall under his spell, but she also knows that if she's alone with him she probably will, and that would be a betrayal of not only her integrity but of Raoul as well. In addition to wanting to avoid Erik's violent instability, she wants to remove any possibility that she would cheat on the man she loves due to a perverse attraction that only comes into effect when she's in Erik's magnetic presence. It's reality versus fantasy, a stable and committed relationship versus the thrill of seduction.
And yes, O E/C shippers, she also wants to protect him, but I'd put that at about equal level with avoidance, or maybe even a bit lower, and a lot of it is motivated by pity. She knows he's flippin' psychotic, but she's also seen his vulnerable, human side, and doesn't want to see him captured and treated like a monster when there is obviously so much more to him. She also knows that she's indebted to him because he "made [her] song take wing;" her feelings towards Erik himself are ambivalent, but she never ceases to treasure the rapture he gave her through music.
The reason Raoul seems like such a jackass for pressuring her into taking part into his plan is because the audience can see the multiple angles of Christine's dilemma, while he sees only the first reason for her reluctance: her fear. Consider what Raoul knows about Erik and what Christine has said about him--in the musical, not the book! He seems to realize fairly quickly that the Angel of Music who's so controlling of her actions is the same as the Phantom who's responsible for her disappearance after Hannibal; the next he hears of the Phantom is on the rooftop after Il Muto. And what does Christine say about Erik then? That he's a murderer, that he took her down to his lair, that he's horribly deformed but that his music has a wonderful effect on her. (Note that she conveniently left out all the swoony seduction bits of Music of the Night.) All through AIAOY she asks him constantly to protect her, to help her live free of Erik and his bizarre netherworld. And so when he tries to convince her to help her trap Erik, he doesn't understand her attraction to him, her desire to protect her relationship with Raoul, her pity towards Erik or her debt to him. All he sees is that she's terrified of what he might do to her, and since her fear is the only obstacle he's aware of, he thinks it's just a matter of reassuring her and giving her courage. Which, regardless of the dubiousness of his plan, is a sweet and supportive thing to do.
The fantasy vs. reality issue, I think, is the heart of the schism between E/C shippers and R/C shippers. E/C is exciting; it's all about danger, seduction, forbidden desire. Whereas R/C is downright boring, but it's an infinitely healthier relationship in the long run. And I completely understand the appeal of excitement--honestly, who doesn't instinctually root for Erik? But where most E/C shippers go wrong is in assuming that because their dynamic is more interesting and more appealing, Erik and Christine are going to settle down happily and have eight children and make sweet sweet music of the night together until they die at a ripe old age, romantically curled up in the coffin in one another's arms. An ending like that is, quite frankly, R/C dressed up with a mask and some pretty music. The excitement and passion of their relationship, let loose as it is in so many twisted forms, makes it ridiculously unstable; to remove the instability is to remove what makes E/C appealing. We find Erik more interesting than Raoul because he's dangerous, because he kidnaps the woman he loves and drops chandeliers on people's heads and throws shit fits whenever anyone touches his mask and extorts and blackmails and murders in Christine's name. The same intensity in his character that's so seductive in Music of the Night leads him to be rather, well, explosive. But seduction, no matter how toe-curlingly delicious it can be, is not in and of itself the basis for a long-term relationship like E/C fics are so fond of portraying. Can a relationship have a crackling-hot dynamic and still lead to years of stability and committment? You bet your buttons it can, but they're separate phenomena and while Erik and Christine have attraction in spades, I'm not seeing the stability and longevity bit. At all.
Raoul/Christine is practically the opposite. It's boring. It's mushy. It's got about as much sexual tension as my left sock. But it's also based on mutual adoration, caring, and respect. No, Christine probably doesn't get the same thrill in Raoul's presence as she does in Erik's, but she does feel happy and safe. That thrill of danger and seduction and infatuation wears off after a while, and unfortunately for the E/C ship it's practically all those two have got going for them in terms of a relationship. But caring, respect, safety--with a bit of maintenance, those can last a lifetime.
I, personally, see Christine's choice not to return to Erik as a sign that she has matured throughout the story. Her childhood was marked by fairy tales and wild flights of fancy, and the entire Angel of Music issue is an extension of that. Erik's love for her forces it into a more mature dimension, but throughout most of the story Christine continues to see him in fairy tale aspect, and constantly gets her feeling with him confused with her feelings for her father, who planted all the fantasy in her head in the first place. After the graveyard scene, she lets go of this fantasy mindset and her inability to get over her father's death; this allows the more sexual side of her relationship with Erik to come into full bloom (PoNR, etc), but it also severs the tie she had to him as her Angel of Music. With that gone, when she is confronted in the Final Lair scene with the full twistedness of his adoration, she is able to forgive him, but she's also able to leave him once he lets her go. And in that act of forgiveness, I think, Erik is able to take a step back and realize, as she has already done, that they have no future together. He lets her go. Yes, she could have gone back, and if she had, I doubt he would have been able to keep up his resolve, send her back to the relationship that would be better for her, and insist on breaking his own heart in the process. But she doesn't go back, because she understands that as alluring and beautiful as the fantasy he represents may be, she can't live in it. Fantasy vs. reality, excitement vs. stability. She gives up the doomed, short-lived ecstasy she might have experienced with Erik for a mild but long-lived happiness with Raoul.
E/C is terribly romantic, but in the end, Christine makes the choice I think most of us would make in The Real World. Fiction is not, of course, The Real World, so the E/C ship flourishes, but yes, it annoys me when people write boring fluff fic that sucks out everything that makes the pairing appealing in the first place. They don't have a happy ending, and that's what makes them more interesting than R/C.
I really should give this thing a decent conclusion, but frankly, I'm all rambled out. I realize that I've completely failed to address Erik's perspective throughout this, but it's not meant to be an all-encompassing rant. No, really, it was originally supposed to have a very specific subject, if you can believe that.
puddleduck3, and I got to thinking about Phantom again. It's slightly odd, revisiting it after a good long period in various other fandoms, but not having it constantly on the brain does make it seem fresher when you come back to it, and I like to think I have more of a sense of perspective on it by now. And so, having not produced a long and caffeinated ramble in quite some time, I think it's time for a bit of meta.Plz to be noting that I have abandoned my Leroux purism for the moment, and this post is based on the ALW musical except where stated otherwise. Mostly because it was relistening to the musical that brought this on, but also partly because for all my book fangirliness, ALW is my original frame of reference, so it's easier to think in those terms.
Abstractly, I think Christine's feelings towards Erik can be summarized pretty well in Twisted Every Way: there are essentially two reasons why she doesn't want to take part in Raoul's plan. She wants to avoid Erik, and she also wants to protect him. Why does she want to avoid him? Well, quite simply, she's terrified of him. She knows he's obsessed with her, that he's unstable, that he places very little value on human life. She doesn't want to be responsible for another disaster, and she most definitely does not want to give him the chance to kidnap her. Underlying this is the subtext that she doesn't want to be in close proximity to him because of the effect he has on her. By day, when she's not in his presence and she's in full possession of her faculties, she knows rationally that he's a psycho stalker and she shouldn't be involved with him at all. But she tends to, ah, forget that when he's singing in her ear and doing the much-fangirled Sexy Hand Thing. And once she's away from him, she knows she shouldn't let herself fall under his spell, but she also knows that if she's alone with him she probably will, and that would be a betrayal of not only her integrity but of Raoul as well. In addition to wanting to avoid Erik's violent instability, she wants to remove any possibility that she would cheat on the man she loves due to a perverse attraction that only comes into effect when she's in Erik's magnetic presence. It's reality versus fantasy, a stable and committed relationship versus the thrill of seduction.
And yes, O E/C shippers, she also wants to protect him, but I'd put that at about equal level with avoidance, or maybe even a bit lower, and a lot of it is motivated by pity. She knows he's flippin' psychotic, but she's also seen his vulnerable, human side, and doesn't want to see him captured and treated like a monster when there is obviously so much more to him. She also knows that she's indebted to him because he "made [her] song take wing;" her feelings towards Erik himself are ambivalent, but she never ceases to treasure the rapture he gave her through music.
The reason Raoul seems like such a jackass for pressuring her into taking part into his plan is because the audience can see the multiple angles of Christine's dilemma, while he sees only the first reason for her reluctance: her fear. Consider what Raoul knows about Erik and what Christine has said about him--in the musical, not the book! He seems to realize fairly quickly that the Angel of Music who's so controlling of her actions is the same as the Phantom who's responsible for her disappearance after Hannibal; the next he hears of the Phantom is on the rooftop after Il Muto. And what does Christine say about Erik then? That he's a murderer, that he took her down to his lair, that he's horribly deformed but that his music has a wonderful effect on her. (Note that she conveniently left out all the swoony seduction bits of Music of the Night.) All through AIAOY she asks him constantly to protect her, to help her live free of Erik and his bizarre netherworld. And so when he tries to convince her to help her trap Erik, he doesn't understand her attraction to him, her desire to protect her relationship with Raoul, her pity towards Erik or her debt to him. All he sees is that she's terrified of what he might do to her, and since her fear is the only obstacle he's aware of, he thinks it's just a matter of reassuring her and giving her courage. Which, regardless of the dubiousness of his plan, is a sweet and supportive thing to do.
The fantasy vs. reality issue, I think, is the heart of the schism between E/C shippers and R/C shippers. E/C is exciting; it's all about danger, seduction, forbidden desire. Whereas R/C is downright boring, but it's an infinitely healthier relationship in the long run. And I completely understand the appeal of excitement--honestly, who doesn't instinctually root for Erik? But where most E/C shippers go wrong is in assuming that because their dynamic is more interesting and more appealing, Erik and Christine are going to settle down happily and have eight children and make sweet sweet music of the night together until they die at a ripe old age, romantically curled up in the coffin in one another's arms. An ending like that is, quite frankly, R/C dressed up with a mask and some pretty music. The excitement and passion of their relationship, let loose as it is in so many twisted forms, makes it ridiculously unstable; to remove the instability is to remove what makes E/C appealing. We find Erik more interesting than Raoul because he's dangerous, because he kidnaps the woman he loves and drops chandeliers on people's heads and throws shit fits whenever anyone touches his mask and extorts and blackmails and murders in Christine's name. The same intensity in his character that's so seductive in Music of the Night leads him to be rather, well, explosive. But seduction, no matter how toe-curlingly delicious it can be, is not in and of itself the basis for a long-term relationship like E/C fics are so fond of portraying. Can a relationship have a crackling-hot dynamic and still lead to years of stability and committment? You bet your buttons it can, but they're separate phenomena and while Erik and Christine have attraction in spades, I'm not seeing the stability and longevity bit. At all.
Raoul/Christine is practically the opposite. It's boring. It's mushy. It's got about as much sexual tension as my left sock. But it's also based on mutual adoration, caring, and respect. No, Christine probably doesn't get the same thrill in Raoul's presence as she does in Erik's, but she does feel happy and safe. That thrill of danger and seduction and infatuation wears off after a while, and unfortunately for the E/C ship it's practically all those two have got going for them in terms of a relationship. But caring, respect, safety--with a bit of maintenance, those can last a lifetime.
I, personally, see Christine's choice not to return to Erik as a sign that she has matured throughout the story. Her childhood was marked by fairy tales and wild flights of fancy, and the entire Angel of Music issue is an extension of that. Erik's love for her forces it into a more mature dimension, but throughout most of the story Christine continues to see him in fairy tale aspect, and constantly gets her feeling with him confused with her feelings for her father, who planted all the fantasy in her head in the first place. After the graveyard scene, she lets go of this fantasy mindset and her inability to get over her father's death; this allows the more sexual side of her relationship with Erik to come into full bloom (PoNR, etc), but it also severs the tie she had to him as her Angel of Music. With that gone, when she is confronted in the Final Lair scene with the full twistedness of his adoration, she is able to forgive him, but she's also able to leave him once he lets her go. And in that act of forgiveness, I think, Erik is able to take a step back and realize, as she has already done, that they have no future together. He lets her go. Yes, she could have gone back, and if she had, I doubt he would have been able to keep up his resolve, send her back to the relationship that would be better for her, and insist on breaking his own heart in the process. But she doesn't go back, because she understands that as alluring and beautiful as the fantasy he represents may be, she can't live in it. Fantasy vs. reality, excitement vs. stability. She gives up the doomed, short-lived ecstasy she might have experienced with Erik for a mild but long-lived happiness with Raoul.
E/C is terribly romantic, but in the end, Christine makes the choice I think most of us would make in The Real World. Fiction is not, of course, The Real World, so the E/C ship flourishes, but yes, it annoys me when people write boring fluff fic that sucks out everything that makes the pairing appealing in the first place. They don't have a happy ending, and that's what makes them more interesting than R/C.
I really should give this thing a decent conclusion, but frankly, I'm all rambled out. I realize that I've completely failed to address Erik's perspective throughout this, but it's not meant to be an all-encompassing rant. No, really, it was originally supposed to have a very specific subject, if you can believe that.