My Greatest Regret... in anticlimatic

Long ago, I was walking along a mill-pond lake of sorts, down by the Sanitarium in Traverse City, when I passed a group of three young women, probably half my age, and as I was approaching I heard them singing. In unison. The following:

Know what I love best? Lottie said,
is when I’m asleep in my bed,
and the Angel of Music sings songs in my head-
thee-ee Angel of Music sings songs in my head

And then they all stopped. Because that’s the end of the female part, and suddenly the opportunity I had been waiting for my entire was on a plate right in front of me. From my belly to my throat flew the following:

Insolent boy! This slave of fashion!
Basking in YOUR. Glory-eeeeeee!
Ignorant fool! This brave young suitor
Share-ring in My. Triumphhhh!

Which of course is the male part that immediately follows Lotte/Mirror from the original Phantom Of The Opera Broadway musical soundtrack, which I had memorized since I was 12.

But it all got lodged in my throat. And I just kept walking.
Why did I do that? I am not one to feel shame at my own expense in the presence of strangers. But, I think I didn’t want to embarrass my date at the time, or involve myself with a group of young women, so I did not shine bright like a diamond that day. And I can’t get over it. I can’t let it go.

When the Gerard Butler and Emmy Rossum film came out I balked. I found it a tremendous downgrade from Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman. It felt like a cheap flashy cash grab, and after seeing it in theaters I never wanted to see suntan gerard cave dweller butler ever again, in anything.

One would think I just had loyalty to the original, that I grew up with, but a few years ago I found a ‘phantom of the opera’ that preceded even that version, though it still had Sarah Brightman in it. It was the original promotional video, like a pilot, that came before even the Broadway musical. And in fact the musical would go on to swallow the promo song completely in the title track ‘the phantom of the opera,’ though the lyrics were different.

Once the musical was flushed out, the lyrics were placed more in the context of the story when the piece is debuted, as the original pilot lyrics were more of a synopsis of the story entire. I think the original song, the brief pilot video, was better than the entire musical that came from it. Thematically, metaphorically, narratively at least.

The overarching story from the Pilot is different from the ultimate story in the Musical. In the musical, the somewhat toxic love triangle between Christine, Raul, and The Phantom plays out almost softly, like a daytime soap opera, with Christine ultimately choosing Raul- maybe only because the theater burns down, and both Raul and The Phantom survive her and attend her funeral. Ultimately, she retains Main Character status and is the single Mortal Victim, while retaining love from both men.

In the Pilot, Raul is the single Mortal Victim, we don’t know the fate of Christine or the Opera house, and The Phantom closes it out singing victoriously. The main character and survivor of the pilot seems to be ‘The Music’ itself. The fate of everything else is questionable, but It triumphs.

The phantom is also voiced by Steve Harvey in the pilot, instead of Michael Crawford, which is objectively a vocal downgrade- but is pitch perfect thematically. Because what I enjoy most about it is a particular theme. A theme that seems to be purely Natural, somewhere between Evil and Divine. Something that touches on the nature of how and where individualism turns into collectivism.

I am an individualist through and through, and I recoil in disgust at most collectivist practices, but there is one area where I do in fact get down with it, and that is in the pursuit of novelty and greatness; discovery and creativity. I have discovered that people who are contrarian and cannot abide ever sacrificing their agency and their identify into ‘going along with the group,’ will themselves choose to sacrifice it if it places them as a cog in something/anything extraordinary. It can be something extraordinarily bad, but extraordinary in and of itself is an important pursuit, even if we have to take the bad with the good.

Instead of letting some self declared authority figure tell you where to play your anti-individualist, make-me-a-vessel-for-the-cause card of subjugation, typically for purposes of their own enrichment and power maintenance, I encourage people to be independent minded and then choose for themselves which system to become a useful and willing tool for. I think this lets people wander towards things that are genuinely beautiful to them, and be drawn by them- into them.

In the Pilot, Christine is the projected ‘voice’ of The Phantom (your spirit and my voice, in one combine), which is why it’s more appropriate that Steve Harvey sings his part in a vastly inferior way. The contrast between him and crawford boosts this sense of disparity in quality, between Christine and The Phantom. When it comes to her agency in the story, she submits it to the musical genius of the man under the opera house. The lyric is changed to:

and when my song begins, I always find…

The semantics are important here. She doesn’t begin singing. The song begins, separate from her, and from the world in fact, and she follows along playing her part. Her ‘song’ isn’t just hers. Is only barely partially hers, in fact. It is more the Phantom’s song, but even then it isn’t ‘his’ either. It’s something special, and extraordinary, and worth submitting to in order to see it birthed into reality.

But there is a warning included and implied- The Phantom is no saint and despite his skill is a toxic menace, and the price of great beauty is often great suffering and devastation.

The pilot just hits different. More honest. Less ‘Opera.’