De Palma: Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

One of the strangest films of Brian De Palma’s career, Phantom of the Paradise is a loose adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, transplanting the rise of Glam Rock for the rise of Grand Opera. In this case, the Phantom starts out as Winslow Leach (William Finley), a struggling songwriter who sells a song cycle to Swan (Paul Williams), the mysterious owner of the Paradise, a baroque nightclub. After Swan reworks it as a Glam Rock musical and has Finley disfigured, the songwriter starts to haunt the cast and crew of his desecrated masterpiece as they prepare for opening night. As that might suggest, most of the film takes place in and around the Paradise, which is as much of a character as the Paris Opera was in the original story. Yet Leroux’s catacombs feel positively lucid in comparison with De Palma’s Paradise, which presents an extraordinary, shifting array of textures and surfaces. More an optical illusion than a sustained space, it’s ostensibly a series of nested microcosms that start with the traditional baroque corridors and foyers, and progress to the high-tech recording studios that form the nerve centre of the building. Yet De Palma’s camera is so hyperactive and vortical that this hierarchy of spaces never quite comes together, never quite feels linear. The closer we get to the centre of the building, the more cluttered with cameras and other electronic platforms it becomes, until it's more like participating in a happening than watching a film from a comfortable or critical distance. That sense of media saturation is perfectly suited to the polymorphous perspectives of Swan’s Glam phantasmagoria, which is nothing if not an accumulation of surfaces upon surfaces, a multi-platform, cannibalistic concatenation of pleasures that depend, for their effect, on never quite feeling commensurable with each other. And, by the end, Glam has become voracious enough to simply incorporate all the Phantom’s efforts to thwart it, until it’s a bit like an alternative version of Carrie in which the final bloodbath merely intensifies everyone’s prom-night high. A rock musical for the cusp of a synthesized age, and a last gasp of Gothic on the eve of Goth, it puts everything out there and never once looks back, hurtling Glamwards with apocalyptic abandon.