| I
was trying to make the story be a perfect Christian
allegory, which it’s not.
As
I watched the film, reveling in the music, but also trying
to put my finger on the spiritual implications of such a tangle
of requited and unrequited desire, I found that my ideas didn’t
solidify easily. I mean, surely this film has to do with good
and evil, and life and death, and love and hate, and all these
big spiritual themes—but I couldn’t wrap it up in
a nice box. I’ve decided that it’s because I was
trying (for some reason) to make the story be a perfect Christian
allegory, which it’s not. It’s close: Christine is
the everyperson/Eve figure, trying to fill the void left by her
father. She is lured underground by the Phantom, to his personal
hell of confinement, where he tempts her like the devil. Raoul,
the Christ figure, whom Christine fell in love with on the roof
of the opera house—suggestive of heaven, as opposed to
the underground lair of the Phantom—then comes and rescues
her, and they live happily ever after. But there are holes here,
mainly having to do with Raoul not being a very developed character,
and with the sympathetic presentation of the Phantom. So, instead
of trying to simplify the story in this way, I’d like to
just lay out some random thoughts on two things that this film
does, spiritually speaking.
First,
Phantom makes us consider the nature of good and evil. Like other
stories in this vein—Paradise
Lost, Jekyll and Hyde, and Prometheus Unbound come to mind—the
Phantom is “the bad guy,” but because of the complexity,
sympathetic presentation, and motivations of the character, the
audience is forced to consider what it really means to be “the
bad guy.” Do we root for the heroic, questing Christ figure,
Raoul? Or do we root for the Phantom, whose downfalls seem forgivable,
given what we know about him? Or is the Phantom himself the hero,
the “good guy?” Does he, in some way, save Christine
more than Raoul does? Does Christine even need to be saved from
him? Or is he saved by her, and somehow redeemed by the end?
All good questions, and all questions that don’t come up
in stories with simpler presentations of heroes and villains.
Second,
Phantom gives insight into what we all know about ourselves: we’re always striving for something, and we’ll go
through a lot to get it. Our strivings are often very deep in
our nature, and often have to do with father/mother issues, and
with love. But as C.S. Lewis once suggested, if we have a desire,
there must be a way to fulfill it—so perhaps there is a
way to fulfill that need we all seem to have for a perfect parent-child
relationship. Perhaps there is a way to love perfectly and be
loved perfectly, unmarred by ulterior motives, or misperceptions,
or miscommunications, or our past. And, as with the Phantom,
Christine, and Raoul, perhaps our choices play a role in how
these needs are met. This, at the risk of simplifying again,
may be the real strength of the story: it makes us seriously
consider desire, proper action, motivation, consequences—in
short, morality. The Phantom of the
Opera is a morality play, hidden inside a love story, with
big visuals and good music. It makes us think about our
part in this big morality play called “our
lives.” And, upon reflection, it will hopefully also make
us think about the possibility of all our evils being understood
and remedied, of all our desires being fulfilled, of all our
needs being met. As such, Phantom truly is an “Angel
of Music.” |
