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The Swan Archives "It's More than Just Songs" Page

At the most superficial level, Phantom is the story of a wronged composer taking revenge against an evil record tycoon. Just barely under the surface, however, lurk some of the themes that were apparently on Brian De Palma's mind in the late '60's and early '70's, principally:

the corporatization of art and corresponding difficulty of a noncommercial artist to receive wide exposure without compromising his art to suit his corporate masters, and the consequences for the artist of making such a "deal with the devil";
the tendency of commercial exploitation to transform art into crap;
the growing mass fascination with public self-destruction, and the correspondingly increasing willingness of entertainers to leverage personal catastrophe into marketing opportunities, and even to destroy themselves for the sake of satisfying the public.

This is probably our favorite photo of De Palma; on the set of The Fury, he and Amy Irving appear to be having some fun switching roles.

A child of the '60's who at one point had been shot in the leg by a policeman, De Palma explores in Phantom the same distrust of "authority" and "the establishment" as permeates his other films, particularly the methods used by those in power to manipulate the masses...and the eagerness of the masses to be manipulated. "The establishment" in 1974's Phantom, personified by Swan, presciently anticipates today's entertainment megaconglomerates, with their sophisticated cross-promotion and vertical marketing. Swan appears to have virtually absolute power to sway the public's tastes in entertainment, and to tell us whom we like and don't like. (Early on, Swan's power in this regard is alluded to when he proposes to turn Annette overnight from "the biggest thing in rock" to "finished," to punish her for giving free concerts for "starving gook orphans" -- for daring to have a mind of her own.) Annette's fate foreshadows those of Winslow and Phoenix.

Mistrust of authority forms the core of De Palma's work, from his first major feature, Greetings, onwards. In Greetings and its sequel-of-sorts, Hi, Mom!, De Palma's satirical ire was (in part) directed at the US government's propaganda, with respect to the Viet Nam war and the Kennedy assassination. He made equal fun, though, of the propagandists and of the conspiracy theorists whose faith in the falsity of the propaganda was just as blind as the faith of those who bought it.

A beautiful Italian poster for Greetings from its 1979 release there.

An original Greetings American one-sheet. It seems ridiculous that this film got an "X" rating in 1969. Writer/producer Charles Hirsch is editor Paul Hirsch's brother.

That's a young Gerrit Graham there in the middle.

In later films, particularly in his more obviously personal projects, he chronicled the individual's fight against the authoritarian fascism of societal peer pressure (Carrie), patriarchal hostility towards women seeking personal power and sexual autonomy through erotic fantasy (Dressed to Kill), the military's authoritarian hierarchy (Casualties of War), government corruption (Blow Out), and so on.

This Pakistani poster for Carrie prominently features, in the black stockings, a woman who wasn't in the film…and describes the film as "A bizappe [sic] tale of romance, mystery and murder."

This Turkish poster puts the emphasis on stuff getting blown up. The text in the upper left corner translates to "Mothers! Have you explained everything to your daughters?"

(He was in good company; during this same time period, Kubrick, another perennial outsider, was focused, in A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon and Full Metal Jacket, on the damaging effects of authoritarian societal constructs upon the individual.) Even in De Palma's stories of individuals pitted against other individuals, the bad guys were inevitably authority figures taking advantage of their societally-granted positions of superiority and status, whether Michael Courtland's trusted lawyer in Obsession or lawyer Kleinfeld in Carlito's Way, the controlling Dr. Breton (who exploits his husbandly and medical authority) in Sisters, the senior spy Phelps in Mission Impossible, Dr. Elliott in Dressed to Kill, or seemingly respectable Commander Dunne in Snake Eyes.

Some of the Mexican artwork for Sisters, like that shown on this lobby card, was maybe a little over the top.

Even De Palma's seemingly most "commercial" projects, The Untouchables and Mission Impossible, are in fact highly personal, and more than a little bit subversive; both films tell stories of original thinkers (Ness and Hunt) stuck working within the confines of corrupt but ostensibly "legitimate" organizations, who survive by surrounding themselves with a few trustworthy compatriots and working outside of, and even tormenting, the dysfunctional power structure (the Chicago police, in the case of The Untouchables, and the IMF, in Mission Impossible) which is supposed to govern their work. The parallels to De Palma's own travails with the studios are, whether or not intentional, clear.

Similarly, in Casualties of War, possibly De Palma's most affecting work, the outsider Eriksson must survive in combat even as he alienates his fellow platoon members, upon whose good graces his life depends. Eriksson, like De Palma, directs much of his energy towards appearing to cooperate with the larger establishment, while secretly attempting to further his own agenda.

De Palma comes by his suspicion of authority, and "outsider" credentials, honestly: Greetings and Hi, Mom! were not mere observations of the counterculture, but products of it. They reflected the lives of De Palma and his friends at the time, and come across today, even in their relative disorganization and "looseness", as authentic journals, rather than the anthropological studies of which so many other late 60's "hippie movies" (e.g., Easy Rider) are reminiscent.

Pinback buttons were kind of a "thing" in the late '60's. People used them as roach clips. Dionysus in '69 roach clips are getting hard to find because people kept putting them down and forgetting where they...whoa, I just completely lost my train of thought, man.

Throughout his early career, De Palma steadfastly pursued the things that interested him personally, in hopes that they would find first backers, and then an audience, rather than those which had obvious "commercial" potential. As a result, he seems to have spent much of his time banging his head against the wall trying to get his films made in the face of an industry that was looking for the easily-marketed. (The parallels to Winslow's travails are obvious.) De Palma's filmed record of a performance of Dionysus in '69, for example, is a product of his own enthusiasm about the Performance Group's rendition of the play, and in particular its pioneering interplay between the performers and the audience. De Palma makes this interplay the story, by filming the performance entirely in splitscreen, with one side showing the "performers," while the other side chronicles the "audience's" reaction and participation...the two groups aren't always easily separable. Dionysus represents a monumental achievement in film editing, which has sadly gone largely unrecognized. As well, Dionysus features a spectacular lead performance by Bill Finley, who shows here that he can play a charismatic and seductive Dionysus just as well as a nerdy Winslow, or creepy Dr. Breton. Finley is completely riveting, funny, spontaneous, and commanding in this exhilarating and exhausting live performance.

Finley, during a Dionysus performance, in a shot taken by none other than Andy Warhol.

De Palma had, with cowriter Louisa Rose, crafted early scripts of both Phantom and his immediately preceding film, Sisters, by 1971; both were written at a time when De Palma was reeling from his horrible experience on Get to Know Your Rabbit, which had been his first project for a major studio (Warners), and a complete disaster for him personally.

Original one-sheet from the ill-fated Get to Know Your Rabbit. De Palma's other rabbit-featuring work, "Home Movies," is a lot more fun.

Rabbit, a vehicle for Tommy Smothers, became so mired in studio politics that De Palma found himself removed from the project after filming it but before it was assembled into a cohesive whole, the result of a doublecross by Smothers. In an interesting parallel to Winslow's treatment by Swan, Smothers reputedly promised De Palma that the film "will be shot your way," and then intervened to have the studio take it out of De Palma's hands just before completion. Among other things, the studio eliminated the clever and ironic ending De Palma had devised for the film, and went with their own, far less interesting (and frankly nonsensical) conclusion. Warner's and Smothers' mutilation here is echoed by Swan's own cavalier willingness to, on a whim, change the classic ending of Faust ("so instead of burning in hell, he gets the girl?") so that the moral of the story is completely eviscerated, all in the interests of "entertainment".

Tommy Smothers explains to three politely attentive little girls, "...and just when it's nearly done, you SNATCH it out of the director's hands, throw it on the floor and take a dump on it," as Brian De Palma looks on.

Orson Welles and Brian De Palma discuss the fate of The Magnificent Ambersons as Tommy Smothers takes careful mental notes.

De Palma returned after Rabbit to making independently financed films -- Sisters, Phantom, and Obsession -- on a relative shoestring, and selling them once completed to the highest bidder. Unsurprisingly, Phantom, and Winslow in particular, seem to channel the "rage against the machine" frustration that we imagine De Palma might have been feeling at the time.

This Australian daybill for Sisters features Bill Finley prominently; as everything should.

While imitative of nothing and utterly original, Phantom makes gleeful reference to everything: from, most obviously, Faust and Phantom of the Opera, to Beauty and the Beast, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Frankenstein, and King Kong. There are a few nods to Hitchcock, including of course the shower sequence that turns our Psycho-borne expectations on their head, and a Man Who Knew Too Much-inspired assassination attempt. There are individual shots that are evocative of The Manchurian Candidate, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and even Touch of Evil.

While De Palma is often accused, generally by morons, of being a "copyist," particularly with respect to Hitchcock, this is ridiculous; it's not fair to jump up and down and yell "Rear Window" every time one character observes another through a pane of glass; "that looks familiar to me" is a criticism favored by the lazy.

Certainly, it's easy to see that Hitchcock was a tremendous influence, and that De Palma shares Hitchcock's sensibility for absurdity in the midst of violence and danger. As well, De Palma's films often share overarching themes and plot devices with Hitchcock's, and are in some cases inspired by Hitchcock's work: Obsession, like Vertigo, is a story of a man obsessed with a woman he had loved in the past, and Body Double revisits Rear Window's peeping Tom-turned rescuer. In Dressed to Kill and Sisters, as in Psycho, a major character "starring role" is dispatched much earlier in the film than audiences would expect. De Palma, like Hitchcock, frequently tells stories -- in Sisters, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Body Double -- of witnesses to crimes who feel compelled to take a role in solving them, typically hampered by indifferent or incompetent policemen or other "professional investigators." De Palma, like Hitchcock, explores the connection between witnessing something you're not supposed to see (perhaps because you're looking through someone else's window), and being implicated in it, and, by tricking audiences into feeling guilty about their own lustful impulses, forces viewers to identify with such voyeuristic characters as Sisters' Grace Collier, Body Double's Jake Scully, and Femme Fatale's Nicolas Bardo.

This insanely rare Sisters poster is from Thailand.

Even Greetings uses Gerrit Graham's maniacal Kennedy assassination theorist to show that, in the age of televised assassinations, everyone -- even those of us watching the movie -- can be an amateur investigator/voyeur.

De Palma's approach is not to copy, however, but to seize upon the best available exemplars of film grammar -- the way the story is told -- and to personalize them, adding his own angles. Since many of those best examples come from Hitchcock, and since De Palma, like Hitchcock, favors constructing stories, and even entire films, around a series of visually-interesting and precisely constructed set pieces, it's unsurprising that comparisons between the two are easily and often made. In reality, though, the two are very different. Where Hitchcock's style is often droll and understated, De Palma's flamboyantly calls attention to itself. Where Hitchcock's sexuality is for the most part buried in subtext, eroticism is De Palma's stock in trade. Most importantly, though, where Hitchcock excelled in showing the audience exactly what they needed to know, so that even the most filmically illiterate could follow the sometimes labyrinthine plots and understand the characters' motivations, De Palma seems far more interested in leaving gaps, counting on his cinema-literate audience to fill them in based on years of experience watching other, more clichéd films...and then, once the audience has decided which way things are going, confounding expectations.

Nor is Phantom a "parody" or "satire" of Phantom of the Opera, Dorian Grey, or of Faust, as it doesn't hold these stories up to ridicule; it is, on the contrary, an earnest retelling, or updating. It's no more a parody of the underlying material than West Side Story is a "parody" of Romeo and Juliet. What it does satirize is 70's entertainment culture.

Just as De Palma's treatment of his film's source material is affectionate rather than critical, Phantom has in turn inspired other artists to create loving tributes. Our favorite of these is Tegan & Sara's video for their song I Hear Noises, which you can watch here (by clicking the thumbnail above) if you have a Quicktime-compatible player installed. Tegan & Sara are Canadian identical-twin purveyors of tuneful alt-rock, whom The Archives has ~~had a massive crush on~~ tremendously respected ever since seeing them open for Ryan Adams in San Francisco a few years back. We showed this video to the Juicy Fruits at two in the morning in a hotel room in Canada, and they loved it...you will too.

The Phantom graced the cover of Volume 79 of "The Movie," a British film encyclopedia of sorts that was issued in 158 weekly installments by Orbis Publishing from 1979 to 1983.

The major themes of the piece are set out in the first song, "Goodbye Eddie," about a singer who commits suicide in hopes of making his debut album a posthumous hit. As the song reaches its end, Juicy Fruit Archie Hahn pantomimes Eddie's suicide, playfully pretending to slice his wrist open with his own microphone, and then writhing in pain on the floor as his bandmates seemingly obliviously continue to perform around him. Encapsulated in this song and in Hahn's performance are the concepts that people will do anything, even killing themselves, in exchange for the chance for success; that the public eats this up, making Eddie's "memorial" album a hit; and that the Juicy Fruits' own audience is thrilled to see a simulated suicide -- even one performed for laughs -- onstage.

As the film progresses, the onstage carnage (and the audience's reactions to it) become more and more serious, mimicking (and anticipating) the real-world one-upsmanship of performers who commit ever more outrageous acts in an effort to outdo themselves and their competitors for the public's attention, with the ultimate attention-getter being complete self-destruction. We make our way from Hahn's innocent goofing with the knife/microphone to the simulated spearing of mannequin audience members, to Beef's impromptu electrocution, to a premeditated "assassination live on television coast to coast," as Swan has his henchman take aim at his bride during their televised wedding, and finally to Swan's and Winslow's onstage deaths, which the crowd assumes to be just part of the show. (We at The Swan Archives have never understood exactly how Phoenix's assassination was supposed to work: how could Swan have imagined that Phoenix, who was under a contract with a "til death do us part" clause, could possibly die before he himself did? Several people have written to the Archives to suggest that perhaps Swan never intended Phoenix to die. Rather, they propose, his intention was that she would be merely stunned, as Winslow was when he attempted to stab himself, so that Swan could "resurrect" her later, before the adoring crowd. While this theory is interesting, we don't believe it; rather, we believe Swan's ruthless willingness to sacrifice his bride on the altar of entertainment was genuine, and an example of the dedication to his craft that made Swan the master showman of his age.)

In parallel with the increasing carnage, audience identification shifts, from Swan to Winslow. Early on, we are encouraged to see the world from Swan's privileged point of view, particularly as Philbin entreaties Swan, whose vantage point we share, to destroy Annette. Winslow is presented as a dorky geek, who deserves our scorn, and is practically asking to be ripped off. We laugh at his expense as he sings passionately for an empty hall, trustingly hands his music over to Philbin, falls instantly and ridiculously head over heels for Phoenix, dresses in drag to gain access to Swanage, faces the prospect of having his teeth pulled, and, finally, as he gets his own song indelibly stamped into the side of his head.

As soon as Winslow returns as the monster, however, he has our sympathy. We see from his perspective as he approaches the Paradise and remakes himself as the Phantom. As he places the mask over our collective head, we become him, and we're suddenly rooting for him, and against Swan, as he attempts to blow up the innocent but despicable Juicy Fruits.

Ultimately, Swan (a bird), Phoenix (another bird), and the Phantom (who wears a birdlike mask) are all destroyed by their own ambition, as the audience at the Paradise takes it in with glee. (Death Records' dead songbird logo is a metaphor for Swan, Phoenix and Winslow, all of whom are doomed by their ambition. Birds, and particularly ravens, crows, and vultures, have traditionally symbolized death -- see, for example, Psycho -- but of course this goes back much further than that. It's worth keeping in mind that one of De Palma's earliest short films was called Icarus, a reference to the Greek myth in which Icarus, using wings made of wax and feathers built for him by his father, flies too high, against his father's advice, only to have his wings melted by the sun's heat...the overly ambitious Icarus plummets to his death in the sea.)

Phantom's melding of "the show" and "the real", perhaps inspired by Altamont and the resulting 1970 Gimme Shelter documentary, anticipated today's "reality" shows, the success of which proves that there's a hunger that mere "fictional" tragedy no longer satisfies. As De Palma predicted with Phantom, the culture demands entertainment that is more and more visceral, with the most desensitized among us insisting upon manipulated "reality" as entertainment, and snuff films the inevitable end result; people are willing to watch video of New York's twin towers tumble hundreds of times, and entire websites have been dedicated to photographs of unfortunates jumping out of the skyscrapers to escape the heat. Of course, in order for "death as entertainment" to flourish, there must be a culture that is sufficiently interested to watch it, while being sufficiently apathetic to do nothing about it; and Phantom is as much an observation of that culture as it is an indictment of the media machine that happily provides that culture with what it wants.

There's nothing new about a culture of "death as entertainment" of course; it's been around at least since the Romans came up with throwing Christians to the lions. But it's something we like to think we have risen above; Phantom reminds us that we haven't.

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