I’m going to tell you a secret: there’s no such thing as the “best” Sherlock Holmes when it comes to screen portrayals. There’s no ranking, either by quality, canonicity (whatever that is), or hotness, that is based on anything but the ranker’s own conscious and unconscious biases. Indeed, the fact we’ve got hundreds to choose from at this point is proof of this concept--no one will ever embody the platonic Holmesian ideal… because that ideal is different for every viewer, and every era.

Like many long-lived characters, Holmes has gone through phases in how he’s presented. And, like Jesus, or Dracula, or Batman, these phases are not random. Every version is a response to something: to the text, sure, but also to history and culture and current events and what the last ten people did with Sherlock Holmes. So the question of “who wore it best” is irrelevant. The real interesting question, to me, is why each Holmes is needed in their time, and what they bring to our understanding of Sherlock Holmes and ourselves.

It’s been observed many times that there’s something timeless and magical about the great detective, in the sense that he embodies qualities that 1) are always going to be of interest and value to us and 2) is a malleable enough figure that he can be fit into a lot of different molds without becoming unrecognizable. A hero who, without any superpowers or inhuman abilities, relies on fact and logic alone to solve the world’s mysteries is a powerful hero indeed. At almost any point in human history, it’s reassuring to think that things make sense, that someone smart enough could explain that which we can’t. He also provides a fascinating set of dichotomies, existing on several knife-edges of society and culture, which makes him useful when exploring class, the urban/rural divide, emotion vs thinking, substance abuse, mental health and neurotypicality, law and order vs crime, and anti-sociability within one of the greatest bromances of all time. Holmes can take on a multitude of human attributes, depending on what you choose to focus on, and that he originally existed in a serialized, nonlinear format means no one is terribly fussed about continuity when creating new adventures--except, of course, for those whose entire Sherlockian careers has been given over to fussing over minutiae of continuity.

By cohesively and consistently embodying contradictory elements, then, Sherlock Holmes has, for over 100 years, been a persistent figure in popular culture. And the image that comes to mind when you read those words may be different from the next person to read this, and you may both believe that you are correct in your assessment that yours is the “right” Holmes. 

You’re both correct.

I’m going to outline a brief history of Holmes which is biased towards my own “unifying theory” of Holmes representation. There is not enough space here to mention every version, nor am I unaware that there will be items that do not fit this thesis. Culture, and its production, are not logical nor linear. I can merely detect patterns, amplified by various cultural moods and needs, but there will always be that writer or filmmaker who has a wild notion they get to play out. Nor do the following rough categories encapsulate every aspect of any one version, or represent any qualitative judgement. My entire point is that there really isn’t any “bad” Sherlock Holmes, because each iteration was what was considered necessary at that time and under that specific set of circumstances. You might not like them--and I myself dislike plenty. But they all have a reason to exist no matter how far off the mark they might feel to you--or to later audiences.

The first set of representations are exactly that: an attempt to put the canon on screen. The most notable of these is the series of 47 silent films starring Eille Norwood. Today those I’ve had access to look stodgy and still even by silent film standards, but at the time they were praised for their faithfulness, by no less than Arthur Conan Doyle himself. We also have, thanks to diligent film seekers and restorers, a film version of the celebrated William Gillette play, which while not really based on a single story does portray Holmes as a very heroic, stoic, upright figure. There is an attempt, however you might judge the interpretation, to recreate the feeling of the stories on film, with a scrupulous honor given the material.

Of course no time in human history is without its attempts at satire and humor, so there are several amusing takes on Holmes not meant to be taken seriously. Famously, the first known portrayal of Holmes on film is 1901’s Sherlock Holmes Baffled, which is simply a camera trick played too long, but my favorite is 1914’s The Leaping Fish which features Douglas Fairbanks as Coke Enneday. (Say the name out loud and you’ll get the gist of the film.)

Some attempts at Holmes were made in the 30s, mostly very static in the way of much early sound film, but the big push that more or less reintroduced Holmes to the US public were the Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce films of Fox and Universal in the late 30s/early 40s. Given their quality and the fact there were 14 of them, these films maintain a lasting impact on the cultural perception of Sherlock Holmes--and of Dr. Watson as a bit bumbling and stupid. But beyond that, these films served a useful cultural purpose. Rathbone’s upstanding, patrician, and beautifully heroic Holmes offered up a British hero we could not only put our faith in but see as a worthy ally, and it’s no accident that most of these films are updated to a current timeline where Holmes can take on modern problems. (Like Nazis.) This is not simply an attempt to make Holmes “relevant,” but to invite American audiences into the war effort, as Hollywood cranked up a wartime propaganda machine not limited to overtly racist newsreels about the threat from Germany and Japan.

While Holmes was assayed a few times in the 50s, (most notably for me in the television series starring Ronald Howard and H. Marion Crawford,) there was a largely dormant period as the UK and US got back to business as usual. This all changed after the cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s, giving rise to a series of films which questioned the very nature of Sherlock Holmes in various ways. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), They Might Be Giants (1971), and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976) were all in some sense deconstructions of the myth. I do not think they are a diminishment of the heroic nature of the character, but they all do call into question what we know about him, either by prying into his personal affairs, his psychology, or by displacing his nature onto the potentially mentally unbalanced mind of a modern-day man who merely thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes. All of this reflects the unbalanced social scene of the 1970s, as long-held cultural beliefs were challenged and people sought new modes of understanding--or coping.

With the return to at least superficial socioeconomic steadiness represented by the 80s, we see some of the most prestigiously ‘faithful’ adaptations yet. Both the Soviet series starring Vasily Livanov and the British Granada series starring Jeremy Brett were beholden to the original stories in a way few had attempted in decades. Well-funded, well acted, and generally very serious works, these series served to introduce the characters of Holmes and Watson to new generations on multiple continents, with a love for the source material that, in a sense, speaks to a desire to “get back to” something lost to time. There is a nostalgia in these series, in some sense for a time that never was, that does not question the cultural assumptions contained therein. This reflects the way the 1980s represented, for many, a yearning for stability and safety. This isn’t to say that there were no risks taken in terms of production, but the thrust of these shows away from deconstruction and towards accuracy (whatever that means) implies a search for stability. And both of these versions were very popular. The 80s also saw “safe” entries into the humor and children’s movie categories with Without a Clue and Young Sherlock Holmes, both of which seemingly diverted far from canon but in relatively unthreatening and/or joking directions accessible to a wide movie-going audience.

Given their solid “completeness,” it makes sense that these icons stood for some time as the platonic ideal of Sherlock Holmes, untouched until one of the biggest proliferations of Holmes material began in 2009 with Guy Ritchie’s action movie Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey, Jr, and continued with the fandom-revitalizing modern day BBC version with Benedict Cumberbatch and CBS’s Elementary starring Jonny Lee Miller. We even had a prestige entry with Ian McKellan’s 2015 film, Mr. Holmes. On the surface, these might have little in common apart from, in the first three, a very modern sensibility. But I would argue that all four of these titles explore Holmes’ presence on the neurology spectrum. Without (in most cases) overtly diagnosing Holmes with, say, having autism or otherwise being on the spectrum of neuroatypicality, all of these Holmes present a form of wrestling with their place in the larger world of “normal” people. With drug addiction, learning disorders, and emotional health far more acceptable topics of public discourse, it makes sense, and fans have long speculated about Holmes’ behavior in regards to their own diagnoses. What makes these Holmes portrayals different is that all are presented as both heroic and worthy of our regard and also having overt difficulty functioning with everyday life. One never got the sense that Basil Rathbone had bad days, and even Jeremy Brett’s sometimes jerky and eccentric Holmes (powered in part by his own undiagnosed emotional issues) went unremarked upon in the context of mental health. But for these more recent Holmes’, their brilliance cannot be separated from their struggle with chemical dependency, difficulty relating to others, or inability to relate to the world as others do. With Mr. Holmes, while his mental deterioration is not because of his special gifts, it does present unique issues given his habitual brilliance. These Sherlocks present a narrative about living in the world with a brain that is differently suited to its tasks and foibles. And this, I think, is largely because we live in a world where it is far more acceptable to discuss such things as difference, not disorder.

Recent Sherlock Holmes offerings have yet to offer up a pattern to my mind, but I will say that we are seeing a recent spate of reimaginings which focus on diversity to varying degrees. Millie Bobbie Brown plays Sherlock’s sister in Enola Holmes. Miss Sherlock offers a modern-day Japanese Holmes and Watson--who are both women. The Irregulars has a diverse cast of younger investigators and a Watson who is mixed-race--and not straight. This could imply a cultural interest in race, ethnicity, and sexual/gender identity which I think is a welcome discussion and which Holmes is perfectly capable of enfolding within his narrative umbrella.

Whatever comes next, what I think the past 120 years has shown is that Sherlock Holmes can take it. He--or she, or they--can be used to fight Nazis, to address concerns about mental health, to explore issues of race and class, or any number of things I’m sure I haven’t thought of yet. The point is that he will always stand for truth, and truth is something we, as a society, are always seeking. We will probably never have final answers for any of the larger questions we ask, and thus, Holmes will always be needed to stand for those questions as he asks them himself.

Last year, while between jobs, I realized I had a marketable skill I had yet to capitalize on, and started art modeling. I’d been taking my clothes off for free in community theater dressing rooms for years, without consequence or shame. Why not take that to the bank?

The reality of art modeling is, of course, more complicated than just “take your clothes off and stand there.” And it’s actually a lot more rewarding than you might think, and I don’t mean financially. Yes, it’s nice to get paid. But it’s not actually easy. On the other hand, it’s not nearly as boring, nor as intimidating, as I expected.

It makes sense why art schools need models; the human form is incredibly varied and quite intricate, and a three-dimensional, posable prop is going to be a lot more useful in learning anatomy, shading, and color than any photograph or book. An artist model’s job is to present interesting planes and angles long enough for an artist to sketch, draw, or even paint them. This means holding various poses for a minute, five, ten, or even twenty. Or, as is the case for me this month, for two whole weeks for three hours a day--with breaks every twenty minutes. Some poses are whimsical and difficult, meant for a quick “gesture” drawing and impossible to hold for long periods of time. Others are simpler, but grow more complex the longer you hold them. You really don’t know what it’s like to hold absolutely still, or what it does to your body to hold one position for twenty minutes, partly because unless you are asleep, you never do. Not really.

I got into art modeling for two reasons: I knew I had no compunctions about nudity, after years of theater, and because I thought it would still be a challenge. Both are true, and I definitely approached my first few sessions with anxiety. Would I be able to hold the pose? Would I be embarrassed by my own body? Would I get bored? Would I fall asleep?

There are all, of course, valid concerns. As I mentioned, holding still is not something you are ever truly asked to do in real life. A model doesn’t get to fidget or twitch. Or scratch. Or shift their weight. You strike a pose, you pick a spot to stare at, and you stay there. Further, you are being stared at by a room full of strangers studying you, taking apart your naked form with their eyes in an effort to duplicate it on paper. And you can’t read a book or watch tv or listen to a podcast, because you have to be aware and present.

But despite all these intimidating facts, the experience of modeling is, in every one of these areas, tremendously freeing. First of all, despite the intimacy it’s the least sexual situation you can imagine. No one is here to judge or evaluate you or your body. Your body is an object, yes, but the objectification here isn’t what we mean when we talk usually about that word. Your body is useful and beautiful, because it is a complex form that the student is learning to imitate in a way they cannot without you. You are a collaborator, in a sense, in their art. You are presenting interesting shapes and shadows that have nothing to do with your desirability or even how you feel about your body. I have never once felt judged or shamed in an art class, because I am there to be dynamic and interesting in a way that literally every human body is. Which leads to some really interesting overheard conversations, let me tell you. It’s fascinating to hear someone talk about the color of your skin or the angle of your neck or the shadow of your back without there being a smidge of judgement or personal feeling there. It’s oddly affirming, because what’s of value here is your particular mode of taking up space. And there is not a wrong way to do that, in an art class. You also get to see your own form take shape as art over a period of time, from various angles, and it leads to an odd detachment from the values and self-consciousness we often load onto that. You get to see your own body not as a collection of flaws, but as a work of intricate interlocking parts that make a whole.

The second, more internal part of this that has been revelatory is what goes on in your mind when you’re forced to sit for twenty minutes at a time and not even look away from the spot on the floor or wall that you picked. It’s a sort of enforced but unguided meditation, and it’s hit me in different ways at different times. Sometimes, I’m just thinking about my day or my groceries or the thing I forgot to do at home. Sometimes I’m listening to the music they’ve put on, but with nothing else to do I find undercurrents in songs I’ve heard before that I never noticed. And sometimes it leads to deep mindfulness and concentration, where the scratching of charcoal on paper and the air currents across my skin and my unfocused gaze on that spot on the floor give rise to all sorts of creative thoughts I scribble down during my next break. Sometimes it leads to deep questions I finally have the luxury of sitting with, no demands on my time or attention there to distract me. And sometimes it’s simply good practice for stillness. Any discomfort I’ve felt over being inactive or bored has been fleeting, and the ultimate lesson is that boredom is a choice.

Art modeling isn’t an activity for everyone, naturally. But it has taught me a lot, both about the body and the mind, that I would not have expected. And I think we live in a culture--if, like me, you’re in the US at least--that often fails to allow us to fully explore our relationships with our own bodies in a way that is affirming and neutral. This experience allows me to do that--and has also provided me with some of the best not safe for work selfies you can imagine.

In 1925, newspapers printed anecdotal reports of women fainting in movie theater seats, unable to process the horror of the face revealed before them. Nearly a hundred years later, viewers squirmed in their seats for wholly different reasons, watching the very same figure and yearning that he would reveal himself to them, instead.

The figure? The Phantom of the Opera, portrayed dozens of times on stage, screen, and novel page. A tragic invention of journalist-turned-detective-fiction-writer Gaston Leroux, the Phantom has lived many lives, and while the basic plot elements remain largely the same, the context within which he exists--and our response to him--has performed a bizarre 180 that would have Leroux’s head spinning. Though he would not, to be sure, mind the compensation. 

Is the hideous figure of Lon Chaney recognizable in the suave, svelte form of Gerard Butler, or even in his monstrously popular stage incarnation in the musical written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, the longest-running show on Broadway? Is the murderous living skeleton depicted in the novel the same character as the romantic figure who lures young and old alike into posting redemptionist, heart-wrenching fanfiction online? I would argue that, yes, of course he is: but that the transformations he’s undergone since 1911’s English translation of the novel are an echo of transformations in our own society, its anxieties, and the way we process those in our fantasies.

The monster-as-metaphor theme is a common one, seen in parables, fables, and fairy tales as well as modern horror and science fiction. The basic idea is that society takes issues that are, if not taboo, at least difficult to talk about and displaces them onto The Other; thus, Dracula stands in for fears of sex and immigrants from the east, and pod people stand in for either communism or consumerism depending on your political bent. In his origins, Erik the phantom recalled several different cultural anxieties for an early 20th century French audience: the foreigner, the sexual danger posed to women working outside the home, and a Frankenstein-like self-criticism of society’s tendency to dismiss those who are imperfect and, thus, risk their retribution.

But the thing about displacing anxieties onto the Other is that, first, cultural anxieties shift over time, and second, these metaphors are never so explicit that they represent a one to one relationship. We’ve seen this in many of our literary and cinematic horrors over the years; to go back to Dracula, are we afraid of death and dying and blood? Are we afraid of sexual predators entering our boudoirs? Or, are we afraid of the desire we have for that same being? The answer is, most likely: “yes.”

 

In the original tale, Erik is hideously ugly in a way that is unexplained but specific: he essentially looks like a corpse, with sunken eyes, no nose, yellow skin stretched over bone and a lanky frame that “smells of death.” We learn that he was born this way, rejected by his parents and thus sentenced to a life on the fringes despite his great gifts in music, architecture, and, as it turns out, murder. Finally retreating to a solo existence under the Paris Opera House, extorting the management for his needs by allowing tales of an “Opera Ghost” to proliferate, Erik is seemingly content until he hears a young soprano by the name of Christine Daae. Christine, kept sheltered by her now-deceased violinist father and fed on tales of an Angel of Music, readily takes both to Erik’s tutelage and his story that he is the Angel sent by her father. Of course, her childhood sweetheart Raoul shows up and wants to take her away. Before that can happen, Erik kidnaps Christine, reveals himself to her, and in the end forces her into a choice: marry Erik, or Raoul dies. She not only chooses to save Raoul, but takes pity on Erik, crying with him and kissing his forehead in an act of benevolence he has never before experienced and, afterward, cannot shake. He lets the lovers go, dying broken-hearted. The novel begs us not exactly to excuse or forgive the Phantom, but to understand that he had been driven mad by society’s mistreatment. He’s hardly a heroic figure, but neither is this the sort of one-dimensional gothic villain he might have been in other hands.

Lon Chaney

In retrospect, it seems almost inevitable that Hollywood would get to this tale. It was far more popular in America than in France, and Lon Chaney, the Man of 1,000 Faces, had recently assayed another sad French “monster,” Quasimodo from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Chaney’s Erik is, however, a bit less sympathetic than the book’s; he does not let Christine go, but rather is in turn a victim of an angry mob seeking retribution for his murders. While circumstances like the return of injured veterans from the first world war and the actually sensitive portrayal by Lon Chaney might make audiences empathize, the studio did not want his villainy to be ambiguous or to make the audience work too hard, and, thus, robbed the story of its redemptive element.

Claude Rains and Susanna Foster

In a strange attempt to reintroduce sympathy, Universal’s next attempt in 1943 with Claude Rains as the Phantom changes the story quite a bit. They wanted to focus on the lush opera setting, not the horror, so they toned down the facial scarring and had Erique (no Germanic tinge here! Not during WWII!) injured while mistakenly believing his music was being stolen. He hides under the opera, but secretly mentors Christine, who in this version may or may not be his daughter. The script is so unclear on this point his motives are really difficult to pin down, and Erique becomes both oddly unthreatening and less rational in his revenge fantasies, given that his story is mostly that of a frustrated artist who can’t get a break, not a social outcast who has been tortured for his entire life. That said, the addition of “frustrated artist” is important here, as it gives another angle for the Phantom story to manipulate: that of individual effort and creation vs corporate control.

Paul Williams and William Finley in Phantom of the Paradise

This element gets heightened over the next few versions: there’s a 1962 Hammer Horror film with Herbert Lom, where the Phantom is not only entirely the victim but not even the main bad guy. The Opera’s owner is the real villain, stealing the Phantom’s music to put his name on and threatening Christine. In Brian de Palma’s 1974 Phantom of the Paradise the redemption/romance plotline is almost completely eschewed in favor of a revenge tragedy in which the hapless indie musician is repeatedly used and abused by a powerful mogul (cast in the mold of Faust by way of Dorian Gray) until he sacrifices himself to stop him. Even then, the music plays on and the crowd simply sees it as part of the show. When you think about the context of the 60s and 70s, and the questions of social upheaval and corporate authority, you can see that these ideas fit within the zeitgeist of their respective moments despite the departure from the original stories. There was plenty of horror going on in the world without making the musician a monster, after all.

Ali Ewoldt and Ben Crawford

Up until now, Phantom has elements of horror and romance, with some half-baked social commentary thrown in. But it’s in 1986 that things really heat up--when the Phantom hits Broadway. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical retooled the original tale--with some elements from the adaptations--into a lush pop pseudo-opera that is all about feeling. Because it leaves out a lot of plot and character elements, focusing instead on emotional storytelling, the arc is entirely about how Christine and the Phantom, and to a lesser extent Raoul, feel about each other. The redemptive element fully back in play, what went on to become arguably the most popular musical of all time grabbed audiences in part because it told such a simple, relatable story: boy meets girl, girl likes other boy, boy kidnaps girl, but girl has enough love in her heart to touch boy’s soul and give him the peace he needs to do the right thing. While his ugliness is not in doubt, the fact we get his own side told in lushly orchestrated tones makes it almost inevitable that we will feel differently about this man than, say, the towering figure of Lon Chaney. The musical itself is on his side, unambiguously romantic even though Christine does eventually leave with Raoul. Even the kiss from the end of the novel has been transformed from a Pietà-like vignette to a passionate lip lock.

So what does this mean, to the overall thrust of the tale and its cultural significance? 

Well, for one thing, like many other formerly verboten figures like Dracula and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Erik is now an acceptable “fantasy” object of desire. This is not to say monsters were never considered sexually attractive prior to the late 1980s, but it was certainly an outlier when it came to how they were portrayed or how (publicly) people expressed their opinions. With the proliferation of monster boyfriends in media, it’s out in the open that one might desire the mysterious and tragic figure as opposed to the “boy next door.” Again, this “bad boy” trope goes back much further than this particular story, but there has been a shift in our media and the conversation around it. I think this can be explained by two complementary thrusts in society: the increasing notion through psychology and social justice that Othering is dehumanizing, and the various sexual revolutions which have created a more varied space for human desire to manifest itself, at least publicly. 

While one-dimensional, demonic villains still persist in our narratives, there’s been an increasing desire to understand or even relate to these figures. Or, to put it another way, an increasing willingness to admit that when we Otherize certain issues, we are really talking about ourselves. As more research went into the origins of human behavior and emotion, dismissing certain types of villainy as “inhuman” became increasingly more complicated. On the other hand, the voices of those who related not to the dashing young hero but the benighted “monster” became more audible. I’m vastly oversimplifying here, of course, but there’s a very large difference between Leroux’s exhortation at the end of the novel that we must needs pity the Opera Ghost and an admittance by many fans that their viewpoint character is the Opera Ghost. And where at one point subterranean desires were exactly that, it is now far more socially acceptable to watch Michael Crawford croon his way through “Music of the Night” and say, “I’ll take that one, please.” If the Phantom is, after all, just a man, then he is both relatable and accessible. 

I would argue that the Lloyd Webber musical (and its fandom) elevated the Phantom to far more than that, until he is actually the equivalent of the handsome hunk on a romance novel cover. There’s no little resonance there to the notion of the “bodice ripper,” the idea that it would be nice if someone just came along and took care of all those niggling, nasty desires for you--in fantasy land, of course. But along with Lloyd Webber’s erotic angel of the night came some interesting responses, both intensifying the effect--and providing backlash.

Robert Englund

After the musical’s premiere, there were a spate of horror movies of varying quality which used the Phantom as a grotesque figure as if to put paid to the idea he was a fluffy romance hero with a fashionably goth veneer. Dwight Little and Dario Argento both made horror versions in the 80s and 90s, starring Robert Englund and Julian Sands respectively. Interestingly, while both portray the Phantom as wantonly murderous (and, in the latter case, prone to sexual assault), they include doses of overt sexuality missing from earlier versions. Once those floodgates had been opened, it seemed, Erik was fair game for all fantasies. He no longer stood simply for misunderstood musician or hounded victim-turned-villain, but for all sorts of dark desires you might play out with an R rating. You also had obvious cash-grabs like Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge which recasts Eric as a young weightlifter whose house gets demolished to make way for a shopping mall, which I suppose was meant to appeal to the direct-to-video youth market.

Teri Polo and Charles Dance

But alongside this “no, he’s actually super gross” backlash, the romantic tide continued to rise. The early 90s gave us the musical and miniseries written by Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston, starring Charles Dance in the movie as the swooniest, most likeable Erik yet. A man rejected by family, longing only for acceptance, who kills people mostly by accident and is actually pretty charitable to his Christine in the sense that he does not lie and essentially does whatever she asks him to. Throughout all of this, fandom plugged away in zines and online, mostly in the vein of the Lloyd Webber musical, weaving its own revisionist fantasies about an eventual Erik and Christine endgame. The narrative had shifted entirely away from weird mystery about a shadowy figure under the opera who kidnaps naive ingenues and towards a “take me, please, you misunderstood genius” mode.

Gerard Butler

To this point in history, this mode has seen its apogee in the 2004 film of the musical, directed by Joel Schumacher and produced and funded by Andrew Lloyd Webber himself. Wildly divisive within fandom (if not in the actual world), this movie waters down the Phantom’s villainy even more, while amping up his attractiveness to the point where it remains unexplained why he’s even hiding away. Gerard Butler’s muscular form and gruff, rock-singer style woo a teenage Emmy Rossum with very little hint of menace or outrage as far as the movie’s concerned. The whole thing plays out like a girl torn between two older lovers: the rich but bland “good boy” Raoul and the sexy but troubled “bad boy” Phantom. (Erik doesn’t even get a name in the musical version, that’s how much he’s actually reduced to an object of desire.) To this day, and I’m only simplifying a tiny bit, forums devoted to The Phantom of the Opera teem with arguments about how the movie is good because Gerard Butler is so sexy. Countless posts and fanfiction attest to the idea that viewers not only want Christine to stay, but think it is only good and right that she do so, and offer themselves in her place.

As I’ve noted before, the trajectory of tragic ‘monster’ to ‘misunderstood romantic hero’ is not isolated to Phantom, and I’m not convinced it’s entirely a bad thing. In some sense, it feels like a step in a more enlightened direction, at least as far as attempting to understand what is different and applying human qualities to actual humans is concerned. That we can uncover some of our repressed longings and admit to shared fantasies means that we can begin to parse out what in those longings is actually healthy and what is probably best left to our solo moments. At the same time, in the Gerard Butler incarnation Erik’s problematic elements have been washed away to the point where he is only a misunderstood hero; and, conversely, his remaining problematic choices (stalking, kidnapping, ultimatum-seeking) are still treated as romantic.

It is unclear where the next iteration will take us. I actually prefer the perversely more nuanced if melodramatic Erik of the Leroux novel, but it’s plain that multiple generations (including mine) have now been trained to see this figure as fantasy fodder. In the wake of greater social justice movements, it will be interesting to see if the old-fashioned notions of male attraction survive, or if Erik will go back to being some form of ‘monster,’ simply recast in a mold familiar to those who see this behavior as reeking of patriarchal entitlement. What I do know is that every generation seems to get the Phantom it needs, and that we will always require figures on which to project our fears--and desires.