Is everybody ready for an oh hell damn uncomfortable ride? At least I can't say Haber didn't work in the Greek mythology. Oi.

 

"The Light of Her Smile" by Karen Haber, 1989

From Phantoms, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Rosalind M. Greenberg

Grade: D+

 

I actually read this the very same day I wrote the review for "Marian's Song", but you might notice that I seem to have not written a review for it for a week anyway. This is because I really needed time to process and figure out what, exactly, to say about it. It tried to do a lot of things, and failed at most of them; it tried to take chances and be edgy, and didn't quite make it. Things started out promisingly, got bogged down in boredom and poor writing, and then took a sharp detour down Trying To Make Things Socially Relevant Alley, with a side trip to the Land of Extreme Squickiness. The whole thing finally crashed facedown in the Swamps of Missing the Point, so despite what could have been a really interesting premise, I was forced to both grade the story poorly and spend the rest of the evening saying things like, "GOD," and, "UGH," for no reason and confusing my poor boyfriend.

 

Let us recap, so that you, too, can share in the sadness that is this story.

 

Haber's choice to make this an updated, modern version of the story works really well because she doesn't stick with a premise that doesn't make sense in the modern day. Up to this point, we haven't seen very many (read: any) versions of the story in which the singer/teacher relationship between Christine and Erik isn't pretty much the same, but Haber reassigns their roles here, making Christine Day an up-and-coming model and Erik a mysterious, highly-in-demand photographer. The dynamic between them is much more faithful to the original than I've seen most musical reimaginings manage--Erik, as the very best in his trade, is allowed his eccentricities and can thus operate on a very shadowy, largely unknown level without forcing the reader to suspend disbelief far enough to believe that someone would actually lurk beneath buildings because of a physical deformity in the modern era. The idea of him as a photography maestro is particularly effective for me, since photography is such a mysterious, talent-sensitive art (or at least it seems like it to me, since I know about as much about photography as I do about shark fishing... my photography major friends are probably like, "Whatever, hack.")--either you have that spark of visual insight or you don't, and there's really not a lot that training can do. Likewise, Christine's fragility and the doomed nature of her innocence are highlighted by her status as a model, a career that generally has a very brief life and is notoriously difficult to get ahead in.

 

There are, however, both good and bad points to her handling beyond that point (personally, I was all excited about that beginning--new! cool! oh, my aching naivete). The idea of Erik as a photographer has a great deal of merit: for one thing, as the photographer, he is in complete control of the art created, despite the fact that it wouldn't be possible without the model. For another, the very nature of photography--of freezing or capturing an image just so, of forcing reality to conform to your vision--is very appropriate for the character's drives and needs. But, unfortunately, other things made me whine, like his scars. He has scars, yes, because he wouldn't be the Phantom without them, but they're... wussy. He has parallel claw marks on one side of his face (someone later theorizes that a jealous girlfriend clawed him). That's it. But worse than that--God knows some of the disfigurements writers and Hollywood come up with aren't exactly pushing the envelope--is the fact that the scars serve no purpose whatsoever. None at all. Never do they come into play at any point. They don't earn him society's scorn or avoidance, they don't cause him significant difficulty in everyday life, they don't alienate Christine from him in the slightest, and they don't have any function other than for Haber to go, "Hey, look! It's the Phantom, see, because he's got scars." Yeah... I think we could have figured that one out, seeing as he is also named Erik, is an artistic genius, is known in the industry as "The Phantom", and has a fixation on Christine, but you know. We could have been functionally retarded, I suppose.

 

Christine is no longer a fresh-faced ingenue here; we can see glimmers of her innocence and youth, but she's fast becoming the sort of jaded wreck that the modeling industry is sadly wont to turn out. In case anyone was still harboring illusions of her pure waifishness after the first few pages, Haber has her whine about how she really wishes she'd had time to do a line of coke. Ah, youth. Despite my tone, I actually think I sort of like this; there are degrees of innocence, after all, and even if she's on the fast track to Lohanville, Christine is still very obviously a young and, in her own way, naive character, especially when compared with Erik (but we'll get to that later!).

 

I wasted a little time trying to figure out Erik's and Christine's ethnicities in there somewhere. They're originally white French people, after all, and all the reimaginings I've read to date have kept them more or less Caucasian, so I thought it would be really cool if Haber had decided to change that up. Unfortunately, so did she; Christine's skin is described as "tawny" at one point, and Erik as possibly having "exotic origins", but that's it. It feels like she was trying to be different just to be different, instead of giving the characters some background to go with it, and she forgot to ever mention it again beyond those first two little notes anyway. I was disappointed.

 

In order to keep the opera element involved, Haber gives Erik a wee little obsession with playing opera during his photo shoots to keep him and the model focused; he favors the later, heavier Romantic operatic composers, like Strauss and Wagner (the proverbial fat ladies), which will be significant later. Christine, on the other hand, is not a fan and sort of wishes he would turn off that annoying screeching and bellowing--until, magically, she is captured by the Power of Strauss (I totally want a superhero to call on the Power of Strauss now, don't you? With the might of a thousand cello undercurrents!) and the music just moves her and transports her and it's like nirvana, and I was wishing for someone to gag her narrative voice. It seemed awkward and sudden, especially since it wasn't as though it were actually Erik's music the way it is in the original novel. Normal opera is great, but it's not usually a supernaturally transcendent experience, you know? Still, I forged on. The premise was so good! Surely it would bear fruit!

 

They're listening to Elektra, and Erik is saying photographer-esque things like, "Be Elektra!" between snaps, and Christine is all, "Yes, I will be Elektra!" in her internal monologue despite the fact that she's just admitted that she never listens to opera or reads and she probably has no fucking clue who Elektra even is. My head, it was courting my desk, but I kept going, philosophical. (Why, God? Why did I not see things coming? There were so many clues as to the oh my god ewww in store and yet I was completely oblivious.) Keep in mind here, if you will, that we're still on the first scene in the story and already the batshit is starting to appear (though, in the story's defense, at least it HAS more than one scene... unlike some others in this anthology that I could name).

 

As a side note here, Haber likes to include the text of the line that's currently being sung in the opera sometimes. The first time, I thought it was a cool touch--I speak German, so I could understand what they were saying, and it was relevant to the scene without being necessary to understand it. However, when she went on to do it FOUR MORE TIMES in the story, it got old. Not because it stopped being relevant, or even because it wasn't cool, but because to a non-German-speaking reader (or non-Strauss-listening one) it would have become aggravating. Nobody likes constantly being confronted with foreign languages in the middle of a story, nor do they like feeling left out. It seems like Haber was writing this almost exactly as she would have written a screenplay; I can definitely see this device being amazingly effective and evocative if those words were being heard in the background as the scene occurred on film. But in a written format, they cease to be background and are shoved right under the reader's nose, with less than satisfactory results.

 

As Christine fails to correctly be Elektra or something (I didn't really want to try to interpret such blatant crazy), Erik starts to come over and manually pose her. A little odd in the industry, but okay, sure. However, the lingering hands and the whispering about thinking about your first orgasm? Uh, no. And Christine is just sort of like, "Wow, he does things a little different than I'm used to. I'm kind of scared but also kind of tingly in my lady areas. Let me think about my first orgasm." Are photographers allowed to manhandle their models nowadays? Am I just out of the loop? The whole part where he's all petting and talking about orgasms and being Elektra, the creepiness just continued to amp right up there; as a consequence of moving the story to the modern age, it's now susceptible to my notions of modern professional standards of behavior, which do not include creeptacular creepitude. This spot in my notes says, verbatim, "Creepy. So creepy. Did not sign up for a tingly rape fantasy power play here." I think that sums up my feelings nicely. If it had been moved into gradually, or, hell, set up at all in a plausible way, I would have gone with it, but as it was... eeeuugh.

 

Despite all this ridiculousness in the very first scene, I was still with Haber, however. The prose, once we got out of Christine's inane narrative voice, was snappy and evocative, very appropriate to the modern time period and easily relatable to the reader. I didn't like Christine overly much--she seemed like an airhead with self-destructive tendencies, to be honest--but I understood her and I could follow her choices. Sometimes, like when people are reliving their first orgasms in the middle of a job and busily being Elektra, that's all I can ask for. Christine has a boyfriend named Johnny, a typical male model gad-about who cheats on her regularly and then shows up to apologize and do some blow. She keeps dating him, because, as I said, self-destructive tendencies. She compounds that bad decision with others, notably going out at 5 a.m. and pulling drugged-up all-nighters with him instead of resting after and before shoots and jobs, behavior that is hardly conducive to her career. Johnny's the obvious Raoul analogue, but again he feels tacked on merely so Haber could point to him as a parallel; they're not in love, and Christine really only pays attention to him when she's bored. All of the irresponsibility of haring off with Raoul, but none of the justification.

 

My dislike of Christine continued to grow by leaps and bounds as I forged onward, desperate for another glimmer of hope. She was spoilt. She was bratty. She was referred to as an "ice princess" and considered sexually inaccessible, but out of hauteur, not purity. She was unlikable. I sort of wanted Johnny to murder her and leave her body in a ditch (well, okay, not quite, but I really, really wanted her to shut up). She continues to have photography sessions with Erik, who continues to take pictures of her better than anybody else can, and her career takes off, but it doesn't mature or sober her any. Erik also starts calling her Elektra repeatedly, and orders her to change her business name accordingly. My notes continue to be creeped out; I believe the phrase "daddy issues much?" is a recurring theme. Interestingly, through industry scuttlebutt, Christine learns that she's not the first of Erik's "special" models, which leads us to the conclusion that he doesn't love her for herself (to be fair, I wouldn't, either) but for what he can make of her. She's a means to his art's end, rather than an end in herself, which is a substantial difference from the original Phantom's motivations. There's also mention of how all of Erik's "special" models always leave him in the end, to go to Hollywood or marry rich dudes or whatever, and we heave a tiny sigh and think, "Poor Erik." Or at least, we're supposed to. I tried, and I did feel a touch of sympathy, but... that's life, man. You don't get to keep your stable of models forever. They have careers, too.

 

At this point, I stopped to wonder why all this Elektra business was bothering me so much. After all, the original Phantom is in his fifties to Christine's late teens/early twenties, right? It's not as if that's any less of an age divide. I think my discomfort can be partially attributed to the fact that Erik so obviously notices the age divide; in Leroux's novel, he seemed never to even give it a thought, being more focused on his extreme devotion to her and on how his deformity would keep him from being with her. Here, since the deformity has been effectively made ineffective, the age divide could have replaced that as the central conundrum, but it doesn't. Instead, Erik basically behaves as if he knows he's behaving in a way that is morally wrong, which just axes all my sympathy for him. I've been able to really enjoy a lot of literature that contains relationships between older men and younger women; when there's genuine emotional attachment and all parties are sensitive to the situation, I think they can be extremely romantic, sometimes more so than conventional relationships. But here, there is no romance whatsoever, and I think that contributed to my dislike of his behavior. He's not calling her Elektra fondly, as a pet name, or a joke: he's calling her that because that's what she is, as far as he's concerned. Creepy. The other, and larger, part of what was bothering me about it is what I like to refer to as the danger sense, which is me subconsciously realizing what's going on before I actually figure it out. The danger sense was hellaciously active during this short story. DANGER, WILL ROBINSON. DANGER.

 

Then, of course, the story hits its sudden, dramatic gear change. Christine gets a call from home which mightily upsets her, and we discover suddenly that bam, Christine was sexually abused as a child by her stepfather (I'm not sure why the choice of a stepfather instead of her biological father... either an attempt was being made to follow the original story's loss-of-father parallel, or the incest angle was too ooky even for Haber). Oh, well, shit. Suddenly, we feel bad for hating her whiny little ass so much. I was not immune to this sudden, dirty trick by the author. I thought, "Well, fuck, I've been ripping on an abuse survivor this whole time. Why don't I just shoot some puppies, too?" But despite the somewhat indignant reaction I automatically had to this revelation, it does actually make Christine a more sympathetic character. Her irresponsible, childish behavior is suddenly put into perspective as a sort of defense tactic, a regressive pattern that she uses to defend herself from the everyday world. Once I had that worked out, however, I could conclude that despite the fact that I felt extremely sorry for her and that child abusers should be hung by their toenails until dead, she was still a whiny little punk who was doing her best to fuck up the rest of her life instead of recovering and trying to make something of it. I now understood her motivations, and could go on happily hating her provided I hated her asshole stepfather more. Excellent.

 

Do I sound nasty and vindictive? I apologize. This story really brought it out in me. I went into this in a happy frame of mind, I swear to god. Two big buttons were pushed for me (and I'm sure for a lot of other people): people who abuse children, and people who use having been abused as an excuse to continue abusing themselves and others. But, I read on. Literature is sometimes about forcing us to look at things we don't like to see and hammering home its point, hopefully in order to enlighten us or force us to think. I read on.

 

After that little revelation and the accompanying sadness and sick feelings, Christine (oops, sorry... Elektra. God.) went right back to being a flighty little hen, this time skipping an engagement with Erik to do a big-name store's photo shoot instead. Unsurprisingly for anyone familiar with the Phantom mythos, the chandelier falls and everybody dies (not everybody. All right, nobody, but everyone is very upset). Much to my annoyance, there is no kind of proof Erik has anything to do with this, aside from Christine's immediate certainty that it MUST have been him (because I would assume that my photographer had dropped a chandelier on people in a fit of jealousy rather than assuming it might have been, I dunno, structurally unsound or something). In fact, had I not known the Phantom story, I might have assumed that this particular occurrence was just karma kicking Christine's behind. There's no reason to believe it was Erik--has hasn't shown any signs of insanity at all before this, or even of serious passion--and the whole incident is apparently forgotten two pages later. Hardly cohesive storytelling.

 

Then, Erik insists that Christine move in with him. What, now? Huh? Even assuming he's enough of a crazy motherfucker to force his models to move in with him--because THAT'S not professionally inappropriate at all, no sir--why the hell wouldn't the rest of the industry know about this? Presumably he's been doing the same thing with all his "special" models. Isn't that the sort of thing people would gossip about, because God knows there's plenty of gossip both in the industry and in this story? Apparently not. Infuriatingly, Christine hardly puts up a fight before acquiescing and moving into his penthouse, making me want to shake her and tell her to stop being such a spineless little worm. She also assumes that along with this new cohabiting arrangement there will come an implicit sexual contract--and she accepts it unquestioningly. While this was frustrating, it seems understandable both in light of her odd daddy-issues attraction to Erik and the abuse in her past, which leads her to regard her body as a tool. Much to her confusion, Erik never presses her to sleep with him. She actually mopes over this.

 

So, like every other sexually frustrated woman in the history of bad literature, she calls Johnny ("Hey, Johnny! Wanna do some blow?"), who proceeds to come over to Erik's apartment while he's not there and start snooping through his things, including the Bluebeard-esque Room That Must Not Be Entered.

 

DANGER, WILL ROBINSON. DANGER.

 

Ha, you think his former "special" models are in there in various pieces or something? Oh, no, my friend. I would vastly have preferred dismembered models or cannibalism on the sly or something. No, the room is full of photographs, which make it clear that Erik is a creepy pedophiliac bastard who rapes children. I said, "HOLY SHIT," really loudly and John actually came out of the shower to find out what was going on. Christine does not react well to this revelation. Neither did I, as the reader (though I am able to appreciate the father parallel at this point... such as it is).

 

Instantly (and fairly understandably) transferring her emotions from her stepfather to Erik, Christine wants revenge and calls the police, who presumably catch him and haul him off to jail (I don't know the specifics because it all happens offstage, while Christine is busy running off to Hollywood). But all is not sunshine and lollipops in Hollywood; Christine misses Erik. Yeah. She really does. She feels bad for turning him in because he never did anything to her, did he? and also nobody can take pictures of her right. Every time someone hands her a photo, she's like, "Oh, man, Erik would have done this so much better." Apparently no one on the west coast knows who he is, since no one punches her in the nose after taking offense to being compared unfavorably to a pedophile. When at some point she is informed that Erik has died in jail, she is despondent over it and mopes around her set before delivering the final line of the story: someone calls her by her name, and she says, "No. Call me Elektra. My name is Elektra." Effectively, she has decided to not only carry on the legacy of a man that she herself admitted was just as much of an evil son of a bitch as her stepfather, but she has decided to let the abuse visited on her define her personality. Rather than attempting to become her own woman, she has chosen to define herself as Elektra, the victim. It's tragic, and made me want to choke a bitch.

 

Again, this can be done in literature. It can be done so well. But why is it being done here? What, exactly, is the point? Is it that the world sucks and people are mean? Honey, so many more talented authors have made that point in a myriad of eye-bleeding ways. Is it that all artists are evil, and/or that evil fuels art? Again, not only was that point made so badly as to be almost unrecognizable, but it's hardly original. Is it that the price of success is immorality? Meet any literature written in the past century. There are no surviving themes from the original story, much less the most central ones of maturity and redemption.

 

MY point (yes! I do have one!) is not that the point is unoriginal (after all, how many truly original points are left to make in literature?), but that I can't figure out what it is. The options are nebulous and poorly presented at best, and none of them are really very appealing. If you want to write a story about the poignancy of sorrow and heartbreak and the evils of pedophilia, I am behind that 100%, but write one that has some meaning to it. Don't just say, "Look, there are bad people in the world and it sucks and people are damaged!" We already KNOW that. We are citizens of planet earth. I suppose a case could be made for the position that this is a horror story, and a psychological horror story at that, but I think my feelings are best summed up in the following quote from Neil Gaiman's Sandman:

 

"You disappoint me... A nightmare created to be the darkness and the fear of darkness in every human heart. A dark mirror, made to reflect everything about itself that humanity will not confront. But... what have you given them? Nothing. You've told them there are bad people out there. And they've known that all along."

 Create your own free wiki!Support CommunityPublic, not yet premium Privacy Policy RSS