meta: more on phantom of the opera, v for vendetta, and folklore/ myth

[cimorene]

i've thought before about the way the phantom of the opera fuses beauty and the beast and east of the sun, west of the moon/cupid & psyche. i like to refer to persephone & hades too because that's my favourite, but the only element from there and none of the others is that she's kidnapped against her will as opposed to offering herself or being offered by her family.

looking under the mask is a clear reference to cupid & psyche, but it doesn't carry the immediate punishment that moves the plot to the climax; instead, phantom borrows from beauty & the beast the ring she has to wear when he voluntarily lets her go, and it's her betrayal then that she has to overcome. the don juan arc is the redemption part of cupid & psyche, although the test is given her by the phantom himself and not the power which has enchanted him. there's even a dramatic final scene with the phantom having a nervous breakdown and christine accepting the ring from him (beauty & the beast style)--which redeems him, in fact, breaking his enchantment (symbolically, but effectively) even though he then lets her go.

the raoul thing is not just a different story entirely, it's a completely contradictory genre. the tension between the fairytale world of magic and the more realistic world raoul inhabits makes phantom nonsensical at times, but it's also the genius that drives it and makes it so unforgettable. the logic of the folktale is completely different from the logic of the romance genre the raoul/christine story belongs to. the latter is much closer to reality. in real life, there wouldn't be any question at all, because it would just be stupid to go with a murderous and deranged stalker--to trust him at all even as far as is possible in a gothic romance, even if he was quite nice to you personally. in reality, erotomaniacs don't love you; they're insane. and they're not going to stay harmless to the object of affection. the raoul/christine romance makes sense in reality, and even more sense in the romance genre. in that genre, the childhood love, the chivalry, the difference in worldly status (while the girl is of course of respectable breeding)--all this is as inevitably eloquent about the proper ending of that story as the phantom/christine element is eloquent about its proper ending.

but it's my belief that it's the power of this implicit fairytale ending speaking so loudly that produces so much christine/phantom shipping. people know how fairytales work, even if they're not familiar with any variants of beauty & the beast or cupid & psyche. they can feel how the end is supposed to go, and the end of phantom is as shocking (and norm-breaking) in its way as was hitchcock's killing off the heroine at the beginning of psycho. it's like playing seven notes of a major scale and then playing the last note a half-step flat.

the beginning of v for vendetta echoes the beginning of phantom more nearly than it resembles either fairytale. evey and christine don't offer themselves to their phantoms as sacrifices and they aren't given to them. but they're not exactly snatched up while picking flowers, either--they both go perfectly willingly, which in fact echoes certain variants of persephone (for instance, one where she goes at hades' request to alleviate his loneliness and one where she enters the underworld of her own volition without consulting him at all, because she wants to comfort the ghosts).

evey gets the tour of the phantomv's lair, has a nap in a princess bed and wakes up with a sense of wonder, at which point we're treated to an absurdly domestic morning-after scene (probably funnier in v even than in the recent phantom film, in fact).  he keeps her for a while and lets her escape when he kills the bishop (after all, do we really believe he couldn't have snatched her back in all that time if he'd wanted to?).

evey's torture doesn't have a proper counterpart in phantom (though he is quite angry with her and it is the phantom himself meting out her punishment at the masquerade and through the performance of don juan, but that's relatively tame). but i might perhaps relate it to the tasks aphrodite makes psyche perform to get cupid back--although since in cupid & psyche she has the help of animals to complete them i think it's actually a bit more like east of the sun, west of the moon, where the maiden nearly starves and freezes to death questing around the world before she's eventually borne across the sea by a giant fish/the north wind to the kingdom of trolls. some of the finland-swedish versions of this folktale are more horrific than others in terms of the tasks she performs, and in at least one she actually has to kill people. in fact, this part reminds me strongly of persephone. although there's no indication hades tortures her especially and certainly not that he's trying to do anything for her own good--the torture and the cell are evey's symbolic descent through death/hell, and the evey who is reborn when she emerges is as different as the persephone who emerged from hades after her first winter there.

of course, v for vendetta isn't a retelling of phantom despite all the resonance. we have evey's return, but her pleas aren't enough to redeem v after all. he acknowledges that he loves her but ultimately rejects her in favour of his revenge. and of course, going away with her would have been ridiculous at that point in the narrative. the phantom-plot was the one out of place in v, transposed onto an epic tragedy as a framing device. although evey does betray v when she bolts to live with gordon, and v does have the mask, the cupid/psyche element isn't really active because she never tries seriously to remove it and v explictly tells her the folktale's moral (that his physical form isn't really "him"). because of this, he's rather more like the beast, whose beastly form is fixed until he's disenchanted. which, of course, doesn't happen to v.

i think it's significant, although i can't decide exactly what the significance is, that evey takes on v's role at the end of the movie. we're told that she's the representative of the new era while he's the representative of the old, but it does seem that she's taken his domain--become the new lord of the underworld, as it were. i don't know of any folktales that end in that way, but of course his voluntary self-sacrifice redeeming everyone else's sins has other resonances.

i'd love to write (or read) a lot more on this subject. this cluster of myths and folktales comprises my absolute favourite themes and narratives.

Comments

[ajodasso.livejournal.com]

I could never put my finger on it, but that is exactly why the ending of Phantom is so heartbreaking! There's nothing like having a fairytale broken, but, in a way, it's the breaking that makes it all the more meaningful. That and, in my bitterness, I am resigned to loss as a constant.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

the unexpected ending makes it more powerful, yeah, and the phantom's sacrifice makes the supposed redemption more meaningful. i mean, in beauty and the beast he's redeemed to live happily ever after, which is just a reward, but the phantom is redeemed spiritually or whatever into giving up what he wants, which is a much harder decision to make of course.

[anglepoiselamp.livejournal.com]

If I recall correctly, in the comic version of V for Vendetta Evey doesn't run away from V, but gets abandoned by him as part of his scheme to make her stronger. Or something. Hmm. The comic is actually subtly different in many ways.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

i heard it was very different. and the comic creator quit partway through the movie or disassociated himself from it, perhaps. i don't know anything about the original, so this is just about the movie.