Loving Bad Writing in Phantom of the Paradise

Bjarne Rostaing’s The Phantom of the Paradise book cover

This paperback is about as thick as a Reader’s Digest that’s missing some pages because it’s been in the doctor’s office waiting room for years.

I almost wrote this piece as a book review, before ultimately deciding that that would be a traffic accident and not worth reading. If you want a book review for Bjarne Rostaing’s Phantom of the Paradise, Goodreads will tell you it is valued at an average of 2.4 stars. My favorite review, written by Shane James Bordas, reads: “As an enthusiast of the film it is based on, this is a lovely little artifact to have. However, it is also the worst book I have ever read.” One star.

Still, I feel like this book is worth talking about, perhaps because reading it was such a wild experience and the fact that it’s a novelization really lets the reader speculate about the writing process. As it so often goes with novelizations, I started with the movie. My musical theatre friends and I had made a point of having movie nights during Covid-19 to maintain a sense of normalcy. What began as a discussion of the best and worst adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera quickly ignited a curiosity in all of us — what was Phantom of the Paradise?

For those that are unfamiliar, this 1974 rock musical horror comedy film combines the literary works of The Phantom of the Opera, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Faust. Intrigue immediately follows trying to figure out how these three tales weave together. The tagline “He sold his soul for rock rock’n’roll” says it all. This movie tells the story of Winslow Leach, a young composer who tries to break into the music industry, only to have his music stolen by big shot producer Swan. Finding along the way that Swan has made a contract with the Devil to stay young and prosper in the music industry, Winslow resolves to kill him for abusing his musical genius and then throwing him away.

Pretty simple, right? Throw in some time spent in prison, a disfigurement plot, and glam rock icon “Beef” and now we’re really cooking with gas. With a storyline so positively deranged, I felt sure that Rostaing’s bookification could not modify it in any way to make it more so. And yet…

Before I expound on the key differences between these two masterworks, I cannot ignore a glaring factor in the book’s creation: It is not only Rostaing’s first novel, but it was written in a staggering 63 hours. Let’s just say that that feels fitting.

Racist or Diverse? You Decide Because My Eyes Are Burning Looking at It

This novel has a bizarre preoccupation with dishing out odd or unprompted things about its Black characters. It pointedly describes Winslow as not having seen many Black people before leaving his quaint home town, but proceeds in a matter equally fascinated with and disturbed by Black people. When we meet our leading lady Phoenix, we learn that her black ex boyfriend has taught her precisely three things: the phrase “stone bitch musician”, to sing, and to “ball.” The text plainly relies on stereotypes to paint a picture of a character that doesn’t require painting to begin with. Later, another side character is simply referred to as “the black.” Rostaing takes the time to invent the bizarre name “Frejus” for some other random, but can’t be bothered for a black character when a pejorative will do. When Winslow is new to town and acting off, he’s met with “Hey, fuck you Cracker, I try’in to be regular. Stick you piano up you ass, man. I hope somebody take it away!”, which frankly he deserved, but begs the question as to why Rostaing introduces racial turmoil and insensitivity to a story already loaded with themes of art, immortality, death, intellectual property, abuse, extortion, and evil. The novel bears an obsession with race that the movie never even introduces, but doesn’t handle its new theme with any tact whatsoever.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

So You Want To Talk About Women’s Bodies, Bjarne

I’ll be blunt here. It must have been easy to write the kind of sleaziness that oozes off our male characters in this novelization. I can’t imagine why else someone might have added in gems like Winslow getting an erection because Phoenix isn’t “like the girls at home” and smiles at him, a rape scene not at all relevant to the plot, and Phoenix ripping off her blouse for an audience. Swan’s characterization as a womanizer was apparently not enough to sate Rostaing’s desire for titillation, because women are ogled in every moment they are inked on these pages. He uses the phrase “Vesuvian vagina” on one page and then “nice pussy” on the following, both in metaphorical capacities. Once again, there is an obsession here that feels introduced, rather than naturally derived from the film.

Horny, Gay, and Homophobic, Oh My!

There is an immense amount of sex here, which feels like a natural progression from the movie, having had a fair share of its own. Of course, the book must have more. Swan casually has a threesome with a woman and his right-hand man, Philbin. Additionally, Swan paints Winslow as a sex legend, going so far as to claim that he died from overindulging in fucking. Where there’s sex, there’s also a fascination with queerness and the homophobia that comes with it:

“… and it was about sodomy; heterosexual sodomy. Reworded for Beef, it had been perfect fag-rock material.”

There has to be a reading in here about Beef in all gold as a play on the golden calf, right? Why else is his name Beef? Not exactly Bjarne Rostaing’s fault but I guess Brian De Palma isn’t safe here either.

The Paradise rock lifestyle has a flamboyance to it. Swan describes Beef as “good, sophisticated. Bisexual, perfect,” but it’s paired with “something sexually confused that these idiots can identify with.” The text even goes so far as to add another character, Georgina, to accompany Phoenix as “Her Special Friend,” and capitalized in that manner I don’t know how to read it any way other than lesbianism. They’re literally gal pals. Some of these changes I endorse. The sex reminds us of the decadence and hedonism of the music industry and the environment that Swan creates as a producer, but I could’ve done without a few slurs. I could spend a lifetime psychoanalyzing Swan’s internalized homophobia, but suffice it to say that this treatment was the right amount of sexy and the wrong amount of bigoted.

What The Fuck Did I just Read?

These things considered, what stands out most to me is how much time this text devotes to its one-off characters. The stars of this book are the many stage hands, body guards, and dudes on the street who make a freaky impression and promptly skedaddle. They masturbate to unknowing girls, exchange jabs about astrology, and bust each other’s balls over the low quality of weed they smoke. There are a seldom few Winslow moments that come to mind, but my memory of this book is rife with the side characters it seems to idolize.

With that in mind, I feel as though I’ve learned something about how we consume stories and why media of objectively bad quality can be so damn enjoyable. Bad writing is often aimless, but all those sloppy components are an analyst’s best friend. I’m not so bold as to assume that these writing choices were made with any kind of intention whatsoever. I tend toward reading text alone, but this text was so jarring that it became impossible not to wonder about the circumstances of its creation and the writer behind it all. My friends and I studied up on him and then voraciously stalked his equally hilarious Twitter account trying to unpack any kind of reasoning behind this wacky novel. I recommend Bjarne Rostaing’s bio to every reader (praise I wish I could extend to Phantom of the Paradise ) because each sentence feels like getting punched in the face. All of which is to say, this writing was so without unity that I began grasping at even the Intentional Fallacy for meaning. Bad writing imbues a reader with doubt and sparks drastically different interpretations from reader to reader. How could you possibly nail the reading of a text that manages to be about every theme and find no strong footing on any of them? Phantom of the Paradise is a literary hell and it filled me with confusion so profound that my usually strict adherence to formalism nearly shattered. It was fascinating. One star.