Film + TV

When movie musicals aren’t stupid

by John Semley

This article originally appeared in the November issue of AUX Magazine. Download and subscribe for free in the App Store.

The problem with movie musicals is that they’re unbelievable. Maybe it’s one of those “suspension of disbelief” things that underlies any movie—you know, the thing where when you think about it everyone on screen is just an actor on a stage reading lines written in a script, and so drains all the on-screen goings-on of a certain dramatic verisimilitude. Movie musicals push the suspension of disbelief over the singing, dancing precipice. It’s like the time I went to the ballet and couldn’t get into it because I kept wondering why everyone was dancing. Was it some kind of spell? Do they not know how to walk?

Anyway the point is that in 99.8% of cases, movie musicals are stupid. I mean at the end of Grease, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John fly into the sky in a magical car while a bunch of idiots dressed like the 1950s sing a stupid song. The only exceptions to the hard-and-fast rule of all, literally all, movie musicals being bad are Jesus Christ Superstar, maybe the South Park movie, The Rocky Horror Picture Show if you’re not being annoying about it, anything with Muppets in it, and for sure Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise, an acutely tragic, slightly campy, sort-of rock opera that predates The Rocky Horror Picture Show by almost a whole calendar year.

The jist of the movie is this: hardscrabble, hyper-earnest singer/songwriter Winslow Leach (the late William Finley, RIP) sells his epic rock cantata based on the Faust legend to the ruthless record producer Swan (real singer/songwriter Paul Williams). Winslow finds that Swan is planning to mount his Faust rock opera at his new club, the Paradise. Ripped off, Winslow storms Swan’s mansion, where he meets the lovely singer Phoenix (Jessica Harper, from Suspiria). Swan won’t hear Winslow’s protests, so he tosses him in jail. There, Winslow learns that Swan has transformed the Faust cantata into a bubblegum pop spectacular, to be performed by the Paradise’s goofy house-band, the Juicy-Fruits. Winslow escapes from prison, ends up mutilated while attempting to sabotage the Swan Records press, and begins hiding out in the Paradise, decked out in a weird silver bird mask and cape, making every effort to ruin Swan’s new nightclub. Winslow and Swan reach a standoff, with the producer offering the disfigured songwriter a chance to mount his music the way he wants, with Phoenix singing, in exchange for not destroying the Paradise. Too agonizingly sincere to recognize the Faustian elements in his own contractual arrangement, Winslow signs in blood.

Phantom of the Paradise is probably my favourite movie, despite the fact that it is, all things considered, a musical. It’s fitted with music provided by Williams, himself a hyper-earnest songwriter in the Winslow Leach mold (he’s probably best known for writing “Rainbow Connection,” from The Muppet Movie). It’s not as musically ambitious as something like Jesus Christ Superstar, but Williams makes the music hang together pretty well, working some thematic and musical threads through his own rock n’ roll Faust cantata. For example: Phantom opens with the Juicy Fruits performing “Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye,” a number about a rock star who kills himself so his fatally ill sister can cash in on his postmortem legacy, foreshadowing—spoiler alert—the sacrifice Winslow makes late in the film to save the corrupted, coked-up Phoenix. Even more remarkably, Williams manages to re-work the film’s central number, Winslow’s “Faust,” as an upbeat surf jam about cruising in a convertible (“Upholstery”), a twinned commentary on how major label success perverts the purity of songcraft and director De Palma’s own love-and-theft relationship with film history (Phantom is essentially a pop pastiche, built on narrative references and visual nods to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Frankenstein, Psycho and, of course, Faust and The Phantom of the Opera). Phantom’s also a thoroughgoing critique of phoniness in rock music. It’s a broad target, sure, but in the forms of Williams’ miniature Mephistopheles (not so much the devil as the devil’s middleman) and his pro-tooled Frankenstein of a rock idol, Beef (Gerrit Graham), a sub-Meatloaf mound of overcompensating, operatic male sexuality, the film ably personifies its wincing appraisal of rock music’s backslide towards decadence and stupidity.

But the best thing about Phantom of the Paradise, the thing that makes it entirely non-obnoxious even as something which is, on paper, an entirely obnoxious movie musical, is that it’s rock club setup provides it with the ability to harmonize all the singing and dancing within the narrative itself. This isn’t West Side Story or Grease where all these supposed criminals are pirouetting around, slicking their hair back like goofs. The musical numbers in Phantom are diegetic and non-interruptive. When someone sings, the reality of the movie doesn’t grind to a halt and wait for the cast to work through four-part harmonies and jazz-hands their way through exactingly choreographed dance numbers. Winslow (well, Paul Williams-as-Winslow) plays “Faust” at the piano, Phoenix sings “Special to Me” during her Paradise audition, and even the film’s most obviously “staged” numbers, the one-two punch of “Somebody Super Like You” and “Life At Last” are being obviously staged, in front of the rowdy Paradise audience. Williams even manages to incorporate the sound of someone being electrocuted into the score itself.

The reality is this: we all want to sing and dance like jerks without being embarrassed at doing so. The obvious disruptions into song-and-dance that mark most movie-musicals make them too humiliating for the average human person whose shame centres are still safely intact, the province of high school theatre kids and flamboyant aunts. Phantom of the Paradise is the antidote to the movie musical’s inherent embarrassment—a movie that synchronizes its singing and dancing within its story, requiring nothing so extravagant as a second-level suspension of disbelief, using music and pop forms to put across its deeply sad love-story, and its deeply cynical critique of the pollutants of pop corporatism. Singing, dancing, pastiche and all, it’s above all else a real movie.