The Phantom of the Paradise (1974) Queer Film B+

DIRECTOR: Brian De Palma

Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise is a delirious collision of The Phantom of the Opera, Faust, The Picture of Dorian Gray, glam rock and the excesses of the 1970s music industry. William Finley plays Winslow Leach, a painfully earnest composer whose music is stolen by the satanic record impresario Swan (Paul Williams). Betrayed, disfigured and literally robbed of his voice, Winslow becomes the masked Phantom haunting Swan’s spectacular new nightclub, the Paradise.

The film was not conceived as a “gay movie” in any conventional sense, yet it has become unmistakably queer with time. De Palma creates a world in which heterosexual normality barely seems to exist. Everything is theatrical, artificial and extravagantly performative: glitter, leather, makeup, exposed bodies, outrageous costumes and identities that can be put on and discarded like clothes.

And then there is Beef. Gerrit Graham’s magnificently camp rock star storms into the picture like an emissary from another movie—or perhaps from the queer future Hollywood was rapidly approaching. His exaggerated masculinity and femininity coexist rather than cancel each other out, and his flamboyance turns the Paradise itself into something resembling a glam-rock gay fantasia.

Even Winslow contributes to the film’s queerness. He is an outsider whose body and voice are transformed, concealed and controlled by someone more powerful. Swan, meanwhile, inhabits a narcissistic world devoted to eternal youth, beautiful young men and women, spectacle and surfaces. Sexuality throughout the film seems less important than transformation, performance and desire. It’s The Red Shoes reimagined for the Me Decade.

That may explain why Phantom of the Paradise has acquired such a devoted queer following. It arrived only six years after the end of the Production Code, when filmmakers were suddenly free to use images, gestures and sexual ambiguities that Old Hollywood had been forced to disguise. De Palma did not simply remove the disguise. He turned disguise itself into the movie.

What emerged was not explicitly gay cinema, but something wonderfully stranger: a film so camp, fluid, excessive and defiantly artificial that queer audiences could recognize it as their own.

Jessica Harper, who three years later would make such an impression in Dario Argenti’s queer-horror classic Suspiria, makes her movie debut here playing Swan’s muse, and Leach’s love interest, Phoenix.